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	The Sources of the Catholic Crisis William Pfaff March 23, 2010 http://www.williampfaff.com/ I would think one judgement history will make on the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council (1962-65), under Pope John XXIII, will be a reproach for its failure to lift the rule of celibacy for secular priests. This has not been a moral failure. It was and remains a monumental failure of human courage and prudence in a matter wholly under the responsibility of the clergy themselves. The rule of celibacy was ceasing to work and was damaging the Church at the very moment of the Council. The result was an exodus of many of the best priests the Church had, followed by a severe drop in the number of American and European candidates for the priesthood. The moral spell of the rule of celibacy had broken. The onset of common sense reform produced inside the Council itself had ended a period of intellectual stultification, repression and reaction in the Catholicism that had lasted since the dramatic condemnation of "Modernism" – so-called "synthesis of all heresies" – by Pius X in 1907, summing up the previous denunciation in 1864 of 80 aspects of Enlightenment thought, issued by his predecessor Pius IX, in what was called his "Syllabus of Errors." The fundamental "error" attacked was the Enlightenment itself. The Church's banishment of the Enlightenment failed to work. Rome had itself eventually to come to terms with the Enlightenment at the Second Vatican Council. Something else at work in 19th and early 20th century clerical culture was the legacy of Jansenism. The Jansenist heresy that erupted in France in the 18th century questioned freedom of will, proclaimed predestination, and denied the ability of man to keep all of Christ's commandments. It was a parallel, but unrelated, phenomenon to Calvinism in Protestantism, possessing the same morbid concern with sin. Jansenism had (and has) enormous effect on French elites, and intellectual and literary life – and on Irish and American, as well as French, Catholicism.
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