Pope Leo XIII and the Catholic response to modernity

We often refer to the latest developments in our times as "modern," but we tend to forget that the modern age actually began five hundred years ago--back in the 1500's with the Renaissance, the Reformation, the birth of modern science, the age of exploration, and the first stirrings of political change that led to the end of feudalism and the rise of the modern state. We also tend to forget that the oldest continuing institution of Western civilization, the Roman Catholic Church, was the principal opponent of many of these changes and formulated strategies to counter some of these movements for several centuries.

Not surprisingly, a common view of the Catholic response to modernity over this period is the critical one expressed by Thomas Bokenkotter in his popular book, A Concise History of the Catholic Church. The author claims that "the Catholic Church's reaction to the rise of modernity was largely defensive and negative ... the result was a state of siege mentality that characterized modern Catholicism down to our day." (1) He argues that this siege mentality damaged the Church in crucial respects, but it was finally ended by the Second Vatican Council in 1962-65 when the Church embraced modern civilization in an optimistic manner and liberated Catholicism from its long-standing distrust of modernity.

There is, of course, an important element of truth to this view. The Catholic Church reacted negatively to the Protestant Reformation and formulated a counter-reformation strategy at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) reasserting traditional doctrines; it opposed Galileo's defense of the Copernican revolution and placed him under house arrest; it responded to the anti-Catholic violence of the French Revolution by condemning liberalism and allying itself with conservative monarchs and aristocratic orders; it clung to the Papal States against the tides of Italian nationalism and unification until the temporal domains were forcibly taken away; the Syllabus of Errors was issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864 stating that it is an error to believe that the Catholic Church should reconcile itself to "progress, liberalism, and modern civilization"; and the Church conducted a debate about the "modernist heresy" for a century after the Syllabus that was not set aside until Vatican II deliberately avoided the use of anathemas or condemnations to present its teachings to the world.

Yet, in all fairness, it cannot be said that the Church responded to modernity solely by a defensive siege mentality until it was liberated by Vatican II. This reading of Church history is based on a misleading division of parties into "reactionaries" vs. "progressives" that, in fact, echoes the progressive conception of history more than the Catholic Church's view. The assumption of the progressive thesis is that modernity is the end point of history and that people who oppose features of modernity are reactionaries who will eventually see the light or die out ("it's only a matter of time until the old guard passes away").

A more accurate understanding of the Church's response to modernity is to see that its view of history is different from the progressive view because it is not based on a simplistic opposition between moving backward vs. moving forward. The Church looks at the world from the perspective of the two realms, the eternal and the temporal, otherwise known as the Two Cities, consisting of "the city of God" with its unchanging principles and its embodiment in centuries of church tradition and "the city of man" or "earthly city" with its historical cycles reflected in the rise and fall of nations and civilizations. Guided by this dual perspective, the Church reacts slowly to all historical change, sometimes taking several centuries to assess new historical periods and gauge a proper reaction. What looks like opposition is often a kind of digestion--a sorting out of the temporal in the light of eternity. Moreover, the Church tends to move forward by looking backwards--addressing contemporary concerns by rediscovering earlier traditions and renewing the past in the idiom of the present (a Catholic version of t'shuvah, the Jewish idea of renewal derived from a Hebrew word for return, repent, and renew). And, in a further complication, the Church's deepest response is sometimes obscured by immediate institutional interests and temporal concerns that gain an exaggerated emphasis until the eternal perspective of the city of God is reasserted and a correct balance of the Two Cities is restored.

Seen in this light, the Second Vatican Council was not a long-delayed embrace of modernism (as progressives contend) but an assessment of modernity from several perspectives that at first glance seem contradictory. On the one hand, the spirit of Vatican II was summed up in the Italian word "aggiornamento" which means bringing things up to date, while on the other hand, the spirit of Vatican II was summed up in the French word "ressourcement" which means going back to the sources, especially the earliest sources of the Church in the writings and practices of the Church Fathers in order to renew the past in the present. The consistent strategy underlying the two slogans lay in re-charting Church traditions from those it had established since the Council of Trent in order to confront modernity with a fuller, richer, and older concept of tradition than those immediately following Trent. A deeper consistency also lay in the Church's belief that the essential truths of the Catholic faith never really change at all--that what looks like change is merely the way that permanent truths are presented to the contemporary world or the way that essential doctrines of faith and morals are distinguished from judgments of prudence in political and social matters.