Papal Resignations! VI

Coat of Arms of Benedict XVI

In my preivous entry I mentioned Father Robert  Barron’s assessment of the papacy of Benedict XVI.  I am a fan of Father Barron and his work, but he is an apologist (one whose work it is to present the Church and its teaching in a light that is meant to win souls to its truth) not a historian.  From an apologist’s perspective, I think he did a fine and fair evaluation of this papacy, but I would like to tackle the subject from a historian’s perspective.  It might be somewhat less sugar-coated, but I would be far from negative.  That being said, I would have to begin by saying that overall the pontificate of Benedict XVI has been a tremendous disappointment, more to the Holy Father, I would imagine, than to anyone else.  His aim from the beginning was to revive the Christian faith and culture of Europe but there is no evidence of success in this matter.  Voices that have called for the very sort of renewal that would fan into new flame the embers of Christian Europe—voices such as the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini or the Swiss Abbots Martin Werlen and Peter von Sury—have been pushed to the margins while prelates that echo the same-old-same-old, and bizarre movements such as the Restorationist Institute of Christ the Sovereign Priest have found encouragement, albeit not by Benedict himself but by a Roman bureaucracy that has no consistent focus.  The result is that there has been absolutely no improvement in Benedict’s eight year reign in the state of the European Church. 

In my years in Rome I saw Benedict often—both as Cardinal Ratzinger and as the Pope.  He is a gentle and cultured man.  A sincere man.  Ironically in his days as the theological adviser to Cardinal Frings of Cologne during the Council, he was one of the principal sub-architects of the Council, but he seems—like the children of Israel in the desert—to have had a failure of confidence somewhere along the way.  He also seems to have had a compulsive need for control and management yet been unable to assert that control once in a position to do so.  His accession to the papacy in 2005 was according to a carefully engineered plan that Cardinal Ratzinger had meticulously put in place over the last ten years or so of John Paul’s papacy. He did this not out of ambition, I believe, but of a deep felt need to take control of the Church to correct the course that the Council had set and of which he had second thoughts.  He had no idea of reversing the Council but of a rather drastic revision of its course. In the end he was not successful in this matter other than ordering some still unpopular changes in the Roman Missal’s vernacular translations. 
His legacy will be his resignation.  What will give him a place in the history books is his courage to walk away from a task that is greater than his strength.  There is no shame in this—to the contrary he is to be congratulated for his candor and his rigorous self-awareness and for his putting the good of the Church ahead of his own desires.  Moreover, he has set a precedent giving future popes an option—and perhaps even a mandate—to do something popes have not felt free to do in centuries.     

Benedict XVI and Turning Back the Clock 200 Years

Medieval bas-relief at Luca Cathedral

showing Mass celebrated facing the people

I mentioned in recent posts that Benedict XVI has not been completely comfortable with the direction the Catholic Church has taken since the Second Vatican Council which is ironic because he, as a theological advisor to Cardinal Frings of Cologne—one of the leaders of the Council—had much to do with shaping the Vatican II Church.  I pointed out in recent postings that his discomfort with the policies of John Paul II in regards to ecumenism and to inter-religious dialogue have led to a cooling of the friendly conversations the Catholic Church has conducted with other Christian denominations and with non-Christian religions. But Ratzinger is also uncomfortable with the liturgical revisions issued under Paul VI in the Missal of 1970. 

I have long felt that the only people who understand the changes of Paul VI—really understand them—are those who, like those who followed Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in schism—have rejected the new liturgy.  Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly support the liturgical revisions and had hoped to see even more revision, but there is a discontinuity in the theology of the Mass of Pius V in the 1570 Missal and the Mass of Paul VI in the 1970 Missal.  I think the Pauline “Novus Ordo” is more faithful to the theological/liturgical heritage received from the Fathers of the Church and that it did well to clear away many of the medieval accretions and restore the Roman Rite to some degree of its original clarity and simplicity of expression.  I wanted—and still want—to see further simplification of the Rite along with a corresponding flexibility that frees it from rubricism and would permit it to be more authentically prayerful.  Not everyone sees it that way.  Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is one who does not.

From early on Josef Ratzinger identified himself with a faction in the Church that resisted the liturgical developments of 1970.  This is not to say that Ratzinger was opposed to any liturgical reform or renewal but he obviously though the reforms of 1970 went way too far.  For years he attended various seminars and workshops at the Abbey of Fontgombault, a French Benedictine Community of the Solesmes Congregation that has opted to maintain the pre-Conciliar Rite.  Fontbombault has been a center for neo-traditionalists who are anxious to minimize the liturgical changes of Paul VI’s revisions of the Missal and Breviary.  Ratzinger also was a close friend of the late Monsignor Klaus Gamber,(+ 1987) whose book Die Reform der römischen Liturgie, (in English: The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background, Una Voce Press, 1993) was an attack on the Reforms of Paul VI. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote an introduction to this book. I have mentioned Gamber in previous postings and believe he was distinctly inferior as a scholar to Josef Jungman (+1975) and Gregory Dix (+1952) whose works have prepared the way for the liturgical reforms at the Council.  But Ratzinger, a theologian and not a historian, has not seen the flaws in Gamber’s “scholarship” and has embraced many of his ideas for their theological import despite of their being grounded in poor historical understanding.  One of the particular issues that Ratzinger/Benedict has followed Gamber’s faulty research is the matter of “orientation”—that is the idea that priest and people alike should pray facing Eastwards.  Granted, that the tradition of the Eastern Churches (Orthodox and Catholic, Chalcedonian and non-Chalecdonian) and the prevalent custom in northern Europe was for Churches to be built facing eastwards so that priest and people together would face the rising Sun—a profound symbol of the Risen Lord, but a study of the ancient Churches in Rome shows us two things.  In Rome, unlike the East, churches were built to every point of the compass.  And in Rome, unlike the East and Northern Europe, altars were positioned so that the bishop or priest presiding at the Eucharist faced the congregation over the altar.  Cardinal Ratzinger was an ardent proponent of the priest celebrating with his back to the congregation.  As Pope he has in public celebrated facing the people.  We need to do a posting on the topic of the Roman Liturgy and the issue of versus populum or versus absidem or ad orientem—three distinct positions for the priest at prayer.

Benedict was also unhappy with the translation of the Latin “pro multis” in the consecratory words over the cup “This is the cup of my blood shed for you and for ????”  Benedict insists on a literal but misleading “for many” whereas most of the translations of the 1970 Rite had long used the more theologically accurate “for all.”   We need to look at that question too.  The pro multis issue has long been a thorn for neo-traditionalists because it was not being translated literally (though, as we will see in a future posting, it was being translated accurately.) 

In expanding the use of the pre-conciliar rites with the 1962 Missal of John XXIII as the so called “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman Rite Benedict has hoped that the traditional rites will bleed back into the revised rite of Paul VI and eventually “correct” the 1970 Rite with accretions from the earlier rite borrowed into the new.  That threatens to make a bit of a “dog’s dinner” of the Liturgy, a hodge-podge as it were—but the scholarly Benedict has little experience with the pastoral issues and practices.  The more significant point, however, is that he too is one whose enthusiasm for the Council is guarded, or even tepid and this is leading to the new hermeneutic that is re-interpreting the Council far from the intentions of the Council Fathers and, presumably, the Holy Spirit who inspired them.       

200 Years Out of Date --Who Turned Back the Clock?

I had mentioned in the previous post that John Paul II at the beginning of his reign appointed liberals such as the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini SJ to the Sacred College (and, in Martini’s case, to a key diocese, Milan) because John Paul seemed to have wanted to develop a consensus among the episcopate to support his planned “corrections” to the Vatican II course the Church was on.  I also wrote that there was, at least in Martini’s case, another agenda item and that was to move the liberal Jesuit out of the leadership role in the two leading Roman theological faculties: the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute.  Martini was “kicked upstairs” as it were from academia where he had a very definite liberal influence to the busy life of the leader of a huge diocese that demanded all his attention.  This second reason, while perhaps the more pressing, doesn’t overshadow the first, however.  The elevation of Americans Roger Mahony and Joseph Bernardin and the French Henri de Lubac are other cases of liberals being advanced to positions of power and influence in the first ten years or so of John Paul’s pontificate.

John Paul, as Karol Wojtyla,  had been a participant in the Second Vatican Council, in the first three sessions as the auxiliary bishop of Krakow and in the final session as the Archbishop of that city.  He was not an enthusiastic supporter of the Council and its agenda, however.  It is important to keep in mind that from the time Wojtyla was nineteen his country had been under the thumb of two of the most ruthless totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century—the Nazi occupation of Poland from 1939-45 and the Soviet dominated Communist government that succeeded the Nazi regime and which fell only in 1989.  As difficult as the Communist years were for the Church, the Nazi occupation was actually worse.  The Poles—and the Polish Church—survived only by forging an unshakeable unity of the Polish people around the Church and the Church around the Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski.  Because this consolidation of People and Church depended on the total identification of Polish Culture and Identity with their Roman Catholic faith where the Church was Poland and Poland was the Church, there was great resistance to any change lest the change provide a crack in the impenetrable façade of Catholic Polonialism/Polish Catholicism.   Liturgical changes were minimal and certainly the pre-conciliar pieties were preserved intact.  Ecumenism and inter-religious relationships were somewhat of a moot point in Poland.  There were few, almost no Protestants.  The Orthodox were identified with the Russians and relationships were cool at best with no desire to build ties with a Church that was seen as “Russian.”  And the Jewish population had been all but wiped out in the Nazi years—not, incidentally, without the support of many of the Polish people for whom anti-Semitism was part of their Catholic faith.  The Social Justice message which had flowered with John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and then went into full bloom with the Council’s Gaudium et Spes never reached Poland where Wyszynski feared it could be distorted to support the Marxist regime’s policies.  Vatican II, for the greater part, never penetrated the Polish Church during those years under communism. At the Council, the Polish participants hung back from an enthusiastic support for the new programs of John XXIIII and Paul VI because they feared the effects of change on their homeland and the solidarity of the Poles with the Church in resisting the political tyranny under which they lived. 

When John Paul was elected to the papacy he seems to have wanted from the beginning to put a different “spin” on the Council.  Certainly the final years of the pontificate of his predecessor but one, Paul VI, had been painful—both for Paul and for the Church.  Humanae Vitae, the encyclical repeating the Church’s proscription of contraception had crashed the Vatican II optimism into the wall of ugly ecclesial reality and the carnage was complete.  Paul VI was bewildered by his loss of popularity.  Bishops, in an orgy of loyalty to the Holy See, were crushing any objections to the Encyclical from the Catholic intelligentsia.  The theological idols of Vatican II—scholars such as Bernard Häring and Hans Kung who had been major players at the Council—were falling from their pedestals. Moreover, the reactionaries were in open revolt under dissident French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  John Paul wanted to reverse the damage and put the Church back onto a major key sound-track.  He couldn’t annul the Council—that would undermine all authority and credibility—and nor did he want to, but he did want to give its decrees a new interpretation. 

John Paul wasn’t totally wrong.  In some ways the Council was out of step.  In a globalizing world, the Council wanted to decentralize Church authority, giving more authority to local bishops at cost to the power of the central administration in Rome.  In a world of totalitarian governments, the Church seemed to want to democratize with greater roles and responsibility for the laity.  In a culture where people were becoming increasingly passive in their entertainment, the Church’s liturgy was demanding increased participation.   

The election of John Paul took the world by surprise, but it probably didn’t take Karol Wojtyla by surprise.  Biographers say that at various times throughout his life people had foretold he would one day be pope and he apparently began to take this message with some seriousness.  He was not an ambitious man and I don’t think it could be said that he sought the office, but he had a preternatural bent to his personality.  He was no mystic—the demands of having to outwit the communist regime at every turn kept him a “feet on the ground” sort of fellow—and I hesitate to use the word superstitious as he was both intelligent and educated, but he was a believer in destiny and I think he came to believe the papacy was in his destiny.  His strong showing in the election that chose his predecessor, John Paul I, probably “sealed the deal” though I doubt he realized just how soon it would be before he sat in the Chair of Peter himself.  But I think he came to that chair with a mission.  He had that single-mindedness, that focus, of the Polish temperament and I believe he was determined from the beginning to refashion the Council into something that he could believe in, a Church that was a global macrocosm of the Polish Church he knew—a Church that was internally strong and united against its external opponents.  It would be, as he was used to in Poland, authoritarian in its internal discipline and populist the face it showed to the world.  John Paul found a Curia anxious to work with this agenda so that it could take back its power from “the College of Bishops” and be even stronger than it was before the Council.  Unfortunately, the pressure of the authoritarianism, instead of forging unity has revealed cracks in the foundation—cracks that need to be fixed before they can no longer bear the weight they are under.  Neither John Paul nor Benedict has been able to close those fissures nor do they seem to know how.

One final anecdote about John Paul and his re-vision of Vatican II.   One of the people I was privileged to come to know in his final years was Denis Hurley, the retired Archbishop of Durban, South Africa.  When Hurley was named a bishop at age 31, he had been the youngest bishop in the world.  When I knew him he was an old man in his 80’s.  He was the voice against Apartheid in South Africa when Desmond Tutu was only a young priest.  He had served on the preparatory Commission for Vatican II.  He was a founder of ICEL.  The last time I saw him was just two weeks or so before his death.  He was in Rome for some meetings with the Communità di Sant’Egidio and I had lunch with him.   He said to me: “I met with the Holy Father (John Paul, just a year before his own death) this morning.  I said to him ‘Holy Father, you and I are both old men.  You know how it is when we get old.  We forget things.  But I distinctly remember that we had a Council.  What did you do with it’?”  They say that Archbishop Hurley, despite his early and prophetic voice against apartheid and his tireless work at Vatican II, had never had been made a Cardinal because he refused to congratulate Paul VI on Humanae Vitae.  It is probably true.  Right to the end he spoke his mind.  What had happened to Vatican II? 

More on Martini

Yesterday we looked at the rather stinging critique that Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, retired archbishop of Milan and a favored alternative to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the 2005 conclave that was after three days to elect Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, left has his final legacy before dying last Friday, August 31.  Some have wondered why John Paul II named this progressive Jesuit to be a bishop, and indeed Archbishop of one of Italy’s premier sees, in the first place.

For one thing consideration must be given to the fact that in the first years of his reign John Paul had not yet fixed on the conservative direction in which he was determined to steer the Church for the greater part of the almost 27 years of his pontificate.  John Paul was never a liberal and probably had determined from the moment of his election to “correct” the course that the Second Vatican Council had set for the Church, but he seemed at first to want to build a consensus among Church leaders to recentralize the papal power that the Council had shared out with the bishops in the Decree Christus Dominus.  It was only after the enthusiasm for a non-Italian pope had waned and he seemed not to be achieving his objectives that John Paul abandoned the consensus-building model for a more heavy-handed approach.  In this first bloom of optimism he named a number of progressives to key sees around the world—Americans Roger Mahony and Joseph Bernardin, Belgian Godfried Daneels, French (and Jewish) Jean-Marie Lustiger, French Henri deLubac among others.  (de Lubac, a theologian, was made a Cardinal in recognition of this theological contributions—for which contributions he had been silenced by Church authorities in the years before Vatican II—but he was not given a Diocese.) Of course, not all John Paul’s choices were progressives, but as I wrote, John Paul seemed to have thought initially that he could move the Church to the right without fracturing it—what is proving to be a tragic misassumption.  We will examine this subject of John Paul’s initial attempts at building a consensus in a future post, but there was a second reason why the Pope was anxious to specifically name Martini to a See and that was that Martini’s own scholarship was threatening some Vatican conservatives. 

As I mentioned yesterday, Martini served as Rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute from 1969 and then to this post was added two more influential positions: Rector Magnificus and Chancellor of the Pontifical Gregorian University.  In other words, he was skipper, not just of one but of the two most important academic posts in the Catholic World.  This made some very unhappy. Martini’s theology was very liberal but as his field was Sacred Scripture he was not easily assailable.  While the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is very quick to go after moral theologians, and won’t hesitate to go after Systematic theologians if they cross certain lines, they have great anxiety in attacking Scripture Scholars.  The reason is that since scripture studies are founded in the biblical languages (and corresponding cultures) of Greek and Hebrew, with Aramaic, Syriac, Chaldean, Akkadian, Sumerian, and Ugaritic lingering in the background the only people who can go after Biblical Scholars without making fools of themselves are other Biblical Scholars.  Ever since Pius X was left with egg all over the pontifical face in the Henry Poels affair a hundred years ago and more, men who are smart enough to know their limitations have been leery about going after Scripture scholars.  (I could swear that I had done an entry on the Poels affair but looking through my back entries, I think I have missed that.  Need to catch up on it.)  So what do you do with a scholar like Martini who could make mincemeat out of a Ratzinger, much less the not-so-bright lights that have sat in the chair of the Grand Inquisitor over the years?  The best way to silence a theologian is to make him a bishop—it takes up time that he would otherwise devote to scholarship, publishing, and teaching.  It certainly didn’t silence Martini as his final interview demonstrates but it did effectively remove him from the active role of scholarship he had pursued through the years before becoming a bishop.  However, on the bright side, it added one very smart cookie to the hierarchy where he did much good by his intelligent observations, his fearless speaking out, and a holy life.  We need more like him. 

A Voice Cries in the Wilderness

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, retired Archbishop of Milan, died this past week at age 85.   Martini, a Jesuit, was a noted biblical scholar who held two doctorates from Roman Universities—the Doctorate in Systematic Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Doctorate in Sacred Scripture from the Biblical Institute.  He was to serve as the Chancellor of the Gregorian University and as the Rector Magnificus of the Biblical Institute at points later in his life.  John Paul II named him Archbishop of Milan in 1979—Martini had not previously served as a bishop—and in 1983 he was named to the College of Cardinals.  An impeccable scholar (he was, after all, a Jesuit), he often advanced ideas that challenged more narrow Catholic teaching on such issues as the use of condoms to prevent transmission of HIV-AIDS, admitting divorced and remarried to the sacraments, and the right of the terminally ill to refuse treatment.   He advocated the admission of women to the Diaconate.  A 2007 talk that he gave was interpreted by many commentators as undermining Pope Benedict XVI’s efforts to insist that Catholic legislators oppose civil recognition for same-sex unions.  He was particularly outspoken in his criticisms of John Paul II and Benedict XVI for not taking the collegiality of bishops—defined at Vatican II as the right and duty of the bishops to share with the Pope in the governance of the Church—seriously.  Despite his regular criticisms of Vatican policy and teaching he was never challenged by those further up the ladder—which, of course, would be only the Pope himself.  Pope John Paul II did, however, accept his resignation immediately upon his 75^th birthday.  Like the American Cardinal McCarrick—another papal critic—Martini was not invited to stay on in his diocese a few extra years after the mandatory age for submitting retirement.  Nevertheless, at the time of the 2005 conclave upon the death of John Paul II, Martini was still eligible to participate in the conclave and was initially a strong candidate to succeed John Paul. (According to some sources he received more ballots in the first round than did Cardinal Ratzinger who would eventually be elected.) Martini, like John Paul II, suffered from Parkinson’s disease and the prospect of another pope who was as physically disabled as had been John Paul in his final years was daunting.  In any event the coalition of progressive cardinals who were trying to prevent the election of Joseph Ratzinger soon fell apart in the face of the inevitable.   (By the way, I think the election of Benedict, while he has been somewhat of a “Jimmy Carter Pope,” will prove to have been beneficial in the long-term picture, but I will have to do an entry on that someday.)  In his retirement, Martini moved to Jerusalem for several years to continue his research, teaching and writing on scripture, and then returned to live in a Jesuit fraternity in northern Italy.  Less than two weeks ago he granted a final interview to be released after his death which was a final blast against the restorationism that has marked the Church during the reigns of the current and previous Popes.  According to Reuters, Martini in claiming that the Church was “200 years behind the times,” declared "Our culture has aged, our churches are big and empty and the church bureaucracy rises up, our rituals and our cassocks are pompous."  (Of course I have been saying this in the year and a half I have been doing this blog and does anyone listen to me?  No!  But then I have neither the prestige of a Cardinal nor the scholarly integrity of a Jesuit, so I gladly accede: YOU GO, CARLO!).  I suspect that Pope Benedict was very sincere in his prayers for the Cardinal and, as a scholar himself, regrets the loss of a critical but perceptive voice in the Church.  On the other hand, I am sure that many a curial head lies more easily on the pillow at night knowing that one more person who sees through the charade of their pompous but inane domination has left the stage.  Requiem Aeternum Dona Ei, Domine.