By Philip Stephens
Published: April 15 2010 20:11
For a time I was puzzled by Pope Benedict’s response to the crisis in the Catholic church. We might disagree about the course of Catholicism. In uncharitable moments, I might mutter that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was politician as much as priest; his piety merged with ambition some time ago. Yet the Pope indisputably was highly intelligent. Surely he could see what was happening.
Now, I think I understand. The pontiff is a globaliser. He can feel the world’s geopolitical plates shifting. He grasps as well as any politician or business leader that the west has had its day. The opportunities to spread the gospel lie elsewhere – in societies more respectful of authority and less questioning of past crimes.
Pope Benedict, after all, cannot be blind to the crisis of faith among his flock in Europe and North America. He must have known as well as anyone else how many tens of millions had walked away even before the revelations of clerical child abuse and episcopal cover-ups.
He has seen what has happened in Ireland where unerring fealty to Rome has given way to revulsion and disillusionment. He knows seminaries across Europe are empty, and Catholicism in the US convulsed.
No, the dismal reality, I now think, is that the Pope does not care – or at least does not care enough to bend from the unflinching defence of temporal power that described his personal path to the throne of St Peter. If the eventual choice is one between the implosion of the church in the west and a dilution of the blind obedience he sees as an anchor of papal authority, Pope Benedict is ready to stand in the ruins.
The future lies beyond the decadent materialism and moral bankruptcy of the richest societies. In the manner of a corporate executive reaping the rewards of globalisation, the pontiff is gathering new recruits in the spiritual markets of the emerging world. The pews may gather dust in Europe and the US, but elsewhere – albeit for obvious reasons with the exception of China – business is booming.
The storm engulfing the Vatican predates the latest allegations of paedophilia and the efforts at concealment in the church’s high echelons. Pope Benedict has been waging a war against liberal Catholicism for many decades. What has happened now is that the backlash against his doctrinal absolutism has merged with growing disgust about the handling of the controversy over paedophile priests.
As a cardinal and prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pope warned anyone who challenged the authority of the Holy See that they were putting themselves outside of the church. Man-made laws – about personal relationships, contraception or clerical celibacy – were elevated into sacred truths. Those who challenged this self-serving primitivism were told to take their faith elsewhere.
Pope Benedict dates the beginning of the church’s decline to the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s; to the passing of the age of deference and the concomitant challenge to traditional authority. It was the secularisation of society, he once said, that had seen Catholic ethics and morals fall into grave decline.
This message was evident in his recent pastoral letter to the church in Ireland. The stated purpose of the address was to express “shame and remorse” about the abuse of Irish children by predator priests. It did so with sincerity. Yet Pope Benedict felt compelled to make another connection – this time between paedophilia among the clergy and the “rapid transformation and secularisation of Irish society”. One problem, he implied, had been the liberalising instincts of the second Vatican Council.
The absurdity of this supposed link is exposed by a simple chronology. Most of the crimes against children uncovered by investigations in Ireland long pre-dated that country’s embrace of what the Pope sees as a lethal moral relativism. To the contrary, it was the opening of Irish society that exposed the sins that had been inflicted on its children.
The Vatican narrative casts the church as victim – as an institution assailed by secularism, the media, and just about everyone else. Thus the Pope’s insistence that his faith will shield him from the “petty gossip of dominant opinion”. One close adviser has compared recent criticism to anti-semitism. Others, just as scandalously, have sought to blame the crisis on Jews and homosexuals. How much further can they fall?
The thread that runs through all this – the reactionary dogma and the refusal to admit any complicity in the cover-ups – is a willingness to sacrifice truth to an unthinking, and futile, defence of the authority of the church.
The right response would be to abandon victimhood and extend to all communicants the apology offered to Ireland’s Catholics. Even the authority of an absolute monarch rests ultimately on legitimacy. The Vatican should abandon the pretence that someone other than the church is responsible by opening the Vatican’s secret archives to full public scrutiny.
But this is a step too far for the present occupant of the Holy See. John Allen, a biographer of Pope Benedict and analyst for the US National Catholic Reporter, recently told the FT’s Rome correspondent that the Holy Father was untroubled by crises of the moment because he had the “great gift of thinking in terms of centuries”.
Mr Allen, as it happens, has also charted the shift in the church’s demographic centre of gravity. Catholicism is booming in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europeans and North Americans, Mr Allen calculates, now number only 350m in a church of some 1.2bn. About two-thirds of Catholics live in what is the emerging world – about 400m of them in Latin America. Brazil boasts twice as many communicants as Italy. Mexico and the Philippines have larger congregations than Germany or France.
This perhaps is where Pope Benedict’s gaze is fixed. Catholics in the emerging nations, after all, have been largely untroubled by the scandal that has rocked his authority in the west. They are less inclined to challenge the pontiff’s moral absolutism and his demand for unquestioning obedience to Rome.
So what of the Catholics left behind in a declining west? Many will join those who have already departed. Others will conclude that Pope Benedict can rob them of their church, but not of their faith.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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