Pope Benedict XVI addressed Germany’s Parliament in the historic Reichstag building yesterday, warning that politicians must not sacrifice ethics for power and evoking the Nazi excesses of his homeland as a lesson in history.
Amid scattered protests outside and a boycott by some lawmakers, Benedict began his first state visit to Germany in a bid to stem the tide of Catholics leaving the church while acknowledging the damage caused by the clergy sex abuse scandal.
The pope spoke for 20 minutes in the Reichstag, which was torched in 1933 by Hitler. “We Germans know from our own experience’’ what happens when power is corrupted, Benedict said, describing Nazis as a “highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.’’
But he said even under the Nazi dictatorship resistance movements stuck to their beliefs at a great risk, “thereby doing a great service to justice and to humanity as a whole.’’
- The Boston Globe.
Now, whyever can he not apply the same caution to himself and his acolytes? The governance of the Roman Catholic Church is similar to that of an absolute monarchy; the history of recent papacies has been one of rolling back the collegiality introduced by Vatican II in favour of greater centralized control; his own record at the CDF and as pope has been one of attempting to muzzle dissenting theologians and stifle debate on women priests and compulsory clerical celibacy; and the abuse of power at all levels of the Catholic Church is widely believed to be one of the contributory factors behind the problems of clerical abuse that he so repeatedly apologizes for.
The warning against the abuse of power are sound - but will ring hollow until he greatly reduces the centralized, bureaucratic control exercised by his own office and Vatican power elites.
Related articles
- Pope Benedict, in Berlin: Some Difficulties With Protocol (queeringthechurch.com)
- Today’s Catholic Church (enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com)
- Survivors of Clerical Sexual Abuse File Petition with International Criminal Court: Historical (and Theological) Reflections (bilgrimage.blogspot.com)
I have been reading Speigel Online’s coverage of Benedict’s German visit, including an interview with Hans Kung, and the thinking seems to echo what you write here. The Boston Globe’s piece there doesn’t really give vision to what is happening. 100 members of the Bundestag boycotted the ceremony, and the CDU had to invite ex-members to fill the gaps. Tens of thousands protesting in the streets. 181,000 faithful (or faithless?) left the German part of the church in 2010 alone.
I’m not a Catholic (Roman or otherwise) but my family is and I grew up with a certain level of knowledge of what grassroots Catholicism was like. Unfortunately Benedict doesn’t seem to embody that. In Germany alone the destruction of a forward thinking, “evolutionary” base in the church has led to what can only be called paranoiac clericalism. And this in turn has only added to the disgust that the faithful feel about child sex abuse cover-ups.
The reasons for the loss of members in Germany is complex and Benedict, along with his reactionary cohorts, simply either fail to see what they are doing to the church, or choose to ignore the very basic problems they are creating for the faithful, who do live in the 21st century. An example would be Christian Wulff, the German President; a practising Catholic who is divorced and remarried. By rights, he should be excluded from the Eucharist right? But I guess, when you have an element of power…
BTW, I’m Liverpool Irish, not German
For years I wondered why the GLBT movement won one victory after another. Then I was sent a photo of Carmen Carerra. That one photograph melted my will to fight against gays and lesbians. If this is what we’re up against, small wonder we are losing in the battle of public opinion:
http://pussypoplikecolacoca.tumblr.com/post/5559371703
I used to fight against gays in the Church. Now I cannot summon the resistance. Carerra is awesome! I have to admit, this is one battle the Church will lose.
Correction, Roger. This is not a battle “the Church” will lose. The Catholic Church, following the Gospels, stands firmly on the side of justice, and a welcome and inclusion for all. The “losers” in this will be those, like the supporters of slavery in previous years, who insist on defending prejudice and privilege for some, to the disadvantage of minority groups.
You now believe gay people will become welcome in the church, because of a drag queen?? Not because of the LGCM, Stonewall, or any number of international organisations putting in the time and the effort to hopefully change your mind? You have changed your mind because of one photograph of a drag queen? And an overtly sexual one at that. People like this set back full inclusion, because they play up to the stereotypes that people expect. Promiscuous gays, heavily sexualised transgenders, these are what the conservative faithful are terrified of; as Julie Burchill once wrote in The Guardian, “pantomime dames”.
Hang on… you’re not this Carerra’s agent are you?
1. Anyone who has studied the individual cases of sexual misconduct knows that the abuse of power that plays by far the largest role in the sex abuse cases is that of the bishops. Each diocese is like a small country/kingdom. There is really no where for a priest or layman to turn to if the bishop is against them. Everyone loves to throw around the term “absolute monarchy” because it is a buzz word, but each political structure has benefits and negatives; each is more effective that than the other for certain situations.
A centralized authoritarian structure is far more effective than a democratic/collegiate system when you are dealing at the macro level. Managing a massive organization that includes multiple ethnicities, cultures, socio-political, and scio-economic groups is not possible with a collegiate structure. I am just speaking historically. Not one thing in history (no matter if it is a religion, a business, a non-profit organization, or civilian government) that involves such a diverse number of people has successfully stayed unified over the long term without a centralized structure.The more voters and the more diversity you add to a democratic system the more it is strained; the American founders understood this, and they seriously debated creating a king for the Federal Government and leave democratic systems for the local and state level for the long term stability and unity of the country; not many people know that.
A perfect example is Rome. As soon as the Romans gave voting rights to non-Roman members of their Empire their centuries old Democratic Republic stalled, failed, collapsed, and was replaced with a centralized dictatorship, because a collegiate system is incapable of functioning when it encompasses that many people with that many different wants, opinions, and world-views. For a modern example, I will simply refer you to the fact that the US government has grown increasingly centralized and overstepping the boundaries defined for it by the constitution over the past century, and there is a direct correlation between that fact and the diversification in worldview of various americans. THe US government took massive liberties in centralizing power in the 1960′s and 70′s (a time of massive social diversification), it began to lessen somewhat in the 80′s and 90′s (a time of decreasing social diversity). And today, the US is more socially dis-unified than it has ever been in its entire history and consequently the US government is rapidly redrawing power back into its central control, and increasing it beyond all precedent.
The oldest unified religious structure in the world (the Roman Church) has outlasted every other human institution and enterprise in history precisely because of its centralized system; and it will collapse into different churches, and progress through sectarianism as soon as it decentralizes. It will first be splits between western and eastern groups, then they will crack along linguistic lines, years later those will fracture along liberal/conservative disagreements, next will be splits along socio-economic lines as the rich and the poor never see eye to eye, and what is left will slowly disintegrate into individualistic communities. The result: modern American and western individualist spirituality, where there is little to no organization or structure, there is no “church” (community), just personalized spirituality based on whatever suits the individual. This is not trying to support an agenda or point of view, nor is there any way to argue against this, because this is simply a statement of fact/cause and effect proven COUNTLESS times throughout history. History repeats itself, or rather, History does not repeat itself, humans repeat history because they do not objectively study the history of humanity (if they study it at all).2. HOWEVER, collegiate structures work FAR better than centralized structures when you are dealing with things on the micro and local level. The smaller and more unified the community the worse a centralized system works. A perfect example is found in Russian History, when at various times Tsars or the Soviet Government would approve of democratic councils to govern local areas. This dual system worked excellently and strengthened the country, as the centralized Tsar/Soviet Government ruled the macro level centrally, keeping all of the various cultures and ethnicities unified in to a single country, yet effectively dealing with the social and local issues by allowing democratic systems to govern where greater personalization toward the individual communities was needed. Even the largest diocese are more than small enough to successfully decentralize, and would benefit greatly from doing so. It would also eviscerate the biggest issues with power abuse (the bishops covering up their own actions or actions of those in their “kingdom” to protect their reputation at the expense of the good of the faithful). For example, the disgusting behavior of the former bishop of miami and his cronies would have been stopped largely before it began if there were more collegiate structures in individual diocese. However, because there was no way for people to readily keep them in check, or easily go over the bishop’s head to the vatican, their un-catholic behavior went on unchecked for years. 3. Also, the vatican does more than people think they do. For example, in the miami case, laymen actually were able to meet with a vatican official. However, the laymen did not see the changes he thought should be made so he went public with his investigations, only to find out that the Vatican HAD acted and was in the process of removing the Bishop and several of his accomplices. He expressed extreme regret for publicizing the problem and bringing more shame to the church when the problem was already being cleaned up from within. Had he waited just a little bit longer, he would have seen that the vatican did act, and that (in many cases across the world) the vatican is quietly cleaning house. BUT, it wouldn’t have to do so if there were a collegiate system at the diocesan level that allowed laymen to take greater (if not the majority) share in dealing with localized problems.
Also, there seems to be a DRASTIC lack of knowledge about the development of the Christian Church as a whole, on all sides. Everyone seems to throw around examples from “the early” church to back up their support of decentralization or whatever changes they want to make. Yet everyone’s education on the matter seems to stop just after constantine legalized christianity. The MOST IMPORTANT part of Church history is not the early church, its not the crusades, its not the inquisition, nor is it the counter reformation. Those things are all AFTER THE CHURCH IS SOLIDIFIED IN THE FORM YOU SEE TODAY.
Everyone has a huge blind spot in their understanding of the church: the developments and the great councils AFTER constantine and BEFORE the middle-ages. Understanding the great heresies and the great councils called to resolve them is crucial to understanding the church today. For example, the power of the bishop of Rome slowly built until it effectively became a monarchical office in the early middle-ages FOR A REASON. THe power of the Pope is the resolution to a fundamental problem in semantics that is a natural product of having hundreds of bishops with all the same amount of authority. The pope is effectively a tie breaker when Bishops cannot resolve their differences. The AUTHORITY of the pope is THE ONE SINGLE THING that has kept the Catholic Church from splitting hundreds of times over throughout the 2,000 years it has been around. The tie breaking authority of the pope is what keeps the catholic church out of the disunity of the orthodox churches (where patriarchs are quick to start their own break away communities if the majority do not vote in their favor) and from the situation that the current anglican church finds itself in (about to split in two because its collegiate system cannot settle the issues it currently faces because they have reached a stalemate and there is no tie breaker).
ANyone who wants to change the church in any manner yet does not have an adequate understanding of the foundational councils, the great heresies, and the major disagreements in the pre-medival church severely hinder the reform process as they are trying to change something that they do not truly understand. Not to mention, the vatican hierarchy, which does understand these foundational things, is not going to take any reform proposal seriously when they are suggested by someone who fails to demonstrate a working knowledge of WHY THINGS ARE THE WAY THEY ARE IN THE FIRST PLACE.