“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”—British historian Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton (April [3? or 5?], 1887) published in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton—better known, simply, as Lord Acton (1834-1902)—is best remembered for the quotation, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Today’s Quote of the Day comes from the same source as his more famous remark, a letter to fellow historian—a Church of England bishop—Mandell Creighton—that weighs the sins of popes as well as princes. The epigrams virtually fly off the page, and the temptation is irresistible to quote them all, at length, about the current situation facing the Roman Catholic Church.
Much of Acton’s historical research was done under the pressure of current circumstances, and perhaps none more so than the declaration of papal infallibility promulgated in 1870 by reactionary Pope Pius IX.
A devout Catholic, Acton could not look away at what his own work demonstrated a thousand times over—that popes, no matter their good intentions, were, like all human beings, prey to the temptations of authority. He only backed down from his relentless campaign against infallibility when it became clear he faced excommunication.
The failed campaign of Acton, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and other 19th-century Catholic opponents of papal infallibility bears crucial relevance to the current storm besetting the Church. Their inability to bring about a papacy that practiced collegiality both toward the archbishops and the larger community of the faithful means, more than a century later, that the Church abuse scandal has, like heat, nowhere to go but up.
Two weeks ago, I wrote of my fear that the pedophilia crisis now implicating the pope was likely to worsen. That has now come to pass with The New York Times’ revelation this weekend that Benedict XVI—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1985, the time of the event—had not a) merely been copied on a memo about the transfer of an abusive priest while serving as Archbishop of Munich, and b) failed to defrock an ailing, aging cleric who had molested youths at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but c) had written—in Latin, no less—that the case against a California priest needed more time for consideration, for “the good of the Universal Church.”
The most thankless job in the world these days is spokesman for the Vatican. And sure enough, the Rev. Federico Lombardi sounds flustered by the increasingly rapid, serious and substantial accusations directed at his boss.
Scandal, it seems, runs an increasingly predictable pattern. First comes outrage at even the possibility of truth in an accusation. Next comes denial of a particular document’s import. Then comes a moan that the whole thing has been wrenched out of “context.” And so we now have Fr. Lombardi groaning about the latest news report, “It’s evident that it’s not an in-depth and serious use of documents.”
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton—better known, simply, as Lord Acton (1834-1902)—is best remembered for the quotation, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Today’s Quote of the Day comes from the same source as his more famous remark, a letter to fellow historian—a Church of England bishop—Mandell Creighton—that weighs the sins of popes as well as princes. The epigrams virtually fly off the page, and the temptation is irresistible to quote them all, at length, about the current situation facing the Roman Catholic Church.
Much of Acton’s historical research was done under the pressure of current circumstances, and perhaps none more so than the declaration of papal infallibility promulgated in 1870 by reactionary Pope Pius IX.
A devout Catholic, Acton could not look away at what his own work demonstrated a thousand times over—that popes, no matter their good intentions, were, like all human beings, prey to the temptations of authority. He only backed down from his relentless campaign against infallibility when it became clear he faced excommunication.
The failed campaign of Acton, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and other 19th-century Catholic opponents of papal infallibility bears crucial relevance to the current storm besetting the Church. Their inability to bring about a papacy that practiced collegiality both toward the archbishops and the larger community of the faithful means, more than a century later, that the Church abuse scandal has, like heat, nowhere to go but up.
Two weeks ago, I wrote of my fear that the pedophilia crisis now implicating the pope was likely to worsen. That has now come to pass with The New York Times’ revelation this weekend that Benedict XVI—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1985, the time of the event—had not a) merely been copied on a memo about the transfer of an abusive priest while serving as Archbishop of Munich, and b) failed to defrock an ailing, aging cleric who had molested youths at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but c) had written—in Latin, no less—that the case against a California priest needed more time for consideration, for “the good of the Universal Church.”
The most thankless job in the world these days is spokesman for the Vatican. And sure enough, the Rev. Federico Lombardi sounds flustered by the increasingly rapid, serious and substantial accusations directed at his boss.
Scandal, it seems, runs an increasingly predictable pattern. First comes outrage at even the possibility of truth in an accusation. Next comes denial of a particular document’s import. Then comes a moan that the whole thing has been wrenched out of “context.” And so we now have Fr. Lombardi groaning about the latest news report, “It’s evident that it’s not an in-depth and serious use of documents.”
The denials are becoming wearier and—you can even see it in the sentence structure—passive. It’s one thing to claim you didn’t read a memo you were cc:d on, as occurred in the 1980 Munich case involving Ratzinger. You can, too, even claim, as some have, that there’s no point in defrocking proceedings when the priest-perpetrator is too sick survive a trial, such as in the case of Fr. Murphy of the notorious Wisconsin deaf school.
But what are we to make of it when, four years after receiving a complaint about Rev. Stephen Kiesle, Ratzinger still hadn’t acted on a request to laicize the California priest; that, instead of excusing the inaction because of the accused’s advanced age and illness, it was the accused’s youth (38 at the time) that was cited as a consideration for proceeding slowly; or that Ratzinger/Benedict’s signature, testifying to his knowledge of the situation, appears blown up, for all it’s worth, on the front page of the Times?
Cardinal Newman’s prayer over Pius IX’s rigging of the First Vatican Council to secure the declaration of infallibility—“Save the church, O my fathers, from a danger as great as any that has happened”—now seems prophetic, as does another epigram from Acton’s letter to Archbishop Creighton: “If the thing be criminal, then the authority permitting it bears the guilt.”
In the two-millennia lifetime of the Church, the doctrine of infallibility is of relatively recent vintage. Look in the Nicene Creed for evidence of papal infallibility. You won’t find it anywhere. There’s a reason for that: the papacy as we know it grew out of a set of historical circumstances that are not eternal.
But infallibility’s very existence now hangs like an albatross around the Church. The identification of Benedict with the abuse scandal has assumed such danger because, in the minds of so many within and without the Church, the Pope stands for Catholicism, crowding out so much else.
My fellow blogger Delia Boylan has written on “Why I Could Not Go Back to Catholicism.” I can provide her with any one of a number of reasons why, for instance, I and so many others remain in the Church, and hope she’ll return someday—that the Church is not the pope or his archbishops, but the community of all the faithful; that from the hard-earned (hardly simple) piety of those in the pews comes the faith that sustains the saints who make gentle the life of this world; that the sacraments offer visible signs of God’s presence in our lives at moments of transition; that the entire literary and visual culture of the faith—the sacramentals, the hymns, the stained glass and statues—testifies to the deepest yearnings of the human heart for something outside itself and makes others know that we are not alone in our spiritual striving.
But it becomes harder and harder for people like Delia to accept such explanations—or for the likes of me to offer it—when every day comes an increasingly flustered, feeble attempt at stonewalling from the Vatican.
The Church most assuredly has enemies, as the Curia believes, but in the end, so what? The current problem would not exist in such stark dimensions had the hierarchy sought to live in truth instead of skulk in evasion. (For God’s sake, what does it say that Vatican II theologians Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx were called on the carpet far more quickly—and with no justification—than the likes of Fathers Murphy and Kiesle?)
Acton’s letter to Creighton speaks much of “crime” and the “historic responsibility” of temporal and spiritual leaders. In her Wall Street Journal column of a week ago, Peggy Noonan noted three sets of victims of the scandal: the abuse victims themselves, the larger community of the faith, and the vast majority of “good priests and good nuns” now unfairly stigmatized.
To survive the scandal, the Church must, at long last, at minimum, purge itself of the notion of a papacy that can impose its will even on the archbishops, let alone the larger infrastructure of priests and nuns--and, of course, the laity--that hold it together.
Acton’s letter to Creighton speaks much of “crime” and the “historic responsibility” of temporal and spiritual leaders. In her Wall Street Journal column of a week ago, Peggy Noonan noted three sets of victims of the scandal: the abuse victims themselves, the larger community of the faith, and the vast majority of “good priests and good nuns” now unfairly stigmatized.
To survive the scandal, the Church must, at long last, at minimum, purge itself of the notion of a papacy that can impose its will even on the archbishops, let alone the larger infrastructure of priests and nuns--and, of course, the laity--that hold it together.
Exposure and expiation of the abuse scandals will leave a church chastened—no longer a patriarchal, pontiff-centric structure of elders coweringly dependent on a single person, sometimes with little to recommend them but blind loyalty--but a more collegial institution looking out for the interests of the faithful—far closer to the Nicene Creed’s “one holy Catholic and apostolic Church,” as well as to the vision of Acton and Newman.
Thanks for this, Mike. It's a very thoughtful post and I respect your piety and "every day" view of your faith and your church. It's one that many share, including my editor in chief over at Politics Daily where I originally published that piece. (Click on the link to her piece = at the top of my article) to see her views, which coincide with yours. As you know, I can't divorce the Church from the church, as it were. But hope, like you, that the Catholic Church can reform itself in important ways.
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Delia Lloyd
www.realdelia.com
The abuse scandals started during the sexual revolution and exploded after the decentralisation following Vatican II. Local bishops in Leftist countries tacitly approved the sexual revolution. Is it a coincidence that this was mainly a problem in Western European countries, Canada and so on? The solution is a crackdown on perversion.
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