Mary Ball Martinez; "The Undermoning of the Catholic Church"
That the Second Vatican Council is the point of departure for so many commentators is understandable. While a look at events of earlier years would make it easy for them to pick up the strands of change, it would also mean having to confront the figure of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, a discomforting prospect for liberal and conservative alike. For the Left, with the passage of the years, if not in his lifetime, Pacelli is an arch-conservative, sadly unenlightened and probably anti-semitic. For the Right, at this distance, a saint. In both cases his life and work have come to be overlaid with pious and impious myth. Probably no pope in history has been as misunderstood. He has been revered and scorned, loved and hated for all the things he never did and never was. No pope in history did as much to change the Church; yet Catholic conservatives look on him as the last firm pillar of orthodoxy. No pope in history ever did as much for the Jєωs; yet Jєωιѕн writers continue to accuse him of indifference to their fate. No pope did as much to oblige the Marxists; yet he is hailed in the West as an anti-Communist hero of the Cold War. In his long years as Vatican diplomat when he pioneered what has come to be called Ostpolitik, in his decade as Secretary of State to Pius XI, in his nearly twenty years as Supreme Pontiff to be followed in extension through the pontificate of his protege and chosen heir, Giovanni Battista Montini, the work of Pius XII spanned nearly a century.
If the facts of the transformation of the Church are to be honestly accounted for, then the facts of the Pacelli contribution to them will have to be made a part of that account. Ample material is available. With the Second World War so long over, American and German archives have been opened and memoirs of important figures of the time are being published. Vatican secrecy, however, can be and often is, everlasting. It was only the accusation against Pius XII concerning his alleged indifference to the Jєωs that caused a limited section of Vatican Archives to be opened to four Jesuit scholars in the 1970's. With or without Vatican cooperation, however, there is still a wealth of Pacelli material available, enough to leave only the foolhardy willing to continue to cling to the old myths.
Granted that Eugenio Pacelli was a giant among popes and that his period of activity was unusually long, one may ask what a pope has to do with revolution. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church, everything. While it would be hard to find a guerrilla movement, be it the Italian Red Brigades or the Peruvian Shining Path that was not inspired and directed by university students and professors, in the Church with its unbudgeable hierarchical structure, the intellectual top, the level at which theologians move, is not high enough. Any mutation in doctrine or practice must come from the very top, from the papacy itself. There is no other way. While Eugenio Pacelli was the dominant figure in the undermining process he was not alone. Four other Italians shared his enterprise. Giacomo Delia Chiesa, Angelo Roncalli and Giovanni Battista Montini were popes while Pietro Gasparri, as Secretary of State, conducted his phase of the operation as though he were. What the five accomplished was no small thing, being the transformation of the single largest religious body in the world, a body which had gone virtually unchanged for nearly two thousand years. Unchanged, it had weathered the great break away four hundred years before, even gaining from the blow a certain strength through forced redefinition of its own identity. The Protestant shock had been a severing. What has happened in our day has been no break but rather an inside turnover, something altogether more drastic.
Measured against what had been taken to be the Catholic identity for nineteen centuries the undermined Church of today is something quite new, While the outward structures of its diminished bulk have been made morerigid than ever, there has been...
Topic: The End of History: "Ci Riesce" of Pius XII. (Read 3470 times)