THE CHURCH TOMORROW
Jerry Harkins
For decades, it has been clear that the Second Vatican Council which met between October 1962 and December 1965 was frustrated in its attempt to modernize church doctrine and practice. Although there are a few surviving cosmetic changes, the idea that papal Catholicism could be reconciled with the humanism of the Renaissance was never more than wishful thinking. The enmity between the church and the modern world had become overt in the aftermath of the French Revolution which had secularized Europe and reduced the church to a pathetic remnant of its former power. The Vatican’s response was disastrous. It raged against what it called “modernism” in all its forms—political, economic, social and cultural. It insisted on absurd new dogmas and proclaimed itself infallible. It rejected science and re-wrote history in the manner of the Soviets to suit its frantic attempts to preserve the civil and spiritual power of the central bureaucracy. The first Vatican Council convened by Pius IX in 1869 elevated a variety of regressive delusions to the realm of divine truth. [1] By the time Pius XII died in 1958, Roman Catholicism faced a paradox: it had never been stronger in terms of numbers and wealth, and had never been weaker intellectually and spiritually.
Pope John XXIII understood this. In convening Vatican II, he had three overlapping goals in mind: to bring the church into the modern world (aggiornamento), to encourage the natural evolution of doctrine in concert with the surrounding evolution of knowledge generally, and to restore the church to its biblical and pastoral roots (resourcement). Most of the bishops and virtually all of the experts were in sympathy with the Pope’s goals and the sixteen final documents they produced reflected that agreement. But after everyone went home, the bureaucracy was determined to reassert its traditional power. The Curia struck a mighty blow against change in 1968 when it persuaded Pope Paul VI to issue a reactionary encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae.
The Council had clearly suggested that it was time to change the blanket prohibition of “artificial” birth control. Paul temporized waiting for the report of a special commission appointed by his predecessor. The commission recommended that the church’s ban be lifted and it offered a way the Pope could do so with minimum embarrassment. It was widely expected that he would gratefully follow its advice but instead he reaffirmed the traditional teaching. He thought he was responding to the prompting of the Holy Spirit but others saw him as caving in to the frightening visions of his curial colleagues. Change, they told him, would diminish his power and that of his successors. Thus, in a single document, the Pope restored the discredited philosophy and theology of Vatican I and rejected both modern biology and the relevance of modern science.
The reaction to Humanae Vitae was far greater than Rome ever thought it would be, reflecting the poverty of its understanding of sex. It expected docile obedience. What it got was disdain. Once people realized that they could ignore the preaching of the uninformed, rebellion spread to other issues. There was a mass exodus of both clergy and laity, leaving the church more conservative than it had ever been. During the long reign of Pope John Paul II, only the most conservative and loyal men were made bishops and cardinals until there were no progressive voices left in the hierarchy. Seminaries became redoubts of reaction. Pope Benedict XVI has spoken of all this shrinkage as a good thing. A smaller but more pious church in thrall to the hierarchy is now seen as the basic objective of his pontificate. This leaves him free to restore the Latin mass, renew the issuance of indulgences and ignore the efforts to heal the many rifts within the Christian world. Having lost its intellectual and spiritual credibility after Vatican II, the church now has shed countless adherents throughout the developed world. It flourishes only in Africa with a unique blend of conservative dogma, animist liturgy and a sexually active clergy that includes married bishops.
Maybe the Pope is right and all the decline and decay—or, as he would have it, the purification—is for the best. It is at least arguable that the institutional church has historically been a socially destructive force wherever and whenever it has managed to gain influence. As the English historian (and devout Catholic) Lord Acton said in reference to Pius IX’s power grab, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The signs of corruption are everywhere. Christendom has become fragmented into hundreds of sects split along every conceivable doctrinal fault line. The priests and bishops rant and rave about trivia such as female altar servers, the granting of indulgences and the return of the Latin mass. The Pope flies off to Africa and announces that condoms increase the transmission of HIV/AIDS. The Vatican Bank has been involved in global laundering of Mafia drug money and has been credibly accused of laundering assets of Holocaust victims. The Pope offends Muslims and Jews not deliberately but through ignorance and negligence. Unspeakable sexual perversities have been uncovered among the clergy of country after country. It is hard to imagine that any of this is what Jesus had in mind. It is however the historical reality. The issues change but the lust for power has been a constant from the beginning.
Ever since the church emerged from the catacombs after the Edict of Milan in 313, it has been ruled by a small self-perpetuating coterie of mostly Italian churchmen who acquired riches and power by threatening illiterate peasants with eternal damnation. The popes claimed temporal dominion over most of Europe by virtue of the so-called Donation of Constantine, a document forged in 752 for Pope Stephen II. They crushed the Gospel of Love and replaced it with a God of fire and brimstone, a God whose mind only they understood and a God from whom they alone held the keys to salvation. It was all a fraud, a monumental scam perpetrated on humanity’s most important idea, the existence of a personal God who acts in history. The Judeo-Christian version of that idea constitutes the wellspring of western civilization, the great foundational myth of nearly one-third of the human race. Even in its contemporary weakened state, it is the most important force holding society together and making culture possible. As Jung wrote, without myth the individual “…like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society.” [2] The idea that any institution would attempt to hold this heritage hostage as its exclusive birthright must be counted one of history’s great crimes.
How have they gotten away with it for so long? In the first instance, they rely on Mathew’s report of a conversation in which Jesus asked the apostles what people were saying about him. They gave various answers and he then he asked what they themselves thought. Peter answered for them (Matthew 16:16-20):
Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he warned his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ. [3]
This is a breathtaking grant of absolute power. Taken literally, it makes Peter a God. Remember, God had mocked Job with the questions (Job 38:33), “Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?” Peter can answer, “Yes, I can.” If Peter could pass this power to his successor Linus and so on down to Benedict XVI, then it follows that whatever any of them promulgated was bound in heaven. Whatever. Does that include all those medieval incumbents who claimed the Donation of Constantine was genuine? In a word, yes. Obviously, a land grab, however flamboyant, is not a matter of faith and morals but the church is not relying on the notion of papal infallibility. Rather, it simply asserts that it enjoys, “…the absolute fullness of this supreme power….over all and each of the Churches and over all and each of the pastors and faithful.” [4] The ellipses in that sentence are not misleading; they are meant to cut through the underbrush of Vaticanspeak which contains enough ambiguity to sound slightly more reasonable.
Matthew is the most rigid of the three synoptic gospels and is the only one that includes anything remotely like the “Peter” clause. The scholars of the Jesus Seminar reject the quotation absolutely. [5] There is no question that Peter was regarded as “first among equals” of the apostles but there is no early tradition that he ever acted as the bishop of Rome. There is not a single shred of evidence that he even knew a man named Linus or thought he could pass on his absolute power. The church cites the last sentence of Matthew (28:20), “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” But this is the last thing Jesus says and he says it to reassure his frightened apostles. They certainly took it to mean that the end of the world was imminent. [6]
If though you want to take Matthew 16 as the literally true word of God, I will not be able to dissuade you but I will be able to accuse you of blasphemy. To say that God would support each and every pronouncement of the Popes down through the ages is to say that God is willing to accept a very long list of sins from simony to genocide. To give a single example, consider Pope Innocent III’s Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) and the Inquisition that followed it. Tens of thousands of Cathar “heretics” were slaughtered in the name of orthodoxy including at least 1,200 women and children who took refuge in the Cathedral of St. Nazairethe in Beziers on July 22, 1209. Anyone who thinks that the slaughter of innocents was bound in heaven or that the Christian God of Love approved or accepted this barbarity is surely saying that said God is a criminal psychopath.
As an institution, the Roman Catholic church cannot and does not deserve to survive. There will always be Catholics because, as Father Greeley says, the people love the stories, the saints and the unmatched pageantry. They need the mythology whether they believe it or not. The Poles need their Black Madonna of Częstochowa and need to believe it was painted by the evangelist Luke in the home of the Holy Family. Mexicans need Our Lady of Guadalupe and need to believe that her image appeared miraculously on the back of a peasant’s cloak in 1531. Pope John Paul II needed to believe that he was protected from an assassin’s bullet through the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima. It must have made him feel very special that the mother of God thought it necessary to spare his life. In all such cases, the "belief" is defended vigorously specifically because it is fragile.
Nevertheless, the institutional church is fast becoming an empty shell, a whited sepulcher run by a little man with a big megaphone like the Wizard of Oz. Certainly that’s been the drift of things since Giovanni Montini was elected pope in 1963. When we reach the “tipping point” the collapse will be quick. Even now, the Vatican has all the trappings of a theme park and the major landmarks of European Catholicism are little more than tourist attractions.
It is hard to predict the future of Christianity except to say that the good news of the gospel will continue to play a role in the lives of many people. It seems likely that Protestant denominations will continue to divide and multiply. The Catholic church might work as a loose confederation of diverse congregations sharing a commitment to the Gospel of Love and a heritage of liturgies and stories. This is the Quaker model and would be appealing to people willing to take an active interest in theology. We might also see the emergence of non-episcopal federations whose congregations “called” their own ministers and whose members looked to leaders generally recognized by large segments of the community. This is the Jewish model, more organized than the Quakers and more likely to promote broad agreement on theology and belief. However structured, some such congregations, perhaps most, will call married priests and women to the pulpit, embrace a more liberal sexual ethic and encourage gay marriage. Such deviations will be seen as schismatic and, perhaps even heretical, by the remnants of the old church and the new movement will itself be subject to divisions similar to those that arose (and continue to arise) in Anglicanism and Lutheranism.
However it works itself out, Catholicism will become a bottom-up religion rather than the top-down one it has been for most of its existence. Ultimately, Christianity itself may become prey to a long and painful period of fading belief and cultural irrelevance. To prevent this will necessitate the development of a new theology for the twenty-first century. This is not as strange as it may sound to the ears of a Catholic raised on the immutability of truth. Indeed, there may be a good start on such a theology in the thinking of Harvey Cox. Cox has developed a Christian theology rooted in the realities of the modern world, by which he means primarily what he calls “secularization.” Over the years, his ideas have been refined but his point of departure is a celebration of modernism which he sees as the rise of urban civilization and the related collapse of traditional religion. Secularization refers to the way people understand their relationships with one another and it is not surprising that the massive dislocations brought on by urbanization have profoundly affected this understanding. As he stated it in the introduction to his first book:
What is secularization? The Dutch theologian C. A. van Peursen says it is the deliverance of man, “first from religious and then from metaphysical control over his reason and his language.” It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed worldviews, the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols. It represents “defatalization of history,” the discovery by man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that he can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does with it. Secularization occurs when man turns his attention away from worlds beyond and toward this world and this time (saeculum = “this present age”). It is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944 called “man’s coming of age.” [7]
It will surprise no one that this was and is not well received by conservative Christians including Catholics. It cuts too close to Nietzsche's "God is dead" philosophy which concludes that religion is no longer capable of acting as the source of morality. For Cox, though, the question is what causes the secularized person to be alienated from the traditional idea of God. “Is it the loss of the experience of God, the loss of the existence of God in Christianity, or the lack of adequate language to express God today?” He agrees with Nietzsche that religion can no longer pretend to offer “…an inclusive and commanding system of personal and cosmic values and explanations.” But he differs in proposing that modern man still encounters God in the “events of social change” which include both momentous transformations such as the civil rights movement and ordinary daily transactions with lovers, clients, co-workers and others.
A new religion might take many forms but it would certainly be based on at least three theological premises. First and most important, God is a personal, unique and transcendent experience, not a corporate rule book. Second, God is ultimately love and love relationships without exception are the only metaphors through which we can experience and relate to God. Finally, God is our destiny, the “Point Omega” toward which we and all history are somehow directed. This, however, is not a matter of faith or belief but of hope.
In any such formulation, the role of the specialist—the one called to minister—is to help each individual find his or her pathway to a satisfying relationship with the instinctive sense of the divine in the here and now. In the words of the old folk hymn, “There’s a road that leads to glory / through a valley far away. / Nobody else can walk it for you, / they can only point the way.”
Notes
1. Pius IX was highly regarded by his successors several of whom moved to have him canonized against the wishes of the Italian government. John Paul II finally beatified him in 2000. His incorrupt body is displayed in a glass tomb in the Basilica of Saint Lawrence outside the Walls in Rome.
2. Symbols of Transformation translated by R.F.C. Hull from the fourth Swiss edition of 1952. Reprinted in Violet Staub De Laszlo, (editor), The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, The Modern Library, 1993, p. 5.
3. New International Version, 1984, International Bible Society. The word “Hell” is “Hades” in the original and in many other modern translations. I believe this is because the Greek term hades was used in the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew term sheol. But the term hades always refers to the abode of the dead in general, rather than the abode of the wicked.
4. The Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus issued by Vatican I, July 18, 1870, Chapter 3, Paragraph 9.
5. Robert W. Funk and Julian V. Hills (General Editors), The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 206-207.
6. This is obvious from the Acts of the Apostles and is made explicit by Paul in 1 Crointhians 15:51: “Behold I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.” In this context, “sleep” means “die.” Paul expected that Christ would return in glory within the lifetime of people then living.
7. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, Revised Edition, Macmillan, 1966.
