The title stems from the heartfelt wish expressed by Pope John XXIII at the outset of the Second Vatican Council that the Council would lead to a renewal of the Church. The Council has occurred and has been followed by the Pontificates of two particular Popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI – in the words of the author, ‘men of Vatican II’– under whose inspired leadership the work of the Council has been brought to completion by the revision of Canon Law (1983), the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), and several important letters, such as Mulieris Dignitatem (1988) and Dominus Jesus (2000). Hence the renewal of the Church has taken place and we find ourselves with its successful outcome, the renewed Church. A consequence of this fact, the author is at pains to stress, is that all of those who express any level of disagreement with the interpretation and implementation of the Council brought about under these two Popes and the Roman Curia would do well to shut up.
That in summary outline is the book's overarching argument. The author, a former Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, feels free to use emotive and tendentious language whenever it suits his cause. For example, the dissenting American moral theologian, Charles Curran, is described as having a ‘genius’ for media manipulation, in contrast with that other American moral theologian, John Ford, whose paper on contraception and infallibility is described as being ‘brilliantly’ argued. The five-volume history of Vatican II edited by Professor G. Alberigo, published in English by what is described as ‘the leftist publishers Orbis books’, is dismissed out of hand in the book's early pages and Alberigo's name does not appear in the Bibliography – Whitehead is the proud translator into English of a book by the curial Archbishop, Agostino Marchetto, which is a sustained attack on Alberigo's work.
However, Whitehead might have learned from Alberigo's work, if he had deigned to consult it, about the importance of placing Vatican II in some kind of historical context and of understanding the questions to which the Fathers of the Council were attempting to provide some answers. The absence of any sense of history and the failure to understand the importance of questioning in the search for truth are the book's biggest limitations; and they are, unfortunately, disabling.
The substance of the book consists of an account of the various Council documents relating to the Church. The documents selected for fairly detailed comment are Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes, Unitatis Redintegratio, and Orientalium Ecclesiarum– the first and last about the Church ad intra and the others about the Church ad extra. Along the way, the author finds space to defend at length Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) which ushered in an ‘Age of Dissent’ within the Catholic Church (p. 81), a period that continues up to the present day and which the author would like to bring to a close. This in turn leads to a discussion of the issue of dissent within the Church, a discussion by which the book's credibility might be said to stand or fall. The author scorns Charles Curran's idea of ‘faithful dissent’ and castigates the US bishops for declaring in 1968 that dissent from the official teaching of the Church could sometimes be ‘licit’. For Whitehead dissent from the Church's teachings can never be licit, whether the teaching is deemed infallible or not, since ‘the whole fabric of the truth of the Catholic faith is, in fact, a seamless garment’. Unfortunately for his position, the author refers flatteringly to the writings of Cardinal Newman, and it was Newman who pointed out that the early dogmas of the Church were the product of ‘the collision of Catholic intellects with Catholic intellects’; it was Newman who complained that the centralisation of authority within the Church following the French Revolution had led to individual thinkers ‘being brought into immediate collision’ with the central authorities. And in the work to which the author refers, Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, we read such statements as: ‘I am far from saying that Popes are never in the wrong, are never to be resisted … I do not contend … that they have never suffered from bad counsellors of misinformation …’ With sentiments like this, one cannot help feeling that were Newman writing today he would be on Whitehead's hit list along with Charles Curran and the US conference of bishops. Unlike Newman, Whitehead's overriding concern is not with the magisterium as something from which we might learn, leading to an enrichment of our thinking and living, but as something that has to be obeyed at all costs. Knuckling down is the only thing he seems to think of.
For a book purporting to be about what Vatican II thought about the Church, this one fails to do anything like justice to the issue of collegiality, the discussion of which in the Council's documents has been called ‘the backbone’ of Vatican II, and its ‘centre of gravity’. One would never know this from reading this book – the author is content to repeat the mantra that the Church is not a democracy. But not being a democracy need not lead to the view, which appears to be the author's, of the Church as some kind of Oracular System, a hierarchical institution with the Pope at the top issuing decrees and judgments to which the rest of us, and bishops most of all, are bound to submit. Whitehead is correct when he blames the culture of clericalism for its role in the sexual abuse scandal (p. 107) but it is hard to see how such a culture could be avoided in the rigorously hierarchical Church to which he subscribes. He attempts to link clerical sexual abuse with the sexual revolution and liberalism of the 1960s (p. 165) when, as a matter of historical fact, the occurrence of such abuse began long before then, and he makes the alarmist and utterly false claim that the world today is ‘facing depopulation’ as a result of its failure to comply with the Church's teaching on contraception (p. 146). The book is a product of the polarised Church in the US, in which the words ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ bear only a pejorative sense, and is most likely to reinforce those on the right and confirm them in their sense of ‘right’. It is unlikely to win many converts from the other side or, most unfortunately, to narrow the gap between the two.
Despite its undoubted strengths – quotations are faithful to the letter of the Council documents and the author's discussion of the document dealing with relations between the ‘Latin’ Church and the Churches in the East is all the better for being free of parti pris– it is not a work of reputable scholarship but a polemical tract, the true nature of which is shown when the author takes to task the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (p. 197) for failing to endorse organisations that have remained ‘loyal’ to the Church (such as, no doubt, Ave Maria University).
The Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University has produced some fine scholarly works, but for the sake of its reputation it should avoid polemical tracts such as this.
