Category: Old Dish

Just a link to an interview I had with America, the Jesuit magazine, a while back. I’ve changed over the last decade. In the interview, I said I felt no anger toward the church. Obviously, I do now. What pushed me over the edge was the sex abuse crisis and the hierarchy’s response to it. But I stand by my questions and by my faith. You know I wish in many ways I could simply leave this church, and say to hell with it. But I cannot. For one, I keep believing. This is not experienced as a choice. It is just my reality. When I read the Gospels, they speak the truth to me. When in the past, I have been at Mass, I have felt as a reality the presence of God. As I sometimes tell people, I can say the creed at mass with very few reservations. But believing in the basic creed is not enough any more. We are required to assent in every way to every papal pronouncement, even if it belies what one can see with one’s own eyes and see in one’s own experience. Ratzinger’s elevation means that will be even more stringently enforced. Even then, according to the new Pope, my conscience is not valid. To ratchet the rack still further, we are forbidden from even discussing changes that we sincerely believe may be essential for keeping the Church alive. This is my family. I can no more divorce myself from it than I can my biological mother. And today, many parts of that family are reeling with grief and anger and despair. If the insular cardinals believe that they have helped save the faith in the West, I fear they are mistaken. They may have ensured its final death rattle.

“Along with many others, both within and beyond the Roman Catholic Church, I offer my prayers for Pope Benedict XVI as he takes up the august responsibility of his office. I pray that the Holy Spirit will guide him in his words and his actions and that he may become a focus of unity and a minister of reconciliation in a church and a world in which faithfulness and truth wear many faces.” – Bishop Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church. Ouch. The choice of Ratzinger will undoubtedly set back attempts at ecumenical cooperation. Remember that Ratzinger has publicly opposed the entry of Turkey into the European Union. Heathens are to be kept out.

One more hopeful:

As one who is on a similar wavelength with you regarding the direction our Church should take and the reforms that are needed to prevent its extinction in the West, I find myself far less pessimistic than you on the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as the new Pontiff. Perhaps it’s simply because I was looking at the election as a realist. To put a twist on the infamous Rumsfeld quote, you elect a pope with the Conclave you have, not the Conclave you’d like to have. In regards to this election, the Conclave that Western Catholics like me and thee had was an older, more conservative group appointed almost entirely by JPII to reflect his conservative views on doctrine and his populist-conservative views on political and social world issues. The result was about what I expected: an older, doctrinaire Cardinal from John Paul’s inner circle ascending to the papacy.
The political rationale for Ratzinger was predictable, at least from my end. To repeat a phrase that’s been uttered ad nauseum for the last few weeks, after a fat pope, a thin pope. JPII’s successor, based on the way the Church has long operated, would have to be someone who would have a short reign and who was serious and pensive as opposed to personable and charismatic. But, like John Paul, the new pope would also have to be a non-Italian as to recognize the global nature of the modern Church. Further, the last thing the College of Cardinals would want is to elect a transitional pope who ends up being another John XXIII and surprises them all with the Third Vatican Council. Hence, the new pope would also have to be someone they could trust, someone within John Paul’s inner circle whose views were so well known that there would be no surprises while the College deliberated the future of the Church over the next decade.
Once you examine the political parameters that were before the Conclave we had, you can see how few choices fit the bill. I personally thought the new pope would end up being Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop Emeritus of Paris and sort of a kinder, gentler version of Ratzinger with an intense personal story (converted Jew, escaped the Nazis, etc). But, once again, Ratzinger proved a safer, more conservative choice for a Conclave that wanted to continue to debate the major doctrinal and administrative issues facing the Church for just a few more years without commiting to a new direction in any regard just yet.
In sum, Pope Benedict XVI (and I do call him that because, as of now, he is my Pope) has a tough job ahead of him and time will only tell just how he will govern and what he will accomplish. But, based on the current realities of the Church and the composition and disposition of its hierarchy, to expect a liberal reformer from the heart of the developing world who would begin cleaning house and make doctrinal changes on a dozen social issues is but an exercise in idealism. Perhaps someday, but not today. Yet this heterodox Catholic remains eternally optimistic for the future of the Church. Maybe I’m being a bit idealistic too.

One less so:

I share your dismay and bewilderment at the election as Pope of the one man who makes John Paul II look moderate. As a gay Catholic deeply committed emotionally to the Church I love but all but separated from it in thought and practice, I had had great hope that a miracle would occur. That perhaps the Holy Spirit would in fact guide the hands of the Cardinal Electors and that the new Pope would be a man of both deep faith and profound reason but, as well, of modesty and humility in understanding our shared human quest to enlighten the path to goodness and truest, deepest humanity. Surely this headstrong, self-assured, anti-democratic and egotistical little man who thinks he has a personal line on the God-ordained right answer to all our deepest questions – surely he will not be that kind of pope. The Lord works in mysterious ways indeed.

In this case, I don’t expect surprises from Ratzinger. And I think that’s why he was selected. And, please, no one is asking or expecting the Church to revise or reverse over night its peripheral docrines on human sexuality or even how to run the church (celibacy, women priests, etc.). What some of us were hoping for was more openness to discussion of the real problems facing the church, some attempt to square teachings with the actual experience of lay Catholics (the sensus fidelium, as the Second Council put it), and a spirit able to reach out to the poor, the marginalized and the faithless. I hope I’m wrong, but in Ratzinger, the cardinals have chosen someone who will make all these things much harder. This was a statement as much as a selection. And the statement is that the church is circling the wagons. They simply could not have picked a more extreme candidate. And that tells us something important.

Some of your emails on the astonishing selection of the new Pope:

As a fellow Catholic with a questioning brain and a personal conscience, your blog was my only comfort this morning as I absorbed the impact of Ratzinger’s election. This was a “circle the wagons” decision. The sex abuse crisis was a wake-up call that the church urgently needs to grow and change- the selection of Ratzinger is a signal that the Vatican still believes they can solve all problems with raw power (theirs) and blind obedience (ours). I never, never thought I would say this, but I really wonder if I can be a Catholic three years from now.

I certainly sympathize with the deep disappointment you and all Catholics with a remotely modern or progressive outlook on life must have felt to see the Vatican’s enforcer of arch-conservative dogma elected Pope. There are some reasons not to lose all hope, however, if we see this election in its broader context.
1. The guy’s 78 years old. I give this papacy 3-5 years tops, given that guys like him don’t exactly jog 3 miles a day and stick to a low cholesterol diet. His election was for a classic “stay the course” place-holder to give the church a few years to take stock of where it wants to go in the long term.
2. He did take the name Benedict rather than Pius, suggesting he wants to see himself as a force of moderation and reconciliation in the church. Benedict XV, who was Pope during World War I, succeeded the infamously conservative papacy of Pius X and attempted to smooth over a lot of the contentiousness sown by his predecessor. It was an interesting choice of name. This may be wishful thinking, but cardinals generally give great consideration to what name they take and the message it sends about their agenda as pope.
3. Ratzinger/Benedict represents the apogee of anti-modern conservative dogma in the Vatican. If you look at the next generation of cardinals who will be in line for the next papacy, guys like Schonborn of Austria, or Maradiaga of Honduras, they’re orthodox to be sure, but also much more liberal and forward-looking than someone like Ratzinger or John Paul II. It’s the /next/ Pope who will matter.
My guess is that Ratzinger will have a brief and rather unremarkable papacy that, at the most, will maintain the status quo in terms of doctrine and social teachings. That, of course, means several more years of heartache and disillusionment for people like you, Andrew. On the other hand, I don’t think he can seriously do more damage in these areas than John Paul did and, indeed, will reinforce the notion over the next couple of years that, ok, the old boys have had their heyday and now it’s time for a new generation to take the reins of the church leadership.

Ratzinger as pope scares me, too–the worst aspects of John Paul II, without the warmth. Maybe we need this to bring about intense demand for change. But oh how this will help perpetuate the crisis of AIDS in Africa, the shortage of priests, the waste of resources talented laypersons could bring to managing church affairs, conflicts with other faiths. The love of Jesus feels so far away.

I should shut up now. And pray.

Thanks for your emails both sympathizing and telling me to leave the Church entirely. But I am still in shock. This was not an act of continuity. There is simply no other figure more extreme than the new Pope on the issues that divide the Church. No one. He raised the stakes even further by his extraordinarily bold homily at the beginning of the conclave, where he all but declared a war on modernity, liberalism (meaning modern liberal democracy of all stripes) and freedom of thought and conscience. And the speed of the decision must be interpreted as an enthusiastic endoprsement of his views. What this says to American Catholics is quite striking: it’s not just a disagreement, it’s a full-scale assault. This new Pope has no pastoral experience as such. He is a creature of theological discourse, a man of books and treatises and arguments. He proclaims his version of the truth as God-given and therefore unalterable and undebatable. His theology is indeed distinguished, if somewhat esoteric and at times a little odd. But his response to dialogue within the church is to silence those who disagree with him. He has no experience dealing with people en masse, no hands-on experience of the challenges of the church in the developing world, and complete contempt for dissent in the West. His views on the subordinate role of women in the Church and society, the marginalization of homosexuals (he once argued that violence against them was predictable if they kept pushing for rights), the impermissibility of any sexual act that does not involve the depositing of semen in a fertile uterus, and the inadmissability of any open discourse with other faiths reveal him as even more hardline than the previous pope. I expected continuity. I didn’t expect intensification of the fundamentalism and insularity of the current hierarchy. I expect an imminent ban on all gay seminarians, celibate or otherwise. And I expect the Church’s immersion in the culture wars in the West – on every imaginable issue. For American Catholics, I foresee an accelerating exodus. But that, remember, is the plan. The Ratzingerians want to empty the pews in America and start over. They will, in that sense, be successful.

“How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching’, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” – Pope Benedict XVI, yesterday. And what is the creed of the Church? That is for the Grand Inquisitor to decide. Everything else – especially faithful attempts to question and understand the faith itself – is “human trickery.” It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It’s not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It’s a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning.

And so the Catholic church accelerates its turn toward authoritarianism, hostility to modernity, assertion of papal supremacy and quashing of internal debate and dissent. We are back to the nineteenth century. Maybe this is a necessary moment. Maybe pressing this movement to its logical conclusion will clarify things. But those of us who are struggling against what our Church is becoming, and the repressive priorities it is embracing, can only contemplate a form of despair. The Grand Inquisitor, who has essentially run the Church for the last few years, is now the public face. John Paul II will soon be seen as a liberal. The hard right has now cemented its complete control of the Catholic church. And so … to prayer. What else do we now have?

So quick? So soon? What can that mean? Ratzinger?? The dread rises.

Michael Novak’s attempt to buttress the notion that one either has to agree with Joseph Ratzinger or endorse complete moral relativism is less than persuasive. I won’t address all its flaws. But here’s an interesting digression. Novak wants to posit communism as a triumph of the post-Nietzschean relativism that Ratzinger is horrified by. Money quote:

Ratzinger experienced another set of loud shouters in the 1968 student revolution at Tubingen University, this time in the name of Marxist rather than Nazi will. Marxism as much as Nazism (though in a different way) depended on the relativization of all previous notions of ethics and morality and truth – “bourgeois” ideas, these were called. People who were called upon by the party to kill in the party’s name had to develop a relativist’s conscience.

This is a big stretch. The philosophical appeal of Marxism was and is, for the handful of fools who still cling to it, its claim to absolute, scientific truth. Similarly, Nazism asserted as a scientific fact the superiority or inferiority of certain races. These totalitarian ideologies allowed for no dissent because the truth had been proven. You see precious little relativism in Communist or fascist regimes. They created absolute leaders to embody and enforce the maintenance of their truths. And they believed in the conflation of such truths with all political life, the abolition of autonomy and conscience. In structure, they were and are very close to the structure of a decayed version of Catholicism that asserts one version of the truth, suppresses any and all open discussion of such truths within its power, and elevates a cult-like leader and mass demonstrations to reinforce its propaganda. Querulous, brave and ornery dissent – dissent designed not to obscure the truth but to understand it better – is quashed.

FAITH VERSUS REASON? Now who in the current religious debate reminds you of that? Of course, the Church is not a state; it’s a private, voluntary organization. So the analogy is not literal. The Pope does not have a police power. Ratzinger does not order his opponents murdered or imprisoned; he simply silences them or forces them out of the Church (and record numbers of theologians were silenced by the late Pope and record numbers of Catholics left the pews). But the structure of a blind, authoritarian and rigid Ratzingerian faith is very close to the blind, authoritarian and rigid secular totalitarianisms of the recent past. Which is why some former communists have now become the firmest supporters of a Ratzingerian-style faith. They have swapped public political totalitarianism for a private religious one. And like their totalist fellows, their inability to persuade others merely convinces them further of their own truth. Their references are never outside their own thought-system, and all fall conveniently back on the pronouncements of the supreme leader, who alone controls truth and thought. When pressed, they assert that history and nature will prove them right. “We will out-breed you!” they proclaim, in a horrifying echo of a eugenic mandate. Novak, I think, therefore gets things exactly the wrong way round. The alternative to relativism is the difficult process of reason, informed by faith. But that process cannot take place in Ratzinger’s Catholic church, because free thought is forbidden. When the conclusions are already dictated, how can you inquire freely? And if you cannot inquire freely, how can Catholics actually believe their own faith with the aid of their own reason? We are, after all, told to understand our faith, not merely swallow it unthinkingly. But how can we understand if we cannot question? And how can we fully believe if even asking the questions is forbidden?

FIGHTING BACK AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISM: Conservatives who believe in a strict separation of religion and politics and Christians who are saddened by the ascent of extremism and fundamentalism within their faith communities have options other than passivity. They have the blogosphere. Cardinal Ratzinger cannot silence us and the capitulation of the conservative media to fundamentalism also opens a space in the blogosphere for dissent. Here’s a great response to Eric Cohen’s attack on living wills in the Weekly Standard; and here’s a liberal Catholic’s responses to challenges from the Ratzingerian magazine Crisis. I should also recommend Bruce Bawer’s classic case against the fundamentalist attack on the core priorities of the Gospel message. The book is called “Stealing Jesus.” And how they have.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I think you are off ther mark on the attitude of social conservatives towards gays. The last thing they want is for gays to disappear; they desparately need them.
As long as these folks can point to ‘those others’ they are safe from confronting what they, themselves, have done to marriage and other social institutions. With gays available, they don’t have to look at their own divorce rates. With gays available they don’t have to look at the mess they make of their kids. And those who are Catholic don’t even have to look at the corrupt and incompetent bishops at the heart off the abuse scandal.
Gays fill the scapegoat role for these people, and that is even more of a danger than a policy of wishing they would disappear. the Nazis didn’t just wake up one day, decide they needed some scapegoats, and randomly choose Jews. The way was paved for them by hundreds of years of social conditioning. Anyone who doubts the social conditioning regarding gays need only look at the record of state constitutional amendments.
We should analyze these folks, not by what they say, but by what they do and what they avoid.”

“I think that you’re incorrect in your take on Cass Sunstein’s stance in legal circles. Sunstein’s politics may very well be liberal, but his constitutional politics are far from your typical leftist with a socialist slant. In fact, Sunstein has long been an advocate of judicial minimalism, arguing that courts ought to provide “narrow and unambitious” rulings leaving the brunt of the politics, law, policy and work to elected assemblies and represented. Not convinced? Then read his book. Its called “One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court”.
This judicial philosophy has led Sunstein to take positions unheard of in left wing legal circles, such as criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade as harmful and overly broad (a critique that, ironically, Sullivan would likely support) or praising the Rehnquist Court as mainly minimalist. But don’t just take my word on it, read for yourself in his article, Judicial Minimalism: Constitution and Court at Century’s End.“
Now, compare this judicial philosophy with what I would consider a grand liberal judicial theorist – Ronald Dworkin, who has urged judges to “get real” and provide expansive constitutional findings for the sake of “integrity” and “fidelity” to the broad language of the constitution. Get the picture? Sunstein is no conservative of the originalist variety, but he certainly no raging liberal either. I have always taken his constitutional politics as being quite centrist and thus consistent with the self description Rosen cites.” I stand corrected on Sunstein’s judicial philosophy. His politics, however, remain partisan Democrat.

YOUNG ON THE RIGHT AND FEMINISM: Cathy Young wrote this interesting review a few years back. It’s on the same theme: how the social right and the far left have come to agree on the need to repress male sexuality and keep women in their rightful and subordinate place – under men, literally and figuratively.