By Robert Royal.
But first a note from Robert Royal: Dear Friends: Today we give you a somewhat longer reflection than is usual on this site about the U.S. Bishops' meeting in Baltimore last week and its ramifications here and in the Church at large. We're also beginning our end-of-year fundraising campaign - which is to say, we seek your support for all The Catholic Things you visit this site to find - not only our daily columns but our podcasts, courses, links to vital News and Commentary, and much more. We only fundraise twice a year because I have great confidence in you, our readers. And that confidence has been repaid for almost two decades now.
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Now for today's column...
In his address to the U.S. bishops at their annual meeting in Baltimore last week, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio to the United States, argued - nearly to the point of obsession - that Vatican II has to be regarded as the guide to the present and future of the Church. And the Council, he made clear, as interpreted recently by Pope Francis. ("Pope Leo also is convinced of this.") It was a bold, if doubtful, claim, given the well-documented ability of theologians to disagree. Even the more progressive among them might find reasons to dispute any such attempt to "control the narrative." Indeed, the Cardinal went further into even more difficult terrain, claiming - Rome must have cleared all this ahead of time - that "We now inhabit the world that the Council foresaw." It's telling - more on this below - that Pierre felt he had to push this so strongly at the American bishops, the implication being that he knows they're not so very much in agreement.
Now, most committed Catholics today often tend to pay too much attention to such passing statements coming from the pope or the curia. (Mea culpa. . .) And, sadly, sometimes "cancel" others just like the social media maniacs. The most important thing happening any given day on the surface of the Earth, however, may not be some large-scale political or ecclesial matter, but a priest helping someone to die reconciled to God and family. Or perhaps a humble, unknown person, entering into the way of becoming a human being as God intended us to be, one who will really make a difference in the world, which is to say, a saint.
Still, lesser truths also matter because truth is one of the divine names. As any fair observer might tell the Cardinal, no one in the 1960s - let alone the bishops gathered in Rome - had any clear idea of the world we currently "inhabit." It does no favor to the real achievements of the Council Fathers back then, or to our confused Church today, to make claims that probably none of them would have made for themselves. It's not merely a question of our brave new world of smartphones, the Internet, and AI, though those are already significant and threatening enough. We live in unprecedented conditions about the value of human life and the nature of human societies, over and above the older problems of sin and unbelief.
In the 1960s, to take a crucial example, Paul Ehrlich published a widely influential book, The Population Bomb, which confidently predicte...
