Greater Than Eternity

The pope stands under the judgement of no man, but not even the pope can elude the judgement of history. The meaning of any pontificate in the providence of God is entrusted to faith and hope in an ultimate promise and seen not in the immediacy of a synodal listening session or in the florid prose of a papal biographer but through a glass darkly—if at all. The enduring meaning of every pontificate, humanly speaking, is determined partially but substantially after it has passed into history by how (or whether) it is remembered and by the subsequent discernment and decisions of the Church relative to its patrimony. What is true of every pope must be true perforce of the pope lauded by many as “the pope of process,” since the nature and meaning of any process are only finally revealed in its terminus. Thus, the meaning of the turbulent twelve-year reign of Pope Francis will be largely determined by whether the revolutionary “new paradigm” advanced in his name becomes the permanent modus vivendi of the Church.

Championed and downplayed by turns as the occasion called for it, the revolution has nevertheless been continually enforced by Catholic progressives who have sought to silence their theological opponents by portraying them as enemies of the pope and who have shown thereby that they understand this historical truth all too well. Their frenzied activity continues: “initiating processes” such as the Synodal Way, “dominating spaces” once committed to the magisterial teaching of the preceding pontificates, and controlling the narrative to erase the memory of Francis’s immediate predecessors. The goal is to advance the Francis pontificate and the progressive interpretation of Vatican II as the definitive meaning of the council and a new beginning for the Church. As sure as rain showers in spring, we are deluged by “think pieces” contrasting the unprecedented appeal and outreach of the late “people’s pope” with the dawning authoritarianism of Trumpian nationalism and the MAGA-fication of the Church in America, a predictably political interpretation of the “signs of the times” and an equally predictable failure to read them accurately. For the Catholic progressive, who inhabits a universe of thought as closed and rigid as any neo-Scholastic’s, we are always on the cusp of 1933—and the solution is always 1968.

Yet shaping the public imagination is trivial next to deciding what never enters it at all. Continually omitted from the narrative is any role played by the revolutionaries themselves in catalyzing a newly militant traditionalism, which has flourished as never before under Pope Francis and which now casts doubt upon the future of the conciliar project itself. More introspection and less ambition might have spared us this result, though we also shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which an often unhinged online traditionalism also served as a useful foil in legitimating the erasure. And vice versa. Suffice it to say that if the most public devotees of Pope Francis represent what it now means to be Catholic in the year A.F. 12, then a significant segment of the Church will respond, “No, and no thank you,” and will have to be brought to heel. Nevertheless, it would be the irony of ironies and a tragedy for the Church if, in the providence of God or the cunning of history, this new traditionalism were the enduring legacy of the Francis era.

Many commenters in recent days have noted that Francis is an enigmatic figure relative to the new paradigm advanced in his name and that this imputes a certain ambiguity both to the man and to the meaning of the revolution itself. Francis may have initiated processes of radical reform, but progressives were repeatedly left disappointed as the desired results on curial reform, the ordination of women, Communion for the divorced and remarried, contraception, and so-called L.G.B.T.Q. issues failed to materialize. He may have been a little ambiguous about Hell, but he had an uncomfortable habit of speaking about the devil. He often spoke in an apocalyptic if ad hoc way about abortion and gender theory and coarsely about homosexuality. The Catechism’s teaching on these matters was never amended; none of the long-desired changes to the Church’s doctrine were ever made.

And yet there were the bewildering appointments to the Pontifical Academy for Life, the elevation of Father James Martin to what one hopes is the apex of his prominence, and the publication by Francis’s Vatican of the ecclesial equivalent of gay pride posters promoting the Synod on Synodality. This is to say nothing of the notorious footnote to Amoris laetitia that continues to cause so much division or of Fiducia supplicans, which speaks for itself. About the meaning of such inscrutable and apparently contradictory motions, or the intentions behind them, who am I to judge? For those who were not personally privy to the mind of the pope, or who could not read it, the attempt to discern the pope’s intentions was futile. And during an era when the categories of “friend” and “enemy” often seemed to supplant those of “true” and “false,” it could also be dangerous.

Besides, the attempt to read the pope’s mind and determine what he “really” believed about this or that doctrine is largely beside the point. This is not only because harmony with the pope’s inner thoughts, feelings, and dreams is an untenable criterion of Christian fidelity—a political criterion and not a theological or philosophic one—nor because our words and deeds always mean objectively more than we mean in speaking and committing them, which is one reason their meaning must continually be ciphered through the long lens of history and tradition. It is because of something still deeper. Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his Principles of Catholic Theology that underlying the Church’s long-running disputes over individual doctrines was a still more fundamental but less visible division “in the realm of their philosophical presuppositions.” It is at this level that real paradigm shifts take place, and why they always denote a crisis. Development takes place within paradigms, not between them. A paradigm shift, by contrast, always marks a break, a rupture, the passing away of one world and the coming-to-be of another. A paradigm shift, by definition, is revolutionary. There is a reason why Thomas S. Kuhn never wrote The Structure of Scientific Development.

A new paradigm succeeds in supplanting its predecessor and establishing itself not by resolving its predecessor’s internal questions and problems but by changing the subject so that those questions and problems become meaningless. It would be superfluous to change or refute a given doctrine if the Church were to cease thinking principally in terms of being and truth. To read Martin, one would think that the only question raised by L.G.B.T.Q. identity was one of affirmation and inclusion, that affirmation did not call the meaning of human nature, the order of creation, and ultimately the doctrine of God fundamentally into question or entail vast consequences for language, law, medicine, political order, and society. Indeed, one of the most disconcerting signs that we may be undergoing such a paradigm shift is the virtual disappearance of the “anthropological question” that defined the reception of Vatican II in the first half century following the council, not as a moral but as an ontological concern. It is even more astonishing considering that in the times whose signs we ought to be discerning the fusion of political ideology, biomedical engineering, and political power threatens the human shape of the future as never before. Champions of a “consistent ethic of life” can argue with justification that Francis broadened the moral scope of the council’s anthropological concern beyond the narrower concerns of the “pro-life community” by emphasizing that the plight of migrants and the world’s poor are also sins against human dignity that cry out to heaven. All the better. And yet Martin’s work is an object lesson in how the reduction of metaphysics to morality can legitimize a therapeutic pastoralism in which ontological questions—questions of truth—are never asked or even acknowledged.

If it is true that the deepest meaning of a paradigm shift occurs at the level of its philosophical presuppositions, it is also true that this meaning becomes more difficult to discern there. What is true of all of us living in the shadow of God’s eclipse, that we do not understand the deepest premises of our own thought, is especially true of Catholic progressives. Regarding metaphysical thought as an instrument of political power or a psychological disease of rigid minds, they conceal—from the world but most deeply from themselves—the metaphysical character of their own historicism and sociologism. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the same words often remain common to both paradigms, which disguises the profound change in meaning that has transpired with the shift in their underlying ontological backdrop.

As the post-conciliar Church seems to dissolve into an inverted image of the pre-conciliar impasse, it is instructive to revisit Maurice Blondel’s assessment of the rival paradigms in the decades leading up to the council, which remains perennially valid in any event. On the one side, there is traditionalism, what Blondel called veterism, which exalts eternity to the exclusion of time and history. In the hands of the traditionalist, tradition becomes the identical repetition of select papal teachings and the supernatural truths delivered once and for all to the apostles in the thirteenth century. Thought consists in the assimilation of each new historical particular and each new question to the closed system of a neo-Thomism that answers every question in advance. And the Church’s relationship to the modern world oscillates between condemnation and the extrinsic imposition of these supernatural truths upon an uncomprehending world by atheist political regimes seeking the Church’s favor. On the other side is historicism, a metaphysics that does not know itself and that exalts the temporal to the exclusion of the eternal and thereby collapses the transcendent order of being into the historical process. Transposing transcendence from the vertical plane of eternity to the horizontal plane of “the future,” historicism reduces truth to the accidental sum of social and psychological conditions that can be scientifically analyzed and manipulated by human action, scientific or political. Sociology, psychology, and other social sciences supplant metaphysics and theology as the primary mode of the Church’s thinking and speaking and the authorities to which its thought must conform, the Church itself is emptied of sacramental and cosmological meaning and subtly reconceived in sociological and political terms, and the Holy Spirit is then invoked to baptize the movement of history and an apprehension of reality that is functionally atheistic.

The Second Vatican Council sought to overcome this impasse by re-asserting the “hypostatic union,” so to speak, of the temporal and the eternal. This is reflected in the Christological and anthropological topics central to the first half century of its magisterial interpretation, as well as the ecclesiology of Lumen gentium. Despite the sometimes conflicting agendas operative in the council’s deliberations and responsible for its final result, and the datedness of some of its diagnoses, attitudes, and formulas, this remains the only truly Catholic way forward: the only way to comprehend the fullness of the Christian mystery and the structure of reality without reducing or exhausting them and the only way to effect a union of what is true in both traditionalism and historicism without an exercise of brute ecclesiastical force (Pascendi? Traditionis custodes?).

While this union cannot be dissolved in either direction without great violence to the faith, the pole of the union in need of emphasis may shift depending upon the historical situation. If it was once necessary, after the long reign of neo-Scholasticism, to emphasize that the eternal Logos of God enters time to perform a historical mission, it now seems necessary, after the ascendence of neo-modernism, to re-affirm that the Christ incarnate in history remains the eternal Logos of God. If it was once necessary to emphasize that Christ continues to pour out His life in the Spirit, empowering His Body, the Church, to carry His life and mission to the peripheries of the earth, it now seems necessary to insist that the Spirit Who animates the life of the Church in history remains the Spirit of Truth. If it was necessary to insist that the Church spread throughout the world must “walk together” through history, it is equally necessary to insist that the mystery of the Church, ontologically rooted in the communio of the Trinity, precedes creation and history, that Her unity is “a reality that ontologically and temporally preceded the individual particular Churches,” that the populus Dei therefore includes the whole communio sanctorum, and that the sensus fidelium finds its fullest expression in the Vincentian Canon: what is believed everywhere, always, and by all. If it was once necessary to insist that man, a per se unity of body and soul with a natural and supernatural end, is also an agent and subject of history, it now seems urgent to insist that man who both makes and is made by history also transcends history by virtue of his very being and nature and in his knowing, that his ontological structure is not changed by our latest experiences or by the failure of an empirical and experimental science, viewing nature from without and oblivious to its own metaphysical principles, to detect the soul on or between the surfaces of bodies.

Only time will tell whether the reign of Pope Francis was in reality a fuller realization of the conciliar vision, perhaps even a “dialectical” occasion for separating the wheat of the essential Christian mystery that the council sought to illuminate from the chaff of its time-bound historical conditioning, or whether it hastened the undoing of the council’s fragile synthesis and the communio that is the Church’s life. Only in the course of time will we—or, more likely, those Christians who come after us—be able to determine what it all meant: the aggiornamento, the adulation, the embrace of the poor and peripheral, the moving and dramatic gestures, the inspiration provided to so many, but also the confusion, the strife, the acrimony, the tarnished reputations, compromised characters, and ruined friendships that now litter the ecclesial landscape in the aftermath of the revolution. We have been taught over the past dozen years that time is greater than space. The meaning of those years hinges on whether, in the life and mind of the Church and the long arc of history, time also turns out to have been greater than eternity.

This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.