PAPA PANCHO, GO AND REPAIR MY HOUSE

Jerry Harkins

In the year 1206 a 24-year old man named Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, later known as Saint Francis of Assisi, was kneeling at prayer in the crumbling chapel of San Damiano.  He heard the voice of Jesus telling him to mend his broken church.  At first, he thought Jesus was talking about repairing the small chapel he was praying in.  But it gradually became clear that the voice was referring to the entire church which, at the time, was led by Pope Innocent III.  Widely regarded as the most important Pope of the medieval era, Innocent called the Fourth Lateran Council which tried to impose several reforms with only minor success.  Mostly, however, he is remembered as the bloodthirsty fanatic who prosecuted three crusades:  the Fourth, the Fifth and the Albigensian.  Against this backdrop, it is said that Francis tried his own hand at reform.  He went to Egypt and preached reconciliation with the Saracens.  They were deeply impressed with his humility and accorded the Franciscans privileges in the Holy Land which are honored to this day.  He wrote beautiful prayers including the Canticle of the Sun and the earliest version of what is now known as the Prayer of Saint Francis which begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”  But he could not repair the church anymore than God himself could.  Instead, he ministered to the poor as Jesus had but, after his death, the church declared his gospel of poverty heretical and, in 1296, it began burning those who still insisted on it—the Fraticelli or Poor Franciscans.

Some 800 years after Giovanni’s mystical experience, the Cardinal Princes of the church elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires as the new Pope, the 265^th successor, so they believe, of Saint Peter.  He took the name Francis in honor of the saint of Assisi.  He is Papa Pancho, a Jesuit, a man of love and humility.  A man with a million dollar smile that lights everything around him.  And a man who apparently wants to repair the house of the Lord in both administrative and dogmatic ways.  The first time somebody tried this was when John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council.  He died before he could finish the job but his council made great pronouncements and roused the beast of hope.  The subsequent disillusionment was devastating and the question now is whether the new Pope or anyone can succeed where Saint Francis and Pope John did not.  It will be a tough row to hoe.

The church is in dire straits.  It is governed by the Pope and some 5,100 bishops almost all of whom were appointed by Francis’ two immediate predecessors.  Virtually all of them are radical conservatives.  Most of them are not stupid but they have only the vaguest sense that they are witnessing the last days of Roman Catholicism.  The institutional church has been in decline since the Renaissance and, for the last forty-five years—ever since Humanae Vitae—they have been following a strategy that has driven priests, nuns and lay people in Europe and North America away from the church in vast numbers.  But they do not seem to be counting.  When he took the reins of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, then-Archbishop Timothy Michael Dolan said, “It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives…things are going well.” His three-year tenure was marked by a bootless war against President Obama’s health care reforms.  The casus belli was the morality of contraception, an issue the bishops had already lost decisively and which Dolan now tried to disguise as a threat to religious freedom.  It was utterly rejected by large majorities of Catholics and non-Catholics alike and resulted in the loss of any credibility the bishops still had or any claim they would make to a place at the national decision-making table.  In other words, they wasted every last cent of their political capital.  Nonetheless, in his farewell address to the Conference, Dolan said, “Our good experience defending religious freedom here at home shows that, when we turn our minds to an issue, we can put it on the map.”  Dolan, too, is not stupid but how he could make two such Orwellian statements can only be explained as deliberate dissemblance.  Or perhaps it was a desperate attempt to toe what he sees as the new line being articulated by Francis.  At 63, he may still have clerical ambitions.

Make no mistake about it.  Dolan’s rhetoric was truly Orwellian in its resort to the Big Lie.  Their experience was not good;  it was a disaster.  More than that, it was never about religious freedom.  It was about the church’s perverted understanding of sexual morality but they’ve already lost that argument decisively so they’ve taken to casting every issue as one of religious freedom.  Historically, the church has condemned the idea of religious freedom as heretical but it was now embraced as “any port in a storm.”  Cardinal Law even launched a trial balloon to the effect that protecting pedophile priests was a matter of religious freedom.  Had he gotten away with it, he would have claimed that pedophilia itself is a sacrament.  I (and the late night comedians) really miss Bernie.

It was not supposed to turn out this way.  Vatican Council II was charged with three objectives: aggionamento which meant bringing doctrine and practice into the modern world, ressourcement which sought to return the church to its fundamentals, most notably the gospel of love, and finally the orderly “development” of doctrine which implied a careful examination of existing catechetical teachings in the light of modern knowledge especially modern science.  Since at least the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the church had taught that it was the sole arbiter of truth and that its teachings had never and could never change.  In 1864, Pope Pius IX issued his Syllabus of Errors which specifically condemned “modernism,” stating in summation that it was an error to believe that, “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”  For more than a century, all priests were required to take an oath against modernism before ordination.  The church wanted to appear as a monolith:  an eternal, immovable, implacable sovereign over all it surveyed.

By the early 1960’s, however, the entire Christian enterprise was seething with novel thinking that often seemed to border on the subversive.  Among the philosophers, Jacques Maritan and Étienne Gilson were reimagining Thomism, and a whole generation of eminent theologians was in its prime:  Karl Rahner, SJ, Hans Küng, Yves Congar, Henri-Marie de Lubac, SJ, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, SJ.  Outside the church, in partibus infidelium, Harvey Cox was developing a People of God ecclesiology, Karl Barth, borrowing from the Marxists, was trying to articulate a kind of dialectic theology, Mircea Eliade was re-interpreting the history of religion as the mythic giver of structure and orientation to the universe and Martin Buber was exploring the meaning of the I-Thou encounter.  All seemed to be working toward a better understanding of the dialogue between creature and creator.  The Curia, the church’s entrenched, self-perpetuating bureaucracy, was at full alert, condemning books, excommunicating dissenters, silencing priestly critics, exiling progressive prelates and proclaiming novel doctrines merely to demonstrate its absolute power. 

The most telling of these doctrines was the Assumption of the Virgin Mary defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950.  This was a bizarre and self-contradicting fantasy without foundation in scripture.  Contrary to the papal claim that Thomas Aquinas had always “assumed” it to be true, the Angelic Doctor explicitly denied it.  But it opened a floodgate.  Almost immediately, conservatives began agitating for a further proclamation that Mary is the “Mediatrix of All Graces.”  In 2008, 500 bishops petitioned Pope Benedict to go even further and proclaim Mary “Coredemptrix,” thereby crowning her as a virtual fourth person of the Blessed Trinity.  This sudden eruption of Marian myth and idolatry was not a latter day recognition of feminist theology in Vatican City.  Quite the contrary, it was an effort to further distance Mary from humanity with all its foibles and especially from that half of humanity regarded by the hierarchy as the source of all sin.  Mary:  conceived without the stain of original sin, perpetual virgin yet a mother, Pietà, the suffering goddess, incorruptible and raised incorrupt to heaven.  The church insists it does not worship Mary but the line it wants to draw seems exceedingly fine.  There is nothing in the liturgy of the Trinity that comes close to the fervor with which it promotes the rosary, the miraculous medal and the various sites associated with Mary’s apparitions.

If the Marian revolution was a reaction to strains of modernism emerging in theology and philosophy, it was also a response to the advent of a new spirituality that was reminiscent of the medieval mysticism that had so threatened the church from the tenth to the fifteenth century.  E. E. Cummings, for example, was thanking God “for everything
 which is natural which is infinite which is yes” and for having been ‘lifted from the no
of all nothing.”  This may not seem threatening but, to a church whose power was based on original sin and was expressed mainly as moral prohibitions—thou shall not—the notion that nature itself is good and that today is the birthday “of the gay
 great happening illimitably earth” is bound to be traumatic.  The church was losing control in every sphere of life.  In 1960, the FDA approved the use of Enovid as a contraceptive.  Almost instantaneously, “The Pill” demolished the entire Potemkin Village of the church’s absurdist teachings about sexual morality.  The same year, John F. Kennedy told the members of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute… I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me.”  This was a clear contravention of Article 55 of the Syllabus of Errors and came as a profound shock to the Vatican. In the Council debate on Dignitatis Humanae, the Curia, led by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani,, mounted a ferocious attack on  religious liberty.   When they lost, they began to lay plans to derail all the Council’s “liberal” decrees.  Their ultimate victory was signaled by the publication of Humanae Vitae, the infamous 1968 encyclical on birth control.  The declaration on religious freedom was subsequently watered down by John Paul II and Benedict XVI who insisted that while error might have its rights, only the church could claim to be the sole custodian of the truth.

The problem presented by the new spirituality is interesting.  The church, after all, has always been heavily invested in mystery and miracles but this was something quite different.  In popular culture, it manifested itself as what was referred to as a New Age or Age of Aquarius sensibility.  As a modern movement, this had arisen in the eighteenth century in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.  The term “New Age” was coined by the Swedenborgian poet and artist William Blake and was taken up by a series of esoteric nineteenth century savants including Helena Blavatsky, George Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky.  It was a serious esoteric movement that attracted the attention of a wide range of intellectuals such as William Butler Yeats, Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner. It blossomed into popular culture as a very disparate but nonetheless integrating credo of the 1960’s counterculture.  It would be a mistake, however, to think of New Age as the product of spaced out hippies and the church made no such mistake.  Through its Pontifical Council for Culture, in 2003, it issued a formal analysis entitled Jesus Christ 
the Bearer of the Water of Life:  A Christian Reflection on the “New Age.”  The authors ascribed the rise of New Age thinking to what they referred to as a paradigm shift involving the emergence of quantum physics which challenged the eternal verities of religion, clinical psychology especially psychoanalysis which diminished personal responsibility and the idea of sin, and feminism which sought to unravel two millennia of misogyny.  But these were not “paradigm shifts” at all but the results of conventional evolutionary dialectics which, by challenging the status quo, had always threatened the church.  At different times, it had reacted violently to any development that questioned its own power.  In the late medieval era, it excommunicated and attempted to execute William of Ockham for his heresy in promoting nominalism and it condemned Thomas Aquinas for promoting Aristotelian philosophy.  Both were disputing aspects of the prevailing official Augustinian point of view.  Still, at this point, the church generally managed to accommodate itself to scholarly disputation and scientific advancement as long as it was restricted to scholarly precincts.  Later, it would condemn Galileo largely because he insisted on publishing his major works in Italian rather than Latin.

The Roman Catholic Church never recovered from the Renaissance.  A thousand years earlier, it had embraced Saint Augustine’s theology which effectively rescinded the gospel of love and had begun the process of accreting a fantastical body of myth meant to centralize all power in heaven and on earth in a corrupt remnant of the Roman Empire.  Through the middle ages, it mostly succeeded although at great cost in blood and treasure.  The turning point came when ordinary people began to insist on the fruits of their personal dignity.  The middle class grew economically, culturally and politically.  In 1382, John Wycliffe published an English translation of the Bible, an act that was and was seen as a rebellion against the hierarchy of the church.  He died two years later but the Council of Constance declared him a heretic in 1415, exhumed his body, burned it at the stake and cast the ashes into the River Swift.  Only 106 years later, Martin Luther was spared the stake through the connivance of Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, a ruler who knew which way the wind was blowing.

After the Reformation, the Vatican never blinked, never sought compromise.  Its only strategy was to pile fantasy on fantasy, a process that reached an apotheosis of the surreal with the publication of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors in 1864.  Ironically, this was the same Pope who also declared the doctrine of papal infallibility.

The loss of Christ’s message is a tragedy of boundless proportion.  The church squandered it for centuries, bending it to the hierarchy’s lust for power, until we have reached a point at which vast numbers of people, nominally Christians, have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.  In abandoning institutional religion, they have been unable or unwilling to distinguish between the medium and the message.  Why would they bother when the church claims to “own” the message, to be the sole interpreter of the truth, to be the keeper of the keys to eternal life.  Given its history, how can any intelligent person take it seriously?  Even if fragments persist in our culture—the great commandments to love, the beatitudes and other elements that underlie so much of the Western social contract—the metaphors that speak to individual souls will fade from memory.  What are the Prodigal Son, the Laborer in the Vineyard or, for that matter, the virgin birth, without a brilliant homilist to give them life?  Already people have little sense of why the Messiah was born in a manger, why he was betrayed by a handpicked disciple or why he frequently rebuked Martha of Bethany.

Poor Francis!  Can he possibly restore the church?  Can he live long enough to restore it?  Has he the will to undertake such a Herculean task?  Even the simplest change will be harmful and painful.  He had an opportunity, for example, to cancel the plan to canonize John Paul II.  Perhaps he thought that by proceeding he would promote unity within Christendom but, no, John Paul is a divisive figure, appealing only to a small coterie of already disaffected, ultra-conservative Catholics.  Everyone else in the world, including the separated brethren of Orthodoxy and Protestantism, sees the late Pope as a dyed-in-the-wool autocrat willing to lie in pursuit of his primitive understanding of morality. Moreover, it is blatantly insulting to the memory of John XXIII to link him to John Paul for the purely political purpose of tamping down liberal opposition.  Or consider the ordination of women.  Francis seems to have taken this off the table in deference to the “definitive” rulings of his two immediate predecessors.  Those rulings were unjust and were based on typical hypocritical, self-serving Vatican logic.  Beyond that, however, it is a simple matter of survival.  The church, having driven so many men out of the ministry by its nonsensical celibacy rules, needs more priests.  It can no longer afford the luxury of its misogyny or its other illusions.  There is scarcely a doctrine it teaches or a discipline it practices that should be thought exempt from logical, theological and scientific analysis.  Why, for example, is the single word filioque worth a thousand years of the Great Schism?  Why is it essential to believe the absurd doctrine that Mary was “ever virgin?”  Why do we insist that our Prophet is God and the Son of God?  Do we or do we not believe in predestination?  If so, why do we believe in free will?  If not, why do we think the Book of Revelation is the inspired word of God?

Throughout its history, the root of the Christian problem is that the hierarchy has never had the slightest understanding of what ordinary people want from the sacred aspect of their lives.  Now it is probably too late.  The church is dead in almost all of Europe and North America.  It is under stress in Latin America and is unrecognizable in Africa.  Demography is destiny and, in the United States, the average age of priests rose from 35 in 1970 to 63 in 2009.  Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians dropped from 49,000 to 4,700.  The number of ordinations fell even more dramatically from 1,575 to 450, that is, from a net gain of 725 priests to a net loss of 810. In 1965, there were 800,000 nuns.  In 2012, there were 56,000 and their average age was 74.  In one recent year, the Irish church ordained nine new priests to replace 160 who had died, resigned or retired.  It is projected that there will be only a handful of priests left in this most Catholic of countries within 20 years. If ever the church needed a miracle, it is now.  Right now.