There is an online review of Geoffrey Hull's The Banished Heart on the National Review Site by Mike Potemra.
What happened to Fifties Catholicism?
In Hull’s thesis, the Sixties revolution in Roman Catholic practice was in large measure a result of the Counter-Reformation and Vatican I centralization of power in the papacy: In the traditional understanding, the pope was the “custodian” of tradition — but the response to the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution made Catholicism expand that role significantly, from “custodian” to “arbiter” (the quoted words are Hull’s). The need for a strong defense against outside attacks on the Church made Catholics rally around the pope, in the name of orthodoxy, little intending that that same power could eventually be deployed in the interest of heterodoxy. (They might in this sense have benefited from an understanding of O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” In this ecclesial case, of course, the contrast would not be the political one between right-wing and left-wing, but rather one between tradition and experimentation.) Hull writes: “There was a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the spirit of ultramontanism and the general acquiescence of Latin[-rite] Catholics in the Pauline liturgical revolution. Or, put another way, ultramontanism is the difference between the rebellious, strong-minded Catholics [who resisted Protestant changes in] 1549 England and the conformist, unthinking ones of the decades following the Second Vatican Council.”
You can read the full review here.
Comments