Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

Recently published remarks by Pope Francis to a group of Jesuit editors have drawn a lot of controversy from conservatives, including conservative Catholics. I discussed his remarks about Ukraine the other day, which as a conservative Catholic I find unobjectionable. Today I want to look at the problem of what he calls in his remarks "restorationism":

[T]he Council that some pastors remember best is that of Trent. What I’m saying is not nonsense.

Restorationism has come to gag the Council. The number of groups of “restorers” – for example, in the United States there are many – is significant. An Argentine bishop told me that he had been asked to administer a diocese that had fallen into the hands of these “restorers.” They had never accepted the Council. There are ideas, behaviors that arise from a restorationism that basically did not accept the Council. The problem is precisely this: in some contexts the Council has not yet been accepted. It is also true that it takes a century for a Council to take root. We still have forty years to make it take root, then!

So, of whom specifically does the Holy Father speak? Well, a prominent conservative Catholic has piped up and given us an example. Anthony Esolen on Monday published an essay, "I Am a Restorationist". As a Catholic convert, I've got to say this presents me with a dilemma in my understanding of Catholicism. In his remarks, Pope Francis makes it clear in so many words that "restorationists" have never accepted the Second Vatican Council. As the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, his opinion on this matter should carry great weight.

The idea that there are Catholics who haven't accepted the Second Council isn't a figment of Francis's imagination. Prof Esolen has simply stood up and, apparently fully accepting Francis's terms, identified himself as one of them. That a conservative US Cathollic magazine would publish this essay simply confirms Francis's observation that there are many "restorers" in the US, i.e. people who do not accept the authority of an ecumenical council.

As Bp Barron has said, you don't get any higher authority in the Catholic Church than an ecumenical council. You don't find any clearer voice in the Church than a pope endorsing an ecumenical council. So for a prominent conservative Catholic to come out publicly to say by clear implication that he's against an ecumenical council and against the pope is, at minimum, problematic.

In fact, recognizing that Esolen is an Ivy Leaguer who has made his career as an academic, I would expect a closely reasoned, heavily footnoted case in support of his position, but this is precisely what we don't get. His argument, as far as I can piece it out, is that in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholics obeyed the Church's authority without question, but look where it got them:

When our pastor removed the marble communion rail with its mosaic inlays of Eucharistic symbols (a basket of five loaves, two fish, a bunch of grapes, the Lamb of God), we figured he knew what he was doing, and we submitted. When he whitewashed the church walls, eliminating stenciled patterns of the fleur-de-lis, so that what had been warm and shady was now bare, with no color connection between the stained-glass windows, the mural paintings of figures from the Old Testament, and the painted ceiling above, we figured he knew what he was doing, and we obeyed. When he covered the hexagonal floor tiles, white and dark green in cruciform patterns, with a bright-red carpet, we wiped our feet and obeyed.

So, er, does this mean Catholics no longer need to accept Church authority? Prof Esolen doesn't like vernacular mass or versus populum celebration. Speaker Pelosi wants abortion to be OK. Who's right? He's proven absolutely nothing.

But also, his argument is, first, emotional, and second, anecdotal. We may regret unjustifiable redecoration in specific cases, and reaction may be along the line of, "My parents were married in that church! I was baptized and confirmed there! Look what they've done!" But that isn't an argument against the Second Council. The Council documents -- I've read them in an edition Bp Barron sponsored with the aim of having them available to contemporary Catholics -- have nothing to say about carpet or whitewash.

Bp Barron in his commentary there himself cites examples like a priest who rode a motorcycle down the aisle to the altar and makes the point that there have been lots of misunderstandings, which are in the process of being corrected. But here Pope Francis suggests it takes a century for a Council to take root in any case.

In many ways, Esolen's argument is post hoc propter hoc.

Sexual morality was the obvious candidate for progress. I understood nothing of it when I was a schoolboy, but when we high school freshmen had a “values clarification” class instead of a real study of Scripture or the catechism, I figured the sister knew what she was doing. It was a feature of the new Church—the Church knew more and better about sex than she used to.

Though most of us in that high school bore an old residue of moral sense, by the time I went to college in 1977, the Church in her ordinary life—in her preaching and her obvious practice—offered us no guard rails, no direction. I never thought of myself as disobedient because the Church, in her practical life, did not think of me so, either. Love pastes over a multitude of sins.

But by 1992, the Church had published a new comprehensive Catechism that contained a full explanation of traditional Catholic moral theology, including sexuality. The priests in our parish often discuss the sacrament of reconciliation, including the need for examination of conscience with reference to Church teaching. Has Prof Esolen attended a diocesan mass at all lately? Has he gone to confession in a diocesan parish? Last I checked, if I confess to a sin, the priest will still give me advice on how to avoid it and prescribe a penance before he absolves me.

The problem with Esolen's argument is that it parades out the traditionalist cliches -- tasteless redecorations, bad architecture, pride flags in the sanctuary -- without addressing them as either outliers or aberrations that are largely in the process of being corrected by a current generation of mainstream priests and bishops like, for instance, Bp Barron. Barron, a fully qualified theologian, is attacked by conservatives who have no particular qualifications as somehow a popularizer or a Bp Feelgood. (Indeed, I've had e-mails from restorationists who say the same about Fulton Sheen.)

Nobody attacks the Council documents themselves. Beyond that, the implication in their resistance to Pope Francis is that he's in some way illegitimate; indeed, the most extreme version of this position is that Pius XII was the last legitimate pope.

The problem with all this is that if Francis isn't a legitimate pope, or the Second Council was illegitimate, these are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary proof. If these proofs can be made, an Ivy Leaguer like Prof Esolen ought to be able to make them. But he falls back on the same old chestnuts, the whitewashed walls or carpeted floors in specific parishes, the sister who bore a child out of wedlock, the divorces, the pedophiles. But how do any of these directly illegitimize, say, Sacrosanctum Concilium? Lumen Gentium? Gaudium et Spes? Does an illegitimate Council also delegitimize the 1992 Catechism?

I'd be curious to know if Prof Esolen has even read them, or if he's read the commentary on them by Bp Barron in his recent edition. Or do the documents somehow not matter, since although Prof Esolen identifies himself as someone who rejects the Second Council, he has nothing to say about them in this version of hier stehe ich? Wouldn't a serious, well-footnoted refutation of the Council documents and, just for starters, Bp Barron's interpretation of them in his edition, be a miniumum starting point?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.