Commonweal 560
Another Nigerian Martyr
The reasons for the violence in Nigeria—Africa’s largest democracy—are varied and complex, and no region of the country is exempt. Many of the attacks on civilians (both Christians and Muslims) can be traced to growing struggles over agricultural resources; aridification due to climate change has intensified the longstanding herder-farmer crisis in north-central Nigeria. Cult and ritual violence has spiked in the southwest, while piracy and oil theft continue near the Niger Delta. Extreme poverty has made kidnapping for ransom routine throughout the country.
American conservatives have accused the Biden administration of “ignoring religious persecution” in Nigeria. Late last year, a group of Republican senators, including Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, released a statement urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to once again designate Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC). Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, a CPC designation paves the way for sanctions against countries found to be “engaged in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom.” But it’s difficult to see what such a measure would accomplish in Nigeria: if anything, U.S. sanctions would only further weaken the ability of the government to protect innocent Nigerians—of all faiths.
A more effective response is the nuanced one offered by Pope Francis in anticipation of his historic trip to Congo and South Sudan in February. Following Achi’s death, the pope decried violence against Christians and invited the world to join him in prayer—demonstrating compassion and solidarity with victims of religious persecution while preserving his commitment to dialogue with the Islamic world. In an interview, Francis condemned not the absence of religious freedom in Africa, but the predatory attitude of developed countries, which he accused of having a “collective unconscious that says Africa is to be exploited.” Fr. Achi’s martyrdom should not be used to stoke more fear and hostility toward Islam. Let it inspire the kind of humility, courage, and superhuman patience that true peacemaking requires—and that lies at the heart of the Gospel.
Benedict the Innovator
The novelty of that situation led to a lot of smaller decisions about what Benedict should be called, what he should wear, where he should live, and so on, right up to the final decisions about his funeral rites. Some of the answers to those questions were imprudent. But the struggle to discern a path forward was itself salutary: even in the Catholic Church, tradition isn’t the only available answer. Sometimes you have to try something new, see if it seems right, maybe change course if it fails. These are banalities in most places, but in Rome they are radical truths. Staying the course, dying in office, would have meant keeping the Church from having to do something new. But that didn’t make it the right choice. Resigning meant trusting that the Church could encounter a new set of circumstances and just…figure it out.
There were intimations, during Benedict’s emeritus period, that the former pope was less than delighted with the choices made by his successor. But whatever his preferences might have been, Benedict had greater faith in the guidance of the Holy Spirit than his most fervent admirers (and Francis’s most fervent detractors) have ever shown. He trusted that the Church would be all right in someone else’s hands. He was open to being surprised, to being, like St. Peter, led in his old age in a direction he might not have chosen. He and I would not have agreed about which were the greatest threats to the Church’s integrity and what sort of adjustments would keep the ship afloat. But he had faith in the Church’s ability to navigate, not just as an extension of his personal authority, but as a project greater than any of us.
The experience of figuring out what to do with a pope who stops being the pope was an experiment in encountering unexpected questions and searching for new answers. It was awkward. We didn’t get it all right. But it was a good warm-up. It turns out the fact that a thing has never been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done now. There are many more questions the Church doesn’t want to face. Searching for answers, embracing humility, and trying new things will be the only way forward.
None of this reflection was interesting to my kids, who were barely aware that Benedict existed. But it seems to me that they are growing up in a Church that is a bit more flexible and able to confront challenges, thanks to Pope Benedict. And that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
The Church’s Memory Problems
In a sense, however, that attempt at metanoia has failed—and we should remember this now that the preparation of the Jubilee of 2025 is underway. The abuse crisis has done more than sweep away the triumphalism of the Jubilee of 2000. It has also revealed just how inadequately (almost embarrassingly so) the Church handled its “purification of memory,” considering what happened soon after: the protection given at both the institutional and local levels to Cardinal Bernard Law, Fr. Marcial Maciel, and other notorious abusers and enablers; and the wasteland that grew between Catholic theology and the institutional Church.
In another sense, the outrage sparked by the abuse crisis and the ecclesial crisis more generally are signs of an ongoing metanoia. If we judge the Church and Christianity as profoundly different from what the Gospels led us to expect, we do so precisely because we refuse to ignore those expectations. That is why we feel the scandal of their denial. If we were able to regard the Church outside this horizon of expectation, the scandal would actually end.
Still, the Church’s memory problem negatively affects the chances of an ecclesial metanoia. The time will soon come to articulate a hermeneutics of the Church’s past. This will have to include what was overlooked in Vatican II, the post–Vatican II Church of Paul VI, and John Paul II’s requests of forgiveness. (Benedict XVI did not believe in the fruitfulness of these mea culpas until the abuse crisis brought him around.)
Pope Francis has hinted at something like the need to re-examine history in light of the abuse scandal. In his December 21, 2018, address to the Roman Curia, at the end of a year that began with the catastrophic visit to Chile and Peru and that also included the McCarrick case, Francis talked about the need for an adequate hermeneutic of history: “Let it be clear that before these abominations the Church will spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice whosoever has committed such crimes. The Church will never seek to hush up or not take any case seriously. It is undeniable that some in the past, out of irresponsibility, disbelief, lack of training, inexperience—we need to judge the past with a hermeneutics of the past—or spiritual and human myopia, treated many cases without the seriousness and promptness that was due.”
Yet this still isn’t happening. It is probably the only way to give the “synodal process” a chance. But the Church maintains a defensive posture—defending its authority as well as its tradition, including defending Vatican II from the attacks of traditionalists. Church politics dominates the conversation at the highest level: the focus on Pope Francis’s pontificate, his possible resignation, and the maneuvers for the next conclave. (See the manifesto written and circulated anonymously last year by Cardinal George Pell, in which he blasted Francis.)
The Blood Libel
Nothing in the long and tragic history of Catholic anti-Jewish action rivals the blood libel for shock, horror, and folly. The sudden disappearance of a Christian child in a small rural Central or Eastern European town is met, unexpectedly, by an outburst of accusations by local Christians against their Jewish neighbors. Good men and women who have lived peacefully for decades suddenly hear themselves accused of abducting and murdering a small child for the purpose of religious sacrifice. The blood libel has been around since the twelfth century, fostering in Christians the feeling that they are once again the victims of Jews, hence justified in defending themselves, their faith, and their children against the ancient enemy.
In truth, ritual-murder accusations took hold only rarely: fewer than a hundred noteworthy cases in a millennium. And such charges almost invariably provoked some degree of disbelief among the educated and those in authority, as well as refutations from the learned—Christian or Jewish. Formal investigations and trials were authorized despite ambivalence and reluctance on the part of doubtful officials. Indeed, the case that proved to be the “big bang” of blood-libel notoriety involves Simon of Trent (1475), which exploded into high visibility mainly because secular and religious authority was united in the hands of a powerful prince-bishop who found it politically expedient to pursue this case. He did this so efficiently that Rome felt obliged to acquiesce: Simon was eventually canonized, while books about “the martyr” were still being churned out more than four centuries later in justification of the blood libel.
Tendentious books of blood libel went uncondemned by the magisterium, transforming fake news into established tradition, a long “memory trail.” Those in search of a pretext could always find phony documentation to justify their chimerical beliefs about Jews. “This long story of the persistence of anti-Jewish blood libels despite arguments to the contrary is dispiriting,” concludes Magda Teter in Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, a long-awaited study of ritual-murder accusations. Teter, a professor at Fordham University, shows that the “great” medieval cases of William of Norwich (1144) or “Little Hugh” of Lincoln (1255) took on celebrity status only centuries later in the sinister retroactive light shed by Simon of Trent. Teter also shows that the blood libel, even as it arose in very Catholic Poland, did not turn on matters theological (e.g. the Crucifixion) but consisted of vitriolic efforts to brand Jews as criminals or perpetrators of anti-Christian cruelties in order to impede their social interaction with Christians. (The attempts did not always work: in Eastern Europe, as in Central or Western Europe, Jews and gentiles got along well for the most part.)
If the Reformation and Enlightenment largely put the kibosh on German, French, and British blood-libel charges, the Counter-Reformation gave the lie new life as a popular discourse in Poland–Lithuania. A report prepared by Cardinal Ganganelli (the future Pope Clement XIV) in 1758 concluded that ritual murder was a calumny void of truth, but this text lay buried in the archives for more than a century. It was printed for the first time around 1900 because the blood libel, having receded from visibility for three centuries, underwent a stunning revival in five shocking cases. Teter does not include Tiszaeszlár (1882–3, Hungary), Xanten and Konitz (1891–3 and 1900, respectively, both Germany), Hilsener (1899–1900, the Czech lands), and Beilis (1913, Russia) in her study, though she does have a postscript on them. They are covered with great detail in another recent book: Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder at Europe’s Fin de Siècle by Hillel J. Kieval, a professor at Washington University.
Teter and Kievel are both accomplished and respected scholars, yet in critical points of method, interpretation, and understanding, they sharply differ in their approach to the topic—a reminder, if one were needed, that history is always as much an art as a science. Had Teter chosen to “finish the story” with a hundred pages of analysis of the modern cases, one suspects she would have turned out a study very different from Kieval’s.
Teter’s is a sweeping work of longue durée, from the mid-twelfth to the late eighteenth century throughout Europe. While much changes, the continuities prevail over the discontinuities. Her book is, most importantly, a study where religion is the final reference point, notwithstanding numerous learned peregrinations into the adjacent terrains of society, economy, and politics. For Teter, the ritual-murder accusation has a clear and stable identity from its earliest appearance to its most recent. In fundamental ways, the Beilis case in 1913 rehearses the William of Norwich case in 1144, thanks to nearly eight centuries of Christian anti-Jewish discrimination, persecution, and contempt in sermons, rites, policies, and public sentiment.
Kieval, on the other hand, has produced a micro-history focusing on five locales in Central Europe over thirty years. In his telling, modern ritual murder is a new phenomenon that relates only nominally to the earlier cases Teter focuses on. In this, Kieval follows the prevailing scholarly view, according to which “antisemitism” constitutes a thorough-going departure from religious anti-Judaism. Kieval’s conclusions about the novelty of latter-day ritual murders are anchored in his analysis of his subjects’ distinctively modern epistemology, which embraced the secular languages of forensic science, politics, and “breaking news” journalism. In other words, their understanding did not turn on theology, and they were not concerned with the religious symbolism of the alleged crimes: Jesus was no longer being “crucified.” Instead, the modern version of the blood libel accused kosher butchers of slicing up Christian children for no particular reason beyond, in Kieval’s pungent words, “raw brutality…. [S]acrifice has been transmuted into slaughter, the altar into the cutting block…. The Jews, themselves, finally, are not religious adversaries, the vanquished recipients of the Old Law; they are Yids.”
Seekers, or Thieves?
When I first moved to New York for graduate school, I started doing yoga: an unoriginal choice for a young white woman, but my choice nevertheless. Yoga was relaxing and affordable. Between newcomer packages and free Saturday classes, I could exercise for less than the cost of a gym membership. I borrowed studio mats and wore ratty t-shirts. I couldn’t do a handstand, but still managed a workout.
Yoga was also, some teachers implied, something more than exercise. It was an awakening. A practice—a spiritual one. And this I struggled with. I welcomed the silences surrounding each session, but some classes also had gongs, chanting, incense. Many had mantras we were asked to repeat. Teachers told us we were awesome; they told us to find light and power within; they asked us to tap into energies so we’d be balanced and peaceful—and also, it was implied, hotter. Our classes finished with a namaste as reverent as amen, but without explanation of who or what we were addressing.
As a Christian, I wasn’t afraid of yoga: these classes were more woo-woo than witchcraft. But I did feel a little dishonest. It felt odd to lay a creed—even one as innocent as love yourself—over a workout class I was paying for.
A similar uneasiness pervades Liz Bucar’s Stealing My Religion, a book-length study of what she calls “religious appropriation.” Cross jewelry, meditation apps, and secular seders might seem innocuous. But using religious iconography, customs, and rituals outside of their original contexts, Bucar says, risks “instrumentalizing religion for political, educational, or therapeutic goals.” Worse, it can “communicate contempt for the deeply held values of religious communities.” Any form of appropriation—defined as a “dominant culture” stealing from “marginalized communities” in a way that causes “harm or offense”—is blameworthy. But religious appropriation is uniquely harmful, dealing not just with cultural artifacts like food and hairstyles but “ultimate concerns” and sacred truths.
Bucar, a professor of religion whose past work has focused on Muslim women’s dress, takes “solidarity hijab” as her first example. Worn by non-Muslims to signal progressive politics, solidarity hijab might appear on a protest poster, in a fashion show, or in a profile picture of a liberal woman speaking out against Islamophobia. But even when well intentioned, these attempts at support are also acts of religious appropriation. They bypass the pious virtues associated with the hijab—“modesty, shyness, humility, obedience” before God—and make it a costume. This transformation risks “undermining the religious meaning of hijab for Muslim women who choose to wear it.”
And, of course, that wearing is indeed a choice; Bucar finds solidarity hijab troublesome in part because many Muslim women don’t wear the covering. To make it a symbol of Islam is to exclude these women from their faith, she writes, “neglecting the diversity of the Muslim community.” She has other criticisms, too: solidarity hijab “coopts inclusivity in the form of a superficial allyship,” “functions as virtue signaling rather than addressing actual injustice,” and “de-centers” Muslims in the aftermath of Islamophobic violence.
These criticisms, though valid, aren’t novel: just the familiar problems of tokenism and slacktivism, white feminism and orientalism. As Bucar walks readers through harms related to race, gender, and ethnicity, she slips into academic jargon. Her central claim—it’s the religious nature of hijab that makes its appropriation really bad—is fresher and more interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get enough space. There’s only one paragraph for Quranic verses on hijab, just a page about its implications for personal piety. I wish Bucar had offered more—perhaps a fuller reading of the Quran or other Muslim commentaries, perhaps more interviews with women about their devotional experiences, and certainly more analysis of hijab’s private, pious meaning.
Yoga isn’t so obvious a theft. But it’s a theft all the same. It’s problematic for lots of other reasons, too, Bucar reminds us: poorly paid teachers, anti-vax sentiments, gurus who sexually assault their students. Yoga can be “orientalist and racist and classist,” creepy and exploitative. Fair. But again these critiques, even when correct, obscure Bucar’s more provocative “yoga as religious appropriation” argument.
That appropriation, she writes, happens during “respite yoga,” any yoga performed for health and wellness rather than devotion. With its mantras and haphazard Sanskrit, its token oms and namastes in between squats and planks, respite yoga is “marked as vaguely spiritual and yet requires no religious commitments,” no adherence to the “Eastern devotional systems with which it is associated.” “Devotion becomes respite, salvation becomes health,” belittling the beliefs of those who practice yoga as an inherited spiritual tradition. During a training course, Bucar notices that a fellow classmate—an Indian woman who grew up practicing devotional yoga—is finding herself the odd one out. The woman struggles through unfamiliar postures and eventually curls up for a nap. “Although this yoga supposedly came from her homeland,” Bucar writes, “it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable.”
All a Matter of Perspective?
The ERDs, to quote from the sixth edition’s preamble, “provide authoritative guidance on certain moral issues that face Catholic health care today.” They must be observed for a Catholic health-care service to be recognized as Catholic. Violations may result, at the local bishop’s discretion, in a service losing its Catholic status.
The ERDs originated in 1948, but they took a hard legalistic turn in 1971, partly in response to changing medical norms with respect to abortion in the United States and partly in response to variations in practice in Catholic hospitals in the 1960s with respect to sterilization and the distribution of contraceptives. In 1994, the bishops significantly expanded the document with the aim of ensuring uniformity. As the Jesuit ethicist Kevin William Wildes observed in a 1995 commentary, “In contrast to the complexity of traditional Catholic morality, the [1994] directives seek to remove areas of ambiguity and leave little room for judgment.” Wildes went on to suggest that “[o]ne way to understand the Directives is to see them as an effort by those in authority [e.g., bishops] to restrict the space and liberty of those who are an authority [e.g., moral theologians].”
Salzman and Lawler couldn’t agree more. The passage in the 2018 ERDs that bothers them the most—to judge from how often they refer to it—appears toward the end of the document’s introduction:
While the Church cannot furnish a ready answer to every moral dilemma, there are many questions about which she provides normative guidance and direction. In the absence of determination by the magisterium, but never contrary to church teaching, the guidance of approved authors can offer appropriate guidance for ethical decision making.
Unsurprisingly, the criteria to qualify as “approved” are not articulated. For it goes without saying that an approved author is someone who never disagrees with Church authorities: in Wildes’s terms, the people in authority.
The 2018 ERDs are a direct descendant of the 1994 ERDs, with some subtractions and additions. Salzman and Lawler focus on the 2018 ERDs not only because they are the most recent but also because, they claim, it is “perplexing and even scandalous” that the USCCB did not revise the ERDs in light of Pope Francis’s “anthropological and methodological contributions.”
Salzman and Lawler are correct that the ERDs reflect a “hierarchical ecclesiology.” As they write with a touch of snark, “
Here the case that Salzman and Lawler discuss at length is illuminating. In November 2009, the ethics committee, chaired by Sr. Margaret McBride, RSM, of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, permitted the abortion of an eleven-week-old fetus. The pregnant woman was suffering from acute pulmonary hypertension, which her doctors judged would prove imminently fatal for both her and her child. After the fact, Phoenix’s then-bishop, Thomas J. Olmsted, criticized both Sr. McBride and the hospital, which he stripped of its Catholic status after it refused to repent of its decision in the case. As Salzman and Lawler comment, “There is no indication [in the 2018 edition of the ERDs] that this case had any impact on the recognition of the possibility of conflicts in interpreting and applying the ERD, resolving such conflicts, or formulating new directives in light of such conflicts.” I have argued elsewhere that the Phoenix case indicates the need for the ERDs to incorporate a principle of lesser evil, but the bishops seem to have drawn neither this lesson nor any other.
The Gatekeepers
Finally, and most revealing of all, are the reactions of Müller and Pell to the current synod on synodality (ignored by Gänswein). Müller and Pell speak of the three-year process —which began in October 2021 with a worldwide gathering of ordinary faithful—with horrified disgust. “What is one to make of this potpourri, this outpouring of New Age good will?” asks Pell in the Spectator of the Document for the Continental Stage (DCS). Müller sneers that the synod amounts to a “democratization, a de facto Protestantization.”
But even more striking than their disgust is their ignorance, sign of an inner isolation from the body of the Church. In claiming that the Synod of Bishops is per se the expression of episcopal collegiality, Müller takes no account of the authoritative International Theological Commission’s 2018 document clarifying the distinction between collegiality and synodality, or of that year’s apostolic constitution Episcopalis communion, which—drawing on the ancient traditions of the Church—says “the Synod of Bishops must increasingly become a privileged instrument for listening to the People of God”.
First, synodality is not just for bishops, a point deduced from the experience of the early Church, which Müller and Pell do not bother to engage. Second, the bishops remain the decision-makers and final discerners, with and under the pope—an essential point that distinguishes Catholic synodality from deliberative parliamentary processes in Protestant churches. “Bishops are not there simply to validate due process and offer a ‘nihil obstat’ to what they have observed,” declares Pell, who seems not to have noticed that Episcopalis communio n. 7 makes clear precisely this: “Consultation of the faithful must be followed by discernment on the part of the Bishops chosen for the task, united in the search for a consensus that springs not from worldly logic, but from common obedience to the Spirit of Christ.”
Pell says bishops are “governors and sometimes judges, as well as teachers and sacramental celebrants, and are not just wall flowers or rubber stamps.” What is missing from that list is listening to the sensus fidei. The Ecclesia docens cannot be separated from the Ecclesia discens. A teaching Church is one that listens to the sensus fidei—“a mutual listening,” as Francis put it in his 2015 speech on synodality, “in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of truth’ (John 14:17) in order to know what he ‘says to the Churches’ (Revelations 2:7).”
This is what happened in the synod on synodality’s first stage: a worldwide mutual listening to discover what “new thing” (Isaiah 43:9) the Spirit may be saying to the Church at this time. The syntheses of that listening, both national and global, took for granted the Church’s apostolic tradition and its teaching. Its purpose was not to restate what is settled; nor was it intended as a teaching document (which it had no authority to be). The DCS, as the document itself makes clear, was a summary of the listening process, which sought to be faithful to what had been heard.
“It is not a summary of Catholic faith or New Testament teaching,” says Pell of the DCS, without any awareness of how odd it would be if it were. The purpose of the DCS was to synthesize what emerged from the global discussion of what people experience as enabling or blocking communion, participation and mission within the Church. Obviously, that meant considering who experiences exclusion, who is “outside,” those whose gifts are not recognized as they should be. Pell describes as “neo-Marxist jargon” the DCS’s references to exclusion, alienation, identity, marginalization, and the voiceless. Yet these were words that appeared in virtually all the national synthesis reports. They were not culled from sociological textbooks; they were used by ordinary Catholics to describe what they saw.
Pell claims, absurdly, that “by an enormous margin, regularly worshipping Catholics everywhere do not endorse the present synod findings.” Numbers are hard to come by, but where they have been published—the U.S. document says 700,000 took part; Spain says 200,000; France, 150,000—the figures are impressive, even if they represent less than 10 percent of the total Mass-going population. There is no evidence to suggest that what participants in the listening sessions expressed was not representative of the views of other Mass-goers, and plenty to suggest that it was.
Pell is horrified by the DCS’s call to “enlarge the space of your tent”—a quote from Isaiah 54:2 that the group in Frascati (I was one of them) felt captured what the Spirit was saying through the reports. Pell reads this as a bid to “accommodate…anyone who might be interested enough to listen.” By “accommodate” Pell means diluting Christ’s message for the sake of appealing to the zeitgeist. Yet the DCS makes clear that the words “help us to focus on what the Lord is calling us to through the experience of lived synodality,” which is then explained in paragraphs 26–28 as an invitation to self-emptying and conversion in order to be better able to deepen communion. Only an extreme hermeneutic of suspicion is capable of reading these paragraphs the way Pell does.
The cardinal adds, quoting from the document, that “participants are urged to be welcoming and radically inclusive: ‘No one is excluded.’” The phrase “No one is excluded,” which Pell quotes with derision, appears twice in the DCS. In the Introduction, it comes in the context of “listening as openness to welcome: this starts from a desire for radical inclusion—no one is excluded—to be understood in a perspective of communion with sisters and brothers and with our common Father.” Part 4.1 states that the “message of our synodal way is simple: we are learning to walk together.… Everyone is called to take part in this journey, no one is excluded. To this we feel called so that we can credibly proclaim the Gospel of Jesus to all people.” In neither case is the phrase used as a justification for accommodating or diluting teaching or doctrine, but as a hermeneutic of listening and proclamation: the missionary starting-point of Jesus himself, who sent his followers out to make disciples of all nations with a message that no one was excluded from God’s love and mercy.
Shortly after Pell’s death and his well-publicized broadside, I was in Luxembourg for a meeting on the experience of local synodality in European dioceses. At a Mass for us celebrated by the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, who is also the synod’s relator, he began by noting “all these attacks, all this fear and accusation” around the synod, adding, with a smile, that “God clearly has a great plan” for it.
“As a Jesuit, in my own spiritual journey, I know that when you have a lot of opposition to something, that can be a sign of confirmation,” he told me after Mass. He explained that one clear sign of where the attacks are coming from is the way they are made: ad personam, viciously, in secret memos and the like. “When I get attacked, I always feel that Pope Francis is aimed at,” he said. “For my own journey, Francis has been very important. I heard him proclaim the Gospel and I knew I had to change, and that made me very happy. I wish the same happiness, the same conversion, for all the bishops—and lay people—who attack the synod.”
We all had to work together, in our imperfection, for the good of the Church and its mission, the cardinal added. For this, he said, “we have to enlarge the tent.” But there were some people who did not want that, who wanted to keep the tent small.
“It’s their responsibility,” he added. “But it’s sad.”
The Anti-Francis Gatekeepers
Finally, and most revealing of all, are the reactions of Müller and Pell to the current synod on synodality (ignored by Gänswein). Müller and Pell speak of the three-year process —which began in October 2021 with a worldwide gathering of ordinary faithful—with horrified disgust. “What is one to make of this potpourri, this outpouring of New Age good will?” asks Pell in the Spectator of the Document for the Continental Stage (DCS). Müller sneers that the synod amounts to a “democratization, a de facto Protestantization.”
But even more striking than their disgust is their ignorance, sign of an inner isolation from the body of the Church. In claiming that the Synod of Bishops is per se the expression of episcopal collegiality, Müller takes no account of the authoritative International Theological Commission’s 2018 document clarifying the distinction between collegiality and synodality, or of that year’s apostolic constitution Episcopalis communion, which—drawing on the ancient traditions of the Church—says “the Synod of Bishops must increasingly become a privileged instrument for listening to the People of God”.
First, synodality is not just for bishops, a point deduced from the experience of the early Church, which Müller and Pell do not bother to engage. Second, the bishops remain the decision-makers and final discerners, with and under the pope—an essential point that distinguishes Catholic synodality from deliberative parliamentary processes in Protestant churches. “Bishops are not there simply to validate due process and offer a ‘nihil obstat’ to what they have observed,” declares Pell, who seems not to have noticed that Episcopalis communio n. 7 makes clear precisely this: “Consultation of the faithful must be followed by discernment on the part of the Bishops chosen for the task, united in the search for a consensus that springs not from worldly logic, but from common obedience to the Spirit of Christ.”
Pell says bishops are “governors and sometimes judges, as well as teachers and sacramental celebrants, and are not just wall flowers or rubber stamps.” What is missing from that list is listening to the sensus fidei. The Ecclesia docens cannot be separated from the Ecclesia discens. A teaching Church is one that listens to the sensus fidei—“a mutual listening,” as Francis put it in his 2015 speech on synodality, “in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of truth’ (John 14:17) in order to know what he ‘says to the Churches’ (Revelations 2:7).”
This is what happened in the synod on synodality’s first stage: a worldwide mutual listening to discover what “new thing” (Isaiah 43:9) the Spirit may be saying to the Church at this time. The syntheses of that listening, both national and global, took for granted the Church’s apostolic tradition and its teaching. Its purpose was not to restate what is settled; nor was it intended as a teaching document (which it had no authority to be). The DCS, as the document itself makes clear, was a summary of the listening process, which sought to be faithful to what had been heard.
“It is not a summary of Catholic faith or New Testament teaching,” says Pell of the DCS, without any awareness of how odd it would be if it were. The purpose of the DCS was to synthesize what emerged from the global discussion of what people experience as enabling or blocking communion, participation and mission within the Church. Obviously, that meant considering who experiences exclusion, who is “outside,” those whose gifts are not recognized as they should be. Pell describes as “neo-Marxist jargon” the DCS’s references to exclusion, alienation, identity, marginalization, and the voiceless. Yet these were words that appeared in virtually all the national synthesis reports. They were not culled from sociological textbooks; they were used by ordinary Catholics to describe what they saw.
Pell claims, absurdly, that “by an enormous margin, regularly worshipping Catholics everywhere do not endorse the present synod findings.” Numbers are hard to come by, but where they have been published—the U.S. document says 700,000 took part; Spain says 200,000; France, 150,000—the figures are impressive, even if they represent less than 10 percent of the total Mass-going population. There is no evidence to suggest that what participants in the listening sessions expressed was not representative of the views of other Mass-goers, and plenty to suggest that it was.
Pell is horrified by the DCS’s call to “enlarge the space of your tent”—a quote from Isaiah 54:2 that the group in Frascati (I was one of them) felt captured what the Spirit was saying through the reports. Pell reads this as a bid to “accommodate…anyone who might be interested enough to listen.” By “accommodate” Pell means diluting Christ’s message for the sake of appealing to the zeitgeist. Yet the DCS makes clear that the words “help us to focus on what the Lord is calling us to through the experience of lived synodality,” which is then explained in paragraphs 26–28 as an invitation to self-emptying and conversion in order to be better able to deepen communion. Only an extreme hermeneutic of suspicion is capable of reading these paragraphs the way Pell does.
The cardinal adds, quoting from the document, that “participants are urged to be welcoming and radically inclusive: ‘No one is excluded.’” The phrase “No one is excluded,” which Pell quotes with derision, appears twice in the DCS. In the Introduction, it comes in the context of “listening as openness to welcome: this starts from a desire for radical inclusion—no one is excluded—to be understood in a perspective of communion with sisters and brothers and with our common Father.” Part 4.1 states that the “message of our synodal way is simple: we are learning to walk together.… Everyone is called to take part in this journey, no one is excluded. To this we feel called so that we can credibly proclaim the Gospel of Jesus to all people.” In neither case is the phrase used as a justification for accommodating or diluting teaching or doctrine, but as a hermeneutic of listening and proclamation: the missionary starting-point of Jesus himself, who sent his followers out to make disciples of all nations with a message that no one was excluded from God’s love and mercy.
Shortly after Pell’s death and his well-publicized broadside, I was in Luxembourg for a meeting on the experience of local synodality in European dioceses. At a Mass for us celebrated by the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, who is also the synod’s relator, he began by noting “all these attacks, all this fear and accusation” around the synod, adding, with a smile, that “God clearly has a great plan” for it.
“As a Jesuit, in my own spiritual journey, I know that when you have a lot of opposition to something, that can be a sign of confirmation,” he told me after Mass. He explained that one clear sign of where the attacks are coming from is the way they are made: ad personam, viciously, in secret memos and the like. “When I get attacked, I always feel that Pope Francis is aimed at,” he said. “For my own journey, Francis has been very important. I heard him proclaim the Gospel and I knew I had to change, and that made me very happy. I wish the same happiness, the same conversion, for all the bishops—and lay people—who attack the synod.”
We all had to work together, in our imperfection, for the good of the Church and its mission, the cardinal added. For this, he said, “we have to enlarge the tent.” But there were some people who did not want that, who wanted to keep the tent small.
“It’s their responsibility,” he added. “But it’s sad.”
A Defense of Casuistry
Two years later, in 2016, Francis portrayed casuistical reasoning as a malevolent snare. In another morning meditation summarized by L’Osservatore Romano, he cites the
“doctors of the law, who were always approaching Jesus with bad intentions.” The Gospel clearly tells us that their intention was “to test him”: they were always ready to use the classic banana peel “to make Jesus slip,” thus taking away his “authority.” They “were separated from the people of God: they were a small group of enlightened theologians who believed that they had all knowledge and wisdom.” But, in “elaborating their theology, they fell into case law, and could not get out of the trap.”
In this talk, Pope Francis sees casuistry as a mark of unjustified moral and intellectual pride, a tool for some people to view themselves, in deluded fashion, as morally superior to others and therefore more beloved by God. In the pope’s view, knowledge is not in itself the problem. Using knowledge to build up oneself by making other people smaller, more vulnerable, or less significant is a problem because it violates the command to love our neighbors as Jesus loves us.
In a 2017 morning meditation, Pope Francis contrasts casuistry with love of truth.
Francis observed, “casuistry is hypocritical thinking: ‘you can, you cannot.’” A thought “that can then become more subtle, more evil: ‘Up to this point, I can. But from here to there, I cannot,’” which is the “deception of casuistry.” Instead, we must turn “from casuistry to truth.” And, “this is the truth,” the pope noted. “Jesus does not negotiate truth, ever: he says exactly what it is.”
From this perspective, casuistry is a self-serving effort to comply with the letter of the law while subverting its spirit and purpose. It is a childish and ineffective attempt to reconfigure the radical demands of the Gospel to fit conveniently within our preexisting plans. This sort of casuistry can happen with liturgical requirements as well as moral requirements. A good example would be someone who finally puts the donut down while getting in the car on the way to Mass, figuring, “Well, it’s a twenty-minute drive, ten minutes to park and walk, and a good thirty minutes in church before I will get communion—so I comply with the one-hour fasting rule. I’m in just under the line! A personal best!”
Most recently, Pope Francis told a global conference of moral theologians that casuistry is a cramped and backward-looking form of moral theology. More specifically, he judged that:
to reduce moral theology to casuistry is the sin of going back. The casuistry has been overcome. The casuistry was my food and that of my generation in the study of moral theology. But it is proper to decadent Thomism.
But what exactly does he propose to replace it? It is clear from the context that Pope Francis rightly believes that moral theology encompasses more than casuistry.
All of you are asked to rethink the categories of moral theology today, in their mutual bond: the relationship between grace and freedom, between conscience, good, virtues, norm and phrónesis, Aristotelian, Thomist prudentia and spiritual discernment, the relationship between nature and culture, between the plurality of languages and the uniqueness of agape.
Moreover, he urges Catholic moral theologians not to remain in their disciplinary ghettos; they must take into account the insights from other disciplines, including the sciences and social sciences. Moral theology is subject to development in at least two ways. First, it is always possible to grow in insight into the Lord’s requirements of us. Second, many of the particular judgments made by moralists depended tacitly on normative accounts of how things are that have since been called into question by science, social science, and human experience. For example, in contrast to St. Thomas’s view that women were in some sense “defective males,” we now recognize that they are fully morally and intellectually equal to men.
In addition, Pope Francis encourages moralists to take seriously the particular experience of the faithful, in order to recognize the Gospel enfleshed in human lives, rather than treating it as an abstract ideal. “Theology has a critical function of understanding the faith, but its reflection starts from living experience and from the sensus fidei fidelium.” Good moralists do not separate themselves from the lives of ordinary Catholics, but engage those lives with compassion and insight.
Most importantly, Pope Francis emphasizes the need to pay attention to people’s good-faith efforts to do the best they can, facing pain, brokenness, and limitations. The task of the moralist is not to pile burden upon burden, but to open space for grace for the faithful, “who often respond as best as possible to the Gospel in the midst of their limits and carry out their personal discernment in the face of situations in which all normative schemas are broken.” What does that mean, concretely? Traditional casuists often considered one action at a time: Is such-and-such activity a sin or not? If it is, that’s the end of the story—don’t do it. But as Aquinas recognized, sometimes people (often, if not always, through their own prior choices) find themselves in situations where there is no perfectly morally acceptable path forward for them. Catholic moralists cannot simply say, “Too bad for you.” They need to help people in these situations bring their lives into accord with God’s will for them, step by step.
The Philosophy of Mourning
This bright-lined separation in Lear’s thought is matched and perhaps required by another: between human lives that resonate to some degree with the good, the Aristotelean kalon (a favored term of art for Lear), and those that fail to do so and are therefore wasted. That separation is clean and clear in his lovely and fascinating, but surely wrong, chapter “Good Mourning in Gettysburg and Hollywood” on our failure to properly mourn the Confederate dead of Gettysburg. (Hollywood is the place in Virginia where those Confederate dead, or most of them, were eventually buried.) Lear is right that we have failed at that necessary act of mourning, and his description of how and why is to me persuasive. What is not persuasive, however, is his consistent claim that the Confederate lives that ended on that battlefield were ordered entirely around an error—believing chattel slavery to be a good—which excludes the kalon. The result, Lear says, is that their whole lives were “failed attempts at the kalon,” which “has no room for such terrible error.” They were wasted lives. He is explicit about that. This distinction, between lives that get some way toward living in accord with the good and those that fail utterly to do so, mirrors the distinction between what is mournable and what is lamentable. Neither distinction can be sustained.
It is possible to do better. The first step would be to renounce the sharp distinction between reparable mournables and irreparable lamentables, and to replace it with an acknowledgment that all the horrors with which we are faced are woven with threads of both, and therefore require both mourning and lament. My father died suddenly and unexpectedly many years ago, when he was forty-five and I was nineteen. I have mourned him since, off and on, with many of the healing effects Lear so clearly describes. But there is that in his death which, as Lear would put it, resists mourning or, as I would prefer to put it, requires the howl and dirge of lamentation. It is one and the same event, though; and not to see that it both requires and resists mourning is to fail to see it for what it is.
There is a second step. It is not that there are some human lives wasted by being closed to the kalon, and others open to it, however imperfectly and incompletely. There are no armies of light and no armies of darkness. It is a Manichaean mistake to think so, and always a violent one. Lear’s treatment of the Confederate dead of Gettysburg involves this mistake, and I doubt that it is coherent even on its own terms. He advocates, rightly, mourning the Confederate dead without memorializing or valorizing them. But according to his argument, for a life to be mournable there must be good in it—it must not have been completely wasted—so the lives of the Confederate dead cannot have been as separate from the kalon as he seems to take them to be. He could have written that all human lives are malformed, oriented in part to the good that gives life and in part to the blankly lamentable absence that is evil. As the Augustinian adage has it: everything is good to the extent that it is, which entails that everything is evil to the extent that it is not. All human lives are alike in this, and any response to them that denies or obscures this is itself blankly lamentable and always violent, usually in the distinctively American mode of self-righteousness. The lives of the Confederate dead of Gettysburg were not wasted, as Lear says; those men were slaughtered for a cause that included chattel slavery, which is beyond defense; but none of them, not a one, is reducible to that cause. Each of them, every one, was a human creature whose battlefield death shares the features of all such deaths: participation in evil’s absence as well as in good’s presence.
Lear’s two dualisms are both evidence of a single uneasiness. It is an uneasiness about mixing—not being able to say that there were good men among the Confederate dead is of a piece with not being able to say that there are properly mournable events that also call for lament at their inaccessibility to mourning. But we must say both things. Saying the first permits us to look at and describe what was good in the social, economic, and political life of the Antebellum South, while being clear about what was evil in that life. Saying the second permits us to observe and shudder at the lamentable horrors beyond all mourning entwined with everything, everywhere, always. Lear’s refusals tend to exile the lamentable and the evil into the elsewhere, placing them anywhere but here. He does not quite do that; he does recognize that there are states of affairs, even here and now, that resist mourning. But the tone of much of his writing about mourning shows that he is on the way toward affirming the Manichaean separation.
I have been critical. But I am also glad to have read this book, and grateful to Lear for having written it. His work has been a companion to me these past three decades or so, and I have never failed to be edified and instructed by it. That is true for this book as well. There are excellent things in it I have not touched on in this short review, including an analysis of gratitude in its relation to mourning, and of the practices of the humanities in the same context. Anyone interested in mourning—and since we are all mourners, that leaves no one out—should read this book.
Imagining the End
Mourning and Ethical Life
Jonathan Lear
Harvard University Press
$29.95 | 176 pp.
‘At the Crossroads of Migration’
On a more practical note, reform is long overdue. And it’s an unpaid debt. Let’s not forget, in many ways, immigrants are already at the center of our society. During the pandemic, Dreamers and essential workers without documents kept us healthy and fed and kept the economy going, often at great risk to their own health, and some of them paid the ultimate sacrifice with their lives. Don’t we owe them something in return? Our politicians need to catch up.
JG: Last November, your fellow bishops elected you to become chairman of the U.S. bishops’ migration committee. What are your goals for that role?
Bishop Seitz: Above all, I want to be a servant to my brother bishops in the conference, to read the signs of the times with them, interpret the magisterium of Pope Francis on this issue in our American context, and do my part to help revitalize our witness to the social gospel. I also want to find creative ways to make sure migrants and refugees feel that the Church is with them. Wherever they’re from, whatever their documentation status, whatever their faith commitment might be, they should feel that the Church is on their side and rooting for them. They need to feel God’s mercy in everyday life. We’ve got to be ministers of joy. I want to understand from immigrant leaders how our Church can better stand with them in their work for reform so our advocacy can be grounded. There are so many inspiring immigrant leaders who are showing us the way. Many of them were formed in our parishes and Church halls.
We’ve also got to work to reduce inequality and injustice abroad so people don’t have to migrate. I ministered for a while in Honduras and I learned how important it is to be in touch with the pain in those countries. This is where the Church can play an important role. As a global Church, we can build bridges with faith communities in sending countries to learn from them and better understand how we can stand alongside them in their struggles.
JG: In 2020, you knelt down with a Black Lives Matter sign for eight minutes and forty-six seconds in a prayerful protest to draw attention to the police killing of George Floyd. That image drew international attention and Pope Francis praised you in an interview. Why did you take that stand and what do you think Catholics can do to support anti-racist movements?
Bishop Seitz: First of all, racism is real. We have to recognize it. If you don’t acknowledge sin, how can you repent? We used to kneel at the beginning of every Mass and beat our breast because we’re sinners. And second, those who suffer racism need to know we’re with them. We believe in a crucified God, after all. George Floyd died because someone we gave a badge and a gun knelt on his neck. And we all know he’s not alone. That’s scandalous. When Jesus was killed, the cross was a sign of shame at first. It smelled of torture and death. But it became a source of life and communion. As Paul said, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It was haunting to see how a people that were tired of injustice and death transformed a wretched image of asphyxiation into a rallying cry for justice and solidarity. On a human level, how could you not be moved by that? But on a spiritual level, how could you not hear the strains of the Gospel in their cries?
There were those who thought it was indecent or somehow threatening to the Christian message because not everyone involved in the anti-racism protests held all of our beliefs, but I don’t agree. The Scriptures say “rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” We need to recognize that when people have a deep thirst for justice and recognition of human dignity, even when some might think differently from us, it isn’t without a holy foundation. And we might have something to learn.
JG: For people who don’t live on the border and are not actively involved in advocacy for immigrants, what are some ways to take action in their own states, neighborhoods, or parishes?
Bishop Seitz: Get to know the poor where you are. Go to Mass in a different language. Get involved in ministry with detained migrants and prisoners. Accompany someone to check in with ICE or to immigration court. Ask yourself who picks your food and pray for them before eating. Never refer to people as “illegals” again. Recognize the different cultural communities in your parish and give them the space to lift up their feast days. Eat together. Pray over the scriptures together. Make space for people from different countries to be leaders in your parish. Work with your parish to sponsor a refugee family. Support your local immigrants rights organizations. Thank a priest when he preaches on immigration. Vote. Allow God to push you out of your comfort zone. He will open up pathways for you to serve, to build community, to encounter Jesus and be transformed.
Benedict’s Theological Legacy
My final node is what I call the “style” of salvation history: “God is not loud. He does not make headlines,” as Ratzinger said in a homily. This quiet gentleness forms the climax of Jesus of Nazareth, which he knew would be his theological last will and testament:
It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he only gradually builds up his history within the great history of mankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history.…
And yet—is not this the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love. And if we really think about it, is it not what seems so small that is truly great?
Tracey Rowland has perceptively noted that Ratzinger is drawn to what is affective, natural, interior, organic, communal; conversely, there is an “aversion to the ugliness of the industrialized world,” as well as its rationalism and materialism. Her comments point to what I would call the monastic, particularly Benedictine cast of Ratzinger’s thought and life: a simple, regular life of prayer, work, reading, and community.
This emphasis on the small and seemingly insignificant nature of divine action in the world, together with Ratzinger’s repeated predictions (dating back to the 1950s) that the Church of the future would be smaller, stripped of its institutions and social influence, has given rise to perhaps the most baseless yet widespread criticism of his thought: that he desires a “smaller but purer” Church shorn of its dissenting and even merely lukewarm believers. I sometimes wonder whether the real object of this criticism is Ratzinger himself or the unpopular Church teachings on, say, sexuality and ordained ministry that he upheld in the face of pressure for change.
In any case, Ratzinger unambiguously rejects any form of spiritual elitism or Donatism. Instead, at the heart of his theology is the thoroughly biblical conviction that God saves the many through the one or the few: Abraham is chosen to be the father of many nations; Israel is elected for the sake of the Gentiles, Christ—the new Adam—gives his life for the sake of all; the Church’s mission is to be light to the nations. God prefers to start small and to use mustard seeds to accomplish his work of salvation. The Church is open to all, and whether big or small, the greatest gift that it can offer the world is being itself and living the twofold commandment of love of God and neighbor.
As a theologian and as a hierarch, Ratzinger played a long game, trusting in divine providence. In his papal installation homily, he said, “God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.” I believe that this humble trust in providence fostered his sense of being a simple “worker in the vineyard of the Lord” and sustained his decision to step down from the papacy.
Now the last surviving major participant at Vatican II is gone. An ecclesial era has ended. The man who grew up under Nazism, who resisted Marxism and theological liberalism, has passed. There are new movements in the world and in the Church, new signs of the times, for good and for ill. Still, I am convinced that the stature of this “mustard seed” theologian and hierarch will grow over the coming decades and bear much fruit.
Papal Fiction
As their encounter progresses, Benedict proceeds to challenge Bergoglio on his record, while Bergoglio puts up a lively defense of his decisions and priorities. The discussion that follows is a quick run-through of matters of philosophical principle on which the two popes are reputed to disagree, or at least to have distinctly different practical approaches. But this is treated simplistically. At no point does The Two Popes become a film of ideas; there is no attempt to chart the nuances of their viewpoints. Meirelles hews firmly to the time-tested formula of setting two opposing personalities against each other.
Yet as they spend more time together, their exchanges become more personal in nature, more intimate, and more human. We learn through flashbacks about how the young Bergoglio decided to become a Jesuit priest. At a point of decision in his life, a chance conversation with a thoughtful priest whom he had never seen before and who, as it happens, was dying of leukemia, tips the balance. Is the unexpected conversation with a kind stranger perhaps the mistake that opens onto a glorious journey?
But the journey is not so glorious. Through flashbacks, we learn about the young Bergoglio (played by the accomplished Argentinian actor Juan Minujín). There are wrenching scenes concerning events that occurred during the dictatorship. Bergoglio was indeed mentored by a communist, a woman at a food chemistry lab whom he deeply respected. Her daughter was abducted by the regime, and she herself was later arrested and killed. We see the mistakes Bergoglio makes after being appointed provincial of his order at an early age. The film depicts the true story of how he ordered two Jesuits out of their frontline ministry among the poor during the Dirty War, out of fear for their safety, and his suspension of them when they refused. What he did not anticipate was that this suspension then would be interpreted as lifting the church’s protection; the two men were soon arrested, detained, and tortured. Many years later, one of these priests forgave him; the other never did. We learn of Bergoglio’s struggle with guilt for not having done more to save those targeted by the regime. We see how he carries within himself his own consciousness of sin and unworthiness as he goes into exile in Córdoba, Argentina, where his community has sent him after a tumultuous and divisive term.
Benedict, who by now has thawed considerably, listens and attempts to console Bergoglio. He confides his own sense of spiritual loneliness, and reveals his decision to resign the papacy. At the end of the scene, Benedict is moved to confess his own sins, and asks for sacramental absolution, which Bergoglio gives him despite being deeply shocked by what he has heard.
The roles are now reversed. Bergoglio forgets about pressing Benedict to accept his resignation as archbishop and tries instead to dissuade Benedict from resigning the papacy. Why? Because tradition demands it! The reformer doesn’t want so much change after all! Meanwhile, Benedict, loses his resistance to the prospect of Bergoglio as his successor. Maybe the man from Buenos Aires is just the person the church needs as pontiff. The defender of tradition becomes the one who breaks with tradition! And so we are to understand that the two men have looked into each other’s hearts with compassion. This changes everything.
All of this, of course, is fiction. Despite the emotionally satisfying resolution of the film, we need to remember that none of this actually happened. The conversation never took place. Confession and forgiveness were neither sought nor received. Benedict never threw his weight behind Bergoglio in the 2013 conclave (according to many journalists, he favored Angelo Scola of Milan and Marc Ouellet of Quebec), and in any case a retiring pope does not choose his successor. There is no evidence either that Benedict was particularly anxious about the prospect of Bergoglio stepping into his shoes, or that he changed his mind in the end. Although Francis has shown great kindness and solicitude toward his predecessor, the two have never become what you’d call buddies.
The most troubling fictionalization, however, is Benedict’s confession to Bergoglio. Meirelles muffles the dialogue, so we don’t actually hear what he says. But it seems we are to believe that Benedict confesses to knowingly reassigning predator priests—something not supported by his actual biography. The admission of guilt is prefaced by a vague reference to Marcial Maciel, the notorious sex abuser who founded the Legionaries of Christ. Ratzinger’s role in that case, however, was quite different from that implied by the movie. Far from enabling Maciel, Ratzinger, in his capacity as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, strove to have him removed from ministry; it was John Paul II who resisted. As pope, Benedict finally got rid of Maciel, sentencing him to “a life of prayer and penance.”
Did Ratzinger perhaps reassign predator priests while he was archbishop of Munich? Anything is possible, and certainly this sort of thing happened in many dioceses. But it is not a known fact that Benedict did so, and on a topic like this, an admission of guilt is far from a harmless artistic embellishment. This stuff is radioactive.
Obviously, Meirelles wanted to dramatize a relationship in which two men acknowledge their sins and confide in one another about their feelings of unworthiness for the great office they have been called to fill. And many viewers like to see antagonists arrive at forgiveness and reconciliation. The imagined dynamic between the two men is the most engaging aspect of the film, the most hilarious, and also the most meaning-laden—and the confession scene is part of it. Yet to suggest complicity in the sex-abuse scandals without a solid anchor in fact needlessly complicates things. Wasn’t there something that Benedict actually felt remorseful about to depict instead?
Glorious journeys do unfold, despite all of our mistakes. And sometimes, tradition and progress meet—and embrace. That’s the uplifting message of The Two Popes. If only it could happen in real-life Rome.
Pope Benedict XVI Dies
Almost ten years after making history for resigning from the papacy, Joseph Ratzinger—Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI—has died at the age of ninety-five, in the Vatican’s Mater Ecclesiae monastery, where he had been living since May 2013.
Born in Bavaria, Germany, on April 16, 1927, Ratzinger had a remarkable impact on the life and intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church, not only as pope, but also as one of the most influential theologians at Vatican II. After publishing major works commenting positively on the documents of Vatican II during the council and in the late 1960s, his insights affected the reception of the council from the 1970s onward, as his anti-progressive views—often expressed with a contrarian spirit—became inseparable from his persona, even after his election to the papacy in 2005.
As a powerful doctrinal policy-maker in the era following Vatican II, Ratzinger was in many ways the alter-ego of Pope John Paul II, whose pontificate is impossible to interpret without considering Ratzinger’s role. After a stint as archbishop of Munich (1977–1981), he was appointed by John Paul II as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an institution reformed after Vatican II. Under Ratzinger’s leadership, it gained greater prominence and generated controversy. His importance and influence was so valuable to John Paul II that the pope turned down his requests to leave his CDF post, which also helped make possible Ratzinger’s eventual election to the papacy.
Already known for revisiting Vatican II interpretations of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI turned his attention to other post-conciliar developments, most notably liturgical reform. He helped himself by remaining something of the theologian-in-chief while occupying the chair of Peter, with no one under him serving as influential a role as he did under John Paul II. Yet he was unable to establish and maintain the distinction between his personal theological views and the theology of the Church, so for many Catholics around the world these came to be conflated. This can be traced in part to his shyness and reluctance to “perform” on the global media stage the way his predecessor did (and his successor does)—something crucial for a pope in the twenty-first century.
In December 2005, eight months after becoming pope, Benedict delivered a speech in which he laid out his interpretation of Vatican II as a “hermeneutic of continuity and reform” (as opposed to a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”). This soon proved problematic. Response to this framing came to function as a litmus test of orthodoxy for some interpreters of the council, who as supporters of Benedict focused far more on “continuity” than “reform,” rather than thinking of them together as the pope had described. Yet at the same time, it’s hard to find an example of “reform” that Benedict himself proposed that didn’t try to undo changes brought about by Vatican II and the early post-conciliar period.
My Meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger
I have met Pope Benedict XVI only once. It was seventeen years ago, when I was a graduate student at Yale. Richard John Neuhaus had organized an invitation-only conference in New York on biblical interpretation. Among the invited guests were Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Raymond Brown, the widely respected biblical scholar, and the eminent Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck, my dissertation adviser, who had been a delegated observer at the Second Vatican Council. With the breezy temerity of youth, I wrote Neuhaus (then still Lutheran), and asked to be the “observer from the next generation” at the conference. Much to my amazement, he acceded to my request.
During the first break, Lindbeck introduced me to Cardinal Ratzinger. The conversation went something like this: Lindbeck said, “Your eminence, I would like to introduce to you Cathleen Kaveny, a Catholic studying moral theology at Yale.” I smiled and said hello. Ratzinger smiled at me and responded, “A Catholic studying moral theology at Yale? You’d better be careful or you’ll have the Congregation after you.” I couldn’t believe my ears. After all, I had just heard, while wide awake, what Cardinal Ratzinger—the Grand Inquisitor—would say to me in a nightmare, which naturally would also include a stake, a match, a heap of kindling, and a long, flowing white dress (à la Cecil B. De Mille’s The Story of Joan of Arc). He was joking, of course, as I realized almost immediately. Nonetheless, my face must have turned as pale as Joan’s dress. The cardinal quickly understood the problem: “With whom are you studying?” he asked. And not quite able to speak again, I pointed mutely to Lindbeck. Ratzinger said, “Well, then, that’s all right…you’re in good hands.”
After the break, Neuhaus invited me to sit at the table for the remainder of the conference. But there was only one open seat, right next to Ratzinger himself. I took it with some trepidation. What sort of being was this man? Gradually, I relaxed, as I realized that by virtue of my undergraduate and graduate training, I was already quite familiar with the universal type, if not this particular German model. He was a real academic, delighting in the world illumined by his beloved texts, which conveyed a reality that seemed to be more vivid to him than the reality conveyed by his own senses. In his discussion with Lindbeck and Brown, I saw immense mutual respect, significant mutual challenge, and not a trace of condescension or rank-pulling on his part. I also got the distinct impression that Ratzinger was relishing the intellectual exchange, much as a professor swamped with departmental administrative responsibilities relishes the all-too-rare opportunity to participate in colloquium on a key topic in his or her own academic field. He also seemed quite shy, in the peculiar, nonretiring manner that many academics are shy: they fearlessly present the contents of their minds for public examination while closely guarding the paths of their hearts.
Now nearly two decades older, I am not yet entirely depleted of breezy temerity. So I would like to give the new Pope Benedict five suggestions, reminding him of what he doubtless already knows.
• Please preach the Good News. People around the world desperately need to hear the Good News of the gospel—that each one is made in the image and likeness of God; that each one is dear to God as a precious child; that the tears and sorrows of this age will be wiped clean in the next, through the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The individualism, materialism, and relativism you see in the United States and Western Europe are symptoms, not causes. If the church does not provide a compelling, positive, vibrant vision that can generate hope of new life in people’s hearts, railing against the symptoms is only going to plunge people further into apathy or despair. No one joins the Church of No.
• Please live out the meaning of your new name. As prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, your job was to say no—to condemn theological views that you believed to be inconsistent with Catholic doctrine. But condemnation is not a value in itself; the no has to be in service of a broader, blessed yes—to the fullness of Christian life. The job of the pope is to articulate and model the yes to the Catholic faithful and to the entire world. “Benedict,” “the blessed one,” comes from the Latin benedicere, which means “to praise” or “to bless.” As pope, you must show that you can bless and praise as well as condemn.
• Please remember that not everyone approaches the world the way we academics do. For most people, the reality of the church is determined not by their ruminations about its doctrine, but by their concrete experience of its care for their own material and spiritual welfare on a local level, and by their perception of its care and concern for others around the globe. For example, to invoke the distinction between the church as the spotless, sinless bride of Christ and the sinful acts of some of the church’s leadership can seem not only hopelessly abstract, but also hopelessly callous to any parent whose child has suffered abuse at the hands of the clergy.
• Please spend some time thinking about the ways in which men and women have similar gifts, aspirations, and callings. In your recent Letter on the Collaboration of Men and Women, you so emphasized the differences between men and women that it became difficult for some people to conceive how women and men could actually work together. But many of us do so all the time. For many people, raising children involves collaboration as much as division of labor. Women work with men as lawyers, doctors, scientists, theologians, and world leaders. The secretary of state of the most powerful nation on earth is a woman. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that your papacy may see a female president of the United States. The church’s anthropology should not give rise to the mistaken view that women who are accustomed to working closely and collaboratively with men are ontological aberrations.
• Finally, please let us see, somehow, that the Holy Spirit has infused your heart with love, and not merely gifted your mind with wisdom. In these polarized times, the words of St. Paul to the Corinthians apply to each and every one of us. “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.” As any good scholar of St. Augustine knows, the decisive mark of the Catholic Church is charity, not purity.
Related: What Next? Five writers look ahead to the challenges Benedict XVI will face
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Regime Change
[Editor’s note: William L. Portier’s and Richard R. Gaillardetz’s are the final in a special series of stories we are posting as the cardinals gather for the conclave. All of the previous articles in this series appear below.]
William L. Portier
On Monday, February 11, my wife called me at 7:30 in the morning. “The pope resigned,” she said. “Who?” I replied.
Pope Benedict XVI surprised the whole world by announcing his resignation. As it turns out, he had been thinking about it for some time. Since the announcement, we have been reminded that, in a 2010 interview with the journalist Peter Seewald, Benedict mentioned the possibility of a papal resignation. And we’ve been reminded that he prayed at the tomb of Pope Celestine V, who resigned amid great turmoil in 1294. Benedict had witnessed the long decline of Pope John Paul II. By resigning, Benedict leaves to his successors an alternative to the example set by John Paul II, whose conscience did not permit him to leave the office to which he had been called by God. Benedict’s conscience led him in a different direction, and his decision will have increasing significance in the future, as further medical advances increase the likelihood of a pope living beyond the time when he can fulfill his duties. Theologians who lament the lack of constitutional checks on the papacy will welcome this more recent precedent. Whatever one thinks of Benedict’s papacy, his resignation is clearly an act of courage and humility—a gift of hope to the whole church. He reminded us that the papacy was about the church and not about him.
He leaves behind a mixed legacy. No pope in history—not even Leo the Great or Gregory the Great—was a better theologian in terms of breadth of knowledge and professional training, or according to the classic definition of the theologian as one who prays. Benedict’s encyclicals on love and hope strike the reader with their clarity and depth. Apparently we will not have an encyclical on faith to complete the triad of the theological virtues. In his February 11 statement, the sentence in which he admits that he no longer has the strength to fulfill his office begins with an observation about the prospects for faith in a world “shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith.” We are left to wonder what more he might have said about these questions.
We do have Caritas in veritate. Written in the wake of 2008’s worldwide economic collapse, this encyclical is simply brilliant in bringing the resources of the tradition to bear on that crisis. It should be required reading for those who make economic-policy decisions that affect human well-being. Benedict writes in this encyclical of the “grammar of creation,” a phrase he applies to both natural law and the environment. His many interventions on environmental questions, especially climate change, and even the solar equipment he has had installed in the Vatican surely distinguish him as a “green pope.”
Pope Benedict’s three Jesus of Nazareth books, two of which I have used in graduate classes, grapple seriously with the present impasse between theology and exegesis, and offer signs of an approach to Scripture that is both theological and historical-critical. His Wednesday addresses on the saints and fathers of the church now run to three volumes and will be a lasting literary legacy
For the foreseeable future, Benedict’s 2005 interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, as neither rupture nor simple continuity but rather reform in continuity, remains the framework within which the council will be discussed and assessed. It also signals his passion for the unity of the church. On this front, he has made two controversial moves. First, his long-standing efforts to reconcile schismatic traditionalists to the church have included the introduction of the Extraordinary Rite of the Roman Liturgy. It is not clear whether this will have the effect he desired of leavening current liturgical practice with greater reverence and solemnity, or will instead just further polarize the church.
His creation of quasi-dioceses (ordinariates) for traditionalist Anglicans who wish to be in full communion with the church is another gamble whose long-term effects are not yet clear. The way this was carried out, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith rather than the curial office for ecumenism, makes clear how dysfunctional the Roman curia has become—or at least how unresponsive to the pope’s wishes.
Sadly, we are still waiting for a pope who will publicly discipline the bishops complicit in the sexual abuse of children by priests.
Benedict chose as his own papal name that of the founder of Western monasticism. That choice reflects his preoccupation with Europe’s Christian roots and his concern for its re-evangelization. His successor will have to steer the church through the demographic transition of decline in Europe and North America and growth in the global South. The next pope could well be African or Latin American. The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power has already laid down odds for the various papabili, but the Spirit blows where it will.
Richard R. Gaillardetz
As the Catholic Church awaits the election of a new pope, we might pause to consider the ecclesiological significance of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. As many have already suggested, the resignation itself is likely to constitute Benedict’s greatest legacy, at least as pope.
When Benedict became pope in 2005, it was commonly assumed that his would be a pontificate in substantial continuity with that of his predecessor. The assumption was understandable given the dominant role Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had played as prefect of the CDF throughout much of John Paul II’s pontificate. Any difference between the two pontificates, it was thought, would be subtle—more a matter of style than of substance. And certainly Benedict’s style and taste were different from those of his predecessor. When it came to the liturgy, for example, John Paul was far more open to inculturation, while Benedict preferred a more somber and traditional approach, one deeply influenced by his Bavarian piety. In retrospect, however, it was Benedict’s vision of the papacy itself that marked his most profound departure from his predecessor.
A charismatic figure comfortable on the public stage, John Paul II took full advantage of the symbolic power of the papacy in a media age. Even though he wrote more pages of ecclesiastical text than any pope in history, for many of us his pontificate was reflected less in his papal teaching than in a series of symbolic events: his meeting with leaders of world religions to pray for peace in Assisi, his prayer with the chief rabbi at the synagogue in Rome, the joint recitation with the ecumenical patriarch of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed in Greek (excluding the filioque!). All of us can call to mind photos of John Paul II praying in a room with his would-be assassin, kissing the ground of a country he was visiting for the first time, wagging his finger at Ernesto Cardenal during a visit to Nicaragua, and, finally, hunched over in a tableau of pain and physical incapacity during his final days.
Pope Benedict, the introverted theologian-pope, demonstrated little of his predecessor’s aptitude for the compelling image. This was more than a difference in personality; Benedict had a more circumscribed view of the papacy from the very beginning. John Paul II saw his papacy as providential, even more so after the attempted assassination: he was convinced that the Blessed Mother had averted his death. He explicitly rejected the possibility of resignation as an unconscionable repudiation of his divine calling. By contrast, long before his election Ratzinger had frankly admitted that the Holy Spirit could be said to have only a limited and indirect role in the choice of a pope. He wryly noted that there had been too may popes who clearly were not the choice of the Spirit.
Benedict’s resignation is consistent with this more modest view of the papacy. He understands well what was too often forgotten over the course of the second millennium—namely, that a pope is pope only because he is bishop of the local church of Rome. Consequently, a papal resignation is, in principal, no different from any bishop’s resignation or retirement from office. Benedict’s resignation can be understood as a salutary reminder that the papacy is essentially an episcopal office, not a personal apotheosis.
But there is more that can be gleaned from his decision. Benedict resigned because his declining health meant that he could no longer fulfill the obligations of his office. Catholic teaching holds that all bishops—and in a preeminent way the bishop of Rome—are given the assistance of the Holy Spirit for the exercise of their office. Benedict’s decision reflects a healthy theological anthropology, one according to which the assistance of the Holy Spirit is mediated in and through our human capabilities. As such, it is also inhibited by our human frailties and failings. The Holy Spirit’s assistance does not simply override the diminishment of our created human capacities. Of course the applicability of this insight can be extended beyond the question of physical infirmity. The assistance of the Holy Spirit also does not magically overcome ignorance, an obstinate refusal to give proper attention to a difficult pastoral or doctrinal issue, or a failure to consult the wisdom of others
Finally, Benedict’s resignation invites a further question. Is the papacy, as currently configured, simply more than one person can handle? Even many who have been ideologically disposed to both Benedict and his predecessor have acknowledged dangerous blind spots in their administration of the church. John Paul II could not accept the obvious culpability of Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who had been credibly accused of sexually abusing young boys and apparently fathered several children. Indeed, John Paul II harbored an uncritical enthusiasm for a wide array of new lay movements such as Opus Dei, the Neocatechumenal Way, Focolare, and Communion and Liberation. For his part, Benedict XVI made a series of blunders in public statements on Islam, condoms, clerical sexual abuse, and other topics. Eager to heal the schism with the Society of Pius X, Benedict prematurely removed the excommunications of four schismatic bishops, including one who had made outrageous anti-Semitic statements. Neither pope was known for particularly shrewd episcopal appointments, and many of those made by John Paul II were simply abysmal. Neither showed any interest in, or aptitude for, the administration or reform of the Vatican’s bureaucracy.
Given the character of a global church with well over a billion members, Benedict’s resignation invites us to consider whether it is time to reverse the centralization of papal authority that began in the early nineteenth century. At Vatican II, the church made a substantial effort to reverse the universalist ecclesiology of the preconciliar period and to recover an ancient understanding of the church as a communio ecclesiarum—a communion of churches. Local churches were no longer to be viewed as mere branch offices of a transnational organization; they were the church of Jesus Christ in that place. Bishops, it followed, were not vicars of the pope but the ordinary pastors of those churches. The council further recognized that all the bishops, as members of a college of which the bishop of Rome is both head and member, shared leadership responsibility for the universal church.
At the council, many bishops had discovered the value of meeting with brother bishops from the same region, and this sparked new interest in episcopal conferences as real, if only partial, expressions of episcopal collegiality. A number of council fathers enthusiastically supported the creation of a standing synod of bishops, of the kind common in Eastern Christianity, as a means of allowing bishops to share with the pope the exercise of universal pastoral leadership. But in a markedly uncollegial move, Pope Paul VI acted on his own authority, while the council was still in session, to create a synod of bishops that was a cheap facsimile of what the council fathers had envisioned. Instead of a standing synod exercising deliberative authority, the synod Pope Paul created was merely consultative and would meet only occasionally.
In the first decades after the council, episcopal conferences bore much fruit as an expression of collegiality. However, leading figures in the Roman Curia, including Cardinal Ratzinger, would soon challenge their status, leading eventually to the apostolic letter of Pope John Paul II, Apostolos suos, which dramatically restricted the conferences’ authority.
Is it time to unburden the papacy by applying the principle of subsidiarity to the church? If so, then we might consider revivifying intermediate structures of authority, including those of metropolitans, new patriarchates (a possibility once championed by Ratzinger himself), and episcopal conferences, all functioning at levels between the papacy and the local diocese. Do we need to admit that the current authority granted to the curia is inherently dysfunctional and fundamentally at odds with the council’s teaching on episcopal collegiality? If so, would we do better to redirect much of the authority currently residing in the curia toward a properly episcopal structure such as a standing synod? Finally, in light of Pope Benedict’s honest and courageous action, we must ask ourselves whether there is something to learn from a more ancient time in the church when the pope was not so much the vicar of Christ as the vicar of Peter; not chief theologian, but court of final appeal; not monarch, but pontifex—literally, bridge-builder.
John Wilson
My mother was still very much herself when she turned eighty-five—in possession of her “faculties,” as the characters in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori say. Within a few months, though, that began to change, and month by month dementia tightened its grip on her.
When I heard the news about Benedict, I was finishing a book by J. I. Packer (whom I greatly admire), Puritan Portraits. I had been reading about Richard Baxter and the “good death”: the notion that, in dying, a faithful Christian should demonstrate the authenticity of his faith. I thought about my mother—who was ninety years old last December—and other faithful Christians I have known whose minds have been broken long before they died. God has promised that he will never abandon his children, and I believe him. But he has not promised us a “good death.”
In stepping down from the papacy, Benedict acknowledged his frailty. He did not elaborate, and there was no need for him to do so—nor for us to speculate. The church he has served with great devotion will elect a new pope. As with his predecessor, John Paul II, there has been a tendency, both among Benedict’s hagiographers and among the church’s fiercest critics, to credit him with an influence far exceeding what he has done or could possibly have done. Benedict himself knows better.
From my standpoint as an evangelical Protestant who has gained much from the Catholic tradition, and from Benedict in particular, I am baffled by the criticism of his decision from writers I respect (including, not least, my dear friend Jody Bottum in the Weekly Standard). The notion, for example, that the existence of a former pope (devoting himself to prayer and reflection) might well pose a serious threat to the administration of his successor sounds like something from The Daily Show.
Before long, of course, attention will shift from Benedict to the upcoming papal conclave. I have no idea who the next pope will be. He will inherit a terrible mess—and a powerful witness to the God who created the universe and sustains it, the God who promises the restoration of all things: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Roman Catholic Church is in desperate need of reform. So too the Orthodox Church, and evangelicalism, and what used to be called “the mainline,” and Pentecostalism…and so it has always been, from the first century on.
I don’t write that blithely, as if (for instance) the scandal of abuse perpetrated by priests and covered up by their superiors is to be waved away or somehow cancelled out by reference to the long history of egregious wrongdoing that all honest Christians must own up to. But if what we say when we join our voices in the Apostles’ Creed is anything like the truth, there is a lot more to the story.
Mary C. Boys
In early January a beloved friend of mine died. A serious student of Vatican II, she was a passionate advocate for women’s voices in the church. The night I received word of her death, a phrase came to me in a dream: “strategic perseverance.” When I awoke, those two words, which I had never before juxtaposed, stayed with me. I regard them as my friend’s wise counsel, particularly with regard to living in the Roman Catholic Church today.
For my part I persevere in the Catholic tradition because that tradition is rich, deep, and broad; I am edified by its spirituality and sacramental life, including the witness of so many who walk the Way of Jesus. I persevere, because the Petrine ministry is vital for the unity of the church. Yet one must be strategic in dealing with a ministry exercised as an absolute monarchy governed exclusively by men—one moreover, that, in too often exercising its authority in a punitive manner, alienates those it judges. Strategic, because working in the interreligious realm and belonging to a woman’s religious community in the United States today requires us to be, in the words of Matthew 10:6, “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”
That “strategic perseverance” has become my watchword offers a hint of my mixed feelings about Pope Benedict XVI. The promulgation of Dominus Iesus in 2000, when the future Benedict was the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, foreshadowed his complicated legacy in ecumenical and interreligious relations. Authoritarian in tone, that declaration surveyed the religious landscape from a position of omniscience. Subsequently, as pope, Benedict ignited controversy with a poorly articulated claim about Islam in a lecture at the University of Regensburg in September 2006. A month later, when thirty-eight Muslim religious authorities and scholars issued an “Open Letter to the Pope,” Benedict showed openness to their response, and his visit to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul in November 2006 partly quelled the protest. On the first anniversary of the open letter, 138 Muslim religious leaders published A Common Word between Us and You, and the numerous conferences that followed in its wake have included Vatican involvement.
In the sphere of Catholic-Jewish relations, Benedict committed himself to honoring the remarkable legacy of his predecessor, indicating in an address in June 2005 his resolve to “continue on the path of improving relations” with Jews. Yet he has been less successful in striking the right dialogical tone. His May 2009 visit to Israel notably failed to escape the shadow of John Paul II’s memorable visit there in 2003. Like John Paul before him, Benedict gave an address in the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to victims of the Holocaust—a speech that was dispassionate and detached, in stark contrast to his predecessor’s personal, even visceral address.
More unsettling was Benedict’s lack of candor with regard to the church’s role in the Holocaust. In Israel, he spoke of the brutal extermination of Jews “by a godless regime that propagated an ideology of antisemitism and hatred.” Such phrases—“the Nazi reign of terror,” an “insane racist ideology, born of neo-paganism”—typify Benedict’s characterization of the Holocaust. Rarely does he admit to any degree of ecclesial complicity; and when he does, he seriously understates it, via such contorted formulations as “it cannot be denied that a certain insufficient resistance to this atrocity on the part of Christians can be explained by the inherited anti-Judaism in the hearts of not a few Christians.” The failure to grapple with disturbing truths about the church in relation to the Holocaust, together with his pursuing the canonization of Pope Pius XII, suggest a reluctance to gaze into the tarnished mirror of history.
Benedict’s patient pursuit of reconciliation with the Society of St. Pius X and other traditionalist groups has also complicated relations with Jews—most notoriously in his removal of the ban of excommunication from the Lefebvrist Bishop Richard Williamson, whose denial of the Holocaust (and misogynistic social views) were apparently unknown to the pope. More consequential was the prayer for Jews Benedict composed for the Good Friday liturgy in the Tridentine Rite. Released in February 2008 under the title “Pro Conversione Iudaeorum,” it petitioned Jews to acknowledge Jesus as the savior of all. Given the church’s long history of denigrating Judaism, particularly the Good Friday prayer for the “perfidious” Jews from the Roman Missal of 1570 that prevailed until 1960, the pope’s formulation was seen as contentious. Cardinal Walter Kasper, then President of the Pontifical Council for Religious Relations with the Jews, intervened in the ensuing controversy to argue for an eschatological interpretation. While Kasper’s intervention alleviated some of the tension, the reality remains that the Catholic Church now sanctions two versions—the 1970 prayer in the Roman Missal and the pope’s composition for the Tridentine Rite—that are at theological odds.
If Benedict’s papacy is ambiguous in its relations with Jews, its treatment of American women’s religious congregations reflects a more coherent—and hostile—posture. Two investigations were initiated under Benedict’s watch: the “Apostolic Visitation” of religious institutes in the United States, launched in 2008 under the auspices of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life with the stated purpose of assessing the “quality of life” in these congregations; and the doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The result of the visitation, although completed in January 2012, has yet to be announced. The outcome of the doctrinal assessment, meanwhile, was announced last April. In it the CDF accused the LCWR of advocating “radical theses incompatible with the Catholic faith,” and of advocating for economic justice, while insufficiently supporting magisterial teaching against homosexuality and abortion. The CDF appointed Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain to supervise changes in the LCWR’s statutes, programs, and affiliations in order to align them more closely with the church’s “teachings and discipline.”
Personally, I view these investigations as disturbing and deeply ironic symbols of a dysfunctional church. It should be noted that some of the Vatican officials who championed the investigations are among those most complicit in the sexual-abuse scandal. But more fundamentally disheartening is the revelation that the church that champions human rights across the globe denies them to those members it deems deviant. Externally, the church expresses a commitment to dialogue with the religious other. Internally, however, no such commitment is evident. In Benedict’s eyes women religious apparently are not capable of being dialogue partners; rather, we are treated like children, told what to think and how to behave.
The bitter irony is that in diversifying their programs, mission, and way of living in the world, women have merely obeyed what was asked of us. In the early 1960s the Belgian Cardinal Léon-Joseph Suenens urged that women’s religious congregations utilize their “latent capacities” and enlarge their vocation by opening new dimensions. In his influential 1963 book The Nun in the Modern World, Suenens observed that women religious “[appear] to the faithful to be out of touch with the world as it is, an anachronism.” Women religious, he recommended, must jettison outdated customs and costumes and “continually adapt to the demands of the moment.” In October 1965 Vatican II issued Perfectae caritatis, the Decree on the Renewal of Religious Life, recommending that religious communities examine the “manner of life, of prayer, and of work” and see to it that “their members have a proper understanding of the conditions of the times and the needs of the church” in order to “help humanity more effectively.”
And so we did. Contrary to hierarchs who charge that we have been misled by “radical feminism,” we have in fact been led by our experiences among those with whom we live and work—people whose lives may be at variance with official teachings, yet who nonetheless strive to live with integrity and love of neighbor. As Sr. Margaret A. Farley said in regard to her book Just Love—a book harshly denounced by the CDF—“I wrote it because people are suffering.” It is dismaying to have to point out to those hierarchs (or to any alert Christian) that the process of entering into the experience of suffering people opens new perspectives. The truth is that women religious did not set out to challenge church doctrine or governance; much more simply, our experiences have affected us, giving us new lenses on the world. We have learned more than we can bear about the unspeakable violence done to women worldwide through rape, sex trafficking, “honor” killings, and acid attacks. And we are faulted for not being more outspoken against contraception?
When the cardinal electors meet in the Sistine Chapel, will they elect a pope with sympathy for women’s experiences in and outside the church? Likely not. That is why I’m keeping in mind the counsel that St. Vincent de Paul gave to his Daughters of Charity: to act in the church with “holy cunning.” And to that I will add, thanks to my late friend, that we must act with “strategic perseverance” as well.
Peter Jeffery
It may be the last time a surprise is announced in Latin. But as soon as I heard about the pope’s unexpected retirement, the conspiracy theories were not far behind. Was he bailing out one step ahead of a whole new scandal? Was this some sinister plot to appoint his own successor? Scarier still were reports that canon law requires a resigning pope to be of sound mind and acting freely. So a pope of unsound mind can’t resign or be forced out? Then lightning struck St. Peter’s.
Doubtless there have been medical issues we hadn’t heard about, but I think it’s obvious why Benedict XVI is retiring. It was he, as Cardinal Ratzinger, who labored to hold the Vatican together during the long, slow decline of John Paul II, so differently chronicled in Stanislaw Dziwisz’s Let Me Go to the Father’s House and John Cornwell’s The Pontiff in Winter. Back then, rumors were rife about Vatican factions pushing pet causes and jockeying for advantage in the next papal election. It was said that John Paul had met with the archbishop of Canterbury without knowing who he was. It was rumored that a secret cabal of curial cardinals was planning to keep John Paul in a permanent vegetative state, so they could indefinitely issue encyclicals in his name—brain-dead but still infallible. There were jokes about John Paul’s successor taking the name George Ringo, in a dramatic gesture to world youth. Even Ratzinger’s election failed to stop it all: the secrets his butler got in trouble for revealing were partly about people positioning their cronies for the conclave that is now upon us. Clearly our Holy Father was right to spare the church another long decline. Better to get out of the way so a younger pope can fully take charge.
But what sort of pope will we get? The American liberal media thinks it has already figured that one out. Coverage on CNN and the in New York Times tends to strike a note of pessimism: Don’t get your hopes up for a pope who will endorse the Democratic Party’s social platform—all the cardinal electors were appointed by the last two popes, and will surely continue the same old tired agendas. For once, the folks at Fox News hope the Times is right.
I don’t believe that terms derived from politics, like “liberal” and “conservative,” offer the best vocabulary for talking about tensions in the church. And I don’t believe we can predict the new pope’s policies on such issues as Vatican finances, women in the church, the pedophilia cover-up. Half the popes I lived through were surprises: John XXIII, John Paul I and II. When the man some people had called “God’s Rottweiler” was elected Benedict XVI, lots of Catholics on both sides thought they could hear the knives being sharpened for a long-anticipated bloodbath. What we got instead was an encyclical called “God Is Love.” I am eager to be surprised again.
Still there are some things I think we can safely predict about the next pope. First, he will probably be the first pope ordained as a priest in the Vatican II era. He won’t remember the preconciliar church, and may not even know Latin. That, frankly, worries me. There’s way too much amnesia already. Our disputes about liturgy, models of leadership, the church’s role in society would be far less painful if the most vocal partisans on every side knew more history. We need a “hermeneutic of continuity” now more than ever before. You can’t know who you are if you don’t know who you were.
On the other hand, the new pope will have grown up in a church that has always wrestled with the challenges of ecumenism, modern culture, liturgical renewal, the vocation shortage. He will know that these things are not temporary detours on our way home to the golden age: they are where we live now, and where he has lived all along. I don’t know what vision he will offer of where we need to go, but I am hopeful he will recognize that we need to do some regrouping and reshuffling to face our challenges head on.
The next pope will take office in the middle of the Year of Faith, which is dedicated to promoting the New Evangelization. Despite some reported wistfulness about a smaller and purer church, Pope Benedict recognizes that, by definition, no church-of-the-few could ever be the Catholic Church. Smaller and fewer is what we’re getting, though, as historic European edifices empty out, ancient communities flee the Middle East, Latin America goes Pentecostal. Rather than accept this shrinkage with relief or resignation, the pope’s response has been to call back the lost sheep with a New Evangelization.
What exactly is a “New Evangelization”? Probably the best guide would be the documents generated by the Synod of Bishops that opened the Year of Faith. Unfortunately the most important of them are available only in unofficial translations, since the official Latin texts are confidential. That is because the synod since its inception has had only “the function of providing information and offering advice” to the pope, who may or may not use the synod’s report to compose an Apostolic Exhortation. Benedict himself, in the homily at the opening Eucharist, said the New Evangelization was aimed “principally at those who, though baptized, have drifted away from the church and live without reference to the Christian life.” One could see this as an unrealistic, even reactionary desire to somehow reverse the recent history of formerly Catholic countries. But rather than giving him a political label, I would say Pope Benedict is the kind of Catholic who sees particularly clearly the immutable, transcendent Truth to which all of us need to conform ourselves—the Christ who, when lifted up, draws all people to himself. The Catholics who don’t feel drawn to his kind of leadership tend to be those who see more clearly the immanent truth hidden in creation, the Spirit who blows like the wind, the Son of Man who emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. The New Evangelization should draw these perspectives back together in a kind of binocular vision, revealing the one Truth as a unity of wholeness, not a unity of exclusion.
Indeed, the unofficial “Final List of Propositions” published on the Vatican website is no jeremiad about rescuing a sinking Europe. Inculturation is one of the first things they mention. Globalization is paired with secularism as “challenges of our time.” The church should “welcome migrants and promote their human dignity,” recognize the charisms and “dynamism of the new ecclesiastical movements and new communities,” “be present in all fields of art.” The bishops also recommend “greater attention to the church’s social doctrine,” rendering liturgical celebrations “relevant to the urban context” of city life, “changes in the dynamics of pastoral structures which no longer respond to the evangelical demands of the current time.” “The preferential option for the poor” means that “they are both recipients and actors in the New Evangelization.” And “the synod acknowledges that today, women (lay and religious) together with men contribute to theological reflection at all levels and share pastoral responsibilities in new ways.”
One of the next pope’s responsibilities will be to decide what to do with the synod’s propositions; he could do a lot more than write another Apostolic Exhortation. And, given the challenges of evangelizing a world that is more interconnected and complicated than ever, he will need all the help he can get. We should take seriously what Benedict’s resignation statement had to say about the burdens of being pope “in today’s world.”
This brings me to the last prediction I feel I can make with certainty: The next pope won’t be me. But, just for the sake of discussion, I’ll tell you what I would do. The first thing I would do is deliver the traditional blessing of the crowd assembled in St. Peter’s Square. The second thing I would do is announce the theme for the next Synod of Bishops. They are to begin discussing how to shape a transitional process for making the synod itself a more deliberative and legislative body, which will operate in union with the national episcopal conferences and St. Peter’s successor. This would help fulfill the desire Pope Paul VI expressed in the synod’s founding document, “for a continuance after the council of the great abundance of benefits that We have been so happy to see flow to the Christian people…as a result of Our close collaboration with the bishops.” And it would confirm his observation that “This synod…like all human institutions, can be improved upon with the passing of time.” John Paul’s and Benedict’s appointees do not all think alike, and the worldwide pastoral experience of all the bishops will be crucial in addressing every problem we face now. When the Spirit speaks to the church, we should listen with all ears.
Benedict’s Untimely Meditation
On the evening of April 10, six weeks after the conclusion of the Vatican’s summit on the sex-abuse crisis, the “pope emeritus,” Benedict XVI, made known his thoughts on the genesis of that crisis in a five-thousand-plus-word essay sent to a periodical for Bavarian priests, quickly translated into English, and then diffused online by Catholic websites known for their hostility to Pope Francis.
The essay is divided into two parts. The second, theological part is a reflection on the spiritual nature of the church, and mirrors Pope Francis’s own approach to the sex-abuse crisis: the pope and pope emeritus agree that the crisis cannot be resolved with only bureaucratic and juridical reforms. Both believe that the crisis involves a spiritual evil that must be confronted in spiritual terms. Benedict writes: “Indeed, the Church today is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus. One speaks of it almost exclusively in political categories, and this applies even to bishops, who formulate their conception of the church of tomorrow almost exclusively in political terms. The crisis, caused by the many cases of clerical abuse, urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope.” All this is in keeping with what Francis has said and written on the subject.
The rest of Benedict’s essay, however, departs not only from the current pope’s analysis of the sex-abuse crisis, but also from that of almost everyone else who has studied it. Ratzinger’s core argument starts from an historical-theological analysis of the post-conciliar period—from 1968 onward—and focuses on the negative effects of the Sexual Revolution on the church. In his view, these effects were twofold: a moral decay in behaviors and the rise of relativism in moral theology.
This is a problematic analysis to say the least. It puts the Second Vatican Council at the origin of moral decadence in the church. This contrasts starkly with the way Francis has always spoken about the Council. Even worse, Benedict’s claim that the phenomenon of sexual abuse was mainly a product of the 1960s is contradicted by all the available studies on the topic, as is his suggestion of a connection between sexual abuse and homosexuality (more on this later).
There is no question that the Catholic Church was hit hard by the Sexual Revolution—not only lay people, but also the clergy and the seminaries. But the history of sexual abuse in the church begins well before the turmoil of the ’60s: one can find evidence of it in the writings of the Fathers of the Church, who coined terms for it that are not found in classical Greek (cf. this study by John Martens). There is a vast literature on the phenomenon and on the tools developed by the church, between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century, to combat it.
Benedict’s portrait of the post–Vatican II period is a caricature. In fact, this was an extremely complex and contradictory time. There were no doubt errors and excesses, but there was also ingenuity on the part of Catholics who were attempting to imagine a church more open to the world. Benedict’s use of the terms “conciliar” and “conciliarity” in this essay is invariably derogatory, and this is not consistent with his own ecclesiology and biography—at least at the time of Vatican II. He was, after all, one of the most important theologians of both the Second Vatican Council and of post-conciliar Catholicism. Particularly surprising is Benedict’s description of the 1960s and ’70s as a period characterized chiefly by the growing acceptance of pornography. His characterization of the past fifty years echoes accounts of the period of “pornocracy,” the saeculum obscurum of Rome in the tenth century. This peculiar “Ratzinger thesis” is not offered here for the first time: you can find traces of it in his earlier writings and interviews—for example, in the Ratzinger Report (1985) and in the letter he sent as pope to the church in Ireland of March 2010. In the past few decades, many Catholics have developed a new awareness of the complexity of sexual abuse, but this awareness is nowhere to be found in Ratzinger’s writings.
Benedict’s essay evinces no awareness that the Catholic sex-abuse crisis is a global crisis, involving non-Western countries that were largely unaffected the Sexual Revolution in Europe and America. The pope emeritus offers hasty and superficial judgment on the responsibilities of the institutional church and of the Vatican during his own pontificate and that of his predecessor, John Paul II. He takes no responsibility for the Vatican’s failures and tragic delays during the time when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or when he was pope. These include the case of cardinal Bernard Law, who took refuge in Rome to escape prosecution in the United States, and the case of Marcial Maciel, the corrupt and predatory founder of the Legionaries of Christ. Nor does he take or assign responsibility for the appointment of a generation of conservative bishops whose rigorism often led to double lives in some seminaries, religious orders, and ecclesial movements. In this regard, hypocrisy has been at least as damaging as moral relativism.
Benedict’s essay is all the more regrettable because it obscures the fact that the Vatican started to take systematic action on this issue only during his own pontificate. He deserves credit for that. But in the essay, one sees only the shortsightedness of Joseph Ratzinger, the most important policy-maker of the Vatican for more than thirty years. There is very little attention paid to the victims of sexual abuse; they are mentioned only once in this long text. This oversight is exacerbated by an unseemly expression of self-pity. “Perhaps it is worth mentioning,” he writes, “that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk.” He once again rehearses his grievance with the “Cologne Declaration” of 1989. Less than a third of this essay directly addresses the question at hand, and much of the rest of it reads like an effort to change the subject.
Christ at the Assembly Line
This failure, which gradually colonizes the clumsy and determines the contours of their lives, is not properly a human failure; it belongs to the things of the external world. And it is precisely its brutal thingness that makes it so disturbing when found in humans. Human as you are, you are supposed to have only “human” failings—errors of thought or judgment, of memory or affection, moral shortcomings, and so on. But when you exhibit a failure that normally belongs to the physical world, a technical malfunction, you become a unique spectacle that cannot fail to unsettle people. You are positively creepy. Others will seek to stay away from you and will end up seeing you as “out of this world.” You are certainly out of their world.
Weil knew this only too well. “I am not someone with whom it is good to cast one’s lot,” she confided to her friend Simone Pétrement. “Human beings have always more or less sensed this.” Pétrement intuited the link between Weil’s physical awkwardness and her otherworldliness: her clumsiness “seemed to spring from the fact that she was not made out of the same crude materials as the rest of us.”
When Simone Weil was six years old, and the First World War was being fought, she decided to go without sugar because, as she told her flabbergasted parents, “the poor soldiers at the front” could not afford any. This was to be her signature gesture: if she thought someone was deprived of something somewhere, she wanted to experience the deprivation herself. Throughout her life, Weil displayed an uncanny capacity to empathize with the suffering, the vulnerable, and the underprivileged. She lived in unheated rooms because, she believed, workers could not afford to heat theirs; she ate poorly because that was how she thought the poor ate. When on one occasion her money disappeared from her rented room, her only remark was, “Whoever took it undoubtedly needed it.” Not only did she feel for others, but she also thought she had to push her life to its breaking point for them; in England, albeit seriously sick and exhausted, she didn’t take the food she needed because the French under occupation were deprived of theirs.
Ironically, this capacity for empathy could make Weil blunt, impatient, even intolerant toward others. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir describes her failed encounter with Simone Weil. It must have been in 1928. “A great famine had just begun to devastate China, and I was told on hearing the news she had wept,” remembers de Beauvoir. “I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world.” When she approached Weil, however, de Beauvoir was in for a shock. No sooner was small talk over than Weil declared that the only thing that mattered was a “revolution that would feed all the people on earth.” As de Beauvoir attempted to voice dissent, Weil cut her short: “It is easy to see you have never gone hungry.” And that was that.
It is not entirely clear what kind of revolution Simone Weil had in mind, but it was unlikely to be a Communist one. She was increasingly critical of the Soviet Union and the Moscow-sponsored Communist parties in Europe. At a time when few left-wing Western intellectuals would dare say anything against the Bolshevik regime, Weil articulated a remarkably lucid and prescient critique of the Soviet system. Whatever was accomplished during the Russian Revolution of 1917, she thought, was destroyed by the Bolshevik regime born out of it. The first Communist state was the gravedigger of the first Communist revolution. Soviet Russia, in Weil’s estimation, was under the control of a bureaucracy that had at its disposal an amount of power (military, political, judicial, economic) that the capitalist states in the West could never even dream of attaining. And the result? Nowhere, she wrote in 1934, is the working class “more miserable, more oppressed, more humiliated than in Russia.”
As Weil familiarized herself with the revolutionary milieu in France and elsewhere, she became convinced that the workers would fare much better without a Communist revolution. “The revolution is not possible,” she wrote in 1935, “because the revolutionary leaders are ineffective dolts. And it is not desirable because they are traitors. Too stupid to win a victory; and if they did win, they would oppress again, as in Russia.”
For all her criticism of revolutionary politics, Weil was not a reactionary. She cared for the workers as few of her fellow intellectuals did. Pétrement recalls that while they were still in high school, Weil told her, looking tenderly at a group of workers, “It’s not only out of a spirit of justice that I love them. I love them naturally. I find them more beautiful than the bourgeois.” Class guilt had fueled the leftist sympathies of generations of middle-class intellectuals in the West, and Weil had her share of it. A worker who got to know her well would recall:
She wanted to know our misery. She wanted to free the worker. This was the goal of her life. I would say to her, “But you are the daughter of rich people.” “That’s my misfortune; I wish that my parents had been poor,” she would say.
Yet it was much more than just class guilt. Having realized that revolutionary politics would not help the working class, and that revolutionary leaders were either crooked, incompetent, or both, Weil decided that the workers could only help themselves. Revolutions generate bureaucracies, and “bureaucracy always betrays,” she said. If intellectuals truly want to understand and help the workers, there is one path they can pursue meaningfully: work alongside them, share their hunger, feel their pain, let themselves be crushed along with them.
Weil’s decision to become an unskilled factory worker was driven by the same fundamental empathy toward the underprivileged that shaped her entire life. Working and living like a “beast of burden,” she hoped, would give her the chance to experience human life at its most naked and brutal. And here she got more than she bargained for.
Barely a few months into her new existence as a factory hand, in January 1935, she wrote to a friend, “It is not that it has changed one or the other of my ideas (on the contrary, it has confirmed many of them), but infinitely more—it has changed my whole view of things, even my very feeling about life.” Nothing would be the same again for her after l’année d’usine (the year of factory work). She would come out of it a changed person. “I shall know joy again in the future,” she went on, “but there is a certain lightness of heart which, it seems to me, will never again be possible.”
A Companion, Not a Judge
Two years later, in 2016, Francis portrayed casuistical reasoning as a malevolent snare. In another morning meditation summarized by L’Osservatore Romano, he cites the
“doctors of the law, who were always approaching Jesus with bad intentions.” The Gospel clearly tells us that their intention was “to test him”: they were always ready to use the classic banana peel “to make Jesus slip,” thus taking away his “authority.” They “were separated from the people of God: they were a small group of enlightened theologians who believed that they had all knowledge and wisdom.” But, in “elaborating their theology, they fell into case law, and could not get out of the trap.”
In this talk, Pope Francis sees casuistry as a mark of unjustified moral and intellectual pride, a tool for some people to view themselves, in deluded fashion, as morally superior to others and therefore more beloved by God. In the pope’s view, knowledge is not in itself the problem. Using knowledge to build up oneself by making other people smaller, more vulnerable, or less significant is a problem because it violates the command to love our neighbors as Jesus loves us.
In a 2017 morning meditation, Pope Francis contrasts casuistry with love of truth.
Francis observed, “casuistry is hypocritical thinking: ‘you can, you cannot.’” A thought “that can then become more subtle, more evil: ‘Up to this point, I can. But from here to there, I cannot,’” which is the “deception of casuistry.” Instead, we must turn “from casuistry to truth.” And, “this is the truth,” the pope noted. “Jesus does not negotiate truth, ever: he says exactly what it is.”
From this perspective, casuistry is a self-serving effort to comply with the letter of the law while subverting its spirit and purpose. It is a childish and ineffective attempt to reconfigure the radical demands of the Gospel to fit conveniently within our preexisting plans. This sort of casuistry can happen with liturgical requirements as well as moral requirements. A good example would be someone who finally puts the donut down while getting in the car on the way to Mass, figuring, “Well, it’s a twenty-minute drive, ten minutes to park and walk, and a good thirty minutes in church before I will get communion—so I comply with the one-hour fasting rule. I’m in just under the line! A personal best!”
Most recently, Pope Francis told a global conference of moral theologians that casuistry is a cramped and backward-looking form of moral theology. More specifically, he judged that:
to reduce moral theology to casuistry is the sin of going back. The casuistry has been overcome. The casuistry was my food and that of my generation in the study of moral theology. But it is proper to decadent Thomism.
But what exactly does he propose to replace it? It is clear from the context that Pope Francis rightly believes that moral theology encompasses more than casuistry.
All of you are asked to rethink the categories of moral theology today, in their mutual bond: the relationship between grace and freedom, between conscience, good, virtues, norm and phrónesis, Aristotelian, Thomist prudentia and spiritual discernment, the relationship between nature and culture, between the plurality of languages and the uniqueness of agape.
Moreover, he urges Catholic moral theologians not to remain in their disciplinary ghettos; they must take into account the insights from other disciplines, including the sciences and social sciences. Moral theology is subject to development in at least two ways. First, it is always possible to grow in insight into the Lord’s requirements of us. Second, many of the particular judgments made by moralists depended tacitly on normative accounts of how things are that have since been called into question by science, social science, and human experience. For example, in contrast to St. Thomas’s view that women were in some sense “defective males,” we now recognize that they are fully morally and intellectually equal to men.
In addition, Pope Francis encourages moralists to take seriously the particular experience of the faithful, in order to recognize the Gospel enfleshed in human lives, rather than treating it as an abstract ideal. “Theology has a critical function of understanding the faith, but its reflection starts from living experience and from the sensus fidei fidelium.” Good moralists do not separate themselves from the lives of ordinary Catholics, but engage those lives with compassion and insight.
Most importantly, Pope Francis emphasizes the need to pay attention to people’s good-faith efforts to do the best they can, facing pain, brokenness, and limitations. The task of the moralist is not to pile burden upon burden, but to open space for grace for the faithful, “who often respond as best as possible to the Gospel in the midst of their limits and carry out their personal discernment in the face of situations in which all normative schemas are broken.” What does that mean, concretely? Traditional casuists often considered one action at a time: Is such-and-such activity a sin or not? If it is, that’s the end of the story—don’t do it. But as Aquinas recognized, sometimes people (often, if not always, through their own prior choices) find themselves in situations where there is no perfectly morally acceptable path forward for them. Catholic moralists cannot simply say, “Too bad for you.” They need to help people in these situations bring their lives into accord with God’s will for them, step by step.
O Blessed Bus!
I stopped reading my Bible on the bus, because it seemed to invite strange men to propose marriage. But then again, one Thanksgiving I was heading to my parents’ house when my seatmate began a quiet, urgent conversation about how much he missed Ethiopia, and he’s the only man who ever spoke to me on a bus who didn’t even ask me if I was single.
The bus has every kind of Christian faith. There’s the kind you get from the driver who comments, as he saddles up for the first round of the day, “I’m blessed to be on this bus.” There’s the kind you get from the psalm someone has posted in place of the schedules, or the sticker on the window that says, “REPENT and RISE WITH Jesus!” There’s also the kind where a woman stands at the front of the bus loudly proclaiming the Gospel, and some people are ignoring her and some people are nodding along, with expressions of slight social strain, until she swerves into what she believes to be God’s opinion of homosexuality and everybody decides to look out the windows. There’s also the kind where the person is not so much preaching as just talking to himself, peppering his moral and religious opinions with, “And they call me crazy!”
One day the 70 was stopped at a long red light up by Gallery Place. The driver spotted a friend on the sidewalk, opened the bus doors and called him over. They exchanged a few pleasantries (“Are you having turkey for Thanksgiving?” “Naw, man, I’m having my jay-oh-bee!”) and then the friend began to talk about his faith. The incredulous driver said, “You’re a Muslim now? You were Christian last week! I know you!” And then the driver opened up his mouth and allowed this poem to take wing: “I see you on the corner saying, ‘Salaam alaikum.’ But when they give you pork chops—you take ’em!” Hey, Anna Karenina: Can your train do that?
People fight on the bus. I’ve never seen a physical fight break out, but I have been on a bus that pulled over and stopped so the driver could call the police on a passenger who was threatening her with a beatdown. I’ve been on a few buses where the riders formed a noisy democracy to demand that the driver eject a passenger who smelled bad. The driver always acceded to these requests eventually. Those buses were bad, and I admit that I didn’t stand up for the targets. The bus is the city: a place where some people do their suffering in public, while other people pass them by.
But the only friend I’ve ever made on public transportation, I made on the bus. I was in high school, with an hour commute each way, and she was a young woman who rode my first bus on her way to work. We chatted every morning as we struggled to stay upright in the seven o’clock crush. I don’t remember why she gave me several long passages from the Gnostic gospels—at the time, I had little interest in religion—but I’ll never forget her plump, precise handwriting, in purple ballpoint on ragged pages torn from a spiral notebook. She copied all those pages out of her library book for me.
Nobody loves the bus because nobody chooses the bus, not if they have other options. The bus rattles and lurches. The bus is cheap and so the bus is crowded, and the bus is probably late. (Amtrak is also probably late, but not cheap.) The seats are small. On an intercity bus there’s no café car, and there sure isn’t any quiet car. The bus isn’t a respite. It takes everything about your life that you wouldn’t have chosen and crams it right into your lap.
And this is how the bus brings people together. When I interviewed the urbanist writer Addison Del Mastro for an article in America magazine, he speculated that perhaps “what we think of as good urbanism is just an accident of having been poor.” When we have a choice, people usually choose privacy, control, and comfort—and then we’re shocked when we wind up lonely. We put up “privacy fences,” and then complain about how nobody knows their neighbors anymore. But communal bonds have always been tightened by necessity.
Look, I love the bus because I love being an ironic observer. The bus is the stage on which I watch the human comedy. But if you forced me to develop a bus philosophy, maybe it would be this: Real communities are made of the duties you accept toward the people you wouldn’t have chosen to live with.
D.C. just announced that all buses will be free within city limits starting July 1, but I don’t expect to enjoy this civic bounty for long. Late last year I fell in love with a woman who lives in one of those California cities where the car is an indispensable prosthetic. (They’ve been like this for a very long time: in 1883 Helen Hunt Jackson called early Californians “a variety of Centaur” who “mounted [horses], with jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the shortest distances, even to cross a plaza.”) If all goes well, I will be moving. I’ll learn to drive. The bus will retreat to the margins of my life. Speed and comfort will replace REPENT stickers, spilled sodas, and that one guy who reacts to a bicyclist swerving out in front of the bus with a frustrated, “Just hit him!” I never thought I would leave my hometown, and so I never thought I’d leave the bus. Nothing will ever replace it—nothing anybody would choose.
The Ratzinger File
This article was originally published in Commonweal on November 15, 1985.
WHEN NORMAL CHANNELS of communication and control fail, try the mass media. This is the strategy Cardinal Ratzinger has followed in this book-length interview (which he has reviewed and approved). It is hard to think of any other explanation for why the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, successor to Grand Inquisitors, second only to the pope, has unburdened himself at great and uninhibited length to a popular journalist.
This explanation fits with what the cardinal says regarding the institutional weakness of his position. He notes, for example, that when he was Archbishop of Munich he presided over a large and well-financed ecclesiastical bureaucracy, while his present staff is small, over-worked, and underpaid (the same, by the way, holds for the Curia as a whole). More generally, Rome has lost the support it may once have had from non-ecclesiastical establishments. Even within the church, the press and the academy are arrayed against it. They are swayed, Ratzinger believes, by the culturally decisive class in Western countries: the affluent, educated, liberal bourgeoisie (which an American, following Daniel Bell, might call the “new class”).
The cardinal regards this class as the producer, product, and victim of the present late stage of free-market capitalism (unlike American neo-conservatives, his anti-Marxism does not lead him to be pro-capitalist). Western societies have lapsed into a hedonistic consumerism, destructive of both nature and tradition, ending in aimlessness. Many try to compensate for the vacuum of meaning in their lives by psychological therapies, Eastern spiritualities, and fashionable neo-Marxisms. Catholic “progressives” (Ratzinger dislikes the term) accommodate to these developments in an effort to make the faith attractive and relevant, but in the process betray both Christianity and humanity. Morality is relativized, the clergy and religious are in disarray, questionable forms of feminism flourish, the authority of Scripture and doctrine erodes, and the very christological foundations of the faith are undermined by revisionist interpretations. So pervasive is the malady that traditionalist reactions such as that of Archbishop Lefebvre are understandable. They are in their way as bad at the primary disease, but in present circumstances less dangerous.
Ratzinger’s analysis of liberation theologies is representative of his wider critique. Contrary to the self-image they try to project, they do not grow out of grass-roots struggles against oppression, but are culturally-imperialistic European and North American exports promoted in the third world by Westernized intellectuals. The fight of these intellectuals against sinful social structures may at times be personally costly for them, but it also brings far more press coverage (and, if successful, far more power) than does the lonely battle against sin in the heart. (It is on the doctrine of sin that Ratzinger would like to work if he had a chance to return to scholarship.)
Mourned or Lamented?
This bright-lined separation in Lear’s thought is matched and perhaps required by another: between human lives that resonate to some degree with the good, the Aristotelean kalon (a favored term of art for Lear), and those that fail to do so and are therefore wasted. That separation is clean and clear in his lovely and fascinating, but surely wrong, chapter “Good Mourning in Gettysburg and Hollywood” on our failure to properly mourn the Confederate dead of Gettysburg. (Hollywood is the place in Virginia where those Confederate dead, or most of them, were eventually buried.) Lear is right that we have failed at that necessary act of mourning, and his description of how and why is to me persuasive. What is not persuasive, however, is his consistent claim that the Confederate lives that ended on that battlefield were ordered entirely around an error—believing chattel slavery to be a good—which excludes the kalon. The result, Lear says, is that their whole lives were “failed attempts at the kalon,” which “has no room for such terrible error.” They were wasted lives. He is explicit about that. This distinction, between lives that get some way toward living in accord with the good and those that fail utterly to do so, mirrors the distinction between what is mournable and what is lamentable. Neither distinction can be sustained.
It is possible to do better. The first step would be to renounce the sharp distinction between reparable mournables and irreparable lamentables, and to replace it with an acknowledgment that all the horrors with which we are faced are woven with threads of both, and therefore require both mourning and lament. My father died suddenly and unexpectedly many years ago, when he was forty-five and I was nineteen. I have mourned him since, off and on, with many of the healing effects Lear so clearly describes. But there is that in his death which, as Lear would put it, resists mourning or, as I would prefer to put it, requires the howl and dirge of lamentation. It is one and the same event, though; and not to see that it both requires and resists mourning is to fail to see it for what it is.
There is a second step. It is not that there are some human lives wasted by being closed to the kalon, and others open to it, however imperfectly and incompletely. There are no armies of light and no armies of darkness. It is a Manichaean mistake to think so, and always a violent one. Lear’s treatment of the Confederate dead of Gettysburg involves this mistake, and I doubt that it is coherent even on its own terms. He advocates, rightly, mourning the Confederate dead without memorializing or valorizing them. But according to his argument, for a life to be mournable there must be good in it—it must not have been completely wasted—so the lives of the Confederate dead cannot have been as separate from the kalon as he seems to take them to be. He could have written that all human lives are malformed, oriented in part to the good that gives life and in part to the blankly lamentable absence that is evil. As the Augustinian adage has it: everything is good to the extent that it is, which entails that everything is evil to the extent that it is not. All human lives are alike in this, and any response to them that denies or obscures this is itself blankly lamentable and always violent, usually in the distinctively American mode of self-righteousness. The lives of the Confederate dead of Gettysburg were not wasted, as Lear says; those men were slaughtered for a cause that included chattel slavery, which is beyond defense; but none of them, not a one, is reducible to that cause. Each of them, every one, was a human creature whose battlefield death shares the features of all such deaths: participation in evil’s absence as well as in good’s presence.
Lear’s two dualisms are both evidence of a single uneasiness. It is an uneasiness about mixing—not being able to say that there were good men among the Confederate dead is of a piece with not being able to say that there are properly mournable events that also call for lament at their inaccessibility to mourning. But we must say both things. Saying the first permits us to look at and describe what was good in the social, economic, and political life of the Antebellum South, while being clear about what was evil in that life. Saying the second permits us to observe and shudder at the lamentable horrors beyond all mourning entwined with everything, everywhere, always. Lear’s refusals tend to exile the lamentable and the evil into the elsewhere, placing them anywhere but here. He does not quite do that; he does recognize that there are states of affairs, even here and now, that resist mourning. But the tone of much of his writing about mourning shows that he is on the way toward affirming the Manichaean separation.
I have been critical. But I am also glad to have read this book, and grateful to Lear for having written it. His work has been a companion to me these past three decades or so, and I have never failed to be edified and instructed by it. That is true for this book as well. There are excellent things in it I have not touched on in this short review, including an analysis of gratitude in its relation to mourning, and of the practices of the humanities in the same context. Anyone interested in mourning—and since we are all mourners, that leaves no one out—should read this book.
Imagining the End
Mourning and Ethical Life
Jonathan Lear
Harvard University Press
$29.95 | 176 pp.
An America of One or Many?
If anything, Berry could be called too consistent. To his credit, he acknowledges that very risk: “Because I write as a rural American, from the point of view of the land and the land-communities, I am obliged in honesty to worry about that point of view as possibly a limitation.” Having said that, he is off and running, and to read some passages of The Need to Be Whole is to think of counterarguments that seem so obvious that readers may feel they’re missing something. For example, Berry’s clear reverence for farmers and farming (he also seems to tolerate people who run small shops), and his sincere concern for the natural world, prejudices him to a startling extent against work that is not tied to the land. “The good jobs in industry and the footholds on the corporate ladder,” he writes, “are available only to employees, people willingly answerable to bosses. Whatever ability and ambition may be involved, so also is a certain passivity or submissiveness, an attitude that Nate Shaw would have condemned as ‘slavish.’” (Shaw was a Black Alabaman sharecropper and the subject of Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers, which won the National Book Award in 1974.) Readers of that passage, wondering if Berry is actually saying what he appears to be saying, perhaps suspecting a trap, nonetheless venture nervously forward to ask: Uh, does Berry really want us all to be farmers (or, failing that, small business owners)? Does he understand that the U.S. population has more than doubled since 1950, and that most of us could not do such work even if we all wanted to, which, by the way, we don’t? Does he get that some jobs cannot be done outside, and that while some of us do not love those jobs, many of us do? Does Berry really see America as being divided between the self-employed—among whom farmers constitute the elite because they work directly with the land—and the self-enslaved?
Others of Berry’s risks pay off. Readers may hold their breath when he begins to tell stories of the African Americans he knew in his youth, thinking, Please, God, don’t let him tell us some of his best friends are Black. But, as it happens, they are—or, more accurately, Berry learned farming and fellowship in large part because of the close relationships he formed in his youth with Black people. Those experiences allowed him to do what he urges the rest of us to do: stop identifying one another, and ourselves, primarily as members of groups and see our fellow Americans as flesh-and-blood people. Some of the most moving parts of The Need to Be Whole concern the late African-American writer Ernest J. Gaines, with whom Berry had a long friendship; Berry quotes Gaines’s novels at length for the way they illustrate the points Berry is trying to make.
A large part of forming bonds with others, for Berry, comes back to the idea of forgiveness. He asks, referring to a specific instance of “cancel” culture, “What…may be the point or purpose of opposing race prejudice and its consequences—what are the protestors asking for—if there is to be no forgiveness, no grant of kindness, to people…who change their minds?” The problem with our current conception of sin, in Berry’s view, is that we care only about those sins we can pin on other people (those sins, depending on who you are, being abortion or racism). Such a view, he notes, obscures the fact that we are united in our imperfection and makes us ever less accepting of one another.
A society “cannot do for its people what it will not do for its land, and vice versa,” the author writes on the second page of The Need to Be Whole. Berry has written a peculiar, powerful book whose central ideas we reject at our peril: that we need to treat our fellow citizens, and our home, much better, and that, as one presidential candidate told us, we are stronger together. Refreshingly, Berry sees his book not as the last word but as “my part of a conversation,” and he enters that exchange, in spite of his own cussedness, with proper humility: “I am, after all, a fallible and struggling writer, intent upon pursuing the truth that finally only God can know.”
The Need to Be Whole
Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
Wendell Berry
Shoemaker & Company
$24 | 528 pp.
Into the Breach
What lessons does this history offer the Greek Catholic Church today, as it once again confronts an unexpected war? The Church of today wants the public to understand its historical role as a moral authority for Ukrainian society. In this way, it can offer a powerful alternative to Russia’s narratives about Ukraine. Unlike the Orthodox Church, its spiritual heritage is separate from Russia. The role of its clergy and believers in the Ukrainian national movement in Austria-Hungary ties Ukrainians to Europe. In response to Russian charges of Ukrainian “fascism,” the Church can demonstrate that it was one of the few churches in Europe that resisted full collaboration with Nazi rule.
But how to apply the lessons of history in practice? In some ways, the legacy of Sheptytsky is carried on through the Church’s active engagement in Ukrainian civil society. In the early 1990s the Church’s ability to draw on European Catholic networks, as well as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic diaspora in the United States and Canada, gave the institution access to people and resources that other Ukrainian institutions did not have. Through these networks the Church helped to found one of Ukraine’s most prestigious universities, Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv, in addition to a plethora of humanitarian organizations and NGOs. Critically, the Greek Catholic Church’s access to global Catholic institutions allowed the Church to mobilize a Ukraine-wide network of social outreach that extends far past west Ukraine and has outpaced smaller charitable endeavors by Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches.
A true test for the Church’s role in post-Soviet, independent Ukraine came with the outbreak of war in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine. Between 2014 and 2021, over fourteen thousand soldiers were killed fighting in eastern Ukraine and over one million Ukrainians were internally displaced. While the battles took place in eastern Ukrainian regions with few Greek Catholics, the Greek Catholic Church managed to mobilize extensively for the war effort—far more so than Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches. As anthropologist Catherine Wanner has argued, the Church’s ability to draw on Roman Catholic war relief networks allowed the Greek Catholic Church to fill in gaps left by the Ukrainian state, including through direct support for the Ukrainian armed forces.
Most critically, in 2010, the Greek Catholic Church established a military chaplaincy that took on a new urgency when the war began in 2014. These chaplains were called to address the spiritual needs of Greek Catholic soldiers, overrepresented in the armed forces due to west Ukraine’s high level of military service, as well as the needs of soldiers from various Orthodox denominations.
The Church’s role as a spiritual bulwark for Ukraine’s armed forces takes a physical form in the Garrison Church in L’viv, which is run by Greek Catholic chaplains and dedicated to soldiers and their families. While the church structure and much of its sacred art date back centuries, the church intentionally mixes traditional religious objects with modern symbols of warfare, like shell casings and pieces of shrapnel. Reporters who have attended Mass at this church note the presence of military families among the congregants and sermons that are specifically about the challenges of the war. As a Times of Israel journalist recalled, priests at the Garrison Church were as likely to be found packing up food and supplies for soldiers, military families, and refugees as they would be leading the liturgy. This building offers a clear example of how the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church sees its role: not simply as a spiritual guide, but as an active participant in shaping Ukrainian society at war, just like Sheptytsky’s Church.
Still, debates that engulfed the Church in the previous century remain unresolved. What is the role for a minority Catholic Church in Ukrainian nation-building, especially for a nation that draws so much on its Orthodox heritage? In 2019, the Orthodox world recognized the existence of an independent (autocephalous) Ukrainian Orthodox Church, separate from the Russian Orthodox Church. While Russia denies the legitimacy of this independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its existence has been a powerful tool for the Ukrainian state to assert a religious foundation that cannot be claimed by Moscow. Where does this leave non-Orthodox religious groups like the Greek Catholic Church? There is an opportunity for the Greek Catholic Church to advance the same idea some Ukrainian activists supported in the nineteenth century: a Ukrainian nation with roots in multiple spiritual traditions. Just as Sheptytsky advocated for the rights of Ukrainian Orthodox alongside Ukrainian Greek Catholics, the present-day Church has supported the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s campaign to be recognized as autocephalous. But the two Churches remain in tension as they grapple with the idea that only one Church can claim to be the moral authority of the Ukrainian nation.
And just as in the twentieth century, many Ukrainians remain unsure of the Church’s capacity to address the problems Ukraine faced before this war and that have only worsened since. The Church remains more conservative on social issues than the rest of Ukraine’s population, recently opposing Ukraine’s participation in the Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women. As Ukraine attempts to promote an image of itself to the world as more progressive than Russia on women’s and LGBT rights, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church consistently opposes legislation meant to protect these communities from violence and discrimination. Moreover, in the project of reckoning with Ukraine’s complicated past, the Church has remained mostly silent. In some cases, Greek Catholic organizations have even sponsored initiatives to present a whitewashed version of Ukraine’s history, such as in the case of the controversial Lonsky Prison Museum, which lionizes some radical nationalists whom Sheptytsky himself condemned.
In wartime it is tempting to gloss over these complexities. It is clear to Ukrainians of all faiths that the Church is involved in multiple projects to sustain the country through this brutal war, building on a tradition of serving the needs of the Ukrainian people when other institutions fail them. In this way, the Church is certainly molding itself in the image crafted by Sheptytsky.
In a recent piece for the Economist, Fr. Andriy Zelinskyy, chief military chaplain for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, offered his view of the Church’s role during this brutal war: “There was never a reason for this war and the Russian army has never had a mission. It was void of sense right from the very beginning. That’s why it is imperative that, if we are to restore global security and personal dignity, we answer the questions it raises.”
In the twentieth century, Sheptytsky’s Church saw itself in the same role as it endured brutal occupations by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union’s repression ultimately made it difficult for the Church to confront the trauma of war and reckon with life after. Today, as Fr. Zelinskyy reminds us, it seems that the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine may have the chance to answer the questions raised by the war. What answers it will provide, and whether they are the right ones for today’s Ukraine, remains to be seen.
