If it is desirable to offer a diagnosis of the text [Gaudium et Spes] as a whole,
we might say that (in conjunction with the texts on religious liberty and
world religions) it is a revision of the Syllabus of Pius IX, a kind of
countersyllabus. Harnack, as we know, interpreted the Syllabus
of Pius IX as nothing less than a declaration of war against his
generation. This is correct insofar as the Syllabus established a
line of demarcation against the determining forces of the nineteenth century:
against the scientific and political world view of liberalism. In the
struggle against modernism this twofold delimitation was ratified and
strengthened. Since then many things have changed. The new
ecclesiastical policy of Pius XI produced a certain openness toward the
liberal understanding of the state. In a quiet but persistent struggle,
exegesis and Church history adopted more and more the postulates of liberal
science, and liberalism, too, was obliged to undergo many significant changes
in the great political upheavals of the twentieth century. As a result,
the one-sidedness of the position adopted by the Church under Pius IX and
Pius X in response to the situation created by the new phase of history
inaugurated by the French Revolution was to a large extent, corrected via
facti, especially in Central Europe, but there was still no statement of
the relationship that would exist between the Church and the world that had
come into existence after 1789. In fact, an attitude that was largely
prerevolutionary continued to exist in countries with strong Catholic
majorities. Hardly anyone today will deny that the Spanish and Italian
Concordats strove to preserve too much of a view that no longer corresponded
with the facts. Hardly anyone today will deny that, in the field of
education and with respect to the historico-critical method in modern science,
anachronisms existed that corresponded closely to this adherence to an
obsolete Church-state relationship. Only a careful investigation of the
different ways in which acceptance of the new era was accomplished in various
parts of the Church could unravel the complicated network of causes that
formed the background of the "Pastoral Constitution", and only thus
can the dramatic history of its influence be brought to light.
Let us be content to say that the text serves as a
countersyllabus and, as such, represents, on the part of the Church, an
attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789.
~ Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology,
(San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987) pp. 381-2.
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