C rossing over
John Organ
The Runaway Church Peter Hebblethwaite (Collins £4.50) The Second Vatican Council, the longest and biggest ecclesiastical assembly in modern history, ended ten years ago amid high hopes of a Roman Catholic Reformation. Unlike the previous twenty Ecumenical Councils, which concentrated on defining doctrinal issues and condemning heresies, Vatican H was more a collective examination of conscience in which the Roman Catholic Church made painful but exhilarating efforts to emerge from the state of siege into which it had progressively withdrawn over the previous four hundred years. It is fashionable today to scoff at siege mentalities, but the mainstream branch of Christiani,ty had much to defend, even if at times it seemed to have retreated into a disciplined fortress removed from the spirit of a founder who preached such a revolutionary message of love that he was condemned by the Romans as a political rebel and by the Jews as a blasphemer. The 2,300 Roman Catholic bishops came to a realisation, during those lively debates in Saint Peter's basilica between 1962 and 1965, that a self-righteous defensive mentality was obscuring the light of that message. Vatican ll's sixteen decrees and declarations move away from the old image of an embattled "City of God" to promote the new ideal of a Pilgrim Church on the move, going out to meet all men, adapting itself to modern conditions without watering down essential beliefs, running itself in a more democratic way, even admitting past mistakes. But it has proved difficult to put all this into practice. Peter Hebblethwaite, in his rather misleadingly titled book The Runaway Church, chronicles the series of confusions and disappointments which have marked the decade since the Council. The biggest shock for most people was Pope Paul's encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 upholding the condemnation of contraception, ignoring the pontifical study commission's recommendation that it was an issue on which each married couple should make their own conscientious decision in the light of various moral considerations. Hebblethwaite quotes Dr Andre Hellegers, an obstetrician who belonged to the ignored commission: "I cannot believe that salvation is based on contraception by temperature and damnation is based on rubber." But both he and Hebblethwaite seem to miss the point that Pope Paul carefully refrained from.following Pius XI's dictum that "those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin," and the encyclical, unsatisfactory as it may be, represents a sufficiently changed attitude for Roman Catholics to have learned to live with it. Another chapter is devoted to the thesis that the reforms of the Roman Curia have had the unwelcome side-effect of enhancing the powers of the Vatican Secretariat of State to the detriment of Vatican II's concept of collegiality, or decentralised sharing of responsibility in the Church. Here the hardworking Archbishop Benelli is cast as the arch-villain, "out of touch and moving in a world that is not inhabited by ordinary Christians . . . a rather weary Roman senator pulling his toga about him and saying: `More trouble among the Belgae, dissension among the Picts.' " A fair number of informed Catholics believe this is less than fair to Benelli, and the thesis basically contradicts Hebblethwaite's just assessment of the agonised and rather touching figure of Pope Paul, for Benelli is nothing if not the loyal servant of his master. Hebblethwaite goes closer to the heart of the problem when he observes that in human terms the office of pope has become impossible to fulfil, containing so many responsibilities that no man can give adequate attention to them all, "and the Pope becomes like a juggler spinning a number of plates. Some of them will fall to the ground," Hebblethwaite does a good chapter on the need and justification of the liturgy changes.
and rightly takes the late Duke of Norfolk to task for complaining snootily about them to the Pope in the name of English Catholics whom he certainly did not represent. But Hebblethwaite seems to overlook the peculiar affection which many English Catholics had for some of the vanished Latin prayers and hymns, and as one of those middle-of-the-road Catholics whom he rather seems to despise at times (perhaps rightly), I fail to see why we cannot preserve the Vent Sancte Spiritus, Stabat Mater and a few other favourites.
There is a fascinating account of the "dialogue" meetings between Catholic and Marxist scholars in 1965, 1966 and 1967, and the ironic sequel for two of the main protagonists: Roger Garaudy, expelled from the French Communist party and subsequently announcing his conversion to a form of Christianity, and the Salesian priest Giulio Girardi adopting a revolutionary Marxist position which became incompatible with his Roman Catholic teaching posts. The exchanges ended with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Hebblethwaite intriguingly maintains that the Catholic-Marxist dialogue provided the intellectual context for Dubcek's ill-fated experiment in "socialism with a human face." He describes how the Council's solidarity with the poor and oppressed has led some priests in Latin America and elsewhere to espouse Marxism, fails to examine in any depth the risks and contradictions involved, but then redresses the balance with a cool look at the Vatican's rather dubious Ostpolitik.
I first met Peter Hebblethwaite when, as a Jesuit priest and Editor of The Month, he came to Rome to join our motley international band of journalists reporting the Council, He arrived late, in time for the last session, and sometimes wonder if he missed the full spirit of Vatican II. A constant criticism of texts being processed in the conciliar debates was that they were insufficiently "Christological," in other words not sufficiently centred on the person of Jesus. Hebblethwaite's book, too, often seems lacking in that essential religious dimension. But I may be carping excessively because, like some of his other friends, I was upset when he left the priesthood. This promises to be the most readable book on the events which have convulsed the Roman Catholic Church in the last decade.
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