Review of “To Change the Church” by Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat is not a traditionalist. For a Catholic reading the official magazine of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X, that is an important—nay, essential prerequisite to understand. It is also an important element in considering his To Change the Church, published in March 2018.
To give some context to this, in a 2018 article,1 Douthat wrote that he could imagine a “traditionalists exile of the sort embodied by the Society of Saint Pius X” which he could not join, because, “the don’t-call-it-a-schism maneuver also seems to answer absurdity with absurdity.” Throughout the book, he makes it clear he considers traditionalist Catholics, and the SSPX in general a fringe element. He does not seem to have changed his mind since Traditiones custodes, or the frequent rumors of an impending ban on the Traditional Mass, which would only affect the parking lots of SSPX chapels.
A traditional Catholic, then, picking up Douthat’s book, will find his answers to the problems he describes naïve: perceiving a real and objective crisis, but with solutions or analysis lacking the conviction and clarity of the definitive positions of a Msgr. Lefebvre or the Priestly Fraternity he founded.
At least it can be said that Douthat does perceive that there is a real and objective crisis caused by, or at least with the help of, Pope Francis from that liberalizing element that wants to see the Church unmade and remade in a very different image and likeness. “This is a hinge moment in the history of Catholicism,” Douthat writes, “a period of theological crisis that’s larger than just the Francis pontificate but whose particular peak under this pope will be remembered, studied, and argued over for as long as the Catholic Church endures.”
Douthat opens by explaining his entry into the Church, and later his theological position, which could be said to be in line with John Paul II. He would certainly accept Pope Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of continuity” as the authentic interpretation of Vatican II, where he openly places his sympathies. What is striking however, but perhaps not surprising given his sympathies and background, is that there is no discussion of those on the more conservative or traditionalist side who see Vatican II as having possibly promulgated errors as did the Council of Constance.2 The analysis mentions nothing of the Cœtus Internationalis Patrum or conservative element restraining the documents from the worst errors, obtaining, for instance, the Nota explicativa prævia into Lumen gentium. Lacking that, it is hard to see how his understanding of Vatican II can be an honest appraisal.
Douthat clearly does not see the “Ungovernable Catholic Church”3 as suffering from a metastasizing bout of always-morphing Modernism, but of some political tit-for-tat between conservative and liberal. Dismissive of any possible error emanating from the New Theology or Vatican II, this fight is between—the actual comparison he makes in the book—a new St. Athanasius and the Arians. In this fantasy, Raymond Cardinal Burke is the much-exiled deacon; the various Synods are the local councils of the 4th century called to support Arianism; and Pope Francis the unfortunate Liberius.
Predicting this objection, Douthat proclaims “[t]his is no more necessarily a fantasy than a similar scenario would have been in 357, when Athanasius was in his third exile, Arian-leaning councils were being organized, and Pope Liberius had been packed off to Thrace.” The only difference, he says, is that today the Church is more centralized.
Our author’s difficulty is that the reverie of a “Council of Nairobi, say circa 2088” (Douthat’s fill-in for the Council of Constantinople) is chimera, for it was the Apostate Emperor, Julian, attempting to destroy the (then-nearly Arian) Church, that put men like St. Athanasius back in their sees. Further, the scenario focuses on important, fundamental, but subsidiary doctrinal points. The Arian Crisis was a fight over Who God is. The present crisis is the same, but Douthat fails to see this, and makes the squabble into a fight over important, but ancillary points. Traditionalists, however, would say that this fight is, in fact, precisely over Who God is, because it is a matter of man’s progressive substitution of himself for God, and anthropomorphically-centered liturgies like the Novus Ordo Missæ do precisely this—take man’s focus away from God and place it on himself.
“Francis-era liberal Catholicism has so often ended up,” Douthat writes “in arguments that imply that the church must use Jesus to go beyond Jesus, as it were, using his approach to the ritual law as a means to evade or qualify the moral law, which means essentially evading or qualifying his own explicit commandments, and declaring them a pharisaism that the late-modern church should traffic in no more … [t]o fulfill Jesus’s mission, to follow the Jesus of faith, even the Jesus of scripture must be left behind.”
He is absolutely correct with this notion. There is a movement to escape from Jesus Christ, and justify this by selective quotation and ambiguity, to leave Christian doctrine and morals, even the Natural Law behind. Very much like the liberal element at Vatican II and Modernists before. There we find the crux of the matter. Marriage and divorce, Communion for adulterers, or the other heterodox practices Douthat brings up issuing from the liberalizing faction in the Church are only the symptoms of the real problem, which is the abandoning of Jesus Christ. That was happening already well before Francis. It was something even the younger Ratzinger was happy to participate in. The solution, therefore, is not to return to the conservative golden years of a Benedictine Papacy, or place one’s trust in a Burke-turned-new-Athanasius, who balked on his “formal correction.”
That difference is, of course, at the root of the fundamental divide between the Society of Saint Pius X and the so-called “conservative” Catholics or other groups which formerly fell under the Ecclesia Dei Commission. At long last, these latter groups are beginning to see that there is a true crisis, and that it goes to the very top of the Church. Hard choices need to be made, with notable consequences. Do they see, however, that the crisis is not one that began in 2013, nor even in 1962, but one which goes much farther back in history? At least Douthat does not seem to.
After these criticisms have been made about Douthat’s work, it bears mentioning that he presents a detailed and very useful historical account of how things came to be the way they are in the Vatican. His theories suggesting that Francis’ ghostwriters (mentioned several times) may be leading a less-decisive pope down a more liberal path than he would, himself, take, is an interesting take, and perhaps bears study.
Whether that is particularly useful for the average Catholic to worry about, however, is debatable. Finishing the book, most Catholics would not be better prepared to deal with the trials of daily life, nor encouraged in any meaningful way in the practice of their Faith. If anything, they may end up seeing a Church in the throes of its passion, and only B-rate fantasy provided as a possible solution. A very depressing scenario.
To Change the Church clearly is an important book. The value of it for a traditional Catholic, or even for a “conservative” Catholic, however, is not quite so clear.
Endnotes
1 Douthat, R. & Miles, J. “Why I’ll Stay, Why I Left.” Commonweal, Nov. 19, 2018.
2 The decree Hæc sancta synodus which promulgated the later-condemned heresy of conciliarism, was initially passed over by Pope Martin V, resisted by Eugene IV, only to be later rejected by the Fifth Lateran Council—to which, ironically, Douthat compares Vatican II as a failed attempt at reform.
3 The title of his July 27, 2021 New York Times opinion piece on Traditiones Custodes.
Current Issue
