Of the Ecclesial Crisis and Winter Bread

The excommunications issued to the six bishops involved in the Society of St. Pius X’s consecrations are easy to defend. Pope Leo told the SSPX not to consecrate more bishops. They did it. He’s the supreme authority in the Church. They are not. This isn’t a matter of papal ruminations or recommendations on political matters. It’s a matter of the nature of the Church. And no “crisis” can justify disobedience to a direct order by the supreme authority in the Church on a matter that is directly ecclesial. 

Roma locuta, causa finita est, as St. Augustine said. 

I don’t think I’m alone among Catholics who are striving for fidelity to the Church in seeing the SSPX leaders as unreasonable and indeed un-Catholic in their actions despite some laudable aims. That said, however, one authoritative decision for Catholics to follow doesn’t make for a new springtime in the Church. 

Whether the crisis in the Church created some sort of “necessity” justifying episcopal consecrations against the will of the Holy Father is a different subject than whether there is a crisis in the Church. Whether bishops or even the pope like to speak in these terms, the fact is that a crisis in the Church kicked into high gear after the Second Vatican Council and is still a reality.  

Looking abroad, American Catholics can say that the Church is in much better shape here than it is in most of the rest of the world. But we too are in serious decline, despite recent improvements in the orthodoxy of young priests and increases in the number of converts. Pew Research’s ratio of 8.4 leaving the Church for each one entering registers that crisis vividly.

How do we deal with this ongoing crisis? The obvious answer is to keep one’s head in the game through prayer and the pursuit of a life of charity in the power of the sacraments. Rational creatures that we are, however, there are thinkers who can help us make sense out of our circumstances. Ida Friederike Görres (1901-1971) has become one of my go-to writers for trying to think things through, with the mind of Christ. 

Though largely eclipsed in the aftermath of the Council, this half-Austrian, half-Japanese, German-speaking Catholic was extraordinarily popular and respected during her lifetime by such notables as then-Father Josef Ratzinger, who gave the eulogy at her funeral Mass. Catholics can be grateful to Jennifer Bryson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington for her continuing work of translating Görres’ volumes over the last few years.

Among the works now translated is Bread Grows in Winter (Ignatius, 2025), a collection of talks given in 1969 and 1970 – at the crest of the first wave of the postconciliar crisis that we still endure, despite the attempts of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. 

In his foreword to the first English edition of the book, Bishop Erik Varden testifies to having taken a German copy of the volume, purchased from a “junk shop,” along on his journeys in the first years of his episcopal ministry. “Trying to work out how to exercise the ministry, I found in Görres a sure guide unfailingly summoning me to focus on essentials.”

What Varden sees in Görres is an ability “to fathom in herself great tensions” and to eschew one-sided approaches to theology and the life of the Church. 

The first chapter, “Our Image of Christ: A Letter,” begins by likening the image of Christ to that of a mountain which is visible from countless angles and in varying kinds of light and shadow. For her, theology and dogmatics are the “maps” by which we approach that mountain. Like Newman and her friend Ratzinger, Görres understands that even the infallible propositions given us by the Church do not exhaust Catholic truth. 

It is only the whole mystical Church, “the great entity, the mysterious living being, rooted in the days of the Apostles and which will experience the Day of Judgment,” that can see the whole vision – and the part of the Church on earth that discerns the outlines and details does so over long periods of time.

This account of how the Church progressively sharpens her vision of the details of Revelation is deeply in line with the great St. John Henry Newman. So, too, is Görres’s understanding that the progress the Church makes is not a straight line. In each age, some part of the vision of Christ is emphasized, often to a heretical extent, and the Church must struggle to regain the whole, advancing “in zigzags and spirals.” 

Even in our age, Görres stresses, there is theological wheat amidst the weeds. Thus, Catholics who defend the truth must be aware that it lurks even amidst one-sided and ultimately wrong depictions of the Faith. We must have a serenity about the Lord’s capacity to bring straight doctrinal lines out of crooked theological proposals.  

Görres displays that serenity in a powerful, dispassionate treatment of true doctrinal development, the nature and required spirituality of theology, and the question of clerical celibacy, among other topics of concern, in this golden volume.

In two chapters, “Demolition Troops in the Church” and “Trusting the Church,” she displays her capacity for both blunt assessments of the Church’s bleak present and unwavering faith in the eternal’s inevitable victory. 

She identifies the crisis as a trahison des clercs, one that has many fathers, many of them theologians and many called “Father.” The priests attempting in the name of “maturity” to “smash” the Catholic spiritual anchor “with an ax and a hammer,” she writes, practice “a form of outright soul murder. . .a spiritual genocide.” 

Bishops and even popes seem either guilty of encouraging or being paralyzed by the insanity. Is it any wonder, she asks, that people wander away or are agonized by fear?

Görres ultimately cheers readers by prophetically pointing to “Christ, the Sun,” who “touches” the Church “anew and fills her again with increasing light.”

Wise words for hard times.

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