Since Vatican II...

By: Andrew W Taylor

Since Vatican II, but not because of the actual documents of the council themselves, the energies of the dynamic intellectual tradition of Thomism have been eclipsed by the pop culture offerings of the enneagram, jungian depth psychology and symbolism, transactional analysis,and an overall tendency toward a reductionistic, protestantized catholicism. This phenomenon can rightly be styled the "americanization" of the culture of the universal church, that is, the america of pop culture, historical amnesia, 'I'm OK, You're OK' and "the eclipse of distance"1.

This result has much more to do with a 1960s bourgeois consumerist self-actualisation movement than it reflects an authentic engagement with the real pathologies and particular insights of roman catholicism. And this is unsatisfactory: we were promised open windows on the world, with new access to the rigors in the thought of Chenu, de Lubac, and von Balthasar -- and instead catholics have acquiesced in the dumbing down of the world's questions and conflicts, a lazy dogmatic indifferentism and capitulation to late capitalist culture. We have often merely traded our old saccharin sentimental kitsch for new saccharin sentimental kitsch! (Out with the embarrassing holy card and Latin mass catholicism, and in with the felt banners and 'laughing Jesus' catholicism; out with guilt and scrupulosity, and in with jettisoning the category of sin altogether)2.

No authentic regeneration can come to the catholic church until it has accepted that the difficult, intellectually arduous task of engaging real catholic history and documents is necessary. And this work needs to begin again after many dodges and ducks over the last 50 years. Every authentic christian work begins in a painful embrace of the depths of historical contradictions, mis-steps and dead-ends -- that is the work of prolegomena: "digging a pit for the cross".



1.Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
2. See the former Dominican Matthew Fox's Original Blessing