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    Why the Catholic Church Will Not Save Itself

    Every month, every week, the Catholic Church's scandal seems to deepen. Andrew Sullivan wants the Pope to resign. Christopher Hitchens wants the Pope arrested. Peggy Noonan has a brilliant column detailing the Catholic hierarchy's inability to grasp the problem and calling for "new blood" in the leadership. These are all reasonable desires. But none of that will happen.

    The Catholic Church, by which I mean the Vatican hierarchy that governs the Catholic Church, is not going to become more accountable because they are faced with widespread public pressure. It is not simply that the current leadership happens to be poor at accountability. It is not the the Vatican organization hasn't caught up to modern management ideas about accountability. It is that the Church leadership considers its lack of accountability a core value. The Vatican believes in being unaccountable. It does not view unaccountability as an obstacle to its mission, or even as a tool on behalf of its mission. It views unaccountability as fundamental to the mission.

    Part of this is that the Church is genuinely meant to be counter-cultural, to be in opposition to the secular world and its values. In practice, it hasn't always been so; the Middle Ages, when the Church was at the height of its secular power, was also a period when the Church was most in thrall to the secular values of the feudal society around it. (The Church did not oppose the medieval class system, for example, but actively promoted it.) Maybe it has never been entirely so. But the point is that the Church is meant to speak for divine and transcendent values rather than those of the historical moment. The Church is supposed to speak for Jesus's teachings, no matter how those teachings happen to poll. And they're supposed to stand by those teachings no matter what any king, senate, dictator or morning newspaper thinks about it.

    From the Church leadership's perspective, making the Church more responsive to outside influences would represent an abdication of responsibility, and a failure. They see themselves as charged with preserving the Church's independent authority; they are terrified of leaving behind a Church that cannot stand up for its genuine spiritual values when those values are unpopular.

    But of course, being answerable to no other Earthly authority is itself a terrible moral temptation, and the Vatican hierarchy has succumbed badly. When one is only answerable to God, it's all too easy and too pleasurable to mistake any number of one's own inner voices for the voice of divine guidance ... and if the God inside is always telling us what we want to hear, isn't that just a sign of our own faithful service? And soon enough, you have a horror show like the Church's handling of pedophiles, and a Church so deeply committed to its own authority that it defends that authority instead of the religious values, such as the protection of the weak and defenseless, that are at the heart of its mission.

    The focus on preserving its own authority has misled the Church badly in the past, too, making some Catholic leaders far too comfortable with traditionalist and autocratic political structures that seem to share the Vatican's institutional means, even when those structures serve distinctly non-Christian ends. The Church's record of support for democracy in 19th-century Europe is depressing. In the twentieth century, groups like Opus Dei, which largely incubated in Franco's Spain, have sometimes seemed more attracted to top-down political arrangements than they seem concerned with the content of those arrangements. And nothing demonstrates the current Pope's clinical wrongheadedness than his dogged defenses of Pope Pius XII. Pius XII is rightfully an example of Church leadership yielding too much, and sacrificing too much of its voice in fear of political pressure; Mussolini and Hitler surely required full-throated opposition. But instead of seeing Pius XII as an accommodationist who harmed the Church, Benedict XVI makes it a point of principle to stand up for Pius, because standing up against outside critics is (to Benedict) defending the Church's autonomy. When criticizing a past Pope for accommodating fascism seems a greater evil than a Pope accommodating fascism, one has lost one's way entirely. And because Benedict recognizes no authority that will speak to him aloud, there is no one to set him on the right path again.

    And even if this particular Pope stepped down, there is no one left to replace him that does not share his views. John Paul II did a very thorough job, over his long papacy, of filling the episcopate and the Vatican hierarchy with profoundly authoritarian conservatives like himself, of whom Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, is only the most visible example. John Paul II and his successor shaped the Church organization methodically and thoroughly. Thirty years on, there are no liberals left, and frankly no moderates. The central Vatican agenda since 1978 has been to undo the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, with its emphasis on modernization and its promise to include laypeople in decision-making. The chief goal of the last two papacies, and of all the Church officials appointed by those papacies, has been to "free" the Church of from modern and popular influences. The thoroughly admirable Hans Kung, with whom Father Joseph Ratzinger once taught, has a beautiful summation of this campaign and its consequences here. (h/t Sullivan) At this point, there's no one left in the Church hierarchy who isn't motivated by the conviction that the Church has already become too liberal and open and accommodating.

    If Benedict XVI stepped down tomorrow, he would be replaced by a Benedict XVII with just the same disastrous and wrong-headed view of the world. The College of Cardinals who would be charged with electing a successor are now a college of little Ratzingers themselves, and would choose one of their own Ratzinger kind. They aren't going to get it. They would consider getting it as a failing and a sin. It will take another long ecclesiastical generation, at least, for the Vatican to get it, as the "new blood" Noonan longs for rises up the bureaucratic ranks. Even that new blood will be unlikely to gain promotion except through bad faith, as a generation that understands the Church's errors conceals that understanding from powerful elders who are committed to those errors as guiding principles. There's a long road left to walk, and no guarantee of walking it straight.

    Comments

    Hatred is hatred in any form whether it is Hans Kung or Andrew Sullivan writing and sounding as if they are Catholic.  To be Catholic is a call to love and be loved by God and in turn, love your neighbor.  This is what Benedict preaches-God.  He doesn't preach counter culture.  He preaches Christ as he was, is and always will be. It's what Popes do - it's what Pius did.  Popes are political as all things are political but their main job is to "strengthen their brothers" in the faith.  And, so I hope that the next Pope will do the same.  And, I hope you and others will love as well.


    Jesus preached counter culture - that was one of the reasons he was killed. Throughout history, Popes rarely just "preach Christ." They are the leaders of a powerful institution that has and always will seek to gain power over individuals. Look at what the Popes did against the Medici families and the rest of Europe. How can anyone study church history and not see that Popes, like the rest of us, are flawed and may not be golden conduit of the voice of God, but rather political leaders doing what political leaders do?

    Opus Dei supported Franco because the other side was killing all the Catholics. Which side would you support?


    The correct answer for a Catholic is Jesus, but you didn't list him as an option. Unless you're saying Jesus supports fascism instead of killing? I'd assume he would support neither.

    I've thought about writing a post called, "What if the Catholic Church Sold Cars?" detailing how it would handle a faulty brake problem. Can't quite make it work in my head though.

    What boggles my mind is less the Church's response--all large institutions try to protect their authorities--but that of the laity. Imagine how the response would differ if some national charter school organization that had been caught covering up child molestation accusations and shuffling around the perpetrators to different schools. J.H.C., would there be hell to be pay. The organization would be sued, prosecuted, fined, jailed, broken up, chewed up, spit out, and defecated on.

    But not the Catholic Church. I leave you with this gem. In 1977, when Miami tried to pass an ordinance to protect homosexuals from employment discrimination, the Archdiocese of Miami objected on the ground that that allowing homosexuals to be hired as teachers was like letting "a fox in the chicken coop."


    Good point, Genghis, but ... which laity?

    A lot of the laity have already voted with their feet. Don't trust the Church? Don't go to church. So the anger has already been priced into the system. Then you have a core of hard-liners (see above) who identify entirely with the hierarchy and its authority, to the extent that Father Hans Kung is imagined as somehow not really Catholic. And you have a bunch of laypeople who are angry and discontent, but don't see any great way to bring that discontent to bear on an organization that's so top-down and unresponsive.

    The most interesting lay organization is Voice of the Faithful, which started in Greater Boston, and which speaks up for a greater role in Church governance for the laity. (The same greater role that the laity was promised by Vatican II, forty years ago.) The Boston Archdiocese, true to form, reacted with hostility. But the VoF is still alive and making its case.


    though commendable in most of what you write, this borderline exercise in rhetorics is not unlike the one that confuses freedom of religion (the justifiable demand for freedom for the adherents to a religious belief) with freedom FOR religious institutions (the unjustifiable demand for freedom of the institution to be above the law).

    let's begin with unaccountability - the church IS accountable, but to a moral and spiritual credo OF ITS OWN CALLING! raping children, letting people die instead of using precautionary measures... these are at the very least complicate with crimes against the rules created by the church itself. if not accountability to the law, they are at the very least accountable to god; and this - by in admission or willingness to do penance - is the sin of the church. Instead of punishing the perpetrators, they thought first and foremost of the institution.

    2nd, pius12 - no again. the church's defense of this collaborator has much deeper implications. if he is declared a saint, his deeds must have been saintly. his cooperation with the forces of evil justifiable (we already have those saying he was silent so more wouldn't die; how ridiculous is that? how many more could have died?). moreso, some day, some SSPXist may decide that killing the jews was justified, because a saint had a hand in doing it. all you first need to do is say that it wasn't 6 mil jews but 6 mi;l poles, and you've already wiped most of the iceberg of evil away - no longer genocide, now simply a very costly act of war.

    fortunately, i do not agree entirely with the conclusion either. As mr. allen has shown, the church awaits its future in the east - not the west. asians and africans have less to lose by facing up to the church's past since they are not truly partners in its sins, as is the difference between european jews and north-african jews (the latter who have traditionally taken a much more user-friendly and less racist approach to the religion's edicts). the problems facing christians in these parts of the globe (unluckily for them, luckily for the rest of humanity) transcend petty inside politics, considerations of history's future, how to eradicate the jews, PR & image, the INSTITUTE, etc. etc. ad nauseum. i truly believe that the church under an african leader would show a less fascist face. obviously the college would at first be unsympathetic, but what JP & B16 wrought, someone else can begin to un-wrought.,,

     


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