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The Catholic Revolution: New Wine, Old Wineskins and the Second Vatican Council by Andrew M. Greeley Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Bursting Readers get to enjoy Andy Greeley’s right brain in his many novels, and can enjoy the rigor of his left brain through his diligent sociological research. In The Catholic Revolution, there’s an influence of his sentimental right brain in the interpretation of decades of research, which produces a well-balanced view of what has gone wrong in the Catholic Church in recent years. In a way reminiscent of the two Americas that John Edwards has used in his stump speeches, Greeley presents a chasm between the clerical leadership of the Catholic Church and Catholics. Here’s an excerpt of all of Chapter 1, pp. 7-16, which sets the stage for the rest of the book: ONE A Catholic Revolution This book is about the revolutionary impact of the Second Vatican Council on the Catholic Church in the United States. I note at the outset that I do not like the misuse of the word “revolution” as a metaphor, a shallow media paradigm for change. The so-called sexual revolution was not in fact a revolution but an increase in premarital sex along with a decline in age at first sexual activity, an increase in the divorce rate, and a steady increase in nudity in films. There has not been an increase in the frequency of sexual intercourse nor, it would seem, in the satisfaction from that activity. It is still true that most sexual activity (and the most satisfying) is between permanently committed partners. More nudity has not made for better films. Moreover, disapproval of extramarital sex has not declined. Change? Yes. Dramatic change? Perhaps. A complete overturning of values and practices? Hardly. Most claims of revolution are an abuse of language, abuse that is inevitable when thought must be reduced to fit a 30-second TV clip or a 750-word press release. Before I began to think about this book I was repelled by the notion that the Vatican Council might not only have been a revolutionary event but might also have, unintentionally, incited a sweeping revolution within Catholicism. I did not want to engage in further abuse of the metaphor. However, I am now forced by theory and data to conclude that there was indeed a revolution within Catholicism in the United States (and in most other countries) in the years immediately after the Vatican Council, which was itself a revolutionary event. The “effervescence” created by the Council had run its course by the early 1970s, though its effects are still felt thirty years later. Attempts to restore the Catholicism of the preconciliar years are doomed to fail because Catholics, particularly those who have come to maturity in the past four decades, no longer recognize the right of the Church leadership to undo the changes made during those critical years. The long reign of Pope John Paul II can be seen in this model as an attempt not so much to repeal the Council itself as to repeal the revolution that swept the Church in the years immediately afterward. This attempt did not succeed, especially when it was directed at the sexual behavior of Catholics, the primary concern of the Church in the twentieth century. Catholics, rightly or wrongly, have withdrawn sexuality from the area in which they feel they have to listen to their Church. The efforts since the birth control encyclical of 1968 to reverse that trend have failed—and indeed probably have been counterproductive. Would it have been possible for the Church to have presided over a Council (which I will argue was a revolutionary event) and not produce a revolution? If one agrees with Pope John and the fathers of the Council that the Catholic Church had to change, could the effects of that change have been less revolutionary? Perhaps, if the quality of leadership and the scholarship had been strong enough. In fact, however, I doubt it. The leadership lost control of the postconciliar moments largely because of arrogance and ignorance—and perhaps because of what seemed to the laity to be an obsession with sex. Moreover, there was not enough depth among either the leadership or the intellectual class in the Church to cope with revolutionary change. The leadership thought it knew what was happening and what was necessary to stem the tide. However, even a wise and prudent leadership would have been swept away by the floodwaters of the change the Council had created. The fathers of the Council had agreed with Pope John that change was necessary. They had not realized how long overdue the change was and how destabilizing the effects would be on the structures of the Church in which they had been raised. They were, in the words of my title, unaware how devastating the new wine of the Council would be to the old wineskins of a Church still structured to resist the threats of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Indeed, they could have decided to enact much less dramatic changes and the effect would have been the same. Unlike some commentators, I entertain no nostalgia for the so-called confident Church of the years 1945—1960. Most of those who lament the passing of that Church weren’t there at the time. Even if the clock could be turned back, what would reappear would be much less appealing than the selective perceptions of those who would like a nice, orderly, “traditional Church.” Nor am I persuaded, as are some in the Vatican, that a strong effort should be made to restore much of the discipline that existed in the preconciliar Church, to undo the mistakes that have been made since 1965 and to protect the Church from even greater harm. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would doubtless like to remodel the Church to fit the rural Bavarian paradigm within which he remembers growing up. Everyone thinks his own neighborhood is special: I lament the Catholicism of St. Angela in Chicago, where I grew up, and of Christ the King, where I served just before the Council. However, his Bavaria and my St. Angela and Christ the King are not there anymore, if indeed they ever were. Moreover, their restoration four decades after the Council is impossible. is that which replaced the Bavarian and Chicago Catholicisms of the late 1950s better or worse? That is a matter of personal judgment. The cardinal (and many, though not most, of the liberal theologians of the Council) think it is worse. I think that it is better and that it will continue to grow and improve as new structures fall into place. I believe that, for all the confusion, all the mistakes, all the false prophets, all the stupidity of the last thirty-five years of Catholic history, the new Church is a great improvement on the old Church. There have been serious losses, but some of them are perhaps not as serious as they might have seemed. The mass departures from the priesthood and religious life, for example, may mean only that those who were unhappy in their vocations now have a chance to make new starts. I cannot see such an outcome as had. Nor can I see as bad the enthusiasm for service that can be found in every Catholic parish in the land where the pastor is reasonably secure and reasonably tolerant. I am not disturbed by a Catholic population that, for all the trauma of the years since 1960, is still largely loyal to its Catholic affiliation and still strongly committed to the Catholic doctrines of Trinity, Incarnation, Eucharist, Sacrament, Church, and Papacy. Finally, I am convinced that it was inevitable that once Catholics entered the ranks of the college-educated middle class, they would he less inclined to accept blind obedience as a criterion for moral decision making. On balance then, I believe that while there is confusion and turbulence in Catholicism as it enters the third millennium, Catholics continue to he Catholic because they like being Catholic. If there had not been a Council in the mid-196os, the Church would be in far worse confusion than it is now. The revolution had to come. It would have been much better for the Church if it had come earlier; it would have been much worse if it had not come at all. My arguments in this extended essay are based on three sources—data, observation, and theory. I will try to distinguish in the chapters that follow among the three sources, though they are so intermingled in my experience that at times it will be difficult to do so. Since 1961 I have been monitoring with the tools of an empirical sociologist the condition of the Catholic Church in the United States (and since 1985 its condition in many other countries). In 1963 Peter Rossi and I conducted a study of the effect of Catholic schooling on adult Catholics under a grant from the Carnegie Foundation (Greeley and Rossi 1966). The national sample data we collected provided the first serious portrait of American Catholics since a study by the (Catholic Digest in 1952 (the data cards from which had been lost). The Council was in session in 1963, but it seemed that nothing much had happened yet—except a revolutionary event that went unnoticed. Thus the 1963 study provides a useful portrait of American Catholics at the edge of the \^7~tican Council—perhaps at the edge of an abyss. Then, in 1974, with a data collection grant from the National Institute of Education, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) conducted a second study of Catholic schools, which I directed along with William McCready and Kathleen McCourt. The national sample data collected in this project provided us with a picture of Catholics after the Council and the material for before-and-after analysis (Greeley, McCready, and McCourt 1976). In the meantime, on behalf of American bishops NORC conducted a study of priests in the United States that I directed with the late Richard Schoenherr, the report of which I wrote (NORC 1972). As I reread the results of these three studies I am astonished at the changes reported (in the case of the 1972 study of priests, as measured by retrospective questions). A tremendous amount had changed in a very short period of time, enough for me to conclude now that the “effervescence” of what can properly be called a Catholic revolution had worked its destabilization on the Church in a very short time and had already spent its force by the time NORC conducted its first General Social Survey in 1972. Since then I have participated in many more studies of American Catholics (which I will cite subsequently) that have confirmed my conclusion that a substantial change had occurred among American Catholics. With some exceptions, however (attitudes toward homosexuality and the ordination of women, for example), these changes in attitudes and behavior had taken place by the mid1970s. The revolution I describe in this essay lasted therefore by the most generous estimate from 1965 to 1974, and probably only from 1966 to 1970. The revolution had occurred, the new wine had been poured into the old wineskins, and the wineskins had burst. Since I am an empirical sociologist, my perspective on the state of American Catholicism in the past four decades has been shaped by these research projects, which provide the raw material for this essay. For many years I was unable to find a theoretical perspective with which to order these findings.’ More recently, inspired by the work of my colleagues William Sewell Jr. and Melissa Jo Wilde, I have arrived at a theory that subsumes my data and compels me to see that a truly era-shaping revolution swept the Church between the mid-196os and the mid-197os, that in some respects the revolution is still going on even though the effervescence has long since gone out of it, and that its effects, a third of a century and two generations later, can reasonably be said to be permanent. The theory explains what happened and points in the direction of possible responses. It has also provided hypotheses for me to test as I reexamine the work—mine and that of others— of the past four decades. If the critical issue in the revolution was the Church’s right to make “rules” that everyone must obey, then one would look for explicit denial of the right to make such rules. By 1974 this right had been seriously challenged by the majority of American Catholics. They would remain Catholics on their own terms. Of such denials of the legitimacy of authority are revolutions made. There are probably several reasons that I did not see this a third of a century ago. The change was so, well, revolutionary as to stun me. I was busy defending the integrity of my work from assaults on all sides. I saw what had happened and, dissatisfied as I was with those who blamed the Council for all the trauma in the Church, I did not have a theoretical perspective that explained why it had happened. Neither did anyone else. Now I understand that the Council fathers had gleefully poured new wine into old wineskins and the wineskins had burst. Church leaders then denied that it was new wine or that the wine-skins had burst, and finally they blamed everyone else for what had happened and made no attempt to fashion new wineskins. Many of them instead called for repairing the old ones. In addition to relying on my own data and on the theories of others that help organize them, I will perforce depend on my own experiences. I am one of the dwindling number of priests who has lived in both the Old Church and the New Church. I was there, so to speak, at the beginning of the revolution. I watched the new wine being poured and the old wineskins bursting. I heard the anxious cries of leaders saying that the old wineskins were just fine. I heard the angry, triumphant cries of the revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille (in this case, the Vatican). Foolishly, I tried to warn everyone what was happening. I grew sour when the euphoria the Council had generated ended, even if some of it had gotten out of hand. I decried foolish attempts at restoration and frivolous attempts to reduce Catholicism to low-church Protestantism. It has been my era, in the sense that it shaped much of my life (and turned me into a storyteller). One does not describe the events of one’s own times from a dispassionate distance. I will try to distinguish in the course of this essay among insight gathered from experience, insight generated by data, and insight gained from the theoretical organization of my findings. I am attempting to write a sociological history of Catholicism in the United States in the last half of the twentieth century. No person with even a smidgen of wisdom would think that such a task is possible. You cannot write a history of your own era because it’s not over, and once it is, you will not be around to write it. The best one can do is report from the field, with the resources at one’s command, and say what it seemed to have been like. Such an effort may provide immediacy to those who write with the perspective of later years but who weren’t there. If they are wise they will at least listen to those who write with immediacy. If they don’t listen, they will not understand, like most of those who now try to write about the American Catholicism of the postwar world.’ At best, then, this essay is an interim effort. Vatican II was an attempt at reform. No one has ever questioned the need for reform in the Church—recall the ancient dictum ecclesia semper refirmanda (the church always needs reform). Throughout much of its history, the Church has been able to absorb various reform movements. (Its most notable failure was its inability to cope with the Reformation, a failure that was in part a result of the complex political situation in Europe in the sixteenth century.) In principle, reform is good. However, the usual response of Church leadership to the demand for reform is a cautious “yes, but not now.” in reforms someone is bound to lose power, and no one wants to do that. Despite opposition from the Roman Curia, the Church’s central bureaucracy, the Council was able to accomplish some moderate reforms. The chaos that resulted—the breaking of the old wineskins—frightened most of the Church leaders. The student unrest that swept Europe in the late 1960s also frightened them. They promptly shut down the reform movement (though the changes caused by the Council and the subsequent Catholic revolution remain, as does the chaos of split wineskins). In particular, Church leaders did not proceed with the reform of the Papacy and the Curia that should have followed the Council. As the London Tablet forcefully put it, they “aborted the reform.” In the following chapters, I will reflect on the kinds of behavior and policy that are appropriate for the situation that has emerged since the Council. My thesis is that the strongest resources the leadership of the Catholic Church has at its disposal are the beauty and charm of its stories. For men who are used to exercising authority and being obeyed without question, this will not be good news. To the extent that they understand my suggestions for new wineskins, they will not like them at all. Or as the Irish would say, at all at all. Some wag once said that Greeley has never had an unspoken thought. Many of the thoughts he expresses in The Catholic Revolution come from the basis of incontrovertible data, and while some readers may not care for his interpretation, the data won’t go away. For those interested in understanding the root causes of the current crisis in the Catholic Church, The Catholic Revolution will provide some insight. Steve Hopkins, July 26, 2004
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