In a post at Catholicae Testudines on the generation gap.
One odd thing is when older people, when they see that I take an interest in Catholic tradition throughout the ages, from the beginning to now, including the part between the early Church and the modern era, accuse me of being nostalgic for the days before the Council, assuming that I want to make things like they were in their parish back when they were children, as if I even knew what that was like, which I don’t.
It is interesting how too many people divide the Church into pre and post Vatican II. As if this was some dividing line where everything was changed. Some people seem to have an etch-a-sketch mentality on Vatican II as if the Council shook up the Church and erased everthing that occured before it. This pre and post view is something that both progressives and rad trads share. The reality is that the councils of the Church are more like tree rings than dividing lines. Tree rings grow from the center and are only larger because they build upon what has gone before it. Intepreting the writings of the Council without putting it into context of doctrinal development that went before it is to misread it.
I was thinking the other day about the story of Zacchaeus the short-in-stature tax collector who had to climb a tree to be able to see Jesus. We are all like Zacchaeus in that we too must be elevated to see Christ. Scripture. Apostolic Tradition, and further development of doctrine is what we can climb up to more clearly see Christ. If we remove or minimize any of them we lower ourselves closer to the the ground and our glimses of Jesus are obscured. What happens is that we might see the crowd around Jesus and not Jesus himself. This might explain why too much theology that went down this road emphasizes more the communal dinner at the Last Supper and minimizes the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist. That the presense of Christ in his followers is of equal footing with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. While the one shouldn’t be minimized or ignorned, it should be put in the proper ordering of how Christ makes himself present. When we are elevated to the proper height we can truly see both God and neighbor.
We truly "stand on the shoulders of giants" when it comes to seeing Christ. We don’t have to rehash the Christology affirmed by the Council of Nicaea or argue about whether the Pope can teach infallibly in certain circumstances as what was taught by Vatican I. Our theology can become deeper and richer as time passes and the Doctors of the Church did not come up with their insights out of whole cloth but by understanding the truths before them. Studying the history of the Church and the progress of doctrine does not makes us nonstalgic, but informed. Better able to read the documents of subsequent councils without falling into error.
6 comments
I think it is reflective of the idea that newer is better. “Vatican II is the most recent council so I don’t need to know about any others.” “Once the next council comes, I can forget about Vatican II.”
The same happens in philosophy – “Who needs to know about Plato or Aristotle? They were in the past, they can’t compare with newer philosophy which is automatically better.”
It’s a logical fallacy, but so very persuasive.
Jeff, I agree with the overall point of your post. However, Catholics who lived through the “before and after” did justifiably perceive that a huge breach had occurred because of the way that the VII changes were carried out.
I also think that some older people probably don’t want to return to some of the “bad” of the pre-VII days — including some of the characteristics that made VII (viewed in the proper way) necessary: e.g., rote memorization instead of understanding, emphasis on avoiding sin rather than drawing close to God, “blind” obedience rather than freely-given obedience out of love. I think they are trying to tell us younger folks who like the old ways that things were not all rosy in the old days, either. And I’m sure they are right, even though I think they tend to minimize the “badness” of our current age.
Then there are pre-baby boomers like my mom, who adopted the whole “obedience” thing from the old days, and therefore thinks things are ok now because the Church “wants” [sic] it this way. Her aesthetic tastes are impeccable, so I think she would be fine if everything were changed back to Latin and chant, but she is fine with her (ATROCIOUS) parish now, too. I wonder how many more of the over-70 crowd are of this mindset. They might view your reading pre-VII material as a sign of “disobedience” to their perception of the current Church.
Someone tell that nice Ragemonkey priest about this. He’s done a whole three-year reading thing where the only pre-VII stuff will be the quotes in the CCC.
Br. Seraphim is right and I think the tendency to think “newer is better” is especially strong in America. We are not famous for our interest in history. If Americans can’t be bothered to learn about (or even read) the Constitution, American Catholics are unlikely to care about what went on at the First Vatican Council, much less what a bunch of guys said back in the Middle Ages.
My mother who is 78 went off the deep end because i mentioned that I am planning on taking my boys to Latin Mass at a parish near by. She went off on a screed about how Latin mass wasn’t worth going to and had been thrown out by VII, and that the church needed to go further in its changes. It was kinda upsetting, as my mother was a guiding force in establishing my faith. She seems to have absorbed alot of the mis-information of VII and she’s alright with it.
I especially like the image of standing upon the raised concentric circles of Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium to see Christ.
I have lately been made aware of of St. Ambrose’s take on the “Lift your hearts to the Lord” portion of the liturgy, where he described it as the point in the Mass where we all are standing on tiptoes, jumping and jostling to see Jesus, surrounded by the host of angels, saints, and martyrs, standing before God, our Father.
Then, of course, we all break into a rousing version of Holy, holy, holy, the ancient foreshadowing of the Trinity, expressing God’s thrice-blessed holiness in a language which doesn’t have superlatives. Just thinking of Isaiah and John both witnessing the Heavenly Liturgy that we all raise ourselves to, if we could but see it in each Mass sends shivers up and down my spine at Mass.
If only I had the faith of some of our saints who actually saw the miracle of earth rising up to the heavenly Zion.
The more I learn, and the more I yearn to see Jesus face to face, the more I wish that the priest still had his back to us, in persona Christi, interceding with the Father, standing before me as my advocate, surrounded by the statures and stained glass windows of the saints which we have too often sacrificed in the name of modernity.
God bless Pope Benedict XVI and his appreciation of beauty and the transcendance of the Mass, Liturgy, and music.
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