The Pope’s anti-liberal revolution

Wednesday, 21st March 2007

The Orthodox Churches are a different matter. ‘The Eucharist,’ the Pope writes, ‘objectively creates a powerful bond of unity between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, which have preserved the authentic and integral nature of the eucharistic mystery.’ There is a sense in which Sacramentum Caritatis can be read as an apology to the Orthodox for the liturgical excesses that followed Vatican II, and a promise that they will not recur.

Two further straws in the wind. At the retreat preached before the Pope and top Vatican officials shortly before the publication of Sacramentum Caritatis, Cardinal Biffi, the former Archbishop of Bologna, repeated the apocalyptic prophecies of the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev at the end of the 19th century. When the Antichrist appears, he warned, it would be as a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist promoting the shared ethical values of all the world’s religions at the expense of the person and sacrifice of Christ.

Also last week, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now headed by the former archbishop of San Francisco Cardinal Levada censured two books by the popular and charismatic Liberation Theologian Jon Sobrino — not for what they said about Liberation Theology but for suggesting that neither the Evangelists nor Christ himself believed in Christ’s divinity; and that his death on the Cross should be seen as a moral example rather than a sacrifice for the salvation of mankind.

None of this amounts to a repudiation of Vatican II: there are many laudatory references to it in Sacramentum Caritatis. But it is clear that Pope Benedict XVI will be even more insistent than his predecessor Pope John Paul II on a conservative interpretation of its decrees. It will not lead to a return to the status quo ante, but clearly the Church of the future will be more like the Church of the past than many had feared.