In the run-up to this fall’s “Synod on Synodality,” I’ve written several essays in this journal relevant to it. I’ve addressed the demand to “welcome” and what welcome has hitherto meant in the Church. I’ve pointed to the call to conversion as the basic posture of the Church. I’ve explored the problem of invoking “experience” as a factor to “discern” what the “Holy Spirit” wants. I’ve focused on factions as providing tribal “insights” as well as how the bishops (it is supposed to be, after all, a Synod of Bishops, notwithstanding Francis’s insertion of non-bishops into its votes) should relate to those factions.
Let’s now consider another relevant problem: how to read the “signs of the times.”
Vatican II put great emphasis on “reading the signs of the times (signa temporis). The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) is largely structured around noting and addressing the “signs of the times” of the early 1960s.
Reading the signs of the times was considered part of the Church’s task of aggiornamento, or “updating.” The two concepts have, in fact, been confused, even though Vatican II’s focus was on reading the signs of the times as the lens for ecclesiastical pastoral engagement at a given moment in Church history. The Church must, after all, engage human beings in the concrete space and time in which they live. Through the sacraments, the eternal God encounters man here and now; Christ comes to us and offers us His grace and life. The Church must bring her perennial riches and wisdom to human beings in every time and place.
The problem with confusion between “reading the signs of the times” and “aggiornamento” has been a kind of unspoken presumption that it is not a matter of the Church, or even her concrete pastoral practices addressing contemporary needs, but of the Church (and perhaps even her doctrines) needing “updating.” Those are two very different realities. Their confusion is in part responsible for some post-Vatican II theological confusion. The Church’s teaching and tradition, instead of being the norm that measures and challenges every era, was frequently transformed into the object that the times measure.
That tendency was abetted by another modern error: the Rousseauean concept of “progress.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau launched the modern conceit that history inevitably involves progress and moves towards a better future. Linear time in Rousseau’s world shapes up as “past—bad; future—good.”
You hear echoes of Rousseau in politicians who talk about how lucky we are to live with “modern progress,” that “the arc of history bends towards justice,” and that it is critical we be “on the right side of history.” That last slogan presumes history is some kind of acting subject that has its own trajectory, maybe even with a shot of consciousness or even inevitability. That is Rousseau refracted through the lens of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, whose idealism postulated a history that produces ever more inclusive “syntheses” to resolve the contradictions of previous eras. Hegelianism found its most explicit ideological embodiment in communism, which envisioned and promised the end-of-history-with-paradise-on-earth (while actually producing hell). But Hegelianism’s temptations, blended with Rousseau’s optimism about history, also beguile Western man.
But none of those ideas and ideologies is true.
However, like most heresies, those errors are appealing because they have a grain of truth to them. History is moving towards justice. But that’s not because “history” intends it, but because Jesus Christ died and rose from the grave as the “first fruits” whose harvest is the Second Coming. Because Jesus conquered sin, history will end in the triumph of good and God. That’s guaranteed.
But that does not mean that the path to triumph will be even, ever uphill, and along beatific vistas. History is not on automatic pilot and can just as readily take a detour through the deepest regions of hell. When we examine human proclivities, the latter is probably a better bet. It also reminds us that, as much as humans may contribute their widow’s mites to the process, the eschaton is not of human building but God’s grace.
Disabusing people of this facile view of a straight-line heavenwards future is critical, primarily because it’s false but also because many of those prone to aggiornamento seem almost to see the spirit of the moment, the Zeitgeist, as some kind of measuring stick for the Church.
Let’s be clear. The “spirit of the times” is not identical to and cannot be equated with the “Spirit of God,” much less where the Spirit of God wants the Church to go. As with experience, the times we live in are not automatically good. They simply are. Their goodness or evil require assessment on the basis of the Church’s faith and tradition, not the other way around. The Zeitgeist is not evidence of God showing us “the Spirit’s Will” of where to lead humanity in the latest degeneracy history offers up.
Properly reading “the signs of the times” may force us to see and judge the degeneracy in which those times are mired.
Expressed in this kind of clear language, most Catholics (even partisans of “listening” to the times) would agree that simplistic lines cannot be drawn between everything today’s world serves up and the life of a disciple of Christ. The blur usually comes when a constant appeal to “dialogue” suggests that questions which for Catholics are settled really aren’t, since so many moderns (including nominal Catholics) are more in sync with the Zeitgeist than the Heiliger Geist (Holy Spirit). Reinforced by the modern Western bias about the “progressive march of history,” you have a toxic but intoxicating brew.
Someone once noted that it is arrogant to assume that the current generation of Catholics has some superior grasp of the faith. Although, in time, the Church as a spiritual reality is not generational: the Church is those “who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith” (Eucharistic Prayer I) as well as those to come. We are simply the momentary custodians who hold spiritual treasures in the temporal earthen vessels of hands and hearts formed from clay (2 Cor 4:7; Gen 2:7).
“What you have received” (cf. 1 Cor 11:23) is the norm that measures your times. Your times do not measure what has been passed on to you.
That is why so many have questioned the methodology of “synodal listening sessions.” Their advocates insist they are not “surveys” or the ecclesiastical version of “consumer input groups.” But—even prescinding from their groups’ sloppy and, therefore, questionably representative qualities, things that would make a secular social science practitioner blush—they leave the impression that the faith is some kind of “product” reaction to which is assessed by some privileged subset of the “faithful” (decided primarily, though not necessarily even upon the fact that once upon a time somebody baptized them).
What makes them “privileged?” That they are alive here and now to opine from that perspective and that, even within the larger Church of today, they are a minority whose opinions are recorded.
Institutionalizing this questionable methodology in a “synodal church” is a permanent invitation for dogmatic, moral, and disciplinary chaos, not organic development-within-continuity of doctrine.
“Reading the signs of the times” has been an explicit methodological approach for the Church since Vatican II. I say “explicit,” because the Church has always had to reckon with how to proclaim the Gospel in every age in which she has existed. So, it is a good methodology: the Church must speak to the “joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties of the men of [every] age” (Gaudium et spes, nr 1).
But we need to articulate a clearer hermeneutic by which to “read” those signs of the times, so that the Church reads the signs and not the signs the Church. Done properly, the Church’s doctrine will develop to address those “joys and hopes” in their proper context in a way that makes the present moment—whenever that moment is—one with the Church past, present, and future. This also ensures that reading the signs of the times is a religious and theological exercise, not a sociological poll—while hopefully also making clear the difference between the two.
Finally, that reading must be conducted not within the confines of a facile modernist and post-modernist “progressive history” but within the sober perspectives of Christian eschatology, which knows both the terminus of history as well as the challenges human freedom poses to getting there.
Ultimately, our challenge is to see history through Christian eyes, not Christianity through the eyes of Rousseau and Hegel. Keeping our eyes on the eschatological prize also keeps us from immanentizing the Christian Gospel in the ideologies and projects of the moment. As William Inge and Fulton Sheen both observed, marrying the spirit of the age augurs rapid widowhood.
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