Can We Save the Catholic Church?

This is a typical example of the damage that can be done by a single bishop pursuing the reactionary policies of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The responsibility for this sad state of affairs lies in no small measure, in my view, with Kurt Koch, the former Bishop of Basle, who became extremely unpopular with both the clergy and the laity in his diocese because of his hard-line Roman views, his opposition to established Swiss laws on church–state relations which ensure strong lay participation in church life, and finally the way in which he handled a five-year conflict with one of the parishes of his diocese after he had arbitrarily dismissed its pastor. Thus it came as no surprise that, at the end of July 2010, Koch hastily abandoned his diocese, announcing his resignation while sojourning in Rome. In recompense, the pope soon appointed him head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, and in connection with his ecumenical activities as a Vatican official I will have reason to come back to him later.

The situation in my home diocese is typical of many other dioceses all over the world. Not long ago, our Sursee pastor wrote to me that it is

noticeable how many people have already emotionally and mentally written off our Church … Perhaps we too should note how a mood of resignation is taking hold within ourselves. This resignation is rooted in the feeling that, whatever we do, nothing will change.

The gradual withering away of the Church continues apace in other places of the world as well. Since the Council, tens of thousands of priests have abandoned their ministry, mainly because of the obligation to live in celibacy. Similarly, the number of people in religious orders, nuns, clerics and lay brothers, has dropped sharply, and the pool of intellectually and emotionally qualified potential candidates for both the secular priesthood and the religious life is shrinking alarmingly. Resignation and frustration are spreading among the clergy as well as among the most active lay people. Many of them feel that they have been abandoned in their difficulties, and they suffer intensely from the Church’s evident incapacity for reform.

More and more places of worship, seminaries and presbyteries now stand empty. In many countries parishes are being amalgamated into large ‘pastoral units’ contrary to the wishes of their parishioners, simply because there are not enough priests to serve the separate parishes. The priests in these new conglomerate parishes are so completely overburdened with work that they rarely know many of their parishioners personally and have little time for real pastoral ministry. Such changes only simulate an attempt at Church reform.

Canon 515 of the Code of Canon Law gives every bishop the unlimited right to establish parishes and to abolish them again. This canonical law was recently cited by the highest court of the Roman Curia in support of bishops such as Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, when ten parishes that he had abolished appealed to the Holy See – of course, to no avail! Since then, the expression doing the rounds in the United States, and elsewhere, is: ‘No parish is safe.’ The parish churches may be safe from robbers, but they are certainly not safe from those higher up in the Church who insist on economizing. The hierarchy prefers to deny the faithful a close-to-home celebration of the Holy Eucharist – the central element of the New Testament religious community – for the sake of maintaining the ‘even holier’ Medieval obligation of celibacy. This allows the Church not only to save on priests but also to save money, of course. Thus, Bishop Richard Lennon closed 27 parishes in his diocese of Cleveland, Ohio and announced plans to merge an additional 41 into only 18 new parishes. These affected parishes also appealed, but given the stubbornness of the bureaucrats in Rome it was once again merely a waste of time and effort. In many places in Germany such parish mergers are being denounced as a ‘persecution of Christians from above’.

I suspect that a theologian like Joseph Ratzinger, who has lived at the Vatican court for more than three decades, is not able to understand how sore my heart is when I see only a few dozen of the faithful attending Sunday church services in my home parish where, in earlier decades, I used to see a full congregation. But this is not, as Rome repeatedly insists, merely the result of increased secularization but is also the consequence of fatal developments within the Church for which Rome must be held responsible.

Many places still have active Catholic youth groups and a functioning community life, supported by the work of brave women and men in these parishes. Yet, on the whole, the Church appears to be disappearing more and more from the consciousness of the younger generation. This younger generation does not even feel annoyed any more by the out-of-touch backwardness of the Church hierarchy in so many areas of morality and dogma. The younger generation simply is no longer interested in the Church: it has become meaningless to their lives. Little of this, however, has been noted within the Vatican, which still proudly boasts of the high numbers of pilgrims (even though many of them are simply tourists) and considers the elaborately staged youth rallies with the pope to be representative of the youth of today.

The Failed Restoration Policies of Two Popes

It never ceases to astonish me how even secular contemporaries who do not consider themselves part of the Church and aesthetically minded intellectuals allow themselves to be dazzled by the return of Baroque splendour and impressively staged papal liturgies used by Rome to demonstrate the presence of a strong Church and the undisputed authority of the pope. All this religious magnificence, however, cannot disguise the fact that the restoration policies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI failed in the areas that count the most. All the papal appearances, journeys and teachings have not been able to change the opinions of most Catholics on controversial questions or to convince them to toe the Roman line. Even papal youth rallies, attended for the most part by conservative charismatic groups and promoted by traditionalist organizations, have failed to slow the numbers of people leaving the Church or to increase substantially the number of candidates for the priesthood. Even in the diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, commonly considered to be broad-minded and appreciative of grassroots initiatives, 17,169 deeply disappointed Catholics, i.e. 0.9 per cent of the total membership, left the Church between January and mid-November 2010.

This progressive erosion of the Church, sketched above, has accelerated over the past three decades. However, despite all complaints and lamentations, the process is largely accepted as irreversible and irremediable, reflecting the will of God (or perhaps only of the pope?). Only relatively recently has the world at large been awakened by the growing numbers of abhorrent sexual scandals, in particular the abuse of thousands of children and adolescents by Catholic clergymen in the United States, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom and other countries. And the revelation of how these cases of abuse have been handled by the hierarchy has resulted in an overall crisis of leadership and confidence, the like of which has never been seen before in the Church.

We cannot ignore the fact that the system devised to conceal clerical sexual misbehaviour and then set in motion all over the world was led by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from 1981 until 2005. Under John Paul II, reports of cases were already being collected by the Roman Congregation under the cloak of strict confidentiality. As late as 18 May 2001, Ratzinger sent a formal letter (Epistula de delictis gravioribus) to all bishops. According to this letter, cases of abuse were to be classed as secretum pontificium – a pontifical secret. Thus, those who made the abuse public – rather than the abusers themselves – were threatened with the most dire church sanctions. That letter has still not been retracted.

Many people rightly demand a personal mea culpa on the part of the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger. But, regrettably, he missed the opportunity to do so in Holy Week of 2010. Instead, in an unprecedented and embarrassing ceremony on Easter Sunday, staged before the beginning of the solemn Easter Mass, he let Cardinal Angelo Sodano, formerly Cardinal Secretary of State and Dean of the College of Cardinals, attest to his innocence urbi et orbi. This scandalous ceremony was all the more shameful because Sodano himself had come under public criticism for his personal embroilment in the scandal. Although Benedict XVI has repeatedly voiced his regret about the abuse, he has remained silent about his own personal responsibility for its cover-up, just as many other bishops have remained silent about their own similar roles. Not even in his recent book Light of the World did Ratzinger offer any comment on his role in the affair. This is not a mere coincidence; it is part and parcel of the overall structure.

The Transition from a ‘Wintry’ Church to a Gravely Ill Church

In an interview given shortly before his death in 1984 and later published in Faith in a Wintry Season: Conversations and Interviews with Karl Rahner (1990), Karl Rahner, the great Jesuit theologian of the Council, described the desolate state the Church had fallen into as existing ‘in a wintry season’; this striking image soon made the rounds as a perfect description of the Church’s plight. Already in 1970, only a few years after the Council, Rahner used the opportunity afforded by his nomination as the first recipient of the Romano Guardini Prize to lash out openly against those responsible for this situation. At the award ceremony attended by Germany’s leading bishops, Rahner pilloried the ‘institutionalized mentality’ of the episcopate, describing it as ‘feudal, rude and paternalistic’. Behind this bitter outburst lay Rahner’s deep personal disappointment over the German episcopate’s cold-shouldered reaction to the cautiously formulated, confidential memorandum on clerical celibacy that he had drafted some months previously and sent to the German bishops with the signatures of eight other prominent German theologians. Not only did the bishops fail to respond to the theologian’s appeal to rethink the matter and take appropriate action; with two exceptions, they failed even to acknowledge receipt of the document.

Despite Rahner’s bitter words at the award ceremony, Cardinals Julius Döpfner and Hermann Volk and the other attending bishops showed not the slightest indication of a willingness to reconsider the prevailing position or to express even regret; instead they reacted with incomprehension, indignation and anger. From that time on, Karl Rahner became persona non grata, even among more progressive churchmen. Even Rahner’s own former assistant Karl Lehmann, who as professor in Mainz had personally subscribed to the memorandum and who would later become the Cardinal-Bishop of Mainz, did not support the increasingly critical course of his old friend. Commenting on Lehmann’s decision, Daniel Decker, his authorized biographer, wrote: ‘on that day, it became clear that Lehmann’s path within the Church could not be that of his theological mentor K. Rahner’.

Although in 1968, in the wake of Paul VI’s encyclical squashing further discussion of the celibacy issue, Rahner, on the orders of Cardinal Döpfner, had dutifully supported the official position with his own widely publicized Open Letter to the Clergy and although he had painstakingly formulated his confidential memorandum two years later in a moderate, submissive tone, he was denounced in conservative Catholic circles for using provocative formulations and embarrassing exposures to foment scandals, making use of popular media in order to publicly orchestrate conflict and controversy. Since then, compulsory celibacy – despite the dwindling numbers of priests and the emergency situation of many parishes – had been a taboo topic for the German Bishops’ Conference until 2010, when suddenly the breaking news of numerous hushed-up cases of clerical sexual abuse brought it to the fore. In other countries, it was the same story; the bishops, intimidated by Rome or prevented by their own dogmatic views, did their best to sit out the ongoing debates and ignore the increasingly vociferous demands for reform until they were pushed to take up the matter by public scandal and indignation.

Karl Rahner died in 1984 in wintry resignation, without having seen any harbingers of a new spring under a new pope. What would he say about the situation of his Church thirty years later? After three disappointing decades of Roman restoration under the pontificates of Wojtyla and Ratzinger, I am sure that he would agree that the advent of spring after such an icy winter will only be possible when we frankly admit that the Church is now seriously ill. It is not simply a matter of the individual, ‘ecclesiogenic neuroses created by the Church’, which the eminent Catholic psychotherapist Albert Görres had long ago diagnosed in the Church; the illness under which the Roman Catholic Church has long been suffering goes far beyond that: it consists in pathological, morbid structures within the Church itself. Not surprisingly, many now ask themselves: is the Church not critically, even terminally, ill?

My assessment of the prevailing condition of the Church has been confirmed by the analysis undertaken by Thomas von Mitschke-Collande, and underpinned by the results of numerous surveys. Mitschke-Collande, director emeritus of McKinsey/Germany and himself a committed Catholic, published a book in September 2010 entitled Kirche – was nun? Die Identitätskrise der katholischen Kirche in Deutschland (‘What’s Next for the Church? The Identity Crisis of the Catholic Church in Germany’). According to him, the problem involves five interlinked crises mutually reinforcing each other:

• a crisis of faith;

• a crisis of confidence;

• a crisis of authority;

• a crisis of leadership; and

• a crisis of dissemination.

Many people experience doubts about their belief in God for a variety of reasons, but when they find themselves in this situation they have little confidence in the ability of the Church and its representatives to help them. And that is understandable, because the authority of the Church itself is at an all-time low; the Church is suffering from a deep crisis of leadership and is virtually incapable of giving convincing witness to its official beliefs or explaining them in a way that can be understood.

Many recent events have combined to worsen the health of the Catholic Church. These events acted upon the Church like a case of chills, sending shivers down its body which – to continue with this analogy – served as warnings of repeated attacks of fever.

Attacks of Fever

The Catholic Church is suffering from an ‘attack of fever’, declared Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, president of the Belgian Conference of Bishops, in September 2010 in Brussels. The conservative expert on canon law, whom the Vatican had appointed as head of the Belgian church in direct opposition to the wishes of the majority, was referring only to a single centre of disease – but one that had become alarmingly visible in Catholic Belgium – the sex scandals. In fact, in 2010 the Catholic Church experienced several fever attacks, which usually alternated with fever-free intervals, especially during the festive season.

The First Fever Attack: Police Investigation of Bishops

In Belgium, an independent investigative committee compiled a document of around 200 pages containing reports of at least 475 cases of sexual abuse of children by clergymen and 19 suicide attempts by victims, 13 of which ended tragically. Ever since the Bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, had to step down in April 2010 after sexually abusing his own nephew, the number of reports made to the police had increased. As the Belgian judiciary suspected an urgent risk of collusion, they ordered that three police raids be carried out on the same day. The first raid occurred during a meeting of the Belgian Conference of Bishops in Brussels: during the raid, all Belgian bishops, together with the Apostolic Nuncio, were detained for several hours and numerous documents were seized by the police; documents were also seized from the private residence of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who had been the Primate of Belgium until the end of 2009; and in Leuven, a centre headed by the child psychiatrist Peter Adriaenssen that had been dealing with cases of sexual abuse was also searched. Peter Adriaenssen had spoken of an ‘affaire Dutroux [after the Belgian serial child-abuser Marc Dutroux] within the Belgian Catholic Church’.

These were all unprecedented events in a Catholic country, and they turned up the heat on other bishoprics and, above all, on the Vatican. Subsequently, however, at the urging of the Catholic Church, the Brussels Court of Appeal declared the police operations illegal because the police had acted out of all proportion. However, there can be no question that the investigations exposed rotten areas in the Church: the sexual abuse itself, and the cover-ups initiated by the bishops.

At least Cardinal Danneels immediately apologized in several interviews (as reported by the Associated Press on 30 August 2010 and Reuters News Agency on 8 September 2010) for his ‘errors of judgement’ in not urging the incriminated bishop to step down immediately and in attempting to dissuade the victim, who was the bishop’s own nephew, from immediately making public his charges against his uncle after having kept silent about them for so many years. At the same time, however, Bishop Guy Harpigny, who was given the responsibility of reviewing and dealing with cases of abuse, declared that Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, the head of the Bishops’ Conference, had refrained from issuing a clear statement of apology because the Church feared potential financial claims by victims for compensation.

In any case, it was clear that, even in Catholic countries, the days when the Catholic Church could demand separate jurisdiction and enforce its own laws contrary to those of the state had come to an end.

The Second Fever Attack: The Vatican Called to Account

The Supreme Court in the USA rejected an appeal by which the Vatican attempted to challenge the verdict of a court in the state of Oregon. The Oregon court had declared that the Vatican itself could be put on trial for the sexual abuse carried out by Catholic priests and that, on conviction, it could be forced to pay punitive damages. The US Supreme Court also rejected the Vatican’s argument invoking its legal immunity as a sovereign state. Attorney Jeff Anderson (St Paul, Minnesota), who has been extremely successful in bringing class action suits against individual clerical perpetrators of sexual abuse and whose own daughter had herself been abused by an ex-priest, declared that this verdict meant that, after eight years of obstruction since 2002, the path was finally clear for a class action suit in which the Vatican could be held criminally accountable for its role in concealing cases of abuse. It is expected that such a suit will soon be filed against Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the former Cardinal Secretary of State and current Dean of the College of Cardinals, and against the current Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone. Moreover, a suit could also be filed directly against Ratzinger himself, for he was the man who, according to a detailed report by the New York Times, while he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, abstained from issuing any sanctions against the priest Lawrence Murphy. Lawrence Murphy abused some 200 deaf boys in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1975. Even if the pope as head of state enjoys immunity from prosecution, these are disastrous prospects.

The Third Fever Attack: Exposure of Financial Scandals in the Vatican

In the recent past, the Vatican has come in for much criticism because certain companies with financial ties to the Vatican have been involved in the armaments industry or in the manufacture and distribution of birth control pills. More serious were the revelations of the shady operations of the Vatican Bank which took place under the presidency of the American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus (1971–1989), a trusted friend of Pope John Paul II, and which continued behind the back of Marcinkus’s successors Angelo Caloia and Ettore Gotti Tedeschi despite their efforts to stop them. The details of these machinations were exposed in the book Vaticano S.p.A. by the Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, published in 2009, and on pages 279–280 of this book I will give a fuller account of them. In 2010, the Vatican was again shaken to the core when the news broke that the Italian authorities had confiscated 23 million euros lodged in an account held by the Vatican Bank at the Italian bank Credito Artigiano, and that a suit had been filed against the new president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, known to have close ties to Opus Dei, and against the bank’s director Paolo Cipriani. In view of the many earlier scandals, all of these separate events probably represent only the tip of the iceberg. Is the Vatican’s ‘national’ independence now under threat, not merely from legal attacks but also financially? And is not the pope himself as the bank’s sole owner legally liable? At least, the new EU guidelines on money laundering now also apply to the Vatican. I will be considering this point in more detail in Chapter 6.

The Fourth Fever Attack: Conflicts within the Top Echelons of Church Leadership

The Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, a former doctoral student of Ratzinger and his protégé since the latter was a cardinal, asserted that the then Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano had been responsible for ensuring that proceedings against the child-abusing Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, Schönborn’s predecessor in Vienna, had been blocked for a long time, even though the Austrian Conference of Bishops had declared that it was ‘morally certain’ of Groër’s guilt. Although the paedophile cardinal resigned in 1995, he was still permitted to attend Cardinal Schönborn’s installation ceremony in Rome in full regalia. No condemnation of Hermann Groër occurred before his death in March 2003. But it was clear that Schönborn’s public criticism of Cardinal Sodano and his moderate comments on priestly celibacy and homosexuality had provoked more ire in the Vatican than the misdeeds of Groër. At all events, Cardinal Schönborn was ordered to Rome, and, in Austria, his trip was generally interpreted as an act of self-abasement. After a private talk between the four of them (Cardinal Secretary of State Bertone had also been invited), a press statement was issued expressing no criticism of Sodano whatsoever but culminating instead in the assertion that criticizing the behaviour of cardinals was solely within the purview of the pope. Why? And since when? Clearly, ‘reasons of state’, or better ‘reasons of the Church hierarchy’, were behind this unprecedented humiliation of the Archbishop of Vienna. Whether, as the press release suggested, Benedict’s ‘great affection’ for Austria and his invocation of the ‘heavenly protection of the Virgin Mary, so highly venerated in Mariazell’ would pave ‘the way for a renewal of the Church community’ is more than questionable. Nevertheless, the mere fact that Cardinal Schönborn had dared to voice such open criticism of one of the most powerful men within the Roman Curia was viewed positively in Austria.

The Fifth Fever Attack: The Flurry of Excitement about Condoms

A long interview given by Benedict XVI to his favourite German reporter, Peter Seewald, and published as a book under the title Light of the World, caused a considerable stir. In the interview, the pope admitted, for the first time, that in the battle against AIDS the use of condoms might be permissible under certain circumstances. Of course, a pope can make his opinion known in interviews, but whether such a delicate and intimate issue should be treated in this informal manner is debatable. Initially it was unclear how authoritative such an interview was. Its prior publication in Osservatore Romano (even before the press release embargo date had expired!) was clearly part of a carefully directed, widespread publicity campaign, and the result was international media frenzy. A heated discussion immediately erupted as to whether this pronouncement by the pope represented a policy change or not. In reality, it was both. After Pope Benedict, during his trip to Africa, had branded the use of condoms as unconditionally immoral, he appeared, to all intents and purposes, to have changed his mind, at least with regard to male homosexuals. Nevertheless, that effectively amounted to a belated admission that it was no longer possible to uphold the previously rigid doctrine on artificial techniques of birth control. The pope knew that even some otherwise conservative Catholics, including bishops and theologians, and, even more importantly, certain Church organizations involved in providing aid to the developing world, rejected the Church’s rigid prohibition of condoms, and that the irrational Vatican policy was making the Church look ridiculous all over the world. Thus, the pope’s statement was mainly a tactical manoeuvre and did not represent a fundamental change. Limiting the ethical concession to male prostitutes constituted an affront to all married couples and particularly to women, who are the principal victims of the spread of AIDS in Africa.

A truly fundamental reversal of the Church’s previously held position would have occurred if Benedict had not limited his casuistic response to male prostitutes but instead had given a fundamental answer to the question being asked by millions of heterosexual married couples, namely whether the Roman Magisterium no longer considers every form of ‘artificial’ birth control intrinsically evil. There is nothing on this topic in the Bible. In reality, the idea derives from a false understanding of natural law, assuming that every act of sexual intercourse must always be directed towards propagating the species. Clearly, the then pope intended to continue to adhere to the position set forth in Paul VI’s controversial encyclical Humanae vitae. And so he got caught in the infallibility trap, a trap that needs to be discussed openly and honestly. The provisional result of this obfuscation was formulated by the International Herald Tribune in an article under the headline ‘Confusion, not clarity from Pope’ (23 November 2010). Paradoxically, this confusion was confirmed four weeks later by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith itself in a statement that attempted to pour oil on the troubled waters stirred up by its former prefect by publishing, just before Christmas, a memorandum in six languages entitled ‘On the Trivialization of Sexuality’. According to the memorandum, Benedict’s comment on the permissibility of using condoms was in no way intended to be understood as implying the principle (otherwise well-established in ethics) that a lesser evil should be balanced against a greater one. What a pity.

Perhaps an end to reports of such fever attacks might indicate a drop in the severity of the illness affecting the Church; unfortunately, however, it looks as though there will be no end to such reports. How then should we react?

Seven Reactions to the Illness of the Church

Every Christian, man or woman, and, all the more, every theologian, needs to face this question. Millions of Catholics do not agree with or approve of the course charted by the Church. In all, I identify seven different reactions to the current situation, but I consider the first four of them to be out of the question:

1. One can leave the Church, as tens of thousands of people have done because of the scandalous revelations. As I mentioned previously, the figures for Germany were around 250,000, and in Austria (based on a projection by Cardinal Schönborn) the numbers were approximately 80,000.

2. One can create a schism within the Church by seceding together with a group of other people, as the reactionary former archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (excommunicated in 1988) did with his traditionalist Fraternity of St Pius X. However, it should be noted that not a single reform-minded group has done this to date.

3. One can retreat into a state of inner emigration and remain silent. Many previously reform-minded persons have done this; giving up in frustration, they remain in the Church, but cease to be involved: ‘It is all to no avail, the system simply cannot be reformed!’ And so, everywhere, fewer and fewer high-profile people are prepared to offer resistance.

4. One can outwardly conform but privately hold dissenting opinions. This is the path pursued by people who are willing outwardly, at least, to toe the prevailing line whatever direction it takes. In particular, it is the course taken by conformist politicians, who place great store on maintaining good relationships with the institutional Church and enjoy sitting in the first row at church conventions and papal appearances, and who flatter the church hierarchy outwardly but voice their objections to official doctrines or ethics only in private or not at all.

But three other reactions are also observable, all of which I consider to be important and helpful: