What is worth falling out about? On a pretty regular basis the Catholic press reports that a parish has descended into acrimony and conflict because of changes made by a new priest.
We had an example of this at Blackfen in London in 2014. Fr Tim Finigan was succeeded by a priest who did not share Finigan’s love for the Latin Mass, and stopped offering the old rite just weeks after his arrival. At the time one blogger who attended the parish stated that people had been “shocked and scandalised”, and that there was a “lack of honesty” about the new priest’s intentions when his appointment was announced.
There was a well-publicised controversy in Oregon in summer 2019, when an energetically conservative Nigerian priest was appointed to a parish – St. Francis of Assisi, Portland – that had become a centre of liberal political activism. Fr George Kuforiji was condemned by some parishioners after removing what he considered inappropriate political displays from the church. He also stopped the parish tradition of using inclusive language in the Mass, and prevented the congregation from making a statement after the Creed that “outlined the values of the community”.
Another similar case arose last week, also in the US. St Elizabeth’s in Boone, a small town in North Carolina, welcomed its new pastor, Fr Brendan Buckler, eighteen months ago. According to a story in the US National Catholic Reporter (NCR), the newcomer has removed unorthodox books from the parish library, and introduced a much more traditional liturgy, including four Masses in Latin per week, compared with only three in English. The NCR claims that many parishioners have left. One of them reportedly said, “He is taking us back to pre-Vatican II”, a reference to the Second Vatican Council.
We are all of us fallen, and tend to prefer comfort to virtue, or perhaps to focus excessively on outward correctness.
As a moderate traditionalist, my own instinct when I read stories such as those noted above is to side with the conservatives, but we should be reluctant to make sweeping judgments about what has happened in any given parish based on media reports alone. Certainly no tribe within the church has any monopoly on wisdom or prudence or sensitivity to those who disagree with them. In the Boone case it seems like the newcomer has taken what the Holy Father might call a “rigid” approach; among the books supposedly purged from the parish library were volumes by Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Neither Nouwen – who wrote a brilliant meditation on the parable of the Prodigal Son – nor Merton are beyond the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. Bishop Robert Barron, certainly no liberal and a student of great theologians like St Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers, calls Merton a “spiritual master”.
People in the church can certainly sometimes react in strange ways to customs, artefacts and practices that they consider threatening to their way of understanding the faith. I remember visiting a Catholic school a few years ago, and being staggered to hear that the elegant but rather bare chapel had once had beautiful wall-paintings, but that they had been whitewashed in the years after the Second Vatican Council by the nuns who ran the school. The decades following the Council saw a great wave of architectural, liturgical and cultural experimentation, because the Council sought to reinvigorate the Church’s witness in the modern world and to adopt a wider range of styles in its worship, buildings and theology. This often included sweeping and irreversible destruction of church art and decoration, by priests, religious and lay people who felt that the new era demanded brand new approaches to Catholicism, and a ruthless suppression of the old. Clearly these people felt very strongly that some things were worth fighting about.
We should be reluctant to make sweeping judgments about what has happened in any given parish based on media reports alone.
I don’t agree with their mindset, but at the same time I don’t blame them for thinking that it matters what the inside of a church looks like, or what happens in the liturgy, what hymns we sing and when we kneel. Clearly it is counter-productive when parishes are split, and when relationships are damaged. Over-zealous conservative priests fixated on liturgical pedantry, and complacent parishioners with an excessive attachment to their post-Sixties nostrums about inclusiveness and tolerance, are always going to conflict. But we should not conclude from such tensions that conflict and disagreement are invariably to be avoided.
Sometimes things are wrong, and need to be fixed. We are all of us fallen, and tend to prefer comfort to virtue, or perhaps to focus excessively on outward correctness. When those tendencies are challenged, we need to have the humility to look at ourselves honestly, rather than simply retreating from disagreement and pursuing a false unity.
Niall Gooch is a regular Chapter House columnist. He also contributes to UnHerd.
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