The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever (review)

In The American Catholic Revolution Mark S. Massa, S.J., dean of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College, is dismissive of the theological perspective of Pope Benedict XVI with regard to the nature of truth, revelation, and the Church in history. It is Massa’s contention that the experience of the Catholic Church in the 1960s created a revolutionary change in the nature of revelation and the Church itself. The key to this interpretation, according to the author, is “historical consciousness,” along the lines of the modernism condemned by Pope Pius X. According to Massa, historical evolution and change, especially in the decade under discussion and more particularly that which occurred in the United States, created a new reality, so that “what faithful Christians did and believed in the mid-twentieth century was not always a faithful replication of what the early Christians and the medieval builders of the great cathedrals had done and believed.” (p. 162). This book is an unabashed and vigorous defense of the so-called “hermeneutic of discontinuity.”

Massa makes his argument in very readable prose and with many historical facts, but with a largely polemical and overridingly cynical style, presuming that there is little significant or reasonable opposition to his theological perspective. Unfortunately, he never fully engages the work of Benedict, specifically in his doctoral habilitation on St. Bonaventure’s theology of history, or that of Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman on the development of doctrine. Both works would have provided ample intellectual challenge to Massa. Instead, Massa appears to delight in announcing, perhaps for a more popular than theological audience, the theme of the “Dirty Little Secret” of church history (pace Gary Wills; see esp. pp. 8–14)—namely, that things have always changed in the Church and that change is the only constant. If Massa had seriously engaged with the theologians suggested above, a better and much more nuanced book might have resulted.

The first chapter lays out the “historical consciousness” theory that guides the book. Wills, “Good Pope John” XXIII, and Bernard Lonergan are the heroes. Subsequent chapters have more heroes (for example, Monsignor Frederick McManus, Charles Curran, and the Los Angeles Immaculate Heart of Mary community) and an ample number of villains (for example, Pope Pius X, James F. McIntyre, and Patrick O’Boyle). There is little new research material in the remaining seven chapters, as the book relies primarily on secondary sources. The second chapter explores liturgical changes, largely through the lens of the 1960s work of McManus, especially his articles in the journal Worship. Here, the topic of “reception” of reforms and doctrine is also broached, but not explored deeply. The third chapter looks at the response in the United States to Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, as well as some subsequent efforts to explain the teaching of the encyclical by means other than the kind of natural law presupposed therein.

The “Charles Curran Affair” (1966–68) at The Catholic University of America is the backdrop for Massa’s meta-conclusion: that in light of the Second Vatican Council, with its embrace of “historical consciousness,” the Church had changed from what it was, “[a]nd if the Church changes and adapts, so does its teaching—on contraception and a host of other things as well” (p. 74). In chapter 5, this theme of inevitable, radical change is explored in the field of religious life, as exemplified in the demise of the Immaculate Heart of Mary community in Los Angeles. Throughout this sad historical chapter, there is never a suggestion that the IHM sisters and leadership could have or should have done anything differently. The sixth chapter studies the antiwar movement of the 1960s as seen in Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, and the “Catonsville Nine”; the various movements with which the Berrigan brothers were affiliated; and some of their most public demonstrations. Their...