On the other hand, the conservative wing of the German episcopate lost one of its most outspoken spokesmen in April 2010, when Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg was forced to resign under a cloud after a string of press reports exposed not only homosexual and alcohol abuse among his notoriously conservative seminarians but also a long list of personal failings, including child-beating, alcohol abuse, financial malfeasance, abuse of authority, etc., going back as far as his earlier years as parish priest and later as bishop in Eichstätt and Augsburg. When attempts to deny the charges and squash the reporting failed, the German bishops and even Pope Benedict XVI dropped him like a hot potato. His subsequent struggle for rehabilitation revealed a complete loss of any sense of reality. (For a summary of this sordid affair see the article by Anna Arco in The Catholic Herald, Friday 2 July 2010.) Statistics indicate the gravity of the crisis in his diocese: whereas in 2009 some 7,000 people left the Church in his diocese, as a consequence of the sordid affair surrounding his retirement the figure rose to 12,000.
In the wake of these recent scandals, resistance to any form of dialogue or reform by the conservative bishops in Germany seems to be weakening. Still, too many bishops hope to follow Rome’s example and sit out the deep-seated church crisis as though it were a mere media smear campaign; with the blessing of the pope, they continue to rule as before. By acting in this manner, however, they are only making their Church more and more sick.
Unfortunately, in other countries, for example in the United States, the situation created by the papal policy of replacing independent-minded liberal bishops by line-toeing conservatives has produced similar disastrous results. In the words of the distinguished Jesuit Thomas J. Reese (see his report in the Washington Post, 16 November 2010), the Conference of Catholic Bishops in America has increasingly ‘tilted to the right’. The former vice-president and current president of the American Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, now plays a particularly nefarious role. Already as a leading member of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), he had successfully edged out opposition to the new slavishly word-for-word translation of the Latin Mass into English. Cardinal George has also led the attack on President Obama’s healthcare reform, claiming it would fund abortions, even though the Catholic Health Association disputes this claim.
In previous years, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops had had a number of outstanding presidents such as Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago, who worked in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. But, under the bishops appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the direction taken by the Bishops’ Conference has shifted radically to the right. Contrary to previous custom, these bishops successfully prevented the moderate vice-president of the conference from being elected the next president. Instead of reflecting the full range of Catholic social teaching, the American bishops now focus their attention almost exclusively on two moral questions: abortion and gay marriage. Ignoring the social issues emphasized by the Democratic Party, they have no scruples about supporting the Republican obstruction of all policies of the Obama administration. Like so many episcopal conferences, the American episcopate overlooks the need for fundamental changes in the crisis-ridden American Church, changes that would halt the general decline and end the self-chosen retreat into a ghetto situation.
In short, there is little or no hope that the illness affecting the Church will manage to heal itself without a radical turnaround on the part of the episcopate.
Diagnosis and Therapy
Given that the illness of the Church is hard to ignore, one might expect that within the worldwide Catholic episcopate, which together with the pope is responsible for the direction and ‘cure’ (possibly also the curative surgery) of the Church, there would be a widespread public debate about the principles which must guide such a radical cure, i.e. a debate which would go beyond mere superficial comments about mandatory celibacy and the like.
But we have not yet reached that point. In 2010, I had the same disappointing experience that Karl Rahner had had decades before, when he waited in vain for a response to his (confidential) 1970 letter to the German bishops. In 2010, I wrote an open letter to the bishops of the world. Copies were duly sent to each bishop, and the letter was widely publicized in the media worldwide and was endorsed by many readers. Not a single one of the approximately 5,000 bishops, some of whom I know personally, dared to answer, either in public or in private. Not only was there no positive reaction, but also no negative reaction, only complete and utter silence. Later on, I will attempt to explain the reasons for this silence.
Admittedly, people will ask me: what can individual bishops or theologians do, considering how gravely ill this Church is? I can only answer for myself: I am not a prophet or a miracle healer and I never wished to become a political agitator. So what can I do – I, who have always viewed myself as a professor of theology, philosophy and religious studies? I can, perhaps, offer services similar to those of a doctor or physician. Better yet – as suggested in the introduction to this book – those of a therapist who can help a critically ill patient, in this case the Church, not by offering superficial explanations and excuses but by providing a fundamental diagnosis that goes to the roots of the illness and by suggesting an effective therapy which will contribute a little to the patient’s recovery.
• The correct diagnosis (Greek: diágnosis = ‘discernment’): there must be no trivialization of the symptoms (‘It’s not as bad as it looks’) but no alarmist dramatics either (‘There is no cure!’). Instead, what is needed is an analysis of the history of the disease based on historical facts, a real pathogenesis which explains precisely how this centuries-old institution, the Catholic Church, got into such a lamentable condition. The medical term for this is aetiology: the search for the aitía, or cause.
• Effective therapies (Greek: therapeía = ‘service, care, medical treatment’): what is necessary is not therapies which merely treat the symptoms or isolated aspects of the disease; antipyretic medication alone will not get the Church back on its feet. What is required is a therapy that goes after the root causes, one which penetrates through all the layers of forgetting, repression and taboo to reach the true causes of the disease and fight the pathogenic factors or processes at work. Maybe even surgery will be indicated in certain areas to root out specific cancers.
At this point, many people will probably demur that this will take too much time and effort and is not worth the trouble.
Medically Assisted Suicide or Reanimation?
No doubt, many people are of the opinion that the Catholic Church is irremediably, terminally ill and that it does not deserve to be saved. They believe that it cannot be reanimated. Recently, this erosion of faith in the Church’s ongoing vitality has even begun to affect traditional Catholic circles. It has become increasingly clear that the number of people who consider the Church necessary – or even useful – has continually decreased since the peak of public approval at the time of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), and under Benedict XVI it dropped to an all-time low. The results of significant surveys conducted in a number of Western countries show that this decline is not a development restricted to the ‘recalcitrant’ German-speaking countries.
In