Such a development of ‘popular Catholicism’ is not surprising, considering the restoration course of the hierarchy described above. In the last few years, numerous Catholics, including wrongfully penalized and marginalized theologians such as Eugen Drewermann and Gotthold Hasenhüttl, Matthew Fox and many others, have had enough of appealing in vain against the course charted by the church leadership and have left the Church: not, indeed, the Catholic community of faith as such, but the public corporation known as the Roman Catholic Church, the community of persons paying the church tax or otherwise conforming to church discipline. People who have left the Church in protest against the German church tax include the Freiburg professor for church law Hartmut Zapp and the Regensburg engineer Dr Andreas Janker. This can set a precedent and should serve as a warning to the church hierarchy – it is understandable that if you have lost your faith in the Church you do not want to continue paying the church tax.
What is more ominous is that a much larger number of Catholics have distanced themselves emotionally from the Church. They remain nominally Catholic, but they have lost all interest in the Church as an institution. I share the assessment of Thomas von Mitschke-Collandes:
Many church members are reading up on how to leave the Church. This type of crisis is unique and unprecedented. Things have not yet calmed down. The numbers of people leaving the Church in 2010 could explode.
And the numbers did indeed explode.
In addition to the loss of faith in the Church among Catholics, we are seeing a growing hostility to the Church within secular society. All too many of our contemporaries feel the recent revelations of abuse have simply confirmed their view of the institutional Church as an unregenerate and power-hungry church hierarchy; they are convinced that local parishes and society in general have suffered immensely from the authoritarianism and dogmatism of church teaching, from the climate of fear the Church has generated, the sexual neuroses and the general refusal to enter into dialogue.
Some Catholics will of course object. Has not Rome recently ‘asked for forgiveness’ for its failures, its mistakes? Yes, but, as pope, Ratzinger did not personally admit his own wrongful involvement in the cover-up, and there were no practical consequences for the present and the future. The cases of sexual abuse and their cover-up have confirmed many people’s impression that the church administration and the Inquisition continue to create new victims and new suffering.
It cannot be denied that hardly any major institution in Western democratic countries treats dissenters and critics within its own ranks so inhumanely. And none of them discriminates so strongly against women, for example by prohibiting birth control, forbidding priests to marry, by prohibiting the ordination of women. No other institution polarizes society and politics so strongly with its rigorously divisive positions on issues such as homosexuality, stem cell research, abortion, assisted suicide and the like. And while Rome no longer dares to proclaim formally infallible doctrines, it still envelops all of its doctrinal pronouncements with an aura of infallibility, as though the pope’s words were a direct expression of God’s will or Christ’s voice.
Given this situation, it comes as no surprise that the more or less benevolent indifference to the Church that began some fifty years ago has in many cases slipped over into outright hostility, cynicism or even open enmity. Some would like to facilitate the demise of this terminally ill Church, to offer ‘assisted suicide’ so to speak. The media are continually serving up topics from the Church’s ‘criminal history’ calculated to appeal to a mass audience, many of which had been described decades ago in the books of the formerly Catholic author Karlheinz Deschner. While we cannot deny that such portrayals may be correct, it is all too easy to forget that a similar method would make it equally possible to write a sensationalist criminal history of Germany, France, Britain or the USA – to say nothing of all the monstrous crimes committed by modern atheists in the name of the goddess of reason, the nation, the race or the party.
However, even in modern-day secular France, Voltaire’s hate-filled dictum about the Catholic Church ‘Écrasez l’infâme’ (‘Crush the infamous thing’) – no longer finds expression in overt persecution; instead, there and elsewhere, it leads simply to the marginalization of the Church. The European Parliament caused quite a stir when the majority refused to include any reference to God in the preamble of the European Constitution; an understandable decision, given the numerous non-believers and believers of other faiths in Europe. But the unwillingness to include any mention of Christianity at all as constituting part of Europe’s cultural heritage alongside the legacies of antiquity and the Enlightenment is symptomatic of the growing malaise, and is incomprehensible in view of the undeniable epochal cultural achievements and humanitarian contributions of the churches in the past. Another example of such marginalization is the advertising campaign on London buses sponsored by militant atheists (admittedly in response to the threats of hell-fire flung at atheists by Christian fundamentalists): ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Often, such reactions simply mirror the Church’s own scaremongering, un-evangelical pronouncements, and the Church would do better to reflect on them critically as warning symptoms, instead of simply rejecting them out of hand.
A Case History of the Church’s Pathology
The illness of the Catholic Church did not begin yesterday; it started long ago. The Church’s medical history is so old and complex that a detailed anamnesis (Greek: ‘remembrance’) is required. It will be necessary to enquire into the preliminary events leading up to the outbreak of the illness. Just as the doctor, psychotherapist or counsellor attempts, in conversation with the patient, to uncover significant moments of the progress of an illness, so the theologian and historian can discover root causes of the present illness in the history of the Church’s ailing body. However, for this anamnesis he or she will need a non-ideological, carefully diagnostic approach to history.
In any event, the optimistic, harmonious interpretation of church history created by theologians in the nineteenth century is not at all helpful for a serious diagnosis and therapy, although this, of course, is the version preferred and put forward by the church authorities to immunize themselves against all criticism that might suggest pathological developments. According to this version, the Church’s 2,000-year history represents an organic growth of teachings, laws, liturgy and piety. This view allows the Church to justify novel Roman dogmas which in fact were only enforced in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century: the doctrines that the pope enjoys immediate and absolute authority over the Church in all its parts (universal jurisdiction), and that he enjoys guaranteed freedom from error when he solemnly pronounces on matters of faith and morals (infallibility), are specific examples. Further examples are two doctrines on the Virgin Mary, namely her freedom from sin from the moment of her conception (Immaculate Conception), and her bodily assumption into heaven at the end of her life (Assumption). And at the same time, this harmonizing approach to church history makes it possible to explain and take for granted the personal foibles and systematic abuses of power on the part of iniquitous holders of office. According to this approach, the Church is an enormous healthy tree in a state of continual growth, development and refinement, even though it occasionally carries dead branches and discards rotten fruit.
Such an idealized historical account can serve as a palliative, helping to make the disease of the Church psychologically endurable, but it does not face up to the causes of the illness. Often it simply serves merely as a placebo, as pseudo-medication, useful because of its calming effect on pious churchgoers and rebellious reformers. Those who share the lopsided view of the history of the Catholic Church as an organic process of maturation are unable and unwilling to take note of obvious abnormal, pathological