The Failed Restoration Policies of Two Popes
It never ceases to astonish me how even secular contemporaries who do not consider themselves part of the Church and aesthetically minded intellectuals allow themselves to be dazzled by the return of Baroque splendour and impressively staged papal liturgies used by Rome to demonstrate the presence of a strong Church and the undisputed authority of the pope. All this religious magnificence, however, cannot disguise the fact that the restoration policies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI failed in the areas that count the most. All the papal appearances, journeys and teachings have not been able to change the opinions of most Catholics on controversial questions or to convince them to toe the Roman line. Even papal youth rallies, attended for the most part by conservative charismatic groups and promoted by traditionalist organizations, have failed to slow the numbers of people leaving the Church or to increase substantially the number of candidates for the priesthood. Even in the diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, commonly considered to be broad-minded and appreciative of grassroots initiatives, 17,169 deeply disappointed Catholics, i.e. 0.9 per cent of the total membership, left the Church between January and mid-November 2010.
This progressive erosion of the Church, sketched above, has accelerated over the past three decades. However, despite all complaints and lamentations, the process is largely accepted as irreversible and irremediable, reflecting the will of God (or perhaps only of the pope?). Only relatively recently has the world at large been awakened by the growing numbers of abhorrent sexual scandals, in particular the abuse of thousands of children and adolescents by Catholic clergymen in the United States, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom and other countries. And the revelation of how these cases of abuse have been handled by the hierarchy has resulted in an overall crisis of leadership and confidence, the like of which has never been seen before in the Church.
We cannot ignore the fact that the system devised to conceal clerical sexual misbehaviour and then set in motion all over the world was led by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from 1981 until 2005. Under John Paul II, reports of cases were already being collected by the Roman Congregation under the cloak of strict confidentiality. As late as 18 May 2001, Ratzinger sent a formal letter (Epistula de delictis gravioribus) to all bishops. According to this letter, cases of abuse were to be classed as secretum pontificium – a pontifical secret. Thus, those who made the abuse public – rather than the abusers themselves – were threatened with the most dire church sanctions. That letter has still not been retracted.
Many people rightly demand a personal mea culpa on the part of the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger. But, regrettably, he missed the opportunity to do so in Holy Week of 2010. Instead, in an unprecedented and embarrassing ceremony on Easter Sunday, staged before the beginning of the solemn Easter Mass, he let Cardinal Angelo Sodano, formerly Cardinal Secretary of State and Dean of the College of Cardinals, attest to his innocence urbi et orbi. This scandalous ceremony was all the more shameful because Sodano himself had come under public criticism for his personal embroilment in the scandal. Although Benedict XVI has repeatedly voiced his regret about the abuse, he has remained silent about his own personal responsibility for its cover-up, just as many other bishops have remained silent about their own similar roles. Not even in his recent book Light of the World did Ratzinger offer any comment on his role in the affair. This is not a mere coincidence; it is part and parcel of the overall structure.
The Transition from a ‘Wintry’ Church to a Gravely Ill Church
In an interview given shortly before his death in 1984 and later published in Faith in a Wintry Season: Conversations and Interviews with Karl Rahner (1990), Karl Rahner, the great Jesuit theologian of the Council, described the desolate state the Church had fallen into as existing ‘in a wintry season’; this striking image soon made the rounds as a perfect description of the Church’s plight. Already in 1970, only a few years after the Council, Rahner used the opportunity afforded by his nomination as the first recipient of the Romano Guardini Prize to lash out openly against those responsible for this situation. At the award ceremony attended by Germany’s leading bishops, Rahner pilloried the ‘institutionalized mentality’ of the episcopate, describing it as ‘feudal, rude and paternalistic’. Behind this bitter outburst lay Rahner’s deep personal disappointment over the German episcopate’s cold-shouldered reaction to the cautiously formulated, confidential memorandum on clerical celibacy that he had drafted some months previously and sent to the German bishops with the signatures of eight other prominent German theologians. Not only did the bishops fail to respond to the theologian’s appeal to rethink the matter and take appropriate action; with two exceptions, they failed even to acknowledge receipt of the document.
Despite Rahner’s bitter words at the award ceremony, Cardinals Julius Döpfner and Hermann Volk and the other attending bishops showed not the slightest indication of a willingness to reconsider the prevailing position or to express even regret; instead they reacted with incomprehension, indignation and anger. From that time on, Karl Rahner became persona non grata, even among more progressive churchmen. Even Rahner’s own former assistant Karl Lehmann, who as professor in Mainz had personally subscribed to the memorandum and who would later become the Cardinal-Bishop of Mainz, did not support the increasingly critical course of his old friend. Commenting on Lehmann’s decision, Daniel Decker, his authorized biographer, wrote: ‘on that day, it became clear that Lehmann’s path within the Church could not be that of his theological mentor K. Rahner’.
Although in 1968, in the wake of Paul VI’s encyclical squashing further discussion of the celibacy issue, Rahner, on the orders of Cardinal Döpfner, had dutifully supported the official position with his own widely publicized Open Letter to the Clergy and although he had painstakingly formulated his confidential memorandum two years later in a moderate, submissive tone, he was denounced in conservative Catholic circles for using provocative formulations and embarrassing exposures to foment scandals, making use of popular media in order to publicly orchestrate conflict and controversy. Since then, compulsory celibacy – despite the dwindling numbers of priests and the emergency situation of many parishes – had been a taboo topic for the German Bishops’ Conference until 2010, when suddenly the breaking news of numerous hushed-up cases of clerical sexual abuse brought it to the fore. In other countries, it was the same story; the bishops, intimidated by Rome or prevented by their own dogmatic views, did their best to sit out the ongoing debates and ignore the increasingly vociferous demands for reform until they were pushed to take up the matter by public scandal and indignation.
Karl Rahner died in 1984 in wintry resignation, without having seen any harbingers of a new spring under a new pope. What would he say about the situation of his Church thirty years later? After three disappointing decades of Roman restoration under the pontificates of Wojtyla and Ratzinger, I am sure that he would agree that the advent of spring after such an icy winter will only be possible when we frankly admit that the Church is now seriously ill. It is not simply a matter of the individual, ‘ecclesiogenic neuroses created by the Church’, which the eminent Catholic psychotherapist Albert Görres had long ago diagnosed in the Church; the illness under which the Roman Catholic Church has long been suffering goes far beyond that: it consists in pathological, morbid structures within the Church itself. Not surprisingly, many now ask themselves: is the Church not critically, even terminally, ill?
My assessment of the prevailing condition of the Church has been confirmed by the analysis undertaken by Thomas von Mitschke-Collande, and underpinned by the results of numerous surveys. Mitschke-Collande, director emeritus of McKinsey/Germany and