For Catholics today, Ratzinger maintains, one of the most pressing needs is to hold the modern world at bay. In August 1984, he stated to a journalist:
I am convinced that the damage that we have incurred in these twenty years is due… to the unleashing within the Church of latent polemical and centrifugal forces; and outside the Church it is due to a confrontation with a cultural revolution in the West.44
And further:
Among the most urgent tasks facing Christians is that of regaining the capacity of nonconformism, i.e., the capacity to oppose many developments of the surrounding culture.45
What is extraordinary is the cardinal's preparedness to offer, without any apparent sense of irony, so novel a definition of ‘nonconformism’. In his context, the rebellion that led many young people of the sixties to turn away from Christianity and look to psychology, Eastern thought and so-called ‘esoteric’ tradition would be presumably classified as ‘conformity’. ‘Nonconformism’ is redefined to mean nothing other than embrace of the Church of Rome.
Veneration of Mary
Pope John Paul II is eager to make new saints. To justify the making of new saints, he wants more miracles. In order to accelerate the entire process, the Pope has changed the rules. The number of miracles an individual must perform to qualify for sainthood is no longer two, but one.
All candidates for sainthood, at least since 1940, must be awarded a certificate of spiritual cleanliness, a written declaration that ‘nothing objectionable’ about them exists in the Vatican's archives. The files containing all relevant information on such matters are held by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is hardly surprising. Where else but in the records of the former Inquisition would one look for both family skeletons and family jewels? On one occasion, the process of canonisation was abruptly curtailed when the candidate was discovered to be deficient in the moral qualities generally associated with sainthood. Incontrovertible evidence revealed that he had been a committed and unrepentant child molester.
Strictly speaking, the assessment of candidates for sainthood is not the business of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but of another department, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Neither does Ratzinger's Congregation generally concern itself with the investigation and authentication of miracles. But apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and miracles associated with her, are of special interest to the cardinal and his Congregation. Indeed, one section of the Congregation is devoted exclusively to assessing the validity, or lack thereof, of Marian manifestations and miracles.
In one of his few genuinely sane and psychologically astute convictions, Ratzinger regards the Madonna as vital to the survival of the Church. In his eyes, worship of Mary is crucial. Without it the Church is incomplete. She is necessary for ‘the equilibrium and completeness of the Catholic faith’.46 She provides Rome with ‘the right relationship, the necessary integration between Scripture and tradition’. The cardinal elaborates on this point:47
The correct Marian devotion guarantees to faith the co-existence of indispensable ‘reason’ with the equally indispensable ‘reasons of the heart’… For the Church, man is neither mere reasoning nor mere feeling, he is the unity of these two dimensions. The head must reflect with lucidity, but the heart must be able to feel warmth: devotion to Mary… this assures the faith its full human dimension.48
For Ratzinger Mary is also an important connecting link between Old and New Testaments, old and new dispensations:
In her very person as a Jewish girl become the mother of the Messiah, Mary binds together, in a living and indissoluble way, the old and the new People of God, Israel and Christianity, synagogue and church.49
And Mary functions, too, as an image or symbol of the Church itself:
In Mary, as figure and archetype, the Church again finds her own visage as Mother and cannot degenerate into the complexity of a party, an organization or a pressure group in the service of human interests.50
In his acknowledgement of Mary, or of the ‘Feminine Principle’, Ratzinger for once would seem to be in accord with the more sophisticated psychological thinking of our age. The Madonna may be an idealised, dehumanised, too-good-to-be-true image of the Feminine. But she is at least feminine; and Ratzinger's endorsement of her as a principle or conduit for integration echoes the pronouncements of C. G. Jung, as well as those of mystics, visionaries and artists for centuries. The cardinal would undoubtedly disapprove, for example, of Goethe's pagan pantheism; but the feminine he extols in the form of the Madonna is not so very far removed from Goethe's ‘Ewig-Weibliche’, the ‘Eternal Feminity’ that leads humanity ‘ever beyond’.
Unfortunately, however, Ratzinger's acknowledgement of the feminine in Mary does not extend to other women – mortal women who inhabit the material and phenomenal world. By the Pope's infallible decree, they are still disqualified from the priesthood. And like the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regards them implicitly or explicitly with suspicion.
It is impossible to do justice in these pages to the history of the Church's attitude towards women. Library and bookshop shelves are crammed with entire volumes addressing the ways in which, through the centuries, women have suffered at Rome's hands. Womanhood itself has been undervalued, the ‘Feminine Principle’ denigrated and distorted. For a substantial part of its existence as an institution, the Church was not even prepared to allow that women possessed souls. So far as the population at large is concerned, of course, attitudes and perceptions have gradually been changing. Not even the Church has been able to insulate itself altogether from such change. Thus, for example, Father Tissa Balasuriya has stated that the priesthood ‘is a spiritual function and not a biological one’.51 In 1990, Father Balasuriya wrote:
There is no reason, biological, psychological, pastoral, theological or spiritual, why we cannot have a yellow, brown, black or white woman Pope.52
Not, however, in the opinion of Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 1996, the Congregation officially ruled that ‘the Pope's ban on the ordination of women was an infallible part of Catholic doctrine and could not be disputed or changed’.53 A year later Father Balasuriya was excommunicated.
Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are rather less than enthusiastic about feminism. ‘I am, in fact, convinced,’ the cardinal states, ‘that what feminism promotes in its radical form is no longer the Christianity that we know; it is another religion.’54 Such feminism ‘announces a liberation that is a salvation different from, if not opposed to, the Christian conception’.55 The sheer strength of this language is interesting. Feminism is placed in a relation to the Church that is not just deviant, but downright adversarial. To that extent, Ratzinger would almost seem to regard it as diabolical. In any case, he is deeply disturbed by feminism's infestation of the convents, especially in North America. ‘Some,’ he complains, ‘have turned with great trust to those profane confessors, to these “experts of the soul” that psychologists and psycho-analysts supposedly are.’56
It is a cliché that politics makes for strange bedfellows. So, too, does religious dogmatism. The Church's intransigence in its attitude towards women has brought it into unlikely alignment with one of the most virulent of its traditional enemies, Islamic fundamentalism. In the past, each has regarded the other as a virtual embodiment of the devil. Each, however, is prepared to sup with its respective devil in order to keep women in their supposed place. In their joint hostility towards women, Catholicism and Islamic fundamentalism have thus paradoxically made common cause. Acting in concert, they have endeavoured to determine attitudes and policies on such issues as birth control and abortion.
In September 1994, a United Nations conference – the UN Conference on Population and Development – convened in Cairo. The objective was to explore methods of stabilising, if not reducing, global population and to bring it under some kind of control through ‘fami
ly planning’, especially in countries of the Third World. The conference also addressed itself to abortion and to measures for limiting the incidence of AIDS and the alarming consequences of urban overcrowding. A total of 171 countries were represented.
For the Vatican, of course, as well as for certain Islamic factions, abortion and ‘family planning’ – that is, artificial contraception – were both anathema. In the weeks preceding the conference, rumours proliferated of a clandestine alliance being forged between the Muslim factions and Rome. During August, it was noted that there were Papal missions to Tehran and Tripoli. No proof of a secret accord was forthcoming until the conference had already convened. Only then did an Italian newspaper manage to obtain a three-page document in Arabic, that testified to a meeting at the Vatican three months earlier, in June, between Church functionaries and Muslim representatives. An agreement had been signed to adopt a joint strategy designed to thwart the UN's proposed measures for controlling population growth.57
At the conference, the Vatican and its Islamic allies refused to budge on the issue of birth control and caused the proceedings to stall hopelessly. All the other participants were prepared to compromise and make concessions – to state strongly, for example, that abortion should never be advocated as a means of birth control. For the Vatican's delegation and its allies, this was not enough. After several days of stalemate, debate had become acrimonious and tempers had begun to fray. Britain, the United States and the European Union all became exasperated with Rome. Baroness Chalker, head of the British delegation, described the Vatican's stance as ‘time-wasting deadlock’.58 Even the editor of the British Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, expressed frustration. ‘If the Holy See was not in Cairo to negotiate,’ he asked, ‘why did it come?’ It had done so, he concluded, for another reason. What was the ‘hidden agenda’? The editor of the newspaper answered his own question:
The conflict at Cairo is not simply over sexual ethics. It is over Western values, specifically the values of the European Enlightenment. John Paul II's doctrinal watch-dog, Cardinal Ratzinger, was explicit in his criticism of the Enlightenment.59
By the end of the conference, the Vatican had overstepped the bounds of prudence and provoked questions about the legitimacy of its own contribution to the debate. The Church's delegation had after all been present, technically, as representatives not of a religion, but of a sovereign state. Other nations began to complain about the delegation's undue and disproportionate influence. According to The Times, they also began ‘to ask why one religion should have representative status at this conference whereas Islam, Buddhism and other religions do not’.60 Implicit behind these questions, there hovered another one. Should the Vatican continue to enjoy the status of a sovereign state? Ultimately, The Times concluded, the ‘big loser at the conference was the Vatican, which so overplayed its hand… that it angered most Third World delegations’,61 as well as those of the developed West.
In September 1992, the definitive version of the new Universal Catechism was published. Public and private mortification at the draft text had been blithely ignored, and no concessions whatever had been made. The new Catechism, so out of step with the modern world, inevitably produced a backlash.
Bishops across the world, and especially in the developed West, voiced their profound concern. In Britain, the Observer commented that the Pope, assisted by Cardinal Ratzinger, had ‘for the first time linked birth control and sexual teaching with tenets of Catholic doctrine’.62 Personal morality was no longer allowed to be personal. It was now inextricably entangled with theology and yoked to faith. To transgress in sexual matters was to endanger one's very status as a communicant member of the Roman Catholic Church.
Subsequent statements from both the Papacy and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have only become more doctrinaire, more intransigent, more arrogantly indifferent to human needs, exigencies and aspirations. In 1994, for example, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter which definitively forbade the ordination of women as priests. Later the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that the Pope's pronouncement on the matter was to be regarded as ‘infallibly taught’.
In the summer of 1998, the Pope issued a new edict which was accompanied by a commentary from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The edict demanded complete and absolute adherence to the Papacy's official position on such matters as birth control, abortion, extramarital sexual relations and the ordination of women as priests. It was expressly forbidden to tamper with the alleged ‘choice made by Christ’ in accepting men alone to the priesthood.63 Disagreement with Church rulings, on this or any other topical issue, was to be considered officially as heresy and rendered punishable by excommunication. The commentary from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stressed the ‘definitive’ nature of the Pope's assertions, which had perforce to be accepted by all Catholics without question. Papal infallibility was invested with a new and reinforced authority, which prohibited any debate on moral as well as on theological concerns. Dissent and heresy were now in effect synonymous. According to the Daily Telegraph:
It is believed that the Pope, nervous of the growth of liberal movements, wanted to close a loophole in Canon Law which allowed teachers to speak against the Church's moral doctrines.64
And further:
It is designed to curb the activity of liberal movements and to pull into line the growing number of Catholics who do not believe they have to obey the Church's teachings to the letter.65
The New York Times described the Pope's edict as ‘one of the most vivid signs yet that in the twilight of his papacy, John Paul II… is seeking to make his rulings irreversible’.66 In effect, future pontiffs will be shackled by the infallible character of the recent rulings; and reform of the Church in the twenty-first century will at very least be retarded, if not thwarted completely.
It is ironic that in their zeal to impose an authoritarian discipline on the Church, the Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have placed themselves in violation of their own Canon Law. According to Canon 212:
Christ's faithful… have the right, indeed at times the duty… to manifest to the sacred Pastors their views on matters which concern the good of the Church. They have the right also to make their views known to others of Christ's faithful.67
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Visions of Mary
By virtue of its intransigence and dogmatism, the Church is currently suffering one of the most severe backlashes in its history – perhaps the most severe since the Lutheran Reformation. In the developed West, previously its stronghold, it is faced with an alarming defection among its congregation. People are leaving the Roman Catholic Church in droves. By the end of the 1980s, almost half of the seminaries in the United States had closed; new ordinations were less than a third of those in 1967; the number of priests had declined from 12,000 in 1962 to a mere 7,000.
Now, a decade later, the situation has dramatically worsened. In England, Church membership has dropped by a quarter of a million. Given the rate of defections, the Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle has reported that by 2028, his diocese will have no Catholics left in it at all.1 In Ireland, traditionally the Church's bastion in the British Isles, the number of priests in 1970 had halved by 1998. The number of nuns had declined from 18,600 to fewer than 7,500. New entries into the seminaries are in single figures.
There is, too, an increasing preparedness to call the priesthood to account for secular transgressions, such as sexual abuse of minors; and this has done little to reestablish confidence. In Austria, for example, Cardinal Groer, former Archbishop of Vienna, has been charged with criminal sexual misconduct. In Ireland, between 1980 and 1998, twenty-three members of the Catholic clergy were convicted of crimes involving sexual abuse, and another fifteen cases are currently pending before the courts.2 It is thus hardly surprising that many former strongholds of clerical authority should have become increasingly secular in attitudes, values
and orientation.
With the spread of education, moreover, a growing number of people are prepared to ask questions; and the Church's prohibition against doing so is coming to seem ever more presumptuous, tyrannical and conducive to alienation. Thus, for example, the movement known as ‘We Are Church’ arose in Austria, quickly assumed international proportions and now numbers more than half a million members, who still regard themselves as devout Roman Catholics. But as the name of their movement suggests, they maintain that they themselves and the millions of other Catholics across the globe constitute the real Church, not the rigid hierarchy based in Rome. The Church, they insist, is their Church, not the Pope's or the Curia's. They oppose the centralisation of the Papacy and wish to see the pontiff as nothing more than Bishop of Rome, perhaps with the largely symbolic status of a constitutional monarch.
Wilfully oblivious to such developments, Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith remain adamant in their entrenched positions. Certain commentators have suggested that the Church has effectively ‘written off’ the developed West as a lost cause especially since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe has left Rome without the adversary formerly cast in the role of Antichrist. The same commentators have speculated that the Church may now be attempting to establish an entirely new centre of power in the underdeveloped countries of the so-called Third World – in Africa, in Asia and in South America. And there is indubitable evidence to suggest the existence of some such cynical design. Rome is patently mustering and concentrating resources in those regions of the globe where poverty, deprivation, meagre standards of living and a general lack of education provide fertile soil for faith.
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