In 1978, shortly after the election of John Paul II as pontiff, the Congregation investigated and clamped down on a French Dominican, Jacques Pohier, and forbade him to teach. A year later, Hans Küng, one of the most distinguished of modern Catholic theologians, had his licence to teach theology revoked. Immediately afterwards, he was dismissed from his faculty post at the University of Tübingen. On being offered another position, which did not require a licence from Rome, Küng commented:
I have been condemned by a pontiff who has rejected my theology without ever having read one of my books and who has always refused to see me. The truth is that Rome is not waiting for dialogue but for submission.12
In 1983, the new Code of Canon Law stated that all teachers of theological material in institutions of higher learning were required to possess a mandate or sanction from ‘the competent ecclesiastical authority’ – meaning, at very least, the local bishop. In other words, according to one commentator, ‘theologians are to serve, not to challenge’.13 Shortly thereafter, more than 500 German theologians appended their signatures to a protest known as the ‘Cologne Declaration’. It announced their distress at the increasing number of qualified individuals who were being denied permission to teach. According to the ‘Cologne Declaration’: ‘The power to withhold official permission to teach is being abused; it has become an instrument to discipline theologians.’14
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith remained indifferent to such protests. In September 1984, a Brazilian Franciscan, Father Leonardo Boff, was summoned to Rome – where, having appeared before the Congregation, he was condemned to a year of silence. In November of the same year, the eminent Dutch Dominican writer, Father Edward Schillebeeckx, received a similar summons – the third such he had received since 1979 – and was ordered to explain himself before the Congregation. In March 1986, Father Charles Curran, a theologian at the Catholic University of Washington, had his teaching licence revoked and was dismissed from his post a year later. In 1987, too, Archbishop Hunthausen of Seattle, a prominent exponent of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, was subjected to a hostile investigation. In 1988, an Indian Jesuit, Luis Bermejo, was condemned. An American Jesuit, Father Terence Sweeney, was commanded to cease his research on ecclesiastical attitudes towards clerical marriage and to burn all his papers. Rebelling against this attempt to re-ignite the old Inquisition's traditional bonfires, Father Sweeney defected from the Jesuits. His indignation at his treatment was equalled by that of a German moral theologian, Father Bernard Häring. Father Häring found his examination by the Congregation more offensive than the four occasions on which he had formerly been forced to appear before a Nazi court.15
In 1989, the Congregation officially demanded that new appointees to seminaries and Catholic universities – rectors, presidents, professors of theology and philosophy – not only make a profession of faith, but also take an oath of fidelity. A similar oath was made obligatory for new pastors. The standard profession of faith was amended to include an additional sentence: ‘I also firmly embrace and hold each and everything that is definitively proposed by the same Church concerning the doctrine of faith or morals.’ 16 These measures were instituted by the Congregation entirely on its own initiative. There had been no previous consultation with the theological community or with participants at any episcopal conferences. They came as a surprise and a shock even to other offices of the Curia. Within the Catholic academic world, there was an immediate reaction of ‘deep and profound disquiet’.17
In May 1990, the Congregation produced the first draft for a proposed new Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church. In its 354 pages, papal infallibility was vigorously reaffirmed, and the rapprochement with other faiths and denominations inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council was implicitly repudiated. According to the Congregation's text:
The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone.18
Condemnation of artificial birth control and of abortion was, of course, reiterated. Cohabitation before marriage was also condemned, as was euthanasia. Divorce was condemned as immoral and conducive to social disorder. Masturbation was condemned as morally reprehensible, homosexuality as sinfully degrading.
The proposed Catechism was sent with a request for comments to all the 2,421 Roman Catholic bishops across the globe. Inevitably it was leaked to the media and extracts from it were published in newspapers. An overwhelming number of people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, were shocked and horrified by the document's doggedly obtuse, psychologically naive and rabidly reactionary nature. Hopes of a more progressive Church evolving from the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were rudely disappointed, even dashed. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seemed adamantly bent on undoing those reforms, rolling history back and further dissociating the Church from the contemporary world around it.
Shortly after the draft text of the new catechism was circulated, Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation's Prefect, hastened to erect a bulwark against possible dissent. This took the form of a twenty-seven-page document written by Ratzinger himself and published officially by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian. In his text, Ratzinger condemned not only personal dissent, but equally ‘that public opposition to the magisterium also called dissent’.19 The cardinal categorically denied that anyone possessed a ‘right to dissent’. On the contrary, the text stated explicitly that Catholic theologians have no right to dissent from the established teachings of the Church and that ‘the theologian should be an instrument of the faith rather than its analyst’.20 Indeed, dissent itself was to be regarded as a certifiable sin: ‘To succumb to the temptation of dissent… (allows) infidelity to the Holy Spirit.’21 The Church made no pretence to democracy. ‘Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.’22 Neither could whatever personal relationship one enjoyed with the sacred. ‘Appealing to the obligation to follow one's own conscience cannot legitimate dissent.’23 The text of the document ended with a warning:
The freedom of the act of faith cannot justify a right to dissent. This freedom does not indicate freedom with regard to the truth, but signifies the free determination of the person in conformity with his moral obligation to accept the truth.24
In other words, insofar as this exercise in obfuscation and casuistry can be deciphered at all, one is free only to act in accordance with the Church's teachings. To act otherwise is not a manifestation of freedom, but of error. Freedom consists solely of accepting the ‘truth’, and ‘truth’ is the exclusive monopoly of the Papacy, to define as it wishes.
In 1992, for example, an American Dominican, Father Matthew Fox, was dismissed from his post in Chicago for having founded an institution in California devoted to creative and spiritual studies that included on its faculty a self-proclaimed ‘witch’. In 1993, three German bishops were forced by the Congregation to retract their assertion that Catholics who remarried without Church approval might still receive communion. In 1995, Bishop Jacques Gaillot of Evreux was dismissed from his position for supporting a priest who had married, endorsing the use of condoms as a defence against AIDS and simply entertaining the possibility of blessing homosexual ‘marriages’. When he refused to resign, the Vatican forcibly ejected him. More than 20,000 people attended his valedictory Mass.
In the same year, a Brazilian nun, Ivone Gebara, was exiled to an Augustinian convent in Belgium for two years of so-called ‘study’, in order that her ‘theological imprecisions’ might be ‘corrected’. During this time, she was forbidden to write or engage in any public speaking. In 1995, too, an American nun, Carmel McEnroy, was dismissed from her institute of theology in Indiana for having signed a statement endorsing the ordination of women. In January 1997, the Sri Lankan Father Tissa Balasuriya – a graduat
e of the Gregorian University in Rome, founder and director of the Centre for Society and Religion in Sri Lanka and founding member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians – was excommunicated for an essay, published seven years earlier, on the Virgin Mary and women's rights in the Church. Father Balasuriya had dared to suggest that women might enjoy a status equal to that of men within the community of the Church.
Such is a representative selection of the activities of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during the last twenty years. It speaks eloquently for itself. As Hans Küng has said: ‘Cardinal Ratzinger is afraid. And just like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, he fears nothing more than freedom.’25
The Grand Inquisitor
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is the Grand Inquisitor of today, the currently presiding Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was born in Bavaria in 1927 and ordained as a priest in 1954. Having served at Freising, in the diocese of Munich, he wrote a dissertation on Saint Augustine, then lectured on dogma at a spectrum of German universities – Bonn, Münster, Tübingen and Regensburg. He attended the Second Vatican Council and published a number of books. In 1977, he was made a cardinal by Pope Paul VI, then Archbishop of Munich. In January 1982, Pope John Paul II appointed him to the helm of the Congregation.
Cardinal Ratzinger is a close personal friend and trusted confidant of the present Pope. They meet for discussions reportedly every Friday. By virtue of their relationship, as well as by virtue of his professional position as Prefect of the Congregation, the cardinal is the Pope's proverbial ‘right-hand man’. Commentators are repeatedly astonished by – and prompted to remark upon – the reactionary nature of the current Papacy, its ostrich-like tendency to bury its head in the sand and render itself wilfully oblivious to developments in the surrounding world. These characteristics are generally and not without justification attributed to John Paul II; but they should also be attributed at least as much to Ratzinger. He is in effect the Vatican's ‘Theologian in Chief’ and, as such, responsible for much of the Church's policy.
As one might expect from a high-ranking prelate and former theology professor, Ratzinger is extremely clever, if not particularly imaginative. He is articulate, frequently even eloquent. His arguments are pointed, focused, lucid, consistent and – within their own circumscribed frame of reference – ostensibly persuasive, even if they do involve elements of sophistry. Circular reasoning is seldom promulgated with such a patina of urbane sophistication. Unlike Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Ratzinger is no world-weary cynic. On the contrary, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity with which he issues his pronouncements, no reason to doubt that he believes deeply and fervently in what he says and does. Indeed, his sincerity and intensity of belief would appear at times to verge on fanaticism. One is tempted to wonder whether fanaticism is better or worse in a Grand Inquisitor than machiavellian cynicism. Both traits can conduce equally to arrogant ruthlessness and the dehumanised single-mindedness of a cruise missile.
Ratzinger is authentically and profoundly concerned about the current and future affairs of the Church. He is anxious to avert a number of crises – of faith, of trust in dogma, of morality – by which he sees the modern Church beleaguered. He believes the Church must be spared such awkwardness. By existing in a lofty and rarefied sphere of its own, the Church should be immune and insulated from the taint and controversy of ‘merely’ human institutions. For Ratzinger the Church is quite literally the ‘mystical body of Christ’. He dismisses any suggestion that it might ultimately be man-made. On the contrary, the Church's
fundamental structures are willed by God himself, and therefore they are inviolable. Behind the human exterior stands the mystery of a more than human reality, in which reformers, sociologists, organisers have no authority whatsoever.26
So fervid is Ratzinger's belief in the Church that he appears prepared, when expedient, to place it above scripture:
A group cannot simply come together, read the New Testament, and say: ‘We are now the Church, because the Lord is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name.’27
Faith in itself for Ratzinger is not sufficient. There must also be the organisation, the structure, the hierarchical edifice:
The Church is really present in all legitimately organised local groups of the faithful, which, in so far as they are united to their pastors, are… called Churches.28
It goes without saying, of course, that ‘legitimately organised’ in this context means created by and subject to Rome. For the faithful to be ‘united to their pastors’ means receiving communion from a priest of the authorised and correct apostolic succession – a priest who has been ordained by the hands of a bishop in communion with the apostolic succession supposedly descended from Saint Peter. The sacraments of the Church are legitimised for Ratzinger by virtue of being passed down from hand to hand through history. If this chain of transmission is broken, the sacrament is no longer valid. That the chain of transmission has indeed often been broken – and often twisted and corrupted as well – is not relevant for Ratzinger.
The Church is not something one can make but only something one can receive from where it already is and where it really is: from the sacramental community of (Christ's) body that progresses through history.29
In consequence, Ratzinger's concept of the Church cannot accommodate any personal experience of the numinous, any mystical experience or individual revelation. Indeed, Ratzinger states explicitly: ‘Revelation terminated with Jesus Christ.’30 And, further: ‘“Revelation” is closed but interpretation which binds it is not.’31 Interpretation, of course, is the Church's exclusive prerogative. One cannot attempt to interpret for oneself. One must not think. One must simply accept the interpretation proffered by those legitimately sanctioned to do so.
From this conviction stems Ratzinger's intolerance of criticism or dissent. ‘Even with some theologians,’ he complains, outraged and incredulous, ‘the Church appears to be a human construction.’32 He contrives to forget that the Church, as it exists today and has existed throughout its history, is indeed a human construction. He contrives to forget, for example, that the Council ofNicea in AD 325 voted Jesus divine by a majority of 217 to 3. He contrives to forget that the Pope was voted infallible in 1870 – by only 535 of the 1,084 ecclesiastics eligible to cast a ballot. Serenely oblivious to these facts, Ratzinger stresses that ‘authority is not based on the majority of votes’.33 It derives solely from ‘the authority of Christ’ – who himself never dreamed of establishing a church, let alone the dogmatic complexities of Rome's. Without any apparent sense of irony, Ratzinger asserts that ‘truth cannot be created through ballots’.34 The Church makes no pretence to democracy. ‘On matters of faith and morals no one can be bound by majority decisions.’35 Indeed,
even ecumenical councils can only decide on matters of faith and morals in moral unanimity, since one cannot establish the truth by resolution but can only recognise and accept it.36
With typical sophistry, Ratzinger uses rhetoric to blur crucial distinctions. ‘We sin,’ he declares, ‘but the Church… the bearer of faith does not sin.’37 He does not clarify how the Church can remain sinless while implementing the decisions of the sinful individuals who compose it. Neither is it clear whether he concedes that the Church, if it cannot sin, can at least err – though recent rehabilitations of individuals like Galileo suggest a reluctant preparedness to acknowledge some such concession. In that case, presumably, the hundreds of thousands whose bodies were forcibly sacrificed for the alleged sake of their souls may come to be regarded as merely victims of error, or oversight.
It is self-evident and generally acknowledged that the Church has survived only through a readiness, however grudging, to adapt. Only by modifying its structures, its policies, its teachings, its attitudes to each successive generation, each successive century, has it managed to last as long as it has. With sovereign obliviousness to this obvious and elemental fact, Ratzinger st
ates that Catholic dogma, as we have inherited it, ‘is a message that has been consigned to us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we like or choose’.38 In consequence, he sees no value whatever in ecumenism:
We must beware of a too-easy ecumenism which can lead Catholic charismatic groups to lose their identity and, in the name of the ‘spirit’… uncritically associate with forms of Pentecostalism of non-Catholic origin.39
Ratzinger remains adamant in prohibiting Catholics from receiving communion in any other Christian church:
The Catholic confession is that without the apostolic succession there is no genuine priesthood, and hence there can be no sacramental Eucharist in the proper sense.40
If the cardinal is hostile to other Christian denominations, he is positively alarmed by the dissemination of interest in other religions and other spheres of professedly spiritual activity. He voiced this alarm in an indignant interview:
Visiting a Catholic bookshop… I noticed that… the spiritual treatises of the past had been replaced by the widespread manuals of psychoanalysis… in many religious houses (of both men and women) the cross has at times given up its place to symbols of the Asiatic religious tradition. In some places the previous devotions have also disappeared in order to make way for yoga or Zen techniques.41
In the same vein, Ratzinger laments ‘an exaggerated shift of emphasis towards non-Christian religions’, which he describes as ‘realms of fear and unfreedom’ – as if the Church never trafficked in either.42 According to the cardinal's obsessively rigid and medieval dogmatism, there is no room in the terrestrial Kingdom of God for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or anything else. There is only the Church of Rome, the one true living embodiment of God. All else is either ignorance – the condition of the ‘benighted heathen’ of other creeds – or heresy. In modern Canon Law, heresy, still deemed a principle of evil, is defined as ‘the obstinate denial or doubt, after baptism, of a truth which must be believed by divine and catholic faith’.43 To that extent, all forms of Protestantism would qualify as heresy.
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