Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology. He taught for twenty years at DeSales University near Allentown, Pennsylvania. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. Dr. Chapp received his doctorate from Fordham University in 1994 with a specialization in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He can be visited online at “Gaudium et Spes 22”.
The presumption is that vast swaths of Church practice and doctrine “must” change lest the Church fall into irrelevance to “modern man”—that is, secular and Western man.
America Magazine recently ran an article by Mary McAuliffe entitled “Women and LGBTQ Catholics are paying the price for church unity” (Jan. 2, 2024). The essay is completely unremarkable except insofar as it underscores and illustrates a point I made in an article last year on this site entitled “The liberal and flawed roots of tiresome synodal grievances”.
Allow me to quote its opening paragraphs at length to reestablish the point at hand:
One of the things I have learned in my 65 years of being a Catholic is that the unquestioned meaning of the term “Church reform” in the post Vatican II era is that it is almost exclusively viewed as a cognate for “liberalization”. Why this is so and how it came to be this way is a story too complex to rehearse here. But it is sufficient for my purposes to simply note the brute facticity of this reality with an eye toward its ongoing significance for our “new way of being Church” in our brave new era of “synodal listening”.
Nor do we need to spend any time analyzing the typical laundry list of issues that the so-called reformers wish to address. From women’s ordination to contraception to LGBTQ everything, the central intellectual impulses are all the same: what the Church has taught for centuries has been wrong, or at least wrong now for our “times”, and needs to be changed in deeply constitutive ways to fit into our “new cultural paradigm”.
Left unarticulated and largely ignored in this avalanche of Newspeak verbiage is just how expressive the Catholic iteration of liberal modernity is to the central thesis that animates all of the variegated versions of modernity. And that is what I call the “teleology of transgression” wherein all that came before via the pathways of culture and tradition are recast as oppressive restrictions on our freedom from which we now need to liberate ourselves. Thus, all that came before, especially in the moral, spiritual, and religious domain, must be erased if one is a pure secularist, or must be simply redefined and reshaped, if one wishes to retain some religious identity, to conform to the new ordo of liberative transgression.
This is precisely the mentality that captured the Church in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, as anyone who lived through that era can attest.
According to this narrative—the narrative of the “spirit of Vatican II”—the Second Vatican Council was an “event” that established a “liberative dynamic of change” in the name of some vague populist renderings of “the people of God”. Furthermore, all the changes were justified on the grounds that the Church must follow the Holy Spirit by reading “the signs of the times”. There was never an emphasis on the signs of the times being read and interpreted through the lens of the Holy Spirit’s past movements in Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterial teaching.
Rather, the opposite, with the presumption being that vast swaths of Church practice and doctrine “must” change lest the Church fall into irrelevance to “modern man”. And “modern man” always appeared as a construct that was synonymous with “secular, Western man”.
The tired hermeneutic of rupture continues rupturing
Therefore, as the headline on a January 6th National Catholic Reporter article on Cardinal Robert McElroy’s new appointment makes clear, the language of “reform” really is quite often just a synonym for “liberalization”: “Pope Francis picks an advocate for church reform for Washington, DC”.
Therefore, the actual documents of the Council were interpreted with this hermeneutic of rupture in mind, which allowed for the emergence of a kind of “canon within the canon” approach to conciliar interpretation, with documents being neatly dissected into “progressive” vs “traditional” currents of theology. The former were then used as the main interpretive key, which allowed for dismissing the latter as the last gasps of a now surpassed Baroque Catholicism.
There was no sense here at all of a holistic interpretive approach where, as Pope Benedict often noted, the various conciliar statements must be read in light of the whole of the Council and in light of the whole of Tradition. This is, after all, how councils have always been properly interpreted. And it is most certainly how the Council Fathers expected the texts they were approving to be interpreted as can be seen in the debates on the Council floor, where adherence to Tradition, even as it was being nuanced and developed in some instances, was a central concern.
But in the new transgressive mood of revolutionary rupture, this hermeneutical stance was also dismissed as part of a now, allegedly, discredited conservative rendering of the development of doctrine which held that all doctrinal change is viewed in material continuity with what came before and must, therefore, be organic in its development. The progressive destruction of this hermeneutic happened through the poisoning of the wells of discourse on a grand scale since the more one appealed to the actual documents of the Council, or Tradition, the more one was dismissed as a simplistic purveyor of a theologically shallow, and now “discredited”, hermeneutic of continuity.
This is a very convenient theological parlor trick, just as it was sixty years ago, insofar as it puts the more tradition-minded Catholic immediately upon the defensive as an enemy of “lived experience” and “the people of God”. And, more importantly, as an opponent of the Holy Spirit’s movement for “reform”. After all, who wants to be viewed as an enemy of the Holy Spirit?
This is a theological reality that conservative critics of progressive Catholicism still have a hard time getting their minds around. Arguments such as “But that is not what Lumen Gentium says!” or “But Sacrosanctum Concilium never called for these changes!” utterly miss the point of the hermeneutic of rupture. All that matters in this hermeneutic is that Vatican II, as an event, lifted the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido, allowing for a thorough revisionism and relitigation of all that came before.
And make no mistake, there is a real theological challenge here, which cannot be dismissed with the catch-all term of “theological dissent from established teachings”. The challenges mounted against traditional moral teachings in the realm of human sexuality were part of a larger theological project. That project included a “low Christology,” a “low ecclesiology,” and a “low soteriology” wherein the very normativity of magisterial teaching is precisely what is being questioned.
This concatenation of various liberal theological voices captured the Catholic academic theological guild, and that “capture”, with some noteworthy exceptions, remains with us to this day.
The revolutionary shift from the Church to the world
And just to be clear, I am not concerned here with those post-conciliar, progressive Catholics whose main goal was a less clericalistic Church and one more focused on lay involvement. I share that concern, even if I disagree with other elements of their theology. But that branch of progressive Catholicism did not come to dominate the theological guild the way more revolutionary elements did. The goal of the revolutionary movement was the decentering of the Church as such as the privileged location for the movement of the Holy Spirit–a movement now to be more associated with the dynamical structures of general human history and individual subjectivity.
This shift in focus from the Church to the world as the privileged locus for the movement of the Spirit is also what lies behind the constant pre- and post-synodal emphases on “listening” to the Spirit and “walking together in the Spirit”. A big deal was made by the synod organizers about the pre-Synod listening sessions, and yet very few actually think the listening sessions were serious exercises in scientific opinion gathering, or care what these listening sessions produced.
Furthermore, their proceedings are hidden in the curated annotations of an elite curial few who filtered the various “findings” and rendered them into digestible bits for synodal consumption. And nobody in their right mind thinks the 1% of Catholics who bothered to participate in the listening sessions did speak for the whole of the “people of God” in some deeply representative way. Or that they were the very eruption of the voice of the Holy Spirit in a manner clear enough to clear the decks of Church doctrines on all manner of issues.
Instead, the listening sessions were a convenient cover in the guise of a faux “democratic process” of “consulting” the people of God in order to promote a cultural agenda of rupture and change in varying levels of intensity. This is the same ecclesial rhetoric employed after the Council; it should not surprise us that the post-conciliar era and the Synod are linked at the hip in this rhetorical game. After all, the main proponents of the Synod have explicitly linked the two events together and have stated explicitly that the Synod represents the fulfillment of the Council, even if it is never specified as to how this is so.
But they don’t have to. What liberal Catholics saw in the Synod, no matter how vague its definition, was the continuation of the revolution. A revolution of rupture that was momentarily interrupted by the retrograde papacies of the two reactionaries, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, but which now has a small opening in the current papacy, no matter how ambiguous and incoherent Pope Francis’s contradictory signals have become.
It is critical to note that the “spirit of Vatican II” is not an utterly vacuous concept that can mean anything the reformers wanted it to mean. There was a specific cultural agenda in play, and this agenda has remained largely unchanged in the past sixty years. Therefore, we also err if we think the post-synodal emphasis on “process” and “listening” is a benign articulation of some anodyne point of ecclesial discipline that means next to nothing. It is the recrudescence of the hermeneutics of rupture viewed by its purveyors as the proprietary watermark of the very movement of the Spirit.
In other words, the more the rupture, the more likely is the presence of the Spirit. Thus do we see that the categories of the utterly “novel” and the “new”—categories viewed as novel and new precisely in direct inverse relation to that which they are overturning–become markers of a form of spiritual “creativity” now lionized as “courageous”.
Along these lines, one of the key intellectual linkages between then and now is the ongoing power of the “curve of history” and “the end of history” forms of thought. For tradition-minded Catholics such as myself, one of the most annoying features of progressive Catholic theology is its smug self-assurance that it is on the “right side of history” in both an intellectual and a moral sense. In their minds, the ultimate vindication of their views is inevitable, and resistance is futile. Furthermore, in their minds, more conservative Catholics are not merely “wrong” on a theological level, but they are morally bad people and/or psychologically compromised people who are motivated by irrational fears, bigotries of all sorts, and deep misogyny.
Therefore, the prevailing strategy of the theological rupturists has been one of lying low and waiting for the inevitable vindication of their views once the “right pope” is in place.
The obsessive push for a Church that “agrees with me”
Returning then to the essay by McAuliffe in America, we see that it is a perfect example of this genre, only now tainted with a deep impatience and sense of frustration. Paraphrased in its bald reality, the title should read: “How long, oh Lord, must we wait for our misogynistic and homophobic Church to change to the correct point of view?” McAuliffe directly links this exasperation with the hopes she and her friends had placed in the Synod as the advent of a new “listening Church”, which only underscores the sort of “end of history” inevitability she sees her views representing.
Because after all, how could a more “listening Church” not see how transparently and manifestly true her views on sex and gender are? How long must we wait for our cis-gendered patriarchy to see how thoroughly wrong Church teaching is?
There is no hint in the essay of self-doubt or introspection. There is no hint of an acknowledgment that weighty theological, anthropological, and metaphysical issues hang in the balance. There is no hint of an awareness of the theological arguments presented against her position. There is no spirit of dialogue or, tellingly, of “listening” on her part to voices other than those of herself and her friends. Apparently, and this is all too typical, what she seems to mean by a “listening synodal Church” is nothing more than a Church that “agrees with me”.
There is also no hint in the essay that one needs to grapple with the normativity of past Church teachings on these issues. As with all good rupturists, this seems not to matter, and it is sufficient to assert without further qualification that the Church is simply wrong on these issues and needs to change. QED.
Finally, McAuliffe mentions that Sean Michael Winters, over at The National Catholic Reporter, has stated that women and LGBTQ Catholics must simply set aside their grievances with Church teaching to preserve ecclesial unity. But she bristles at this suggestion because a listening Church needs to start taking her pain and that of the “LGBTQ community” as the normative baseline for what constitutes the “lived experience” of “the people of God”.
Why their pain and not that of others–for instance, Catholics who love the traditional Latin Mass and are now tossed out into the peripheries–she does not say. She offers no hedonic calculus for adjudicating between competing pain claims.
There is a reason for that. It is because she does not think she has to supply us with such a calculus. The mere assertion of gender and sex grievance is sufficient.
Grievance lives loudly in many of these synodal enthusiasts. They seek transgressive rupture. Those of us who oppose this agenda need to remember this is an open-ended project with no theological or logical limits. It is an ongoing revolution against which we must mount theological, and not merely magisterial, arguments.