Summer
Books Book
lacks longer, tragic historical view
ABSOLUTE
TRUTH: THE STRUGGLE FOR MEANING IN TODAYS CATHOLIC CHURCH By
Edward Stourton TV Books, 270 pages, $26 |
REVIEWED By STEPHEN
SCHLOESSER
Modern Catholicisms struggle with absolute truth
began somewhere around 1860 in the wondrous new sewer systems of London and
Paris. Industrialization had brought peasants into the cities and transformed
them into a proletariat. Overcrowded slums bred rampant cholera. In response,
great water works -- the management of both sewage and drinking
water -- extended life spans beyond imagination.
As infant mortality rates declined, urban children were
transformed from economic units (potential labor as farmhands) to emotional
units. The mid-1800s saw the invention of the Victorian Christmas,
for this newly invented childhood. The inventions of childhood and
contraception roughly coincided. The French birth rate plummeted throughout the
century as couples practiced prevailing forms of contraception -- onanism and
coitus interruptus. Late-century inventions such as the English
Rubber (referring to materials obtained from brutalized peoples in the
newly invented colonies of Africa and Asia) offered a new means of
contraception and were hawked in the bourgeois quarters of Paris.
These developments only increased in the 20th century with the
formation of an unprecedented middle class after 1945, the G.I. Bill and
penicillin. Small wonder that 20 years later, the new mentalities of the new
bourgeois creature clashed bitterly with older notions of human life --
humanae vitae.
Although this is a story I do hope to see told one day, it is not
the story told by Edward Stourton in Absolute Truth. A gifted journalist
in both televised and written media, Stourton has served as foreign
correspondent and news anchor for the British Broadcasting Corporation. His
book succeeds due to the journalists strength -- it conveys a sense of
immediacy. Interviews with people on stages both large and small who were
there -- including Patty Crowley, Chicago lay leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,
Soviet premier, and Cardinal Franz Koenig, former Vienna archbishop -- make the
reader feel you were there during the tumultuous years of the
Catholic churchs journey from 1960 to the present.
In the first two chapters, Stourton nicely conveys the sense of
freshness and possibility that marked the opening of the Vatican Council in
juxtaposition to the 1950s that preceded it. Most significantly, as with the
Nixon-Kennedy debates, modern media altered the substance of church politics
forever -- absolute truth was the product of debate and
consensus.
With the councils 1965 document, Dignitatis Humanae,
the gulf between the church and Enlightenment thought had been bridged: One
could once again be fully modern and fully Catholic.
If 1965 serves as Stourtons moment of triumph, the
publication of Humanae Vitae in 1968 triggers the debacle. His chapter
titled Intrinsically Evil gives an account bursting with personal
drama -- but not with new information. The material here has been seen before
in works by Robert Kaiser, Peter Hebblethwaite, Jonathan Kwitny and Tad
Szulc.
The same criticism might be made for the next section as well, an
overview of the post-modern, post-colonialist, post-communist world of the
1980s and 90s. John Paul IIs election is connected to the end of
Soviet communism. Latin America as a Cold War theater and the development of
liberation theology leads to the Vaticans punishment of Leonardo Boff for
challenging a power that could not tolerate dissent from what it held to
be absolute truth.
But is absolute truth all bad? Although Stourton does not say so,
presumably a conviction about the absolute truth of intrinsic evils
played a part here in fueling anti-communist revolution? Stourton attempts to
negotiate the thorny problem of what is revolutionary and what is
reactionary by embedding them in the complex person of the pope; he
might do better by seeing them within an overall post-modern, post-hegemonic
world order.
Finally, Stourton brings the reader up to the present with stories
from the radically new situations of the decolonized world in Asia and Africa.
The excommunication of Indias Tissa Balasuriya stands as a test case in
the debate over the nature of truth for Asias theologians.
Archbishop Medardo Mazombwe of Zambia reflects on truths uneasy
boundaries in Africa where devout members of his flock finish reciting their
rosary and then make a trip to the local witch doctor. However, these forays
into post-colonialist cultures end up seeming a bit like side-trips when
Stourton finally ends where he began: He returns to Europe and America where
the crisis continues to be the great failure of the church in the 1960s,
the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae.
For this historian, Stourtons narrative lacks two important
ingredients. First, a narrative with stronger explanatory power: Can a conflict
between mentalities of this magnitude really be explained as the interpersonal
conflicts of these pouting Roman personalities? I would rather see the story
start at least 100 years earlier, back in the sewers of London and Paris when
human beings acquired for the first time in history radically new expectations
of human life -- humanae vitae. Not only would they live, but perhaps
they ought to live well, and in a way more material than Aristotles
posing of the question. This was something radically new. Virginia Woolf
famously remarked that on or about December 1910, all human
relations had shifted. Although one could quibble about the date, Woolf was
right. Modern material conditions have changed human beings -- and since we are
that radically changed species, we have a difficult time getting enough
distance to understand adequately what has happened.
Second, it lacks tragic vision. The summer of 1968 looks pretty
good in Stourtons telling, a moment of confident expectations of
liberation from tradition. But where are the devastating American
assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in April and June 1968?
The May riots throughout Europe (including Rome) that tragically reinforced the
gulf between the bourgeoisie (students) and working classes? The Chicago riots
of August, a bloody mix of race, class and national interests? That same
months brutal Soviet repression of the Prague Spring, barely acknowledged
(like the repression in Hungary in 1956) by the Western Left? By 1968 Mao Tse
Tung had turned to his army to brutally restore order after the failure of his
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966.
From the iconic perspective of Woodstock, the 1960s reads as
utopia. But now that the worst of all human centuries (in the words
of British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin) is over, we can see 1968 within
a different tragic drama.
Stourton characterizes Paul VI as a Hamlet figure, a
man paralyzed by introspection, second thoughts and self-doubt. The comparison
is apt: Paul VI had a global vision -- information overload? -- and he seems to
have been overwhelmed by presiding as pontiff over the cataclysmic 1960s.
Stourton, on the other hand, lacks that tragic vision. He believes
(quite incredulously, to my mind) that you can strengthen your teaching
authority by reversing your teaching. A change in the ruling on
contraception, he asserts, would restore the churchs
authority in the arena of sexual ethics and personal morality -- something for
which the need and the demand become ever more urgent as the bewildering
choices offered to us by modern science multiply. He believes you can
have it all.
Paul VI realized better than Stourton does the stakes at hand. You
cant have it all. If and when the church reverses some of these teachings
in the future -- and frankly, it is difficult to imagine the church not doing
so, as it has done in the past with usury and slavery -- a certain sense of
authority will pass away as well. Perhaps it will devastate;
perhaps no one will notice. Perhaps Virginia Woolfs changed human nature
neither desires nor seeks such teaching authority as people in the
past have. In any case, stepping back from a journalists immediacy to the
historians long view leads to an inescapable conclusion: There are some
irrecoverable losses in historical existence. There will be some in this case
of reversed magisterial teaching, too. That is a tragic vision.
Although Stourton has produced an enormously engaging book,
readers will have seen much of this material before. In addition, the
journalists method points to a larger problem for the historian: In order
to understand Humanae Vitae, one needs a longer -- and more tragic --
view of humanae vitae.
Jesuit Fr. Stephen Schloesser is an assistant professor of
modern European history at Boston College and of church history at the Weston
Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.
National Catholic Reporter, May 11,
2001
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