Spiritual direction: Understanding the Popes

Here is another quick spiritual direction regarding understanding the Popes. I want to comment about Pope Paul VI, who I remember very well. In fact I remember all the Popes since my birth, so that covers Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and of course our present Benedict XVI. So I know what I speaketh about!

Many cruel and incorrect things have been attributed to Pope Paul VI, going so far as to call him an antipope, and I must tell you that makes me very unhappy and annoyed. There are two things that you need to understand. The first is that there is a difference between making decisions about liturgy and so forth, whether you agree with them or not, and remaining true to the faith as Vicar of Christ. If you actually read his encyclicals you will see that Pope Paul VI was devoutly and purely true to Jesus Christ and God and certainly does not deserve the labels he has been unfairly and ignorantly slammed with. Pope Paul VI, however "liberal" he may have seemed, was liberal only in the context of trying to interact with the rapid modernization of society and the accompanying pressures, but without changing one iota of Church doctrine. It is a feat to be applauded that all this centuries' Popes have maintained 100 percent purity of doctrine even as they took the brunt of the secular and relativistic assaults. For example Pope Paul VI continued to instruct beautifully in the true presence of the Holy Eucharist (as society demanded symbolism and "scientific realism"), the sanctity of life (in the face of the legalization of abortion), and the priesthood in the image of Christ (as certain people started "demanding" "women priests"). His doctrine remained perfect and pure and it is outrageous to imply otherwise.

Now, many have correctly pointed out severe consequences from questionable implementations from Vatican II (which he inherited, as it was convened under John XXII). However, just because there were severe consequences from a direction that the Church took does not mean that everything would have been hunky dory otherwise. This is my second point. Somehow this odd view of human progress has crept into modern thinking. It is the "road not taken" attitude where somehow people assume that if all else was equal, that one decision makes all the difference between one outcome and another. This is not scholarly and incorrect to even the most casual student or observer of human history. Let's use the example of the change in the liturgy that was an outcome of Vatican II. I agree that there were many bad consequences from decisions made about the liturgy. But I'm a smart person and I know that if you could wave a magic wand and make those liturgical decisions to have "never happened," other very problematic things would have happened instead because this is the age of the crisis of faith. It's not like abortion would not have happened, for example, or the attacks and erosion of relativism. It's not like Catholic parents would have continued to be an island of faith, raising goody goody families with well formed Catholic children while the rest of society turned to Internet porn, New Age, abortion, single parenting, substance abuse and the pressures of Communism and socialism. If Pope Paul VI "had not changed the liturgy" are you telling me that you think that the rest of society would have allowed the Catholic Church to sail untouched because it still had the Latin Mass and the Extraordinary Form? Don't we wish that the evolution of history and current events are so simplistic, but they are not. Who knows how many might still have fallen away from the Church even if the Latin Mass and traditional liturgy were preserved? What if some well springs of vocations that thankfully still exist today never came into being because of a cultural clash with the Latin Mass and traditional liturgy? There are people in the Church today who would probably not have been called, just as there are others who perhaps were not called who would have been had the traditional liturgy remained as the Ordinary of the Mass. Whenever a major decision such as what Pope Paul VI faced is made, you must understand it is not pure and linear, with all of subsequent events being "good" or "bad." That's why I call them consequences. There are consequences of the change in the form of the Mass, but there would have been consequences of not changing the form of the Mass too. People are used to a kind of cost-benefit analysis but they are weak at considering "missed opportunity" analysis. Whenever a decision is made there are consequences, and there are consequences of making no decision (status quo, therefore) too. I can assure you that even if Pope Paul VI argued for and preserved the Latin traditional liturgy the Church would still have been assailed by the pressures I already mentioned. Ironically when that happened people would have blamed the traditional Latin Mass! In that "alternate scenario" I can see the crisis of the Church hitting and people blogging angrily about that stale Latin Mass, even as the faith of those who are true would have been sustained by the traditional Mass, as well it should be. I'm just saying that the crisis in the faith for Catholics (and the other faiths, incidentally) would still have occurred because of the very unfortunate times that we find ourselves in. By unfortunate I don't mean matters of luck. I mean that there is a very troubling global and humanitarian crisis of faith which comes from a turning away from God, the destruction of the family, the abuse and killing of children, and materialistic and substance addictions. That would have happened either way, obviously, with traditional Mass or the Vatican II ordinary of the Mass.

So you must take a more adult and mature attitude toward the Popes and the Catholic Church. While children are the future, we can only fix the mess if thoughtful people are all grown up and sit at the big boy and big girl table. Calling someone an "antipope" and slamming the Vicar of Christ is churlish, stupid and un-Christian. I've been spending time reading the Encyclicals of the Popes, including Pope Paul VI for comfort as we sit in this unbelievable mess of a world. People ought to thank his memory, and all the Popes, who have preserved the purity of doctrine and their role at Vicar of Christ in the midst of the, no nice way to put it, crap that people have made of the world they have been given while turning away from God, no less.

I hope this helps.