“Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.”
-Edith Stein, canonized as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
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Anyone with more than a passing understanding of recent Church history will readily identify the doctrinal and liturgical extremes present in Catholicism since the Second Vatican Council: progressivism on the one hand, and traditionalism on the other.* Both sides have a strong internet presence. Each has a lot to say about its converse, most of it unkind.
I entered the Church through a local parish priding itself on being forward-thinking (whatever that means), and the men and women leading RCIA there, as well as the majority of the priests, have an undeniably progressive bent. Around the time of my confirmation, I stumbled across a website naming common liturgical abuses and quickly realized upon perusing the list that my parish was guilty of most of them. Borderline heterodoxy being preached from the pulpit, laypersons reading the Gospel and giving homilies, barefooted women performing liturgical dance—someone even inserted Gandhi’s name into the Litany of the Saints at Easter!
On the other hand, I started my journey having been raised in a doctrinally sound Protestant home and managed to find—or, rather, was found by—a decidedly orthodox sponsor, a fellow convert. (We wrote a letter about the Gandhi incident. Word has it that whoever’s in charge of such things will be taking his name of the list.) Moreover, in addition to the abovementioned parish, I’ve spent a lot of time at a far more tradition-minded community 20-30 minutes drive from my apartment; the parish priest there offers a Novus Ordo Latin High Mass every Sunday, and an ICKSP father celebrates Mass in the Extraordinary Form seven days a week. Most if not all of the New Oxford Review’s writing staff attends that church, and extra copies of their magazine are a frequent sight on the free table outside the sanctuary. And, for better or for worse, I’ve been all over the Catholic blogosphere and read what many of the traditionalists there have to say.
Thus, despite having been Catholic for less than a year, I’ve gotten to see both sides of the coin up close and personal. And, in the process, I have come to recognize the aptness of this metaphor: progressive and traditionalist Catholicism truly are, at least in certain respects, two sides of the same coin.
The progressives are intent on making the liturgy accessible to the faithful, which actually means attempting to horizontalize the liturgy, eliminating the distinction between priest and parishioner, saint and sinner—even between God and humanity. For them, moreover, the Mass is a means of spreading, not the Word Made Flesh, but the words of secular-minded social justice, feminist theology, and liberal politics. The traditionalists want to preserve the Traditional liturgy, which I’m all for; at the same time, for many (though by no means all) such folks, the liturgy is equally ideological in nature, a means of spreading a Catholicism made up only of individuals like themselves: well-read, well-dressed, rigorist and intensely conservative, not only theologically but politically as well.
Again: the progressives want Christian unity at any cost, to the point where they are willing to eliminate or at least deemphasize all that is specifically Catholic, both in doctrine and practice, from the Christian faith. And, of course, they desire not only peace among Christians but between Christians and other faiths and between Christians and those they view as having been marginalized in some way by the Church—an admirable goal that they are willing to obtain at the cost of indifferentism and an inane acceptance of any and all beliefs and attitudes. Meanwhile, the traditionalists spend a significant portion of their time bemoaning the alarming declines in Mass attendance in America and Western Europe since Vatican II, the poverty of catechesis in the Church today, and the relative lack of political power possessed by the Church today as compared to the early 20th century and before. Indeed, major concerns all; but for many it’s a numbers game and seemingly little more.
And, of course, the traditionalists and progressives have in common their hatred of each other. The sort of vitriol I regularly encounter being spewed forth from both camps against their opposites is nothing short of remarkable for its unselfconscious lack of charity. If love is such a major part of Christian life, why is there this astonishing gap in some Catholics’ ability to follow through with Christ’s command—which, indeed, includes the injunction to love not only one’s friends but one’s enemies as well? The answer seems to lie not simply in a dispute over ideas but, at least in part, in the perceived threat that each group holds for the other’s sway over the Catholic faithful. The progressives want to destroy the traditionalists because the latter are seemingly all that’s holding the former back from taking over the Church, and vice-versa.
In short, both camps are obsessed with power. What counts is that their side wins: that the masses of Catholics who want nothing to do with such battles will be swayed to follow their lead; that the Magisterium would rise up and crush the progressives in the case of the traditionalists, that it would declare itself impotent and its directives nonbinding in the case of the progressives; that all of humanity would be drawn to their version of the Catholic faith, either because it has no choice—the papacy once again controls Western Europe—or because Catholicism no longer expects it to believe anything different from what it already believes.
What is lost in all of this? Nothing less than the entire point of Christianity:
Seeing the crowds, [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:1-12)
This is the God we worship as Christians, a God who desires that we both love our enemies unconditionally and suffer mistreatment, even death, at their hands for what we believe. Love and truth—words used as proper nouns for God the Father and God the Son respectively: both are necessary. Indeed, “one without the other becomes a destructive lie.”
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I have struggled with perfectionism throughout my life—in academics and interpersonal relationships, certainly, but in faith most of all. In this vein I once asked a priest to explain to me the meaning of a Scripture verse that had caused me so much trouble over the years: Christ’s command to His disciples in Matthew 5:48 to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The priest’s response not only spoke to my immediate question but illumined my understanding of who God is and what He expects of us. In seminary, he told me, he had been taught that the Greek verb in that verse, translated into English as “be perfect,” literally means “love as God loves”—that is, love perfectly. Who must we love? Christ tells us the answer: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind… [and you] shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37b, 29). And while we certainly cannot love our neighbor without the grace that comes from loving God, there is a way in which the reverse is true as well; the prayer of intercession to St. Francis de Sales implores him to “pray for us to Our Lord… that we may have that love of our neighbour, without which we cannot hope to love God.”
This, then, is God’s command to us: that we not only love Him but our fellow man as well, enemies as well as friends. And we must show them the sort of love that God has shown us—a love to which we surely can only aspire this side of heaven.
What has been lost in the ideology-driven warfare that has wracked the Catholic Church these past 40 years? Progressivism—iconoclastic and Protestantizing in its aesthetics, ingratiating in its acceptance of unchristian beliefs and behaviors, and anti-tradition in its doctrinal agenda—has never been something I’ve found myself able to take seriously. Questions of right and wrong have long held serious significance for me; additionally, I’m the sort of person who wants what is genuinely beautiful and despises chintziness attempting to take the place of or even masquerade as beauty. Progressive Catholics, in their overbearing attempts to accomplish the honorable goal of realizing the love of Christ on earth, have spent the past four decades trying to destroy all that is beautiful in the Church, both aesthetically and doctrinally. Ordinary Catholic life has suffered terribly as a result, especially in America and Western Europe but elsewhere as well; we have lost much in this way.
Not surprisingly, I am personally far more likely to veer in the direction of traditionalism because of its supposed concern for truth, both in liturgy and doctrine. Yet, if I am fully honest with myself, I recognize many times in the past when I pitched love in the gutter for the sake of truth; in pursuit of a perfect orthodoxy and orthopraxy (which I certainly haven’t gained by my own fruitless strivings), I have often ignored God’s command to love, which should be the driving factor behind getting everything else right in the first place. This is also a tendency I’ve encountered among a number of traditionalists as well. Once again, I’m hardly startled to find myself identifying with them more often than not—birds of a feather, and all that.
So those Catholics who have spent the years since Vatican II attempting to realize perfection in doctrine and practice in their besieged parishes—has the Church lost anything on their account? A few months back, a fellow blogger whose writings deserve much more attention than mine posted a wonderful entry on why he loves Jesus; what he has to say is relevant and worth quoting:
[God] is a face and not an idea. This is indeed very, very scary. You can manipulate ideas; you can justify yourself with ideas. You can’t with a face. A face merely is. A face demands your attention. A face grimaces, a face smiles. And that is what God is, that is how God reveals Himself. If there is any profound crisis of thought in modern man, it is that he cannot grasp this. And even when he thinks he understands, he really does not. In all things, the vice of abstraction and the distance of information put a barrier between us and the true knowledge of God.
Indeed, it is “the vice of abstraction” that plagues, not only traditionalist Catholicism, but Western Christianity in general. As the above quotation makes plain, to turn the Christian faith into a faith of ideas is to effectively neutralize its central point: that the God we worship is a Person who loves us very much—who, indeed, is Love personified. Doctrine cannot be the pivot on which our faith turns; no, the center of our faith is something else. The words of Jaroslav Pelikan, quoting 1 Corinthians 13:13 in The Emergence of Catholic Tradition are apt: “The church worships God and serves mankind, it works for the transformation of this world and awaits the consummation of its hope in the next. ‘Faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love’—love, and not faith, and certainly not doctrine” (1).
Of course, Pelikan almost immediately follows this by saying that “the church cannot be less than a school”; clearly, doctrine is important. But our response to this God cannot stop short at explaining Him in the clearest and most specific terms possible and to understand our faith perfectly. No: the truth must guide the way we love, but love must also be central to our understanding of truth.
Truth and love; love and truth. “One without the other becomes a destructive lie.”
*As the reader may already have anticipated, I will be making a lot of broad, sweeping statements about traditionalists and progressives in this essay. I am fully aware that reality is far more complicated than categorization admits. There are individuals who will identify as “traditionalist” or “progressive” but not exhibit many of the traits I will describe here; likewise, there are many who don’t own the labels but act fully in accordance with the stereotypes. And then there’s everyone in between.
What I mean to say here is that actual human personalities and beliefs are found in shades of gray. Nevertheless, such categories as I will be employing in my descriptions here are useful because able to describe tendencies that may be observed in significant portions of their constituents. So when you read a statement like “the progressives are intent on making the liturgy accessible to the faithful,” know that this is code for “I notice a tendency common to many Catholics identifying themselves as progressive, that they have a tendency to want a more accessible liturgy.” It should be apparent why I have chosen one way of expressing myself over the other.
St. Paul also wrote in 1 Cor. 13 that love is the highest of the gifts. Thank you for your use of artwork and poetry, and for your thought ful essays, and including the reflections of others. Meredith