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Freedom and the Catholic Church
By Leonard Swidler

"It is in the nineteenth century-the century of freedom and liberalism-that we witness an extraordinary growth of arch-conservative authoritarianism, of Catholic ghettoism. . . . If the first session of Vatican Council II can be said to mark the wedding anew of the Catholic Church and freedom, the Catholic University affair of the spring, 1963, was its consummation. . . . The issue of freedom in the Catholic Church is one that suddenly and providentially has a glowing future."

The issue of freedom has long been an issue of increasing concern in the Catholic Church. It certainly was not missing even in the earliest days of Christianity. But it was particularly sharpened during the latter part of the so-called Dark Ages and the Middle Ages as the church and the state became more closely wedded. This marriage was especially pregnant with mischief for Christian freedom: witness the essentially new Christian phenomenon of burning heretics at the stake; witness the inquisition and all its horrors, particularly the horror of thinking one could force people to believe in and love Jesus Christ under the threat of the torch.

Still there was a great deal of liberty within Christendom-inside of certain limits-and in some ways this liberty was in practice expanded at the time of the Renaissance, though only partly because the papacy suffered terrific blows against its authority and prestige with the rise of the national monarchies, the Avignon Papacy, the Western schism, and conciliarism. Unfortunately these evils, and others, helped to prepare the ground for the Reformation that was

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long overdue. Also unfortunately the reform attempted by Luther, Calvin, and others did not produce a unified reformed Christian Church as they had hoped. Rather it divided Christianity into warring camps which proceeded to close ranks, to whip their citizenry into phalanxes prepared for total war. Thus the Protestant Reformation exacerbated the problem of freedom-at least for Roman Catholics.

I

In the latter half of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century there was a certain relaxation of this closed-rank, vigilant attitude among Catholics if only because of weariness, the in-Toads of the Enlightenment and rationalism, and the attacks upon the authoritarianism of the church by the Philosophes and others; witness the dissolution of the Jesuits, the rise of Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephism.

But it is in the nineteenth century-the century of freedom and liberalism-that we witness an extraordinary rolling back of Christian freedom, an extraordinary growth of arch-conservative authoritarianism, of Catholic ghettoism.

This is the century that saw the condemnation by Pope Gregory XVI of Lammenais, who had attempted to foster a rapprochement between Catholicism and liberal thought. This was also the century which witnessed the pontificate of the longest reigning pope in the history of the Catholic Church, Pius IX. It was he who, on the strength of the papacy, declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and also he who issued the "infamous" syllabus of errors in 1864 in which he stated that it was erroneous for anyone to say: "In our times it is no longer necessary that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the State to the exclusion of all others whatsoever." It was also declared false for anyone to say: "The Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile and align himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." All this reached a plateau of climax with the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 and the forbidding of all Italian Catholics to participate in Italian politics or even to vote, consequent to the loss of the Papal States to the newly unified Italian national state. Thus in a way all liberalism, all democracy, all science, all contact with the non-Catholic and modern world were condemned as being at best wasting time and highly dangerous.

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However, the reaction on the part of Roman Catholics-perhaps best exemplified on the civil scene by Count de Maistre and his insistence on the re-establishment of those two pillars of society, the Pope and the executioner-is by no means unintelligible historically and psychologically.

Already during the Enlightenment the Catholic Church was attacked from many sides under the banner of liberty. During the French Revolution, with its slogans of liberté, fraternité, egaité, the church was tremendously ravaged-even on the physical level. Priests and religious were persecuted, exiled, and murdered. Church property was desecrated-some being rededicated to the goddess of reason-and confiscated all over France and central Europe. The situation was only somewhat ameliorated by Napoleon who was capable of kidnapping and brow-beating Pope Pius VII But the church's troubles were just starting. The movement of democratic liberalism in its wider nineteenth-century sense rose up to cut away at the foundation of the authoritarian, hierarchical structure of the church and society in general. This was followed by the more perverse movement of socialism, which would destroy the very basis of society-and hence the church-that is, private property. And if this were not enough, there then came the satanic development of communism-the embodiment of materialism and atheism. Add to this the fact that the period between 1815 and 1870 was constantly filled with revolutions all over Europe and North and South America, the development of anarchism, scientism, evolution, and Protestant "liberal theology" with its debunking of the Bible as a Jesus myth foisted upon humanity by a dozen or so Jewish fishermen, and you will begin to see why so many nineteenth-century Christians were in a panic. Nothing seemed certain, nothing seemed stable anymore. Everything appeared to be washed away in the deluge of revolution and isms that swept across nineteenth-century Europe. In terror people frantically searched for something stable. Many Catholics found it in an authoritarian church with its structured-from-above hierarchy and the papacy at its apex. The cry among many seemed to be "To Peter, to the rock!" An impenetrable bastion was built around the rock fortress and the condemned world was shut out. Until better times would come only invectives and sallies were to come forth from the rock.

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Those Catholics who attempted to resist the mad, though in a way explainable, rush of the time were badly mauled and trampled under foot; for example, Cardinal Newman, Lord Acton, Archbishop Strossmayer, and many of the German bishops.

The conservatives pretty well reigned supreme during the rest of the pontificate of Pius IX and on into the time of Leo XIII, although here they were gradually restricted and held back. Leo, for example, gave the Cardinal's hat to the aged and almost broken John Henry Newman; many of the Vatican archives were thrown open to all scholars; the relatively revolutionary social encyclical "Rerum novarum" was written, etc. There was the beginning of a renaissance, an upsurge of Catholic freedom; Catholic historical and biblical studies began to catch up with the rest of the world; there was even a beginning of a flowering of a Catholic lay movement in this country.

But this seemed to be only a hiatus, for soon after Pius X came to the papal throne in 1903 a terrible purge took place under the guise of rooting out the heresy of "Modernism." Doubtless there were non-orthodox elements in the ideas of several so-called modernists. But unfortunately these elements were used as an excuse for the conservatives to conduct a campaign of terror, driving practically all of the Catholic Church's best scholars into silence, for example, Pere Marie La Grange, the real founder of modern Catholic biblical scholarship. Vigilance committees were ordered to be set up in every diocese throughout the world which were to meet periodically-in secret-to report on any modernist tendencies noted among the priests or their writings and take appropriate measures to stamp them out. The censors worked overtime; Catholic scholarship was relegated to mouthing old out-dated, and hence ineffective, formulas.

Only after many years did the fervor of the heresy-hunt wear off. But the restrictions on Catholic freedom remained nevertheless very severe. Gradually in slow piece-meal fashion Catholic scholars pushed forward in various areas, but one will never know the number of books that never saw the light of day because of lack of ecclesiastical permission. Not that all of the books would have been good or that none of them would have contained non-orthodox ideas; but in our human condition we must be permitted to make errors in the search for truth-there is no other alternative.

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II

Gradually the so-called "new theology" developed, almost in underground fashion. At any rate the impression was given by the conservatives, who held most of the key positions of power, that this "new theology" was at best very dangerous and most likely contained large heretical elements. Those who had "liberal" ideas in the Catholic Church were made to feel that they were a very small minority with very suspect ideas who were kicking against the goad of the majority. All of the liberals apparently believed this; whether or not in their ecclesiastical vantage points the conservatives also sincerely believed this is difficult to say. judging, however, from their very negative reaction to Pope John's suggestion that a Council be convened-and the even dogged resistance on the part of some, notably in the Curia-the conservatives either knew they were a minority overruling a majority, or at least had a terrible fear-a justified one I might say-that it would turn out to be proved so.

The liberals all strove mightily before the Council in a sort of desperate hope that a break-through in progress and liberty could be made. For the most part they were not optimistic, at least not in public and not in print. Hans Küng's book on reform and the Council, which came out in German in the middle of 1961, was mildly optimistic, but mostly urgent in its plea that everything be done to make the Council a success. By a year later, shortly before the Council opened, his articles on the Council indicated a growing pessimism. It was not only the liberals who were striving mightily to promote their cause at the Council. The conservatives were diligently at work, too. Moreover, they seemed to have all the advantages. They surrounded Pope John and influenced him in many ways; look at the papal statement "Veterum Sapientia" in 1962 legislating greater insistence on the use of the Latin language in the church. Pope John, who by his own admission never could speak Latin with any facility, certainly did not think of this himself. Probably even more important, the conservatives held most of the chairmanships and other key positions on the various commissions that worked to prepare the draft material to be discussed by the Council fathers. The conservatives were all set to push through the Council their rather polemic, nineteenth-century scholastically phrased schema with a minimum of discussion.

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But then that which the conservatives most feared and the liberals most hoped for happened. A number of liberal cardinals spearheaded resistance against the conservatives' attempt to make the Council a rubber-stamp affair. For the first time in a century the Catholic episcopate began to learn to know one another. The liberals found to their surprise and joy that they were not some small suspect minority, but that they formed a large part of the church, and before the first session of the Council was over they formed an overwhelming majority on many issues. Doubtless all those who voted for the reform schemas-notably on the liturgy-did not go to the Council as liberals. But the liberals appeared to be the ones with the most dynamic ideas. Moreover, those very theologians who had been constantly plagued with restrictions and censorship were at the Council, and increasingly were asked to address various national groups of bishops: men like Hans Küng, Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray, Godfrey Diekmann, Jean Danielou. The influence of these theologians and the contact with liberal bishops, and particularly the more free-wheeling missionary bishops, wrought amazing changes in many bishops-including American bishops. A spirit of ecumenism and freedom reigned as it had not for a long, long time in the Catholic Church.

III

The conservatives, however, were by no means completely displaced or cowed, as was indicated by the Catholic University affair last spring. This affair, however, marked not only a new high point in the intransigence of the conservatives but also a turning point in the history of freedom in the Catholic Church in America. There had been some very forward-looking American bishops at the end of the last century who promoted a lay revival and a progressive attitude in the church in general, men like Archbishop Ireland, Bishop Spalding and Cardinal Gibbons. But in many ways the open spirit of these and like-minded men dried up in the reaction against the phantom heresy of Americanism at the turn of the century and the modernist hunt shortly thereafter. The Catholic press was usually quite conservative, the diocesan newspapers being official organs for the hierarchy. Commonweal, founded in the middle 1920's by a group of Catholic laymen, often provided a single beacon light. But here, too, in America, the climate changed very, very slowly. The

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influence of the "new theology" made itself slowly felt among the American clergy and educated laity.

If the first session of Vatican Council II can be said to mark the wedding anew of the Catholic Church and freedom, the Catholic University affair of the spring, 1963, was its consummation.

Perhaps the main points of this celebrated event should be here briefly reviewed. A list of potential speakers for a lenten series of lectures to be sponsored by the University was submitted by the appropriate committee of graduate students. The Rector of the University then struck from the list the names of Gustav Weigel, John Courtney Murray, Godfrey Diekmann, and Hans Küng, four of the most respected theologians of the Catholic Church. This was all to remain private-in the usual fashion. But it didn't. The student newspaper bravely protested. Time picked up the story and so did a few Catholic diocesan newspapers. In the past such a situation would probably never have developed even that far. But if it had, the most that would have been forthcoming would have been a few scattered remarks and then silence. But the old days were gone. Dozens of Catholic newspapers carried the story week after week. Many of them courageously criticized the administration of Catholic University, whose board of trustees is composed of all the American Cardinals, a number of bishops, and a few laymen. Several of the faculties of C.U., including the Theology faculty and the Canon Law faculty, publicly censured the administration for its actions. Other Catholic university faculties reacted publicly, as for example the Duquesne University Chapter of the Association of American University Professors, which sent a public letter of protest to the Rector of C.U. As the protests spread and grew the evidence of a practice of past suppression came out. Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, that most highly respected American Catholic church historian' publicly stated that similar suppression had been going on for at least the past ten years at C.U.-with specifics given. An article was published by a Pittsburgh priest, in the Steubenville, Ohio, Catholic newspaper, criticizing openly the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Vagnozzi, in Washington, D. C., for having been behind the whole suppression.

In the midst of all this Hans Küng, the celebrated-and banned at C.U.-German theologian arrived in this country for his previously scheduled lecture tour. Several other places beside C.U. forbade him to lecture, notably Philadelphia and Los Angeles. But wher-

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ever he did speak the hall was jammed to overflowing. His audiences ran as high as five and six thousand. When he arrived at Duquesne University, he spoke in the auditorium which normally holds one thousand persons. Chairs were put everywhere, including two hundred on the stage, so that sixteen hundred could be packed in. For days ahead of time it was announced to people not to come if they didn't have tickets. Still, there were over an additional two hundred who sat in the cafeteria to hear by loud speaker his speech entitled "Freedom and the Church." Hans Küng had suddenly become the symbol of the new freedom of the Catholic Church. Without the first session of Vatican Council II all this would have been impossible. But since it happened the Catholic Church could never be the same again.

Indeed, this spirit of freedom continues to make new advances. Pope John followed his epoch-making encyclical on the social question, "Mater et Magistra," by his even more epoch-making encyclical "Pacem in Terris" ("Peace on Earth") in which amid a wealth of wisdom he pointed out that even though error itself has no right to exist, those persons who may be erroneous are the bearers of rights; one may not force a conscience for any reason. This was a landmark for freedom in papal statements. The second session of the Council has continued on this path with its presentation and discussion of statements on the condemnation of anti-Semitism and religious freedom, for whose cause the American bishops did yeomen's work.

Thus we can conclude that the issue of freedom in the Catholic Church is one that suddenly and providentially has a glowing future.