Quote of the Day (Fr. Hans Kung, on the ‘Roman Way’)

Q: “But hasn’t John Paul II given Communion to non-Catholics, making exceptions every now and then?”

A: “Of course he made exceptions, and probably also Cardinal Ratzinger [later Pope Benedict XVI] has made exceptions. That is the Roman way: to give favors to the favorites. It is an indication that they are not honest in this issue. If they would be honest, they would permit the others what they do themselves.”—Hans Kung quoted in Laura Sheahen, “Towards a 'Continual Reform of the Church': Interview with Hans Kung,” Beliefnet, February 2004

Today marks the 85^th birthday of Dr. Hans Kung, the Swiss-born prelate who is the last surviving the last surviving theological adviser to Vatican II. In 1979, the Vatican stripped him of his authority to teach Catholic theology, though he remains a priest in good standing. In the decades since, he has tangled with the man whose hiring he had once urged at the University of Tubingen in Germany, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict VI). (One notably exception to this: a surprising talk the two had during Benedict's term as pope, when the cordiality of the meeting was largely maintained by sticking to subjects they could agree on.)

Some of Kung’s positions—notably, a call for “voluntary euthanasia”—are highly questionable. But the Church hierarchy swung into action against him most of all because of his criticism of its retreat from the Vatican II ideals of openness, with his broadsides against papal infallibility counting most heavily against him.

Through the years, the Church has been filled with theologians (e.g., Teilhard de Chardin) and even saints who have run afoul of its governing body from the Middle Ages, the Curia, only to be rehabilitated at a later time. Kung might not live enough to see the “Vatican Spring” he has called for, but in years to come he will be seen as a prophetic voice against a “Roman way” of hypocrisy and lack of internal dialogue, I'm sure. His tart response to the question above indicates impatience with a governing body unnecessarily arbitrary and petty.

(Photo of Hans Kung from 2009.)

 

Flashback, February 1878: Leo XIII Begins Surprising Papacy

For years, Gioacchino Pecci, Cardinal Bishop of Perugia, had hardly seemed papabile (“pope-able”—i.e., a plausible candidate for Roman Catholic pontiff). 

He wasn’t a member of the Curia, the Vatican’s administrative unit; he had so botched an early diplomatic posting to Belgium that he had been withdrawn at the urging of that country’s royal family; he had run afoul of the powerful papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli. 

And now, after being elected pope on the third ballot on February 20, 1878, Pope Leo XIII appeared, in his frail, 67-year-old body, unlikely to be more than a caretaker for a venerable but embattled institution.

Instead, Pope Leo surprised everyone by lasting for 25 years, advancing scholarship within the Roman Catholic Church, soothing the Church’s troubled relationship with rulers and activists in the streets, and, most important, kick-starting the social-justice movement within the Church through a series of encyclicals.

As the College of Cardinals prepares to gather for another conclave to elect a pontiff in the wake of Benedict XVI’s unexpected resignation—the first pope to resign in six centuries—speculation has run rampant over possible candidates and whether the eventual winner might change the Church. 

Leo’s tenure offers one possible scenario of how an evolution can occur in an institution that, to the frustration of many, often reacts to events and new schools of thought at a snail’s pace.

Leo was hardly a radical; indeed, one doesn’t exist for years in the Church hierarchy without absorbing its basic assumptions. Moreover, a number of his positions were not out of step with those of his predecessor, Pius IX. 

All the way into his 90s, for instance, Leo believed that he would recover the Papal States, the territories under direct sovereign rule of the popes for an entire millennium before they were lost in the midcentury drive for Italy's unification. 

In addition, disturbed by continued anti-clericalism in Europe, he launched an unnecessary pre-emptive strike against the “Americanism heresy” of separation of church and state—a move that the most prominent American prelate of the late 19^th century, James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, regarded as a slap at the faithful in the growing United States.

With that said, the reign of Leo represented a welcome change from that of Pius. Recently, columnist E.J. Dionne noted that Benedict XVI was “a kind of neo-conservative — not in his foreign-policy attitudes but in sociological terms,” a moderate progressive who ended up recoiling not just from the student rebellions of the late 1960s in his native Germany but also from nearly any deeper examination of Church theology. 

In a sense, Pius was the Church’s neocon prototype—only he turned away from what he perceived as the nationalist, secularist excesses of Europe in the late 1840s. 

By the end of his reactionary three-decade period as the Vicar of Christ, he had refused to accept his diminished temporal power (even to the point of becoming a rather farcical "prisoner of the Vatican") and pushed through the doctrine of papal infallibility. 

In the process, he encouraged Protestants who believed Catholicism was, by its nature, antithetical to any notions of democracy, republican government or, scientific, philosophical or even theological innovation. His was the longest pontificate in history, and it did some of the worst damage.

With a culture that stresses tradition, the Vatican is slow to change, even in those instances where it is clearly perceived, even at the time, that a mistake has been made. 

For one thing, the pope who made the initial move has already stacked the Church hierarchy with his own appointees; second, the work culture of the Vatican reflects the la dolce vita lifestyle of Italy as a whole (recall Pope John XXIII’s wisecrack when asked how many people work at the Vatican: “About half”); and third, an immediate admission of an error obviously calls into question papal infallibility.

For this reason, popes advance the Church incrementally, in ways often not immediately apparent to casual observers. 

Favorites of the last pontiff find themselves sidelined to less conspicuous positions; those previously in disfavor see their thinking and achievements recognized at last; canon law is tinkered with at the margins; rhetoric is recalibrated, to a notably less fevered pitch; and new initiatives are launched.

Leo was not about to undo everything Pius did; in fact, the centralizing tendencies of his predecessor would prove crucial in his attempt to steer the Church in a different direction. But his elevation to his new office unleashed an unanticipated burst of energy in the aging cardinal, so much so that within hours of his election he cried out, "I want to carry out a great policy!"

The papacy under Leo, then, offers a good example of the type of evolution we might expect to see in a pontiff of the near future with conservative, but not reactionary, instincts:

*Henry Cardinal Manning, who had used his position as an ally of Pius to undercut fellow Catholic convert John Henry Newman, saw his rival become a cardinal himself in 1879.

* “The new pope does not…curse, he does not threaten…The form is sweet,” editorialized the Italian journal Riforma—and Leo used that tone to re-set the Vatican’s disastrous relationship with Otto von Bismarck, who had used Pius’ promulgation of infallibility as an excuse to push his policy of Kulturkampf, or subordination to the new German state. Within a few years after Leo’s ascension, Bismarck began to rescind the worst of the anti-Catholic legislation.

*Many in the Vatican bureaucracy had resisted opening its archives to historians, who they felt were prejudiced in favor of Protestants, if not secular. Leo would have none of it. “There are some of you who, if you had lived in the time of Christ, would have wanted to suppress the betrayal of Judas and the denial of Peter,” he answered. In 1881, Leo opened the archives to historians, including Protestants—a boon to research about Europe’s past.

*In the greatest paradox of all, Leo—though of aristocratic birth—decided to confront the twin specters of unfettered capitalism and socialism with Rerum Novarum (1891), one of 85 encyclicals—the most of any pontiff. (By comparison, the energetic John Paul II, in the same length of time, issued only 14.)

Consider this line from the encyclical: “A small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself.” Mainstream thought in the current Republican Party would regard that as unmitigated class warfare. 

The impact in its own time was revolutionary. “Leo’s attack on unrestricted capitalism, his insistence on the duty of state intervention on behalf of the worker, his assertion of the right to a living wage and the rights of organized labor, changed the terms of all future Catholic discussion of social questions…” wrote Eamon Duffy in his history of the papacy, Saints and Sinners. “Without being either a democrat or a radical himself Leo opened the door to the evolution of Catholic democracy.”

Quote of the Day (Stephen Colbert, on the Pope’s Resignation)

“Can't believe the pope quit. It's like that old saying goes: ‘Does the pope quit in the woods?’ I'm pretty sure I got that right.”—Comedian (and practicing Catholic) Stephen Colbert, on the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, February 11, 2013 tweet

Quote of the Day (‘America’ Magazine, on Nuns and ‘People on the Margins’)

“Working for meager pay (which they passed on to their communities), women religious have taken the lead in working with people on the margins: not only schoolchildren, but indigent patients in hospitals, the imprisoned in jail cells and the homeless in the inner cities. Not satisfied with works of charity at home, they have labored in fields afar; some have paid with their lives. The martyrdoms in Central and Latin America of Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Maryknoll Sisters; Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun; and in Brazil of Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, testify not simply to the Gospel but to a certain kind of woman. These were the women who wholeheartedly embraced the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar decrees by revisiting the founding documents of their orders and throwing themselves into ministry with the poor, all as the church had asked of them.”—“Current Comment: Praise for Sisters,” America Magazine, May 14, 2012

Gaze at this picture and ask yourself: Do these women really look very radical? Yet a decade after the sexual abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican has taken the full measure of the faithful’s discontent and disillusionment, and come up with an entirely logical source: nuns.

On the editorial page of its May 14 issue, the national Catholic weekly America listed the above accomplishments (in the event--now, we must acknowledge, all too likely--that they escaped the notice of the Holy See), then followed it up with another editorial asking pertinent questions related to the origins of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR)  in the United States.

American Catholics should expect answers to those questions to come in the most tardy of fashions. Normally, I groan whenever I hear the word "patriarchal" coming up every time a church policy on, say, abortion, is disputed--it's as if someone at The New York Times thinks that the mere use of the word should all by itself be enough to dispense with any meaningful inquiry into the moral consequences of modern reproductive alternatives. 

Unfortunately, the church's hierarchy has only itself to blame for the use of this cliche in this particular situation. Women religious who are utterly committed to “people on the margins” now find themselves marginalized by the Vatican. And the most maddening aspect of it is that there's no good, sane reason for it.

Too bad. A wildly funny episode from the first season of the great Seventies sitcom All in the Family had a lawyer advising the bigoted Archie Bunker that his case was hopeless, because "In a court of law, you can't beat a station wagon filled with nuns.” Nowadays, you’d be lucky to find enough nuns to fill a station wagon, but their reputation for probity remains as high as it was 40 years ago—certainly higher, dare I say, than that of most bishops and archbishops, most of whom, it has become dismayingly clear in recent years, owe their positions more to blind adherence to every tenet set down by Rome than to any significant merit of their own.

Three reasons are cited by the Congregation for the assessment of the LCWR: 1) past addresses at their assemblies; 2) "policies of corporate dissent," i.e., dissent from Vatican policies on women's ordination and homosexuality; and 3) "radical feminism." 


But where has the confusion by ordinary Catholics come from--certain nuns' views on these matters, or the hierarchy's continuing problems with the fallout from the abuse scandal--problems, one might add, that extend worldwide? (See, for instance, this Huffington Post piece on potential liability from a case in the U.K.) 

One strongly suspects that longtime churchgoers are less likely to be discombobulated by one of the religious speculating on gays or married priests in the Church than on how various bishops, long stressing that theirs is a "universal" church, could push, with a straight face, the novel legal notion that a priest was not an "employee" of said universal church and that, therefore, the hierarchy should not be held accountable for his crimes.

I wish Pope Benedict XVI would re-read America’s brief catalogue of the exemplary work of American nuns—even commit the words to memory, if possible. Maybe then, he’ll stop scandalizing the faithful and making a joke of his institution by getting off the nuns’ backs.

Quote of the Day (Pope Benedict XV, on Peace and the “Germs of Former Enmities”)

“…[I}f in most places peace is in some sort established and treaties signed, the germs of former enmities remain; and you well know, Venerable Brethren, that there can be no stable peace or lasting treaties, though made after long and difficult negotiations and duly signed, unless there be a return of mutual charity to appease hate and banish enmity.”—Pope Benedict XV, Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrimum (On Peace and Christian Reconciliation) (1920)

No, I didn’t miss something from the Roman numeral or use an incorrect photo. The pontiff in question is not the current controversy-plagued Benedict but the last one to take this name before him as successor to St. Peter.

Historian-novelist Thomas Fleming had a thought-provoking blog post in which he wondered why the news media didn’t consider at greater length why Cardinal Ratzinger took the name of an early 20th-century pope upon his election. “As a German, I think we can be fairly sure he is trying to remind the world of the tragic story of his predecessor, and how close he came to bringing World War I to an early conclusion.,” the noted historian-novelist noted.

There are many aspects of Benedict XVI’s reign that can—and should—raise some eyebrows, but his initial act—a claim of nomenclature—suggested that he had a strong sense of the possibilities of his position.

Benedict XVI has, on more than one occasion, not always with the greatest of ease, tried to position the Roman Catholic Church in this age of terror as a central point of reason-informed faith between the secular West and the Islamic world. In the age of total war that began with World War I, Benedict XV (1854-1922) similarly asserted himself as an impartial religious emissary of peace between the Allies and the Central Powers.

In one sense, the former Giacomo della Chiesa repeated, in the papal encyclical Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrimum—promulgated on this date 90 years ago--the same warnings about the threat to peace that he made since his election to the papacy in September 1914.

But, as can be seen in the quote above, Benedict was as prescient about the war’s aftermath as he had been about the scale of the carnage in the recently concluded conflict. Adolf Hitler had not yet emerged as a political force in Weimar Germany, but already the pontiff sensed the potential for a political and spiritual bacillus (“the germs of former enmities”) spread by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles.

The outbreak of war had broken the heart of his immediate predecessor, Pius X. Benedict took up the burden of putative peacemaker with a stouter heart. He was used to being underestimated, ignored and even ridiculed. One look at the image accompanying this post clues you in as to why.

He’s almost receding into the background of the photo, isn’t he? Indeed, his small, bird-like appearance gave rise to his nickname in archdiocese of Bologna, il piccoletto—i.e., “The little one”--and he would need patience as the two sides in the war ignored his appeals to end what he called the “degrading slaughter.”

Benedict’s call for a Christmas truce in 1914 was met with resounding silence. The following year, the Italian government not only ignored his plea for a negotiated peace, but was so angered by his strict neutrality that, in the Treaty of London that sealed its entry into the war on the side of the Allies, all parties to the pact secretly agreed to turn a deaf ear to his peace moves toward the Central Powers.

Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points has been hailed by admirers as a lost basis for a lasting peace. But in August 1917, before Wilson had formalized his famous diplomatic talking points, Benedict had already anticipated him with a “peace note” that called for freedom of the seas and taking into account the aspirations of nationalities.

The papacy of Benedict also began a period when the Vatican sought to end its isolation since the 19th-century unification movements in Italy and Germany. An accomplished diplomat, he believed in dealing with the world as it was. Critics make a serious mistake in concluding that the concordats between the Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany hint at sympathy between the popes and Europe’s rising Fascist powers. That error can be best understood when it’s remembered that the Vatican had, in the 1930s, also attempted a treaty with the Soviet Union.

Despite the Vatican’s request to participate in the Versailles peace talks, the Allies refused to extend an invitation to Benedict to attend. Perhaps it was just as well: it’s doubtful whether the pontiff who had decried “the suicide of Europe” could have stomached it as the powers that be settled on another death pact.