The Spirit of Vatican II: Part III

There is no denying the importance of the condemnation of total war in Gaudium et Spes 80, although, as it makes clear, it did not say anything new, just as the manufacture, stockpiling or use, including threatened use, of nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons is self-evidently contrary to just war doctrine to anyone who reads it and who does not then seek to argue it away as somehow no longer operative. The same is of course true of every argument, such as there was, that was advanced for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which has resulted in the ongoing genocide of the very ancient and previously numerous Christian, including Catholic, population there.

It is evident from Gaudium et Spes 50 and 51 that the affirmation of the responsibilities of married couples in planning their families entails no change whatever in the Church’s Teaching as to the means to be employed. That God is not mocked is now observable in the simple out-breeding within the Church of those who have dissented from this truth by those who have adhered to it, over the same decades as everything predicted in the foretelling that is always part of prophetic forth-telling has come to pass: the phenomenal increase in promiscuity and its consequences, the invariable increase in abortions wherever there is contraception, the horrendous medical side effects of contraceptive drugs, the enthusiastic approval of Natural Family Planning even by the World Health Organisation (hardly a Vatican puppet), the almost zero divorce rate among its (by no means only Catholic) practitioners, and the growing recognition that the war against fertility is a war against the working classes, a war against non-white people, a war against the people of the developing world, and, above all, a war against women.

If it were not for the carping of our own dissidents, then we should already, in this generation, have made it unspeakable that women should poison themselves in order to be permanently available for the sexual gratification of men, or that the problem with the world was that it had proles and darkies in it, or that powerful chemicals to stop body parts from working properly were somehow medicines rather than the very reverse. The anti-natal movement defines femaleness itself as a medicable condition, a misogyny comparable only to the definition of the unborn child as simultaneously insentient and part of the mother’s body. Assisted by the realisation of what the West now has to do in order to compensate for its self-imposed demographic collapse, here’s to the next generation, in which our own troublemakers will die out or be institutionalised.

Although they might have been dramatic at the time, there was nothing remarkable about the Latin Church’s restoration of vernacular liturgy, of Communion in both kinds, of concelebration, or of the Permanent Diaconate in general and that of married men in particular. Although it is probably too late to do anything about it now, the first would have been better gone about by reference to those Protestants who were in the 1960s maintaining in the vernacular something approaching the classical liturgical life of the Western Tradition. The same attentiveness would have made possible the second on certain occasions even if what is now called the Extraordinary Form, one of several reforms that the Council really does mandate. Instead, it was the decision of Catholics to render the Sacred Liturgy into the language of the public house and the betting shop that moved Anglicans and Lutherans to do likewise, not without bitter resistance and significant loss of attendance. Eastern Catholics have always had concelebration, with no more concelebrants than can be accommodated in the sanctuary, all in full vestments, and all reciting the Eucharistic Prayer inaudibly along with the principal celebrant; they are rightly horrified at our “mob concelebrations”, our parcelling out of the Eucharistic Prayer, our distracting cacophony as if that Prayer were addressed to the congregation rather than to God, and so forth. Permanent deacons have, alas, often retained lay attire, a secularisation of the Church rather than a sacralisation of the world, and thus very much in the spirit of the generation before last.

There is nothing new about the celebration of Mass facing the congregation, which was done routinely for educational and other purposes before the Council. But nor is there any denying that, in the intellectual and cultural context of the period, its near-universal adoption has had the effect of turning the congregation in on itself, and of expressing a certain solidarity of the bourgeoisie with itself, easily collapsing into smugness and disengagement. The more theocentric eastward position is clearly more appropriate to the tone of Advent, or Lent, or the Requiem Mass, or Votive Masses, or the most solemn celebrations, at least the most solemn parts of which ought certainly, in the Latin Rite, to be in Latin. The utterly non-theological non-argument that “the Latin Mass was the same everywhere” would have no force even if had any factual basis, which it does not. The historically late and even aberrant Low Mass, never designed for congregational use, has been made the model when in fact the normative form, historically and ecclesiologically, is the Solemn Pontifical Mass celebrated, at least on Sundays and other great festivals, by the Bishop in his Cathedral Church. It is to this that all other celebrations, at least on those days, should approximate as closely as possible.

The normative music of the Western Rite is Gregorian Chant and the Sacred Polyphony based on it, to which all other music should likewise approximate as closely as possible. We must never forget that the use of secular music is explicitly banned, just as we must never forget that certain modifications of the Immemorial Roman Rite as celebrated in the 1960s are explicitly required by the Council. Useful though the Jerusalem Bible’s footnotes are, the text itself is awful. The Revised Standard Version is preferred by all sensible people, and certainly not the New Revised Standard Version with the masculine pronouns taken out to the ruination of the sense; if the Bible is that bad, then why use it at all? At least until such time as anyone has the wit to reissue the RSV Edition of the Missal, authorisation of which has never been withdrawn, those reading at Mass (or, of course, on other liturgical occasions) should read out the appointed passage from the superlative Ignatius Bible, which no English-speaking Catholic should be without. Nothing could better accompany the move to a more accurate translation of the Mass, suitable for properly educated people. It must be said that if those entering the Catholic Church under the aegis of the Ordinariate were everything that they are held up as being, then the RSV Missal would never have gone out of print.

People who make a fuss about the creation of Bishops’ Conferences need to be asked why. What is so important about these purely administrative arrangements, which are for the most part perfectly serviceable in those terms, but which are wholly insignificant theologically? And while it is true that Gaudium et Spes 90 gave rise to the Justice and Peace Commissions, immense damage has been done – I write this from the Left – by the life of its own that the Justice and Peace movement has acquired. The Source and Summit of all aspects of the Church’s, and thus of each Catholic’s, life is the celebration of the Mass, the reception of Holy Communion, and the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This overflows into and as participation in the Church’s wider life of prayer and spirituality, which overflows into and as participation in the Church’s life of evangelisation, which overflows into and as participation in the Church’s life of education and scholarship (witness those forms of Religious Life, such as the Dominicans and the Jesuits, which proceeded rapidly and to glorious effect from their origins as missionaries to the inclusion in that mission of work as teachers, academics and intellectuals), which overflows into and as the Church’s pro-life work, which overflows into and as the Church’s social work, which overflows into and as the Church’s work for justice and peace, strictly in that order, and strictly, at every stage, in accordance with the Church’s Teaching, including where education and scholarship, or pro-life work, or social work, or work for justice and peace includes involvement in institutions, organisations or activities that are not Catholic in origin.

This is of course as much a stricture against a socially and politically quietist spirituality, or a minimisation of missionary activity as such, or evangelisation followed up by little or nothing, or a deliberate or functional anti-intellectualism, or an academic retreat from the world, or an ostensibly pro-life and pro-family compromise with neoliberal economics and with neoconservative foreign policy, or a simple duplication of well-meaning and even important but fundamentally incomplete secular social care, as it is against the defects and deficiencies of many a Justice and Peace group. Those who presume to agree with the Church about bioethical and sexual matters but not about economic and geopolitical ones, and who lionise Blessed John Paul the Great and Benedict XVI even while ignoring much of their teaching, are as much in error, and at times as close to de facto schism, as are those who presume to agree with the Church about economic and geopolitical matters but not about bioethical and sexual ones, and who demonise those Popes even while concurring with much of their teaching (as if it were their place to concur, but even so). Neither has the Spirit, the Ecclesial Spirit, the Catholic Spirit, God the Holy Spirit, of Vatican II.