PAPAL WONDERLAND:  1800-PRESENT

Jerry Harkins

Over the years, I have written several essays on a subject that has intrigued me all my life:  the inexplicable, often appalling sins of institutional Catholicism.  “Inexplicable” because the gospel, even as we have it corrupted by self-serving editing and distorted interpretation, teaches a message of love and hope.  It is a message that has been taken to heart by legions of priests, nuns and brothers over the millennia who have given witness to the power and glory of the beatitudes, to brotherhood and sisterhood, to peace and good will.  But the church as an institution has almost always failed the critical test Jesus proposed repeatedly throughout his life.  “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:9).  The institutional church has never loved anybody or anything except the maintenance and exercise of its own absolute power.

Church history is everywhere and always marred by immorality, arrogance, hypocrisy, deceit and treachery.  On December 22, 2014, Pope Francis delivered a devastating critique of the Roman Curia in terms that may have been gently phrased but were no less damning.  Among other things, he accused the Cardinals and Bishops of what he called the disease of existential schizophrenia.  “It is,” he said, “the disease of those who live a double life, a result of the hypocrisy typical of mediocre people and of advancing spiritual emptiness, which degrees or academic titles cannot fill.”  It brought to mind Lord Acton’s famous remark in regard to the proclamation of papal infallibility.  He famously wrote, “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases…Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The official hagiography of the church and the penchant of recent popes to canonize their predecessors notwithstanding, any fair-minded reading of history will conclude that a significant number of the 266 men who are said to have been Bishops of Rome have been power hungry autocrats guilty of despicable crimes up to and including genocide.  In spite of the decree of Gregory VII in 1075 that all popes are by definition saints having inherited their sanctity from Saint Peter, most have been criminals, incompetents or both.  In spite of the decree of Pope Pius IX of 1870 that Popes are infallible under certain conditions, the overwhelming majority have said and done unbelievably stupid things.  A tiny number, fewer than a dozen, have been saintly and perhaps a similar number have been good men if ineffective shepherds.  Some have been intelligent leaders confronted with intractable difficulties that allowed of no moral solutions.  And some, of course, knew that the church was a house built on sand and sought only to manage it carefully without excessive concern for dogma.  

Here the focus is on the 16 men who have occupied the throne of Peter since 1800.  Of these three have been canonized as saints:  Pius X, John XXIII and John Paul II.  Three more have been declared blessed:  Pius IX, Pius XII and Paul VI.  John Paul I has been made a Servant of God, the first step on the path to sainthood.  Two are still living as this is written so the church is saying that half of those eligible merit veneration.  Until the recent surge in sanctifications, only 78 popes (and two anti-popes) had actually been named saints.  All but five reigned before the year 1000.  The sudden uptick suggests a certain defensiveness.  In fact, the most recent sixteen are a remarkably diverse group of mostly experienced, well educated professional scholars and diplomats who have led the church through the most challenging times it has ever faced.  They were not evil men but were mostly desperate defenders of a desperate dream of global hegemony.  Some were good, even saintly men and intent reformers but the pendulum never settled long enough to reverse the moral decline that set in with the Protestant Reformation in 1517.  After two thousand years the church is a dying institution with a dwindling constituency.

The Reformation

In 380, the Emperor Theodosius issued The Edict of Thessalonica, which established Constantinian or Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Almost immediately, both church and state fell into decline.  Rome had not been the imperial capital since 286 and was reduced to rubble by the Visigoths in 410.  Church and state both had already moved their headquarters to Ravenna in 402 to be closer to the real seat of power which was Constantinople.  The Rome-centered church re-emerged under the patronage of Charlemagne in the seventh and eighth centuries as the dominant religion of Europe and as an important military and political entity as well.  It quickly became a den of iniquity interrupted now and then by brief and mostly unsuccessful periods of reform.   The early Renaissance introduced an element of papal imperialism characterized by conspicuous and ostentatious luxury.  The climax was signaled by the construction of the new Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome begun by the sybaritic Pope Julius II as a fitting venue for his tomb.  Both the church and the tomb were designed by Michelangelo and ground was broken on April 18, 1506.  To pay the enormous costs involved, Julius and his successors begged, borrowed and stole from every source they could think of.  Most notably, they sold indulgences in the form of coupons guaranteeing remission from some or all of the time a penitent would otherwise have to spend in purgatory.  As a fundraising technique, it was a huge success but it offended the sensibilities of the Augustinian monk Martin Luther and became the precipitating cause of the Protestant Reformation.

The church’s response to Protestantism was disastrous.  Luther was an unpleasant person and a notorious anti-Semite but he was right about the church.  The denizens of the Vatican could not bring themselves to accept even his most obvious criticisms.  Instead they convened the Council of Trent (1545-1563) which did try to prohibit the sale of indulgences and which did institute several administrative reforms.  Otherwise it simply affirmed the bull Exsurge Domine of Pope Leo X which had condemned 52 of Luther’s theses as heretical, excommunicated Luther himself and strongly reiterated all controversial dogmatic issues.  The church had sought to have him burned at the stake but had lost all standing with key secular leaders who resented its assertion of ultimate authority over their domains.

The church deliberately chose a posture of intransigence because it believed any concession would weaken its temporal power which was based on its absolute spiritual power.  It was the wrong strategy and it came at the worst possible time.  A new middle class was emerging and was gaining important social and economic influence.  Artisans and merchants resisted the social hierarchies of feudalism and mounted successful challenges to both the bishops and the nobles.  The church felt compelled to support the aristocracy and the doctrine of the divine right of kings.  Ironically, the nobility too was in the process of forcibly rejecting the power of the papacy to dominate its affairs.  Protestantism soon began to accommodate the emerging economic value system.  John Calvin for example originally shared the traditional Christian aversion to private property and lending money at interest but after 1541 he began to lend state funds to private enterprises.  Calvinism eventually came to regard private wealth as a sign of God’s approval, a view that attracted favor in the major mercantile nations and became the foundation of the Protestant work ethic.  It is not surprising, then, that the Reformation was followed by two centuries of decline in papal power and prestige.  Catholicism further suffered from the horrific bloodshed of the Wars of Religion waged between 1524 and 1648.  It was in this greatly weakened state that it was forced to confront the great challenge of modernism.

The French Revolution

By the middle of the seventeenth century, a new intellectual current, referred to as The Enlightenment, began to dominate European culture.  It emphasized reason over belief, science over religion and individualism over the traditional hierarchical order of society.  Among its central tenets was the idea that authoritarianism in all its forms is contrary to the natural rights and dignity of the individual.  In 1776, this was enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence’s radical proposition that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,  That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The church ignored the American Revolution but was disturbed by the Enlightenment ideas that had precipitated it.  Shortly after he became Pope, Pius VI (1775-1799) issued the Encyclical Inscrutible in which he condemned, “…these accursed philosophers [who] proceed to destroy the bonds of union among men, both those which unite them to their rulers, and those which urge them to their duty.”  He was referring to those opposed to medieval feudalism and making a distinction between it and “modernism,” a battle already lost but one which has been continued to the present day.

The Seven Years War (1754-1763) was really the first world war and was extremely costly in terms of lives and treasure.  However, it settled little in Europe and, by the 1780’s, Europeans generally sensed that they were living in an era of constant upheaval.  Still, the French Revolution still came as a major surprise.  Under the Treaty of Paris, France had lost almost all its colonial possessions in the New World, its Navy had been destroyed and its economy ruined.  Church and state were both blamed and the popular discontent rapidly escalated into the storming of the Bastille.  On August 26, 1789 the National Assembly, adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man which was based largely on the American Declaration of 1776.  It contained a similar assertion that the people are the masters of their government.  Like the Americans before them who called upon their Creator and the Supreme Judge of the world, the Assembly acted “in the presence of the Supreme Being.”  However, the revolutionary government was already displaying its true atheistic colors.  On August 4, it had abolished the last remnants of feudalism and abolished the onerous tax collected for the support of the church.  Then on November 2, it seized all church property and abolished all monastic vows.  In February of the following year, it dissolved all religious orders.  There was, of course, resistance, including a bloody civil war in the Vendée region which is remembered as part of the Reign of Terror.  But France had become a secular country and largely anticlerical almost overnight.  Both characters have persisted ever since, resisting even the gesture of Napoleon who, in 1804, staged his own coronation in a spectacular religious liturgy.  He made it clear however that his power derived from the people when, at the climactic moment, he virtually seized the imperial crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and crowned himself.

The church quite correctly saw the French Revolution as an existential threat and it spent the next 170 years trying to combat it and its influence.  It elected a long series of Popes who crusaded against what it explicitly called “modernism” by which it meant the Enlightenment values that brought the revolution about.  At first, Pius VI had high hopes that Napoleon would restore the church’s position in France but in 1797, French armies led by Napoleon invaded the Papal States, deposed the Pope and declared the formation of a Roman Republic.  Pius VI died in exile in 1799 and was succeeded by Pius VII who fared no better.  A concordat was negotiated in 1801.  But when the Pope arrived in Paris for the emperor’s coronation, he found that the church was in no better position than it had been and his relations with Napoleon deteriorated.  In 1808, French troops again occupied the Papal States including Rome and deposed the Pope.  Pius in turn excommunicated the Emperor who then had the Pope arrested and imprisoned.  He was held in various places for five years and, like his predecessor, died in exile, a virtual prisoner of the French.

Leo XII was a compromise candidate elected specifically because he and his fellow cardinals thought he would be dead within a few months but he fooled everyone by lasting five years.  He was an arch conservative, an anti-Semite and an absolute tyrant as ruler of the Papal States.  He promulgated a law imposing excommunication on any seamstress who made an immodest dress and on any woman who wore one.  The church had always sought to repress women but this was the beginning of its obsession with what it deemed modest dress, an obsession which remains almost pathological.  It is true that Leo’s foreign policy was mostly progressive but within the Papal States his dictatorial style brought about discontent and rebellion.  He responded by instituting a widespread spy network.  He hunted down his enemies and had many hanged and others enslaved.

Leo’s successor Pius VIII reigned for only 20 months and is remembered as a likeable man who did little good but also little harm.  He wrote only one encyclical which essentially reiterated all the concerns of his Post-reformation predecessors: the “numberless errors and the teachings of perverse doctrines which, no longer secretly and clandestinely but openly and vigorously, attack the Catholic faith.”  His successor, Gregory XVI (1831-1846) was another compromise candidate and an extreme conservative who nonetheless in 1839 issued a ringing denunciation of the Atlantic slave trade and, importantly, of slavery itself.  But like Leo XII, he was a domestic tyrant who practiced wholesale executions and other draconian penalties for political crimes.  He was also an anti-modernist to the extent that he banned railroads and gas lights in the Papal States on the theory that they would only cause more innovation.  He died of a severe streptococcus infection and was succeeded by Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti who was to reign as Pius IX for more than 31 years.

Pio Nono was elected as the politically liberal and theologically conservative candidate at the conclave of 1846.   Reversing the edicts of his predecessor, he was an enthusiastic builder of railroads and he installed street lighting throughout Rome.  He freed all political prisoners, promoted science and education and was friendly to Rome’s Jews with one notorious exception.  Edgardo Mortara was born to Jewish parents in 1851.  Six years later a domestic servant claimed she had baptized the boy shortly after birth because she felt he was in danger of dying.  It was against the law in the papal states for a Christian child to be raised by non-Christian parents so Pius directed the papal police to kidnap the boy which they did.  Edgardo was raised a Catholic and eventually became a priest.  Of course, had this happened today in the United States, the Pope would have been prosecuted under the federal Lindbergh Law and spent considerable time in prison.  As it was, it caused another tidal wave of criticism which did massive damage to the church’s standing at a critical juncture of its history.  Pius’ reaction was given at a meeting he had with a group of prominent Jews.  He told them, “I couldn't care less what the world thinks.”

Throughout his reign, Pius was extraordinarily generous to the poor and lived modestly himself.  At the same time, he was theologically the most conservative Pope in the history of the church and his legacy became one of hidebound dogmatism.  To be fair, he was living through very difficult times.  The Risorgimento was nearing its climax.  The Papal States were lost permanently in 1860 and Rome itself had to be ceded to the new Italian state in 1870.  Having threatened to leave Rome several times, Pius now declared himself a prisoner of the Vatican and neither he nor his successors ventured outside its 110 acres until 1929. 

Anti-clericalism was rampant in many parts of Europe.  Churches were emptying and financial collapse seemed immanent.  The Vatican had come to a crossroads, this one more ominous than the Reformation.  Again, it chose intransigence.  In 1864 Pius published two truculent documents, his Syllabus of Errors and the encyclical Quanta Cura.  The latter is a broadside denouncing the separation of church and state and the idea that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed.  The former listed and denounced 80 modern errors including freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and secular education.  Error Number 80 was the catchall.  It claimed it is an error to think that, “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”  Modern apologists sometimes claim this meant something other than what the words clearly state but at the time they aroused a universal, global firestorm of ridicule.  Pius was shocked but again he decided to double down.  He convened the first ecumenical council since Trent, Vatican I, to inveigh against modernism and rationalism and to declare papal infallibility as a doctrine of the faith.

At first, there was considerable opposition among the bishops even though the church had long claimed infallibility for the pope, for councils of bishops or for both.  Ultimately the debate centered around the issue of appropriateness, some arguing that this was not an opportune time for such a proclamation.  No one seems to have raised the vast catalog of demonstrable papal errors and contradictions.  Sixty bishops decamped from Rome rather than have to vote on the issue which then passed by a margin of 433 to 2.  It was an intellectual power play which, however, was rarely invoked until John Paul II and Benedict XVI devised the slightly less onerous version of “definitive teachings.”

Leo XIII, elected in 1878, was another aristocratic intellectual who reigned for many years.  He pursued better relations with the European countries and with Protestant and Orthodox denominations but was largely unsuccessful.  He also sought to be more accommodating to the modern world but these initiatives too foundered against his unwillingness to tolerate any changes in traditional doctrine.  His 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris restored the works of Thomas Aquinas as “the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith.”  This may or may not be true and, if true, may or may not be to the good of the church.  Although some see in Leo’s endorsement a progressive counterweight to the prevailing Augustinian theology, the actual text positions both as part of a seamless guide to eternal truth.

Fortunately for his reputation, Leo is remembered almost exclusively for the remarkable encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891.  The main point of the document was to continue the church’s war on socialism and to defend private property and private enterprise as part of the law of nature and, “something best suited to man’s nature and tranquil living.”  It goes on to say that the employer-employee relationship is not simply a commercial contract because the worker has a right and an obligation “…of securing things to sustain life, and only a wage earned by his labor gives a poor man the means to acquire these things.”  The worker is said to have a right to a “living wage” which is, “…a wage sufficiently large to enable [the worker] to provide comfortably for himself, his wife and his children…” It even endorses the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively although under the guidance of the church.  Finally, “…gainful occupations are not a mark of shame to man, but rather of respect, as they provide him with an honorable means of supporting life.  It is shameful and inhuman, however, to use men as things for gain and to put no more value on them than what they are worth in muscle and energy.”

These were profoundly progressive ideas for their time and were not easy for the Pope to endorse given the church’s traditional identification with the moneyed classes.  They were influential both within and beyond the church.  In the United States, the 1914 Clayton Act explicitly stated that, “The labor of a human being is not a commodity or an article of commerce.”  Rerum Novarum represents the first gesture the church ever made in support of the working class and is the foundation of much of its modern social theology.  For this encyclical alone, Leo is recognized as the Pope who restored the reputation of the church in Europe.  He died in 1903 at the age of 93 and was succeeded by Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, Pius X who was a throwback.

Cardinal Sarto was the conclave’s third choice.  It very nearly elected Mariano Rampolla who had been Leo’s Secretary of State for sixteen years and was cast in his progressive mold.  At the last minute, Rampolla was vetoed by Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria who sought a return to traditional conservatism.  Many electors, including Sarto, were outraged but decided to acquiesce and elected him on the fifth ballot.  At first, he declined but after an hour or so of private prayer, he changed his mind.

Pius X was a tragic figure.  He had the personal qualities to continue Leo’s new direction but he deliberately and explicitly chose to reverse course.  At the outset, he announced his motto would be Instaurare Omnia in Christo, to restore all things in Christ.  Restore he did.  Three months after his election, he reinstated the church’s traditional ban on women singing in church choirs and added a similar ban for secular theaters over which he had no control.  At the same time, he insisted on abandoning classical and Baroque musical forms, returning instead to the Gregorian chant of the ninth century.  In 1907, he issued Lamentabili Sane Exitu which added 65 errors to the Syllabus of Pius IX.   He further declared that modernism was not merely erroneous but also heretical and he required all members of the clergy to take an Oath Against Modernism.  He established the League of Pius V named for the Grand Inquisitor of the Reformation Era.  It was essentially a spy agency used to report priests and lay persons suspected of modernist sympathies.  He refused to recognize the government of Italy, broke relations with France and denounced trade unions not run by the church.

Benedict XV sought to carry on the war against modernism but he was swallowed up by World War I.  He tried to act the part of a neutral mediator but was ignored by all the belligerents.  He is remembered principally for canonizing Joan of Arc thereby bringing to an end nearly 500 years of disgraceful horse trading involving the Vatican, France and England.  His death in 1922 came at another terrible time for Italy.  The government had switched sides and entered World War I on the side of France and England mainly to try once again to unify the fractious states that had been cobbled together during the Risorgimento.  It suffered massive casualties and was largely ignored at Versailles gaining very little for its efforts.  By 1922, unemployment was rampant and revolution seemed imminent.  Fascist bands were rioting in the streets of all the major cities.  Their Leader, Benito Mussolini, was a rabid anticlerical.  The conclave was split between those who favored a return to the conservatism of Pius IX and a faction that wanted to continue to pursue the somewhat more progressive initiatives of Benedict.  Ultimately the progressives prevailed and elected Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI, on the fourteenth ballot.  As it turned out, he was no progressive but he was as close as the church had come to selecting an empiricist since the pontificate of Alexander VI (1492-1503).

The reign of Pius XI was a schizophrenic nightmare in which the goal was always to negotiate favorable treatment for the church from the government of a madman who despised the church but admitted that its acquiescence was essential to his ability to govern.  He and Mussolini had little or no respect for each other but each felt the need to work together whenever possible.  The Pope, like many other Italians, welcomed the ability of the Fascists to bring order and stability to public affairs.  He negotiated the Lateran Accords of 1929 which validated the government’s seizure of the Papal States in 1860 in turn for a substantial cash payment.  He was however unable to prevent Mussolini’s gradual embrace of Hitler and his racial obsessions.

Pius, like most of his predecessors, was an anti-Semite but not in the Nazi sense of racial inferiority.  He probably believed that Jews were Christ killers who had been abandoned by God and that the ghetto and its disabilities were justified in the name of public virtue and order.  But he certainly did not believe that they should be exterminated.  Much to the chagrin of some of his closest advisors, he gave a speech in 1938 arguing that humanity comprised a single race and as such left no basis for racism of any kind.  But in a memorandum written the same year, he said that although the church had never mistreated the Jews, it had always taken care, “…to rein in the children of Israel and [had taken] protective measures against their evil-doing.”  As proof, he noted that the Good Friday liturgy specifically referred to the Jews as “perfidious.”  His emissary to the Duce, the Jesuit priest Pietro Tacchi Venturi, negotiated an agreement on August 16 under the terms of which the government promised not to impose on the Jews any “…treatment worse than that which was accorded them for centuries and centuries by the popes who hosted them in the Eternal City and in the lands of their temporal domains.”  Several days later, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore romano enumerated these “restrictions and persecutions.”  In turn for this implicit approval of its actions, the government agreed to allow Catholic Action groups to continue their religious works.  There is evidence the Pope was uneasy with the accord but allowed it to go forward just as the government initiated a vast anti-Semitic propaganda campaign reprising the most blatant and fanatical fabrications of historical anti-Semitism.  A government magazine ran an article about the treatment of the Jews in the Jesuit magazine La Civilita cattolica.  It concluded, “…there is no incompatibility between the doctrine of the Church and racism as it has been expressed in Italy.”  Actually there was but the results were the same.

When Pius died on February 10, 1939 there lay on his desk an unpublished encyclical Humani generis unitas (On the unity of the human race).  It contained both themes that had occupied much of his life.  It explicitly condemned racism of every sort and especially the persecution of the Jews that was already underway in Germany and Italy.  At the same time, it denounced the Jews as Christ killers. With a stunning indifference to history and logic, the encyclical proclaimed:

By a mysterious Providence of God, this unhappy people, destroyers of their own nation, whose misguided leaders had called down upon their own heads a Divine malediction, doomed, as it were, to perpetually wander over the face of the earth, were nonetheless never allowed to perish, but have been preserved through the ages into our own time. No natural reason appears to be forthcoming to explain this age-long persistence, this indestructible coherence of the Jewish people.

Responsibility for the encyclical is not clear.  Its principal author was John LaFarge, a distinguished and liberal American Jesuit but it had been delayed and then severely edited by racist “assistants” appointed by Wlodzimierz Ledochowski, the Jesuit Superior General who was an unreconstructed anti-Semite.  In any event, the Pope died knowing his pontificate had been a failure and that he had conceded far more to Mussolini than his objectives had warranted.  He was succeeded by his Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli who took the name Pius XII.

Pacelli was another religious anti-Semite, more dangerous than his predecessor because he had developed a deep respect and admiration for Germany and a good working relationship with Hitler during his tour as the Vatican’s Ambassador to Berlin.  His reign has become even more controversial than that of Pius XI.  During the war, he played the same game of being a neutral advocate for peace and a protector of the Jews of Rome while agreeing that they were a thorn in the side of human history.  He regularly claimed that the Axis and the Allies were equally immoral.  When the Allies captured Rome, he claimed they had done more damage to the city than had the Germans.  In fact, Rome was virtually unscathed by either side.  The archives of his papacy remain secret and historians continue to debate his actions and motivations.  Pope Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2009 and wrote of him as the “savior of Europe’s Jews.”  Savior?  In 2014, Pope Francis announced that the cause of his canonization had been “stalled.”

The conclave that followed the death of Pius XII elected Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli who took the name John XXIII.  The theory of the electors was that his reign would be short and he would undertake no important initiatives.  His reign was indeed short but it became the most important and eventful one in centuries.  Roncalli was the son of peasant sharecroppers, a good man who knew the church was troubled.  He will be most remembered for convening Vatican Council II which produced a remarkable series of schemae related to three objectives:  aggiornamento, the updating of the church, développment, the evolution of doctrine, and ressourcement, a return to original sources especially the Bible.  He also renounced the historical anti-Semitism of the church, most notably in a prayer he wrote begging forgiveness:

We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren.  We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh.  For we knew not what we did.

Two months before he died, John published his last encyclical Pacem in Terris which endorsed a number of progressive ideas that were ultimately promulgated by the Council itself.  Among these were freedom of conscience with respect to religion, the first time in its history that the church had admitted that it might not be the sole source of salvation.  It also unambiguously championed the struggle of women for equality.

John correctly predicted that the next Conclave would elect Giovanni Battista Montini as his successor which it did on June 21, 1963.  He became Pope Paul VI and set about to bring the Council to a conclusion.  He was faithful to its published progressive mandates but was otherwise torn between its liberal bishops and the arch conservative members of the Curia.  He removed the controversial matter of contraception from the council’s purview and added a number of conservative bishops and theologians to the advisory committee on contraception.  Ultimately the committee recommended that the existing policy be changed and suggested how this might be done.  The Curia however persuaded Paul that to change anything would fatally compromise his own power and that of his successors.  The result was the encyclical Humanae Vitae which unequivocally endorsed the status quo and led directly to a mass exodus of priests and lay people from the church and almost total rejection of the papal teaching even by those who remained.  The Pope was shocked and thoroughly disheartened by this response but brought himself to reiterate its mandates on the tenth anniversary of its publication just months before he died.  Many said that the silver lining was that he had not made it an infallible doctrine of faith.

The first conclave of 1978 elected the Patriarch of Venice Albino Luciani who became Pope John Paul I.  There are some who think he may have more open to contraception and more liberal on other issues.  He had refused to attend a tenth anniversary convocation in honor of Humanae Vitae but his reasons for doing so must remain speculative.  He died after only 33 days in office and the second conclave of that year elected Karol Józef Wojtyła, Archbishop of Krakow as Pope John Paul II.  There is no doubt the electors thought they were choosing a man who would reform the Curia and return the church to the progressive mandates of Vatican II.  His candidacy was promoted primarily by Cardinal Franz König of Vienna, the conclave’s most liberal member and one who had denounced Humanae Vitae as a “tragic error.”  They were wrong.  Wojtyła was a heroic figure in Poland who had survived both the Nazis and the Communists.  He was therefore a cold warrior in an era of détente and an absolutist in an era of democracy.  Paul VI had abolished the Oath against Modernism but John Paul II virtually reinstated it in his Apostolic Letter Ad Tuendam Fidem of 1998.  Simultaneously, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the old Holy Office of the Inquisition, issued an instruction with the same title.  It defined a new category of mandatory compliance to ordinary church teachings.

No one doubts that Wojtyła was instrumental in the downfall of Communism although he was only one of many major players.  He also significantly extended the church’s embrace of progressive social policies, most notably in his brilliant 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum.  In it he warned that the Information Revolution then building must not be allowed to create a class of technology have-nots.  At the same time he and his doctrinal chief Cardinal Ratzinger denounced the Latin American priests who promoted Liberation Theology.  Some were silenced while others were excommunicated for promoting what was said to be the Marxist myth of the Church as the People of God.  They took to appointing bishops and cardinals who could be counted on to support the Contras and other oppressive regimes in the region.

In 2000, John Paul led an unprecedented liturgy asking forgiveness for the historic sins of the church including its sins against women which, however, he failed to specify.  Throughout his long reign he was sensitive to the complaints of women but unable to counsel anything but patience and traditional feminine values.  He declared “definitively” that women could not be ordained and he denounced the idea of girls serving as altar servers.  Nor can one ignore the sad posturing that attended his last years.  Vatican spin doctors insisted that that his struggles were a heroic endorsement of his “gospel of life” and that, in fact, he was in full possession of his faculties.  Even in his last hour, he was said to be in control, perfectly lucid and holding bedside meetings with key advisors.  They were, of course, lying.  One could be forgiven for suspecting that the loud demands for immediate sainthood (Subito Sancto!) that disturbed the funeral rites were orchestrated by the Vatican PR apparatus.

John Paul was succeeded by Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, elected by a conclave that still feared to oppose the dead pope’s mandates.  Benedict was a tone deaf intellectual who undertook only minor initiatives of his own.  He prosecuted the church’s war on women, especially nuns, and theologians who argued for doctrinal changes.   He explained the ban on girl altar servers by claiming that their presence would drive boys away and thus dry up the church’s best source of priests.  The blatant circularity of his logic belied his reputation as a philosopher.

The incumbent Pope, Francis, represents another shift toward reform although so far he seems to be limiting himself to the low hanging fruit of administrative and pastoral reforms.  Several times he has insisted that he has no intention of tinkering with established doctrine.  Exactly what constitutes doctrine is of course a matter of definition.  Does it include drawing lines between natural and artificial contraception?  Are skirts shorter than eight inches below the knee heretical?  Is freedom of religion a mortal sin?  Must I believe under the threat of eternal damnation that the female half of the human race is eternally debarred from the priesthood?  Must I accept as perfectly just the statement of God in Exodus 20:5, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation?”  A great deal of nonsense has been preached in the name of dogma.  It is this nonsense that has been rejected by large majorities of Catholics and other Christians and has become the core of the church’s current irrelevance.  Most papal pronouncements, especially those of the last 200 years or so, have been gratuitous accretions on the gospel message, mere exercises in asserting and extending the power of the central administration.  Why else did Pius XII deem it essential to proclaim the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven?  It is an unseemly contest in which each Pope seeks to trump his predecessors.  Will we next see Mary named the Mediatrix of All Graces or even the Co-Redemptrix?  Such theological conceits are both frivolous and narcissistic but they are also dogmatic in nature and will be hard to undo.

Contrary to the Syllabus of Pius IX and contrary to the history of Catholicism since the middle ages, the Pope and the church can and must make an accommodation with modern civilization, indeed they must embrace it.  Small communities—the Amish, the Hassidim and many smaller groups—may reject modern lifestyles but an institution that seeks to be universal cannot swim against the tide of history.  It cannot reject science or condemn culture or censor thought.  It cannot purport to be the sole custodian of truth or the sole keeper of the keys to heaven. 

Notes

I have made no effort to document any of the assertions made in this essay and the reader is cautioned that all are controversial.  I could have done so but my citations themselves would have been controversial.  The case of Pope Pius XII makes the problem obvious.  The literature is enormous even though the Vatican has yet to open the relevant archives to scholarly scrutiny.  Thus, it is not surprising that he has been praised as a saintly Pope and condemned as complicit in the holocaust.

I find it difficult to treat the philosophy of John Calvin with objectivity.  There is no doubt that his views about usury evolved and that his later more progressive understanding was self-serving.  But it is unfair to suggest he was a hypocrite on the subject.  Certainly he was a paragon of virtue compared to the Catholic hierarchy which forbade its flock from charging interest but were happy to borrow at interest from Jewish bankers.

With regard to my treatment of  Pope Pius XI, I wish to acknowledge a debt to Professor David I. Kertzer and his remarkable book The Pope and Mussolini:  The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Random House 2014).  He was among the first scholars to gain access to the Vatican archives covering the period and the book must be regarded as definitive.  The quotations of Vatican material from the period are, presumably, Kertzer’s translations.