In implementing his anti-Council policies, Benedict XVI, like his own predecessor, enjoyed the full support of the Roman Curia, a Curia in which those persons who support the Council have long since been isolated or eliminated. In the years that have passed since the Council, a highly efficient propaganda machine has been set up to serve the Roman cult of personality. Modern mass media (television, the internet, YouTube and now Twitter) are being used systematically, professionally and successfully to promote the vested interests of the Curia. When you watch the huge Masses at the Vatican, or the gatherings surrounding papal visits and journeys, you could be excused for believing that all is in order in the Catholic Church. But the question we must ask is: what is the substance behind this glittering façade? On the local level, things look quite different.
Decline of Church Institutions
I do not, of course, underestimate the immense amount of good work done all over the world at the local level, especially in individual parishes and in local institutions, the countless pastoral and social contributions of innumerable priests and lay people, men and, above all, women; time and again I have met these people, whose work is a true testimony to their faith. Where would the Catholic Church be today without the untiring commitment of such people? But who has thanked them? So many of them feel they are hindered rather than helped by ‘those up there’, by policies, theology and discipline formulated in Rome. Complaints are pouring in from all over the world about the decline of traditional church structures built up over years or even centuries.
I, too, have been affected personally. I refer to the drastic reduction in pastoral care not merely in the university city of Tübingen and in the entire diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart but also in my native Swiss town of Sursee near Lucerne, where I return every year in the summer and where I continue to celebrate the Eucharist. But the joy I experience in celebrating the liturgy is diminishing year on year. What I learned in August 2010 provides a saddening snapshot of the current state of affairs.
For centuries, the town parish of Sursee always had at least four ordained priests, the so-called ‘Vierherren’. Now, however, it no longer enjoys the services of even a single ordained priest. Instead, it is headed by the lay theologian and deacon Markus Heil, who would make an excellent priest; however, because he is married, he cannot be ordained. And, therefore, although he and his team do an excellent job, in order to be able to celebrate the Eucharist they must fall back on the services offered by retired priests – for as long as such retired priests are still available. In Switzerland, too, celibate clergymen are a vanishing species. Nobody knows how long it will be possible to continue to offer pastoral care or regular Eucharistic services.
The Capuchin friars, important providers of pastoral care since the early seventeenth century, have had to close their monastery in Sursee and sell the site; the same has happened in many other places due to the lack of new blood. New recruits to the diocesan clergy are equally rare.
In nearby Lucerne, the theological faculty (and the kernel out of which the university developed in the last century) now fears for its survival. Because of the declining numbers of students, some politicians have proposed that it be merged with the Catholic Theological Faculty of Fribourg or with the Protestant Theological Faculty in Zurich and that the medical school should be expanded in its place. The fact is that, in Switzerland today, there are simply too few students wanting to study Catholic theology and too many centres offering theological training.
This is a typical example of the damage that can be done by a single bishop pursuing the reactionary policies of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The responsibility for this sad state of affairs lies in no small measure, in my view, with Kurt Koch, the former Bishop of Basle, who became extremely unpopular with both the clergy and the laity in his diocese because of his hard-line Roman views, his opposition to established Swiss laws on church–state relations which ensure strong lay participation in church life, and finally the way in which he handled a five-year conflict with one of the parishes of his diocese after he had arbitrarily dismissed its pastor. Thus it came as no surprise that, at the end of July 2010, Koch hastily abandoned his diocese, announcing his resignation while sojourning in Rome. In recompense, the pope soon appointed him head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, and in connection with his ecumenical activities as a Vatican official I will have reason to come back to him later.
The situation in my home diocese is typical of many other dioceses all over the world. Not long ago, our Sursee pastor wrote to me that it is
noticeable how many people have already emotionally and mentally written off our Church … Perhaps we too should note how a mood of resignation is taking hold within ourselves. This resignation is rooted in the feeling that, whatever we do, nothing will change.
The gradual withering away of the Church continues apace in other places of the world as well. Since the Council, tens of thousands of priests have abandoned their ministry, mainly because of the obligation to live in celibacy. Similarly, the number of people in religious orders, nuns, clerics and lay brothers, has dropped sharply, and the pool of intellectually and emotionally qualified potential candidates for both the secular priesthood and the religious life is shrinking alarmingly. Resignation and frustration are spreading among the clergy as well as among the most active lay people. Many of them feel that they have been abandoned in their difficulties, and they suffer intensely from the Church’s evident incapacity for reform.
More and more places of worship, seminaries and presbyteries now stand empty. In many countries parishes are being amalgamated into large ‘pastoral units’ contrary to the wishes of their parishioners, simply because there are not enough priests to serve the separate parishes. The priests in these new conglomerate parishes are so completely overburdened with work that they rarely know many of their parishioners personally and have little time for real pastoral ministry. Such changes only simulate an attempt at Church reform.
Canon 515 of the Code of Canon Law gives every bishop the unlimited right to establish parishes and to abolish them again. This canonical law was recently cited by the highest court of the Roman Curia in support of bishops such as Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, when ten parishes that he had abolished appealed to the Holy See – of course, to no avail! Since then, the expression doing the rounds in the United States, and elsewhere, is: ‘No parish is safe.’ The parish churches may be safe from robbers, but they are certainly not safe from those higher up in the Church who insist on economizing. The hierarchy prefers to deny the faithful a close-to-home celebration of the Holy Eucharist – the central element of the New Testament religious community – for the sake of maintaining the ‘even holier’ Medieval obligation of celibacy. This allows the Church not only to save on priests but also to save money, of course. Thus, Bishop Richard Lennon closed 27 parishes in his diocese of Cleveland, Ohio and announced plans to merge an additional 41 into only 18 new parishes. These affected parishes also appealed, but given the stubbornness of the bureaucrats in Rome it was once again merely a waste of time and effort. In many places in Germany such parish mergers are being denounced as a ‘persecution of Christians from above’.
I suspect that a theologian like Joseph Ratzinger, who has lived at the Vatican court for more than three decades, is not able to understand how sore my heart is when I see only a few dozen of the faithful attending Sunday church services in my home parish where, in earlier decades, I used to see a full congregation. But this is not, as Rome repeatedly insists, merely the result of increased secularization but is also the consequence of fatal developments within the Church for which Rome must be held responsible.
Many places still have active Catholic youth groups and a functioning community