Book Review: The Undermining of the Catholic Church

 

In the early 1990s, Mary Ball Martinez did a better (though still problematic) job than most answering the question any thinking Catholic should be asking: what happened to the Catholic Church in the 20th century? I’ve read through the book twice here. 

The Gist

What sets this book apart from the many tired narratives is that, for the most part, it keeps a laser focus on the men in charge of the institutional church during the 20th century. It provides valuable context on their families of origin, education, professional associations, and track record. 

This approach allows the book to dodge the threadbare myopia around the Second Vatican Council, which is mercifully discussed very little. 

The book traces Ms. Ball’s opinion on the origin of the crisis back to the 19th century. She begins by focusing on a close-knit group of men around Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, Vatican Secretary of State from 1887 to 1903. Rampolla’s protege was Giacomo Della Chiesa, the future Pope Benedict XV. Rampolla was also responsible for the education and early clerical life of Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII. 

Pope Benedict XV would appoint Cardinal Pietro Gasparri as Secretary of State shortly after his own election. Gasparri would be Pacelli’s boss until Pacelli himself became Secretary of State in 1930 en route to becoming Pope nine years later. Pacelli would grow very close to Gianbattista Montini, the future Paul VI, working closely with him at the Vatican Secretariat of State for over 30 years before Pius XII named Montini Archbishop of Milan in 1954. 

Much of the book is a full on broadside against Pope Pius XII. It begins with his largely secluded private education to his later education at the Liceo Visconti and then the Almo Collegio Capranica, to his actions as Secretary of State and Pope. 

Ms. Martinez claims that Capranica (also the alma mater of Pope Benedict XV) was and remains a well known liberal seminary whose parties in response to liberal election victories (including a referendum in favor of abortion) would draw regular complaints from neighboring residents. 

She runs through a series of vignettes showing how the Vatican continually intervened to gut traditional, orthodox Catholic bodies in favor of secular liberal governments and liberal, modernizing trends within the Church. 

The Vatican Secretariat of State under Gasparri and Pacelli gutted Action Française’s attempt to restore a more traditional, Catholic government in France by excommunicating its members. The Secretariat also withdrew support from the cristeros in Mexico, who were fighting a socialist government that banned Catholic education, required registration of churches with the state, limited the number of clergy, forbade wearing clerical garb, and deprived violators of trial by jury. 

Once pope, Pius XII pushed modernization after modernization, without which the Second Vatican Council’s excesses and aftermath would have been unthinkable. 

From radically rethinking the way the Church saw herself in the encyclical Mystici Corporis, to giving tacit endorsement to biblical criticism that was undermining the foundations of the faith in Divino Afflante Spiritu, to opening the door to papal (and curial) micromanagement of the liturgy in Mediator Dei, to driving the formation of national and regional bishop’s conferences, to pushing nuns to modernize, first in the early 50s and then again in 1956 with the Vatican-driven formation of the Conference of Major Superiors of Women, to encouraging an overhaul of traditional catechesis by the Jesuit Lumen Vitae Institute and rapidly liberalizing Louvain University. 

Pius XII organized the liturgical conferences in Assisi that would lead to the gutting of the calendar and Holy Week liturgy in the 1950s, the reduction of the Office in the early 60s, and eventually the Novus Ordo, which Paul VI proudly proclaimed was the end goal of Pius’s reforms. 

He also organized the study groups that would lead to the calling of a Council. 

Perhaps most damning, and underappreciated, are Ms. Martinez’s compelling claims that Rome did not condemn Communism for 12 critical years, from Pacelli’s meeting with President Roosevelt during his 1937 visit to the US to the 1949 Italian elections in which the communists were threatening to beat Montini’s Christian democrats. During that time, the Soviets took over and destroyed much of the institutional Church in Eastern Europe, in part due to Pius’s work supporting the Allies in the Second World War in their fight against Axis countries that had majority Catholic populations. 

Following this are lesser charges toward the later popes. John XXIII is cast as something of a useful idiot who saw himself as a compliant bridge between Pius and Paul. 

Paul VI is cast as a weak man who could not emerge from the shadow of his liberal political activist parents and modernizing boss but who lacked the strength to face the nightmarish consequences of his changes to the Church. 

John Paul II is allegedly exposed as a theatrical liberal at heart, whose shady relationship with Poland’s communist government gave him full travel and teaching privileges at a time when other priests in the area were being jailed or worse and whose public moves and episcopal appointments were meant to shore up the Conciliar revolution. 

The Good

The Undermining of the Catholic Church goes where few traditionalists dare to tread and does so by tracing influences, digging deep into historical backgrounds of the men involved, and naming names when it comes to sources of the more controversial allegations. The book is at its best when busting the myth that would blame all of the modern Church’s ills on the 60s, John XXIII, Paul VI, and Vatican II. 

It also asks honest, fact-based questions that few are willing to ask regarding the education and career track of the early 20th century popes, the politically sanitized biography of Pope John Paul II that most of us have been given, and the sudden death of John Paul I. 

The book also gives us refreshing perspectives from normal people. In rejecting Ratzinger’s comment about the supposed longing for renewal in the 1960s, Ms. Martinez rightly points out that this longing existed in elite, intellectual clergy, while the vast majority of Catholic faithful wanted stability and friendly political regimes to support them in the difficult struggle of keeping the faith in the modern world.

The book gives a solid hat tip to the modern Jewish people who have remained true to their identity and successfully built a nation state, resurrected the Hebrew language, and built an industry celebrating Jewish martyrs and educating the world about them. This is in stark contrast to the modern Catholic Church which has opposed a Catholic state for over 100 years, stigmatized and suppressed its own sacred language of Latin, and focused on apologizing for its fights with its enemies rather than highlighting martyrs who suffered and died at the hands of those enemies (Father Walter Ciszek and Father Emil Kapaun come to mind).  

The Bad

This book is not a balanced consideration of the men involved. While this might be necessary in the case of Pius XII who gets glowing and uncritical treatment from most traditionalists, it becomes downright schizophrenic when it comes to John XXIII. 

While the book does well to highlight the formation and professional relationships of Pope John (Angelo Roncalli) it fails to confront the reality that he was a good deal more traditional than Pius XII in many ways. The book does raise episodes where Roncalli hesitated to follow through on Pius XII’s support for zionism and staying silent in the face of Soviet advances into Catholic Europe. 

But it does not address Pope John’s rejection of some of Pius’s reforms to Holy Week and the Psalter, his Apostolic Constitution demanding that priests be taught in Latin, or his wish that the Council start and finish within two months using documents pre-prepared in line with Trent and Vatican I. 

The book fails to make real distinctions between the men involved in Church reforms, from those who favored reform but still held to a mainly traditional line in liturgy and politics to those who wanted to overturn the apple cart. Thus Cardinal Mercier’s initial Malines Conversations with members of other faiths in Brussels are equated with the idolatrous excesses of the World Day of Peace in Assisi in 1986. Ratzinger is equated with Montini is equated with Rampolla as though they were all a hive mind. 

This points to a larger hole in the author’s long-term historical context. Though Ms. Martinez does point out how the faithful had little sense of the treasures they were losing, she does not dig further into this point. Liturgy was due for healthy reform given the laity had little understanding of the Mass or the Office. Catechesis did need to be enhanced, but by enriching the question and answer catechisms with deeper Biblical and Patristic sources, not by throwing them out entirely. The Church’s embrace of royalist and authoritarian regimes caused more problems than it solved, as evidenced by the backlash against the faith following clerical collaboration with the Nazis, Salazar, and Franco. 

The Ugly

The most grating part of the book is its failure to distinguish between established fact and rumor. It is an established fact that Cardinal Rampolla’s potential election as Pope in 1903 was vetoed by the Austrian Emperor. It is a rumor pushed by French Monsignor Rouin that this was because Cardinal Rampolla was a member of the masonic Ordo Templi Orientis, which revolved around a cult of sex magic. The book initially says the latter was conjectural, but then goes on to speak of it as established fact. 

While much of the book is factual, this happens often enough that it detracts from the book’s reliability. Examples include allegations that Pius X’s canonization was a concession to conservatives to get them on board with liturgical reforms, that the Ratzinger Report was a ploy designed to smoke out conservative opposition, that Pius IX (yes that’s right) joined a masonic lodge, that John Paul I was definitely poisoned, that apostolic visitors to the SSPX in Econe questioned the Resurrection of Christ, and more. 

The ugliest subtext of the book is its tacit support of Nazism. The book does confront the damage done by Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and his disciples within the church during and following the war. However, it very clearly makes the claim that Pius XII erred in his overt support of the Allies during the war due to his political bias and that it would’ve been better for the Church had he stayed fully neutral or even supported the Axis to defeat the Soviets. One can sense nostalgia in Ms. Martinez’s recounting of how crucifixes went back on the walls of schools and public buildings in Mussolini’s Italy and Vichy France, and in describing how John Paul II’s theological education went underground only when it was clear that the Nazis were pulling out of Krakow and leaving it to the Communists. 

Closing Out

The Undermining of the Catholic Church has its holes, but if one is able to look past them and step back from its conspiratorial, rightist excesses, it shines a much more penetrating light on the history of the crisis in the Church than one finds elsewhere.