Robert Fulford: a Democratic Reconstruction of the Catholic Church
By Robert Fulford
Catholics of many descriptions, and non-Catholics concerned about the Church’s influence, will be hoping next month that the cardinals elect a pope committed to changing the Church. Whatever their desires, however, they’ll probably be as little satisfied as the people who dreamt that Pope Benedict XVI would produce significant innovation. A pope can push the Vatican slightly this way or that, but can no longer be expected to effect serious transformation. The bureaucracy is far too encrusted to be budged and for many more years will be kept busy dealing with sexual-abuse cases. Even so, the Church does greatly alter itself, contrary to widespread opinion. It is not rigid, even when it tries to be. Those who have observed it over the last few decades have seen fundamental, unpredictable developments. They add up to the biggest Catholic reconstruction since the era that began with Martin Luther in the 16th century. This has proven to be one of the biggest social changes of recent times, right up there with feminism and racial equality. But changes in the Church are implicit rather than articulated. Birth control is the obvious case, the most important one and the biggest surprise to people like me, who guessed that it would never happen. I remember a friend I knew in high school. We lost touch, but I heard she married in the early 1950s. She called me about 10 years later about something I had written. When we exchanged brief life stories, she mentioned that she had seven children. “Seven!” she said. “And I’ll tell you something. If this pope has the nerve to make birth control permissible, I’m going Protestant.” She was talking about John XXIII, but of course he didn’t change the doctrine on “artificial” birth control. And in 1968 Paul VI vigorously re-affirmed it. Then, in 2008, Benedict praised the 1968 statement for its courage in reasserting the continuity of church doctrine and tradition: “What was true yesterday is true also today,” he said. Even as popes were taking this position, much of the church was moving away from them, leaving the leadership isolated, looking like an unworldly clique devoted to abstractions everyone else wanted to abandon. The laity, many bishops and many, many parish priests worked out a silent accommodation by ignoring the hierarchy. Their collective decision, that birth control was intelligent and not sinful, began to drive down birth rates. For Catholic women this was a transforming event. My friend with the seven children must have been among the last of the blindly obedient Catholics. In 1965, David Lodge wrote a famous comic novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down, about a young man who follows the Catholic rules (the rhythm method, which the book calls “Vatican roulette”) and lives in desperate fear that his wife will get pregnant with a fourth child. Years later I asked Lodge why Catholics like the man in his book changed their views and practices. He said that John XXIII, in setting up the Second Vatican Council, claimed to be “throwing open the doors and windows of the church” so that it could embrace the world. John XXIII made it clear he wanted everyone to talk things over. Once Catholics digested that radical idea they began admitting their dislike of the rules governing their lives. Later, they reached the subject of divorce. Of course Catholics don’t divorce, but in talking things over they arrived at annulment, which later became popularly described as a “Catholic divorce.” For decades Catholics took the advice of the church in their cultural lives. The Church’s Legion of Decency did its best to censor the Hollywood movies. In the 1970s the laity decided it no longer required that advice. In what Church history will some day describe as the era of sexual abuse, the laity again asserted itself. Once it was clear that the Church had sacrificed its principles in order to save its personnel, smuggling abusive priests into innocent parishes and schools, the laity roused itself. With the help of the criminal law it forced the hand of the chronically evasive and grudging hierarchy. In this crisis of conscience, ordinary Catholics have exerted far more control than would have been conceivable in the past. Perhaps John XXIII was the last pope who made a difference in the private lives of Catholics, and he did it by questioning centuries of calcified tradition. Since then, in its own unsteady way, the Church has been moving toward a form of democracy, but silently, and almost always from below. National Post Contact: robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
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