John Allen thinks (and I suspect he's right) that Benedict's animus against the christology of Roger Haight is driven by a fear of relativism (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3062). Allen notes that Ratzinger's homily before the conclave that made him pope focused on the "dictatorship of relativism."And, as Allen also points out, the concern to silence Haight began when Ratzinger was head of the CDF, the Vatican office that censures theologians . . . .
The theological question that occurs to me--at least, one of them--as I think about Ratzinger's claim that Christianity is up against the "dictatorship of relativism," is how Benedict thinks we can sustain Vatican II's confidence that God reveals Godself in all the religions of the world, while we condemn christologies that seek to explore the implications of that affirmation of God's salvific presence in the entire world and its religious traditions?
Under the rubric of combating relativism, Benedict is implicitly saying that Vatican II was wrong: that God is not salvifically present in the religious traditions of the world. Vatican II left room for a creative tension in Christian thinking about christology and world religions. Benedict deals with that tension by denying it, by collapsing it back into a univocal affimation that salvation comes only through Jesus (and Jesus understood in traditional high-christological terms). Benedict removes one leg of the two affirmations that seek to hold in tension traditional affirmations about Jesus and the insight that God can be salvifically present in other religious traditions.
And why does he do this? In my view, the concern is not relativism at all, though Benedict's agenda may masquerade as a concern with relativism. The underlying concern is to combat christologies that undercut the unilateral claims of the clerical system to power. Benedict needs, wants, and intends to enforce (at the price of censuring all other approaches) a high christology that undergirds the exclusive sacral claims of the priesthood.
Benedict intends to center the church--his church--on an exclusivist, triumphalistic christology that reads all other religious traditions out of the history of salvation, except insofar as they accede to his exclusivist claims. He intends to suppress any christology that might see God active among the laity, independent of clerical control--that might see God at work to save the people of God apart from and even in opposition to the privileged clerical elite.
And for this christology, he is willing to pay a tremendously high price--on behalf of the whole church, which, after all, pays the price at his command, since the church is not really his church, no matter how devoutly he believes that. It is God's church, first and foremost; it is the church of the people of God. He is willing to pretend that a century of historical critical research about the scriptures simply does not exist, as he did in a recent remark he made at a papal Angelus, when he claimed, astonishingly!, that the gospel of John is an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus.
And he is willing to write off the crisis of faith that ensues for many believers when we are told that we have to swallow exclusivist, triumphalistic claims about Jesus and his significance--a crisis of faith, because our faith has come to center, after Vatican II, on a Jesus whose entire sigificance was to undercut such exclusivism and triumphalism, in a life lived in complete self-abnegation and total donation to the other. The Jesus many of us have come to follow and believe in would never repudiate and condemn to eternal damnation the adherents of other world religions.
He would find a way to embrace them. To dialogue with them. To learn from them. To find God among them.
What an atrocious price John Paul II and Benedict have asked post-Vatican II Catholics to pay, in order to keep the clerical system alive and to bolster the dying triumphalism of the defensive Tridentine model of the church. How will history judge this movement against history, I wonder? This movement against the Spirit that brought Vatican II about . . . .
