Destruction Comes Also From the Ground Up

I have often told my students that there used to be three ways for an army to get inside a walled city. They could scale the walls, batter the gates in, or dig a tunnel underneath and set off an explosive to blow up the defenses—literally what it means to undermine. I should have added a fourth way: get somebody inside to open the gates for you, somebody to whose advantage it will be to trade rulers. 

Perhaps the traitor thinks it would be better for all concerned to get rid of the governor because the newcomer promises liberty and prosperity. Perhaps the traitor is ambitious, seeing—though under subjection to the outsider—an opportunity to lord it over his neighbors. Perhaps he is weary of peace, saying, with Milton’s Satan, “For only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts.” Perhaps he prefers chaos to spiritual goods which he does not enjoy, such as harmony, piety, and the sweetness of a life ordered by nature and by God, the author of nature. Perhaps, like a sour divorcee, he resents those goods and the people who do enjoy them. “Sight hateful, sight tormenting!” says Satan, when he sees Adam and Eve kissing.

These things are on my mind, having just read Hanael Bianchi’s wise, careful, and clear-thinking work A Liberal Revolution: The Implementation of Vatican II in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Throughout the book, Bianchi asks and attempts to answer the obvious question, “How did all this happen, in this place?” Who was primarily responsible for the collapse of Catholic education there? Who came up with precisely the wrong means of attracting the young so that they would stay with the Church, once the novelty of singing shallow folk songs to the guitar had worn off? Who tolerated or authorized or mandated the destruction of so much sacred art? What did the people in Baltimore think and say about it?

Bianchi combs through diocesan newspapers, in Baltimore and elsewhere, and much public and private correspondence, particularly that of Cardinal Lawrence Shehan, archbishop of Baltimore (1961-1974). He finds that the crucial turn, as far as most parishioners were concerned, was the change in the language of the Mass from Latin to English—not the subsequent change, six years later, of the old rite to the Novus Ordo. The first change came with blaring headlines. The second was hardly mentioned. “As a result,” he says, “the public response, centered almost entirely on the introduction of English, appeared broadly favorable.”

A touch of scorn for the old, among the laity, is not far to seek. One Margaret Casper “wrote that the use of English brought her closer to God,” as opposed to what she called “the solemn singing of the Credo and the writings of Cicero.” I have no idea where Cicero appears in the Tridentine Rite. Who knew that the old senator was a Roman Catholic—and dying four decades before Jesus was born! 

One Helen Mitchell, slightly more careful about her history, remarked that “Jesus spoke Aramaic,” eliding the question of whether Jesus also prayed in Aramaic and read and sang the psalms in Aramaic rather than in the classical Hebrew they were written in. Bianchi gives such proponents of English one benefit of the doubt, noting that “these testimonies reflect a genuine desire for accessibility and clarity of prayer. Ordinary Catholics were not evaluating the Novus Ordo as a liturgical form; they were simply relieved to hear the prayers in familiar words.” They did not see, Bianchi says, that a radical transformation had taken place.

Often, the faithful were more conservative than their priests, usually for the good but not always. Returning to Baltimore, his own native city, Shehan “immediately ordered the desegregation of all Catholic institutions, including schools and hospitals, and instituted a rule of nondiscrimination.” This was easier said than done, as white people fled the city for the suburbs. Some priests shamefully dug in their heels:

One priest refused to baptize black children until parish women appealed for his removal. Another Black Catholic was admitted to the Holy Name Society only after threatening to go to the bishop, and the rest of the members quit in protest. 

One miserable result of this hard-heartedness was that traditional priests “were often assumed to be complicit in racism,” while the younger priests who fought against racism were given free rein in their liturgical abuses.

Parishioners tended to be less enthusiastic than their priests when it came to dismantling their churches or scrubbing out their sacred art. But big and ambitious projects with high-toned names attract the meddlesome and ambitious, who are often less devoted to the good they purport to advance than are the ordinary people who want no part of the project. Most Catholics were content with the way their churches looked; they felt at home there. Yet whenever new churches had to be built, sometimes because the old churches were too small or were too expensive to repair, the laity—or the most meddlesome among them—often went along with all the new and improved denuding of sacred space. 

In one parish in St. Paul, Minnesota, “the decision to replace pews with chairs was put to a parish-wide vote and approved 775 to 574 at the recommendation of the parish board and building committee.” The sales pitch, pretty stale by now, was that the new architecture would return the Church to her original ways of worship.  Think of the Eucharist celebrated in the homes of the early Christians. Think of the catacombs. 

But, says Bianchi,

this attempt to recapture the early Church had an unintended consequence. It produced churches that are distinctly and immediately dated…The church architects failed at their stated goal. No one entering a church built in 1968 would imagine the catacombs or an early Roman house-church; it evokes instead a 1960s hotel conference room or theater.

In most regards, the laity were suspicious of priests and religious women doffing their robes to don the garb of social workers, pop psychologists, and political protesters. Here Bianchi’s book strikes me close to home. A cabal called the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, “which organized anti-war draft raids,” breaking into draft offices and burning files, “had allegedly plotted to kidnap Henry Kissinger to pressure the government to end the Vietnam War.” That led, in 1970, to “the Harrisburg Seven trial, which included Sister Mary Cain,” from the Sisters of Notre-Dame de Namur, centered in Baltimore, “who had left religious life and married fellow defendant and former priest Anthony Scoblick.”

I was 11 years old then, and I heard strange news in the air involving the main drivers of Catholic anti-war protests, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and their friend Scoblick, who was born in my hometown (Archbald, Pennsylvania), and whose father or uncle, I am not sure which, lived three houses away from my grandparents on our dead-end street. Their family name had been Scopelliti, but a rift in the family caused some to adopt a name that hid the Italian origin. I knew members of both sides.

At that time, the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary staffed the school I attended, St. Thomas Aquinas, serving 400 pupils, about 50 to a classroom from first to eighth grade. We knew things were getting tumultuous in some of the orders of sisters; back then, if you didn’t have a priest or a religious sister in your family, you knew a family that did.

Hollywood, meanwhile, was pushing the “new” religious life: see the sentimental and popular film The Singing Nun (1966), about the guitar-playing smiley-name-taking “Soeur Sourire,” Sr. Luc Gabriel (born Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers), and her hit song “Dominique.” Deckers ended up leaving the religious life in 1966, writing the song “Glory Be to God for the Golden Pill” in 1967, and still being invited by the Belgian Cardinal Suenens in 1973 to write songs for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. In 1985, she and her longtime roommate committed suicide together.

That was yet to come. What we knew then was that religious women were getting involved in secular work, without the habit. The IHM sisters in our town did not do so, yet in California their order was being corrupted by Carl Rogers and his theories of self-actualization, with a nationwide crackup in the offing. When they turned from teaching to other activities, they ended up exposing parochial schools to sudden and severe deficits in the budget, hurting schools among the poor and the working class worst of all.

“Decades earlier,” writes Bianchi,

religious orders had built a vast Catholic infrastructure—schools, hospitals, and parish ministries—that shaped generations of faithful. But much of it was abandoned in favor of headline-grabbing protests and high-profile activism. And when the fervor of the early 1970s faded, what was left? The hard-won legacy of Catholic education and formation had been traded for a fleeting moment in the spotlight. 

As for us, the IHM faded away, and our parochial school was sold to the borough.

There are other areas I could bring up in discussing this superb book, notably Bianchi’s focus on the ineffectual and expensive bureaucratization of parish life and diocesan management and his portrayal of Cardinal Shehan as a partly tragic figure whose latter years were clouded by the consequences of his own folly. I would like to end instead by noting what A Liberal Revolution confirms in my mind. It is that the liberal—I use the word in its colloquial sense—believes that man does indeed live by bread alone, or at least that such bread is more important than the word of God. Replace bread with any material good or any subjective pleasure.

The truth is the other way around. Unless we get that right, we will end up like theoretical machinists who reverse a central gear and then wonder why all the rest are seizing up or like theoretical physicians who prescribe aconite and then are dismayed when the patient’s liver shuts down. Look to God first if you want to know yourself, stripped of illusions and self-flattery. Then you may look upon your neighbor in a more kindly and yet more realistic way. Reverse the action and you get confusion, friction, seizure, nothing.