Father Tyrrell and the Catholic Crisis

Extract

The title of this paper expresses a certain wilful, or at least studied, ambiguity. What Catholic crisis? you may ask; or, more realistically, which Catholic crisis? Upon the publication of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in July last year, there was a single point of agreement between those Catholics who welcomed the papal letter as a major contribution, in Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s memorable phrase, for stemming ‘the Gadarene slide into American morality’, and those other Catholics who recognized it at once as yet another offering for that ever-growing catena of documentary embarrassment which the Holy See, in a kind of reverse Peter’s Pence, has generously provided in the course of the last 150 years. The nearly unanimous response—one of the notable exceptions being the author himself, if we are to believe some observers—was that we were now on the threshold of a new crisis, of faith, of authority, what you will, which would reduce the dimensions of the Modernist crisis, 1894-1910, to something resembling a parochial squabble between the vicar and the mothers’ union.

There are others, on both the ecclesiastical right and left, who would hold that the present crisis in the Church is simply chapter two, or the logical outcome of that earlier one, that the problems at the heart of the modernist controversy have re-appeared, sometimes in rather new garb, and that we must once again face them and come to terms with them.