Father Brown at Vatican II
At the end of his book Heretics, Chesterton wrote: “When [man] drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he no longer believes in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sets himself up as God, holding no form or creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass.” Thus he denounced, with his robust common sense, the era of universal suspicion into which modernity has plunged the human mind.
What would Chesterton have said if he had heard that between 1962 and 1965 a Council would be held at the Vatican, and that while the Catholic Church was being challenged by skeptical modernity the Council would respond by refusing to make any dogmatic definition whatsoever, being content with merely pastoral statements? I think that he would have taken up his pen again: “When a man—a fortiori a Council Father—claims to have outgrown dogmatic definitions…, he sinks slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.” Father Brown, Chesterton’s famous detective-hero, would no doubt have wanted a Council that was more doctrinally authoritative and less…vegetative. A Council immune to vagueness thanks to the precision of its dogmas.
Fr. Alain Lorans
