All Against All: The Postconciliar Period Recounted by Ratzinger, Theologian and Pope
The period following Vatican II reminds Benedict XVI of the "total chaos" after the Council of Nicaea, the first in history. But from that stormy Council emerged the "Credo." And today? Here is the pope’s response to the priests of Belluno, Feltre, and Treviso
by Sandro Magister
ROMA, July 27, 2007 – Like two summers ago in Aosta, again this year Benedict XVI, during his vacation in the Alps, wanted to meet with the local priests and respond to their questions.
He did so on the morning of Tuesday, July 24, in Auronzo di Cadore, in the church of Santa Giustina Martire, against the backdrop of the Dolomite mountains.
The pope responded spontaneously to ten questions on a wide variety of issues.
For example, in relation to the growing presence of non-Christian immigrants in Italy and Europe, he explained how to reconcile the proclamation of the Gospel and dialogue with the other religions, beginning from “agreement on the fundamental values expressed in the ten commandments, summed up in love of neighbor and love of God.”
In regard to divorced and remarried Catholics, he urged first of all that couples be prepared for a “natural marriage, according to the Creator,” freeing them from the current idea according to which “it is normal to get married, divorce, and remarry, and no one thinks that this goes against human nature.” And in the case of a failed marriage, he encouraged that the divorced persons be made to feel that they are always “loved by Christ and members of the Church, even if they are in a difficult situation.”
On the clash between creationism and evolutionism, “as if these were mutually exclusive alternatives,” he explained that “this contrast is absurd, because on the one hand there is much scientific evidence in support of evolution,” but on the other hand “the doctrine of evolution does not respond to the great question: From where does everything come?” And he recommended a rereading of his lecture in Regensburg, so that “reason might be opened further.”
But the most interesting response was the last of the ten. To a priest who told him about his disappointment with the many dreams that were awakened in him by Vatican Council II but then vanished, Benedict XVI replied by recounting his own experience and his own views of the Council and the period after it: the initial enthusiasm, the tension between those who interpreted the true “spirit” of the Council as a sort of cultural revolution and those who instead reacted against the Council itself, the historic upheavals of 1968 and 1989, the Church’s ability to move forward, in spite of everything, along the right path, in silence and humility...
Here follows the complete transcript of Benedict XVI’s response on the Council and its aftermath:
"We had such great hopes, but things proved to be more difficult..."
by Benedict XVI
I, too, lived through Vatican Council II, coming to Saint Peter’s Basilica with great enthusiasm and seeing how new doors were opening. It really seemed to be the new Pentecost, in which the Church would once again be able to convince humanity. After the Church’s withdrawal from the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it seemed that the Church and the world were coming together again, and that there was a rebirth of a Christian world and of a Church of the world and truly open to the world.
We had such great hopes, but in reality things proved to be more difficult. Nonetheless, it is still true that the great legacy of the Council, which opened a new road, is a “magna carta” of the Church’s path, very essential and fundamental.
But why did this happen? I would like to begin with an historical observation. The periods following a council are almost always very difficult. After the great Council of Nicaea – which is, for us, truly the foundation of our faith, in fact we confess the faith as formulated at Nicaea – there was not the birth of a situation of reconciliation and unity, as hoped by Constantine, the promoter of the great Council, but a genuinely chaotic situation of a battle of all against all.
In his book on the Holy Spirit, saint Basil compares the Church’s situation after the Council of Nicaea to a nighttime naval battle, in which no one recognizes another, but everyone is pitted against everyone else. It really was a situation of total chaos: this is how saint Basil paints in vivid colors the drama of the period following the Council of Nicaea.
50 years later, for the first Council of Constantinople, the emperor invited saint Gregory Nazianzen to participate in the council, and saint Gregory responded: No, I will not come, because I understand these things, I know that all of the Councils give rise to nothing but confusion and fighting, so I will not come. And he didn’t go.
So it is not now, in retrospect, such a great surprise how difficult it was at first for all of us to digest the Council, this great message. To imbue this into the life of the Church, to receive it, such that it becomes the Church’s life, to assimilate it into the various realities of the Church is a form of suffering, and it is only in suffering that growth is realized. To grow is always to suffer as well, because it means leaving one condition and passing to another.
And we must note that there were two great historic upheavals in the concrete context of the postconciliar period.
The first is the convulsion of 1968, the beginning – or explosion, I dare say – of the great cultural crisis of the West. The postwar generation had ended, a generation that, after seeing all the destruction and horror of war, of combat, and witnessing the drama of the great ideologies that had actually led people toward the precipice of war, had discovered the Christian roots of Europe and had begun to rebuild Europe with these great inspirations. But with the end of this generation there were also seen all of the failures, the gaps in this reconstruction, the great misery in the world, and so began the explosion of the crisis of Western culture, what I would call a cultural revolution that wants to change everything radically. It says: In two thousand years of Christianity, we have not created a better world; we must begin again from nothing, in an absolutely new way. Marxism seems to be the scientific formula for creating, at last, the new world.
In this – let us say – serious, great clash between the new, healthy modernity desired by the Council and the crisis of modernity, everything becomes difficult, like after the first Council of Nicaea.
One side was of the opinion that this cultural revolution was what the Council had wanted. It identified this new Marxist cultural revolution with the will of the Council. It said: This is the Council; in the letter the texts are still a bit antiquated, but behind the written words is this “spirit,” this is the will of the Council, this is what we must do. And on the other side, naturally, was the reaction: you are destroying the Church. The – let us say – absolute reaction against the Council, anticonciliarity, and – let us say – the timid, humble search to realize the true spirit of the Council. And as a proverb says: “If a tree falls it makes a lot of noise, but if a forest grows no one hears a thing,” during these great noises of mistaken progressivism and absolute anticonciliarism, there grew very quietly, with much suffering and with many losses in its construction, a new cultural passageway, the way of the Church.
And then came the second upheaval in 1989, the fall of the communist regimes. But the response was not a return to the faith, as one perhaps might have expected; it was not the rediscovery that the Church, with the authentic Council, had provided the response. The response was, instead, total skepticism, so-called post-modernity. Nothing is true; everyone must decide on his own how to live. There was the affirmation of materialism, of a blind pseudo-rationalistic skepticism that ends in drugs, that ends in all these problems that we know, and the pathways to faith are again closed, because the faith is so simple, so evident: no, nothing is true; truth is intolerant, we cannot take that road.
So: in these contexts of two cultural ruptures, the first being the cultural revolution of 1968 and the second the fall into nihilism after 1989, the Church sets out with humility upon its path, between the passions of the world and the glory of the Lord.
Along this road, we must grow with patience and we must now, in a new way, learn what it means to renounce triumphalism.
The Council had said that triumphalism must be renounced – thinking of the Baroque, of all these great cultures of the Church. It was said: Let’s begin in a new, modern way. But another triumphalism had grown, that of thinking: We will do things now, we have found the way, and on it we find the new world.
But the humility of the Cross, of the Crucified One, excludes precisely this triumphalism as well. We must renounce the triumphalism according to which the great Church of the future is truly being born now. The Church of Christ is always humble, and for this very reason it is great and joyful.
It seems very important to me that we can now see with open eyes how much that was positive also grew following the Council: in the renewal of the liturgy, in the synods – Roman synods, universal synods, diocesan synods – in the parish structures, in collaboration, in the new responsibility of laypeople, in intercultural and intercontinental shared responsibility, in a new experience of the Church’s catholicity, of the unanimity that grows in humility, and nonetheless is the true hope of the world.
And thus it seems to me that we must rediscover the great heritage of the Council, which is not a “spirit” reconstructed behind the texts, but the great conciliar texts themselves, reread today with the experiences that we have had and that have born fruit in so many movements, in so many new religious communities. I arrived in Brazil knowing how the sects are expanding, and how the Catholic Church seems a bit sclerotic; but once I arrived, I saw that almost every day in Brazil a new religious community is born, a new movement is born, and it is not only the sects that are growing. The Church is growing with new realities full of vitality, which do not show up in the statistics – this is a false hope; statistics are not our divinity – but they grow within souls and create the joy of faith, they create the presence of the Gospel, and thus also create true development in the world and society.
Thus it seems to me that we must learn the great humility of the Crucified One, of a Church that is always humble and always opposed by the great economic powers, military powers, etc. But we must also learn, together with this humility, the true triumphalism of the Catholicism that grows in all ages. There also grows today the presence of the Crucified One raised from the dead, who has and preserves his wounds. He is wounded, but it is in just in this way that he renews the world, giving his breath which also renews the Church in spite of all of our poverty. In this combination of the humility of the Cross and the joy of the risen Lord, who in the Council has given us a great road marker, we can go forward joyously and full of hope.
> With the priests of the diocese of Belluno, Feltre, and Treviso, July 24, 2007
The Higher Law That Undergirds Virtue, Liberty, and the Government
Professor Russell Hittinger is the William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law, at the University of Tulsa. He teaches and publishes in the areas of philosophy, theology, and law. His most recent book is entitled The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World and addresses contemporary issues involving the natural law. He also regularly lectures on the Natural Law and related topics.
R&L: You have done extensive research and written books on the subject of natural law. What is natural law?
Hittinger: The history of philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence is replete with different definitions. Some definitions emphasize the first principles of practical reason— principles which are implicit whenever we reason about conduct. We can call this order in the human mind. If we emphasize the order of nature, then we bring into view human nature itself as a standard for what ought or ought not to be chosen. We can call this order in nature. While Stoic thinkers of antiquity defined natural justice in relation to divine providence, it was Christian theologians who carefully defined natural law as lex indita, a law imprinted on our being by the Creator. The most famous definition is that of Thomas Aquinas: “This sharing in the Eternal Law by intelligent creatures is called natural law.” Thomas, of course, did not mean the entirety of the Eternal Law, but rather that part of it we can know naturally. All three definitions—order in the human mind, order in nature, and order in the divine mind—are correct, though Thomas was especially adept at harmonizing the three foci.
R&L: One of your recent books on natural law is The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World, published by ISI Books. Why do you consider the natural law to be the first grace?
Hittinger: The title of this book is taken from the letter of a presbyter named Lucidus who taught that after the sin of Adam no work of human obedience could be united with divine grace, that human freedom was not weakened or distorted but totally extinguished, and that Christ did not incur death for all human beings. At the Second Council of Arles (473), Lucidus retracted his position. In the letter of retraction, the natural law is mentioned twice. The natural law is said to be the “first grace of God” (per primam Dei gratiam) before the coming of Christ (in adventum Christi). Lucidus also affirmed that, according to Romans 2:15, the natural law is “written in every human heart.” This did not suggest that, after sin, and without the restoration of the human soul by grace, that mankind know the natural law in every detail, or with perfect clarity. Nor did it suggest that what remains of human moral responsibility after sin is sufficient for the righteousness communicated by Christ. But it did mean that the early church rejected Lucidus’ position that human beings are unable to do any moral good.
R&L: Why must the natural law be “rediscovered?”
Hittinger: Natural law is always “discovered,” at least in the sense that it is not constructed or “made” by the human mind. The sub-title of my book, however, bids us to understand once again that the fundaments of morality constitute a “higher law.”
R&L: How does or should a proper understanding of the natural law affect the political and social institutions of society, if at all?
Hittinger: One of the questions that haunts the modern mind is whether moral judgment is bereft of any note of authority save the private estimation of the individual subject. In my view, no one expressed the question, with all of its ramifications, better than Thomas Hobbes. To be sure, individuals make judgments; but whose judgments have public authority? Slowly, but inexorably, modern culture posited a dichotomy between individual judgment and public authority. Natural law could no longer be reckoned a higher law, expressing a supra-public order of law. In our country, we were fortunate indeed that at the time of our founding, natural law still was deemed a higher law that rendered individuals and societies subject to a divine bar of authority. Disagreements or skepticism about matters of revealed theology and ecclesiology did prevent the founders from affirming a transcendent source of moral norms. James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance (1785) argues very explicitly that the ground of religious liberty is the antecedent duty of every human soul to the Creator of the natural commonwealth.
It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the governor of the universe.
R&L: Many commentators contend that the reigning philosophy of law within the courts of the United States is positivism. Would you agree? How is the positivist philosophy of law different than the natural law?
Hittinger: Positivism can mean different things. On the one hand, there is a kind of lawyerly positivism that insists that the descriptive task of saying what the law “is” is analytically separate from what the law “ought to be.” This kind of positivism allows a moral critique of human law. On the other hand, there is what I call a “cosmological positivism,” according to which all norms of conduct are imposed, posited by the human mind. The great myth of Prometheus, told in Plato’s Protagoras, is still the best example of cosmological positivism. On this view, there is no separation of law and morality, for civic morality is entirely a creature of human law.
I propose that although our legal culture sometimes seems to hover between these two kinds of positivism, we still exhibit a deep and persistent expectation that human law satisfy moral norms. Americans believe that human commands ought to comport with moral rights. Every nook and cranny of human law is litigated, as though law must fall in line with natural justice. In ways that are truly astonishing, Americans demand not only that law be just, but also that society be just. At the same time, Americans are reluctant to impose “morality.” From one point of view, this is a contradiction. From another point of view, it indicates how difficult it is to shake ourselves loose of natural law. The most controversial Supreme Court decisions—on religion, sexual conduct, marriage and family, affirmative action—bear the marks of dissatisfaction with legal positivism. Typically, both sides in these disputes appeal to something like natural law and natural rights.
R&L: In Casey v. Planned Parenthood, The United States Supreme Court has defined individual liberty as “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Is this definition of liberty consistent with the natural law? If not, what definition of liberty would be consistent with the natural law?
Hittinger: Clearly, this dictum does not appeal to the black-letter law of the United States Constitution. Rather, it appeals to a transcendent notion of justice—transcendent, in the sense that there are norms more fundamental than the rules imposed by human legislators. Our Court routinely “discovers” (rather than claiming to “make”) natural standards of justice. The reader of my book will not be in doubt that I believe that the Court’s discoveries are very flawed. For one thing, the Court often asserts liberties which subvert law itself. The Casey dictum, literally understood and applied, would cancel out obligation to obey the Court’s own verdicts.
R&L: What role should religion play within the formal process of lawmaking within a society, if any?
Hittinger: This is difficult to answer abstractly because “religion” can mean so many different things. Some Supreme Court decisions have gone so far as to say that “religion” means the conviction that there exists transcendent sources of morality; religion can mean the merely subjective “religious” state-of-mind of the legislator; religion can also mean the religious-historical sources of custom and common law relating to matters of marriage and family, crime, civil associations, and so forth. Thus, “religion” has become an artificial category, sometimes expanded, sometimes cut and trimmed, for the purpose of winning legal, political, and policy arguments. Because ordinary human beings tend to make judgments according to standards that transcend mere human rules, and because relatively few of us have a highly articulated super-structure of philosophy or theology, religion is a rather foggy and elusive target. An extreme version of First Amendment jurisprudence interprets the establishment clause in such a way as to forbid the state from recognizing the specifically religious content and importance of the free exercise clause. To recognize specifically religious conscience is to establish religion. The danger here is that the right of free exercise of religion is drained of content, and then tends to be collapsed into an all-purpose right of free-speech or self-expression. Although academic legal literature abounds with efforts to define religion, the issue remains unsettled. At the national level, all kinds of religious discourse is in evidence, and courts rarely try to intercept it on First Amendment grounds; yet, at the level of a local public school, even a moment of silence can be struck down as a violation of the establishment clause.
R&L: Is it appropriate for religion to have any impact on the development of law within a society, such as the United States, that places a high value on individual liberty?
Hittinger: We are a free society. Society is not a creature of the state. So long as people are religious, religion will have at least an indirect bearing upon public policies and laws through society itself. A state would have to either destroy religion or destroy society for it to be otherwise. Compared to other political cultures, Americans tend to enjoy a very vivid sense of social liberties distinct from the institutions of the state.
R&L: Does a person need to be a Christian before he or she can accept the principles of the natural law?
Hittinger: No, of course not. Read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
R&L: Do you think that Christianity—and any other theistic religion for that matter—is currently being excluded from public policy debates? If so, what effect do you think this has on societal norms and values?
Hittinger: Increasingly, truly believing Roman Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals are regarded by the elite culture as having no sense of public justice, as having a private lust to impose their religion. This cartoon-like view is especially apparent whenever one gets into the precincts of public law and academia. It is much less true in the world of business, sports, civic associations, and in the day to day life of municipal culture.
R&L: As a scholar and professor, how does your faith inform your studies and teaching?
Hittinger: You carefully phrased the question “as a scholar and a professor.” Taken in just this way, let me say that I am very inclined to look for the good sense in our western habits and institutions. I view even the most adamant secularist positions as part of our common culture. A Christian can take a more inclusive view of the quest for truth. Christ is our redeemer by the cross, but he is also the second Adam, and hence the consummator of human history.
R&L: Does your contact with university students leave you optimistic or pessimistic regarding the rediscovery of natural law within society?
Hittinger: Speaking generally, I do not think that students are very well formed in their respective theological traditions. Over some twenty years of teaching, I have seen more students arrive at the university with an amorphous sense of religion accompanied by a therapeutic sense of morality. By way of exception, I often find that orthodox Jews and some Reformed tradition students are more attentive to their traditions at the intellectual level. Catholics are usually somewhere in between. Students mature very rapidly in their 20s, and therefore it is a crucial time in their lives. Usually, by the age of 25 or so it is clear whether a young man or woman will develop an intellectual curiosity about the big questions of morality, the soul, and God. Every generation is a work in progress.
