Pope Benedict: An Assessment

Since everyone else is evaluating Benedict’s papacy in light of his decision to resign, I thought I should throw my hat into the ring. I’d like to think that this will also shed some light on a potential future for the Church.

1. Let’s start off on a negative note. It should have been completely obvious from the start but now it is even more obvious: If you are going to select someone to be the supreme pastor of the entire Church, you should probably look for someone with pastoral experience. As far as I know, Ratzinger never even had any experience with pastoral work at the parish level. As I hope to make clear, this lack of pastoral experience has affected nearly every single facet of his papacy. I am going to say he is brilliant, and that he has had some good ideas, but a pope with genius and good ideas is nothing if he doesn’t know how to be a pastor (which every pope must be).

Here is one way to think about this: Benedict never had to accept the papacy. In fact, he has said many times that he didn’t want to be pope. It is baffling to me why this has not outraged more Catholics. Imagine if your parish priest repeatedly said he didn’t want to be your pastor. This would be insulting, to say the least. I suspect the reason that this hasn’t been considered an outrage is that too many Catholics today consider cheerleading to be a sort of quasi-sacramental. No matter what, the pope and the rest of the hierarchy need our cheering on. A pope could devour a live cat in the middle of a shopping mall and I know Catholics who would, within minutes, start telling you what a great job he was doing as pope.

With an eye to the future, our next pope should be someone who has been with the people, who understands the issues facing Catholics at the family, social, parish and diocesan level. This will make him more effective. That’s a keyword: Effective. Even Benedict’s most ardent supporters haven’t been able to call Benedict effective.

2. Eventually we need a pope who realizes that the average person in the 21st century isn’t as gullible as the average person in the Middle Ages was. People today expect explanations. Benedict has been pretty unwilling to give them. This leads to people leaving the Church. Now Benedict would probably chalk that up to a lack of faith or secularization or some other scapegoat, but it is really just bad pastoral skills. In the New Testament it says we must always be ready to give an explanation and account.

Some examples: For some reason, women cannot be ordained to the priesthood. Interestingly, no one seems to know why this is. And I’ve looked. Thomas Aquinas thought it was because women can’t tell other people what to do and no one would ever listen to them on account of their inferiority. Well, obviously no one is going to say that today. So then you have this document from the 1970′s called Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood which basically argues 1) We’ve never done it before, and 2) Even if we wanted to do it, women look nothing like Jesus, so we can’t.

Now most Catholics find reasons like this to be unpersuasive. And the problem isn’t that Benedict keeps repeating these arguments. The problem is that Benedict has encouraged a culture wherein anytime these questions get brought up the answer is usually something like “That’s already been decided so just live with it.” He’s essentially shut down the possibility of theological debate.

I happen to think Benedict might know this is a problem. He sort of hinted at it in his resignation speech. We need a pope and pastor willing to confront the issues and questions which face the Church in the 21st century. Simply declaring by unexplained fiat what people have to believe isn’t working anymore.

3) I think it is safe to say that Benedict has been truly revolutionary in bringing an environmental message to a great deal of his preaching. He has been unequivocal in stating the dangers of global warming and continued environmental destruction. For this he is to be commended. It is the point that I hope most his successor will pick up. However, his lack of pastoral skill is perhaps the reason this part of his papacy has been ignored by so many Catholics. In the United States, some of the most devout papal cheerleaders are the ones most willing to disregard global warming as a hoax to be ignored. This is unfortunate.

4) So about the elephant in the room: I think it is pretty undeniable that Benedict failed to do anything about the abuse scandal. If you disagree with this, ask yourself: What is the most important thing that should be done about the abuse scandal? And if your answer is something other than “combat the pervasive culture of clericalism” you might want to reconsider. That some priests abused people was pretty much inevitable: What could have been avoided was the repeat offenses and the cover-ups. A lot has been focused on the question: Why did priests commit abuse? And while that is a reasonable question, maybe we need to ask: Why did bishops cover it up? And the answer is clericalism. Or, perhaps, Hierarchism. At all costs the image of the Church hierarchy, from the level of priest up, had to be protected. Once again this was assisted by the Catholic Cheerleading Squad who from day one went to any extreme necessary to defend the bishops and everyone else in the Church and insist it was the liberal media’s fault that priests molested kids. But to most people, including the thousands of people who quit going to Mass because of this, the clericalism and Hierarchism just got to be too disgusting.

Now at this point someone is probably going to point out that Benedict made a comment or two about clericalism during his pontificate. He probable made these comments while also restoring some of the more ornate papal robes not seen since the high middle ages. Let’s be clear: The pope can’t say “To make my point about clericalism even clearer, I think I am going to wear an even more grandiose outfit than usual today.”

Plenty of recent surveys have shown clericalism on the rise amongst seminarians, too. Why shouldn’t it be when the pope keeps putting on more and more fancy clothes? Recently I told a seminarian friend that, when I was considering the priesthood, I would never wear a collar as a priest. He responded, and I suspect many seminarians would agree with him, that people should know when there is an alter Christus in the room.

Do you know what that means? That means people think the priest is another Christ. Now I know we are all called to be Jesus in the world for others, but I am pretty sure St. Paul said we are only supposed to have ONE Christ. If someone is going to think there is “another Christ” in the room, it should be from the way you behave with love and compassion, not because you are wearing a collar. Clericalism has descended into a kind of idolatry. If they guy who wears a collar is another Christ, then I guess if he molests a kid I should probably keep my mouth shut about it, right?

So, with an eye to the future, I hope the next Pope will take a stand against clericalism of the sort we haven’t seen since John XXIII and Paul VI. This alone can really help end the scandals (of many varieties) which are entangling the Church.

5) Caritas in Veritate: That was good stuff. I hope the next Pope will follow up with more things like that. People are hungry for that sort of active justice in the world from the Church today. The pope would do well to ask himself: What issues would Jesus be confronting today? Who would be the pharisees and power brokers that he would be challenging today?

6) I’ll conclude with this. For whatever I have said of Benedict, he has been, I think, deeply interested in the Jesus Christ of the Gospel. Now I think there is a lot to be still learned about the historical Jesus that we can’t always access through the Gospel, but obviously the guiding ideal for the Church and the Christian life must be the Gospel. This can be seen in the books Benedict has been writing about the life of Christ. And I hope the next pope will bring this same ideal to his papacy.

A friend recently asked me to comment on an NPR story about the tendency of young people to give up on religion. My comments are as follows:

Let me begin by saying that religion has always manifested itself in at least two ways. I say “at least” because there is also a third, which I will mention momentarily. But the two which are most important are the “myth of persons” and the second is the religion which is truly religious but yet not ignorant of reason.

The myth of persons is by far the more common in history. This is the approach to religion which is perhaps most obvious in ancient myths: Gods who fight, who war, and who act like us. Contemporary religion may have tamed some of this inclination, but, nevertheless, it isn’t difficult to find religious people, including catechists, preachers and teachers who think God is basically like us, except really really cool.

But this sort of religion is completely unacceptable to anyone with a basic common sense. It is even less acceptable in an era of scientific inquiry. We no longer want a God who kills people for disagreeing with him. A God who lets his leaders enslave unbelievers, or who causes natural disasters because he is sick of all the sex going on, or who jingoistically lets one nation slaughter another because of territory disputes. All of that is, and should be, on its way out. Young people, thank God, know better. Unfortunately, because the myth of the person has been so dominant, most people can’t envision any other kind of religion.

On the other hand, there are plenty of theologians doing work to show new models of God and religion which are completely feasible in the contemporary world. Liberation theology, with which I assume you, Bob, must have some familiarity, did a great deal in the 1970s and 1980s to demonstrate how the face of God can be seen in the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed. And, more importantly, it showed how we can approach God, and become God, or God-like, in helping to eliminate systemic causes of the injustices that produce this suffering.

I think anyone who does a serious study of, say, St. Thomas Aquinas, will find he is not interested in the myth of the person when it comes to God. He is interested in something very different from anything else we know, including persons. My own first hand experience is this: Any atheist who seriously engages the thought of Aquinas, especially when presented by those who can best present his thought, will at the very least no longer consider religion to be wholly silly. This doesn’t mean they will become theists. But it means that, unlike Dawkins and his crew, they will no longer be able to say that religious belief or theism is just stupid. I remain convinced that there are ways that religious thinkers can engage the modern, scientific world in important, intellectual and honest ways.

Now, about that third way I mentioned. This is the way of mysticism. In some sense, it combines the two ways, in that, from the first, it considers God as something which is approached outside of philosophical or theological abstraction, as something which can be known in some sort of (very special) direct way that resembles in some important way the way you and I encounter each other. However, it is closer, I think, to the second, in that it also does not shrink away from the developments of the modern world. This only makes sense: In so far as it is encountering that which is the eternal truth, it could never negate the truths which human beings are constantly discovering.

So, why are young people abandoning religious belief? Well, let me here invoke something that Thomas Aquinas said. Aquinas taught that bad arguments ought never to be given in religion, because it will just make people hate religion for being something “stupid” or, to use modern parlance, “backwards.” Young people are abandoning religion because the only thing they know about religion involves a God that orders homosexuals slaughtered, or who created the world around 6000 years ago, or who sits about at the beck and call of pious praying folk who need a new job, or a new car, or a football touchdown. Rarely are young people presented with the important works of contemporary theologians, who have aptly demonstrated the roles of feminism, Marxism, and (I dare add) Thomism in how we can understand religious matters. Even less rarely are they presented with the important truths of the mystics, who can tell us a great deal about what I call “God the friend, God the lover, God that is.”

I say as little as possible about mysticism because, well, there isn’t a lot that can be said about it in words.

But, I do suspect that if young people, educated and raised in the modern, scientific world, were given a good sense of what theology is really about these days, and perhaps alerted to the continuing mystical traditions that persist in all of the world’s religions, they would be able to more easily shake off the shackles of the myth of persons.

But, as long as the myths about God persist, I suppose it inevitable that myths about religion will also persist.

This has just been brought to my attention. A Swiss Abbot and a prominent Bishop are calling for serious Church reform. Amongst the issues mentioned:

• Permitting remarried Catholics to go to Communion as the Orthodox do.
• Increased dialogue with other groups.
• Admitting lay men and women to the College of Cardinals.
• Greater power vested in local Churches, per the wishes of Vatican II.

See the whole article here: http://ncronline.org/news/global/swiss-abbot-makes-fiery-appeal-church-reform

For me, Advent has always been about a journey. “Every journey begins with a first step,” as they say, and Advent represents a first step in the Christian journey. We realize that our faith begins in primordial feelings of hope, wonder, even curiosity. Hope that our brokenness will be mended (this is why we have the wonderful readings from Isaiah), as well as hope for peace and justice. Wonder: We know something is going to happen, but we know not how. We know that the whole universe is on a crash course with God, that divinization is our destiny (For, as Thomas and other Fathers have said: God became man so that men might become God). And curiosity: Just as Mary was curious about the message of the angel, about its meaning, so to we may experience the work of the Holy Spirit in our curiosity: How will God work in our lives? How has God already been working in our lives?

I suspect every Faith journey must begin with an advent of hope, wonder and curiosity. Every experience of the divine grows from these sentiments. We are all at some point faced with the fact that we don’t really understand how we got to where we are and that we have no idea where we are going next. This is at first terrifying. Advent is the solution to the terror, for it offers answers: We are moving toward Christmas (the entry of God into human history—into our history–into your history). Whatever strange and mysterious chances brought us to where we are now have not been chaotic, but, rather, for all the damage, selfishness, greed, and injustice we see around us, we have the promise that our own sinfulness will be transformed into something beautiful.

If the Christian life is a book, Advent is like a little prologue with Christmas as the first chapter, Good Friday as the last chapter, and Easter as the indispensable epilogue. The prologue of Advent sets the stage for all the characters we will meet and sojourn with on our pilgrimage in a strange, often surreal, sometimes scary landscape. The more we understand this prologue, the more we will realize what is happening in subsequent chapters. So Advent, for me, is a chance to reflect on how the Holy Spirit has worked in bringing me to where I am, introducing me to the people I know, the ones I love and the ones I can’t stand. Advent is an invitation to see traces of the divine already present in the things around me, both pleasant and torturous. For when Christmas comes, when God becomes fully in matter and flesh, we will have to love all these things because God is in all these things.

What does Advent mean to you?

It would be nice to hear honest preaching like this in our own churches. Enjoy and have a peaceful week to close out the liturgical year.

Truth Vs. The Empire

Readers may assess for themselves the opinion of Rev. LaMoine and, apparently, his bishop, in denying a teenager the sacrament of confirmation, and that of Thomas Aquinas, in ST III. Q. 72 Art. 8. Aquinas says that Baptism is a prerequisite for confirmation, but beyond that, he says everyone should receive confirmation.

So, we have Reverend LaMoine saying that a teenager who has said he thinks civil law should extend benefits of marriage to any couple who asks for those benefits, is to be denied confirmation, and a family that has asked for that sacrament (confirmation) to be given to one of its members.

LaMoine’s argument is that if you think civil law ought to grant the civil rights of marriage should be widely applied, you are no longer Catholic.

In the 15 years since I converted to Catholicism, never once did I think my Catholic identity depended on that.

These are sad times.

Some Catholics, namely this guy, argue that your opinions on civil matrimony laws are what make-or-break-you as a Catholic.

But that is hard to believe. I think Catholicism is deeper than that. In my estimation, subversive Thomism is the belief that Catholicism has to do with having a generally sacramental worldview. The specifics are often up for debate. We may debate freely whether or not the sacrament (emphasis on that word) is only for male-female couples. But whether civil authority can extend benefits has noting to do with that sacramental view.

Pray for this family, because they are a victim of injustice.