NOTE: This is one of a continuing series of blogs on the current situation in our West Chester, Ohio parish.
WE TRADITIONAL Catholics are aware that internecine controversies in our own times can divert us from accomplishing greater things.
It is also enlightening to look at parallel cases in history for some perspective. Here we can see the bad effects that result when Catholics launch a war over what is not a matter of doctrine, but over what is merely a matter of discipline or prudential judgment — as was the case here at St. Gertrude’s of late.
The monastic order to which I once belonged, the Cistercians (founded 1098), was plagued with grave internal divisions in France during the seventeenth century. The central point in the dispute was whether the monks could eat meat occasionally or whether they should abstain entirely.
None of this, obviously, had anything to do with the Catholic doctrine. It was certainly not worth fighting a war over, especially at a time when the faith in Europe faced so many other threats.
Nevertheless, the monks who favored perpetual abstinence — called the Abstinents or the Reform — engaged in a century-long campaign against fellow monks who wanted to retain what was called the Ancient Observance.
Among the low points in the controversy were suits in civil courts, police interventions, physical violence between rival groups, lockouts, and barricaded monasteries.
This warfare went on for nearly a century, in large measure because the king of France would not allow the pope to resolve religious disputes without royal permission. So, for the Cistercians, practically speaking, the Holy See was “vacant,” and they fell to fighting over an issue that under normal circumstances the pope himself would have ultimately resolved.
This took its toll on all the parties involved. Father Louis Lekai, who during the twentieth century was considered the premier historian of the Order, described one of the bad effects of the controversy on the side that first provoked it:
“The devotional literature bequeathed by Abstinent Cistercians cannot measure up either in volume or in depth to the best works of seventeenth-century French religious genius.
“However, it was not lack of talent, zeal, or education that prevented the Reform from producing a long series of eminent authors or attractive models of monastic perfection, but rather the dismal fact that nearly all of its capable leaders were drawn into a consuming yet barren fight for power.
“The best minds of three successive generations spent more time in planning legal strategy than in meditation; used up a greater amount of paper in writing defamatory pamphlets than works of edification; spent longer hours sitting before court benches than in choir stalls.…
“The possibility that the means might in fact frustrate the end hardly occurred to the combatants. The men who helped to shape the destiny of the Reform were fighting children of a fighting century.… They were all activated by the unshaken conviction that anything less than battling with unflagging pertinacity to the last would amount to a shameful betrayal of a holy cause.” (The Rise of the Cistercian Strict Observance in Seventeenth Century France [Washington: CUA Press 1966], 186–7)
One factor that kept the dispute going, by the way, was the endless pamphleteering — the seventeenth century equivalent of an Internet attack site, which in our own days the Abstinents would have probably operated as www.ancientobservanceinfo.com
Thus the waste of effort and talent that results when one provokes bitter controversy and division among Catholics not over some point of doctrine, but merely over discipline or practical judgments.