First off….are blogs back?
Did Traditiones Custodes reinforce the value of media that’s just a bit more permanent than Instagram posts and Twitter fights?
If so, thanks, Pope Francis!
Just a quick link and reflection on a blog post (yes) by Larry Chapp, found here:
My claim is that the controversy is not so much an argument over liturgy, which is merely a proximate provocation, but is rather a renewed eruption of the seemingly never-ending debate over the proper reception of Vatican II….
….In other words, the stakes are high in this debate and go far beyond arguments over liturgy, which are merely a symptom of a much deeper pathology.
And what is the debate about?
….the Church has failed to recognize that the anomic and nihilistic cosmos of post-modernity has laid waste to all of our standard structures of meaning, all of the traditions that embodied and made “real” that meaning, and all of the moral and spiritual weight of everything that came before five minutes ago
In short: the abyss. The abyss of life on earth without God, characterized by impermanence, transience and in the end, meaninglessness.
Ours is a Church that has failed to ask the right questions and has therefore failed to flip the script of our culture’s lies and deceptions. We asked for bread. We got stones. And thus did some in the sheepfold seek bread elsewhere in the alternative Catholic communities made possible by Summorum Pontificum. And if some have fled to such havens with a goodly amount of undifferentiated bitterness it should be understood not as the bitterness of hatred, but rather as the bitterness of the desperate.
And here’s his sentence from which I took the title of this post:
The progressives at least also recognized the abyss below. But they wanted to embrace it as an “always already reconciled and engraced abyss.”
This is brilliant and precise wording, and resonates with one of the points I’ve been mulling over for years: how the meaning of salvation has changed in recent decades into not much more than self-acceptance. We are lost, we are told, because we don’t recognize how good we are and how much God loves us. Salvation lies in accepting God’s love for us just as we are.
Which then, of course, has implications for liturgy – which becomes a celebration of God with and among us now just because it’s all good and we’re all good, not because anyone or anything needs to change or be reconciled.
I have a few quibbles and a more agreements with Larry’s post, but I’ll just end this with the question that struck me at the end, a question emanating from similar questions I’ve been reflecting on.
The generation that set all this into motion – the generation that produced the generally optimistic documents and Spirit of Vatican II was a generation that had actually looked into the abyss.
It was the generation that had suffered through the ravages of the Second World War right where many of them lived, that had fought in it, been imprisoned by it, that had rebuilt from the rubble – rebuilt the structures which had to be rebuilt from the previous war to end all wars, that had seen tens of millions killed by totalitarian regimes all over the world, that lived, at the moment of the Council in the shadow of possible nuclear destruction, which was keenly felt by all.
I’m endlessly fascinated by that question.
Where did the Council Fathers’ optimism about the “human family,” come from?
We’re sixty years past that now, and there are different motivations at work, all worth exploring. But the failure to critique and radically stand in opposition to nihilistic modernity and offer what Christ offers – and has always offered – didn’t begin today. This particular failure (because the Church has failed to answer urgent questions of the moment with great regularity through its history) has its roots in the decisions of men who knew what horrors human beings were capable of.
The question to me, is – why, then, did they decide that what they had inherited was inadequate, and, with the liturgy as it developed over the decade following the Council, actually stood in the way to human wholeness in the face of the abyss? Was it simply that they saw the destruction of the old world all of a piece that included the Church within it, and that if it were all rebuilt, the abyss could be breached?
Crafts & Vintage
Thanks Amy for this wonderful analysis and for sharing my blog post. As you know so well, blogs have to be relatively short and so a lot gets left on the cutting room floor after the final edits. Therefore, I view my posts as the beginning of a conversation rather than as some pretentious “last word” on the topic. So thanks for engaging the dialogue. Been a fan of yours for years….
Blogs are back. We’ve always been here, but have become more important in the era of cancel culture.
Blogs & emails are the last refuge for those that are banned or will soon be banned on social media accounts.
Go visit foedus.co & bigpulpit.com to get your fill of St. Blogs!
“Engraced”.
Being Gen X & poorly educated in English (my second & only legible language), I had to look up what I thought it meant. I was kind of close.
Apparently this word hadn’t been seen or heard used since 1968.
“The question to me, is – why, then, did they decide that what they had inherited was inadequate, and, with the liturgy as it developed over the decade following the Council, actually stood in the way to human wholeness in the face of the abyss? Was it simply that they saw the destruction of the old world all of a piece that included the Church within it, and that if it were all rebuilt, the abyss could be breached? ”
My first question is, who are the “they” who decided? I dont believe the Council Fathers thought clown masses were the way of the future, although I could be wrong.
Second, from what I have gleaned, there appeared to be a movement to lessen the effects of living a life of virtue (that is, ongoing metanoia) because people had suffered so much for a long time (30s, 40s, 50s) in Europe and elsewhere. I think there is a valid recognition of the overwhelming pain so many experienced during the Depression, the Second World War, and reconstruction . The problem I see is the lack of preparedness for the severe post-trauma symptoms of millions and millions of people by the overseers of the Church. What I kindly think of as attempted solution–of not requiring suffering on the Way of the Cross–neither offers hope nor salvation for those traumatized. The way out is usually grieving and grieving and grieving, not lots of Kumbaya (true community is usually based on common suffering, not eating candy together).
Third, my pet theory is that there was a counter-CounterReformation sentiment.( just a guess) that in its reactivity led to discarding the last three hundred years of tradition.
Of course, all the rest of it was nonsense as I lived through it. But one of the “theys” who believed the liturgy at the time of the Council was in need of some reassessment and development, at least in some of its elements, was Father Joseph Ratzinger.
What is Substack if not a revival of blogs in new clothing? Heck, TC even motivated me to post again on the fitful blog I started last fall: https://thedayisnowfarspent.wordpress.com/2021/07/22/motiones-propriae/
To the more substantial point: my wife and I have been reading Helen Andrews’s _Boomers_ in the evenings of late, and while we appreciate the criticisms she has of the people she criticizes, we cannot help but think that something’s missing, that she doesn’t give enough credit to the parents of the Boomers for planting the seeds of their naïve optimism and arrogance.
Along those lines, Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau mentioned on Twitter recently that, in conversations he has had with Boomers, they have said that their parents told them they could safely ignore certain teachings of the Church. He didn’t specify whether this was part of the general expectation prior to Humanae Vitae that contraception would be permitted, or a different phenomenon; I interpret him to be saying it’s different.
Given that almost all of that prior generation is gone, I doubt we’ll ever know why they did this, but your thesis about seeing the “old” Church as part of the world to be cast away in rebuilding is plausible to me.
Outside of the Church, a similar question must be posed of post-modernity, deconstructionism, and relativism: Why would the generation that saw such evils ever want to concoct philosophies which argue that there is no such thing as good or evil?
I’m not saying that the Conciliar Church is driven by postmodern philosophy, but the Catholic and non-Catholic worlds were both responding to the same horrific historical experiences, and both responded in ways are paradoxical to us later Gen-Xers & Millennials.