The Iterations of Catholic Fundamentalism

 Michael Sean Winters has an interesting article on the NCR site today.  Actually it is the second of two articles:  Not merely Latin and lace: New book chronicles iterations of Catholic fundamentalism | National Catholic Reporter

I was unfamiliar with most of the names he mentions, since I don't spend a lot of time hanging around fundamentalist sites.  But the article explains a lot.

"Catholic Fundamentalism in America, the new book by Jesuit Fr. Mark Massa, provides a much-needed framing of developments within the Catholic Church in the United States. "

"...I was completely unfamiliar with the life of theologian Fr. Gommar DePauw, who led the first great protest against the changes to the Mass enacted by the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council.

"...At issue in DePauw's resistance to the new rite was not merely Latin and lace. The issue was authority. If the council fathers at Vatican II had undertaken a reform of the liturgy that was irreformable, then their actions were illegitimate. DePauw questioned the authority of one ecumenical council, Vatican II, to defend the authority of another, Trent. He denounced not just the new Mass but the "damnable Robber Council of Vatican II."

"If the struggles over the traditional Latin Mass were only about language, we would not have the troubles that continue to stalk the church. It is this unwillingness to confess the legitimacy of Vatican II that animates many advocates of the old rite and makes them dangerous."

"Massa's chapter on the Eternal Word Television Network and its foundress, Mother Angelica, touches on more familiar terrain, but he sees the same kind of fundamentalist characteristics at work in that ministry. Massa writes, in a fine passage that highlights his gifts as a writer:

"And like those Protestant "Bible Believers" a century ago, the teaching "passed on" was both a-historical and committed to an older paradigm of Catholicism in which "faith" was both propositional and unnuanced. The Catechism could only be interpreted in one way (just like the Bible for Protestant fundamentalists). 'Doctrine' — in reality, a multi-valent term in Catholic theology — was presented as both objective (like gravity) and perspicacious (i.e., self-evidently clear). "

"Again, the problem is, for these fundamentalists, ultimately ecclesiological: "Mother Angelica and her soldiers at EWTN seem to have missed the central ecclesiological component of Catholic identity: communio ... the belief that the faithful were 'in communion' – with the Bishop of Rome, with their own bishop (the only authorized teacher in a Catholic diocese) and with each other." The essence of the Reformation faiths was that this communion was less important than the individual witness of the Christian to truths he or she perceived, but the irony was lost on Mother Angelica and her acolytes that their ecclesiology was more akin to Luther's than to that of the Council of Trent."

"Massa introduces his chapter on the community in St. Marys, Kansas, home to an outpost of the schismatic Society of St. Pius X, with a reference to conservative writer Rod Dreher's 2017 book The Benedict Option. Massa makes the important point that "St. Benedict had never intended his call for monastic retreat from the world to be seen as a model for all Christian believers."

"...Subsequent chapters examine Christendom College, the Church Militant media empire, and Eric Sammons, the current editor of Crisis magazine. In each case, Massa provides sufficient information about, and evidence against, the groups he examines to sustain the charge that they are Catholic fundamentalists. In each case, the fundamentalism is seen to highlight the degree to which these arch-Catholics have lost sight of foundational Catholic ecclesiology and practice."

"Perhaps most importantly, Massa has shown why these fundamentalist characteristics so often end up producing people who are very angry at the world, very severe in their judgments, adopting, even relishing, the role of the fool in the parable who tries to remove the speck from his brother's eye while ignoring the plank in his own."

"...Massa divides the groups he surveys by using the taxonomy devised by H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic work Christ and Culture. DePauw, Mother Angelica's EWTN, and the community in St. Marys, Kansas, epitomize the "Christ against culture" model while Christendom College, Church Militant and Sammons are placed in the category "Christ the Transformer of Culture." 

"...Many of us grew up learning that the "heroes" of the Catholic story in the U.S. were the Americanizers like Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, Bishop Denis O'Connell and, later, Cardinal George Mundelein, all of whom argued for Catholics to embrace the ambient culture. The "villains" were those who resisted such assimilation, men like Cardinal William Henry O'Connell, Archbishop Michael Corrigan and Archbishop Frederick Katzer. Indeed, this narrative argued that Gibbons and his cohort were vindicated at Vatican II with its embrace of religious liberty and interreligious dialogue."

"The truth is more complicated. Assimilation, like all major cultural changes, involves loss as well as gain. "