official representatives of the Church have been the ones mostly and primarily responsible for these phenomena and because the Church’s representatives cannot and do not want to admit their existence, over the centuries alarming relapses have occurred time and again, despite intermediate, quasi-miraculous improvements. And the popes in particular have been far from innocent in contributing to these relapses. Instead of admitting the papal involvement in such relapses, the Holy Fathers prefer to canonize even their quite ‘unholy’ predecessors such as Pius IX, Pius X, and perhaps also Pius XII – canonizations which at best can be viewed as a confirmation of the simul iustus et peccator (of the saint and the sinner in one)!
On the one hand, while I reject the optimistic, harmonious view of the Church’s history, I also reject the hate-filled denunciatory interpretation, which does not have a single good word to say about the Church. I agree neither with the uncritical admirers nor with the resentful critics, as both groups see only one side of the Church. Because the history of the Church – like that of all other big institutions – is mixed, I propose instead to make the effort to differentiate.
A detailed anamnesis will start with the historical causes of the illness and at the same time explain how things could come to such a pass. Non-historians may also observe many things on the surface, but cannot explain them. Often, behind the efficient organization stands a powerful financial machine making use of quite worldly methods. The impressive mass celebrations of Catholic unity all too often manifest only a superficial form of Christianity lacking in substance. The conformist hierarchy often consists mainly of clerical functionaries always keeping an eye on Rome for orientation, servile to those above them and autocratic towards those below. Embedded in the closed system of doctrines and dogmas is an obsolete, authoritarian, unbiblical, sterilely orthodox theology. And even those proudly acclaimed Western cultural achievements ascribed to the Church have often been accompanied by excessive worldliness and a neglect of real clerical duties.
Already I can already hear the objections of the apologists of the church establishment: Quo iure? – what right have you to sit in judgement on the institution of the Church? I can only repeat: I am not a judge but a theologian–therapist; I do not wish to sit in judgement but to provide a diagnosis and suggest remedies like a doctor, a psychotherapist or a counsellor. Admittedly, my recommendations, expounded at length in so many books and substantiated there in detail, have not been appreciated by the authorities to whom, along with a larger public, they are addressed. The authorities have found my recommendations so uncomfortable because many of these people are themselves caught up in the pathogenic structures. And they do not want to hear about necessary surgical operations and reforms in the body of the Church.
But, the apologists exclaim, surely it is not just a matter of historical changes within the institution? No indeed, it is a question of something far more permanent, a question of the truth, of the eternal truth. And the question is: what must endure in the Church, what should be the criterion for the truth?
Is Tradition or Progress the Criterion of Truth?
Two opposing attitudes to the truth can be seen not only in the concerns about the physical well-being of an individual but also in the concerns regarding the welfare of a society. For one group, it is the ‘old ways’, the things that have withstood the test of time, tried-and-true knowledge that counts; in short, it is tradition that must take precedence. For the other group, it is instead what is new, up-to-date, scientific, innovative, progressive that counts. Which of them is right?
I value tradition but I am not a traditionalist. Yet, in the Church, and not just in Rome, there are people who swear by the old ways. While the ‘good old ways’ may often be a stimulus, they should never be a model per se. Such thinking assumes that God would have been present only at certain periods in the past, for example during the time of the Church Fathers (the era of patristic Greek and Latin theology and culture) or during the Middle Ages (the era of scholasticism, Romanesque and Gothic art) but would have had nothing to do with subsequent ages, in particular with the Reformation and the Enlightenment. These modern eras, the traditionalists believe, were times of ‘decline’, which they often describe in veiled, umbrella terms like ‘de-hellenization’, ‘de-churching’ (= secularization) or ‘de-Christianization’. But this approach means surrendering to the debilitating myth of decline, which is averse to any form of progress.
Along these lines, Benedict XVI saw his task as consisting primarily in preserving rather than unfolding the truth, which, for him, meant preserving tradition. But, in asserting his supreme authority over all church teachings, he claimed to determine by himself – at best with reference to his more recent predecessors – what belongs to tradition and what does not. In this vein, his predecessor Pius IX replied to the bishops who challenged his impassioned insistence on his own particular definition of papal infallibility, which claimed to rest on the Bible and tradition, with the notorious riposte: ‘La tradizione sono io’ (‘I am the tradition!’) In reality, this papal dictum represents an absolutistic understanding of truth not unlike the absolutistic understanding of the state expressed by Louis XIV’s dictum: ‘l’État – c’est moi!’
And so, in the Catholic Church of the nineteenth and twentieth century a typical Roman Catholic traditionalism or fundamentalism developed, which believed that everything should and could be left as it was – or must be restored to what it once was. That the Church continually needs to be renewed, they understand, at best, only as a moralizing truism used to discipline individual believers, for instance, in calling them to adhere more closely to papal doctrines on sexual morality and to defend the privileges of the Church. This kind of traditionalism survives into our own day. Moralizing papal platitudes are given a cheering reception by the young people at the huge youth rallies with the pope, even as these same young people continue using the pill and condoms, leaving the vestiges behind on the very grounds where the day before they had so enthusiastically cheered the pope.
Unquestioning devotion to the past results in enfeebled creativity, mental impotence and anaemic scholasticism. No, traditionalism cannot be the Church’s top priority. Rather than an unreserved commitment to some version of the past, the Church needs freedom, a freedom that also manifests itself in a critical sifting of the Church’s own history. And such a critical attitude will therefore dissociate itself from the equally extreme alternative of fanatical Modernism.
I love what is new but I am not addicted to novelty as such. In modern society, many people swear by everything that is new. They demand an unconditional orientation towards the future, setting their sights on Utopia. In the twentieth century there were those who proclaimed the advent of a 1,000-year Reich (which perished in 1945 after only 12 years); others who proclaimed the emergence of a classless society (it had run its course and collapsed by 1989). But even in the twenty-first century, many still dream of a new shape that humanity could take as a result of technological or ecological evolution, or political and social revolution. But neither black, nor brown, nor red, nor green Utopian visionaries have succeeded in bringing forth the ideal ‘new humanity’ of which they dream.
The Catholic Church has also had its share of individuals, groups and movements who were so fascinated by modern Utopias that they demanded a modernization of the Church by conforming to the spirit of the age. Alongside such modernizers, there also exists an odd Catholic mystical fanaticism paired with an apocalyptic belief in the future. The adherents of this type of apocalyptic thinking invoke higher revelations, mostly of more recent date, which go beyond those given by the historical Jesus Christ: precise prophecies about when and how the world will end, about a coming great war, about the conversion of Russia and the like, and they often underpin these prophecies with intricate numerological calculations. In his latest book, Benedict XVI himself gives an example of this kind of apocalyptic mysticism in referring to the strange ‘Secret of Fatima’. In short, these modern-day mystical prophets offer a medley of superstition and obscurantism – widely disseminated by the modern media – to satisfy the craving for miracles and religious sensationalism of people both educated and uneducated in religious teachings. But is this true Christianity? Surely not!
Christian Churches Need to Be More Christian
Catholicism,