By Dr. Jeff Mirus (bio – articles ) | September 09, 2013 5:23 PM
If you had to pick one central factor to explain both the
collapse of Western civilization and the contemporary crisis of the
Catholic Church, what would it be? For Martin R. Tripole, SJ, that
factor is the shift in the modern world from the primacy of faith over
reason to the primacy of reason over faith. In fact, this is the thesis
of Fr. Tripole’s 2012 book from Ave Maria University’s Sapientia Press, Church in Crisis: The Enlightenment and Its Impact upon Today’s Church.
Now, you may ask: Isn’t this thesis suspect? Isn’t it true that faith
itself must be subordinate to reason? With the great variety of
religious beliefs on offer, can any Catholic possibly advocate mere
credulity? And anyway, in what sense can things work the other way
around? In what sense can reason be considered subordinate to faith?
I could recommend that you read Church in Crisis to see how
the author answers these questions, but my recommendation would be
unfair without first acquainting you more thoroughly with this important
book. Fr. Tripole, who is professor emeritus of theology at St.
Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and who has devoted much of his
career to the study of Jesuit education and spirituality, has here
written a major work of intellectual history, some six hundred pages
long, both closely reasoned and well-documented. And while the labor
invested in reading the book will be richly rewarded, surely not
everyone who can benefit will want to read the whole thing.
History and Analysis
Church in Crisis traces the loss of the primacy of Faith
through four major sections. Part One presents the “Data of Impending
Crisis”, offering a thorough review of the various contemporary studies
which have demonstrated the gulf between what the Church teaches and
what Catholics actually believe and how they act. Many readers will
recall seeing references to these studies—as well as to the problem as a
whole—in our news and commentary over the years, but Fr. Tripole brings
them all together to thoroughly portray the gravity of our present
situation.
Part Two covers the preceding “History of Crisis in the
Enlightenment”. While the focus is squarely on the intellectual history
of relativism, the Enlightenment, liberalism, modernism and
post-modernism, the author is not unmindful of more pragmatic causes,
such as the excessive entanglement of the Church with the political
order in Christendom, which bred its own less rarified reaction in
Protestantism, the rise of secular states, and de-Christianized
conceptions of human liberty. Back in my days as a practicing
intellectual historian, I might not have written this story exactly the
same way, but my conclusions would have been very nearly identical.
Part Three explores the relationship between “Enlightenment and
Crisis in the Contemporary Church”. Here, since Fr. Tripole can take
advantage of a shorter timespan to sink deep wells rather than merely
flooding the plain of our knowledge, he does some of his best work. The
four major chapters explore the following areas: (1) The intellectual,
as in the modern collapse of Catholic education; (2) The social, that
is, the rise of secularized concepts of social justice to replace the
Christian emphasis on transformative love; (3) the political, by which I
mean the confusions attendant upon our American concept of the
separation of Church and State; and (4) the ecclesiastical—the disarray
which followed the Second Vatican Council, and the clerical abuse
crisis, including its hierarchical cover-up.
As is perhaps most obvious in the political chapter, Church in Crisis
does have an American focus. But in most portions of the text, the
application may be broadened to the entire West with almost no strain at
all.
Solution
In Part Four, Fr. Tripole presents his “Solution to the Contemporary
Crisis”. This solution has two major parts. First, it is necessary to
reunite faith and reason. Fr. Tripole’s prescription is largely drawn
from Pope John Paul II’s brilliant 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason).
This is the problem with which we began, and I intend to return to it
in greater depth in a future commentary. Suffice it to say, by way
of answering our introductory questions, that Fr. Tripole is right when
he asserts that the Christian faith must have primacy in the
relationship between faith and reason, because only faith can open us to
the full dimensions of reality. Or, as Pope John Paul II explained,
only through faith can we overcome the barriers to knowledge that have been erected in the modern age.
This is a concept that stands the whole modern world on its head.
The second part of the solution is to restore the unity of the
Church. The author insists that this must be done along the lines
proposed at the Second Vatican Council. The Council saw that the unity
of the Church has its source in the Eucharist, the body of Christ; it
realized that the very mission of the Church requires unity (which
means that those willing to disrupt that unity must perforce place
little value on the Church’s mission); it recognized that the
pre-eminent servant of unity in the Church is the successor of Peter,
especially in the exercise of his Magisterium; and it follows from all
this that fidelity in self-giving love is the key to the recovery of
unity, as it is of all authentic reform and renewal.
This part of the conclusion actually answers a question that might be
raised in the minds of some readers earlier in the book. In the course
of his historical survey, Fr. Tripole treats the Council in terms of its
immediate ecclesiastical repercussions. In other words, he explains how
the shift in emphasis from a defensive “Counter Reformation” message
against the world to a message of widespread engagement with the world
tended to catch the Church unprepared. There were too many in roles both
high and low who were inadequately formed to respond to what they
unfortunately received (almost incredibly) as a kind of bombshell. The
author captures the resulting upheaval very well, but the inattentive
reader might temporarily wonder whether Fr. Tripole regards the
conciliar texts themselves as fundamentally flawed. Fortunately, this
doubt arises only from a failure to grasp the author’s method, and it is
soon thoroughly dispelled.
Outstanding Method
And in fact the author’s method is actually part of the greatness of
the book. He does not merely assert one thing or another at each point
in his narrative (such as I so often do in writing a couple of thousand
words or less). Instead, in proper scholarly fashion, he explores his
subject through the perceptions, accounts, and analyses of well-chosen
sociologists, historians, philosophers, theologians and commentators,
from whom he draws a very revealing portrait of both the nature and
genesis of the problems we face. And while Fr. Tripole is careful in
each chapter to explain what should be retained and what must be
rejected from various sources, the result is a dramatic increase in both
evidence and understanding—without “special pleading”.
Church in Crisis is a remarkable achievement. The work as a
whole is superbly crafted and organized, yet each section—and within the
sections each individual chapter—is so thoroughly developed that it can
stand alone as an analysis of its particular subject. Do you want the
statistical evidence of the mess we are in? It is all there in one
place. A history of the intellectual developments which created the
problem? Turn to Part Two. An analysis of key contemporary confusions
(like that between social justice and Christian love)? It is readily
available and easy to find. Or perhaps you prefer to cut to the chase by
reading only Fr. Tripole’s prescription for making things better. If
so, the last two chapters stand very well on their own.
It is precisely this characteristic which makes the book
extraordinarily valuable to a far wider audience than will read it from
beginning to end, even if I did find that to be a distinct pleasure. It
goes without saying that it should be in every significant Catholic
library, both institutional and personal. But the book deserves a place
in our slighter collections as well, simply because it can be used so
easily in so many different ways. Within Church in Crisis, both data and wisdom abound—in each chapter, and even more in the whole.
Related articles
- “Every Baptized Person Is Called To Evangelize” by Francis Cardinal Arinze (insightscoop.typepad.com)
- Facing Christ (fatherjerabek.wordpress.com)
- Four Marks of the Church (ubiquelucet.wordpress.com)
- Celibacy of Catholic priesthood up for debate (o.canada.com)
- Fr. Ray Blake surveys the loss of “Catholic” in the Church (veneremurcernui.wordpress.com)
- Pope John Paul II bows and kisses Koran (christianspooksite.wordpress.com)
- WATCH – Are Married Priests In the Catholic Church’s Future? Pope Francis’ Number-Two Man Says the Matter Is Open to Discussion (blackchristiannews.com)
- Faith VS. reason: A too-convenient modern story about medieval monks vs. scholars (gratefultothedead.wordpress.com)
(Vatican Radio) Some one hundred C(Vatican Radio) Some one hundred Catholic Patriarchs, 
Parchment Paradigm+ 
English: Bytča (Nagybiccse) – mosaic in the catholic church Slovenčina: (Photo credit: Wikipedia)