Katolsk

Etter konsilet kastet mange katolikker vrak på Kirkens tradisjoner, skriver Eamon Duffy. Duffy er ingen forsvarer av Kirken slik den hadde blitt i 1960, men han er samtidig svært kritisk til måten man kastet vrak på tradisjonen etter Konsilet – og at man ikke erstattet det man kastet med andre elementer fra Kirkens skattkammer. Han skriver mot slutten av sitt forord i boka ‘Faith of Our Fathers’:

It is a mystery because by and large in the past Catholic theologians advocating change, even radical change, have been as anxious to invoke the notion of tradition as those seeking to maintain the status quo. At the heart of the ‘New Theology’ of De Lubac, Congar and the other theological midwives of the Council, was a passionate call to rediscover the tradition. They set about freeing the Church from the narrow straitjacket of a debased nineteenth-century neo-scholasticism by opening up the riches of the deep tradition of the Church, in the scriptures, the liturgy, the Fathers. For them the past was not a sterile cul-de-sac to be escaped from, but an inexhaustible well of Christian experience and wisdom, which liberated theology and the Christian imagination by demonstrating how diverse, subtle, endlessly inventive the Church has been, and is called to be, in her journey through time.

Within Ultramontane Catholicism, however, the notion of tradition had been in danger of narrowing to mean little more than the current Roman theology. Pio Nono’s notorious 1870 aphorism ‘I am the tradition’, was a telling reflection of the day-to-day reality of an increasingly powerful central authority, which strangled Catholic theology (and episcopal teaching) for a century. Most of the citations in the (rejected) draft declaration of faith drawn up for the Second Vatican Council by the Holy Office under Cardinal Ottaviani, for example, were from the writings and speeches of Pius XII and his immediate predecessors: no church document earlier than the Council of Trent was cited, and there were no quotations from scripture. Tradition had shrunk from being a cathedral of the Spirit to a storeroom in the cellars of the Holy Office.

The Conciliar reforms did a great deal to correct this sterile and authoritarian notion of tradition, to recover a sense of the variety and richness of the Christian past as a resource for the Christian present. But whatever the roots of reform, much of the practical liturgical, theological and catechetical reform carried out since the Second Vatican Council was informed by a search for immediacy or authenticity of experience, rather than attentive encounter with the diversity, depth and wisdom of the tradition. In place of a philistine authoritarianism, cut off from the riches and complexity of the Christian past by a mindset described as ‘non-historical orthodoxy’, we have tended to substitute a non-historical liberalism, which has even less to offer.

Reaction was inevitable, and drew strength from the fact that the years immediately before the Council proved to have been the high-watermark of institutional Roman Catholicism in Britain and North America. In the wake of the Council, thousands and priests and religious abandoned their vocations to marry, clerical recruitment plummeted, and Catholic practice eroded. Unsurprisingly, the blame for this institutional erosion was often laid at the door of post-Conciliar change. Accordingly, over the last 20 years there has been a growing call for ‘restoration’, endorsed at the highest levels of the Church, and manifesting itself in a revived clericalism and a strong-arm exercise of ecclesiastical authority which many find deeply alienating. ‘Tradition’ has become a fraught and difficult term, invoked by self-styled ‘traditionalists’, to call a halt to change and herald a return to the forms and mindset of the recent past, rather than as a resource for change.

The essays in this book were written out of a quite contrary conviction, that an understanding of the richness of the Church’s past is a liberation, not a straitjacket. The tradition offers us a point of vantage from which to criticize the present, certainly, but it is also a source of confidence in launching into the uncharted future. Cardinal Newman once famously declared that `in another world it may be otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. The Church’s past, in all its complexity and contradictoriness, is abundant evidence that change, not stasis, is the sign of life. …

Eamon Duffy er en dyktig kirkehistoriker; har studert katolske praksis i England rundt reformasjonen svært grundig, har skrevet lange bøker om pavene og også reflektert over forholdet med sitt eget kjennskap til irsk katolisisme på 50- og 60-tallet. I forordet til boka ‘Faith og Our Fathers’ skriver han:

Roman Catholics have always attributed a special value to their Church’s past, for they believe that the saving truth of God is encountered not merely in the pages of the Bible, but in the proclamation, worship and shared experience of the Christian community — that complex expression of lived faith which we call the tradition. Yet in the latter twentieth century the Catholic Church underwent a dramatic and, to many, disturbing transformation, which seemed to open up a deep gulf between modern believers and their past. Anyone raised a Catholic before 1965 was formed in a Church which understood and presented itself as essentially timeless, its worship and its law enshrined (or, from another perspective, entombed) in the immemorial splendours of the Latin language, its authority structures dominated by its clergy, its principal teachings infallible and therefore irreformable. Roman Catholics had little contact with Christians from other traditions, and were indeed forbidden to worship or even to recite the Lord’s Prayer in common with them. A ‘fortress mentality’ prevailed, Church against world, which in Britain and in America was underpinned by the ethnic and social history of Catholics, many of whom were first-, second- or third-generation descendants of economic migrants, not always entirely at ease in the society around them.

The reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965, profoundly changed the experience of Catholics at every level. The monolith seemed to crumble, immobility gave way to flux. In the wake of the Council, worship was simplified and translated into the vernacular, and almost overnight the Latin liturgy, with its millennia-long repertoire of sacred music, became an exotic rarity: plainchant and renaissance polyphony were replaced by folk hymns accompanied by guitar and electronic keyboard. Catholic churches were ‘reordered’ to allow the clergy to face the people across the altar, and much of their traditional liturgical furniture and imagery was discarded as redundant. These ritual and organizational changes reflected profound theological reorientation as the older certainties of the seminary textbooks were challenged and replaced by theologies which emphasized engagement with social issues and openness to other Christians. Catholics were now encouraged to throw themselves into ecumenical activity, and structures were democratized to give lay people greater scope for involvement.

The religious ferment which began in the mid-1960s was part of a much wider social and cultural unsettlement. The sexual revolution which began then found its more decorous counterpart in the Roman Catholic debate over artificial methods of birth control, and the rethinking of authority and hierarchy with which Catholics were wrestling was inevitably influenced by the widespread suspicion of power and the structures of power which were the special mark of the 1960s and 1970s. It was an exhilarating time, filled with the sense of momentous and life-giving transformations, the bursting of constraints and the opening of new possibilities. For many who lived through them, myself included, these were unforgettable and formative years. But it was also a time of naive and sometimes philistine incomprehension of the past which had formed us, in which much that was precious was disparaged or discarded. In this atmosphere, to suggest that an idea or an institution was old-fashioned was often enough to discredit it. ‘Pre-Conciliar’ became a term of abuse or dismissal. It is now possible to see just how wholesale and indiscriminate this communal repudiation of the past was, and in a Church which claims to set a high theological value on tradition and continuity, this is a mystery which needs explanation. …

De siste ukene har jeg lest gjennom de nokså ulike kapitlene (de begynte som artikler i tidsskriftet ‘Priests and People’) i boka: Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition, by Eamon Duffy, Continuum. 187 pp. I First Things kan vi lese en anmeldelse av boka, som begynner slik:

Faith of our Fathers is a spirited defense of Catholic ritual, discipline, and communal observance—of the ways in which the collective wisdom of Christian tradition is passed on from one generation to another. “After thirty-five years of studying and teaching the theology and history of the Church,” writes Eamon Duffy, “I find myself living more and more out of resources acquired not in the lecture room or library, nor even at the post-conciliar liturgy, but in the narrow Catholicism of my 1950s childhood, warts and all.” This insight, says Duffy, “springs . . . from growing appreciation of just how much of the essence of Catholicism my provincial Irish childhood transmitted to me. For all its apparent narrowness, it bore stronger witness than many modern forms of Catholicism to realities which have come to seem to me infinitely precious. Its ritual absolutes and rules look legalistic, rubric-mad today: but they spoke with a sure confidence of the sacramentality of life, the rootedness of the sacred not in pious feelings of ‘spirituality,’ not in our heads or even exclusively our hearts, but in the gritty and messy realities of life, birth, death, water and stone and fire, bread and wine.”

Eamon Duffy is no traditionalist, mind you. He is calling neither for the restoration of the Tridentine Latin liturgy nor for a return to the devotional practices of past generations. Duffy is generally considered to be a man of the left, and he has been a critic of some of the policies of Pope John Paul II. Again and again in these essays he says that tradition has to do with change, adaptation, and in one place he calls it an instrument for “discovery.” Yet he has come to view the developments within Catholic life over the last two generations with mounting alarm—not because they brought change but because they ignored the deeper wellsprings that nourish and sustain Catholic piety. …