The New Counter-Reformation

In the eight years since the end of the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic left has commanded much of the public's attention. Escalating protest has often led to the slamming of doors--priests leaving their ministry, nuns leaving their orders, theologians like Britain's Charles Davis dropping out of the church entirely.

To a newly vocal conservative element in the U.S. Catholic Church, however, all too many liberals have not only remained in the church but moved quietly into control of the chanceries, the seminaries and parochial schools. Moreover, conservatives complain, some bishops are now wielding against the right the same hierarchical clout that they once used against the left.

A case in point: in a speech at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., last March, Bishop James Rausch, general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference, intervened in a feud between some liberal Catholic biblical scholars and several right-wing Catholic columnists who had charged the scholars with heresy. Taking the liberals' side, Rausch accused the journalists of scholarly incompetence; he deplored them as "third parties" who were trying to usurp the bishops' power to decide what is "orthodox" in Catholic theology. Freedom of the press, he said, "should not protect them from public criticism and public rebuke."

The scholarly squabble demonstrates a shift in priorities on the part of the Catholic right. In the 1960s it was largely concerned with political issues like attacking Communism and defending the Viet Nam War. Today, conservatives are more worried about church doctrine, liturgy and education. The biblical imbroglio, for instance, focuses on such questions as the literal reality of the Virgin birth, the nature of original sin, the historical accuracy of the Resurrection accounts and even, conservatives claim, the deity of Jesus Christ.

Many conservatives--or traditionalists, as some prefer to be called--are also alarmed at what they see as the casual abandonment of a culture that once seemed both rich and reassuring. They miss not only the Latin Mass and many familiar old hymns but many other pious practices that have been widely discarded since Vatican II: novenas, benediction, meatless Fridays, priests wearing cassocks and birettas, nuns wearing wimples. The old rituals and disciplines were visible symbols that Catholics were different from (and perhaps better than) other people. Many who resent the passing of traditional Catholic ways seem to feel that a comfortable certainty has vanished with the piety.

Domino Theory. A Minneapolis housewife, Delores Wegner, 37, recently voiced just such a note of loss in a distressed letter to her diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Bulletin. "What was the first snowflake of compromise," she asked, that led to the "present avalanche of spiritual and religious concessions? Was it the first time we said 'Holy Spirit' instead of 'Holy Ghost'? The first hamburger we ate on Friday? The first time we stood to receive Holy Communion?" Believing in an ecclesiastical domino theory, Mrs. Wegner and many like her find the beginnings of Catholic troubles in even the minor changes wrought by Vatican II. Now, faced with a world of rapid and bewildering change, shifting values and lost standards, they complain that neither their church nor their schools still teach the sound old traditions.

Like the liberals in the church, those on the right form no single group but a broad spectrum: they stretch all the way from small bands of angry dissidents who are in open defiance of the Pope's reforms to even-voiced, literate and intellectually respectable loyalists. There is considerable disagreement among them. But they share to varying degrees the conviction that the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of Vatican II is tolerating far too much diversity in doctrine and practice, and many of them are trying to mount something of a counterreformation.

Dozens of groups have sprung up in the U.S. and Europe to fight for orthodoxy or traditional ritual. The largest and most vigorous of these in the U.S. is Catholics United for the Faith (C.U.F.), an organization with 135 chapters and nearly 12,500 members across the country. Founded in 1968 by genteel Wall Street Broker H. Lyman Stebbins and four other concerned Catholics, C.U.F.'s main complaint is that religious indoctrination of Catholic youngsters has virtually been taken over by liberal priests, nuns and publishers. As a result, they contend, traditional doctrines of faith and morals are hardly taught in many schools (they have even cited some texts that do not include the Ten Commandments). C.U.F. has ties with the increasingly vocal conservative movement in Europe. Along with similar organizations in seven other nations, it is a member of a loose confederation called Pro Fide et Ecclesia.

Both in Europe and the U.S., a few recalcitrant priests and congregations are stubbornly holding on to the Tridentine Latin Mass, which was replaced by a new rite in the wake of Vatican II. Best known in the U.S. is Father Gommar De Pauw, who draws worshipers from as far as 100 miles away for his Tridentine Masses each Sunday in Westbury, L.I. De Pauw's Masses are also broadcast on 20 radio stations coast-to-coast. Another small coterie of believers, who want to make the U.S. a "Christian Commonwealth" (i.e., a Catholic one), clusters around L. Brent Bozell, brother-in-law of Newspaper Columnist William F. Buckley. In his magazine Triumph (circ. 5,000) Bozell has been fighting the traditionalist battle since 1966 but has proved too extreme and eccentric to gain many followers.

Triumph is only one of the Catholic magazines arguing for a return to tradition. The national Catholic press as a whole has become noticeably more conservative in the past few years. The most prominent of the right-wing editors:

> Alphonse J. ("Al") Matt Jr., 42, is the personable, chain-smoking editor of the Wanderer (circ. 48,000), a journal that started as a German-language parish bulletin a century ago and has in recent decades become the pugnacious defender of orthodoxy. Matt admits that his paper is "roughhewn" and quips that intellectuals order it in a "plain brown envelope." In a series of articles criticizing reforms in the Archdiocese of Detroit, a Wanderer writer hit its progressive archbishop, John Cardinal Dearden, particularly hard, even suggested that he might be "a major heretic, one of the worst the Catholic Church has ever suffered from." Another piece compared today's liberal religion teachers to "chimpanzees," charging that they "cannot be relied on to respect any tradition, to understand any dogma."

Matt defends the Wanderer by complaining that "the teaching function of many bishops is not being exercised. As long as there continues to be silence on the issues, an informed layman--or journalist--can make his own judgments. After the tremendous leakage in active church membership, those who are left are more and more realizing that the faith is up for grabs and they have to defend it."

> Dale Francis, 57, is a softspoken, teetotaling journalist who has not taken a week's vacation in the four years since he took over the National Catholic Register (circ. 90,000). Francis was chosen for the job by Schick Millionaire Patrick Frawley Jr., who bought the then-progressive paper at the urging of conservative Jesuit Gadfly Daniel Lyons to give it a more traditional tone. A onetime Methodist lay preacher who became a Catholic in 1945, Francis has socially liberal credentials as a longtime union supporter and early civil rights advocate.

He insists that the Register "does not take a stand to the right of the church. It is to the right of some who differ from what the Pope says." Nevertheless, his principal columnists are bitter polemicists, some of whom delight in discovering evidence of ancient heresies among contemporary Catholic liberals.

> Father Kenneth Baker, 44, is an energetically conservative Jesuit educator who has edited the monthly Homiletic and Pastoral Review (circ. 17,000) since 1971. Like Francis, Baker won his editorial slot through the good offices of fellow Jesuit Dan Lyons, who found backers to buy the ailing magazine. Baker has kept the Homiletic open to a broader range of viewpoints than the Register. But Baker too believes that the bishops have largely abandoned their magisterium--their teaching office.

"They are tolerating all opinions," he complains. "We have a vacuum. It used to be that books had to have an imprimatur, but now a Catholic has no way of knowing what relation a new book might have to Catholic teaching. The theologians and the journalists are running the church." To bring a more conservative circle of journalists and theologians to the fore, Baker recently helped found a scholarly new quarterly, Communio.

> James Hitchcock, 36, Renaissance-history professor at St. Louis University, is Communio's editor. A political liberal (he backed George McGovern) and disillusioned church reformer, Hitchcock has become perhaps the most effective spokesman for the conservatives. He is respected enough on the Catholic left to be welcome in such remaining progressive journals as the Jesuit weekly America, the Critic and the National Catholic Reporter. But his attacks on liberals can be acerbic. In his 1971 book, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, Hitchcock lists no fewer than 26 "heretical notions" of Catholic radicals, including several that strongly reflect the cultural evolutionary thought of Jesuit Philosopher Teilhard de Chardin.

Communio's first issue last April--crisply written and including articles by progressives--suggests that it will be the conservative journal most worth reading. But Hitchcock warns that the magazine will not be looking for novelty. "Vatican II was not a charter for endless change," he says. Some questions are "closed." Among them: whether homosexual acts can be morally permissible (no); whether divorced Catholics can be permitted to remarry (no); whether the Christology of the ancient church councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon can be modified (no).

Potential Split. Communio is loosely allied with journals in Germany, Italy and Yugoslavia, two of which bear the same name. Like them, it bears the theological imprint of a reclusive Swiss theologian, Father Hans Urs von Balthasar, who is the intellectual leader of the more moderate elements in the European wing of the counterreformation.

Hitchcock candidly concedes that the conservatives' fight is uphill. "The liberal catechetical establishment is so entrenched that it will take ten years for any theological recovery to take hold," he says. As for liturgy, "In some dioceses you can do almost anything you want to." Yet Hitchcock, at least, does not want to return the church to its monolithic, pre-Vatican II days--even if it could be done. "There is a substantial element in the church that has accepted the changes but is dismayed by the never-ending process of eroding the traditions," he says. It is this erosion that Hitchcock is trying to halt. If it is not stopped, he warns, "Roman Catholicism has the potential to be just another Protestant denomination," splitting into "fundamentalism or vague liberalism." The conservatives' struggle may be long but, he believes, "the trend is not irreversible."

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