I have already written on Counter Reformation Catholicism on the Anglo-Catholic blog. Though this blog has been in hiatus for some time, we can be grateful to its moderator for having kept the existing material in place. I woke this morning with the idea of adding a few reflections. Perhaps this desire was triggered by seeing the Brideshead Revisited series that appeared on British television in 1981. There has been a recent remake, which apparently makes a huge concession to the LGBT agenda, certainly not intended by Evelyn Waugh when he wrote his book. I prefer the innocence of the 1981 version with the extremely well-studied character portraits. Waugh was a satirist and the characters of his novels are caricatures, but amazing well-constructed ones. It is available on Youtube in ten-minute segments, which is tedious. I suggest either buying the DVD or getting a software package for downloading files from Youtube onto your hard disk, and another programme for joining the *.flv files. You can then watch the series at your leisure.
My seeing this series left a deep impression on me, as it was the time I was converting to Roman Catholicism in London, largely attributable to a friend who was himself under instruction with a Jesuit priest at Farm Street. My first port of call was St Etheldreda’s Ely Place, and then having been quite shocked at some of the things the assistant curate responsible for my instruction said, I went to the Society of St Pius X. The Fathers of the Oratory had been suggested, but I just felt out of place other than by going to their famous Sunday Vespers with full ceremonies and music.
In 1981, I was 22 years old and incredibly naïve about what aspired to be a continuation of the Counter Reformation Church known by countless English Catholics in the twentieth century. In the chapels and churches of the Society of St Pius X, I met many who had been converts as early as the 1930’s and into the 1950’s and heard their reflections about how the dream was shattered by Vatican II and the changes. I befriended a man by the name of Ken Cooper, born in 1912 and converted in 1932, who has served in World War II in the RAF and was a prisoner of the Japanese. He was very devout and did all he could to encourage the youngsters without the crankiness he found among many of his fellow churchgoers. I also befriended a priest of the same age by the name of Fr John Coulson who had been converted during the war (he was sent into Italy and was part of the Bari beachhead) and stayed in Italy and became a Camaldulese monk. Many servicemen did in those dark days of destruction and the close of World War II. It is said that the American who pulled the lever to release the atomic bomb on Hiroshima became a Trappist monk at Tre Fontane in Rome. Wars do strange things, they draw agnostics to the faith and make atheists of believers. It suffices to read The Waters of Siloe by Thomas Merton to understand the sheer numbers of former servicemen knocking on doors of monasteries in the late 1940’s.
So it was the kind of Catholicism I believed at the time I should seek out, offering a clear truth and certitude against all the errors and incertitudes of Protestantism, liberalism, agnosticism, atheism and the modern world in general. Through my friend who was going through instruction with the Jesuit priest, I came into contact with the various groups of conservative Catholics in London mostly concerned with apologetics and upholding Humanae Vitae. A little retro-futurism sufficed to project Pius IX’s aura of infallibility on the still relatively youthful John Paul II. I sensed it was another kind of Counter Reformation, less concerned about the liturgical rites than the Lefebvrists.
The triumphalism and certitude of the Tridentine Church can instil a sense of wonder in the innocent and those who have suffered in life. This kind of Catholicism welcomes a man with a long confession to make and God’s forgiveness to receive. It was a kind of Catholicism that repelled as many as it attracted. It oscillated between Jansenist rigorism and Jesuit voluntarism, and by the 1950’s it concealed deep corruption, perverted sexuality and excessive punishment in the schools and convents.
The Counter Reformation was an attempt to clean out the system and bring in freshness and clarity, concentrating on catechesis and pastoral work. The sixteenth century was the period that saw the first vernacular Bibles and more healthy devotions for the laity. If one is going to have a celibate clergy, then it is better to have religious communities. The two great innovations were the Jesuits and the Oratory of St Philip Neri. There were also the Theatines and the Barnabites. Many of those priests were from the Italian nobility and those communities patronised the arts. It was also a period of uniformity and centralisation.
In 1981, one could find Counter Reformation Catholicism in London in plentiful supply. There was the Indult in England for the old rite Mass from 1971 and the Latin Mass Society was a stable and assured institution. Many of us went both to the LMS and the Society of St Pius X, though the clergy of the latter did not like two-timing!
When I finally went to university five years later, we had an excellent church history professor who had obviously taken a great interest in the Counter Reformation and the anti-liberal polemics of the nineteenth century. He was of great help to me when I researched into the missal of Pius V of 1570. What were things like in the Church in those days? We have little to go on except documents and narratives. The impression I have is that life was a struggle for raw power, and the fires were fuelled by religious fanaticism. When they killed, they did so with a maximum of sadism and suffering: burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, breaking on the wheel and everything the perverse human mind could imagine. The following century was no better. It was also a time of sublime beauty with the art of the Renaissance. There were saints and holy fools of God, probably like in Russia under the Tsars. We can only speculate. In England, as the message seemed to come over in school history lessons, a nobleman had only to say a word wrong and he would be sent to the scaffold for high treason.
Much of the old fanaticism was flattened out in the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment and the acceptance of scientific discoveries of men like Newton, Galileo and Copernicus. The eighteenth century was a time when one could breathe a little more easily – if you were from the right noble family. It all ended in the bloodbath of the French Revolution with a wave of fanaticism against its fanatic opposite number. In the nineteenth century, it could not possibly have been the fault of the infallible Church and Catholic apologists saw a conspiracy everywhere – the secret societies and the Jews. By the end of that century, the country folk and urban working classes were alienated. Then there was World War I and the slaughter of millions of young European men and the “lost generation”. Popes Pius XI and Pius XII did and said what they could about the latest threats of Communism, Fascism and Nazism. By 1945 it was known that many bishops had collaborated with the occupying regime for favours and a power base, and the young priests revolted, attracted as they were by Communism. So it seemed, only the Communist had real guts to oppose the Nazis. Of course, that was not true, since many non-Communists also resisted and paid with their lives.
I see the Counter Reformation period (Council of Trent to 1945) as one of Hegelian dialectics, one of massive mood swings from thesis to anti-thesis and back to thesis, and so forth. The nineteenth century was one of monstrous conspiracy theories which fuelled the anti-Modernist polemics of the early twentieth. They still continue in traditionalist circles, and they have republished many of the books written in the nineteenth century against the Illuminati, the Alta_Vendita dei Carbonari and especially the Jewish organisations like the B’nai B’rith. The famous and successful American novelist Dan Brown did nothing more than to exploit conspiracy theories that lay just under the surface of the collective consciousness. Nowadays, most of the conservatives have either rejected these discredited theories or are more careful about what they say in public.
When I think of it, it is shocking to see every means exploited to defend and promote the Church except prayer and the gentle non-violent way of the Gospel. That alone says so much. No organisation that fights for political power and influence is immune from the temptation to justify evil by a finality perceived as good. This is something of which increasing numbers of ordinary people are becoming aware, and as a result are leaving the Church either to find the ideals of Christ in some other form or embrace secularism and the contemporary form of the Enlightenment.
I think that it is likely that the Church will continue on a downward spiral until it runs out of money and worldly power as conferred by political leaders openly or under the table. The Vatican should lose its status as a nation and come under Italian nationality and law, just like any cathedral or parish anywhere else in the world. Already, St Jerome in the fourth century had noticed that the Church had become weaker in virtue as it accepted favours from the Roman Empire under Constantine onwards. Cujus rex ejus religio – that was the slogan of the sixteenth century in the Catholic and Protestant worlds alike. It was about politics and power and not about Christ. How can one kill in the name of Christ?
As a final word, I had hopes that Benedict XVI was enough of a historian and theologian to see this problem. He certainly has, but he is overwhelmed and can do nothing about it. It would cost him his life – perhaps as may have happened with John Paul I. It can’t go on forever.
The Blue Flower 