Can We Save the Catholic Church?

5. One can get involved in the local church community and work together with the local pastor and others, disregarding the popes and bishops. Alternatively, as increasing numbers of men and women who want to remain involved are doing, one can take over, officially or unofficially, some of the tasks of the absent priests.

6. One can protest publicly, and vigorously demand reforms on the part of the ecclesiastical leadership. Unfortunately, the number of involved people who are willing to criticize the Church openly in this way has been dropping continually in the face of the massive resistance offered by the Roman Catholic establishment. Even the organized reform movements now suffer from a shortage of active supporters and especially from the lack of young people willing to get involved.

7. One can study the situation academically and publish the findings, hoping that these publications will inspire and guide individual church members and communities. That is what those theologians are doing who have not simply given up in despair or retreated to their comfortable academic ivory towers, but instead continue to take seriously their responsibilities as teachers (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:28 ff.). This is where I see my own special duty as a teacher of theology.

No less important, however, is the question: how have the bishops reacted to the situation?

Bishops Prepared to Enter into a Dialogue

In December 2010, a specially commissioned report on the archbishopric of Munich and Freising – a former workplace of the seminarian, priest, professor and bishop, Joseph Ratzinger – concluded that between 1945 and 2009 at least 159 priests had committed acts of sexual or physical abuse in the archbishopric. The real number was probably ‘considerably higher’, according to Marion Westpfahl, the lawyer responsible for the report. However, only 26 priests were convicted of sexual offences. In the past, cases were systematically hushed up: ‘We are dealing with a widespread practice of destroying documents.’

Nevertheless, the fact that the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, allowed the incriminating report to be published and publicly admitted that these were the ‘worst months’ of his life, must be acknowledged with respect. It shows that some theologically conservative bishops are beginning to understand how serious the situation within the church is. The Archbishop of Munich and the Bavarian bishops have drafted a joint prayer for forgiveness and pledged to do more in terms of prevention and to work more closely with the public prosecution authorities. At the end of 2010, Archbishop Marx once again spoke out in favour ‘of a policy of openness, of looking more closely, and of transparency’. He considered the crisis and its aftermath to be far from over.

But Christian Weisner, the speaker of the reform movement We are Church, argues that to overcome the deep crisis of credibility it will be necessary to tackle the underlying problems, namely, the abuses of power, the inhibitions in dealing with sexuality, the lack of equality between men and women, celibacy … The bishops should not cherish the hope that the cases of abuse will be quickly forgotten: ‘The memory of these abuse cases is not going to go away.’ It is not enough to get these cases of abuse under control within the organization. Surely, all of the bishops need to recognize how serious the situation is.

To paraphrase the beginning of the famous poem of Heinrich Heine: ‘Thinking of Germany’s Church at night/puts all thoughts of sleep to flight.’ In 2010, despite two heavily promoted and expensive campaigns launched that year – the Year of Vocations and the Year of Priests – only 150 candidates responded from all over Germany. This is the lowest number ever reported. And how many of them will change their minds before they are ordained? Moreover, how many priests will die in the meantime? In view of the upside-down population pyramid of the Catholic clergy, it looks as though the celibate priesthood may die out in the foreseeable future.

But this is just another symptom of the dramatic loss of confidence the Catholic Church is facing. According to a study by the Allensbach Institute published in July 2010:

… the percentage of the general population that believes the Church to be capable of offering orientation on questions of morality has dropped from 35 per cent in 2005 to 23 per cent; between March and June 2010 alone it decreased from 29 per cent to 23 per cent. At the same time, the belief that the Church offers answers in the search for meaning has also declined. In 2005, around 50 per cent of the population still believed that; by March 2010 the figure was only 45 per cent, in June it was down to 38 per cent. (Frankfurter Allgemeine, 23 June 2010)

The latter figure is especially alarming because it concerns the Church’s core mission, and figures such as these should galvanize the church leadership into taking immediate action.

However, at the Second Ecumenical Church Congress in Munich (May 2010) the bishops never even mentioned any of the numerous reform movements. Since then, numerous articles, comments, letters to newspapers and personal discussions have shown them the extent to which unrest, resentment, frustration and anger have spread among the church laity and clergy alike. And so there have been indications of a slow change of opinion within the German Bishops’ Conference, and, if I am not mistaken, within other bishops’ conferences as well. On the eve of the autumn plenary meeting of the German Bishops’ Conference in Fulda in October 2010, the Bishop of Fulda, Heinz Josef Algermissen, who was hosting the conference, spoke of a ‘bottleneck situation’. He indicated that many questions were ripe for discussion, from sexual morality to celibacy. Such topics can no longer be kept under wraps. In truth, apart from the virtually incomprehensible official catechism, it is the increasing backlog of reforms, halted for many decades and culminating in the cover-up of widespread sexual abuse, which constitute the main reason for the current wave of people leaving the Church.

Bishops Refusing to Enter into a Dialogue

Still, the massive opposition to dialogue on the part of the ultra-Roman wing of the worldwide episcopate should not be underestimated. Again I call attention to the situation in Germany as typical of that elsewhere.

In Cologne, the largest archbishopric, currently headed by the conservative Cardinal Joachim Meisner, only nine priests were ordained in 2009, and only four in 2010. The 221 parishes will soon be downsized to 180. The situation is the same in the Essen diocese under Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, another member of the conservative wing; there, only two new priests were ordained in 2009 and only one in 2010. He has amalgamated some 272 parishes (with roughly 350 church buildings still in ecclesiastic use) into 43 mega-parishes (information provided in 2010 by the art historian Dr Christel Darmstadt from the grassroots campaign ‘Save Bochum’s Churches’). Clearly, as role models for future priests, such conservative prelates alienate more than they attract.

The diocese of Limburg offers an especially alarming example of the damage being done by the narrow-minded, conservative prelates appointed under John Paul II and especially under Benedict XVI. There, in 2007, the widely admired, open-minded Bishop Franz Kamphaus was replaced by Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, a protégé of Cardinal Meisner. Fully committed to the Roman line, he high-handedly set about streamlining his diocese. (See the report by N. Sommer in Publik-Forum on 3 December 2010 and also the report in Spiegel online on 15 November 2010.) He also ignored a public letter from ten of his priests accusing him of excessive spending, of dealing arrogantly with his clergy and of fostering a general climate of fear in the diocese (reported in Frankfurter Allgemeine, 17 September 2012).

Specifically, he has been taken to task for treating himself to an exorbitantly expensive and opulent episcopal palace to replace the modest housing of his predecessor. On his instructions, the new vicar general has warned the clergy to observe discretion and maintain secrecy, thus leaving them afraid to speak out and tell the truth about the prevailing conditions in the Church; the editors of church newspapers are being pressured to avoid controversial topics; every effort is being made to re-clericalize diocesan life. The candidates for the priesthood are once again inculcated with clerical arrogance, and, contrary to an explicit decision by the diocesan Council of Priests, clerics who toe the line are once again being rewarded with Roman titles like ‘Prelate’ or ‘Monsignor’. Meanwhile, lay people are being marginalized and are no longer permitted to act in the name of the Church, e.g. lay theologians serving in pastoral and liturgical roles are no longer called ‘pastoral ministers’. Under no circumstances are remarried divorcees permitted to receive Holy Communion or homosexual couples to receive a blessing. The overall prevailing policy is to put an end to the parishes as they have existed for centuries and replace them with centres of worship staffed by the few remaining priests. This means that the diminishing numbers of practising Catholics must make ever-longer journeys to receive the sacraments at these centres.

Surely, one can understand the cry for help from the priests affected by such policies. In their open letter to their bishop they wrote:

Are we old-fashioned models that are being phased out? We are pastors who wish to be close to and truly share in the lives of the people in their parish; priests who have come to love their parishes and who do not want to change and accumulate parishes as you would change your shirt; who are committed to a loving community of discussion and prayer …; who are involved in parish councils; who have taken on responsibility and are increasingly finding themselves relegated to the margins as though they were just pieces of furniture …; artists and intellectuals who perceive very clearly that their world is not the world of finery and tassels once again used by the Church for embellishment and adornment nor the world of glossy, puffed-up kitsch expressed in empty phrases …

The letter could equally have been addressed to Bishop Georg Ludwig Müller of Regensburg, a former professor of dogmatic theology and friend of Ratzinger, who enjoys an even worse reputation than his colleague in Limburg, thanks to his authoritarian, anti-ecumenical church policies and hostility to the laity. But, already in February 2010, Müller was declaring that the Church had everything under control. He has repeatedly taken action against critical journalists, and, in August 2010, he denounced the public discussion of clerical sex abuse as ‘stage-managed public criticism’. After all, he claimed, everything possible had already been done for the victims of abuse. In January 2013, Müller, now cardinal archbishop in Rome and Ratzinger’s successor as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had the audacity to suggest that the ongoing criticism of the ‘Catholic Church’ – by which he means the Catholic hierarchy – harks back to the former campaigns of the totalitarian ideologies against Christianity and evokes ‘an artificially generated outrage these days that already reminds one of a pogrom atmosphere’ (interview with Archbishop Müller: ‘Deliberate discrediting of the Catholic Church’, Die Welt, 1 February 2013). Not surprisingly, Bishop Müller showed little or no concern for the victims of sexual abuse in Catholic institutions when their representatives rejected the bishop’s offer of monetary compensation. Instead of a four-digit lump sum paid out quickly, the bishops’ ‘round table’ proposed a long, drawn-out, petty examination of every individual case.

On the other hand, the conservative wing of the German episcopate lost one of its most outspoken spokesmen in April 2010, when Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg was forced to resign under a cloud after a string of press reports exposed not only homosexual and alcohol abuse among his notoriously conservative seminarians but also a long list of personal failings, including child-beating, alcohol abuse, financial malfeasance, abuse of authority, etc., going back as far as his earlier years as parish priest and later as bishop in Eichstätt and Augsburg. When attempts to deny the charges and squash the reporting failed, the German bishops and even Pope Benedict XVI dropped him like a hot potato. His subsequent struggle for rehabilitation revealed a complete loss of any sense of reality. (For a summary of this sordid affair see the article by Anna Arco in The Catholic Herald, Friday 2 July 2010.) Statistics indicate the gravity of the crisis in his diocese: whereas in 2009 some 7,000 people left the Church in his diocese, as a consequence of the sordid affair surrounding his retirement the figure rose to 12,000.

In the wake of these recent scandals, resistance to any form of dialogue or reform by the conservative bishops in Germany seems to be weakening. Still, too many bishops hope to follow Rome’s example and sit out the deep-seated church crisis as though it were a mere media smear campaign; with the blessing of the pope, they continue to rule as before. By acting in this manner, however, they are only making their Church more and more sick.

Unfortunately, in other countries, for example in the United States, the situation created by the papal policy of replacing independent-minded liberal bishops by line-toeing conservatives has produced similar disastrous results. In the words of the distinguished Jesuit Thomas J. Reese (see his report in the Washington Post, 16 November 2010), the Conference of Catholic Bishops in America has increasingly ‘tilted to the right’. The former vice-president and current president of the American Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, now plays a particularly nefarious role. Already as a leading member of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), he had successfully edged out opposition to the new slavishly word-for-word translation of the Latin Mass into English. Cardinal George has also led the attack on President Obama’s healthcare reform, claiming it would fund abortions, even though the Catholic Health Association disputes this claim.

In previous years, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops had had a number of outstanding presidents such as Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago, who worked in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. But, under the bishops appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the direction taken by the Bishops’ Conference has shifted radically to the right. Contrary to previous custom, these bishops successfully prevented the moderate vice-president of the conference from being elected the next president. Instead of reflecting the full range of Catholic social teaching, the American bishops now focus their attention almost exclusively on two moral questions: abortion and gay marriage. Ignoring the social issues emphasized by the Democratic Party, they have no scruples about supporting the Republican obstruction of all policies of the Obama administration. Like so many episcopal conferences, the American episcopate overlooks the need for fundamental changes in the crisis-ridden American Church, changes that would halt the general decline and end the self-chosen retreat into a ghetto situation.

In short, there is little or no hope that the illness affecting the Church will manage to heal itself without a radical turnaround on the part of the episcopate.

Diagnosis and Therapy

Given that the illness of the Church is hard to ignore, one might expect that within the worldwide Catholic episcopate, which together with the pope is responsible for the direction and ‘cure’ (possibly also the curative surgery) of the Church, there would be a widespread public debate about the principles which must guide such a radical cure, i.e. a debate which would go beyond mere superficial comments about mandatory celibacy and the like.

But we have not yet reached that point. In 2010, I had the same disappointing experience that Karl Rahner had had decades before, when he waited in vain for a response to his (confidential) 1970 letter to the German bishops. In 2010, I wrote an open letter to the bishops of the world. Copies were duly sent to each bishop, and the letter was widely publicized in the media worldwide and was endorsed by many readers. Not a single one of the approximately 5,000 bishops, some of whom I know personally, dared to answer, either in public or in private. Not only was there no positive reaction, but also no negative reaction, only complete and utter silence. Later on, I will attempt to explain the reasons for this silence.

Admittedly, people will ask me: what can individual bishops or theologians do, considering how gravely ill this Church is? I can only answer for myself: I am not a prophet or a miracle healer and I never wished to become a political agitator. So what can I do – I, who have always viewed myself as a professor of theology, philosophy and religious studies? I can, perhaps, offer services similar to those of a doctor or physician. Better yet – as suggested in the introduction to this book – those of a therapist who can help a critically ill patient, in this case the Church, not by offering superficial explanations and excuses but by providing a fundamental diagnosis that goes to the roots of the illness and by suggesting an effective therapy which will contribute a little to the patient’s recovery.

• The correct diagnosis (Greek: diágnosis = ‘discernment’): there must be no trivialization of the symptoms (‘It’s not as bad as it looks’) but no alarmist dramatics either (‘There is no cure!’). Instead, what is needed is an analysis of the history of the disease based on historical facts, a real pathogenesis which explains precisely how this centuries-old institution, the Catholic Church, got into such a lamentable condition. The medical term for this is aetiology: the search for the aitía, or cause.

• Effective therapies (Greek: therapeía = ‘service, care, medical treatment’): what is necessary is not therapies which merely treat the symptoms or isolated aspects of the disease; antipyretic medication alone will not get the Church back on its feet. What is required is a therapy that goes after the root causes, one which penetrates through all the layers of forgetting, repression and taboo to reach the true causes of the disease and fight the pathogenic factors or processes at work. Maybe even surgery will be indicated in certain areas to root out specific cancers.

At this point, many people will probably demur that this will take too much time and effort and is not worth the trouble.

Medically Assisted Suicide or Reanimation?

No doubt, many people are of the opinion that the Catholic Church is irremediably, terminally ill and that it does not deserve to be saved. They believe that it cannot be reanimated. Recently, this erosion of faith in the Church’s ongoing vitality has even begun to affect traditional Catholic circles. It has become increasingly clear that the number of people who consider the Church necessary – or even useful – has continually decreased since the peak of public approval at the time of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), and under Benedict XVI it dropped to an all-time low. The results of significant surveys conducted in a number of Western countries show that this decline is not a development restricted to the ‘recalcitrant’ German-speaking countries.

In Italy, the land of the pope, less than half of the population still consider themselves to be Catholic, 20 per cent less than in 2004 (IARD RPS). This is despite the fact that more than 80 per cent consider religion to be important, a drop of only 8 per cent compared to six years previously. But many people want to have nothing more to do with the Church as an institution. Only 46 per cent still have confidence in the pope; six years ago the number stood at 60 per cent. Similar developments have been noted in such bastions of Catholicism as Spain, Ireland and even to some extent Poland. Three-quarters of American Catholics believe it is possible to be a good Catholic without submitting to the pope’s authority.

Such a development of ‘popular Catholicism’ is not surprising, considering the restoration course of the hierarchy described above. In the last few years, numerous Catholics, including wrongfully penalized and marginalized theologians such as Eugen Drewermann and Gotthold Hasenhüttl, Matthew Fox and many others, have had enough of appealing in vain against the course charted by the church leadership and have left the Church: not, indeed, the Catholic community of faith as such, but the public corporation known as the Roman Catholic Church, the community of persons paying the church tax or otherwise conforming to church discipline. People who have left the Church in protest against the German church tax include the Freiburg professor for church law Hartmut Zapp and the Regensburg engineer Dr Andreas Janker. This can set a precedent and should serve as a warning to the church hierarchy – it is understandable that if you have lost your faith in the Church you do not want to continue paying the church tax.

What is more ominous is that a much larger number of Catholics have distanced themselves emotionally from the Church. They remain nominally Catholic, but they have lost all interest in the Church as an institution. I share the assessment of Thomas von Mitschke-Collandes:

Many church members are reading up on how to leave the Church. This type of crisis is unique and unprecedented. Things have not yet calmed down. The numbers of people leaving the Church in 2010 could explode.

And the numbers did indeed explode.

In addition to the loss of faith in the Church among Catholics, we are seeing a growing hostility to the Church within secular society. All too many of our contemporaries feel the recent revelations of abuse have simply confirmed their view of the institutional Church as an unregenerate and power-hungry church hierarchy; they are convinced that local parishes and society in general have suffered immensely from the authoritarianism and dogmatism of church teaching, from the climate of fear the Church has generated, the sexual neuroses and the general refusal to enter into dialogue.

Some Catholics will of course object. Has not Rome recently ‘asked for forgiveness’ for its failures, its mistakes? Yes, but, as pope, Ratzinger did not personally admit his own wrongful involvement in the cover-up, and there were no practical consequences for the present and the future. The cases of sexual abuse and their cover-up have confirmed many people’s impression that the church administration and the Inquisition continue to create new victims and new suffering.

It cannot be denied that hardly any major institution in Western democratic countries treats dissenters and critics within its own ranks so inhumanely. And none of them discriminates so strongly against women, for example by prohibiting birth control, forbidding priests to marry, by prohibiting the ordination of women. No other institution polarizes society and politics so strongly with its rigorously divisive positions on issues such as homosexuality, stem cell research, abortion, assisted suicide and the like. And while Rome no longer dares to proclaim formally infallible doctrines, it still envelops all of its doctrinal pronouncements with an aura of infallibility, as though the pope’s words were a direct expression of God’s will or Christ’s voice.

Given this situation, it comes as no surprise that the more or less benevolent indifference to the Church that began some fifty years ago has in many cases slipped over into outright hostility, cynicism or even open enmity. Some would like to facilitate the demise of this terminally ill Church, to offer ‘assisted suicide’ so to speak. The media are continually serving up topics from the Church’s ‘criminal history’ calculated to appeal to a mass audience, many of which had been described decades ago in the books of the formerly Catholic author Karlheinz Deschner. While we cannot deny that such portrayals may be correct, it is all too easy to forget that a similar method would make it equally possible to write a sensationalist criminal history of Germany, France, Britain or the USA – to say nothing of all the monstrous crimes committed by modern atheists in the name of the goddess of reason, the nation, the race or the party.

However, even in modern-day secular France, Voltaire’s hate-filled dictum about the Catholic Church ‘Écrasez l’infâme’ (‘Crush the infamous thing’) – no longer finds expression in overt persecution; instead, there and elsewhere, it leads simply to the marginalization of the Church. The European Parliament caused quite a stir when the majority refused to include any reference to God in the preamble of the European Constitution; an understandable decision, given the numerous non-believers and believers of other faiths in Europe. But the unwillingness to include any mention of Christianity at all as constituting part of Europe’s cultural heritage alongside the legacies of antiquity and the Enlightenment is symptomatic of the growing malaise, and is incomprehensible in view of the undeniable epochal cultural achievements and humanitarian contributions of the churches in the past. Another example of such marginalization is the advertising campaign on London buses sponsored by militant atheists (admittedly in response to the threats of hell-fire flung at atheists by Christian fundamentalists): ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Often, such reactions simply mirror the Church’s own scaremongering, un-evangelical pronouncements, and the Church would do better to reflect on them critically as warning symptoms, instead of simply rejecting them out of hand.

A Case History of the Church’s Pathology

The illness of the Catholic Church did not begin yesterday; it started long ago. The Church’s medical history is so old and complex that a detailed anamnesis (Greek: ‘remembrance’) is required. It will be necessary to enquire into the preliminary events leading up to the outbreak of the illness. Just as the doctor, psychotherapist or counsellor attempts, in conversation with the patient, to uncover significant moments of the progress of an illness, so the theologian and historian can discover root causes of the present illness in the history of the Church’s ailing body. However, for this anamnesis he or she will need a non-ideological, carefully diagnostic approach to history.

In any event, the optimistic, harmonious interpretation of church history created by theologians in the nineteenth century is not at all helpful for a serious diagnosis and therapy, although this, of course, is the version preferred and put forward by the church authorities to immunize themselves against all criticism that might suggest pathological developments. According to this version, the Church’s 2,000-year history represents an organic growth of teachings, laws, liturgy and piety. This view allows the Church to justify novel Roman dogmas which in fact were only enforced in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century: the doctrines that the pope enjoys immediate and absolute authority over the Church in all its parts (universal jurisdiction), and that he enjoys guaranteed freedom from error when he solemnly pronounces on matters of faith and morals (infallibility), are specific examples. Further examples are two doctrines on the Virgin Mary, namely her freedom from sin from the moment of her conception (Immaculate Conception), and her bodily assumption into heaven at the end of her life (Assumption). And at the same time, this harmonizing approach to church history makes it possible to explain and take for granted the personal foibles and systematic abuses of power on the part of iniquitous holders of office. According to this approach, the Church is an enormous healthy tree in a state of continual growth, development and refinement, even though it occasionally carries dead branches and discards rotten fruit.

Such an idealized historical account can serve as a palliative, helping to make the disease of the Church psychologically endurable, but it does not face up to the causes of the illness. Often it simply serves merely as a placebo, as pseudo-medication, useful because of its calming effect on pious churchgoers and rebellious reformers. Those who share the lopsided view of the history of the Catholic Church as an organic process of maturation are unable and unwilling to take note of obvious abnormal, pathological phenomena, even when they clearly infect the whole body of the Church. Because the official representatives of the Church have been the ones mostly and primarily responsible for these phenomena and because the Church’s representatives cannot and do not want to admit their existence, over the centuries alarming relapses have occurred time and again, despite intermediate, quasi-miraculous improvements. And the popes in particular have been far from innocent in contributing to these relapses. Instead of admitting the papal involvement in such relapses, the Holy Fathers prefer to canonize even their quite ‘unholy’ predecessors such as Pius IX, Pius X, and perhaps also Pius XII – canonizations which at best can be viewed as a confirmation of the simul iustus et peccator (of the saint and the sinner in one)!

On the one hand, while I reject the optimistic, harmonious view of the Church’s history, I also reject the hate-filled denunciatory interpretation, which does not have a single good word to say about the Church. I agree neither with the uncritical admirers nor with the resentful critics, as both groups see only one side of the Church. Because the history of the Church – like that of all other big institutions – is mixed, I propose instead to make the effort to differentiate.