Book Review: The Catholic Church, Modernity, and Modern History

From Basic Books:

A powerful new interpretation of Catholicism’s dramatic encounter with modernity, by one of America’s leading intellectuals

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, both secular and Catholic leaders assumed that the Church and the modern world were locked in a battle to the death. The triumph of modernity would not only finish the Church as a consequential player in world history; it would also lead to the death of religious conviction. But today, the Catholic Church is far more vital and consequential than it was 150 years ago. Ironically, in confronting modernity, the Catholic Church rediscovered its evangelical essence. In the process, Catholicism developed intellectual tools capable of rescuing the imperiled modern project.

A richly rendered, deeply learned, and powerfully argued account of two centuries of profound change in the church and the world, The Irony of Modern Catholic History reveals how Catholicism offers twenty-first century essential truths for our survival and flourishing.

This is a fascinating but ultimately frustrating overview of the history of the Catholic Church from 1789 to 2018. It's fascinating because Weigel interprets Church History from the French Revolution to the McCarrick Scandal to help his readers understand how the Catholic Church has been reacting to the loss of Christian faith in modern society since the late eighteenth century, largely through the projects and efforts of our Popes. From Popes Pius VI and VII's wranglings with the French Revolution and Napoleon, Weigel takes us through the pontificates of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII; then to Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI and the confusion after the Council, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI and the project to revive the implementation of the Second Vatican Council in transition to the New Evangelization and the pontificate of  Pope Francis. Its frustrating because of how it seems the Church may be stalled in our efforts to help the modern world--our world--love Jesus and love each other.

Weigel organizes this history as a drama with five Acts and four Entr'Actes. The Acts drive the narrative history forward on stage while the Entr'Actes consider important events and personalities off stage. He provides both narrative drive and cogent analysis with attention to biographical detail.

Act One describes the pontificates of Gregory XVI and Pius IX, including a discussion of the First Vatican Council and Papal Infallibility, as these popes were opposed to many of the hallmarks of modernity and its rejection of Catholic teaching authority, while the first Entr'Acte highlights the contributions of Mohler, Rosmini, Scheeben, Ketteler, and Newman to different responses to the revolutions of the nineteenth century--and the distinctive position of the Catholic Church in the United States of America.

Act Two places Pope Leo XIII at center stage with his efforts to "gingerly" reach out to the modern world, reviving Catholic philosophy and theology through his emphasis on St. Thomas Aquinas and biblical interpretation and proposing some Catholic wisdom for the industrial age and the treatment of workers with dignity (Rerum Novarum); then Pius X comes on stage with his efforts at sacramental renewal and battles with Catholic modernists; World War I and Benedict XV follow, reviving Pope Leo XIII's projects; then Pope Pius XI; and finally Pope Pius XII. Weigel shows great appreciation of three of the latter's encyclicals, Mystici Corporus Christi, Divino Afflante Spiritu, and Mediator Dei, but deprecates Humani Generis.

The second Entr'Acte includes a large cast of theological renewal characters including Guardini, various Thomists (Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Gilson,), the ressourcement school (Congar, de Lubac), the Catholic personalists (von Hildebrand, Scheler, Mounier), Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Courtney Murray.

Act Three brings us to Pope John XXIII and what he hoped to achieve with the Second Vatican Council to "embrace modernity", examining Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, and then various documents of the Council, including Lumen Gentium, Dei Verbum, and Dignitatis Humanae. Weigel offers a substantial critique of Gaudium et Spes, pointing out particularly how dated some of its optimism of how well modern democracy and the Catholic Church would be able to get along seems now. So the Entr'Acte, not surprisingly, examines the aftermath of the Council: Pope Paul VI's efforts to implement it, highlighting Evangelii Nuntiandi; Karol Wojtyla's vade mecum Sources of Renewal and his curial retreat Signs of Contradiction; and the theological rivalry between Communio and Concilium.

With Act Four Weigel brings two of his favorite dramatis personae to the stage: the protagonist Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), and in the supporting role, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). If you are familiar with Weigel's great biography of Pope John Paul II you'll find much that you've read about before with a overview of his papacy and his encyclicals. Weigel also offers an analysis of Pope Benedict XVI's four "September Lectures": Regensberg (9/12/2006); Bernardins (9/12/2008); Westminster (9/17/2010); Bundestag (9/22/2011)--all Weigel's commentary is focused on how these two "distinctively modern men" offered modernism some critiques of unresolved issues of reason, freedom, conscience, morality, economy, and society.

The Entr'Acte reviews the problem of implementing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council since it was "the Council without Keys" and the solution to this problem: the Extraordinary Synod of 1985. Weigel sets the stage for the last Act with the Great Millennium of 2000 and New Evangelization. 

So in Act Five, after explaining John Paul II's vision in Novo Millennio Ineunte, Weigel inserts a flashback to Redemptoris Missio, his 1990 encyclical on the Church's permanent missionary mandate. Weigel also examines John Paul's efforts to influence the EU Constitution, which was poised to skip all of its history from 180 to 1596 by avoiding any mention of Christianity. His 2003 General Audiences and the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Europa attempted to remind Europeans of the work of the Church to proclaim the Gospel of Hope in Jesus Christ.

Then Weigel comes to the unsatisfactory denouement: "The Franciscan Stall". He has to end his review of Pope Francis' pontificate with the McCarrick revelations of 2018, but he starts with Evangelli Gaudium, the 2013 apostolic exhortation setting out the Franciscan program of evangelization and the continued spread of the Joy of the Gospel. Then Weigel describes the confusion of the 2014/2015 Synods on the Family and the 2018 Synod on Young People, which both resulted in contradictions of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (Dei Verbum) on the deposit of faith; Jesus Christ on marriage, and St. Paul on the worthy reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus in Holy Communion with implications of historicism (Church moral and sacramental teaching can change with and adapt to the mores and trends of the world) and a new Gallicanism (what's true in Poland about Catholic teaching might not be true in Germany). Weigel asks how this helps fulfill the efforts of the New Evangelization to spread the Joy of the Gospel to everyone, those who believe, those who've fallen away, and those who've never heard of Jesus.

Then the McCarrick Crisis, with the Vatican displaying the same old modes of "institutional-maintenance and status-quo thinking" with slow responses (not to mention Pope Francis' intransigence regarding the Chilean bishop) demonstrated that Pope Francis, blaming a culture of clericalism, still didn't want to take action in certain cases or be transparent: we've been promised a report for almost two years on how a serial abuser of boys and seminarians became a Cardinal and continued to have influence even after he was supposed to retire from official duties and it hasn't been issued yet. 

So we have to wait for the continuation of Act Five or for Act Six.

In the meantime, Weigel summarizes his argument that the Church has rediscovered itself through contending with the issues of modernism and can offer the modern world some guidelines for reform of its own issues: doubt, the naked will to power, emptiness. Jesus Christ is the answer to every human question, he concludes, and the Catholic Church has, from the Apostles, through the Popes, Bishops, clerics and laity, been offering that answer throughout the ages. We may be stalled as Weigel believes, but we still have a message to share and solutions to propose: "liberating truths about salvation and the ultimate destiny of human beings" through the Person of Jesus Christ.

Except for some glimpses in the Entr'Actes, Weigel's spotlight is on the top of the Church's hierarchy: the Popes, but that makes sense since he is describing the Church's official responses to modernity. He provides a good list of sources. Fascinating but frustrating.

After Catholic Emancipation in England

While Catholics had finally been granted the rights that were theirs by birth in 1829, much work remained for them to exercise those rights, including in the field of education. Richard J. Janet, PhD., professor of history, and director of the Thomas More Center for the Study of Catholic Thought and Culture at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri writes about this crucial period for Homiletic & Pastoral Review:

It was a particularly difficult time to be Catholic in Britain. While the repeal of the penal laws granted Catholics full political rights in 1829, a deep, popular, anti-Catholicism permeated British society. The Oxford Movement, culminating in the conversion of John Henry Newman to Catholicism in 1845, seemed to confirm fears that closet Catholics lurked everywhere. The influx of Irish immigrants into England, many fleeing the effects of the Great Famine in Ireland, fed the resentment of this largely foreign, ignorant, and Catholic underclass. Respectable newspapers like the Times routinely stoked the fires of anti-Catholicism, engaging in the most blatant racial profiling of Irish Catholics (often caricatured as monkeys in political cartoons). The growth of the Catholic population inspired some Catholic leaders to plan for the reorganization of the Church, including the return of the Catholic hierarchy to a land that, since the Reformation, had been administered as mission territory. English nativists responded with attacks on this “papal aggression,” and, within five years, the government would contemplate legislation to prevent such an incursion. While controversy reigned, the mass of Irish Catholics in English cities remained desperately poor and uneducated.

English Catholic schools proved incapable of improving the situation, existing (in the words of a recent history) in “a decentralized, irregular, and poverty-stricken condition.”1 The Catholic Institute was founded in 1838 to improve Catholic schools but could do little to improve conditions, given its lack of resources. Effectively rubbing salt in Catholic wounds, in 1839, the English government proposed changes in educational policy, establishing a Committee of the Privy Council on Education to dispense public grants to private schools, including those operated by the Church of England, and by dissenting denominations. Catholics were to be excluded from these grants unless they consented to use the protestant Bible in their curriculum—a blatant discrimination that was felt keenly by the leadership of the English Catholic community.

What to do? The ecclesiastical head of the English Church, Vicar-Apostolic Nicholas Wiseman, was preoccupied with Vatican negotiations for the return of the English hierarchy. The most popular figure in the Catholic community—Irish reformer Daniel O’Connell, the great “Emancipator”—focused on efforts to repeal the Act of Union with Ireland, and the devastating effects of the Great Famine. O’Connell died on May 15, 1847. The remaining lay leadership of the Catholic community was, unsurprisingly, deeply divided. The old Whig Catholic gentry favored a patient, moderate approach stressing quiet negotiation and keeping a low profile. The new converts were more aggressive, polemical, and unattached to any political faction. Neither side was willing to defer to the other. Prospects did not look good for a Catholic campaign to secure government grants for desperately needy Catholic schools.

He describes the personalities involved in the crisis--laymen dealing with practical issues, as Father John Henry Newman would argue they should in his famous article on "Consulting the Faithful" in The Rambler--and the compromise finally reached, referencing the book pictured above:

English Catholic schools still faced obstacles in achieving parity with Anglican and secular schools. The historian, Eric Tenbus, in a revealing book entitled [sic] English Catholics and the Education of the Poor, 1847-1902 (Pickering and Chatto, 2010), argues that efforts to promote English Catholic schools helped form a more cohesive Catholic community in 19th century Britain. And Catholic schools have earned high regard in English educational circles, as evidenced by recent government attempts to require Catholic schools to register a higher number of non-Catholic students in an effort to “improve social cohesion” in the kingdom.13 What began as an apparently one-sided attempt of poor Catholic schools to share in the public largesse has evolved to the point that the broader English society recognizes (and covets) the values on which Catholic education rests.

"This Republic of Suffering": Death and the Civil War

This is a portmanteau review and I'm afraid it's a little mixed up in its combination, because I'm reviewing a television documentary and a book. I'm looking at the same subject via two different media and I'm going back and forth between the two.

First, I watched the PBS documentary, Death and the Civil War, written and directed by Ric Burns (he and his brother Ken Burns produced The Civil War--cue the "Ashokan Farewell") on the PBS Roku station. Then I bought the book upon which the documentary was made, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust, the current president of Harvard University.

At first I thought I had made a mistake, that the documentary had recreated the book so exactly that I did not need to read the book. But the documentary did not include everything that is in the book, including Faust's examination of the literary responses of Ambrose Bierce, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, the influence of Swedenborgianism and spiritualism after the Civil War, and the popularity of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, which was the second best-selling book of the nineteenth century (after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin). Faust comments that if the latter, according to Lincoln, "helped to cause the war, Phelps's work dealt with the war's consequences." The novel offered comfort beyond commonplace religious generalities, Faust notes, offering a vision of Heaven as an eternal Earth, with all the comforts of home: "Victorian family and domesticity are immortalized, and death all but disappears."

The documentary had all the hallmarks of a Burns' film: the use of photographs (some of which were in the book); the reading of letters and other first-hand accounts (drawn directly from the book), so I was still in the multimedia, documentary experience as I read the book, especially in the early chapters. Both the documentary and the book convey how much both the North and the South failed to prepare for the casualties of the War Between the States. Both sides thought that the military conflict between the remaining United States of America and the Confederate States of America would be over quickly: Lincoln first called for soldiers to serve only 90 days--no one realized how bloody and long the Civil War would be; how many would die on so many battlefields; how little everyone was prepared to deal with 620,000 (estimated) dead.

There were no dog tags, no ambulance corps, no cemeteries, no administrative structure to notify relatives--no infrastructure at the local, state, or federal level to deal with the numbers of dead or wounded. The first Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) was a shock--not just because the South won the first engagement, but because: "Nine hundred men in all had been killed and 2,700 wounded -- nearly half the battlefield deaths of the entire two-year long Mexican War -- in just 12 hours." (Documentary transcript)

Because of the Civil War, the United States federal government had to develop some of these processes, although even during westward expansion, the U.S. Army did not implement the use of dog tags--not until World War I.

Faust points out that even counting the wounded and dead after a battle had a strategic purpose: The main reason to count the dead and wounded is to know how many soldiers you have for the next battle. Robert E. Lee warned against over-estimating casualties because it gave the enemy too much information. George McClellan, to the frustration of Abraham Lincoln, over-estimated his own loses and under-estimated Lee's: that's why he so often held back from pursuing the Confederate army even when he had won a battle. Survivors and the soldiers facing death began to press for greater care of the dead, who were giving their lives for the cause: both book and documentary cover this story very well, the struggles, the monumental task, the role of the women and the Black soldiers in the efforts to find, identify, and bury the dead, etc.

In both the book and the documentary there is a discussion about how this process changed the federal government and the relationship between the citizen and the federal government--rather parallel to the commentary at the end of The Civil War series: before the war, people would say "the United States of America ARE"; after the war, they would say "the United States of America IS". One of commentators, historian Mark S. Schantz, who has written his own book on this theme,  states that:

Certainly, as we think about the obligation of citizens to the state, and what the state owes its citizens -- particularly with regard to the thing that we, in some sense, is the only thing we really own, which is our own body and our own mortality. The Civil War made us rethink that definition as a country, and as a people. What do governments owe to their bodies -- to the bodies that make them up? And that becomes a central question in the war. In the Civil War, I think we come as a nation to the insistence that citizenship is predicated on the willingness of people to lay down their lives for the state. That's the absolute bottom line.

and later he comments, after the discussion of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

What the war does is take notions of immortality that had been previously located in heaven -- in some afterworld (sic) -- you know, you'll be reconstituted -- and shift that sort of eternal frame to the state. And that your eternity, your lasting contribution, will be to the body politic -- and to the nation now that this new birth of freedom in America is based on the sacrifice -- and, literally, the martyrdom -- of Union troops; of American troops. That those deaths are redemptive. And they serve a theological purpose, but now they serve a political and civic end, too. They are literally rebuilding -- remaking -- reconstituting -- the American civic order.

And those sections were rather disquieting to me--the state taking over for heaven? The citizen dies for the state? I always think of the soldier dying for his country. I think Schantz overstates his argument: if it was true today, we would have mandatory military or social services for each citizen and not a volunteer armed forces.

In her book Faust doesn't speak that way about the change in how Americans thought about death in the service of country before and after the Civil War, but she does address how religious--how Christian--how overwhelmingly Protestant--America was in the nineteenth century and how the Civil War experience of death on such a huge scale affected that religiosity. She highlights how popular Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying was and how there was a firm idea of what constituted a good death: in one's own home, in the presence of family, with some statement of the hope of Heaven, the hope that the dying will soon see other family members, and will be in a better place, etc. 

I think Faust's consideration of America's religious attitudes before and after the Civil War may be the weakest points of the book. She needed to give more detailed attention to the orthodox Protestant thought at that time re: the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell), and the variety of beliefs. Did some Protestants in antebellum America believe in Christian mortalism, that the souls of the dead sleep until the Second Coming, the Last Judgement, and the Resurrection of the Dead? If they were looking forward to reunion with family and friends on the other side immediately after dying, they seem to have rejected a crucial Lutheran and Calvinist teaching (cited for example by William Tyndale against Thomas More when the latter defended Catholic teaching on Purgatory and prayer for the dead). She passes over these issues with a brushing reference to a certain "Protestant ecumenism" that Catholics and even Jews who served in the war accepted. But the Catholic idea of a good and holy death required more than a peaceful, comfortable death at home: the presence of a priest, the sacramental confession and forgiveness of sins, the reception of Viaticum, and Extreme Unction, then thought of as the anointing sacrament of the dying, and the promise of prayer for the soul after death. I think that Faust ignores some of this complexity.

Her discussion of growing uncertainty in these orthodoxies after the war--including the practice of spiritualism with seances and other efforts to contact the dead, particularly to find out how the body of the dead in Heaven can be reunited with its severed limbs (before the Resurrection of the Dead?)--also has to be in some ways superficial. Faust would have to choose to write the companion to Owen Chadwick's The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century--quite a Faustian choice!--to explore the influence of the Civil War experience on religious belief about death and the hereafter. 

These weaknesses aside, I recommend both the documentary and the book if you want to explore another view of the American Civil War. 

I'm off now to explore Mark A. Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis and St. Robert Bellarmine's The Art of Dying Well. By the way, did you know that St. Thomas More and his daughter Margaret worked on a study of the Four Last Things together? We have only part of More's examination of Death.