I have been reading a pair of recent books presenting “alternative history.” The contributors imagine “what might have been” if, say, Socrates had died on the battlefield at Delium, the Spanish Armada had won, or Patton’s troops had reached Berlin before the Soviet army did. I first came across this genre years ago, in a book titled If. One of the contributors was Winston Churchill, whose essay speculated on what might have happened “If the North Had Won the Civil War.”
Churchill wrote “counterfactual” history cleverly from the point of view of a historian living in the aftermath of a Southern victory. If Grant, not Lee, had surrendered at Appomatox, what would later writers think might have happened if the North had prevailed? Of course, Churchill’s imaginative post-1865 landscape did not end up looking quite like the one we are familiar with. (His Lincoln did not fall to an assassin’s bullet, for instance, but finished out his second term.)
Writers who dabble in alternative history take an old-fashioned view of real history. They think it is made not by impersonal and irresistible forces but by free-willed men whose decisions could have gone another way. The greater the men, or the greater the things they choose, the greater the change in history. While there is utility to the study of economic pressures, sociological trends, and cultural sensibilities, those things do not determine the course of history. The course is determined by real people making real decisions.
Seemingly small decisions can turn out to be momentous, sometimes for the whole world, sometimes for a small part of it. The Germans could have ended the war early, on their terms, if Hitler had not inexplicably halted his advancing troops before Dunkirk. If dead people had not been permitted to vote in Texas and Illinois, Nixon would have become president in 1960 rather than in 1968. If Ritchie Valens had insisted on driving instead of flying to the next gig, he, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper might still be alive today.
Translate this to the Catholic Church. What might have happened if, instead of Karol Wotyla, the conclave had chosen a different man, someone who took the name Pius XIII because he wanted his emphasis to be on ruling and disciplining rather than on inspiring and teaching? (This is not to say that popes do not do all four, but each has his emphases, and John Paul II, it is fair to say, has been known for the latter more than for the former.) Would the Church be better off today—or worse? Would dissidents have been checked (good) but the faith less carefully explicated (not so good)? Would Pius XIII have “rolled back” Vatican II, or would he have perfected the legacy of the Council beyond what John Paul II has been able to do?
Of course, we cannot really know, but we can speculate, and in speculating we might come to a deeper understanding of the Church and of her real history.