“But still we have a wisdom to offer those who have reached maturity: not a philosophy of our age, it is true, still less of the masters of our age… . We teach what scripture calls ‘the things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.’ ” I Corinthians. Chapter 2
The crisis and, one must say, the agony into which the Church has entered since Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae are not, of course, about birth control. The birth control question is merely the catalyst that has forced us to face polarities and problems that have been growing in the Church since the beginnings of Vatican II. The real crisis is one of authority and freedom, and the agony it brings with it is shared by those who think they must now defend one of these values against the other, and those many more who are tragically torn between the two.
If the time of troubles now upon us is to be a time for growth, through the Spirit, in the Church, this real crisis and the shared quality of its agony must be quickly grasped. For though the birth control “debate” within the Church as we know it has indeed ended, our crisis has just begun. It will finally work to the good of the Church only if we recognize that the agony it brings with it is shared by men who oppose each other out of an equal love for the Church.
What we see in the Church today are the beginnings of a drama that has been played out in civil societies for the past 160 years-since the French Revolution, at least. The claims of authority versus the rights of individual conscience; the necessity for continuity versus the need for change; the demands of order versus the expression of freedom: these have been the great conflicts, the great polarities, of modern societies, and they have finally invaded the Church. That we kept them out for so long was a miracle of our ancient stability that could not endure forever. Our peace has seemed increasingly unreal, and our crisis was bound to come.
But if we in the Church can learn from other crises of authority and freedom that have been lived out in modern secular societies, we must know that the way to tragedy and disaster lies precisely in the failure of opposing parties to recognize their shared and bedrock concerns, their shared loyalty and love, even in the midst of their disagreements. In civil society values seemingly opposed must be held together in tension, and so too in the Church. Tyranny or chaos—the dissolution of society itself—are invited when the defenders of a particular value see the defenders of an “opposed” value as The Enemy and seek the future of society only through the total triumph of their own cause.
What has been emerging in the Church in this decade, and is now fully in view, is—a situation that reminds us of these things. If in the crisis now upon us the defenders of “authority” see dissent from the conclusions of Humanae Vitae as disloyalty and subversion, and spokesmen for a new Christian “freedom” view defenders of the magisterium as simply obscurantist or “irrelevant,” then all possibility of creative tension is ended and the stage for schism is set. “Betrayal of the Church” in the present crisis will be precisely by those, on either side, who seek further to polarize opinion and thus close themselves to the possibility of the Spirit’s working through a time of trouble to bring forth a new synthesis of values.
The crisis that now seizes us has, of course, been smoldering for over a century, waiting its historical moment to erupt. Only those lacking a sense of history could think it was “caused” by the birth control controversy or would disappear were all Catholics docilely to accept the conclusions of Humanae Vitae. A hundred years ago, in the great Ultramontane-Liberal Catholic struggles of the mid-nineteenth century, the outline of our unresolved conflict was composed. William George Ward wrote in 1869 that the test of Catholic loyalty was “to live as it were in an atmosphere of authority; to look for direction at every moment towards the Church and towards the Vicar of Christ.” But John Henry Newman, who was horrified by such views, after he had been made a Cardinal offered his famous reply to a toast to the Pope: “I drink to the Pope—but I drink to Conscience first.”
Newman knew that the dichotomy between authority and freedom posed by Ultramontanes was a false one, and that the hope of Catholicism for the future lay in the creation of new relationships between them. Such a creation he knew would be painful—and made even more painful than it need be by “party men.” But he looked to theologians who would refuse to join any party and who, aware of historical and theological complexities, seek new understandings of the proper roles and limits of both authority and freedom—gifts that must always coexist in tension within the Church. And such is now clearly the task of all who wish to serve the needs not of a party nor of an immediate moment but who seek the evolution of a new Catholic synthesis of values.
In 1867 the aging Newman wrote to Ward from the Birmingham Oratory: “You are making a Church within a Church, as the Novatians of old did within the Catholic pale, and as, outside the Catholic pale, the Evangelicals of the Establishment. As they talk of ‘vital religion’ and vital ‘doctrines’ and will not allow that their brethren ‘know the Gospel’ or are Gospel preachers, unless they profess the small shibboleths of their own sect, so you are doing your best to make a party in the Catholic Church, and in St. Paul’s words are dividing Christ by exalting your opinions into Dogmas.”
Sectarianism is a narrow and limited response to immediate and short-term problems. Lacking any sense of history or of complexity, it may achieve certain quick victories and answer certain felt needs, but it soon is lost and forgotten in the boundless oceans of time. It thus stands as the eternal enemy of any genuine Catholicism which, of its very nature, is universal, long-range, and complex. And the sectarianism of “party men” is what threatens the Church—the Catholic Church—today. Those who see the present crisis in simple terms of either authority or freedom—not realizing that the very nature of the crisis demands new understandings and limits for both authority and freedom within the Church—are sectarians. From them and from their fervors may God deliver us.
It is somewhat worse than pointless, for example, for defenders of the magisterium to demand acceptance of all the conclusions of Humanae Vitae in the name of authority when authority, its exercise and its limits, is precisely the question, along with the question of the exercise and limits of freedom, that must now be reconsidered in the Church. And it is somewhat worse than irresponsible for defenders of freedom to argue as though freedom were a value that exists within the Church in splendid isolation, unrelated to the nature and functions of the magisterium.
A time of crisis should be a time of learning—and this, perhaps, is an historic moment when the learning Church and the teaching Church can meet in a radically new encounter. There must be authority in the Church; but how simple is it and how complex? How single and how multiple? How centered and how diverse? From whom and from what does the teaching Church learn, and what does it learn? Who and what must it consult—what kind of consensus must it discover—before it can function as the teaching Church, and then what are the limits to what it can teach with an authority binding on all the People of God? Those things delivered unto it “that no eye has seen and no ear heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him”: surely and infallibly it can and must teach these things. But the philosophy of this or any other age? Or politics or economics? Or individual moral choice, beyond the statement of general principles?
These are questions we must finally and honestly face, all the time holding multiple values in focus, confident that the Spirit works in the Church even in a time of acrimony, confusion and pain-indeed, that our present trouble may be the Spirit’s movement bringing to birth new things in the Church. For the Spirit is a troubling Spirit and He shakes us from easy securities to see that the path of the Church through history is a pilgrim’s way.
The whole direction of modern thought and culture, for example, has been toward limiting areas of authority and extending areas of freedom. It is the process Bonhoeffer identified as “the coming of age of humanity.” Vast parts of human life once regarded as provinces for the exercise of paternal direction by the Church or by the State are now accepted as the proper domain of an individual’s conscience. Thus has man’s hard-won dignity as a choosing being been achieved. The Church, no more than any civil society, can escape from this direction, nor can the Church fail forever to reconsider her traditional understanding of the limits of her authority in light of this earned experience of the race.
And yet, having said this, we must say at the same time that authority within the Church is a gift, divinely granted and not able to be humanly revoked. To bring these truths together in new understandings, and in charity, is the task to which we are called today in the Church. We have avoided this task for too long. But the questions of authority and freedom in the Church can never be thought of again as they were before July, 1968. This, in God’s plan, may be the indispensable service rendered to the Church by Humanae Vitae.
