PAUL BLANSHARD AT VATICAN II: A REVIEW

It is like two trains on separate, parallel tracks that are moving in the same direction. The passenger in Train A, which is moving slightly faster than Train B, looks out of the window casually and thinks that his train is moving very slowly past Train B, which seems to him to be standing still. The truth is that both trains are moving rapidly, but the passengers in each train tend to judge their motion by that of the other.

By this analogy Mr. Blanshard gives his view of the accomplishments of Vatican II and of the recent changes in the Roman Catholic Church. In terms of its own long history, the Roman Church moved rapidly and accomplished much during Vatican II. But in terms of Western culture, which has advanced more in the past two centuries than the entire world had progressed up to that time, both the Council and the Church have moved so slowly that its progress is imperceptible.

The Council moved the Roman Catholic Church from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, which is high velocity indeed. But it still left Christendom’s largest church 300 years behind the times. Progress? Speed? It all depends on which train you are riding!

In an effort to draw up a “Balance Sheet” of credits and debits of Vatican II, Mr. Blanshard lists these four on the credit side:

1. Liturgy reform. The shift from “the gobbledegook of Latin ritual” to the language of the communicants, even if only partially realized, is viewed as a move away from obscurantism. Some priests in some rituals can now face their congregations instead of turning their backs.

2. Admission of possible mistakes in the past. Blanshard is encouraged that Pope John and Pope Paul both admitted that the Church may have erred in some of its activities in the distant past, and he sees this as “a great emotional gain for honesty in Christian interrelationships.” While these admissions were vague and general, he does not doubt their genuineness, and he is made hopeful that in another century some pope will go further and actually concede that his Church has been doctrinally mistaken.

3. Limited religions liberty, in principle. Blanshard sees this as perhaps the greatest single advance in principle of all the sessions. While there is much yet to be desired in the Church’s view of religious liberty for others, it has at least taken the first step in at least giving lip service to the principle.

4. The commitment to social reform. The Roman Catholic leaders have been much too long in either heaven or purgatory, Blanshard observes, and have consequently ignored the world that really matters to their constituents. Now they are more concerned with human suffering and social reform. What came out of Vatican II may have to be viewed as only a freshman textbook in Catholic social science, which Blanshard deems appropriate since the Church is not yet ready for a graduate textbook.

He finds four points for the debit side also:

1. Continued opposition to birth control. Blanshard is convinced that Pope Paul hurt himself badly with his Church and with the world by clinging to the traditional opposition to contraceptives. Overpopulation is an evil that is the parent of many other evils, and sooner or later the Church is going to have to yield on this, point. But the Pope had his chance at Vatican II, and since he didn’t take it his influence is irreparably damaged. It was the greatest single defeat for intelligence at the Council sessions, Blanshard insists.

2. The reassertion of Catholic claims on the public treasury. The Roman clergy is unrelenting in laying claims upon public funds for the support of its schools. Vatican II did not change this, making the Church’s policy just as antagonistic to the American principle of separation of church and state as ever.

3. The continuation of papal autocracy. The Council depicted papal absolutism as much as it depicted progress, for along with such gains mentioned above, which at least faintly suggest a move toward more freedom, both popes felt free to break into the proceedings with arbitrary decisions that were contrary to Council opinion. At Vatican II the pope was not merely the superior cleric, for he was an awesome figure that would be worshipped before he would be questioned.

4. Discrimination in mixed marriages. After four years of behind-the-scenes debates only two minor changes were made on the policy on mixed marriages, and these “only add insult to injury” and are wholly unsatisfactory. Blanshard will not be satisfied on this score until the Church allows parents to make their own decisions about the religion of their children, without any priestly interference.

While the foregoing appears to us to be the heart of the book, there is indeed much more, all of which reveals careful research on Mr. Blanshard’s part. We are impressed both with his resourcefulness and his sophistication. He is obviously a concerned man, one moved by principle rather than bigotry. As one reads this book he is convinced that the Roman Church would itself profit greatly by listening to this reasonable and responsible criticism. One would also suppose that Pope Paul would be eager to read the chapters about himself and Pope John, and that it ought to influence his thinking. “Here is an appeal to reason and to human dignity” one says to himself as he reads these chapters.

Yet the book is quite candid. It is explained to those who have the image of affable Pope John as one who was ready to make concessions in order to achieve unity with the Protestants that such a view is incorrect, for the only kind of unity the kindly pope ever advocated, even in his most liberal moments, was for the dissenters to return to Rome. Pope Paul is described as an institutional man, so institutional in fact that Blanshard questions that he can be considered a truly educated man. Reversing Emerson’s remark that an institution is the lengthened shadow of a man, Blanshard says that Paul is the lengthened shadow of an institution.

There is a provocative and embarrassing chapter on the Jews, which shows how the Roman clergy in Germany played ball with Hitler, actually justifying moderate anti-Semitism and objecting only to extreme and immoral acts. He reveals how the German bishops continued to receive money from Hitler, almost to the very end of his regime. The Hitler-Vatican Concordat was never renounced by any pope, not even during Hitler’s brutalities against the Jews, and the Church continued receiving benefits from Hitler. He discusses at length the influence of the play The Deputy, which exposed the Church’s duplicity in reference to the Nazis, and he freely refers to Lewy’s documented account of the conduct of the German bishops during the Hitler period in a book entitled The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany.

There are chapters on Christian Unity, which reveals the Church’s internal factions as well as discusses the larger problem of ecumenicity; and Sex, Celibacy and Women, which raises haunting questions about the Church’s view of sex, convent life and the treatment of women. And there is extensive treatment of Blanshard’s favorite subjects: birth control, federal aid to parochial schools, and what he calls “the miraculous underworld,” where even relics and indulgences are treated with the same scholarly objectivity that characterizes all the chapters.

The book goes beyond Vatican II, of course, and deals with the issues within the larger framework of world culture and Roman Catholic history. Like other Blanshard books, it is a treatment of modern Roman Catholic thought and practice as a cultural problem. This should be welcomed by all people, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant or no religion at all. Even if one suspects that Mr. Blanshard goes out of his way in his treatment of Vatican II to expose the Roman Catholic Church, this should be offset by the fact that he is indeed dealing with problems of great significance to human welfare and with an institution that is closely involved with these problems. We should therefore be grateful for all the information we can get. And above all else it can be said of this volume that it is surely informative, disturbingly informative. It appears to us that it should be more generally reviewed and discussed in the world press.

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