Abstract
The multiple crises facing the Catholic Church over several decades are not easy to trace, yet Helmick sure-handedly addresses the major fault lines in the Church and why it has weathered the crises in such a defensive posture. He lays out the fortress mentality of the Catholic Church after the French Revolution and its heavy-handed, reactionary control that sowed the seeds for the upheavals starting in the 1960s.
After the Church’s devastation during the French Revolution, the forces of reaction elected Leo XII (1823–1829), who embarked on a course of deep conservatism (37). From then on, the papacy shored up its power, authority, and influence. H. engagingly unfolds this power narrative from that point through the First Vatican Council, the imposition of stringent safeguards against Modernism, and the silencing of theologians in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time John XXIII was elected in 1958, “what was lacking to the Church, the thing that needed to be filled up in the flesh of the Body of Christ, was much of the love that Christ had assigned to his followers as their true task” (84).
H. shows how Vatican II, following the inspired lead of John XXIII, reversed the tide. Relying heavily on the “treasure house of knowledge” (83) of the scholarship of John W. O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II (2010), H. deftly tracks the multiple currents operating during the council and the great hope it unleashed. His close reading of the council’s breakthroughs and the rearguard machinations of those resisting change offer page-turning, high drama.
All the major players on the ecclesial world stage were at the council: Cardinals Joseph Frings, Léon-Joseph Suenens, Giacomo Lercaro, Bernardus Johannes Alfrink, Achille Liénart, Alfredo Ottaviani, Ernesto Ruffini, Augustin Bea, Pericle Felici, Giovanni Battista Montini, the Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh, and in lesser roles the American Cardinals Francis Spellman and Joseph Ritter. A crib sheet for the dramatis personae would undoubtedly assist younger readers who have no personal memory of the council.
The interventions by Paul VI during the council, especially his reiteration of traditional church teaching in Humanae vitae in 1968, were key factors in the subsequent crises. The Vatican continued to exert power and control by censoring the distinguished Catholic ethicist Charles Curran, among others.
H. identifies two different worldviews during the conciliar debates on Gaudium et spes that shaped dialogue for the next 50 years. The document brought up a division between the German-speaking and French-speaking contingents. The Germans, with Josef Ratzinger and Karl Rahner as their theological counsel, had “a more pessimistic outlook on human society, a more Augustinian view, the French a more optimistic one, drawing more on Thomas” (123). Influenced by the more pessimistic view, John Paul II and Benedict XVI readily curbed liberation and Asian theologians who sought to address the structural causes of poverty or to establish a vibrant interfaith dialogue with Eastern religions.
As priests and nuns left the priesthood and religious life in droves, the Vatican imposed stricter controls on seminary training. Ordination of women became a forbidden topic of discussion. Liberation theology became highly suspect because of its use of Marxist analysis. Anthony de Mello, S.J., and Jacques Dupuis, S.J., were accused of religious indifference or syncretism (253). In other words the Vatican resorted once again to power and control over those who held contrary views.
H. devotes an entire chapter to the “Sex Scandal in the New Millennium” (233–48), which broke wide open in 2002 with the Boston Globe’s lurid coverage of predatory priests and bishops’ cover-ups. The scandal rocked the Church and shocked almost everyone. Long-engrained suspicion of the modern world, however, led some church leaders initially to deny how widespread the problem was. But the scandal itself broke open how the clerical system itself with its penchant for control aided and abetted the scandal.
H. masterfully situates the Church’s current crisis within multiple historical factors, even though he is unable to examine all its aspects. The book includes extensive footnotes, an excellent index, but, unfortunately, no bibliography.
H. finished writing his comprehensive opus just after Bergoglio’s election as Pope Francis. He welcomed the Argentine pope’s “radically different style” and “proven devotion to the poor,” who has filled many with “renewed hope” (249). H.’s readers will eagerly await an inclusion of the current papacy in an epilogue or second edition to complement many of the joys and hopes embedded in the Church’s journey through the last century.