THE CHURCH AT EBB TIDE
Jerry Harkins
We are witnessing the end days of the Roman Catholic Church. Since the beginning of his pontificate, Benedict XVI has bemoaned the “marginalization” of Christianity in Europe and America. But a major theme of his reign has been the not entirely consistent notion that Catholicism might be better off smaller but purer and he seems to be working successfully toward that goal. Church attendance is down dramatically everywhere, contributions have plummeted, many parishes have failed to register a single baptism in more than ten years and the recruitment of new priests is at an all time low. In 2008, for example, 160 Irish priests died and were replaced by exactly nine newly ordained ones. Around the world, Catholics have rejected the church’s so-called “definitive” teachings on sexuality and other great moral issues of the day. The Pope and his predecessor even failed to persuade the framers of the Treaty of Lisbon to acknowledge the European Union’s Christian heritage.
Since Pius IX published his infamous Syllabus of Errors in 1864, the church has stood exposed as an irrelevant remnant of feudal social theory. The burgeoning pedophilia crisis and the Vatican’s effete response to it have exposed it as a moribund brotherhood based entirely on the lust for power among an aging priestly caste that is poorly educated and psychosexually challenged. The desperate efforts to impose archaic standards of orthodoxy have exposed the universal church to ridicule and contempt. The gospel—the “good news” preached by Jesus of Nazareth—will survive. Some will continue to call themselves Catholics and will continue to celebrate the Catholic liturgies in both traditional and modern forms. But the institutional church is no longer sustainable economically or morally. Its schismatic offspring in the form of hundreds of Protestant sects and cults are equally fragile, beset by both the ranting lunatics of the right and the distraught, ineffectual intellectuals of the left.
The root of the problem is and always has been a pathological expression of what Nietzsche called the “will to power,” the drive to become master over people and events and to challenge everything that stands in the way of that mastery. The claim that whatever the church binds on earth is bound also in heaven (Matthew 16:19) has been used as a cudgel to strike the fear of fire and brimstone into the minds of the “faithful.” The church’s interpretation of whatever is breathtaking in its arrogance. The hallmarks of papal megalomania have included the bloody military suppressions of the Middle Ages, the torture and burning of heretics and witches, the massive personal cupidity of the Renaissance hierarchy, and the assault on human freedom and dignity that followed the Reformation. Today, Vatican City has become little more than a theme park but its denizens still seek to control the moral and cultural lives of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, resorting to what Garry Wills has called papal “structures of deceit” by which he means blatant lies. “The arguments for much of what passes as current church doctrine,” he writes, “are so intellectually contemptible that mere self-respect forbids a man to voice them as his own.”
In spite of all this, the gospel message remains compelling. It is not without ambiguity but, as I have written previously, an honest reading reveals a clear three-part core. First and most important, God is a personal, unique and transcendent experience, not a bureaucratic 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 seem somehow directed. Now this message is not “true” in any scientific sense but it resonates perfectly with the cardinal virtues of faith, hope and love which, in turn, are the characteristics that distinguish us as human beings. God is not a person, a character who acts in history, but an idea. Heaven is not a place but a purpose for and the meaning of existence. Rigid atheism does not work. The great French mathematician, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, explained to Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis and the British physicist, Stephen Hawking, has recently come to the same conclusion. They may well be right that God is not needed to explain the universe but God is still an essential element of human happiness. Throughout its history, the church has hijacked this reality and used it to promote the personal aggrandizement of its leaders. Its demise, therefore, is welcome even if it comes at the cost of great suffering to believing Christians.
It may seem that questioning the empirical reality of God is blasphemous or heretical but it is neither. Whatever God might be, there is no entity like the elderly gentleman depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The description of God as three persons of a single substance is not a mystery but a contradiction in terms and the doctrine of transubstantiation is a primitive myth derived from ritual cannibalism. The tortuous elaborations and complexities of theology have nothing whatever to contribute to the moral life or the quest for salvation. There is no logical predicate to complete the conclusion God is…
In fact, there is a tradition as old as the church itself that holds there is nothing that can be said or thought or depicted or known in a positive sense by humans about God because God is ineffable, that is, the divine cannot be described. Hence the question of God’s existence or non-existence is futile and pretentious. All that can be said is negative: what God is not. God is not a creation, not defined by space or location and not confined by time. Called “apophactic theology” from the Greek word meaning negation, it was initially propounded by Clement of Alexandria (150-215) and Tertullian (160-220) and later taken up by such early philosophers as the Cappadocian Fathers including St. Basil the Great, and by St. John Chrysostom and Psuedo-Dionysius the Areopagite. In the Middle Ages, it was taught most notably by St. Symeon the Theologian, Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross. The scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas is a dialectic of apophasis and cataphaisis, its more conventional opposite, as is the theology of the modern writer C.S. Lewis. Mother Teresa’s spiritual autobiography, Come, Be My Light, was largely misunderstood because its point of departure is very much in the same tradition.
Apophasis is often associated with Christian mysticism which is something else that makes the institutional church uncomfortable and suspicious. Mystics claim to deal directly with God, the saints and angels thereby by-passing the authority of the hierarchs. Whenever possible, they were burned at the stake but often they were more trouble dead than alive. During the Middle Ages, the great mystics attracted large followings, making it difficult for the church to silence them. Dame Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416) is a good example. She was not a theologian of any stripe and she did occasionally describe God in positive terms: wisdom, truth, rightfulness and, most importantly, love. But her focus is limited to what God does, not what he is. For example, she says God reveals himself as the indwelling spirit of man’s soul. She wrote and preached about God as man’s joy, full of love and compassion. She thought of sin not as evil but as a necessary path toward self-knowledge, clearly contrary to official church teaching since the time of Augustine. She always spoke of God as “mother” and seems to have meant it literally, not metaphorically. While the church said that the Black Death was God’s punishment for man’s wickedness, Julian saw it as a reminder of Christ’s passion and, thus, of his love for us. Like other mystics of her time, she claimed to be a docile child of the holy church but her reverence for the individual and the particular was and is at odds with the church’s fundamental body-of-Christ doctrine which sees itself as the exclusive mediator of the sacramental union.
Dame Julian and other medieval mystics such as Angela of Foligno (1248-1309) Richard Rolle (1290–1349), Walter Hilton (?1340-1396) and the appealingly frenetic Margery Kempe (1373-1436) all experienced Christianity internally, personally and even idiosyncratically. Religion for them was a heuristic template specifically meant by God to be shaped by the individual believer. They were pilgrims on a road to glory but the road was unmapped. In the words of the much later folk hymn, “Nobody else can walk it for you, you have to walk it by yourself.” Ultimately the church has always known this and has reluctantly conceded the supremacy of individual conscience in making moral decisions although it is referring to a “well formed” conscience that is “conscientiously submissive to the Catholic church.” In other words, conscience informed by the absolute power of priests to condemn you to hell for eternity. Margery Kempe was brought to trial by church tribunals several times for such crimes as preaching in public and wearing white clothing, a sure sign of hypocrisy in a married woman.
Power corrupts, as Lord Acton said. Over time, it is common if not inevitable for those running institutions to accrue more and more power, for bureaucracies to expand and for an original mission to become muddled in the resulting miasma of internal politics. Organizations become top heavy and ideologies become constraints on the ability to adapt to change. The collapse of the Soviet Union, as surprising as it was, seems obvious and inevitable in retrospect. It is Parkinson’s Law writ large. In the absence of revolution, it is almost impossible for an organization to reinvent itself and it is unlikely that the church could do so even if wanted to try.
Or, more accurately, try again. In 1962, the Second Vatican Council convened with the three-fold goal of aggionamento (modernizing), ressourcement (return to fundamentals) and the “development” of doctrine. It was an extraordinary meeting and it culminated in an extraordinary document, the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope). Progressives read it as nothing less than a repudiation of much that had taken place since the Reformation and, specifically of the decrees of Vatican I. It may be they were reading into it conclusions that were only cautiously hinted at, but the legacy of the council was an upsurge of lay enthusiasm and engagement. Once the bishops went home, however, the Curia reasserted its control and the march of history resumed its downward spiral. The papacies of Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have firmly restored the status quo ante. The turning point was the retrogressive 1968 birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, but a more telling misadventure was the semi-clandestine (and so-far unsuccessful) effort to sanctify the most conservative pope ever, Pius IX. It is hard to see this effort as anything other than a desperate attempt to impose a divine mandate on a long series of reactionary absurdities.
There is reason to think that the changes required for the survival of the church are so formidable as to be virtually impossible. It would require the reversal of fifteen hundred years of steadily increasing centralization of power in the Pope and the Curia. In effect, the church would have to divest Vatican City, abolish the Curia and allow the laity of all dioceses to elect their own bishops. The bishops might still elect a Pope as a constitutional monarch with a limited term of office but it would have to repudiate a long list of papal pronouncements, most notably the doctrine of infallibility. It would have to assume a much more modest dogmatic posture, allowing, for example, the possibility of good ideas emerging from without and giving up its treasured ideas about the “magisterium” or teaching authority and the claims of a unique “deposit of faith.” It would have to accept the legitimacy of the secular sphere in regulating what the church considers areas of universal natural law. As an example, the church has no standing to demand that the state impose the Vatican’s views on such subjects as stem cell research, contraception or in vitro fertilization. Obviously, it may teach anything it wishes. But once it seeks to compel compliance, even among its own adherents, whether by canonical process or the force of civil law, it is speaking not for God but as God. Thus, it is free to excommunicate Catholic politicians who do not hew to its line but, in doing so, it abandons the teaching role in favor of the police power. When its bishops denounce a Catholic university for inviting the President of the United States to speak, they invite nothing but deserved contempt for failing to engage openly with their opponents. As Mr. Obama said on that very occasion, “Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in an admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son's or daughter's hardships can be relieved.”
It may be that the most essential and least likely reform is that of the ministry itself. There are about 370,000 Catholic priests in a world of 6.7 billion souls. In theory, all are celibate males who have chosen a career that insulates them from the company of women. That choice is itself very troubling. The church claims to be shocked and dismayed that so many of its clergy are pedophiles and it blames everything it can think of except its own historical misogyny. It claims that an overly sexualized society is to blame, precisely the society young seminarians are seeking to escape. In Boston, Cardinal Law blamed it on the parents of victims for not protecting their children against the ravages of priestly perverts. Gay priests are frequently the target of episcopal wrath and Vatican II is blamed for relaxing the macho standards of the good old days. The church denies it is misogynistic although John Paul II did once concede that it might once, centuries ago, have seemed to be mildly antagonistic toward women. But however one manipulates history, a church that denies the sacerdotal potential of half the human race has no claim to catholicity or universality. More importantly, it has no claim to common sense and should not be surprised when it is ignored or rejected by educated people of good will. The challenge for the church is to repudiate entirely the overbearing theory that it alone holds and withholds the keys to salvation for all humanity.
Such a reduced role would be awkward for an institution that claims to be the sole authentic interpreter of the mind of God and, for that reason, it is unlikely to survive in the modern world. It is not alone in this. Even among the most observant, sectarian fragmentation is the order of the day in all religious traditions. All over the world, God is rapidly becoming secularized. We hear more and more about God, but it is a God being invoked to support political and other ideological causes. “God’s on our side” is, however, politics, not worship. For Catholics, the monolithic church of the 1950’s has already passed into history and has been replaced by scores of factions occupying every conceivable niche of belief and practice. It would, therefore, be rash to speculate about what “Catholicism” might mean in twenty, fifty or a hundred years. Perhaps the mainstream survivor will be a loosely affiliated group of Catholic Congregationalists united principally by the Apostles’ Creed. There will surely be conservative and ultra conservative sects led by bishops and popes claiming the mantle of infallibility. On the other end of the spectrum, there will be Universalist groups as there are in all religions. In between, there will be many sects promoting many agendas some of which might make Jesus weep but most of which will be consistent with the gospel even if emphasizing one element of it or another.
Only one thing is fairly certain: we have arrived at a hinge of history, a “tipping point.” The church has been here before. One thinks of the Babylonian Captivity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and the rearguard decisions of Vatican I. None of these destroyed Catholicism or even changed it very much but none played out on the global stage created by the Information Revolution. Increasingly, the hierarchs are talking only to themselves. A consensus is forming in the world that, in the metaphor of Dorothy Day, the church is the cross upon which Christ is crucified. King David sings, “…even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” The darkness now falling on institutional Christianity is, however, the darkness of the grave, pitiless and uncompromising.
