What would a returned castaway think of the Church today?

whom I could offer a charming variety—including John XXII who in three sermons from his pulpit at Avignon, gave a teaching about the soul between death and the Resurrection of the body which the Church has had to correct; and Clement V who put the Knights Templar to the torture—in order to save the dead Pope Boniface VIII (whom Dante placed in Hell!) from the vengeance of Philip of France.
'A slob like
me,
The Council lay still in the future when I told a large Catholic audience that the adjuration 'Put not your trust in princes' included Princes of the Church—and the presiding Cardinal led the applause. It was about the same time that another Cardinal said to me: "The Catholic Church is the only institution in which a slob like me could be made a prince."
2 I have seen it stated in 11.7 three recent books by Catholics that one of the great defeats of triumphalism in the ten years has been the willingness to use the phrase "a Church of sinners," and the firm assertion that "the Holiness of the Church" means the Holiness of Christ. I quote a passage which summarises the outdoor teaching of Catholic Evidence Guild speakers for the last forty years :
"The holiness of the Church is simply the holiness of Christ. Every member, in contact with Him, has available to him a. fount of holiness; there is no limit save our own will to receive what He has to give. There is no growth, and of course no diminishing.
"If every one of her members were in a state of grace at a given moment, the Church's holiness would be no greater; if we were all in mortal sin together, it would be no less. The holiness of the Church is not the sum total of the holiness of her members, any more than the wetness of rain is measured by the wetness of all those who have ventured out in it.
"If the whole population goes out and gets drenched, the rain is no wetter: if everyone stays indoors, the rain is no less wet. The Church is holy, because it is Christ living on in the world. AN such, it is the cause of whatever holiness may be in its members, but its holiness is not measured by their response.
"Every man must make his own response. The saints have responded totally; and, in their thousands upon thousands, they stand as proof that, in the Church, holiness is to be had for the willing. Every saint is certain evidence that, if you and I are not saints, the choice is wholly our own."
No. The pre-conciliar Church was not a place of muted whispers. Or of closed minds. Between 1914 and the accession of John XXIII the Catholic mind was rather specially alive. Two doctrines emerged from long obscurity —the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, the Priesthood of the Laity. Pere de la Taille's Mystery of Faith meant new and splendid thinking on the Mass (by those who agreed with him and those who did not).
In Scripture there was the growing influence of the Ecolc Biblique in Jerusalem, Pius XII's Divino aifiante. the Jerusalem Bible and Knox's notable one-man translation. In Hagiography, in History, in Theology, in Psychology, there was work of high originality— it was a wonderful time to be a publisher.
You never knew what the morning's mail would bring in. And authority was benevolent. One heard of occasional unpleasing interventions, but they were not frequent. I remember saying, after one long period of untroubled tranquillity, that if you happened to want to get a .book on the Index, you'd have to bribe a Cardinal.
My own feeling is that all the changes ushered in by Pope John XXIII were made possible by the forty years which preceded him. But how fast and furiously they have come. Consider how things would strike a Catholic wrecked in 1957 on a desert island and only just brought home. His Catholic friends have him in their houses. In all of them he finds the conversation beyond him. It circles, sometimes heatedly, round two words, which mean nothing to him—Ecumenism and the Pill. Who in 1957 had even heard the word Ecumenism? Who had known what a handful of scientists were doing about estrogen?
The weeks that follow are full of shocks. The priest facing the congregation takes some getting used to. And Mass in English even more. He remembers arguments with Protestants in which his trump card had been the use of Latin as proof of the Church's Catholicity — "one language everywhere in the world."
Then there Is Benediction. He used to enjoy Benediction, especially the 0 Salutaris (once he heard it sung to the tune of "Danny Boy": that had tickled him rather). But Benediction proves hard to find; and some of his friends tell him that of course it is non-liturgical.
Whichever way he looks, the Catholic world he knew seems to have turned upside down— and So quickly: after all, he was only away ten years. He hears of priests getting married, with other priests performing the ceremony. He hears of nuns in picket-lines, nuns marching with Negroes and communists in Alabama; of seminarians picketing Cardinals, refusing daily Mass, declaring the Pope unfitted for his primacy.
And Protestants. He had known that Protestants need not go to hell—he remembers his surprise when a priest ran into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities on this very topic. But things seem to have gone far beyond that while he was on his desert island.
He learns that when John XXIII died. an Episcopal Church had a requiem in its Cathedral, and a Cardinal sent his Vicar-General to be present at it, and would have been there himself only that he had to be in Rome. And his friends tell him that on their TV set they watched the funeral service for Winston Churchill in an Anglican Cathedral, and not only was a Cardinal in the congregation, but an Apostolic Delegate as well.
He remembers when his own Episcopalian grandfather died, and just what the parish priest said when he asked permission to go to the funeral service— that was the first time he had heard the phrase communicelloin sacrist he heard it at least twenty times, he was not sure what it meant, but it was unmistakably a mortal sin.
All these changes, we may feel, are on the surface: they need getting used to, that's all But in the first place the surface is what first meets the eye: and unless the depths are well known, the surface may be almost all that meets the mind. And in the second place there are changes being talked about which go well below the surface.
Our returned castaway has believed in the Angel of the Annunciation all his life. He is startled to find daily-communicant friends of his who apparently bracket Gabriel with Santa Claus. He quotes against them the first chapter of St. Luke and receives the biggest shock so far: he is left with a shaken feeling that it is safer not to quote the Gospels at all. • And this he finds hard to reconcile with the discovery that Scripture is now considered indispensable. It seems to him as though Scripture had become at once indispensable and incomprehensible. Hardly a sentence means what he used to think it did. Only the most learned can hope to understand Scripture, and even if they agreed, the plain man could not understand what they were saying.
Nor does he get any comfort from what seems to him to be happening to the Church herself. Reading about the Second Vatican Council he gets the impression that the Church was split right down the middle. There were conservatives, who thought Pope John a catastrophe; there were liberals, who thought Pope Paul a catastrophe.
Nobody stopped to tell him how very much on the fringe the matters are about which the Council seems to be rent in twain—the structure and daily running of the Church, her relation to men of other faiths. In all the excitements he does not realise how rnalch agreement there is between conservatives and liberals upon the great mass of Catholic doctrine which the Council did
not feel called upon to treat; Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption, Sanctifying Grace, the World to Come.
Nor do the mass of Catholics realise it. And to strengthen the feeling that the teaching Church is divided, every week brings news of some revolutionary sounding denial by some theologian somewhere—and not a sound out of their own hierarchy! Great numbers are feeling a kind of unease not common among Catholics since the lines were drawn after the Reformation.
Yet this is not my principal reason for asking whether we are at a sunrise or a sunset. More troubling still is the evaporation of faith generally. The Catholic Church was not the first to experience it, but it is with her now, especially among the young : once one is aware of it, it is a nightmare. Though Vatican II did not, I think, discuss it, we may wonder if it was not Pope John's most urgent reason for wanting a Council!