Popes Can't Afford To Be Tone-Deaf

According to news sources, the Holy See is instructing bishops that it is “not necessarily” their duty to report accusations of clerical child abuse and that ultimately victims or their families should make the decision to report abuse to police.  The document, produced by the Pontifical Council for the Family, advises bishops that while they must be aware of local laws that require allegations to be reported to civil authorities, as far as the Holy See is concerned the only duty of the bishop is to deal with the matter internally. 

Now, despite the impression the news agencies are giving, the Vatican isn’t telling the bishops that they can break the civil law in those places where it is required for social workers, teachers, and other authorities to report abuse cases. And I can understand the dilemma of a bishop who becomes aware of an allegation against a member of the clergy or a Church employee but also is confronted with a victim or a victim’s family that is reluctant for the matter to be made public.  But the directive obviously shows that some people in Rome are still tone-deaf to the crisis of credibility that is facing the institutional Church. 

And, of course, this story follows up on the the suspension of clerical sex-abuse survivor, Peter Saunders, from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.  Saunders was “voted off the island” by an all but unanimous vote of his fellow commission members.  (There were sixteen votes against, one abstention, none for Saunders.)  Now, again, this was not an executive decision from above but a decision by peers.  And we have all served on committees where one member keeps gluing up the works with his or her own agenda.  But again, however justified the commission members might be, it is a matter of tone-deafness that brings considerable scandal on the Church and undermines our credibility. 

And now we have the president of a Catholic University, fortunately in this instance a layman and not a priest, comparing under-performing students to “bunnies” who “should be drowned.”  Boy, where in the Gospel do you get that????    I realize that good academic management requires weeding out those who will not succeed so that more viable candidates can take their space—but again, how does the murdered bunnies image play in Peoria?

Why is the Catholic Church on a suicide mission?  If there is a failure in regard to implementing the mandate of the Second Vatican Council for the Church to take its place on the modern world, it is this: the presupposition that we, as Church, are not accountable to the larger human community among whom live and work.  How can we be that “light of revelation to the nations” if we maintain that we are somehow exempt from the standards of behavior we ourselves set with our Christian ideals? 

And I must admit that as much as I admire Pope Francis he too seems at times to have become bogged down in protecting the institution rather than witnessing to the integrity of the Gospel.    The Pope’s appointment and defense of Juan Barros Madrid as Bishop of Osorno, Chile, despite Barros’ ties to notorious priest-abuser Fernando Karadima, is another case of Rome being tone-deaf.  Barros’ installation in his cathedral church turned into a huge fracas as the vast majority of the faithful made their rejection of their bishop public.  Moreover, the vast majority of his brother bishops in Chile, including the two Chilean Cardinals, refused to attend the installation, signifying that few, if any, supported the Pope’s appointee.  Francis allegedly referred to those who opposed Bishop Barros Madrid’s appointment as “lefties” and “dumb.”  Holy Father, we know you can’t carry a tune in a basket, but get to a hearing-specialist and get your ear canals cleaned out.  We can’t afford to have a tone-deaf Pontiff sitting on the chair of Peter. 

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that hearing confessions desensitizes the clergy to the evil of certain sins.  This isn’t just a Catholic problem.  I suspect that many Protestant clergy  and rabbis after years of pastoral counseling ministry, also become somewhat immune to the impact of evil.  The problem is that most of the evil encountered in confession or counseling is done by basically good people. Bad people—and there some—generally don’t come to see the priest or rabbi.   Most people sin to, in some way or other, escape the pain they feel in life.  (Pardon the split infinitive in the above sentence; I too am a sinner.)  The husband who finds himself continually rejected by his wife (or the wife, by her husband), turns to an illicit relationship. This is not right but the sin is most often the result of the pain and anger of rejection.  Beneath the abuse of alcohol or drugs is often a huge amount of psychological pain.  And when it comes to physical or emotional or sexual abuse: how many abusers have themselves been the victims of abuse?  None of this justifies the evil we choose,  but the priest or minister, becoming aware of the complexity of people’s lives, puts sin in a context that not only involves judgment but compassion.  In pastoral care that is most probably a good thing.  But it can’t leave us, as a Church, in a world of moral ambiguity.  It is a difficult balance to achieve, especially without risking the sin of phariseeism ourselves, but we need to find it.   Our integrity as a Church demands that while we deal compassionately with sinners we keep true to the moral compass of the Gospels. 

Perhaps the problem is, at least in part, that the bishops and clergy have no idea that they are in any way accountable to us, the People of God.  We are still an overly hierarchic Church rather than a true community of the faithful.  There are still too many working on the pyramid model of Church where the Pope is over the bishops, the bishops over the clergy, and the clergy over the people.  In this model, communication is one way—top down and the role of the laity is still perceived to be “to pay, pray, and obey.”  And need I say that for many of us, those days are over. 

We need to develop an ecclesiology in which we—and I mean all of us, not just the laity—see ourselves  not in a hierarchic pyramid but in a communal model of concentric circles with the bishop at the center, the clergy around the bishop, the faithful around the clergy.  In the same way the larger perspective is viewed with the Bishop and Church of Rome at the center surrounded by the communion of local Churches with their bishops at their center.  This model of Church is far from new and was the predominant ecclesiology in the patristic period from the second century through the thirteenth. 

To a certain extent we have already begun to move towards this model of Church.  The decrees of the Second Vatican Council, particularly Lumen Gentium (the dogmatic Constitution on the Church) and Christus Dominus (the Decree on the Bishops), and to a lesser extent in Apostolicam Actuositatem (On the Apostolate of the Laity), actually lay out this theology.  Unfortunately, as we all know, John Paul II didn’t much care for this model and pretty much smothered it in its post-Paul VI cradle.  Francis has given us hope of reviving it, but the above-mentioned actions on the part of the Holy See show not only some back-pedaling but even the Pope’s failure to see the implications of his actions.  Hopefully his remarks about “lefties” and “dumb” is only another case of a live-mike picking up an indiscreet comment from a world leader, but it is still troubling that the Pope doesn’t see the profound theological issue when not only the faithful but the regional episcopate reject a candidate for bishop. 

Today’s adults are not going to continue to belong to an organization—even a Church—that doesn’t take them seriously.  I am not advocating a democratic Church but one in which there is genuine communication so that those whose ministry it is to speak the faith of the Church know what is in the mind and the hearts of the Church’s members.  The consensus fidelium needs to be restored as an essential part of the dynamic of the Church’s teaching and governing mission. 

Why Are They Afraid of Pope Francis? 9

In his interview with La Civilta Cattolica/America, Pope Francis said

Pope Francis: Looks friendly--but not to the

pezzi grossi monsignors who are afraid of

losing their desk jobs

Discernment is always done in the presence of the Lord, looking at the signs, listening to the things that happen, the feeling of the people, especially the poor. My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing.

Discernment, at least in the tradition of Ignatian spirituality, is something new to the process of governing the Church.  The Church has, at least in the past four centuries, been governed primarily as a rational autocracy—and probably at least since the illnesses of Pius XII in the 1950’s, as a rational bureaucracy.  What do I mean by these terms?

With the rise of royal absolutism in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as the theories of “Divine Right” and absolute monarchy determined the politics of secular Europe, a corresponding notion developed in the Church—in part, no doubt, by the confusion of roles of the Pope between being a secular monarch and an ecclesiastical superior.  Popes had not always been absolute.  Their direct governance had in the first millennium been pretty much limited to their own See while their influence—as distinct from power—spread over the Western Church.  As papal power began to grow with the popes of the 11^th century Gregorian Reform it was checked and balanced by the power of local bishops, synods, and Councils.  From the 13^th-the 15^th century it was understood that the Roman Pontiff was subject to the authority of an Ecumenical Council. But after the Fifth Lateran Council and especially at Trent, the same sort of absolutism claimed by the Tudors and Stuarts in Britain and the Valois and Bourbons in France, as well as the royal houses of Spain and Portugal, was claimed by the Popes.  One can say that from Lateran V (1512-1517) until today, the Pope is an absolute monarch.  And while Pius IX made some feeble efforts at introducing governmental reforms—one cannot go so far as to say democratic reforms—in the Papal States upon his accession in 1846, there was no corresponding attempt to share governance of the Church until the Decree Christus Dominus of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. 

While Popes in this period could be considered—for the most part—to be wise and discerning shepherds of the faithful, “discernment” was not part of their operating mechanism.  While always cloaked in the most pious of language, decisions and decrees were made for all variety of reasons.   The 1773 Bull, Dominus ac Redemptor which suppressed the Jesuits, can hardly be said to reflect the Divine Will.  It was issued as a result of political pressure from the Courts of France, Spain, and Portugal where strong Masonic influence governed the religious policies and saw the Jesuits as the main resistance to the liberal Enlightenment ideologies they, the Masonic societies, were trying to advance.  Other policies—such as the 1896 Bull, Apostolicae Curae—were motivated by ecclesiastical politics, in this case a desire to undermine the credibility of the Anglican Church so as to maintain the number of converts to Roman Catholicism stemming from the Oxford movement.  Sometimes, Papal Decrees such as Pascendi dominici gregis and Lamentabili sane of Pius X addressed real problems but from a perspective that reflected a failing of personal intellect as well as what might even be termed a paranoia on the part of the Pope himself.  There were, of course, remarkable Popes and some excellent governance in this period, but while Bourbon France and Czarist Russia could also be used as outstanding examples of malfeasant authority, nothing proves the inadequacy of autocracy better than papal government as we have seen over the period of papal autocracy from the sixteenth through the twentieth century.   I think to a great extent that the Second Vatican Council was an attempt to re-direct the barque of Peter from the shoals of such unwise (and unholy) waters such as Mortalium Animos—in which Pope Pius XI condemned the Ecumenical Movement—or Jamdudum cernimus, which provided the basis for the notorious proposition found in they Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX that condemned the idea the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.  Similarly the Conciliar decrees swept away other embarrassing relics of papal absolutism such as condemnations of democratic government and the rights of freedom of conscience.  At the same time, the Council drew from and built on the extensive repertoire of sound papal decrees such as Rerum Novarum, Quadrigesimo Anno, Mediator Dei, Divino Afflante Spiritu, Mystici Corporis, Tra le Sollecitudine, and others.  All in all, the mixed record of Papal autocracy demonstrates that that the governance of the Church was no better—nor no worse—than other autocratic states.  Just because the Holy Spirit is available to those who call on Him (Her?), doesn’t mean that He(She?) is always consulted or that His(Her?) consultation is followed.  But then, when I look at my life, I would have to say the same for my own decision making.   
As for the allegation that rational bureaucracy replaced the rational autocracy that had been the modus operandi of modern popes sometime in the 1950’s, what I mean is that the serious illness and decline in health of Pius XII after 1952 led to that papal autocracy being exercised sub rosa not by the Pope personally but by the machinery of the Papal Curia in the Pope’s name but by their own  authority.  Most papacies through the history of the Church have known the torpor of a Pope’s declining years.  If they are given the opportunity, Popes, like the rest of us, are subject to becoming aged, feeble, and even senile.  For centuries this has not been a problem.  Without modern media it was easy to draw a veil of discrete dignity between a decrepit Pope and the credulous faithful.  Public appearances could be kept to a minimum.  There was no pressing need for an encyclical that couldn’t wait until the new reign.  Most papal business could grind to a halt for a year or two—or five.   Committees could meet and function to confirm elections to episcopal sees (bishops being more normally elected by their chapters than appointed by Rome until the 19^th century).   Government by ministers could function in the Church as it did in the Great European Monarchies during the dotage of the king.  But just as a succession of a new king to the throne gathered power back into the royal hands from the late king’s ministers, so too a new pope quickly overshadowed the Curial bureaucracy and gained control.
The decrepitude of Pius XII presented a different challenge.  While papal ceremonies could be shortened and audiences cut back, the day to day functioning of the Church could not be allowed to slow down in the turbulence of the Post-World War II/Cold War world.  There were huge challenges to be met from the spread of International Communism to the spread of Protestant missionary inroads in Latin America.  An intellectual renaissance triggered in part by Pius’ own 1942 Encyclical Divno Afflante Spiritu was causing concern about a revival of Modernism.  The ideas of Teilhard de Chardin—the Jesuit paleontologist/mystic were causing an uproar about orthodoxy as were the political ideas being advanced by the American Jesuit scholar John Courtney Murray.  In France advocates of the Nouvelle Theologie were upsetting those clinging the neo-Thomism mandated by Leo XIII.  This was no time for a Pope who was not running at full steam.  As usual the Vatican bureaucracy, especially the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office  (formerly known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition—how’s than for a bone-chilling title?) stepped in and took charge.  The final years of Pius XII were not happy ones for the internal life of the Church, but more perilous was that the new Pope, John XXIII, had considerable difficulty trying to wrest power back from the Curia Romana and in particular from the indomitable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Head of the Holy Office.  The Curia was taken aback when John, only three months into his papacy,  called a Council.  There was no need, they assured the Pope, of a Council.  He was infallible.  They—no, we meant “he,” the Pope (no, they meant “they” the Curia) could do anything a Council could do.  After writing a lineamenta (agenda) for the Council that would produce some window-dressing but no substantial change, the Curia officials were appalled that the Pope threw their schema out and permitted a commission of Council Fathers to re-set the agenda.  In session after session of the Council, the Curia prelates and their allies battled John’s successor, Paul VI and the proponents of collegiality (shared governance of the Church by the College of Bishops).  When the Council documents were signed, sealed, and delivered the Collegialists had won.  But they went home and the Curialists stayed to “implement the Council.”  They violated a key safety maxim: never leave a wounded animal.  I don’t have to tell you what a disaster that was, especially once John Paul II became Pope.  No Pope—John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I or II, or Benedict XVI—has been able to curb the power of the Curia.  The bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own.  Pope Francis has called in a commission of eight cardinals to “reform” the Curia and not one of the eight is a curialist himself.  Cardinal Guiseppe Bertello who administers the Vatican City State itself is the closest thing to a Curia prelate, but as his duties involve the temporal administration of the Vatican and not ecclesiastical responsibilities for the Holy See he is only on the “margins.”  We will see how successful Pope Francis shall be but there are those who fear, if not for their jobs, for their power and influence.  Good.    

The Papal Posse: White Hats, Black Hats, Red Hats continued

Commission member,

Cardinal Sean O'Malley

Well in the past two postings we have looked at the eight Cardinals who make up the papally appointed commission to see what can be done to reform the administrative branch of the Church, the Roman Curia.  So  now, what is there to think of this reform commission?  Rather than look at how the different personalities fit together, I think we first need to frame the analysis correctly.  What most people have picked up on is that given the troubles at the Vatican Bank, the dossiers stolen by the butler and given to journalists, the “rumors” of a gay cabal in the Curial ranks, and other front-burner news items, the commission’s task is to go in and identify the problem people and suggest their replacement.   But in fact, it seems to more keen observers that the task is far more fundamental.  According to Robert Mickens, Vaticanista at the London Tablet, probably the finest English language Catholic paper, Francis was struck, in his Cardinal days, by a book by former San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn, The Reform of the Papacy, the costly call to Christian Unity (Crossroads, 1999).  Quinn who earlier in his life leaned somewhat toward the right, grew very disillusioned with the recentralization of the Church under John Paul II.  He took an early retirement—some say he was pushed into early retirement by an unfriendly papacy—and has spent most of his golden years with a subtle but weighty undermining of the current style of papal authority.  When John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint (That All May Be One) asked leaders of all denominations to help him find new ways of exercising the Petrine Ministry, Quinn used the pope’s own words as wedge to force open the door to a historical critique of the Papacy.  In his lectures and writing, Quinn demonstrated how the papal monarchy of the last five centuries is a malformation (I would like to say cancerous malformation but that would be stronger than Quinn’s stated views) of the historic papacy.  Vatican II with its call to collegiality tried to change the way that authority is exercised in the Church, but the re-centralizing of authority in the Roman Curia under John Paul II and Benedict XVI undid that mission to restore proper governance to the bishops.  Now it seems that Francis wants the question investigated anew and what this commission is charged with it not simply looking for unworthy servants in the papal household, but restructuring the governmental apparatus of the Church. 
One person I spoke with said that supposedly Francis picked this particular group of Cardinals because they have each had run-ins with the Curia.  In fact, it would have been difficult for the Holy Father to pick any bishop for this commission who has not had runs with the Curia.  In my years in Rome I saw any number of prelates making their ad limina reports —Bishops, Auxiliary Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinal Archbishops—come out of the various meetings with dicastery officials apoplectic over the way some pezzo grosso monsignor with his ego inflated by his purple belly-band had treated him.  Bishops called in like miscreant schoolboys and berated by some pompous junior grade pansy in a red dress—this is no way to run a Church.  Hopefully this commission will design the sort of reforms that will empower bishops to be the shepherds of their flocks, empower the pope to be first among equals, and give the administrative departments of the Holy See the mission to be of service to the universal Church and not to get wrapped up in egocentric power plays that satisfy their petty egos but hinder the Church’s mission of evangelization.       

Correcting the Course of Vatican II

Sorry—travelling there for a few days, so let me pick up where I left off.  I had mentioned in my previous posting that John Paul II had never been an enthusiastic proponent of the Second Vatican Council and, when elected pope, was anxious to re-interpret the conciliar decrees to fit with his vision of a more centralized and authoritarian Church administration, similar to what he had known in the Polish Church during the years when the Polish Church was the sole resistance to the communist regime that governed Poland with such an iron fist.   Under John Paul’s papacy, the emphasis on the role of the local bishop in his diocese and the authority granted him by the Conciliar Decrees Christus Dominus and Lumem Gentium  was steadily revoked and power was confirmed in the central administration known as the Roman Curia.  We saw in the United States that very steadily after 1980 more and more bishops were chosen for American dioceses whose principle qualities were a strong sense of Romanitas, the Roman “mentality,” that viewed the Church principally from an institutional perspective and whose loyalty was first and foremost to the papacy.  The more pastorally oriented bishops who had been appointed in the ‘70’s were increasingly replaced by men educated in Rome and with backgrounds in Canon Law.  There have been some outstanding bishops appointed in the John Paul II years (and now the Benedict XVI years) including Gerald Kikanis, Timothy Dolan, John (Mort) Smith, Wilton Gregory, Sean O’Malley, William Keeler, Thomas Kelly, Donald Trautman, Kenneth Untener,  William Curlin, Dennis Madden,  John Ricard, Robert Morneau, among others, but there have been many, far too many, episcopal duds as well.  Overall, it has left the American Church in considerable disarray with the clergy demoralized and the laity neither understanding the role of their bishop nor trusting the man who is their bishop.  The disgrace of Cardinal Bernard Law and his subsequent exile to Rome has left a leadership vacuum (as distinguished from a power vacuum) in the American Church.  Despite his slimy reputation at home, Law still wields immense power in Rome, especially in the nomination of Bishops to American Sees.  He sits on seven congregations (including the Congregation for Bishops) and one Pontifical Council (The Pontifical Council for the Family—frightening, isn’t it given his failure to grasp the import of the pedophilia scandal?). Law’s protégé (after the death of Cardinal James Hickey in 2004) and designated heir as American Kingmaker (or, actually, bishop-maker) is William Lori, the new Archbishop of Baltimore.  The “Reform Party” in the hierarchy is hoping that the leadership can devolve on New York Archbishop, Timothy Dolan, an orthodox but pastorally savvy prelate rather than Lori who has an unsavory reputation for blind ambition.  But I have gone far from where I wanted to go today.  Let me refocus. 

My point was going to be that just as John Paul had wanted to correct the course as set by Paul VI and Vatican II, Benedict sought the papacy in the hope of correcting the course of John Paul II.  We can do an entry some day on Benedict’s engineering his election despite his empty protests of not having wanted the post, and while I think Benedict would have ideally wished that the post could have gone to someone else, I also believe that he felt he had a responsibility to correct some of the direction given to the Church by John Paul—notably in the areas of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue.  I also think Benedict wanted to “rescue” the liturgy before it evolved any further away from the pre-conciliar rites.  I hope to explore these topics in future postings but it adds up to more and more “correcting” the course of the Council which is tantamount to annulling many of its most important advances.     

Reformation Today! 5

John Henry, Cardinal Newman,

champion for the voice of the

faithful in the formulation of

Church Doctrine

This issue about the “loyalty oath” in the Arlington Diocese returns us to the topic of necessary reforms in the Catholic Church.  As I had written in some earlier entries, reform and reformation is always part of the Church’s agenda.  Semper reformans, semper reformanda—always reforming, always in need of reform is an old axiom of ecclesiology—the theology of the Church.

In the past many of the Church’s reformations such as the Carolingian Reform or the Tridentine Reform (sometimes called the Catholic Reformation to distinguish it from the Protestant Reformations which it followed and attempted to staunch) have been internal reforms.  Other times, unhappily, attempts to Reform the Church have ended up splitting the unity of the Church.  Luther’s Reformation and the English Reformation are two examples of this.  Sometimes Catholics lump Luther and Henry VIII and John Calvin and others all together into a single “Protestant Reformation but the history is far more complex and Luther, Calvin, the English Church, and other Protestant movements of the sixteenth century are as different from one another as they are from the Papal Catholicism from which they split.  If one is to consider the new religious groupings of the sixteenth century in general it is better to pluralize it and refer to the “Protestant Reformations.”   But that isn’t where I want to go today.

I think that “liberals” and “conservatives” alike can agree that there is an urgent need for Church Reform today.  We may disagree on how that reform be implemented, but we all can agree that there are serious problems facing our Church.  The sex-abuse scandals and the financial irregularities, both of which stretch from the highest authorities in Rome down to the level of local parishes, are only two such indications.  The emerging stories of nuns being sexually abused by priests in Africa is a third.  The loss of huge numbers of Catholics to secularism in Europe and to Evangelicalism in Latin America is yet another.  The vocation crisis facing the Church in Europe and North America is one more. 

At the same time that we speak of these problems, however, we can also see that in some ways the Church is healthier than it has been in centuries.  We have a much better educated membership.  We have a laity that is stepping up to bat and assuming vocations and ministries in the Church proper to their status as baptized and confirmed members of Christ’s Body.  The Church is growing rapidly in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa—and Latin America, where once the Catholic faith had fallen into gross inactivity through the lack of priests, is now alive and vibrant with small faith communities who are evangelizing and animating the faith of their neighbors.  While the Church in the Northeast and urban centers of the upper Midwest sees parishes closing, South of the Mason Dixon (once staunch Baptist land) and west of the Mississippi, new churches are being built to hold large congregations. 

Well what about the Arlington Oath?  How does that give us any indication of what is needed in Church reform?  Any reform of the Church today needs to respect the laity and take seriously their vocation as full members of the Body of Christ. When I speak with people who have left the Church for other religious groups, and especially the evangelical communities, it seems that the most common response I hear is that they were frustrated in the Church because they were not being listened to and their gifts were not being taken seriously. 

According to Blessed John Henry Newman, in the early days of the Church, when the Church was in its first flower and at its strongest, it spoke with three voices: the Magisterium—the bishops; the theologians, those who studied and knew the tradition and prepared the work of the magisterium; and the consensus fidelium—the articulated faith experience of the laity.  Over the centuries first the laity and then the theologians have been pushed to the margins.  The faithful were told to be quiet and think as they were told to think and act as they were told to act.  (Some would call this “assent of the intellect and will.)   Then from the end of the Council of Trent up to the present, the theologians have not been allowed to think for themselves but relegated to providing a rationale for what the magisterium was proclaiming.  And then, after Vatican I, the bishops—an essential component of the magisterium—were told that the Pope (and his Curia) would do the thinking for them and they simply had to utter to those below what they had heard from those above.  Although Vatican II and the decree Christus Dominus was an attempt to restore at least the bishops to their proper authority, the effort has been reversed in this and the previous pontificates.  This is not a healthy situation.  As Newman also said: when the laity stop questioning the bishops, the bishops fall into heresy.  (He was referring to the Arian heresy of the fourth century into which the majority of bishops fell and from which only the faithful adherence to orthodoxy of the laity preserved the Church.) 

We need a laity today who are educated (which we have), informed (which they must be) and are allowed to ask the significant questions and articulate the faith as their experience provides.  It doesn’t mean that they will always be right or that the Church is a democracy.  But they have been baptized and sealed with the Holy Spirit and their voice is an essential part of the confession of the Church’s faith.    And theologians must be allowed the freedom inquiry without which their work—formulating the faith of the Church with intellectual credibility—will be dismissed as insubstantial by those who use the intellects God has given them.    

 

The Deterioriation of Papal Authority

Pope Benedict speaks his Sunday message to the
faithful, but are the faithful listening? 

I think it is worthwhile to ask ourselves why there was an erosion of papal authority during the pontificate of John Paul II.  In the first place the erosion did not begin with John Paul but had begun already with Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae.  I have no intention of criticizing the encyclical from a theological point of view.  In the first place, Paul VI has always been one of my heroes.  I think he and Pius XII were the greatest popes of the 20^th century. (yes greater than John XXIII—I will explain why some day.)  I am not competent to criticize Humanae Vitae from a theological perspective nor do I want this blog to get into theological issues except as they are also historical issues.  But there are problems with the encyclical.  Perhaps we will do a detailed entry on the subject sometime, but to keep it in the context of its effect on papal authority we can note several factors. 

1.      It did not take into adequate consideration the complex scientific data intrinsic to the questions it was examining. 
2.     Given that the encyclical did not follow the recommendations of the majority of the papal-appointed commission but accepted the conclusions of the commission minority, the basis of the final decision reflected in the encyclical can be called into question.  In other words, what were the Pope’s motives in accepting the minority conclusion? The Pope’s reasoning for rejecting the advice of the majority of his commission was never sufficiently given.  Certainly the Pope was not bound to accept the majority conclusion, but the failure to explain why lessened the credibility of the decision. 
3.     The conclusions on which Paul VI based the encyclical are not reconcilable with the cultural framework of the time.  
4.     The vast majority of the Catholic laity and perhaps even of the clergy implicitly or explicitly have rejected the teaching.  

     There may be other factors to consider but let me say that the first two I think are valid concerns; the second two, and especially the third, are not.  Yet valid concern or extraneous to the argument, modern society for the most part dismissed the papal teaching and did so with considerable disrespect and that alone weakened the magisterial authority.  
     Related to the issue of Humanae Vitae but extending far beyond it, a second reason for the erosion of papal authority in the final years of Paul VI and in the pontificate of John Paul II is that there was a “change of rules” where I think both bishops and laity expected to have more input into Church teaching and discipline and were disillusioned when their views were not heard.   In its decrees, and notably in the decree Christus Dominus, the Council had returned an immense amount of authority to the local bishop at the expense of the power of the Roman Curia yet the pontificate of John Paul II saw the reconsolidation of power in the hands of the Congregations of the Roman Curia.  As this has been particularly true in regard to matters of Worship where the Congregation began ruling on such minutiae as prohibiting the use of Eucharistic flagons to hold the Precious Blood or where hundreds of changes in the new translation of the Roman Missal were made on curial desks even after the respective Bishops’ Conferences had approved the translations that had been foisted on them by Rome to begin with, the bishops were emasculated by pezzi grossi monsignori in the sight of all the Church.  The laity have fared no better.  Despite the decree  Apostolicam actuositatem   which called on the bishops to respect the expertise of the laity, we see the laity as being treated as little more than the lackeys of the magisterium in the realms their expertise--politics, economics, education and other areas proper to the laity,  In particular many both in Rome and in the American hierarchy see that Catholic laity are only to do the bidding of the hierarchy in public life and many of the laity whose expertise is not theology but fields such as Constitutional law, psychiatry, reproductive science, education, civil law, or political science object.  The day of the laity deferring to the clergy in matters of secular concern are over and not likely to return and while good Catholics will listen patiently to sermons of varying worth outlining their responsibility, and will study documents such as Faithful Citizenship, they will make up their own minds on how to live their Catholic and Christian faith in the marketplace.   Today's laity have learned to think for themselves and while, like thinking people, they are open to information that makes them reconsider their position, they are not about to cede their duty to make responsible decisions to others, even Church authority. 
       This brings up a third problem and that is a clergy that is not sufficiently educated to convincingly relay magisterial teaching to contemporary laity.  Gone are the days when the priest, the doctor, and the lawyer were the only three men in the parish who had a college background.  (In those days no women, except possibly some of the nuns in the parish school had been to college, and they to the educational hothouse of a women’s college.)   The problem is that most Catholic priests today are educated little more than their predecessors of two generations past, but the laity—men and women alike—are far more highly educated than were their grandparents.  College education among white American Catholics is all but universal.  While immigrant populations are often poorly educated they, and especially the Asian and Pacific Rim immigrants, make the education of the second generation a high priority.  Graduate degrees are not rare among contemporary American Catholics--in fact today Catholics are probably the most highly educated religious group in the United States excepting Jews.  Catholic laity are used to leadership roles in business, education, science, technology, the military, politics and other fields and they expect to be talked with as peers.  Meanwhile the clergy, while they may have earned an “M.Div.” degree at some seminary or other, are usually abysmally undereducated in non-theological fields and lack the “renaissance” background to intelligibly explain the doctrines they have been taught to modern people of some sophistication.  When the clergy get into the pulpit and pontificate—whether it is liberals about socio-economic matters or conservatives about psycho-sexual issues, what one too often sees is an appalling display of ignorance.  And I don’t think this is an uniquely Catholic problem but that most Christian denominations seem to have far too many clergy who—while good people—lack the intellectual discipline to convincingly put forth the importance of their faith for modern people.  It may explain why religious practice is falling off among more highly educated and critically thinking people of all Christian denominations.    

What is Benedict's Problem?

The Holy Father
greets the faithful
from the window
of his study

In my most recent posting I mentioned the need for the Church to achieve some sort of consensus on its mission and role in the world—not simply a magisterial consensus or even a theological one, but rather a program that excites the Church from the Pope on down to aboriginal Catholic in Australia, the illegal immigrant Catholic in the California peach orchard, to the Polish Catholic dockyard worker in Gdansk, to Catholic Catechist in Zimbabwe.  And of course—to you and to me.  
     The Second Vatican Council had made some good headway in this.  I am a product of the Pre-Conciliar and the Conciliar Church.  I remember the great excitement when John XXIII called the Council.  I remember the first time I heard English spoken in the Mass.  I, as a teenager, was one of the first lectors reading the epistle in our parish church.  I remember hearing the organ (our parish church was rather poor but we had a magnificent pipe organ) open up full glory for the first time into a stirring rendition of the “Protestant” hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”  I remember those “bible vigils” and the first ecumenical prayer services at Thanksgiving.  We got off to a good beginning.  Along came parish councils and finance boards—good idea.  Even more English, and less Latin;  I liked that.  Paul VI’s revision of the Liturgy;  Bible Study and Adult Education;  Eucharistic Ministers—it all made sense to me.   Communion in Both Kinds—I thought that it was about time we listened to the Divine Command: “take and drink.”    I graduated from college (Philosophy and History) and went on to study Theology.  I read Avery Dulles and Karl Rahner and Bishop Robinson and Raymond Brown.  I also read a “minor theologian,” little known at the time, Josef Ratzinger. I also read Jerome and Augustine and Ambrose and some—admittedly not much—Aquinas. (As a result, I am pretty much of an Augustinian more than a Thomist in my basic outlook—and sorry to all you neo-cons, but I am happy about that.)  It all came together for me and began to make sense and I saw how the Council, far from introducing “new” ideas into our Catholic life and practice was reaching into its storehouse of the ancient and the true and retrieving the best of its earliest wisdom and practices and adapting them to a contemporary world.  I loved it.  I still do.  I think the two books that most influenced me—and continue to do so—are Avery Dulles’ Models of the Church and J.A.T. Robinson’s The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology.  Theology was not to be the study that defined my life’s work, however.  While I continue to read in theology, I went on and earned a second Master’s Degree and then a Doctorate in History (Medieval and Early Modern Europe). 
      One of the youngest—indeed, I believe the youngest of the Bishops a the Council was the forty-two year old Karol Wojtyla.  At the time he was auxiliary bishop of Krakow, though by the third and fourth sessions of the Council (1964-65) he had been named Archbishop of that city.   Wojtyla showed mixed enthusiasm for the Council.   He made two interventions during the Council, one for the Decree on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudiam et Spes) and the other on behalf of liberty of conscience (Dignitatis Humanae).  I have heard—and I want to make this clear that I have not been able to discover one way or the other—that he did not support the decree Christus Dominus on the role of bishops and its theology of collegiality.  Certainly as pope, while he was supportive of many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, in particular regarding inter-religious and ecumenical dialogues, he either never quite grasped the idea of collegiality or he deliberately blocked its implementation and development.  Whatever progress had been made in decentralizing church authority, empowering bishops in their dioceses and the national episcopal conferences to make decisions regarding disciplinary (including liturgical)  matters in their jurisdictions (bishops) or regions (conferences) in the years since the council was soon reversed.  Indeed the Roman Curia’s control over local jurisdictions is stronger than ever and the bishops have been—in practice, not theory—reduced to papal lieutenants in ways unthinkable under the predecessors of John XXIII.  Indeed after the feisty response of several Bishops’ conferences to Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae which reinforced the Church’s traditional ban on artificial contraception, Wojtyla, elected pope in 1978, began selecting bishops who would understand their role to be to carry out papal (and curial) directives and not see themselves as collaborators with the Pope in governing the Church.  (One of the entries I hope to get to one of these days is on the marked difference in today’s American episcopate from that of thirty years ago.)  I think we need to see that collegiality, other than in its ritual expression of concelebration with the pope on certain occasions such as a papal visit or the bestowal of the pallia, is dead.   I do believer, however, it is not to be buried but to be raised to newness of life when this winter of ecclesial discontent is over.  Unfortunately, by that time I myself will be awaiting resurrection too.  
     John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI, in his salad days was an ardent supporter of the Council and its agenda but through the years has grown somewhat doubtful of its fruit.  That is understandable.  As a young (late thirties) theologian, a peritus (theological advisor) to Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne—one of the most liberal voices in the Council—Ratzinger was in the company of the leading theologians of his day—Rahner, Schillebbckx, Küng, deLubac, Daniélou—other than  all his seniors.  Moreover the group of prelates around Frings was the most liberal wing of the Council including Cardinals Koenig of Vienna, the Jesuit Bea, the Dutch Alfrink, and the other architects of the Council.  It was a heady experience and Ratzinger’s demotion to academia when the Council finished must have seemed exceptionally boring, even for one who cherished the turgid as did this young German theologian.  What caused Ratzinger/Benedict to become so critical of the Council—or, as his defenders put it—to the interpretation of the Council so prevalent in the years immediately following it?  (One cannot say that a bishop, much less the Pope himself, is “critical” of a Council as that would undermine all authority in the Church, including his own as a Council, even Vatican II, is an embodiment of magisterial authority.  Criticism must be softened to challenge not the Council itself, but the “interpretation” given it by named or unnamed persons who are allegedly “abusing” its authentic meaning.)     Some scholars and writers claim, and I think accurately, that the cultural shift of the late sixties—a shift not within the Church as much as in society at large—where respect for traditional authority was rejected (Americans: think Vietnam, 1968 Democratic Convention, Woodstock, Watergate) shocked the maturing theologian who while intellectually liberal was so culturally conservative.   The authority of the Church was challenged too, even from within high levels of the Church, in the almost universally negative reaction to Humanae Vitae, a reaction that deeply pained the sensitive Paul VI.  I suspect the equally hypersensitive Josef Ratziner felt a deep personal concern for the unhappiness of the “Hamlet Pope.”   I would point out that at this same time not only was there a revolt against established authority, religious, civil and even familial, but there was, in Europe at least, a cultural revolution in which the “new generation” walked away from hallowed institutions ranging from the Church to Europe’s cultural heritage.  The Rolling Stones replaced Mozart and cannabis replaced the Eucharist as the sacrament of communion.  This collapse of culture has undoubtedly been a shock for Ratzinger as one of the professed aims of his papacy is the restoration of Christian culture (I am of a divided mind to put that term in quotations) to Europe.   I mentioned that Josef Ratzinger has, like Paul VI before him, a (hyper)sensitive personality.  This is not to say that he overreacts to situations based on perceived slights or insults.  To the contrary, both men (have) displayed a patient long-suffering.  But this too is problematic in a prelate who has pastoral responsibilities whether as Archbishop of Munich, as the very public Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or as Pope.  The nerves of steel to make the tough unpopular decisions and then get a good night’s sleep for the next day’s work—a quality displayed by John Paul II—are  incompatible with a sensitive soul.  Paul VI’s anguish earned him the sobriquet “the Hamlet Pope,” but it seems that Benedict may find himself suffering even more intensely than Paul even as he holds the papal office in a time even more complex and critical, far more complex and critical, than his predecessor but two. 
     Finally let us remember that when all is said and done, Benedict is not a spring chicken (a term one of the small children around here just asked the meaning of, having heard it on the television blaring across the room from me.)  Why is anyone surprised that an eighty four year old man favors communion on the tongue, mass celebrated versus apsidem (facing the wall), and likes a more antique style of furniture in his apartment and some more old fashioned clothes on himself and the nuns who bring him his breakfast?  Let the man be an old man, for heaven’s sake.  You want a pope who jogs bare-chested and in shorts, elect a young pope next time.