Cardinal Burke Throws Down the Gauntlet: "I Shall Resist" (Is This Cordileone's Message, Too?)

The new insert added by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone to the faculty handbook of employees of Catholic high schools in the San Francisco archdiocese: all administrators, faculty, and staff of these schools are to 

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "How Could a Catholic Priest with Such a History End Up As Second in Command of a Diocese—in 2014?"

At Commonweal, Grant Gallicho examines the curious case of Father Carlos Urrutigoity, who was removed by the Vatican in July from his position as vicar general in the diocese of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. In defending Urrutigoity and the decision of Ciudad del Este bishop Rogelio Livieres to make him vicar general of the diocese despite repeated (and seemingly credible) allegations that he had sexually abused minors and seminarians, diocesan officials state that Urrutigoity came to Ciudad del Este with the recommendation of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.

Archbishop Georg Gänswein and Benedict's Fixation on Rehabilitating SSPX, Benedict and Immunity from International Prosecution: What's Going on in the Vatican?!

Follow the Money

To be frank, I am not particularly interested in Vatican chit-chat. It seems far removed from my tiny little life in the miasmatic swamps of Arkansas. And I wonder how anyone can truly know what goes on in the inaccessible miasmatic swamps inside the Vatican. Anyone other than insiders, that is, and everyone who works inside the Vatican takes an oath, as I understand, not to see, hear, or tell.

In the News: End of Year Commentary on Religious News Stories (Uganda, Gay Marriage, Papal Pathology, Hobby Lobby, SSPX)

Good commentary from articles uploaded to Facebook feed by friends in the past day or so, and from blogs I read:

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? The Vatican's Current Turmoil

In Der Spiegel, Fiona Ehlers, Alexander Smoltczyk, and Peter Wensierski chronicle the astonishing turmoil now taking place inside the inner power circles of the Vatican, where a deep-throat source yet to be identified and calling itself "Maria" keeps spilling bean after bean about what's going on inside:

Europe's Resurgent Far-Right: "Same Politics of Scapegoating" (with a Catholic Footnote)

At Salon, Steve Weissman and Frank Browning report (as many other commentators in the U.S. and abroad are also reporting) that the far right is marching strong in Europe these days.  As the Anders Breivik trial unfolds in Norway, the media are paying renewed attention to the resurgence of a right energized by economic stress across Europe now.

Jesus and the Church: To Forget the Church Is to Forget Jesus?

At National Catholic Reporter this past week, Joe Ferullo takes Andrew Sullivan's recent Newsweek article entitled "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus" and juxtaposes it next to a response to Sullivan that University of Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting recently published in the New York Times.  As Ferullo notes, Gutting's response concludes, ". . . [T]o forget the church is to forget Jesus."

Gerald T. Slevin: Philly Abuse Trial: More HBO Than MSNBC?

Jerry Slevin has sent another strong statement about the situation in Philadelphia, where, as he notes, the ongoing seamy revelations in the trial of Msgr. Lynn have become more HBO than MSNBC--though as Jerry notes, the American mainstream media appear to a great extent to remain reluctant to deal with the abuse story, even as they give the U.S. Catholic bishops extensive face-time to spread talk about their "religious liberty" crusade.

Anthea Butler Excoriates Attempt of Catholic Centrists to Give Cover to Anti-Semitism of Lefebvrists

At Religion Dispatches, Anthea Butler writes, "On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Catholic 'Liberal' Hails Return of Anti-Semitic Group."  Butler, who teaches religion at University of Pennsylvania, and whose work I've recommended here in the past (e.g., here), is commenting on Michael Sean Winters's article earlier this week at National Catholic Reporter carrying the headline, "Welcome Back Lefebvrists."

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "Heck Yeah . . . God Bless the Magisterium"

At a posting at the Commonweal blog site yesterday, Grant Gallicho notes that in a single day, Catholic officials announced

Vatican Targets U.S. Nuns, Welcomes St. Pius X: Good, Bad, Ugly

"Vatican Orders LCWR to Revise, Appoints Archbishop to Oversee Group"

"Welcome Back Lefebvrists"

Amidst Controversy about Susan Sarandon's Benedict-Nazi Remark, Anti-Semitic Bishop Williamson Spouts Off Again

A day or so ago, when Kathy Hughes mentioned to me the dust-up about Susan Sarandon's recent remark re: Pope Benedict Hitler Youth past, I hadn't yet seen the news about Sarandon's remark.  I subsequently read an article at Truthdig reporting what Sarandon said.

Rome's Witch Hunt Against American Nuns: Women as Source of Vatican's Loss of Authority

When I first read about the recent Vatican announcement that there is to be a doctrinal investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) in the United States (here), I asked myself what sociological motives might lie behind this unprecedented attack on religious women in the U.S. I say “unprecedented” not because Rome cannot and does not investigate religious congregations, but because this is the second announcement in a matter of months that Rome has American religious women in its sights.

Last December, the Vatican congregation overseeing religious life announced an upcoming visitation of American religious women, to ascertain their “quality of life.” This latest announcement came from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) on 20 February, in a letter the officers of the LCWR received on 10 March. American nuns are now to be investigated on doctrinal grounds: are they upholding hard-line teaching about ordination (that is, hard-line teaching that ordination is to be forbidden to women) and homosexuality?

This is an unprecedented attack, then, because, to most of us observing the lives and activities of American nuns, nothing indicates the imperative need for not one but two investigations. American religious women are being used in some political game that transcends their own lives. Otherwise, there would not be the need to work up a case against this particular group of dedicated believers, at this particular time in history.

And as an aside, it bears noting that when a central investigating authority stages investigations of people or groups under its power, such an investigation always does constitute an attack. The very announcement that an investigation is underway is a form of an attack, an insinuation that something is there to be investigated. Powerful top-down systems of authority mount such investigations when they wish to give the signal that they are slapping down the person or group being investigated—and that this person or group is powerless to resist.

I have learned this lesson the hard way in academic life, when I was subjected on several occasions to “investigations” or “evaluations” that were all about consolidating the power of the big man/big woman on top. These “investigations” were always rigged. The person on top controlled them, feeding the “investigator” information, questions to ask, conclusions for his or her final report. There was no possibility at all to protest or to vindicate oneself, when the big woman/big man on top decided to mount such an investigation, since the point of the investigation was not to ascertain the truth about the one being investigated: it was to reinforce the power of the one on top.

As Colleen Kochvar-Baker points out in a thought-provoking commentary on the latest announcement (here), this attack on American nuns as possibly deficient both in the practice of religious life and in their doctrinal assertions is curious, to say the least, when the Legionaries of Christ, even after their founder was deposed following years of proven allegations that he abused seminarians in his community, are subject to only one investigation—and that reluctantly—and when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has never been investigated after it has come to light that a large majority of U.S. Catholic bishops have sheltered and re-assigned known sexual predators among the clergy. Colleen asks, “Why do American nuns merit two Vatican investigations when the Legion reluctantly only gets one, and the seminaries who cranked out all those abusers only got one?”

Why, indeed? Why this obsessive focus on refractory nuns now, when there have been almost no news stories in recent months about nuns attending women’s ordination ceremonies, or nuns speaking out publicly about the hot-button issues of ordination or homosexuality? Just nuns doing what they typically do: going about their ministries quietly, courageously, faithfully—teaching, healing the sick, caring for the indigent, praying, helping immigrants and street people and the elderly.

Nuns doing what they always do, suddenly in the sights of one of the most powerful religious juggernauts in the world, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: what’s going on here?

My first reaction, when I read about the doctrinal investigation, was to wonder on what grounds Rome is wagering it can score points by announcing a double investigation of American religious women in the absence of any strong indicators of serious problems to be investigated. There will inevitably be a very powerful sympathy factor at play in this investigation, one dangerous to the Vatican.

Women religious are aging. The women in religious congregations today have given their lives in service of the church. They have maintained schools across the United States, staffed the hospitals they have founded, operated and staffed nursing homes and countless other institutions serving the church and society in admirable, valuable ways. And they have done so without asking for anything. Many women’s communities today can barely make ends meet, as their members age and, in many cases, do not have access to social security benefits.

These are the new doctrinal bugbears of the Vatican’s CDF, these faithful and long-suffering women. These are the women who merit special attention from Rome, because of apparent lapses in how they are living their vows and in what they believe. It will be exceedingly difficult for Rome to paint its attack on these aging, devoted women who have been faithful to a fault as anything other than a witch hunt—to use the phrase highlighted by Joseph Leary in his blog’s summary of the Vatican initiative (here).

If the stakes are so high, why this witch hunt now, I have been asking myself? To me, the answer seems obvious—and lamentable. Women religious are being targeted because they are aging, and relatively powerless. And above all, because they are women.

Rome needs, quite simply, someone to bolster its power right now. Rome needs someone to bully, in order to demonstrate its power at a moment in which the Vatican has done just about everything possible in recent months to undermine its moral authority. Against the advice of many insightful advisors, Benedict chose to readmit the schismatic and anti-Semitic Society of St. Pius X to the Catholic church, without expecting that group to accept Vatican II as a precondition for readmission to communion. And when the Vatican made its announcement about this initiative, it noted that it timed the announcement to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the calling of Vatican II!

The reaction to the rehabilitation of SSPX—and how it was done—has been devastating in Catholic country after Catholic country. And the unilateral, anti-collegial appointment of a bishop for Linz, Austria—right-winger Gerhard Maria Wagner—on the heels of the SSPX initiative did not help matters, and caused the Vatican eventually to have to back down in this case. As the pope’s tone-deaf and counter-factual remark to reporters in mid-March questioning the efficacy of condoms in curbing the spread of AIDS also did not help . . . .

The church, in its institutional side, is clearly on the defensive. From an American standpoint (but one that also implicates Rome as well), the church’s unthinking alliance—in its institutional leadership side—with a single political party for decades now, and its unwillingness to accept and work with a new political majority, compounds the problems the church now faces. When a tiny, 106-year old American nun living in Rome endorses the president-to-be, calling him a “good man with a good private life,” at the very time in which powerful American bishops are suggesting that Mr. Obama is the incarnation of evil, things have clearly gotten out of hand (here), from Rome's viewpoint.

The men who rule us are losing moral authority. And they also appear to be losing what counts even more to them in the end: control. And they’re losing these weapons of the ruling elite rapidly, right before our very eyes.

It’s time for a witch hunt. It’s time to find some witches. I use Joseph O’Leary’s term here with full deliberation, because it’s a correct term. Read the discussion following the National Catholic Reporter’s story about the doctrinal investigation to which the first link above points, and you’ll see a troubling, surprising theme running through not a few postings. This is the claim that this particular witch hunt is necessary because, well, witches remain alive and well.

And they’re nuns. Those same elderly women who have worn themselves out teaching children, praying, tending to the sick, taking in orphans and the homeless.

The witch rhetoric is already running through what many Catholics of the far-right say about women in general and nuns in particular these days. And as Johann Hari’s article about the timeless allure of witch hunting at Slate’s website today reminds us (here), witch hunting—hunting, accusing, killing of women outrightly accused of witchcraft—is not even a thing of the past in some cultures in the world today. It’s still going on.

Hari notes that witch hunts break out particularly in times of trauma and stress. They are fueled by a deep sociological need of communities feeling out of control to find someone on whom to blame their problems—someone to scapegoat and sacrifice in order to reassert the illusion of control.

And those “someones” are almost always women, when it comes to witch-hunts. Hari notes the deep misogyny of Christian traditions about witches, which is strongly evident in the classic textbook for witch hunters, the 15th-century book Malleficus Maleficarum (Witches’ Hammer). As Hari notes, women are susceptible when powerful social groups seek a scapegoat in order to bolster the illusion of power of the men on top, because

Women are generally weaker than men. They are less able to defend themselves from braying mobs. They are easier to pin down and turn into a screaming, denying receptacle of evil. The mobs usually choose the weakest women of all—old women and little girls.

Are we correct to think that witch-hunting is a thing of the past today, a throwback to ancient prejudices that have disappeared from the enlightened Western world? Hari thinks not. As he notes, even a vice-presidential candidate in an American federal election—in this case, Sarah Palin—is apparently not immune to the suggestion that witches are still at work in the world. Hari notes that Palin has been prayed over for protection from witches by Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee.

No doubt about it: Rome is involved in a good old-fashioned witch hunt with women religious. And the claim that women religious have not been faithful enough in assisting the men who rule us to disseminate homophobia is part and parcel of the dynamics of slander and subordination that are driving this particular witch hunt. Though the rules are made by men in the church, and though ordained men claim absolute authority to enforce those rules, women religious are now to be slapped around for not leading the charge against gays and lesbians?

This stinks. To heaven. The use of women and gays as scapegoats by a Vatican increasingly isolated and robbed of moral authority by its own truculent refusal to dialogue with the people of God and to empower anyone other than itself is scandalous. It will only further erode the wavering authority Rome hopes to shore up, through this witch hunt.

Continued Conversation about Catholic Centrists: David Clohessy on Michael Sean Winters

UPDATE (2 P.M., CST): Interestingly enough, the America thread to which I link below, by Michael Sean Winters, with David Clohessy's response, is now gone from the America website. And I've just gotten a press release from VOTF combating misinformation in the media about its role with the legislation in CT (now withdrawn) that provoked Winters' posting (here).

I noted yesterday that Michael Sean Winters questions the faithfulness of the Catholic lay group Voice of the Faithful in a posting at America magazine's blog this week (here). Winters asks what criteria those who characterize VOTF as faithful use, and whether they are competent to make that judgment.

In response, I noted that the question of criteria used to judge brother and sister Catholics as faithful, and the question of the competency to make such a judgment, cuts both ways. It can be asked of Winters himself and of other centrist American Catholic thinkers who, as does Winters, write off millions of brother and sister Catholics to the left of the center-right as inadequately faithful.

I conclude,

I wonder what criterion they're using in making such a cruel judgment. And if they are competent to make it. And if they think it serves the church well to do so. And if they think that it doesn't undermine their pontifications about catholicity and love and justice and what "we" all believe.

I'm not the only one asking Winters those questions, I find. David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), responds to Winters in a comment at America today (here):

What a mean-spirited, gratuitous and unfair slap at the many fine Catholics who are in VOTF! Regardless of how one feels about the legislation advanced by 2 VOTF members, few doubt the good intentions and genuine compassion of the largely well-educated and clearly compassionate members of this group.

Democracy is messy and any public forum attracts a few loud-mouths. But such sweeping disdain for good Catholics in a Jesuit publication is disturbing.

Clohessy is absolutely right. Winters's snide remarks about VOTF (which has supported SNAP and those abused by priests) implicitly write off a wide group of faithful brother and sister Catholics, including lay groups working for reform of the church, and those sexually abused as minors by priests, as well as those who stand in solidarity with survivors of such abuse.

As I have noted over and over on this blog, American Catholic centrists have constructed a narrow ecclesiology that apologizes for the status quo and excludes millions of brother and sister Catholics whose voices sorely need to be heard, if the church is to heal from the horrific clerical abuse scandal, and to face the challenge of this postmodern millennium effectively. VOTF and SNAP may well represent the future of the Catholic church--the viable future of the church--far more adequately than do centrist apologists for the status quo.

Pope Benedict XVI has issued a statement this week admitting that the Vatican mishandled its offer of reconciliation to the Society of St. Pius X and its bishop Richard Williamson. In that statement (I'm relying on a copy published on Rocco Palmo's Whispers in the Loggia blog yesterday), the pope speaks of the need for "breadth" in the church:

But should not the great Church also allow herself to be generous in the knowledge of her great breadth, in the knowledge of the promise made to her? Should not we, as good educators, also be capable of overlooking various faults and making every effort to open up broader vistas? (here)

A splendid statement, indeed. And one touching on the root meaning of the word "catholic"--a church with "broader vistas" and "great breadth," capable of accomodating everyone, and of "overlooking various faults" as it extends its broad welcome to everyone.

Benedict's ecclesiology here is at odds with the ecclesiology of Winters in his remarks about VOTF. As long as those occupying the power seats of the center find it possible to welcome SSPX and Williamson, while they cannot find room for their brothers and sisters in VOTF and SNAP as well as for millions of Catholics who stand in solidarity with those groups and what they represent, something will remain radically awry with the church and its claim to catholicity.

The State of the Catholic Church, Lent 2009: A Photo Essay

For today, a photo essay--an interesting snapshot of the state of the Catholic church as Lent begins, 2009 . . . . The first two photos are from the Carnival parade in Düsseldorf on Monday, 23 February. The armband of the dignitary with the red wings reads (in case you cannot make out the lettering), "Bischof Williamson.

And then a photo of the real Bishop Richard Williamson, as he left Argentina this week for England, Argentina having demanded that he leave the country when his anti-Semitic views became known. Bishop Williamson is the gentleman in the ball cap raising his fist to a reporter:

Some Notes on the Meaning of Church in Light of Benedict's Rehabilitation of SSPX (2)

A week ago, I posted some notes (here) on Vatican Council II. I wanted to look back at that council in light of the choice of the current pope, Benedict XVI, to rehabilitate a group who reject that ecumenical council, the Society of St. Pius X. As that posting promised, I also want to append to that initial discussion some reflections about the practical implications for the church today of the different ecclesiological paths represented by Vatican II and those in reaction to the council.

My previous posting argues that ecclesiology (how we are to understand and talk about the church) is fundamental to Vatican II. When John XXIII convened this council of the entire church (that’s what the term “ecumenical” means; these councils are thought to represent the Spirit’s direction for the entire church), he sought to return to ancient ecclesiologies that had been discarded in the church of the Counter Reformation and the modern period. In his view, the time for defensive reaction against modernity was past. The church needed to retrieve its ancient ecclesiologies in order to engage the world redemptively and dialogically, and not merely by way of constant condemnation.

My posting notes that the church of the Counter Reformation and modernity was primarily a church in reaction: first to the Protestant Reformation, and then to the rise of modernity, with its sovereign nation states, scientific worldview, emphasis on human rights (including the rights of women), and historical-critical methods for interpreting the Bible. The church of this period envisaged believers as prey to destructive, godless currents of thought from which they had to be protected.

The church of the Counter Reformation and the modern period closed ranks, drew into a fortress, pulled the drawbridge up over the moat, and hurled down threats and anathemas against the entire modern project. Its leaders preached to the laity that absolute, unquestioning obedience was the primary virtue. Without total obedience, the church could not effectively combat the threat of modernity.

The church of this period stressed what it called the deposit of faith, the doctrinal inheritance the church transmits from generation to generation, based on scripture and tradition. The deposit of faith was thought of in objectified terms as a body of “truths” that had to be safeguarded and transmitted to the faithful, and which it was the duty of the faithful to receive with unquestioning obedience and intellectual assent, if they hoped to be Catholic and to achieve salvation.

A single philosophical tradition, neo-Thomism, an adaptation (and bastardization) of a richer Thomist tradition from the medieval period, became the authorized language for presentation of these “truths”—almost as if that philosophical language and its formulas were part of the deposit of faith itself, and not to be questioned. Faith, in this tradition, came to be understood primarily as something the mind does—intellectual assent—rather than as something that the whole person does, mind, soul, heart, and body, through giving oneself to God. The notion of faith that prevailed in the church of reaction to modernity stressed the willingness to accept “truths” handed down by the church in approved philosophical formulas, rather than the personal relationship of the believer to God which is central in biblical understandings of faith.

This approach to church life—constant enmity towards the world, with a heavy emphasis on “truths” captured in neo-Thomist philosophical formulas, and the obligation of the faithful to assent to and defend those truths—went hand in hand with the understanding of the church as a perfect society, something I noted in my previous posting. The church of the perfect society was above all orderly and unified: from top to bottom, through rules handed down from its absolute monarch through his henchmen in each local church, the bishops, and their representatives at the parish level, pastors. The perfect society model of the church rests on the presupposition that if one removes any aspect of that top-down approach to church life—pope safeguarding the deposit of faith, handing its truths down to bishops, who oversee the transmission of those truths by priests to the faithful—the entire system would fall apart.

With its movement back to the much more traditional ecclesiologies of the Christian scriptures and the patristic era, that is precisely what happened, in the minds of those who had everything invested in the perfect-society model, with its top-down leadership style. Their strong push against Vatican II is rooted in a belief that everything has fallen apart in the Catholic church, insofar as it began to question the perfect-society ecclesiology and to make changes in its institutional life reflecting its critique of that model.

This is to say that those attacking Vatican II have refused, at a fundamental level, to give up the attack on modernity—even in this period in which influential cultural commentators insist we have moved beyond modernity to postmodernity. In their worldview, the world remains a dark and sinful place to be combated and overcome. Contrary to Vatican II, which for the first time in Catholic history began to speak of the Protestant churches as churches, valid Christian communions led by the Spirit, from whom Catholics can learn, those resisting Vatican II continue to insist that the Catholic church has exclusive ownership of the truth and Protestant churches are threats to the unity and purity of Catholicism.

The fundamental impulse of those rejecting Vatican II is to continue to close ranks, weed out dissenters, and fight—from within the fortress, where truth reigns and everything is in perfect order, insofar as each member of the church assents to all truths in the deposit of faith. This is a fight pitched directly against the key ecclesiologies that Vatican II retrieved from ancient tradition: the images of the church as the pilgrim people of God and the body of Christ.

Certainly those images were not absent from ecclesiological thought before Vatican II. But they were subordinated to the image of the perfect society, and their implications were not adequately explored, since they could not be explored as long as the perfect-society model prevailed. When those gathered at Vatican II made the fateful decision to move away from the perfect-society ecclesiology, with all that this implied about the church’s relationship to the world and how the church organizes its inner life, a simultaneous decision was made to give primacy of place to the images of the church as the people of God and the body of Christ.

And that’s when the trouble began. It is well-nigh impossible to synthesize the perfect-society model with the people of God model of church. One metaphor stresses order and control; the other stresses communion and participation. One privileges top-down leadership and unquestioning obedience to the leader on top. The other emphasizes the presence of the Spirit in each believer and the need for each believer to seek God in her or his own pilgrim journey.

The implications of these two ecclesiologies for the inner life of the church—for how it views itself, preaches about itself, organizes itself—are starkly different. If the church took seriously what Vatican II says about the church as the pilgrim people of God (and I would argue it has not yet done so, due to powerful resistance to Vatican II in its leadership circles), the entire way the church structures itself would have to be revised at a very fundamental level.

For instance, the top-down approach to transmitting the deposit of faith would have to give way to a more participatory, communal style of discerning the Spirit’s voice in the church. The latter approach need not imply the abolition of pastoral leaders, of those designated within the community to listen carefully to the voice of the Spirit in the entire people of God and then to formulate the significance of what the Spirit is saying for all.

But what would have to change is the autocratic, anti-democratic style of the church’s leaders, a style rooted in the imperial traditions of the Roman Empire and not in the gospels. What would also have to change is the assumption that the ordained members of the church (clerics) should have special power and privilege among the people of God—and that the people of God should be powerless objects in an institution in which only the ordained can exercise power.

I am emphasizing the question of where clerics fit in the scheme of things because, in my view, much of the hidden reaction to Vatican II in the church today—the hidden attempt to continue the perfect-society model inside the shell of the people of God model—arises out of clericalism. Since Vatican II, the Catholic church has been stuck—deliberately arrested in its attempt to come to terms with that council and its ecclesiology—because of the determination of powerful groups at the center to maintain the clericalist system within the church.

These powerful interest groups know full well that if the system that provides power and privilege to clerics and denies it to the rest of the people of God were questioned at a fundamental level, everything in the church would have to change. Their resistance to Vatican II is fueled not merely by a resistance to the Council’s retrieval of the people of God ecclesiology, or to modernity: it is fueled by resistance to any attempt to critique the clerical system that is integral to the perfect-society model.

In the way the crisis of clerical sexual abuse has been handled by the church's leaders—from Rome down to the level of national bishops' conferences and of individual bishops—we see the handwriting on the wall: that crisis is rooted in clericalism and can never adequately be addressed unless we examine honestly the horrific price the whole church pays for keeping this system intact. But both the Vatican and prominent leaders of most national churches adamantly resist this critique and any attempt to delve into the damages clericalism has inflicted on the church. Their response to the crisis—shielding priests, blaming and revictimizing victims of abuse, playing hardball with lawyers and courts, lying and refusing the disclosure of information sought by the public and the legal system—is all about their intent to hold onto the clericalist system. At all costs.

To a great extent, the resistance to Vatican II in many sectors of the church represents a preferential option for clericalism—for a continuation of the clericalist model in church life, for a continuation of the special power and privilege clerics enjoy in the church, and for the continued subordination of the laity to the clerical elite. Those combating Vatican II—both overtly, as in SSPX, and covertly, from the center of the church, where the reforms mandated by the council have been checkmated by the restorationist agenda—are willing to wager the future of the church on the continuation of clericalism. At all costs.

They are willing to subordinate the church and its future, in other words, to a mutable, historically developed polity and system of structuring the church, that (in the view of many observers) gives unjust power and privilege to the clerical elite. This is—ultimately—why a tacit decision has been made among the ruling sectors of the church to edge out millions of Catholics in the developed nations of the world, who were energized by Vatican II's retrieval of the people of God ecclesiology. This is why church leaders continue to ally themselves with movements that have strong ties to fascism, including Opus Dei, the Legionnaires of Christ, and SSPX, while battering theologians who explore the implications of Vatican II and pushing millions of their brothers and sisters who find hope in the council out of communion.

This is, in the final analysis, what Benedict’s smaller, purer church is all about. It is not merely a church that preserves essential features of the perfect-society model in the shell of Vatican II. It is a church that absolutely resists any and all critiques of clericalism, and above all, any institutional changes that will concede something to critiques of clericalism. It is a smaller, purer clericalist church, in which historically conditioned understandings of the priesthood and its place in the church have been elevated to the status of unchangeable doctrine. Benedict welcomes SSPX because, in key respects, even with its rejection of Vatican II, the ecclesiology of that schismatic group is closer to Benedict’s than is that of millions of Catholics of the post-Vatican II era.

Continuing Crisis in Austrian Church: Wagner Resigns

Also in the news today, Gerhard Maria Wagner, the right-leaning auxiliary bishop-to-be in Linz, Austria, about which I’ve blogged a number of times (here), has declined Benedict XVI’s appointment of him to the episcopacy (here). And the media are reporting that Benedict has accepted Wagner’s response to the promotion. Apparently the deciding factor was the vote of no-confidence by 31 of 39 deans of the Linz diocese, about which I blogged several days ago (here).

As the posting to which I just linked also notes, the Viennese Cardinal Christoph Schönborn convened a meeting of the bishops of Austria today to deal with the crisis in the Austrian church precipitated by the appointment of Wagner and Benedict’s rehabilitation of the Society of St. Pius X. Cardinal Schönborn has stated that the meeting is necessary to do “damage control” in the Austrian church, in which there has been an unprecedented number of resignations following these two papal actions.

I suspect it’s going to take far more than damage control to retrieve the shattered confidence of many Catholics. Nothing less than the future of the church is at stake here—just as nothing less than the retrieval of Vatican II following years of “restorationist” attack on that council is at stake if the church’s future is to be safeguarded. The no-confidence vote of those 31 peers of Wagner is a good sign. It’s an assertion of the right of the local church to make its voice heard as episcopal appointments are made.

Unfortunately, there is no official mechanism at all in the Catholic church for such expressions of the sensus fidelium. And in the American church, where bishops have for generations been notoriously slavish about bowing to papal dictates, there’s not likely to be such a mechanism anytime soon.

Weekly News Roundup: Austrian Church Crisis, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, Knoxville Shooter

Lots of stories today following up on ones discussed in recent postings on this blog. A number of websites are reporting that the Catholic bishops of Austria will meet on Monday to deal with the crisis caused in the Austrian church by Benedict’s rehabilitation of SSPX and his naming of Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop of Linz (here and here). These decisions are having the following effect:

Four times as many Catholics have officially quit the Church in Linz so far this year as in early 2008, the Austrian Press Agency APA reported, and departures have also been running higher than usual in Vienna, Salzburg, Tyrol and Lower Austria.

On Tuesday this week, 31 of the 39 deans of the Linz diocese issued a statement of no confidence in Wagner. On the same day, Salzburg Archbishop Alois Kothgasser said that the church must avoid shrinking into "a sect ... with few but strictly obedient members" through such decisions that alienate more and more Catholics of good conscience shaped by Vatican II.

Meanwhile, as my e-friend Colleen Baker reported on her Enlightened Catholicism blog this week, Rabbi Yehuda Levin of the right-wing Rabbinical Alliance of America, has praised Benedict’s choice to rehabilitate SSPX and anti-Semite Richard Williamson (here and here). Levin, who supported Patrick Buchanan in his failed 1996 presidential bid, and who has participated in anti-gay demonstrations with Fred Phelps (who maintains the God Hates Fags website), has told Lifesite news that Benedict deserves support because he is seeking to weed the church of left-wing Catholics and fill its pews with morally upright believers. Levin states,

I understand that it is very important to fill the pews of the Catholic Church not with cultural Catholics and left-wingers who are helping to destroy the Catholic Church and corrupt the values of the Catholic Church. This corruption has a trickle-down effect to every single religious community in the world.

Levin believes that there is a conspiracy of a “strong left wing” in Catholicism, which is using events like the media furor over Richard Williamson’s outspoken anti-Semitism to undermine Benedict’s platform to purify the church of dissidents. In his view, this conspiracy involves an alliance between the “strong left wing” of the Catholic church and the “homosexualist” movement. Levin calls on Benedict to preserve his version of Catholic orthodoxy, and states that he is willing to overlook the anti-Semitism of SSPX because of that group’s other morally and politically upright views.

Vis-à-vis that “homosexualist” conspiracy, also in the news this week is an allegation by Tony Perkins of the influential religious-right organization Family Research Council that lesbians are ultimately responsible for the choice of Nadya Suleman to have octuplets through in vitro fertilization, in addition to the six children she already has. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has that lesbians-made-me-do-it story (here).

Also in the news this week is the sentencing of Knoxville, Tennessee, church shooter Jim David Adkisson for his rampage in a Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church in July 2008. Adkisson opened fire in the church without warning and killed two people. He was sentenced this week to life in prison.

At the time Adkisson was apprehended, he indicated that his motive for the shooting was his hatred of liberals and gays. A manifesto Adkisson wrote before the shooting has just now been released (here). It indicates that he hoped through his murderous actions to spur similar actions across the country to rid the United States of the “cancerous pestilence” of liberalism and homosexuality.

Adkisson writes,

The worst problem America faces today is Liberalism. They have dumbed down education, they have defined deviancy down.

I’m struck by that oft-heard complaint of the American political and religious right: "[T]hey have defined deviancy down.” It appears that, in the view of Jim David Adkisson, taking a gun and walking into a church full of people (including children) and opening fire is not deviancy. This act, is, rather, a response to deviancy.

And there, in a nutshell, we see, I would argue, just why the rhetoric of the American religious and political right has become so dangerous to our democracy and should be monitored vigorously by those concerned to safeguard our democracy. Shooting unarmed gays and liberals at worship and placing their children at risk in the process,is not deviancy. Being gay and/or liberal is.

And finally, headlines I like this week:

"Next Time, Let’s Have the Women Study the Men” at NCR, on the recent Vatican announcement that it will be "studying" American women religious to ascertain whether they are doing a proper job of carrying on their founders' charisms (here); and

“Reaching Right” at America on Benedict’s decision to rehabilitate SSPX (here).

Some Notes on the Meaning of Church in Light of Benedict's Rehabilitation of SSPX

As discussion has unfolded in recent days about Benedict XVI’s choice to rehabilitate the Vatican II-denying group Society of St. Pius X, it has occurred to me that many people following that discussion may not fully understand all that is at stake with Vatican Council II. What I take for granted both as a professional theologian and as someone who lived through the council years many other may not take for granted—or perhaps even know. Since I began this blog with the intent of sharing my own theological journey with others, and also making freely available to others resources I’ve gathered in that journey, I’d like to offer some reflections here about Vatican II.

These are very much at what professional theologians might call the “popular” area. That is, they are not written in the abstruse language spoken by most theologians, nor do they cite the copious sources a well-documented account should cite. In my view, there is a valid and compelling reason that some professional theologians need to do such theology.

Theology needs to reach people where they live—and professional theology also needs to recognize that many “ordinary” believers and “ordinary” human beings are doing theology in their own way and in their own right, and can teach professional theologians as we enter into dialogue. One serious shortcoming of much contemporary theology is that it is deliberately written for an in-house audience and avoids such dialogue. Some theologians, particularly in the Catholic church today, deliberately avoid engaging the public, in fact, for fear that they will be punished if they make themselves too clear.

Many accounts of Vatican II focus on the council as a response to the modern world, a belated Catholic response to cultural developments that took place in the Western world from the Reformation into the 20th century. It is certainly possible to view Vatican II that way, and Pope John XXIII’s statements when he called the council—statements that he hoped to open the windows of a building long closed and bring the church up to date (aggiornamento) certainly reinforce such an interpretation.

But it is also possible to argue that the primary goal of the second Vatican Council was to rethink the issue of ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is the area of theology that talks about the church—about how we think about it, about the theological sources that norm the conversation about the church, etc.

Many commentators on Vatican II note that, at a very fundamental level, the documents of Vatican II retrieve ancient, traditional notions of the church which had fallen by the wayside in the modern period, as the church reacted to modernity (and to the Reformation, a seminal event of modernity). In reaction to the Reformation, the Catholic church chose to view itself first and foremost as what it called “a perfect society.” This notion of the church was promoted by an influential cardinal of the late 16th and early 17th century, Robert Bellarmine.

In response to the Reformation and the development of the modern nation-state, Bellarmine argued that the church is a “perfect” society in that it has rulers that lay down its laws and regulations, and enforce the interpretation of doctrinal truth. This is in contrast to the growing claims of the nation-state that each ruler had the right to determine within the boundaries he or she ruled how people believed, and in contrast to the Reformation emphasis on the right of individual Christians to apply their consciences and make moral and theological judgments on that basis, resorting to scripture as their norm.

Note what lies at the heart of Bellarmine’s notion of a “perfect society”: a defense of monarchy as part of the “constitution” of the church, of how the church is made. This notion has had strong (and some would argue, primarily negative) consequences in Catholic thought. It is not merely a description of how things are, but a statement about how they should be: to retain its perfection and fulfill its mission, the church has to be ruled from on top by an absolute monarch.

The reaction against modernity that this concept of the church implies continued to grow accentuated throughout the modern period, due to a number of factors. These included revolutionary movements in Europe and America and the loss of the papal states, the territories ruled by the pope in central Italy. Almost simultaneously with the fall of these lands to reunification troops in 1870 (and in response to the demands being made by the troops for a sovereign state in Italy), Pope Pius IX convened the first Vatican Council, which formally proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility.

Several years before Vatican I, in reaction against modernity—which he tended to view as a godless, secular movement intent on overthrowing clerical control—Pius IX had issued an encyclical called the Syllabus of Errors in which he condemned the modern world wholesale. The ecclesiology that came to prevail in this period from the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent through Bellarmine and Vatican I up to Vatican II was largely reactionary and defensive: reacting against modernity itself.

The church of this period of history is often called by historians and theologians “the fortress church,” since it envisaged itself as the sole locus of salvation in a world hurtling itself to damnation. In contrast to the world, where there was darkness, relativism, lack of perfection, the church proclaimed that inside its walls was to be found light, truth, perfection. The believer’s chief responsibility was to accept the truths handed down to him or her from the keeper of the perfect order, the Pope, through those who received these truths from the papal hands, the bishops and priests.

What needs to be noted about this ecclesiology of the perfect society and the fortress church is that it is not traditional at all, as many of its defenders after Vatican II now seek to claim. Many of those attacking Vatican II claim that this council departed from tradition and created an innovative new ecclesiology that is not rooted in the church’s tradition at all.

This is not the case. In contrast to the defensive ecclesiology that had grown up in the modern period, the second Vatican Council called on the Catholic church to return to its ecclesiological roots by retrieving far more ancient, and more biblically grounded, notions of the church than the “perfect society” model and the fortress church model.

In particular, Vatican II reemphasized the ancient patristic (and biblical) notions of the church as the pilgrim people of God and the body of Christ. These metaphors for the church stress that the church is on pilgrimage through history along with all other human beings, seeking the reign of God at the end of history. As Augustine taught, its relationship to the world is not hierarchical, as the perfect society and fortress church images suppose: it is dialogical. The church interacts with the world in a dialogic fashion as it proceeds through history.

Far from having all truth shut up inside itself, the church receives truth from sources external to itself. If, as influential patristic theologians following St. Paul taught, the Spirit of God breathes within all of creation as all creation groans for salvation, then the church has an obligation to listen for and discern the presence of the Spirit outside its own walls—in other Christian churches, in non-Christian religions, and in secular movements seeking the same salvific goals towards which the church itself journeys on pilgrimage.

All of this is implicit in the image of the church as the pilgrim people of God. The image of the church as the body of Christ accentuates the “belonging” of all members of the church—and not just the ordained ones—to one body animated by one Spirit. This image critiques the concentration of power and privilege at the top of the church, the imagination that truth is somehow confined to the top and handed down to those below as passive recipients of divine truth. This notion of the church sees all Christians as led by the Spirit, as co-seekers of God along with the hierarchy. This ecclesiology undergirds the sensus fidelium concept of 19th-century theologian John Henry Newman, who argued that the Spirit speaks and acts within the faithful in a way that sometimes speaks truth to those at the top and corrects their mistakes.

Interestingly enough, for its authority figures as it retrieved these ancient, venerable ecclesiological notions, Vatican II turned to many of the same theologians who had been condemned in the early 20th century under the guise of pursuing those who were modernizing the faith. These included French theologians whose specialization was the patristic era, and who were involved in a ressourcement movement to recover the actual thought and words of the fathers of the church (e.g., Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar), and German theologians involved in dialogue with modern personalist philosophies (e.g., Karl Rahner) and with the biblical research being done in Germany in the 20th century.

When the council documents were voted on, with their call for a return to patristic and biblical images of church predating the perfect society notion, Bishop Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, voted against the proposed documents and in favor of the perfect society model of the church. To many theologians, this speaks volumes about the anti-Vatican II restorationist model that John Paul II and his right-hand man head of the Holy Office Cardinal Ratzinger began setting into place after the election of Wojtyla.

Though Ratzinger had been part of the group of theologians promoting the return to patristic and biblical models of the church at Vatican II, at decisive moments in his career, he did an about-face. His own writings suggest that the turning point was when he saw close-hand the effects of student discontent as he taught at Tübingen in the 1960s. Ratzinger implies that, in the student uprisings of that period (which were much milder at Tübingen than in many other places, including Paris), he saw the ultimate effects of modernity gone wild: relativism, destructive political ideologies that undermined Christianity, etc.

For many theologians who have followed Benedict XVI’s theological career, however, the real turning point took place in 1981 when John Paul II named Ratzinger head of the Holy Office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which enforces doctrinal purity in the church. From that decisive moment in Ratzinger’s career, it became clear to many of his colleagues that he was integral to—even spearheading—the anti-Vatican II movement to restoration that has dominated the life of the Catholic church from the papacy of John Paul II up to now.

And in my next posting on this theme, I’d like to give some consideration to the question of why: why John Paul II and Benedict preferred the perfect society model of the church over Vatican II’s ecclesiology, and the practical consequences of that preference for the church as a whole.

A Reader Writes: The Real Cost of Benedict's Smaller, Purer Church

In this posting, I’d like to give attention to a comment that an astute reader of this blog recently posted in response to my reflections on the thinkability of papal resignations (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-thinkability-of-papal-resignations.html).

Carl is responding to a comment made by a previous poster at the same thread, who had stated, “The church now is not losing members . . . . Where the faith is traditional, it is growing. Where it is radical, it is withering away.”

In response to the statement that the church is not losing members, Carl writes,

Quite bluntly, that is a lie! Pew forum reports that the Catholic Church is experiencing a net loss of 7.5% of its membership annually. That number is escalating. This week, the German Government reports that record numbers of German catholics are renouncing their membership in the Catholic Church. While there are old members returning, I myself am one, the numbers are far too small to offset the numbers who are leaving. Those loses are not sustainable. There is no way the RCC can survive this level of losses.

Carl’s comments then link to recent Pew Forum reports at http://religions.pewforum.org/portraits and http://religions.pewforum.org/reports#.

For anyone seeking accurate information about what is happening demographically in American Catholicism, the Pew Forum data are a sine qua non. They provide a very troubling snapshot of what the restorationist agenda of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, upheld by American bishops largely hand-picked by those two popes, means, precisely, in terms of continuing affiliation of American Catholics with the Catholic church.

As I reported in November (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/11/points-to-ponder-approaching-election.html), the Pew data show the following:

Percentage of Americans who are former Catholics: 10%

Percentage of American adults raised Catholic who have left the church: 33%

At the present moment in the history of the American Catholic church, a tenth of all American adults are now former Catholics, and a third of all American adults raised Catholic have left the church. As the same posting notes, as of February 2008, statistics from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) show the percentage of American Catholics attending weekly Mass at 23%. I suspect the number is lower now.

Carl’s posting also notes that, in the wake of Benedict’s rehabilitation of Richard Williamson and his SSPX confrères, resignations from the Catholic church in Germany have been “escalating.” I’ve been reporting on this phenomenon (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/living-in-hope-petition-of-german-swiss.html). As the posting to which I just linked notes, on 7 February, the newspaper Deutsche Welle reported that German Catholics are leaving the church “in droves” following Benedict’s action: that is, they are officially leaving by going to their local governmental office that maintains lists of church members for tax purposes, and having their names removed from those rolls.

Patrick Allard’s blog reported on this still-unfolding story on 7 February, with a transcript of a 6 February article from Der Spiegel, which indicates that all over Germany, Catholics are officially resigning from the Catholic church in unprecedented numbers following Benedict’s rehabilitation of SSPX (http://patrickattard.blogspot.com/2009/02/spiegel-catholics-leave-church-out-of.html). As I have also noted (see the link above to my Living in Hope posting), a similar situation exists in Austria, where there has been a mass exodus from the Catholic church in the past several years—and where media reports indicate further resignations following Benedict’s recent action.

And the situation I am describing is not different in other developed nations of the world. Even in formerly staunchly Catholic countries like Spain and Ireland, the Catholic church is dropping members at an unthinkable rate.

I agree with Carl: in light of these numbers, it seems strange, indeed, that Catholics enamored by the restorationist agenda still speak of their movement as one that is saving the church, returning people to church and to the practice of their faith. The numbers speak for themselves: precisely the opposite is happening in developing nations with Catholic populations. And the numbers of those leaving are skyrocketing in the wake of recent decisions by Rome.

And, it must be remembered, those statistics capture only the numbers of those officially leaving. They do not count those of us who have accepted, with heavy hearts, the church's decision to exclude us, and who longer participate in church life and liturgy because we have been given a clear message that we are not wanted.

This phenomenon appears not to perturb either Benedict or most bishops around the world—the majority of which have been appointed under the last two papal regimes and are solidly in the restorationist camp. As I’ve noted on this blog, the weeding out of Catholics who raise critical questions about the place of women in church and society, about sexual ethics, and about the political strategy of the church (e.g., in the pro-life movement) is deliberate. It is taking place under the aegis of purer, truer Catholicism: the restorationist agenda that has been at the center of Benedict’s church politics for decades now, from the period when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as Cardinal Ratzinger, intends and celebrates the exclusion of vast numbers of Catholics from the leaner and meaner "restored" church.

In the view of those promoting the restorationist agenda, authentic Catholics (even avowedly anti-Semitic ones) will remain and are welcome. The rest are unwelcome and should go, because we are disobedient children. As I’ve also noted, the new right-wing bishop in Linz, Austria, Gerhard Maria Wagner captures the nonchalant (and belligerent and intransigent) attitude of the church’s present pastoral leaders about this loss of millions of Catholics who took hope from Vatican II by arguing that the church cannot permit itself to be blackmailed by those leaving.

As if those leaving the church in large numbers are leaving primarily because we have sought to force change in the church, and not because our consciences no longer permit us to collude with a system that hides pedophile priests and welcomes anti-Semites and makes a shambles of an ecumenical council of the church. The consciences that the church itself has formed, through its teachings about ethical issues . . . .

In my view, the response of the current pastoral leaders of the church (and those who defend them from the center) to the pastoral needs of millions of Catholics experiencing a crisis of conscience because of the behavior and decisions of those pastoral leaders is not merely inadequate: it is a shocking betrayal of all that pastoral leadership is about. The charge given to the church’s pastors is to seek out the lost members of the flock, and to feed the flock—not to drive away and starve the flock.

Historians will one day ask how people given such a charge could drive away and starve the flock entrusted to their care. By then, of course, it may well be too late to ask that question in anything but a theoretical sense, since starved and dispersed flocks have a way of disappearing altogether.