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Book Review: Turmoil and Truth: The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Catholic Church

Turmoil and Truth: The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Catholic Church
by Philip Trower
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003
207 pages
$14.95

Reviewed by Sean P. Dailey

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A priest I once heard speak said that periods of confusion have historically followed many of the Catholic Church’s ecumenical councils. He was trying to mollify an audience of mostly conservative-leaning Catholics who were fed up with much of the goofiness that seems to have crept into Catholic discipline and liturgy since the Second Vatican Council, but I don’t know if his words did much good.

Depending on who you ask, Vatican II was either the greatest boon to the Catholic Church or the worst thing to happen to her since the Reformation. On the former side are those who credit the Council with allowing everything from altar girls to hula-hoops at Mass, and who think it allowed the ordination of women. At the opposite end are those who deny the Council’s very legitimacy, and even go so far as to say there has been no authentic Pope since the death of Pius XII. Many books have been written in the decades following the Council defending both extremes and covering just about every position in between.

Most of these books rely on a lot of finger-pointing, but now we have one that takes a different approach. In Turmoil and Truth, Catholic journalist Philip Trower instead examines the historical roots of the conflicts and factionalism that erupted almost immediately following the Council. But as he makes clear early on, it didn’t start with Vatican II or with Pope John XXIII. Pressure for what Trower sees as the Council’s two main undertakings—the reemphasis of the role of the laity and aggiornamento, or an “updating" or “renewal” of many Church practices—had been building for some time.

“In fact it was not sudden,” Trower writes. “There had long been a movement in the Church for both kinds of ‘reform’ I have mentioned (its origins go back to the early 19th century), and a great deal had already been achieved in the ninety-odd years between the First and Second Vatican Councils.”

Specifically, in the mid-20th century, French and German “new theologians” began to agitate for “more radical shifts of emphasis, bolder adaptations and the ‘baptism’ of a greater number of contemporary ideas,” Trower writes. “The resulting presentation of the faith, which they offered the Church for its approval, has come to be called ‘the new theology.’” Pius XII had suppressed a number of these theologians and scholars, even forbidding some of them to write and teach. But John XXIII was more welcoming, and by the time of the Council, “The new theologians, backed by a minority of influential bishops, were the driving force behind the ‘reform party’ at the Council.”

Opposing the reformers were neo-scholastics, and for historical perspective, Trower likens this conflict to the roughly 300-year long dispute between the theological schools of Antioch and Alexandria over Jesus’ divine and human natures, which began around A.D. 400.

Turmoil and Truth is divided into four sections. “A Bird’s-Eye View” examines the Council and its issues, as well as the major players; “A Backward Glance” examines whether the seemingly solid façade of the Church might have had a few cracks before Vatican II. Indeed, using the open rebellion by bishops, priests and the laity against the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae as a springboard, Trower says, “Catholics do not suddenly abandon large numbers of their beliefs and moral principals if they have been serving God as they ought.”

Part III, “The New Orientations,” looks at the role of the laity and the relations between the Church and other religions and Part IV examines “Aggiornamento and the Rise of Modernism.” The chapter on the laity (“The Laity: Waking the Sleeping Giant”) in “The New Orientations” is especially instructive. In an easy-to-understand writing style that permeates the entire book, Trower gives a detailed though brief rundown of the laity’s proper role in the Church, especially as rightfully emphasized by the Council: “The Council’s principal remedy for lay passivity and individualism was its teaching about the call of all members of the Church to holiness, … and the fact that the laity as well as the clergy share in Christ’s threefold office of prophet, priest and king (if not in all respects in the same way).”

None of these teachings was in the broad sense new, Trower writes. From the earliest centuries, lay Christians had thought of themselves as apostles, missionaries who helped spread the Faith. And Church history is filled with holy laypeople who exerted great influence on the Church (“The Church is in a real sense the one classless society and the calendar of saints is there to prove it.”). But that changed as the West became increasingly de-Christianized in the wake of the Enlightenment, and the laity relied more and more on the clergy: “Excessive lay dependence on the clergy was mainly a 19th- and early 20th-century phenomenon.”

Trower’s explanation of this trend and the reaction to it makes a lot of sense in light of what’s happened in the four decades since the Council’s close. If the hierarchy had received too much emphasis in the years preceding the Council, then (especially given the numerous anti-clerical movements in Europe and elsewhere in the 19th and 20th centuries) it was almost inevitable that any attempt to restore a proper balance would be misused by some who wanted to do away with the hierarchy altogether. One of the most influential here was “new theologian” Dominican Father Yves Congar, and his writings did much to shift “the notion of hierarchy to the notion of community.”

Fr. Congar’s voice was eventually to be the most powerful. Lumen Gentium, the Council’s document on the Church, after dealing in its first chapter with “The Church as a Mystery,” devotes the second chapter, under the title “The People of God,” specifically to what all the members of the community have in common. Only in chapter three are the rights and duties of the hierarchy explained.

Turmoil and Truth is brimming with details like this, and many readers will find its lucid account of Vatican II and its aftermath invaluable.

Sean P. Dailey is editor-in-chief of Gilbert Magazine, a literary journal devoted to the thought and writings of English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton.

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