| Part 1 Tracey Rowland on the Pope's
Interpretation of the Council
MELBOURNE, Australia, 24 JULY 2005 (ZENIT)
Many believe that "Gaudium et Spes" was the key document that shaped
the life of the Church in the years immediately following the Second
Vatican Council.
However, according to theologian Tracey Rowland, 40 years of post-conciliar
history and reflection on the 1965 pastoral constitution have led many
to conclude that the document had an inadequate understanding of
culture, particularly that of the culture of liberal modernity.
The result, Rowland reckons, was the unleashing of currents within the
Church that gravely harmed the liturgy and offered a false humanism
ultimately destructive to the pastoral care of souls.
Rowland is dean and permanent fellow of the John Paul II Institute for
Marriage and Family
Melbourne and author of "Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After
Vatican II" (Routledge).
She shared with ZENIT why a reconsideration and reinterpretation of "Gaudium
et Spes," a dominant theme in the theological work of Joseph Ratzinger,
is necessary to reorient the Church's encounter with liberal modernity.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Monday.
Q: What was Joseph Ratzinger's role at the Second Vatican Council, and
how did it shape his theological views?
Rowland: He attended the Council as a peritus for Joseph Cardinal Frings
of Cologne. In a famous speech, Frings launched an attack on the Holy
Office and the exchange between him and Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani is
often described as the most passionate debate of the Council. It is
thought that the young Ratzinger contributed ideas for Frings'
criticism.
As for the effect of the Council on Ratzinger, his attendance as a
peritus would have given him a valuable bird's-eye view of the Catholic
intellectual landscape, a knowledge of the problems faced by the Church
in different parts of the world and some experience of the operation of
the Curia.
I don't think, however, that the Council changed his views so much as
his views shaped the Council.
Q: What is the new Pope's view of the Church's role and its relationship
to "the world" as understood by the Second Vatican Council?
Rowland: The Second Vatican Council described the Church as the
universal sacrament of salvation. Accordingly, the Church is not an
entity distinct from the world but the world reconciled unto itself and
unto God. This is the kind of vision one would expect Benedict to
promote.
Contrary to popular perceptions, his Augustinian spirituality does not
mean that he is against the world or that he believes that Catholics
should crawl into ghettos.
What it does mean is that he is no Pelagian. He doesn't think that with
sufficient education the New Jerusalem can be built on earth. Civics
education alone, lectures on human rights, exhortations about brotherly
love and the common good, will get nowhere unless people are open to the
work of grace and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
A humanism that is not Christian cannot save the world. This was the
conclusion of his fellow peritus Henri de Lubac, and Benedict has made
some very strong statements against the pretensions of a mere secular
humanism.
Moreover, while he is not advocating a retreat from the world, he has
exhorted Catholics to rediscover with evangelical seriousness the
courage of nonconformism in the face of the social trends of the
affluent world.
He has said that we ought to have the courage to rise up against what is
regarded as "normal" for a person at the end of the 20th century and to
rediscover faith in its simplicity. In other words, one can engage the
world, and be in the world, without being of the world.
Q: How has this project, laid out by the Council Fathers in "Gaudium et
Spes," succeeded or failed?
Rowland: Against the background of secularizing readings of "Gaudium et
Spes," John Paul II argued that the document needs to be read from the
perspective of Paragraph 22. In a nutshell, it says that the human
person needs to know Christ in order to have self-understanding.
No doubt Pope Benedict would agree that this paragraph undercuts some of
the ambivalent language if it is taken as the lens through which the
rest of the document is read. But how many of the world's Catholics,
including the clergy, know about the significance of Paragraph 22?
The popular interpretation of this document was that it represented an
acknowledgment on the part of the Church that modernity is OK and that
it is the will of the Holy Spirit that Catholics accommodate their
practices and culture, including liturgical culture, to modernity's
spirit as quickly as possible.
This had the effect of generating a cultural revolution within the
Church such that anything that was characteristically pre-conciliar
became suspect.
Modes of liturgical dress, forms of prayer, different devotions, hymns
that had been a part of the Church's cultural treasury for centuries,
were not just dumped, but actively suppressed. To be a practicing
Catholic in many parishes, one had to buy into the pop culture of the
1960s and 1970s.
Against this, Ratzinger has been critical of what he calls "claptrap and
pastoral infantilism"
"the degradation of liturgy to the level of a parish tea party and the
intelligibility of the popular newspaper."
If the project of "Gaudium et Spes" is taken to mean "accommodating the
practice of the faith to the culture of modernity," then I think that
the project has been problematic in pastoral terms.
If, however, it is read more through the lens of de Lubac's "The Drama
of Atheistic Humanism," then I think that the project of reaching out to
so-called modern man and helping him to find himself by promoting John
Paul II's theology of the body, the Trinitarian anthropology of the
encyclicals "Redemptor Hominis," "Dives in Misericordia" and "Dominum et
Vivificantem," and the values of the Gospel of Life in "Evangelium
Vitae" and "Veritatis Splendor"
that project has really only just begun and has a long way to go before
it starts to bear fruit.
Q: In what sense is there continuity or discontinuity between in the
views of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II
a
major contributor to "Gaudium et Spes"
in regard to the Church's interaction with "the world"?
Rowland: I think that there will be continuity in the sense that
Benedict would no doubt agree that a de Lubacian-type reading of "Gaudium
et Spes" is desirable
that culture is not theologically neutral, that we have a choice between
a civilization of love and a culture of death, and that Christ and a
Christian anthropology are needed to rescue us from a web of cultural
and moral practices which destroy human integrity and foster nihilism.
However, one difference in nuance is that Benedict is less inclined to
use a particular rhetorical strategy favored by John Paul II.
To give an example, John Paul II once said that the Church of the
Council "saw itself as the soul of modernity." He then defined modernity
as "a convergence of conditions that permit a human being to express
better his or her own maturity, spiritual, moral and cultural." The
problem here is that this is not what most people think of when they
hear the expression "modernity"; and it is certainly not the reading one
finds in the many scholarly accounts of this cultural phenomenon.
From what I have read, Benedict doesn't adopt this intellectual
strategy. When Benedict talks about modernity he doesn't try to redefine
the common meaning. This is perhaps because he thinks that there is
little rhetorical advantage in presenting the Church as modern when the
postmoderns are so busy being critical of modernity. It simply aligns
Catholics with a position whose popularity in on the wane.
A second way I think the papacies of the two might differ is that
whereas John Paul II concentrated on ethics and anthropology
and hence the central themes of "Gaudium et Spes"
it is possible that Benedict will take a more ecclesiological focus,
concentrating on themes in "Lumen Gentium" and the [Vatican II] decree
on ecumenism as well as dealing with the whole territory of liturgy.
In the "City of God," St. Augustine wrote that in the composition of the
world's history under divine providence there is a beauty arising from
the antithesis of contraries
a
kind of eloquence in events, instead of in words.
Comparing the two papacies there is a kind of historical eloquence in
that Wojtyla, the Pole, is elected to see off the Marxists and focus on
the promotion of an alternative Christian anthropology, while the German
Ratzinger is elected to contend with problems created by, among others,
Luther and Nietzsche.
This papacy may well be focused on healing the wounds of the Reformation
that began in Germany, and fighting what Benedict calls the
"dictatorship of relativism" whose intellectual lineage is also strongly
Germanic.
There is a definite divine beauty and playfulness in this. ZE05072429
Benedict
XVI, Thomism, and Liberal Culture
Part 2
Tracey Rowland on the Church's Response to Modernity
MELBOURNE, Australia, 25 JULY 2005 (ZENIT) Is liberalism a positive
and "liberating" intellectual development within Western history that
can be both baptized and integrated into the life of the Church?
Or, is it a destructive cultural and political force that thwarts the
desire for transcendence?
Theologian Tracey Rowland believes the latter description of liberalism
an intellectual tradition derivative of the epistemology and moral,
political and economic philosophy of the various European Enlightenments
in the 18th century
better understands the phenomenon, and believes Benedict XVI shares at
least some elements of this diagnosis. The encounter with liberal
culture, she says, may be one of the central themes of his papacy.
Rowland is dean and permanent fellow of the John Paul II Institute for
Marriage and Family
Melbourne and author of "Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After
Vatican II" (Routledge).
She shared with ZENIT why two schools of Thomism have differing visions
of how the Church should respond to, and interact with, liberal
institutions and culture, without being subsumed by them.
Part 1 of this interview appeared Sunday.
Q: You have said that the major intellectual and theological battle
within the Church is between the "Augustinian Thomists" and the "Whig
Thomists." What does this mean?
Rowland: First, let me define "Whig."
The expression "Whig Thomist" was coined by Michael Novak to describe
his intellectual project. Originally the word "Whig" came from the
Scottish word "Whiggamor" for a cattle driver
though some sources say cattle thief and others say horse thief. It was
initially applied to Scottish Presbyterians, mostly from the west coast
of Scotland, who opposed the Stuart cause in the wars of the 17th
century.
Their counterparts, the Tories
a
word derived from the Gaelic for "outlaw"
consisted of some aristocrats, large landowners and agrarian peasants.
They were mercantilist in economic policy, royalist in politics and
tended to support the succession of James II [1633-1701].
Over time the term was used to refer to a faction in British politics.
Although there was never anything like a strong doctrinal definition of
the term, as a sociological generalization it can be said that the Whigs
were the heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized economic
and political liberty, or an emerging philosophy known as liberalism,
which was often fused with a Puritan form of Protestantism.
In the 19th century Lord Acton popularized the idea that Thomas Aquinas
was the first Whig, that is, the first proponent of a modern,
post-Enlightenment concept of politics. Thus "Whig Thomism" refers to an
intellectual project that seeks to locate the genesis of the liberal
tradition in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and to synthesize elements of
the Liberal tradition, particularly those provided by the Scottish
Enlightenment, to classical Thomism.
The project of reading Aquinas as the first Whig or first Liberal has
been criticized by a number of scholars.
For example, Robert Kraynak, in his work "Christian Faith and Modern
Democracy," has written that "though intriguing, Acton's interpretation
is misleading because Thomas defends power sharing and political
participation, not as a right of the people to parliamentary consent nor
as a means for protecting personal rights and liberties, but as the
prudent application of natural law whose ends are best realized in a
stable constitutional order dedicated to peace, virtue and Christian
piety. This is medieval corporatism applied within the [Augustinian]
doctrine of the Two Cities, rather than the first stirring of modern
liberty."
Those who may loosely be classified as "Augustinian Thomists" follow
such a Kraynak-style reading of Aquinas, rather than an Actonian.
What I argued in my book "Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After
Vatican II" is that there is a division between those who think that the
Thomist tradition should accommodate itself to the culture of modernity,
particularly the economic dimensions of this culture
the self-described "Whig Thomists"
and those who believe that modernity and its liberal tradition are
really toxic to the flourishing of the faith.
Those who take the latter position do not want to supplement the Thomist
tradition with doses of Enlightenment values. They are very broadly
described as Augustinian Thomists for the want of a better label
because, in a manner consistent with St. Augustine's idea of the two
cities, they reject the claim of the liberal tradition to be neutral
toward competing perspectives of the good and competing theological
claims.
While the Whigs argue that liberalism is the logical outgrowth of the
classical-theistic synthesis, the Augustinian Thomists argue that the
liberal tradition represents its mutation and heretical reconstruction,
and they tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that the devil
not Thomas Aquinas
was the first Whig.
There are thus two different readings of modernity and with that, two
different readings of how the Church should engage the contemporary
world. While the Whigs want the Church to accommodate the culture of
modernity, the Augustinians favor a much more critical stance.
Another point I made in my book is that those who think that the liberal
tradition is avant-garde are about 40 years behind the times. Liberalism
ceased being the hegemonic intellectual tradition in the Western world
in 1968. At least since then the intellectual battlefront has been
three-cornered.
First of all there are theists
Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, etc.; secondly, there are
believers in Enlightenment-style rationality, that is, different
varieties of liberals who sever reason from faith; and thirdly, there
are the postmoderns who think that the Enlightenment was a very
oppressive social experiment and that all versions of rationality are in
some way related to theological or mythological presuppositions,
although they do not accept that we can use our reason to judge between
those competing theological presuppositions.
On some fronts Catholic scholars may do better to work with the
postmoderns than those who insist on a strict severance of faith and
reason, or at least not nail their colors irrevocably to a liberal mast.
The point at which the Whigs and Augustinians come into conflict is over
the issue of the moral quality of what is called the "culture of
America," which is not of course confined to the geographical boundaries
of the United States. It is, as Alasdair MacIntyre says, a theoretical
construct.
The Whigs want to baptize the current international economic order,
while the Augustinians take a more critical approach, arguing that there
are economic practices characteristic of this order that cannot be
squared with the social teaching of the Church.
Moreover, the Augustinians are more likely to point out that most people
do not sit down and develop a worldview for themselves from hours of
philosophical and theological reflection. They tacitly pick up values
and ideas from the institutions in which they work.
The Augustinians argue that there are aspects of the culture of
modernity that act as barriers to the flourishing of Christian practice
and belief, and unless the culture is changed, no amount of intellectual
gymnastics on the part of the Church's scholars will be of help to those
1 billion Catholics who have to make a living within the world.
In other words, if one has to be a saint not to be morally compromised
by the culture in which one works, then there is something wrong with
that culture.
I don't think that this is the major intellectual battlefront within the
Church, but it is an important one.
Q: In what sense is Pope Benedict an Augustinian? In what sense is he a
Thomist?
Rowland: I would say that Pope Benedict is a Thomist insofar as he would
probably agree with most of what St. Thomas wrote. However, he is not a
Thomist in the sense of appealing to the authority of St. Thomas in his
defense of the faith, focusing his scholarly endeavors upon the works of
Aquinas or in the sense of using a scholastic methodology.
Rather, Pope Benedict is one of the many members of his generation who,
while not disagreeing with the content of Thomist thought, believed that
the scholastic presentation of the faith doesn't exactly set souls on
fire unless they happen to be a particular type of soul with a passion
for intellectual disputation. He has said that "scholasticism has its
greatness, but everything is impersonal."
In contrast, with Augustine "the passionate, suffering, questioning man
is always right there, and you can identify with him."
Benedict has also been strongly influenced by the Augustinian principle
that faith is the door to understanding. He has said that he believes
that a kind of memory, of recollection of God, is etched in man, though
it needs to be awakened.
His Augustinian pedigree is also manifest in his interest in the
transcendental of beauty and his understanding of the catechetical
importance of language and symbols and the relationship between matters
of form and substance.
So much of the liturgical mess of the last 30 years has been brought
about by philistines who want to dumb down the language of the liturgy,
replace symbolic gestures by lay people explaining what Father is doing
as if we are all uncatechized Martians
and gutting liturgical language of its poetic dimensions.
Even secular linguistic philosophers argue that form and substance are
inseparable
that if we change language, we also in some sense change the way that
people think. Pope Benedict is onto this, along with Francis Cardinal
George of Chicago, and liturgical scholars such Aidan Nichols, OP,
Monsignor Peter Elliott, Stratford Caldecott of the Center for Faith and
Culture in Oxford, and Alcuin Reid, OSB.
Q: How does Pope Benedict XVI's "Augustinian Thomism" shape the way he
views the phenomenon of liberal democracy?
Rowland: From an Augustinian point of view, the biggest problem with
liberalism is its claim to be theologically neutral or indifferent
toward different religious traditions. Quite a long list of scholars are
coming to the view that the liberal claim to theological neutrality is
bogus. This list includes Anglicans associated with the radical
orthodoxy circle and scholars with a more Baptist-oriented theological
background.
It is not a position limited to so-called conservative or ultra-montanist
Catholics. Indeed most postmoderns would agree with this criticism of
the liberal tradition. Pope Benedict has made it clear that Catholics
should not be persuaded by the liberal rhetoric to believe that in order
to be good citizens they must bifurcate themselves into public and
private halves.
He has observed that secularism is itself an ideology, a kind of
religious position that presents itself as the only voice of
rationality. He sees these views as posing a challenge to the dominant
political cultures of contemporary liberal democracies.
To say this, however, is not to say that he is against
constitutionalism. He is not saying that the Church should run the
state. He would probably agree with the saying of Martin Luther King
that the Church is neither the master of the state, nor the servant of
the state, but the conscience of the state.
Q: Pope Benedict XVI has been described as a "man of culture," and
suspect of theologians who do not have an appreciation for great art,
music or beauty. What role does culture play in theology and political
life?
Rowland: One of my favorite Ratzinger quotations is that "A theologian
who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous!" It
comes in a close second behind his observation that in some ways he
prefers the Italian spirit to the German because the saints were all
people with imagination
not functionaries of apparatuses.
In other words, beware the person with no interest in literature, music,
art, poetry and nature but who has a big interest in keeping the
machinery operating. I haven't heard what he has said to the Vatican
bureaucrats who reportedly wanted to ban his cats from the papal
apartments, but they sound dangerous, too
the bureaucrats, that is.
But to answer your question about culture and theology, the territory of
the theology of culture is very broad. It ranges from the morality of
different institutional and social practices, including practices within
political institutions, to questions about the propriety of different
types of music for liturgical use and questions about the role of
language in the process of evangelization.
For example, should we adopt the language of hostile intellectual
traditions when presenting the Church's teachings? And what principles
should be applied when discerning which of the "spoils of the Egyptians"
to plunder?
Pope Benedict has observed that the Church is its own cultural subject
for the faithful, which is a further indication that he is not inclined
to follow the pastoral strategy of accommodating the Church's culture to
whatever happens to be fashionable in the contemporary Western world.
In a recent address to the Knights of Columbus, Cardinal Stafford said
that every world religion is trembling before the advances of American
pop culture. I think that Pope Benedict would agree with this assessment
and that he understands that the Church, in a sense, needs to be the
mother of culture. She needs to put life back into culture, so that
people can be edified and experience self-transcendence.
Q: By what standards is the health of a culture measured according to
Pope Benedict?
Rowland: In his book "The Spirit of the Liturgy," Benedict made the
point that the sole purpose
not the major purpose, but the sole purpose
for the liberation of the Jews from Pharaoh was that God wanted them to
be able to worship according to his prescriptions.
Thus, I would say that for Benedict the most important question about
any culture is, where does liturgy stand within this culture? Is it the
highest good? Are we dealing with a liturgical city? Or are we dealing
with a culture which is driven by economic factors? Who are the gods of
this culture? What is the dominant vision of the human person? How are
the sick and vulnerable treated?
Concretely, it is of little benefit to Christians to live in a culture
where any kind of liturgical expression is permitted, if, like the Jews
under Pharaoh, they are being forced to work like slaves just to provide
shelter and food for their families and have no time for prayer and
leisure, that is, no time for God, in lives dominated by the quest for
physical survival.
In the same work, Benedict said that law and ethics do not hold together
when they are not anchored in the liturgical center and inspired by it.
He also made the point that every society has its cults; even the
decidedly atheistic, materialistic systems create their own forms of
cult. He comes very close to the position of scholars such as Catherine
Pickstock and William T. Cavanaugh who have argued that in contemporary
Western society the market has replaced the Eucharist as our object of
adoration.
This is not to say that he is against the idea of a market per se, but
my judgment is that he is against making market competition the
underlying, infrastructural dynamic of a culture.
Karl Polanyi expressed the position well when he wrote that a "natural
order" is one in which the economy is embedded in social relations,
rather than one in which social relations are embedded in the economic
system, making society a mere adjunct to the market.
By making the test that of the place and nature of liturgy within a
culture Benedict is also taking a very Augustinian position. Augustine
would say that what we adore is a sign of what we love, and what we love
is a declaration of our membership card of one of the two cities
the city of God or the city of Man.
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