On steady decline – James Butler in LRB:

“In the background were two other problems: a steady decline in churchgoing and the legacy of the Second Vatican Council – a vast exercise in reform, which reshaped every aspect of Catholic practice, streamlining the Mass and permitting its celebration in languages other than Latin. John XXIII, the pope who initiated the council in 1962, described it as an aggiornamento, a ‘bringing up to date’, an attempt to ‘throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through’.
Much church politics over the last few decades has been driven by attempts to close the windows again. Attitudes to Vatican II are good predictors of other positions: liberals and progressives tend to approve of it, wishing its reforms had gone further in changing the church’s approach to social issues; conservatives tend to see it as a sad loss of self-confidence, degrading a rich and beautiful tradition and setting the church adrift.”

(…)

“He loved Furtwängler’s recordings of Wagner; his letter on the value of literature quotes Proust, Cocteau, Borges and Celan. His reflections on the Covid pandemic quote Hölderlin, in lines which also characterise his papal approach: ‘where the danger is, grows/the saving power also.”

(…)

“What you make of this depends on where you stand. A cynic might suggest Francis was merely a good PR man, savvy about the disposition of Western progressives but short on substance. A church historian might see a flexible Jesuit cunning in his public statements. Others might acknowledge that, in the lives of the faithful, the symbolic gestures made by the pope are profoundly meaningful, perhaps more so than his doctrinal pronouncements. That is why his washing the feet of migrants, prisoners, women and non-Christians, or his refusing of grand papal apartments, or his daily phone calls to Catholics in Gaza, took on such significance.”

(…)

“When I was young, the pope always seemed to be dying. John Paul II’s long, public suffering with Parkinson’s made him an emblem for Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life. At the time, I thought it sad and cruel. But I came to understand something of that emblematic force as I watched the ailing Francis insist on visiting prisoners, gasping out greetings, being present for his Easter message, speaking against the madness of rearmament and war, squeezing every last opportunity to speak to the world as it continues to erect new prisons and walls, and new oligarchic idols. ‘Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers,’ Francis wrote in his last meditations on Good Friday. ‘Theirs is the construction site of Hell.’”

Read the article here.

The rhetorical power of these last lines should not be underestimated.

Now it’s the church that always seems to be dying.

But new churches will sprout.

The longing for god or godlike figures will die last.