Passion and Gibson
Suddenly, the controversy over Passion makes more sense, now that I know that Mel Gibson is a traditionalist, pre-Vatican II Catholic. While our history books are peppered with references to many of the major moments in Catholic history; I have always been surprised at how modern historians ignore and downplay what was perhaps the most significant event in Christian history in the last 250 years: Vatican II. Not only the historians, but even the Catholic church itself seems to want to pretend that there is little fundamental difference between the church before and the church after Vatican II, and pretend that traditionalists do not exist, while at the same time working actively to eliminate the traditionalists. It was interesting to note that the archdiocese of Los Angeles refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Gibson’s church, while Gibson’s church believes that it is a legitimate member of the Catholic family because “under some conditions it is acceptable to give Latin mass”. In a period of a generation, the church has gone from demanding that masses be given only in Latin, to actively discouraging the use of Latin. Not quite as extreme as Gibson’s case, but we used to have a single church in the Seattle area that gave Latin mass. The church tolerated it, because the priest giving the mass during the early morning mass was old and nobody wanted to publicly fight him, and during other mass times the other priests used English. However, it was clear that the old priest was seen as being a bit “tainted” with traditionalism, and the parishoners who fought for his right to give Latin mass were painted as a band of traditionalist malcontents. When he died, the last tattered remnants of his traditionalist flock had no choice but to assimilate under the remaining priests, and the Vatican II transformation was complete in yet another archdiocese. This pattern has been repeated in every archdiocese across the globe, and the more I’ve read about the various local histories and how the process took place, the more intrigued I’ve become. Of course, if it was just about Latin vs. English, I probably would not be so fascinated. But Vatican II was about much more than language; it was the moment that everyting changed, and it set in motion a series of shock waves that few people today acknowledge. I believe that it’s all but impossible to return to the situation prior to Vatican II, and I tend to believe that the goals of having a universal secular political organization are impossibly contradictory with the goals of maintaing a universal and unchanging faith. So I’m interested, not because I wish to “fix” the situation, but rather because I believe that we have underestimated the magnitude of what has happened, and we won’t fully be able to guage the impact until the history texts are written a few generations from now.