But more and more Catholics are seeing through the knee-jerk reactions that have brought Rome more and more power and only worsened the Church’s pathological condition. No one who has even the slightest idea of the real history of the Church can either ignore its flaws, ruptures and cracks, deny the many contradictions and inconsistencies in its history, or gloss over and excuse them.
Conversely, however, the question arises: can such things really be reformed and transcended? I admit that I have become increasingly sceptical, not just in view of the current, lamentable situation in the Catholic Church, but also in view of the epic upheavals and paradigm changes that mark the history of all three Abrahamic religions, and particularly the history of Christianity, which I have analysed in two decades of laborious research. Neither Catholic leaders nor church historians have taken seriously the consequences of such shifts for our present-day Church.
I will return later to the topic of paradigm change, those epochal changes in the overall mindset and way of doing things that, in the history of the Church, have led to the formation of separate confessional traditions and churches. But here, I want to highlight at least briefly some of the problems facing the Church as a result of such changes.
Anyone who knows the Church’s history will ask themselves: can one seriously expect a Church so deeply rooted in a Medieval paradigm (‘P III’ in my terminology – see Editor’s Note) to embark on a new course in the future? Can one expect this of a Church which has largely forgotten the original Jewish–Christian paradigm of the Apostolic Church (‘P I’) and which only selectively accepts the early Christian–Hellenist paradigm of the first millennium (‘P II’)? Can one expect an adequate response to the current problems facing the Church from a Church that sees both the paradigm of the Protestant Reformation (‘P IV’) and the paradigm of Enlightenment and Modernity (‘P V’) only as a falling away from the true path of Christianity? How can such a Medieval, Counter-Reformation, anti-modernist Church manage the transition to a new, more peaceful, more just, ecumenical paradigm (‘P VI’) appropriate to the twenty-first century? Given the fact that, at the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church only partly managed to integrate the Reformation and modern paradigms and that currently a restoration of the pre-Vatican II paradigm is well under way, is such a Church at all capable of steering a path into the future that allows it both to preserve the original message of Christianity and express it anew?
And this brings us to the crucial point; the challenge to reform is addressed not only to the Catholic Church but to every church that considers itself Christian: the Protestant and the Orthodox churches are likewise not sanctuaries immune to similar criticism. The crucial question is always the same: Does one’s church faithfully incorporate and reflect the original Christian message, the Gospel, which to all intents and purposes is Jesus Christ himself, to whom each church appeals as its ultimate authority? Or is it mainly a church system with a Christian label, be it Early Christian/Orthodox, Medieval/Roman, Protestant/Reformed or Modernist/Enlightened?
Without a concrete and consequent return to the historical Jesus Christ, to his message, his behaviour and his fate (as I described it in my book On Being a Christian [1977]), a Christian church – whatever its name – will have neither true Christian identity nor relevance for modern human beings and society. For Catholics, that means that all the many Roman Catholic institutions, dogmas, doctrines, ceremonies and activities must be measured according to the criterion of whether they are ‘Christian’ in the strict sense of the word or, at the very least, not ‘anti-Christian’, in short, whether or not they are in agreement with the Gospel.
This is what so many people in the Church are hoping for when they say to themselves: our Church must become more Christian again, must once again model itself on the Gospel, on Jesus Christ himself. And to ensure that such hopes are not dismissed as an unrealistic theological agenda, I want to illustrate this point so crucial for the survival of the Church with an – admittedly drastic – image.
An Ominous Snapshot
Few scenes in the recent history of the Catholic Church have troubled me as much as the one that took place on 8 April 2005 in St Peter’s Square in Rome. The occasion was the opulent funeral for Pope John Paul II, staged with a degree of pomp and circumstance that would have befitted a Roman emperor. As always, the camera work had been pre-arranged between the Vatican and Italian television, ensuring that the ceremony was impressively broadcast to an audience of many millions all over the globe. During the ceremony, Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dean of the College of Cardinals, and vested in festive crimson, came down the steps and took his place next to the deliberately chosen plain wooden coffin. Next to the coffin – placed there equally deliberately – stood a huge crucifix realistically representing the cruelly tortured body of the suffering and crucified Christ. I could not imagine a greater contrast. On the one side, one saw the opulently clad head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern name for the notorious, former Sanctum Officium of the Inquisition, which, with its authoritarian teachings and secret inquisitorial proceedings, has for centuries been responsible for the suffering of innumerable people within the Church and which to this day, more than any other papal institution, embodies the concentrated power of the new Imperium Romanum – a point underscored by the presence of 200 guests of state from all over the world, including, in the first row, the family of the war-mongering president of the United States, George W. Bush. On the other side, one saw the Man of Sorrows from Nazareth, who in his life had preached peace, non-violence and love, and who represents a last court of appeal for all those unjustly persecuted, tortured or suffering innocently.
Involuntarily, one is reminded of the figure of Christ in the famous chapter on the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. According to the tale, Jesus Christ has returned to sixteenth-century Spain and has been incarcerated by the Grand Inquisitor of Seville with the intention of burning him at the stake as a heretic because he dared to bring freedom to humankind, a freedom that, in the mind of the Grand Inquisitor, human beings are utterly incapable of living. Confronting Jesus, the Inquisitor demands to know: ‘Why have you come to get in our way?’ In response, the prisoner answers not a single word; instead, at the end of the Inquisitor’s reproaches, he gently kisses the wizened old man on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips. Touched by this incomprehensible gesture, the Grand Inquisitor, instead of pronouncing sentence, shows him the door, opens it and sends him away, saying: ‘Go and do not come back … do not come back at all … ever, ever!’
But Jesus does come back – again and again. I have often thought how easy it would be to transpose this story from gloomy sixteenth-century Seville to the friendlier Vatican of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The subject of the freedom of Christians is as topical as ever. And this perhaps constitutes ‘the fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism’, as Dostoyevsky conjectured when he had the Inquisitor say to Jesus: ‘It was all told to you by the Pope and so it is now all of it in the Pope’s possession, and now we should appreciate it if you would stay away altogether and refrain from interfering, for the time being at any rate.’ But then, to many people’s astonishment and dismay, Ratzinger – the head of the Congregation that today, although no less authoritarian than its predecessor, uses more subtle methods of repression – was himself elected pope. In an initial charm offensive, he presented himself as a humane and charitable shepherd, but time and again he revealed his old face as the merciless head of the Inquisition. And after a time, many people noted how Pope Benedict XVI was following a disastrous course not unlike that pursued by George W. Bush. It was no coincidence that, at Bush’s invitation, Benedict happily celebrated his 81st birthday in the White House, together with the autocratic president: both men, Bush and