Post by hibernicus on Dec 18, 2008 15:34:17 GMT
I don't think it would be fair to Fuller to compare her with Fahey. Fahey was paranoid on an individual level - Athans quotes one of his late pupils as telling her that towards the end of his life he believed that everywhere he went there was a Jew waiting to kill him - and he couldn't take criticism at all from anyone and just regurgitated the same dubious quotations. Fuller does engage in original research and engage in rational discourse within the limits of her assumptions - with her it's more a case of "groupthink". Also I wouldn't say that Fuller's views are anywhere near as noxious as Fahey's.
Ireland and Quebec seems to be the comparison most widely favoured. There a society whose identity had traditionally been bound up with a very authoritarian style of Catholicism (in politics as well as in church governance), a sense of being besieged, an exaltation of the rural, went from 90% Mass observance to about 40% within a decade, has continued downwards ever since and is now the most secularised part of Canada. (This was also accompanied by a massive collapse in birth-rate, from one of the highest in North America to one of the lowest.)
The Dutch Catholics who had a strong sense of being a besieged minority and altered very quickly are another example. Other possibles might be parts of France where Catholicism was allied with regional identity, like the Vendee; Flanders in Belgium. Spain and Southern Italy (which supplied the bishops most vigorously opposed to the Declaration on Religious Liberty at Vatican II; Pius XII's Archbishop of Palermo was a northern Italian who came to idealise Sicilians as representatives of true Catholic values to such an extent that he always denied there was such a thing as the Mafia.) Perhaps Bavaria underwent a similar process. I suppose I am thinking of the areas which provided the main reservoirs of electoral support for the postwar European Christian Democrat parties whose electoral ascendancy after 1945 led to the widespread perception that a great Catholic renewal was taking place in Europe, and whose subsequent corruption and secularisation (generally in that order) showed that to a great extent that perception was an illusion, based on mobilisation of existing strength rather than winning over new followers. Perhaps the decline of "ghetto" Catholicism in the USA was similar.
I think the decline of these forms of Catholic regionalism relates to (a) economic backwardness and a growing sense among elites - who initially would have seen themselves as liberal Catholic reformers before becoming fully secularised, Pierre Trudeau is an example - that this was linked to such factors as clerical dominance of the educational system (b) increasing social and geographic mobility (c) attitudinal change through increasing penetration by consumerism and mass media. These would have produced some change anyway; the question is how the church responded or failed to respond, and what alternatives were open to it. My beef with Fuller is essentially that she downplays the role of human agency for a form of determinism and (b) she takes it for granted that the liberal Catholic response is the only one possible and doesn't discuss whether it has drawbacks of its own.
The big issue is "hermeneutic of rupture" versus "hermeneutic of reform" - precisely. I think part of the problem is that the impression was given before the Council that the Church had always been unchanging, so that any change at all made it seem as if the pillars of eternity were shaken and everything was now up for grabs.
Ireland and Quebec seems to be the comparison most widely favoured. There a society whose identity had traditionally been bound up with a very authoritarian style of Catholicism (in politics as well as in church governance), a sense of being besieged, an exaltation of the rural, went from 90% Mass observance to about 40% within a decade, has continued downwards ever since and is now the most secularised part of Canada. (This was also accompanied by a massive collapse in birth-rate, from one of the highest in North America to one of the lowest.)
The Dutch Catholics who had a strong sense of being a besieged minority and altered very quickly are another example. Other possibles might be parts of France where Catholicism was allied with regional identity, like the Vendee; Flanders in Belgium. Spain and Southern Italy (which supplied the bishops most vigorously opposed to the Declaration on Religious Liberty at Vatican II; Pius XII's Archbishop of Palermo was a northern Italian who came to idealise Sicilians as representatives of true Catholic values to such an extent that he always denied there was such a thing as the Mafia.) Perhaps Bavaria underwent a similar process. I suppose I am thinking of the areas which provided the main reservoirs of electoral support for the postwar European Christian Democrat parties whose electoral ascendancy after 1945 led to the widespread perception that a great Catholic renewal was taking place in Europe, and whose subsequent corruption and secularisation (generally in that order) showed that to a great extent that perception was an illusion, based on mobilisation of existing strength rather than winning over new followers. Perhaps the decline of "ghetto" Catholicism in the USA was similar.
I think the decline of these forms of Catholic regionalism relates to (a) economic backwardness and a growing sense among elites - who initially would have seen themselves as liberal Catholic reformers before becoming fully secularised, Pierre Trudeau is an example - that this was linked to such factors as clerical dominance of the educational system (b) increasing social and geographic mobility (c) attitudinal change through increasing penetration by consumerism and mass media. These would have produced some change anyway; the question is how the church responded or failed to respond, and what alternatives were open to it. My beef with Fuller is essentially that she downplays the role of human agency for a form of determinism and (b) she takes it for granted that the liberal Catholic response is the only one possible and doesn't discuss whether it has drawbacks of its own.
The big issue is "hermeneutic of rupture" versus "hermeneutic of reform" - precisely. I think part of the problem is that the impression was given before the Council that the Church had always been unchanging, so that any change at all made it seem as if the pillars of eternity were shaken and everything was now up for grabs.