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What Ever Happened to Catholic Authority?
| Article
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15880 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
9,136 Words |
| Author
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
And I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this
rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall
not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys
of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on
earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
--Matt 16:18-19
The greatest religious event of our era will prove to have
been the signal transformation of the Roman Catholic Church
by the Vatican Council…For the Roman Catholic Church was
the last real stronghold of the kind of authority that lies
in religious institutions, in ritual and in sacraments. To
an astonishing degree it had resisted the acids of
modernity which in the Protestant faiths had virtually
destroyed the sense of visible community in religion and
that had driven more and more of their members either out
of religion altogether or to the work of secularizing these
faiths in the interests of either politics or Mammon.
--Robert Nisbet, Twilight of Authority
Will the Second Vatican Council succeed where the gates of hell have failed? Robert Nisbet might reasonably have surmised this, for when he pondered the situation back in 1975 the Catholic Church was engulfed in turbulence and confusion. Seldom in its history had it suffered such disarray. Ten years after the conclusion of the Vatican Council, vocations in the United States had slowed to a trickle, and conversions, having attained a record rate in the late 1950s, had trailed off into insignificance. Priests and nuns in droves were repudiating their vows, and many of those who stayed were busy transforming their orders into kitchens where they could cook up heresy and grotesque forms of religious expression. Theologians were scuttling to embrace the idea and practice of dissent and hurling at
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