Interesting book review at The Corner about Catholicism and authority

Mike Potermra writes (my bolds):

To read memoirs of pre-Vatican II Catholicism is, often, to visit a glorious world of great aesthetic beauty and unambiguous, doctrinally certain religious identity; with the eternal Mass, the perfect work of worship, at the living center of a parish life of great vitality. But the picture can be so compelling, so all-enclosing, that it creates its own skepticism: How could something so perfect have collapsed so suddenly, and with so little protest on the part of its supposed beneficiaries? The default position of many in my generation (born in the Sixties) was to simply believe that the nostalgia is phony in the first place: The Good Old Days were actually pretty awful, and once people realized they had a choice they said goodbye, good riddance, and don’t let the door hit you on the rear end. But Australian scholar Geoffrey Hull has come forward with a rather more specific explanation. In his new book, The Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church, he says it was one of the key underpinnings of the pre-Vatican II culture that planted the seeds of that system’s destruction.

In Hull’s thesis, the Sixties revolution in Roman Catholic practice was in large measure a result of the Counter-Reformation and Vatican I centralization of power in the papacy: In the traditional understanding, the pope was the “custodian” of tradition — but the response to the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution made Catholicism expand that role significantly, from “custodian” to “arbiter” (the quoted words are Hull’s). The need for a strong defense against outside attacks on the Church made Catholics rally around the pope, in the name of orthodoxy, little intending that that same power could eventually be deployed in the interest of heterodoxy. (They might in this sense have benefited from an understanding of O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” In this ecclesial case, of course, the contrast would not be the political one between right-wing and left-wing, but rather one between tradition and experimentation.) Hull writes: “There was a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the spirit of ultramontanism and the general acquiescence of Latin[-rite] Catholics in the Pauline liturgical revolution. Or, put another way, ultramontanism is the difference between the rebellious, strong-minded Catholics [who resisted Protestant changes in] 1549 England and the conformist, unthinking ones of the decades following the Second Vatican Council.”

It’s a fascinating notion, and there is at least a kernel of truth to it: If you’ve been rallying around authority for as long as your culture can remember, that authority can indeed develop a momentum of its own — even at the expense of what the authority is designed to protect.