The Rule of Benedict

David Gibson

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061753367
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

There was no neutral response to the announcement that the "enforcer"—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—had been elected Benedict XVI, the next pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Conservatives saw it as the final triumph of their agenda. Liberals were aghast. Everyone else wondered what to expect. Award-winning religion journalist David Gibson explores the "war of ideas" that will be a defining feature of this new papacy.

Gibson persuasively argues that by tackling the modern world head-on Benedict XVI is gambling that he can make traditional, orthodox Catholicism the savior of contemporary society. But if the elderly Benedict fails in his battle with modernity, will Catholicism wind up as a "smaller-but-purer church"—the new kind of fortress Catholicism that some conservatives want? Such fears haunt millions of American Catholics pressing for change. Gibson points to the early warning signs of a papacy hyperfocused on "right belief" and shows how the key decisions of this surprising papacy will profoundly impact the future of Catholicism.

Chapter Eleven

THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

For Catholics pushing for change, there are essentially two main arenas for reform in the church. One concerns church teachings and practices, which vary widely in their prospects for adaptation and the amount of agita they induce—from the ordination of women (no way, no how) to the ban on contraception (not likely) to the church law on mandatory priestly celibacy (maybe we can talk). The other arena is the push to reform church structures to promote greater collaboration, dialogue, transparency, and accountability. Benedict XVI has made it clear that he is not likely to be flexible in either area and would instead focus on a third option, the cultivation of personal holiness, as the preeminent means to renew, rather than change, the church. As he wrote in the Introduction to Christianity, “The Church is most present not where organizing, reforming and governing are going on but in those who simply believe and receive from her the gift of faith that is life to them.”¹

Benedict’s opposition to structural reform draws together several aspects of his personality and theology. One is his innate conservatism, which translates into a preference for keeping bureaucracy to a minimum. It is an ingrained personality trait, but one that finds a perfect rationale in his theological minimalism. Individual responsibility and unadulterated belief are theological priorities, so structures just get in the way. As Benedict has argued, churches, especially in the West, are “suffocating on account of their own over-institutionalization,” and the flame of faith “can’t, you might say, burn through because of the excess of ash covering it.”² His words could have been those of Luther or Calvin in the sixteenth century, or any one of the other great Protestant reformers.

Benedict’s distaste for structural investments also stems from his reading of the German church’s principal failure during the Nazi era, which was to make too many compromises in order to protect the cherished Catholic network of schools and universities and hospitals. Referring to the pastoral letters from the German bishops that he heard read from the pulpit when he was a young boy, Benedict recalled, “Already then it dawned on me that, with their insistence on preserving institutions, these letters in part misread the reality. I mean that merely to guarantee institutions is useless if there are no people to support those institutions from inner convictions.”³ Later, as a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger held the same view: “It’s precisely the fact that the Church clings to the institutional structure when nothing really stands behind it any longer that brings the Church into disrepute.” The church, he says, has not shown any capacity to shed possessions voluntarily, so they have been taken away by force, which he says “turned out to be her salvation.”⁴

Benedict has tried to buck the historical trend by either discarding what he considers to be extraneous or bloated structures or trying to reinforce the “Catholic identity” of the church institutions that do remain, such as Catholic colleges and universities. One of those oversized structures, he has said, are the national bishops’ conferences, which he worked to rein in while he was prefect of the CDF. To Benedict, the collective action of a national hierarchy undermines individual responsibility (of the bishop, in this case), as well as posing a potential alternate source of authority to Rome. In the Ratzinger Report of 1984, Benedict rejected the idea that national hierarchies could “vote on truth,” and worried that “the group spirit and perhaps even the wish for a quiet, peaceful life or conformism” allowed “active minorities”—by this he meant liberals—to hijack the agenda. “I know bishops who privately confess that they would have decided differently than they did at a conference if they had had to decide by themselves,” Ratzinger continued. “Accepting the group spirit, they shied away from the odium of being viewed as a ‘spoilsport,’ as ‘backward,’ as ‘not open.’ It seems very nice to always decide together” (his italics). But Ratzinger claimed such an attitude only aggravated the crisis of the church.⁵

The constant pleas for “decentralization,” to Benedict’s thinking, would not be addressed by creating collaborative or consultative bodies, or by Rome granting “local control.” Rather, decentralization was about the bishops making decisions the way Rome wanted so that Rome did not have to do so for them. “If the bishops have the courage to judge and to decide with authority about this battle for the Gospel, the so hoped for decentralization is automatically achieved,” then cardinal Ratzinger said at a 2001 synod of bishops on the role of the bishop in the third millennium.

Synods themselves are a relatively new structure for which Benedict has no great love. Synods are regular meetings of bishops in Rome (they usually convene every three years) created by Paul VI after the Second Vatican Council to create an avenue for greater collegiality among the bishops. Instead they turned into rubber stamps controlled by the Roman Curia that effectively tie up an entire month of a bishop’s valuable time away from his home diocese. The October 2005 Synod on the Eucharist, which was Benedict’s first chance to show how he would govern, was highlighted by his decision to reduce the meeting from a month to three weeks. A few small changes were made to allow more give-and-take among the 250 bishop-delegates, but there was so little confidence that the results would be anything but foreordained that the reaction to the shortened synod was one of relief.

Even before the synod convened, the road map to the bishops’ discussion, known as an Instrumentum Laboris, or working paper, was being privately criticized as inadequate at best. One bishop who spoke out publicly voiced the concerns of many when he said the Instrumentum was “an echo of the chronic complainers who have an impoverished understanding of liturgy and Vatican II.” The author of the critique, Bishop Donald W. Trautman of Erie, Pennsylvania, was writing in—yes—America, even post-Reese, and he was no marginal voice but chairman of the American hierarchy’s committee on liturgy.⁶ Trautman wrote that the synod’s working paper reflected “a narrow, preconciliar view unworthy of a world meeting of bishops,” and that it “spends more time looking in the rearview mirror than looking ahead and steering the church into the future.” (Perhaps the stale familiarity of the Instrumentum may be partly attributed to the subsequent revelation that its principal author, an Italian priest named Nicola Bux, had been dismissed from a pontifical university for plagiarism.)

Unfortunately, by the end of the synod it seemed that too many of Trautman’s fears would be realized.

Similarly, one of Benedict’s early priorities was a reform of the Roman Curia, which bishops around the world hoped would mean a curtailing of the Curia’s tendency to involve themselves in local affairs. Instead, Benedict saw the reform as downsizing the bureaucracy, trimming unnecessary departments, though not vital organs such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Benedict’s approach recalls the story of a French priest a century earlier who suggested that the Roman Curia should consist of just two offices, one a congregation for the defense of the faith and another to defend Catholics against the actions of the first congregation. The priest wound up sanctioned by Rome as a Modernist.⁷

In short, Benedict’s preferred model for the institutional church would be analogous to Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD by the Romans, who crushed the Jewish rebellion and scattered the tribes of Israel to the ends of the earth. Judaism then was held together by religious feasts and “the shared life of the rites,” as Benedict once put it with admiration, rather than being focused on a physical structure and a national identity.⁸

For Benedict, “reform” of the church (he puts the word in quotation marks, an indication of his attitude toward the topic) parallels his view of the church’s role in the world: if it is to have any meaning, it is in a passive sense, without active agency by believers apart from individual, internal spiritual labor. As the theologian Christopher Ruddy has noted, Benedict invokes traditional sexual typologies that cast the church in feminine, and therefore passive, terms—the Bride of Christ or, more specifically, his mother Mary: “Receptive before active, contemplative and not bureaucratic, seeking only to let God’s will be done.”⁹

True church reform, Benedict has said, “does not mean to take great pains to erect new façades (contrary to what certain ecclesiologies think). Real ‘reform’ is to strive to let what is ours disappear as much as possible so what belongs to Christ may become more visible. It is a truth well known to the saints. Saints, in fact, reformed the Church in depth, not by working up plans for new structures, but by reforming themselves. What the Church needs in order to respond to the needs of man in every age is holiness, not management.”¹⁰ He cites his namesake, Saint Benedict, as a model for reform, retreating to his monastery and living a life of poverty and simplicity, which later fostered a mass movement. “Reform will come from convincing personalities whom we may call saints.”¹¹

That view in fact idealizes saints out of their historical context, where holy men and women like Gregory the Great and Catherine of Siena were hands-on reformers and gadflies who nagged popes and bishops until they made real efforts to change the church and make it better reflect the beliefs that the church itself preaches.

But to Benedict, the church—like absolute truth and the liturgy—is a “given” from God, not something that can be constructed or in any way reformed by man. As Cardinal Ratzinger once put it, “The fundamental structures [of the church] are willed by God himself, and therefore they are inviolable. Behind the human exterior stands the mystery of a more than human reality, in which reformers, sociologists, organizers have no authority whatsoever. If the church, instead, is viewed as a human construction, the product of our own efforts, even the contents of the faith end up assuming an arbitrary character: the faith, in fact, no longer has an authentic, guaranteed instrument through which to express itself.”¹² In other words, tinkering with the visible structures in any way leads to the slippery slope of heresy in belief.

More challenging for proponents of reform is Benedict’s extension of the church’s divine structure to include not just the hierarchy but the hierarchs themselves.

The bishops are the main target of reformers’ hopes and, more frequently, their frustrations, because in traditional Catholic ecclesiology, which was reinforced as recently as the Second Vatican Council, the bishop’s threefold mandate is to teach, to sanctify, and to govern. It is that last leg of the tripod that causes so much difficulty, for two reasons: first, lay Catholics do not necessarily want to vote on the nature of the Trinity but they certainly want a say in how the diocese is spending their money or who their pastor might be; and, second, though they respect the traditions of the faith and the sacred role of their bishops and priests, lay Catholics find it hard to understand what is so sacred about the bishop’s role as CEO of the diocese. This is a matter not of subjecting all decisions to a kind of shareholder vote but rather of collaborating on matters that do not directly affect the faith, thereby engaging and involving lay Catholics in a way that may actually lead to a greater practice of the faith.

Yet Benedict has shown himself to be deeply suspicious of even those types of reforms, arguing that by their nature they undermine the obedience that he says is due the church, which in his view is equated with the hierarchy. The “deep and permanent structure [of the church] is not democratic but sacramental, and consequently hierarchical,” he says (his italics). The hierarchy “is the indispensable condition to arrive at the strength, the reality of the sacrament. Here authority is not based on the majority of votes; it is based on the authority of Christ himself, which he willed to pass on to men who were to be his representatives until his definitive return. Only if this perspective is acquired anew will it be possible to rediscover the necessity and fruitfulness of obedience to the legitimate ecclesiastical hierarchies.”¹³

By divinizing the structures of authority in the church so completely, however, Benedict effectively inoculates the bearers of that authority—the bishops—from personal accountability, except of course to God. The problem is that when that exalted ecclesiology runs smack into the horrific reality of something like the sexual abuse revelations that burst forth in 2002, the inevitable result is to cause the very scandal that the culpable bishops were commanded to avoid by the Catholic Catechism: “Scandal takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized…. Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2285).

On that point of the catechism, lay Catholics were in agreement. Polls consistently showed that although Catholics were horrified by the abuses committed by some priests, they felt the bishops were the real culprits for perpetuating the scandal by reassigning abusers for years. A fall 2003 survey by sociologists James D. Davidson and Dean R. Hoge found that 72 percent of Catholics agreed that “the failure of bishops to stop the abuse is a bigger problem than the abuse itself.” Two-thirds believed “the cases that have been reported to date are only the tip of the iceberg.” More than 60 percent said the bishops “are covering up the facts,” and only 20 percent said they thought the hierarchy was “being open and honest.” A Pew survey during the contentious 2004 campaign showed that just 29 percent of Catholics said they looked to their faith for guidance on political matters, a lower level than any other denomination.

During the last year of John Paul’s life and the first year of Benedict’s pontificate, things did not get much better for the bishops.

In February 2004, the National Review Board, a blue-ribbon panel of lay Catholics set up by the U.S. bishops to help implement and oversee the hierarchy’s response to the sexual abuse crisis, published a research study showing that over the previous half-century nearly 4,400 priests had abused more than 10,600 minors. That represented 4 percent of all priests who had worked in the United States over the previous five decades. Though the numbers were no higher than the rate suspected for similar professions, like teachers and athletic coaches (so little research on child abuse is available that exact comparisons are hard to make), and though the figures were cumulative totals from across fifty years, the sudden impact of the huge numbers made it appear that the priesthood was awash in abusers. But the National Review Board tried to put the acts of abuse in context by placing the blame for much of the scandal squarely on the systematic actions of bishops who practiced “secrecy and concealment” to protect their own interests rather than those of vulnerable children. “Sexual abuse of minors is an evil and, as one priest told the board, knowingly allowing evil conduct to continue is ‘cooperation with evil,’” the board wrote.

For the rest of 2004 and through 2005, the price tag for the hierarchy’s actions continued to mount. Dioceses around the country continued to make huge payouts, often topping $100 million each, until the total bill for the U.S. church soared past $1 billion—a figure that critics had predicted for years but which was always dismissed by church officials. Lawsuits forced several dioceses to declare bankruptcy, which was an unprecedented and troubling development for Rome because it meant bishops were effectively taking orders from secular authorities in the management of their churches. In November 2004 the bishops of the United States elected Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane president of the conference; a month later his diocese filed for Chapter 11 protection, arguing it could not meet the $80 million in outstanding abuse claims. As part of the plan, the diocese was to sell its headquarters and Skylstad’s house, certainly an unprecedented circumstance for the leader of the U.S. hierarchy.

The payouts and bankruptcies led to enormous confusion and further anger among the faithful, as bishops were forced to close parishes or, in the case of bankruptcy proceedings, to argue that the diocese did not in fact own or control the parishes and thus they should not be included in assets subject to forfeiture. This was a sharp historical turnabout that many other bishops did not accept. Over the history of American Catholicism, bishops in most parts of the country had set themselves up as the “corporation sole” of the diocese, a legal status that allowed a bishop to control all aspects of diocesan life and to prevent laypeople from running parishes or attempting to hire or fire pastors, for example. But now that episcopal monopoly was turned against the hierarchy. In July 2004, the Portland archdiocese became the first in American history to file for bankruptcy. In an effort to limit its exposure, the archdiocese claimed that it did not control its 124 parishes and 3 high schools, worth some $500 million, and thus those should not be considered assets. A year later the judge rejected those arguments. As a result, all Catholic parishioners in western Oregon—more than 389,000 people—became subjects in a class-action suit. Potentially, that could mean that the churches built by the laity would be sold off to pay for abuse perpetrated by a few priests and allowed to spread by a series of bishops.

To make matters worse, one of those Portland bishops was William J. Levada, who headed the archdiocese from 1986 to 1995 before becoming archbishop in San Francisco. Levada had a record of keeping abusers in ministry and of taking a hard line with abuse victims who sought justice through the courts. In responding to a 1994 lawsuit, for instance, Levada’s lawyers argued that a woman who had been impregnated by a seminarian and was suing for $200,000 was negligent because she engaged “in unprotected intercourse…when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy.” The seminarian, Arturo Uribe, was later ordained a priest and the woman was given just $215 a month in child support from the church. News of Levada’s tactics emerged in July 2005, and a month later the archbishop left to take up a post in Rome as the new head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—Benedict’s personal choice as his successor at the CDF. The following March, Benedict made Levada a cardinal, along with fourteen other churchmen, giving him a vote in the conclave.

Thus the church’s new chief doctrinal overseer left behind not only an archdiocese in bankruptcy but a legal record in which he had argued that a woman should have violated the very church teachings that he has a sacred duty to defend. While it is probable that Levada never saw the motion before it was filed, it was characteristic of his willingness to use hard-line tactics, and it was also troubling to Catholics, left and right, that he did not repudiate the maneuver. Moreover, at his farewell Mass at a San Francisco cathedral on August 7, Levada was served in the sacristy with a subpoena to testify about his handling of clergy sexual abuse in Portland. (Things didn’t get much better for Levada when his cousin, a priest across the bay in Oakland, published a letter to Levada pleading with him to change the CDF, which he said had become “heavy-handed and unilateral.” Father Richard Mangini cited Reese’s dismissal as a prime example of what he was talking about.)

So it was that, at the start of Benedict’s papacy, the most powerful American ever to serve at the Vatican remained embroiled in court battles in the United States over his role in the scandals, while the leader of the American hierarchy headed a bankrupt diocese that was about to sell his house out from under him.

Then in Philadelphia, in September 2005, a grand jury released a scathing 418-page report, three years in the making, that recounted in horrifying detail how previous two archbishops, the late Cardinal John Krol and Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, then retired, engaged in a systematic cover-up over four decades to shield dozens of priests who sexually abused hundreds of children. “We mean rape,” the grand jury report said. “Boys who were raped orally, boys who were raped anally, girls who were raped vaginally.” It concluded, “What makes these allegations all the worse, the grand jurors believe, is that the abuses that Cardinal Bevilacqua and his aides allowed children to suffer—the molestations, the rapes, the lifelong shame and despair—did not result from failures or lapses, except of the moral variety. They were made possible by purposeful decisions, carefully implemented policies, and calculated indifference.”...