Backwards and forwards

Some things change, some don’t, and it can be hard to know what to do about it. Wise sayings point in different directions:

“[I] beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints.” (Jude 1:3)

“But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.” (Galatians 1:8)

But also:

“The old things are passed away, behold all things are made new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. (Times change, and we too change with them.)

So judgment is needed. In religion, for example, we should hold fast to some things, but try to understand them better, and adapt to the circumstances in which they must be communicated and applied. All those things are needed.

With that in mind, current denunciations of “backwardism” and insistence on the need always to be going forward seem surprising. Whatever happened to keeping the faith and being skeptical of novelties? It seems that would sometimes also be fitting.

The difficulty is knowing exactly when to accept and reject change. And here humility is needed. Our understanding of what we’re doing and what we’re dealing with is limited. These understandings can grow—they often have—but the accumulated growth in 2000 years means that the bright ideas we come up with today may be misconceived. They need to be tested before we insist on them.

More generally, we should be cautious about believing our thought and way of living the Faith are better than in the past. Sometimes, in certain ways, they are. They may often be more suited to the present day, for example. But we can also fail to understand and follow the past because it is our teacher, and disciples often fail to understand their master. And sometimes we advance over the recent past by better understanding the more remote past—perhaps by recognizing that recent changes have been misguided.

How do we tell what’s what?

Not much is guaranteed, so the Church has usually avoided lockstep on such matters. She needs tending more than re-engineering. So the usual approach has been to maintain general stability of practice and unity of doctrine but let people like Francis of Assisi try out their ideas with some supervision, encourage them when they work, and step in when they seem to be going off the rails.

Saint Francis and his followers were welcome to do their thing—the Church needed something—but nobody was required to follow them, and when the Spiritual Franciscans became impracticably dogmatic, higher authority intervened.

We see a similar approach everywhere. It took centuries for the Vulgate to become the Latin Bible most commonly used. Canonizations were usually performed well after the saint had died and a cult had developed among the people. And the very moderate and indeed conservative reform of the Mass at Trent was optional for long-established rites like those used by the Dominicans and in places like Milan.

Many, including Saint John Henry Newman, have pointed out that caution regarding change has particularly been the practice of the papacy, which has acted far more as a brake on new developments than their originator.

With all that in mind, and assuming our ancestors in the Faith knew in general what they were about, it’s doubtful backwardism has been a bigger problem in the Church recently than forwardism. We live in an age in which people overestimate their knowledge and abilities, and have lost their understanding of the past and of tradition—the former is now often viewed as a mass of ignorance and injustice, the latter as a collection of “tropes” and “deeply rooted social stereotypes.” If that is the outlook we’re immersed in, why be especially confident in our judgment?

Claims of superior illumination need testing. In the past, they have been rare among responsible Catholic leaders. More often they have been a form of cultish or manipulative behavior—conversation-stoppers that have been used, along with denunciations of “fear of change,” “resistance to the Spirit,” and the like, to silence reasonable concerns. When they appear among the clergy, they suggest extreme clericalism—the idea that the Church is the property of the clergy to do with as seems good to them.

It is not surprising that such claims have often led to heresy and schism. Iconoclasm, the Spiritual Franciscans, and the Protestant rebellion provide examples. Everybody had been doing things all wrong, the idea seemed to be, but the illuminati would tell people what’s what and they had better listen. More recently, an ideology of forwardism guided by assimilation to the modern world has repeatedly led to a radical decline in Protestant groups. They successfully assimilated, and after that no longer had anything of interest to say to the world.

Our own post-Vatican II forwardists are unable to show many successes except an ability to gain power within the Church. The radical and continuing decline in Mass attendance can serve as a sign of what has happened. Growth in Africa and China seems due to something other than post-conciliar changes—for example, population growth, or a general tendency to abandon traditional folk beliefs in favor of Christianity or Islam.

People disagree whether recent troubles in the Church have resulted from the Council itself, mistakes in its implementation, or external circumstances. It seems to me though—perhaps because I am a lawyer—that much of our problem has been less substantive than procedural. Since Vatican II was an ecumenical council and thus a supreme legislative authority, many people viewed anything coming out of it as something like a new constitutional principle that was to be interpreted and imposed on everyone by bureaucrats and hierarchs.

From that point of view, the post-Conciliar period was very different from a new Pentecost. In a Church run by experts and administrators, where is the room for the Spirit that blows where it wills? The piecemeal accumulation of understandings regarding old realities and new situations? The gradual unforced changes and siftings necessary for something like traditional devotions or the traditional Latin liturgy? Or the contributions of an eccentric small-town nobody like Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone—later known as Saint Francis?

True reform in the Church has most often been understood as a return to a past that was purer and less compromised by concessions to human weakness. That past was often idealized, like all guiding visions, and the result was never actual return, but its ideal aspects were nonetheless a useful inspiration for the future.

Francis of Assisi wanted to return to Christ and the way of the Apostles. Monastic reformers have wanted to return to founding principles and disciplines. It seems odd to think of them as forwardists, even though the implementation was necessarily guided by current realities, as well as ideal visions.

The same principle applies, by the way, to the secular world. The Renaissance was to be a return to antiquity, the rising power of Parliament a vindication of the ancient British constitution, the foundation of republican institutions a return to republican Rome. Even Italian opera was intended to bring back Greek drama. None of them turned out as planned, but each made use of ancient models to guide evolving practice.

So what now? Catholics are not slaves. The Church is in a bad way, and each has his own responsibility before God. That responsibility requires him to be as wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove—which is not easy.

In such a setting, it seems good to take the tradition of the Church seriously. That too is difficult, since that tradition is long and complex, but many ordinary believers who are feeling their way forward in difficult times have found help in the devotional and liturgical practices people had long found sustaining before the changes imposed during the last sixty years.

How, then, is it pastoral to call them names and put obstacles in their way? And is a Church that turns her back on her own past—as catchphrases like “backwardism” and “always going forward” seem to suggest—really a model of catholicity?

Catholic World Report