Examining Vigor, Turmoil Within Catholicism Today
The Catholic Church has long claimed a monopoly on truth, proclaiming itself to be “the one true faith.” Historically, the institution considered dissension and argumentation the realm of heretics. In “Absolute Truth: The Struggle for Meaning in Today’s Catholic Church,” British author Edward Stourton appraises this ancient institution as it currently stands, perched at a crossroads.
On one side is the core of immutable truth that the church has always claimed, the eternal beliefs bequeathed by Christ. On the other is a world in flux, a post-absolutist age that requires religious institutions to keep step with modern life. Catholicism’s old guard is reactionary and stolid, while the new church, exploding in developing countries, is revolutionary and vibrant. How, exactly, has the world’s oldest institution come to this juncture? And, more to the point, can these elements exist side by side without fracturing the church?
By examining these questions, “Absolute Truth” focuses less on the church’s long-standing assertion of truth than on the effects within the church of doubt.
“Everything that has happened in the church since and is happening today is a result of the council’s decisions,” Stourton writes of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. “It was a hugely ambitious enterprise: to reverse in little more than three years the course of the church over centuries, so that it looked forward instead of backward.” The council’s decisions unleashed a period of great turmoil and of equal vigor, as Catholics worldwide--lay and clergy alike--responded to the challenge of “taking the worship of God away from the elite and giving it back to the people.”
One of the tenets forwarded by Vatican II was that the church should be engaged with the world. To this end, the format of the Mass was changed to be celebrated in the vernacular, with the priest turned to face the congregation. Thus, a new dialogue was entered when believers were no longer considered passive observers of the Mass but participating members. The door to questioning and disagreement was also inadvertently opened--an element that caught its leadership off-guard.
The scope of this absorbing, well-researched book is broad and deep. It considers the background leading to Vatican II and the outcome of the council’s actions, including the regressive encyclical “Humanae Vitae” (“On Human Life”) that Pope Paul VI issued in 1968, reaffirming the church’s ban on artificial birth control. It examines the conclave of bishops who elected John Paul II in 1978 and how his papacy has become much more conservative than anyone might have predicted.
The author explores the pope’s young adulthood in Communist Poland to help explain the many contradictions of his papacy. Key positions in the papal Curia, for example, “are held by men who believe in the old pre-conciliar model of a church that stands in opposition to the world,” Stourton writes.
“There is a double irony in that. No modern pope has had as profound a political impact as John Paul. . . . Yet everything about the way he rules suggests he fears the corruption of the church by its contact with the world.”
The book looks into the flowering of liberation theology in Latin America and its subsequent quashing, the fall of communism and the role that John Paul II is said to have played in its demise, as well as the hotbeds of dissension now causing trouble within the church, particularly in Asia and Africa. Within these pockets, Stourton finds a “worldwide web of rebels” who are “engaged in essentially the same struggle: a battle to build a new kind of church.”
Today, the church is most alive in those very places that pique the Vatican, as the traditional heartland of Catholicism grows increasingly moribund.
One of the most telling details Stourton considers is the way that the concept of sin in Latin America and the developing world is often tied to social ills--greed, consumerism and extreme poverty--while in the developed world it is most commonly associated with sex. This speaks to the crisis in Catholicism’s traditional heartland, Stourton says, which can be traced back to the great failure of the church with “Humanae Vitae.”
According to Stourton, the fissures threatening the church’s cohesion were evident when Vatican II was being debated on the floor of St. Peter’s. By the end of the council, he reports, “the balance seemed to have swung decisively in favor of the progressives, but, in fact, the tension between these two visions has never gone away.”
Rather, these fault lines have increasingly threatened the church’s unity. Will the church be able to withstand the fissures? To his credit, Stourton, himself an earnest Catholic, offers no easy answers. One thing, though, seems clear: For better or worse, doubt has entered the conversation.
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Bernadette Murphy is a fiction writer, currently completing “Venice Street,” a novel.