Crisis Magazine has published my latest article, titled “Kneeling Before the World, 60 Years On,” in which I riff on a passage by the late Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain to discuss the current crisis in the Church. Here’s a snippet:
Maritain was also one of those who firmly believed, as his fellow countryman Lamennais had a century before, that only if the Church ceased to insist on the social privileges it had acquired over the course of centuries when it dominated European life could it reach the heart of “modern man” and finally win the approval of that mythical beast. He was harshly critical of many aspects of the Church in the 19th and early 20th centuries and, therefore, enthusiastically welcomed the Second Vatican Council as a monumental step in that direction, an enthusiasm he never abandoned.
By 1966, however, Maritain had become alarmed at what actually transpired as a result of the council and took up his pen to denounce it in his book of that year, The Peasant of the Garonne. The passages excerpted above are drawn from a section in that book titled “Kneeling Before the World,” in which Maritain excoriates a tendency which every devout Catholic born since that time has encountered, above all in the hierarchy: a worldliness that sets aside every difficult, demanding, or out-of-step-with-the-times doctrine the Catholic Church has held and practiced in the past—seeking, instead, to adapt to contemporary mores…
I sometimes wonder what Maritain would make of the Church today. What would he have made of Pope Francis or his still-prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Fernández? Would he see in their efforts the continuation of his legacy or that of Vatican II? It is hard to believe he would.
Read the rest at Crisis if you would be so kind.
