The Holy Year of 1950 was the last historical moment in which the Church appeared in all the power it derived from being the Seat of Truth. While Europe was recovering with difficulty from the moral and material devastation of the war, the Jubilee offered an extraordinary image of the militant Catholic Church. The climax of the Holy Year was the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven on 1 November 1950.
A witness narrates that, from the dawn of that day, St Peter’s Square, still immersed in silence, “was transformed into a huge limitless sea, into which an unending and uninterrupted flow of people crowded”.4 Every people and every nation were represented in that immense undulating crowd, while the singing and prayers melted harmoniously into each other. Preceded by the white procession of the bishops in cope and mitre, the Pope appeared on the gestatorial chair. After imploring the assistance of the Holy Spirit, Pius XII solemnly defined “to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory”.5 The whole world, linked by radio to the teeming square, exulted.
“It seemed like a vision, and yet it was reality: until late at night, Pius XII blessed, because the crowd never ceased to call him even after the window was closed, for one stream of people that left the square, another took its place. Everyone wanted to be blessed again before that wonderful day came to an end.”6
However the symptoms of an incipient crisis were not lacking. On 12 August of that same year, the Pontiff published the encyclical Humani Generis, to denounce the “poisonous fruits” produced by “novelties in almost every field of technology”.7 The encyclical condemned the relativism of those who believed they “they could reconcile Catholic dogmas with any kind of philosophy or theory, whether immanentism, idealism, existentialism or any other system”.8 This relativism, which had already characterized the modernism condemned by St Pius X, was now strengthened under the guise of “nouvelle théologie” (new theology).9 Its exponents were Jesuit theologians, influenced by the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, such as Fathers Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, and Dominicans, who proposed a revolutionary interpretation of the theology, like Fathers Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar. All these would play a forefront role in the religious life of the following years and would then be elevated to the Cardinal purple.
The incipient crisis of the Church emerges for example from the correspondence of those years between two religious, now beatified: Don Giovanni Calabria, founder of the Poor Servants of Divine Providence, and Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan. “For years” writes Don Calabria “with growing insistence, I hear the lament of Jesus in the depths of my heart: my Church!”10 “May God preserve the Holy Father Pius XII” answers Cardinal Schuster in his turn “because I already pity his successor. The storm is raging and who will ever dare take command of the boat?”11
Notes:
4. Sister Pascalina Lehnert, Pio Il privilegio di servirlo, It. tr. (Milan, Rusconi, 1984), p. 172.
5. Pio XII, Munificentissimus Deus, in Denz-H., no. 3903. also the text in AAS, 42, 1950, pp. 767-70.
6. Suor P. Lehnert, Pio XII, p. 174.
7. Pius XII, Encyclical Humani generis, of 2 August 1950 in Denz-H., no. 3890 (nos. 3875-99) e in AAS, vol. 42, 1950, pp. 561-77. On this important document, Cf. Various authors, La encíclica Humani Generis, Madrid, C.S.I.C., 1952; Garrigou-Lagrange O.P., La struttura dell’enciclica Humani Generis, in ID., Sintesi tomistica, (Brescia, Queriniana, 1953), pp. 541-54; Mgr Pietro Parente, Struttura e significato storico e dottrinale della enciclica Humani Generis, in ID., Dio e i problemi dell’uomo, (Rome, Belardetti, 1955), vol. II, pp. 611-36. Cf. also J. de Aldama, “Pio XII y la Teología nueva”, Salmaticensis, no. 3, 1956, pp. 303-20.
8. Pius XII, Encyclical Humani generis, in Denz-H., no. 3882.
9. The denomination is of Pius XII in the address Quamvis inquieti of 17 September 1946, in DR, vol. VIII, p. 233. The necessity of the condemnation of the “nefarious germ of modernism” resurfacing in the dogmatic, biblical and social fields, emerged, ten years later, from many of the “pre-preparatory votes” of the Council sent by the bishops to Rome (Cf. Acta et Documenta Concilio Oecumenico Vaticano II Apparando, Series I (Antepraeparatoria), Appendix Voluminis II. Pars I, (Typis Plyglottis Vaticanis 1961), pp. 218-19). Thomas M. Loome thus comments: “Teilhard de Chardin, Congar and De Lubac are among those deemed worthy of the Council’s attentions. And from one bishop we find the rather curt suggestion: ‘Doctrina J. Maritain damnetur’”. Liberal catholicism, p. 25.
10. Letter of Don Giovanni Calabria to Cardinal Schuster of 21 November 1948, in L’epistolario Cardinal Schuster-don Calabria (1945-1954), edited by Angelo Majo and Luigi Piovan, (Milan, NED, 1989), p. 30.
11. Letter of Cardinal Schuster to Don Calabria of 20 July 1951, in op. cit., p. 93. When in 1953 Our Lady wept in Syracuse, the Cardinal commented: “even the most holy Virgin weeps over the evils of the Church and concerning the chastisement that hangs over the world” (Letter of Cardinal Schuster to Don Calabria of 6 October 1953, in op. cit., p. 160).