Putting Humpty Back Together Again

A while back, there was some discussion about restorationism in the Catholic Church. Not a few people raised questions about why young Catholics would want to restore the Church to what it was like before Vatican II, and some wild theories were put forward.

Speaking for millennials, I can say that our motives should not be hard to figure out. By the time we were children, much of the Church’s patrimony, from vestments to textbooks, had been discarded. It would be one thing if they had gotten rid of junk, but these were frequently nice things: high altars, statues, music, literature, scholasticism, etc. At the root of the restorationist impulse among young Catholics is a simple question: If past generations of Catholics had nice things, why can’t we have nice things?

At first glance, the solution seemed simple: just put the nice things back. Dust off the fiddleback, make the old confessional functional again, break out the old chants and hymns. But those who have engaged in this project know from bitter experience that it is more complicated than that. For instance, I remember discovering Aquinas’ Eucharistic hymn Adoro Te Devote in the back of a hymnal during college. I was deeply moved by it and suggested that it would make a good communion hymn. I was gently informed that it was unsuitable as a communion hymn because Christ wasn’t there in the species, He was here in the members of the congregation.

Clearly, this conversation was going to be about more than just whether the hymn was pretty. In fact, if I wanted to defend the appropriateness of Adoro Te Devote, I would need to engage a host of controversies. These included sacramental theology (what does “real presence” mean?), fundamental theology (have we “developed” our understanding of the real presence since Trent?), and dogmatics (do definitions really matter anyway?). Not to mention, if humble adoration were a proper posture before our Eucharistic Lord, then the whole orientation of the church, with its off-center tabernacle, would be called into question.

In short, to have that one nice thing, a host of other issues would have to be resolved. This was true not only of Adoro Te Devote but also habits, altar rails, the Baltimore Catechism, and whether St. Anthony was allowed to have a shrine in the church. It turned out that restoration was less like dusting off priceless antiques and bringing them out of the attic and more like putting the pieces of a puzzle back together. You can’t just put one piece back; all the surrounding pieces must go with it to make a complete and consistent picture.

The difficulty for millennials like me is that we never saw the puzzle before it got taken apart. Prior generations knew what traditional Catholicism was meant to look like; they had seen the puzzle in its more or less complete form. (Whether or not they liked the picture was a different story.) Not so with millennials. The Church we grew up in was a radically revised version of what it once was. At best, we have seen bits and snatches of the old Church that we picked up from anecdotes from relatives and chapters from old books we stumbled across. We have never lived in a time when the whole was intact.

There are two difficulties that come as a result: one is that we can mistake the relative significance of certain pieces. You see this sometimes in the way traditional Catholics handle dress code questions. We know that the modern sense of decorum is insufficient, but we sometimes swing to the other extreme and try to restore Victorian dress in response. Yes, modesty and decorum are important, but how much prominence should they have relative to the whole body of Catholic practices and beliefs? It is hard for us to tell because we have never seen it modeled for us. Questions on how much emphasis to give to the final judgment, penance, or authority work similarly.

Second, it commonly happens that millennials discover some aspect of the Faith they never knew was there and conclude that they have found the missing piece to the puzzle. What that piece is varies. I have seen people do this with mysticism, Thomism, evangelical poverty, and a host of other forgotten aspects of the Faith. The mistake here is not to think these pieces were missing (they were) or that they have a place in the Catholic tradition (they have a prominent one). The mistake is to think that one piece is in competition with all the others. 

For instance, evangelization really was downplayed in the wake of Vatican II, and efforts to restore the Church’s missionary activities are laudable. But I have heard the same people promoting evangelization criticize those who opt to retreat from the world. In their mind, those who are not evangelizing must be part of the problem. Contemplative life without a missionary focus or the Benedict option for families looking to preserve the Faith are unacceptable to them.

I have seen the opposite too. Efforts at restoring religious life have put a great emphasis on prayer after it was downplayed in favor of activism in the 1960s and ’70s. It is certainly good to see people who understand that “Mary chose the better part.” Unfortunately, those reemphasizing prayer will also sometimes criticize traditional active religious life. If your order was too busy teaching or the bread and butter of your spiritual life was devotional prayers rather than the Divine Office, then you must have been a harbinger of the crisis to come.

Neither is fair. Both parties have a piece of the shattered tradition, and each piece has its place in the Mystical Body. The Church needs missionaries who engage the culture. The Church also needs her contemplative orders who retreat from the world. The tradition has a place for both.

I could go on. Traditional obedience cannot be restored without restoring traditional doctrine. Moral theology cannot be restored without also restoring teachings about sin and Hell. Thomism has its rightful place, but it should be in conversation with the Church Fathers, the scholastics, and the baroque theologians.

There is a place for the simple chapels of the Missionaries of Charity and the grand cathedrals of Europe. There is a place for dignified prelates like Cardinal Borromeo and the holy fools like Br. Juniper. There is a place for chant, and there is a place for hymns. There is a place for intellectual rigor and a place for simple faith. There is a place for great saints and a place for poor sinners struggling to do better.

All of these are pieces of the puzzle. We need every piece if we are to put Humpty back together again.