The Episcopal Collegiality of Lumen Gentium 22 must always be read in
light of the fact that the Pope, as such, is always part of the College of
Bishops. The “subsistit in” of Lumen Gentium 8 signifies ... well,
what, exactly, in the view of those ageing or aged souls who wave it like a
banner? Both Orientalium Ecclesiarum
5 and Unitatis Redintegratio 16 use
the word “solemnly”, not otherwise employed by the Council, in upholding the
respective rights of each of the constituent churches of the Roman Communion:
the Church of the West and the several Eastern Catholic Churches. There is
undeniably still work to be done in giving full practical effect to the status
of each of those as a qualitatively equal body, organised according to Her own
rites and customs, enriching and enriched by those of Her Sisters, sharing
equally in the duty and privilege of missionary expansion, and properly headed
by a Patriarch to whom She is subject in all parts of the world. But it is
beneath ignorant to suggest that this is about “geography”, and is thus in
principle just as applicable to Africa (not somewhere any longer likely to be
invoked by the remaining liberal Catholics), or the United States (where the
full effects of de facto independence
from Rome are now horrifically clear), or wherever. As it is to engage in
“delatinisation”, the anti-Catholic programme that has driven into schism
Ukrainian Catholics who merely wish to continue the Holy Rosary, the Stations
of the Cross, and Eucharistic Adoration. And as it is to suggest that anything
comparable is or could be applicable to any Protestant body.
Presbyterorum
Ordinis 16 simply does not compromise the discipline of priestly celibacy
in the Latin Church, but the very reverse. Nothing could be more appropriate
theologically and pastorally in the present age than the preservation of that
discipline, while those who blame it for the shortage of priests in the tiny
number of countries where there is such a thing need to be asked in exactly
which of the last 50 years they imagine sex to have been invented, and exactly
when they expect the rest of the world to become aware of it. Never mind what
use they think marriage would be in controlling a man whose sexual interest was
in teenage boys. As for the exceptions, mostly for convert Protestant
clergymen, they make perfect sense, and if embittered priests and other
teachers of a certain generation either do not know that and how they do, or
else refuse to teach it, then the fault is most emphatically in them, and even
more so if they are passing on what they must know to be entirely baseless
claims about celibacy and “pollution”, about celibacy as a Medieval innovation,
about celibacy as concerned with questions of property, and so on.
However, having mentioned endowments, it must be
said that the Church of England, in particular, has married bishops and married
presbyters because it can afford them. Where do the proponents of such a change
among us imagine that widows’ pensions and the rest are supposed to come from?
Or would they have our priests adopt the Eastern discipline and work the land?
Furthermore, as the Church of England has discovered, the benefits of spouses
cannot legally be denied to civil partners. And then there is divorce. In any
case, the mass laicisations of the Paul VI years, at least ostensibly on the
celibacy issue, now belong to a distant age, even if some people are still
living in it in their own minds.
Perfectae
Caritatis, in defining the Gospel as the ultimate norm of the Religious
Life, and in requiring that each expression of that life return to the charism
of its founder, precisely did not mandate the changes which have wrought such
havoc among Religious, especially women Religious, with such calamitous effects
on their number, and thus on the witness of their lived martyrdom at the heart
of the Church.
Dignitatis
Humanae most emphatically did not canonise the secular State, or admit of
“the separation of Church and State”, regardless of whether or not its
principal author wanted it to. If he did, then he exhibited the
twentieth-century American hubris that has met its nemesis in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Freedom of religion is not freedom from religion, but the freedom to
argue from a specifically religious standpoint in the public sphere, and all
the more so within Western civilisation or within most Western and many
post-colonial states (though not, it is true, the American Republic), of which
Christianity is in fact the fundamental basis. Every erosion of this – of the
Christian collective worship in the Sixth Forms of Wales, of the Lord’s Prayer
at the start of proceedings in the Australian House of Representatives, of the Crucifix
in Italian classrooms or between the Speaker’s Chairs and the Royal Coat of
Arms in the Assembly of Quebec – is to be resisted as an act of obedience to
the Council. Those who promote the secularist, Americanist reading of Dignitatis Humanae often place great
store in Justice and Peace work, discussed below. They cannot have it both
ways.
The condemnation of anti-Semitism in Nostra Aetate 4 was welcome enough,
especially within a generation or so of the Holocaust. But there was nothing
especially remarkable about it. It certainly did not represent any sort of
break with some nonexistent history alleged in certain circles, but was totally
in keeping with the Papal position on this question, not least as expressed in
word and deed by Pius XII. It provides no basis whatever for the ridiculous
suggestion that the Church should somehow cease to attempt to convert Jews, nor
for any concession to Judaism, a conscious reaction against Christianity, in
matters such as the naming, translation or other interpretation of the Old
Testament. In its unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation, and in its denial
of Original Sin, Judaism has given the world Marx and Freud, monetarism and
neoconservatism, to name but a few with which Catholic Teaching can have no truck,
as well as creating a vacuum to be filled by ever-expansionist Islam. A body
blow was dealt in 1948 to a civilisation to which the Church was and is
integral, and the Catholics of Lebanon live in constant fear of bombardment in
pursuit of a claim to all territory south of the Litani, an existential threat
to a state of which the President has to be a Catholic, while the Catholics of
the West Bank are subject to martial law rather than to the government of the
viable Palestinian State lawfully constituted on both sides of the Jordan.
These, not some speciously invented history of anti-Semitism, are the Church’s
priorities.
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