Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control over Lay Catholic Elites

by Jean-Guy Vaillancourt

361 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1980

Reviews

[James R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty interesting snapshot of the mood of certain high status members of the laity in the 20th century (this surveys a very specific group). The surveys from the 1967 lay congress were interesting, showing the disconnect between the lay elites & The Vatican. It's clear that huge numbers of laity were extremely dissatisfied (even among the more centrist members), and that many of their concerns were eventually dismissed and ignored (e.g. desire for smaller parish sizes, more lay control of The Vatican, change in clerical dress, lay involvement in selecting bishops, birth control pills, etc.). I wonder how many of these people eventually just said forget it, and walked away from the church entirely. I think all the more radical elements among the laity just walked away from the church, once they saw The Vatican was unwilling to change. And this was before all the abuse & Vatican bank scandals were daily news.

Now in 2022, I wonder why the Catholic Church made the decisions it did. Strangely, what happened in America was neither what the laity wanted nor what the conservatives wanted. It's almost like everyone gave up and handed the church over to a totally separate group of people in the 1980s, who then created a really cringe version of what they thought the church should be. Now there's a growing radicalized group of traditional Catholics who have created their own highly idealized and distorted view of the past, creating some weirdly abusive fascist church, cherry picking from the historical record as it suits their purposes.

I think more of the socially minded Catholics eventually gave up and moved on to other things, like environmentalism or social justice nonprofits. These people probably never should've joined the Catholic Church in the first place, but I think in the early 20th century, it was still just the thing to do if you were from a historically Catholic country.

I think this book fits well into trying to understand the fall of the imperial church of Constantine that lasted from the 4th century until Vatican II. Good luck getting the Roman church to give up their imperial trappings & Byzantine palaces, even the supposedly liberal Pope Francis is still very much hooked on the imperial church practices of cassocks, St. Peter's, etc.

[Pierre A Renaud]

Eight kinds of power the Vatican exercises to control Catholics http://churchandstate.org.uk/2012/07/...