Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Like many things, there is a half truth that gets weaponized. Of course it can be a sin to look backwards depending on the circumstance and the object in question. Isaiah 43 calls the Israelites to “remember not the former things” in reference to their future deliverance from Babylon. Jesus tells the parable of the old and new wineskins in reference to the new covenant. But there are also exhortations to hold fast to the tradition received, to remember one’s first love and return to the things that one once did, etc. On another level, the entire logic of the Catholic Church is predicated on a continual looking backward. To be more precise, it’s less of looking backward as it is integrating oneself into a continual whole.
Ironically, much of the theological groundwork of thinkers such as Ratzinger prior to, during and following VII was that of ressourcement, which involved a putative return to patristic thought, which is surely “looking backward” if there was any such thing. Additionally, much of the rationale for the liturgical reform (if not its actual implementation) was a putative restoration of that which had been purportedly lost in the Middle Ages.
Looking backward for me but not for thee, I suppose.
I agree, Jason. Many of the “Council fathers” approached the Council with a restorationist mindset.
Case in point: Fr. Henri de Lubac SJ. Hardly a staunch traditionalist, (having been silenced in the ’50s for his “nouvelle theologie“) he observed opportunists co-opt the Council for destructive purposes under the pretense of ‘restoration’. This moved him to write in Témoinage Chrétien:
It is clear that the church is facing a grave crisis. Under the name of “the new Church,“ “the post Conciliar Church,“ a different Church from that of Jesus Christ is now trying to establish itself: an anthropocentric society threatened with immanentist apostasy which is allowing itself to be swept along in a movement of general abdication under the pretext of renewal, ecumenism, or adaptation.
… That was in 1967. It didn’t take them long.
I guess it all depends on what you’re looking back to … If you’re looking back to Eden, that’s not a bad thing. Looking back to Sodom however …