Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Personal Postscripts

 

Chapter 10

The Restoration

It would be possible to build a case that John Paul II was another of the counterreactors, and it would go something like this: Karol Wojtyla, the future pope, came from a conservative and defensive Polish church and did his doctorate at the Angelicum in Rome under the direction of Garrigou-Lagrange in the years leading up to the condemnation of the nouvelle théologie. But as a young bishop at the council he met and was inspired by men like de Lubac and Congar, and impressed them, in turn, and worked on the schema on the relationship between the church and the world that was to become Gaudium et spes. Later, however, he was to become disenchanted, and at the extraordinary synod that he called in connection with the twentieth anniversary of the council, he was to say that it was not the teachings of the council that were up for discussion, “It is the postconciliar period that has to be revised.”¹ A little later he would elaborate: “In the present day Church, it must be admitted with realism together with a deep and sorrowful awareness, that a very great number of Christians have become troubled, disoriented, perplexed, and even deceived; ideas which are in disaccord with that revealed truth taught by the Church since apostolic times, are currently widespread: veritable heresies have even flooded the fields of dogma and morals, giving rise to doubts, confusion and rebellion.”² But this portrait of John Paul II as a member of the counterreaction fails to hold up under scrutiny. His actions paint another picture in which his progressive tendencies are firmly rooted in a very traditional view of the papacy and the church.

 

The Story of Humanae vitae continued

 

Hans Küng’s dossier at the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith had grown weightier with the fallout from his book, Infallibility, but when he wrote the preface to August Bernhard Hasler’s How the Pope Became Infallible in February, 1979, his troubles with the Congregation began to reach the breaking point. Noting the new pope’s recent trip to Latin America, he had concluded his preface: “Is it hoping for too much, then, to expect him to take a decisive step towards clearing up this vexing question of infallibility – in an atmosphere of mutual trust, free research, and fair-minded discussion?”³ But Küng was not done. In the New York Times on Oct. 19, 1979, and later in Le Monde and the Frankfurter Allgemeine, he made his criticism more pointed, asking whether the new pope, “the darling of the masses and the superstar of the media” was “truly free from the personality cult of former Popes, for example Pius XII.”⁴ The pope’s response was not long in coming. In December, 1979, Küng was declared to be unfit to be a Catholic theologian. The pope was beginning to clean house, and one of the centerpieces of his papacy was going to be a rigid insistence on obedience to Humanae vitae. On May 15, 1980 the pope wrote to the German Episcopal Conference about the Küng affair, and said that infallibility was “in a certain way the key to the certainty with which the faith is confessed and proclaimed, as well as to the life and conduct of the faithful. For once this essential foundation is shaken or destroyed, the most basic truths of our faith likewise begin to break down.”⁵

At the September 1980 Synod of Bishops on the family, the Archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn, questioned the “intrinsic evil of each and every use of contraception,” and called for a world-wide dialogue on the issue. The next day, however, Quinn told the Synod, “There is no doubt the teaching of Humanae vitae on contraception is authentic teaching of the Magisterium of the Church.”⁶ What caused this turnabout? The most likely explanation is that much like the Suenen’s affair at the council in which the cardinal had been called in and admonished by Paul VI, this time it was John Paul II doing the dressing down of the Archbishop.

Joseph Ratzinger, now the Cardinal Archbishop of Münich, in connection with this Synod, wrote a letter to the diocesan pastoral leaders in which he said about Humanae vitae: “in the case of the alternative between natural methods and contraception we do not have a morally meaningless question of different means to the same end, but that there is an anthropological gulf between them, which for that very reason is a moral gulf. But how am I to indicate this in a few lines when our common consciousness simply bars the door to understanding?… With the pill a woman’s own sort of time and thus her own sort of being has been taken from her… All this and much else has, as we all know, led to a weariness with the pill that we should look upon as a chance for reconsidering the whole subject.”⁷

June 5, 1987. The pope asserts, “What is taught by the church on contraception does not belong to the material freely debatable among theologians.”⁸ 

The pope in an address to the fourth International Congress for the Family in Africa and Europe, meeting in Rome, talks about Humanae vitae being “permanent patrimony,” and how arguments “can lead to doubt on a teaching which for the church is certain, obscuring in this way the perception of a truth which cannot be discussed.” These comments turn out to be warning shots heralding the battle to come or what could be called the offensive of 1988, the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Humanae vitae.

 

The Offensive of 1988

 

Feb. 14, 1988. Álvaro del Portillo, head of Opus Dei, tells a crowd of 4,000 in Chicago that Christian parents have the duty to bring as many children as possible into the world. If couples have only one or two children, “it will be difficult to have vocations and we may have to close all the seminaries.”⁹

March 17-20, 1988. Three hundred people, mostly connected with charismatic renewal, meet under the auspices of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, headed by Carlo Caffarra and the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. Germain Grisez tells them, “that for couples who justifiably decide not to have additional children, “the choice is to abstain from intercourse…””¹⁰ And Janet Smith says, “Critics assume the question is settled.” But in reality “the defenders’ of church teaching are winning. They are more serious and more honest.”¹¹ Steve Clark of the Word of God community says strict rules are needed to protect the traditional family: “Unmarried men and women should not touch one another, except to shake hands.”¹²

Summer, 1988. Michael Jackson, a city council member of Alexandria, Virginia, is attending Mass, but when he approaches the altar to receive Communion, the pastor of the church refuses him the Eucharist and later calls him “a public and obstinate sinner.” His crime? He had voted for a clinic where teenagers could, among other things, receive information about contraceptives, as well as the  contraceptives, themselves.¹³

August 7-12, 1988. A “Trust the Truth” conference of Humanae vitae by its supporters is held at Princeton, New Jersey. Cardinal Edouard Gagnon of the Pontifical Council for the Family tells them that the night before the release of Humanae vitae Pope Paul told him, “Don’t be afraid. In twenty years they’ll say I was a prophet.” This sentiment the audience enthusiastically embraces, seeing it fulfilled by the devastation caused by the sexual revolution. Among the sponsors of the conference is Opus Dei.¹⁴

Nov. 7-9, 1988. These events have served as the warm-up for two back-to-back conferences. In the first, the Pontifical Council for the Family hosts about 60 bishops in support of Humanae vitae. Then on Nov. 10 – 12 the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and family, under the direction of Carlo Caffarra and Opus Dei’s Roman Holy Cross Theological Academy, sponsor a meeting of 300 like-minded moral theologians. The pope addresses both of these conferences. Among the Opus Dei members at the second conference were the Americans Russell Shore, Carl Anderson and Lorenzo Albalete, as well as the Swiss Martin Rhonhei Mer, the Chilean José Ibañes Langlois, and the Spanish director of the Holy Cross Academy, Ignacio Carrasco de Paula. For Caffarra any exception to Humanae vitae is anti-life, anti-human and anti-God, and it would be opportune to return to the condemnation of contraception as homicide. If men, according to Jesus’ saying, can commit adultery in the heart, contraception is “homicide in the heart.”¹⁵ In a puzzling and yet somewhat frightening statement he said, “Once man has reached the ethical state, he is no longer interested in the slightest or ultimately by the possible historical consequences of his acts; he is above any such calculations.”¹⁶ Caffarra was to gain a certain notoriety when at an AIDS conference, he stated that if one spouse has AIDS, then the appropriate course of behavior is total abstinence, but if that would lead to adultery they may have unprotected sex. Caffarra apparently served as the pope’s ghost writer for speeches in the area of moral theology, including the one that the pope gave at this conference. In it the pope said, “This moral norm does not allow of any exceptions: no personal or social circumstance has ever been, is, or ever will be, able to make such an act rightly ordered… In reality what is called into question by the rejection of this teaching is the very idea of the holiness of God… it has been inscribed by the creative hand of God and has been confirmed by him in revelation… To call it into question is thus equivalent to refusing to God himself the obedience of our intelligence… Because the Church’s Magisterium has been instituted to enlighten the conscience, any appeal to this conscience in order to contest the truth of what has been taught by the Magisterium involves the rejection of the Catholic concept of both the Magisterium and of the moral conscience.”¹⁷

The pope’s speech sent a wave of dismay through the European Catholic community. Bernard Häring wrote to John Paul II on December 1, 1988, reasoning with him and forthrightly stating: “For if the pope is directly drawn into intransigent interpretations and the most shocking kinds of argumentation, then we are all plunged into a crisis and are compelled by our loyalty to the Church to express our distress and agony.”¹⁸ The Italian publication Il Regno published both the pope’s and Caffarra’s addresses on January 1, and Häring, having received no answer from the pope, responded in the January 15 issue of the magazine with the hope of stopping “catastrophic polarization” and theological “intransigence” leading to “psychological schism,” and he urged the pope to reopen the debate on birth control. When Häring tried to draw the attention of the hard-liners to the pastoral problems created by such statements, to his mind, they responded: “But that doesn’t mean a thing to us. Our business is to halt the silent and sometimes explicit lapsing from the Church that is a result of an emotive and almost incurable anti-Roman feeling.” At the last minute, he also signed the Cologne declaration in which 163 German-speaking theologians objected to the pope imposing Joachim Meisner as archbishop of Cologne, and the excessive papal statements on birth control. They were later joined by 130 French theologians, 60 Spanish, 63 Italian, and 431 members of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Feb. 15, 1989. L’Osservatore Romano states that the problem of contraception “is not a theological opinion open to free discussion.” Walter Kasper of the International Theological Commission is quoted as saying that the church’s teaching “is a doctrine founded on tradition and no one can put it into doubt.”¹⁹ A subcommittee of the International Theological Commission with Carlo Caffarra on it was created to prepare a document on the crisis of moral theology. This special commission sent out seismic shock waves in front of the actual document, which was to be finally published as Veritatis splendor.

July 12, 1990. Apparently rumors are already circulating that the pope’s forthcoming encyclical letter will declare the doctrine of Humanae vitae infallible. Twenty-two mostly German-speaking theologians, including Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx, signed a document “for freedom in the church” at Tübingen saying that presenting birth control as infallible would lead to “catastrophic” polarization.

In the summer of 1991 Karl Lehmann, head of the German bishop’s conference, comments that the pope says ‘no’ about birth control, but is “not concerned with the consequences.”²⁰

Retired Cardinal Franz König, in a debate with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger which appeared in the periodical Jesus in May, 1992, says the question of world population cannot be ignored, and complains about the “irritating” distinctions between natural and artificial birth control, “as if from the moral viewpoint what is important is the “trick” of cheating nature.”²¹

Cardinal Ratzinger, himself, gives an interview to Die Welt, and says about birth control, ““There will have to be a development in our thinking to get to the kernel of the problem.” He also said the distinction between artificial and natural birth control was confusing and has obscured the “real problems.””²² 

August, 1993. The rumors reach a crescendo. Newsweek reports that working versions of Veritatis splendor have been circulating for weeks. It also goes on to say that inspiration for the document came to the pope during a vacation in the Dolomite Alps where he came back from an all-day walk declaring that he had been “inspired to publish a major theological investigation that would confirm the often discredited arguments underpinning Humanae vitae.”²³

Veritatis splendor is finally released in October 1993, and Ratzinger’s remarks are recalled and provide a slender basis for some to believe that he had doubts about Humanae vitae, and the failure of Veritatis splendor to make it infallible is attributed to his moderating influence, something he later denies.²⁴

Germain Grisez, not untypically, comments: “The rejection of the pope’s interpretation is… inconsistent with any Catholic conception of divine revelation and its transmission.” Those who disagree with the pope have three choices: “To admit that they have been mistaken; to admit that they do not believe God’s word; or to claim that the pope is grossly misinterpreting the Bible.”²⁵

Nov. 5, 1993. Bernard Häring, after reading Veritatis splendor, suffers long-lasting brain seizures. The document contains some beautiful things, he says, but is “directed above all towards one goal: to endorse total assent and submission to all utterances of the pope – and above all on one crucial point: that the use of any artificial means for regulating birth is intrinsically evil and sinful, without exception, even in circumstances where contraception would be a lesser evil.”²⁶ Häring goes on to contrast it to the attitude of Albino Luciani who had suggested a change in the doctrine about birth control before the appearance of Humanae vitae, and when he had become John Paul I had intended to make a review of the matter. “John Paul II’s mentality is different. His starting point is a high sense of duty, combined with absolute trust in his own competence, with the special assistance of the Holy Spirit. And this absolute trust in his own powers is coupled with a profound distrust toward all theologians (particularly moral theologians) who might not be in total sympathy with him.” The pope, without consultation, had introduced into the new code of canon law of 1983 a canon that criminalized dissent. He had also attempted central control of theologians and of bishops, and required “wholehearted assent to non-infallible (that is, fallible) papal teaching and a particular oath of fidelity towards the supreme pontiff. The Acta Apostolicae Sedis says this measure was approved by the Sanctissimus (Most Holy). The text speaks of the pope as beatissimum (most blessed). Should one see some special significance in that? Do not these titles given to the pope sacralize his authority unduly?”²⁷

If the pope had to choose between Häring and Caffarra, apparently he had no hesitation. It seems Caffarra had made a smart career move by becoming the pope’s man on the matter of contraception, no matter how intemperate his remarks. His presidency of the John Paul II Institute was to become a stepping stone to becoming the Bishop of Ferrara. The pope went on to promise him the cardinal’s hat, and honored that promise by elevating him to the cardinalate see of Bologna. However unwillingly, we are led to the conclusion that Caffarra’s overheated rhetoric met a need in John Paul II.

1997. In November a column appears in the Southern Nebraska Register of Fabian Bruskewitz’s Lincoln diocese in which an unnamed priest writes about Patricia Crowley describing her as “a very old degenerate who roamed about promoting sexual immorality. Nobody pays much attention to what she says, except perhaps some depraved members of the Call to Action sect. Her views deserve no consideration whatsoever.”²⁸ It is hard to imagine that the bishop of Lincoln had no knowledge of this beforehand.

Feb. 17, 1997. The Pontifical Council for the Family in its “Vademecum for confessors concerning some aspects of the morality of conjugal life” seems to present Humanae vitae as infallible: “The intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, of every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful” is “to be held as definitive and irreformable.” The “irreformable” is language close to or equivalent to saying that it has been infallibly taught.²⁹

What was the practical result of John Paul II’s efforts which included a multitude of papal talks on human sexuality? In 1993 Peter Steinfels conducted a survey for the New York Times, and found that eight out of ten Catholics disagreed with the statement, “Using artificial means of birth control is wrong”; and nine out of 10 said that “someone who practices artificial birth control can still be a good Catholic.”³⁰ The figures have remained steady since then.

That same year Avery Dulles spoke frankly to a gathering of bishops held in support of Humanae vitae on its twenty-fifth anniversary, and described the negative effects that this decision had caused in the church. It had affected the appointment of bishops, the candidness with which parish priests felt they could talk to their parishioners about sexual morality, the relationship of theologians to bishops, and bishops to the pope, and he recommended that Humanae vitae not be used as a litmus test for church office.³¹ It is hard to avoid coming to the same conclusion we came to in regard to the forces that shaped Paul VI’s decision in Humanae vitae. Despite John Paul II’s deep interest in women and human sexuality, a genuine discussion of birth control could not be permitted because the matter had already been settled by papal decrees which he, himself, had reaffirmed over and over again.

 

The Ordination of Women

 

The debate over the ordination of women under John Paul II became another, albeit smaller, Humanae vitae affair. Pope Paul VI had made negative comments about the possibility of women being ordained, and Inter Insigniores issued by the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith on October 15, 1976 has set forth a variety of reasons to defend his position. The discussion, however, continued.

But John Paul II, quite in accord with his view of papal authority, did not hesitate to try to settle the matter once and for all. He “told a group of cardinals and bishops whom he had invited to lunch that he had been thinking about the debate and had come to a conclusion. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger later recalled, the Pope said, “I must speak about this. I have the responsibility to clarify this and to clarify it in a definitive way.””³² On May 22, 1994 in his apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, he swept aside the bit of nuance and room for maneuvering that had existed under Paul and wrote: “Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force.

“Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

Instead of his words settling the matter, however, they have had the opposite effect. Polls have shown that the number of Catholics in favor of women’s ordination actually rose after the pope’s pronouncement. It was as if people said to themselves: “How can the matter be decided and the debate closed before I have even begun to think about it? And now that I am thinking about it, no reason occurs to me why women can’t be priests.”

The theological world had a more elaborated response which came to the same conclusion. Rome, however, was not used to being told “no,” and on Oct. 28, 1995 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a response to the question whether this teaching was to be held definitively as belonging (some translated it as pertaining) to the deposit of faith, and said: “This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.” (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 25, 2)

Once again our intention is not primarily to weigh the theological issues at stake, but rather to look behind and below them, to try to sense other more human and less conscious factors at work. In this regard the insistence of the infallibility of the ban on women’s ordination is interesting. It is infallible, we are told, not in virtue of an ex cathedra, or formal declaration by the pope, but in virtue of having been taught by the bishops of the world both now and through the centuries. The pope, therefore, is simply relying on this kind of episcopal infallibility that was clarified by Vatican II’s Lumen gentium. But this argument is not as solid as it first might appear because it is necessary to actually demonstrate that the bishops now and before taught this doctrine and also taught it was something that was to be definitively held. Instead, they may have, for example, held it in a rather passive and material way like we often hold unexamined opinions. Or they may have taught it, but not as something they insisted upon as belonging, or pertaining, to the deposit of faith, as well as something to be definitively held. There have been wide-spread theological opinions in the church before about all sorts of matters that later turned out not to be true. It was widely taught, for example, that there was no salvation outside the church, and when this doctrine was finally examined at Vatican II, it was seen not to mean what it had been commonly understood to mean. Further, to make this matter of determining, if something is taught by the universal magisterium of the bishops, more complicated, it is the question of the bishops’ freedom to teach. If Rome imposes certain litmus tests on the selection of bishops and imposes silence on their discussing certain matters, and controls the synods held by bishops, then it is harder to turn around and say that the episcopate is unanimous in its teaching of a certain position.

Even the way the pope made this judgment about the ordination of women was problematical. It is not as if he was polling the bishops of the world, compiling the data of the history of episcopal teachings, and consulting the theologians and the faithful so that he could finally articulate the consensus that he discovered. Rather, as Francis Sullivan puts it, the declaration of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith for this matter: “marks the first time, to my knowledge, that an authoritative document of the Holy See has specifically declared that a particular doctrine has been infallibly taught in this way.”³³

Richard Gaillardetz makes a similar comment: “It is under the pontificate of John Paul II that we have witnessed a vast expansion of official claims for the exercise of the ordinary universal magisterium.”³⁴ What we are faced with in Ordinatio sacerdotalis appears to be a particular way of looking at infallibility, itself. The three traditional ways in which something could be taught infallibly were through an ecumenical council, by an ex cathedra pronouncement of the pope, and by way of the teaching of the universal episcopate as described in Lumen gentium. But is the pope really making use of the third way, or is he pioneering a fourth? Certainly the pope thought the matter could be spoken about infallibly. According to one report, when he consulted with top-ranking bishops about his letter, he wanted to use the word “irreformable” that would have pushed this pronouncement strongly in the direction of an infallible statement, if not made it one.³⁵ He was discouraged from doing so, but his appeal to the universal ordinary magisterium allows him to get his way. But the danger is, as Gaillardetz puts it, that by doing so he is transforming the ordinary papal magisterium “into a second papal mode of exercising the ordinary universal magisterium.”³⁶ In short, the non-infallible teaching of the pope converts itself into an infallible one by asserting that it is articulating the teaching of the ordinary universal magisterium of the bishops, and this is done in such a way that the complex and delicate task of deciding what the ordinary universal magisterium is saying risks becoming short-circuited. Along with this way of making the pope more infallible, we can discern a parallel movement in which the scope of the matters subject to infallibility becomes broadened. The secondary objects of infallibility, that is, those things that could be declared infallible prior to John Paul II, were described in terms of things necessary to safeguard and expound the faith, but with his pontificate they have become morphed into a much broader category of things connected to divine revelation by logical and historical necessity.

The end result is to intensify the aura of infallibility surrounding the pope, and we cannot avoid asking whether the theology presented to justify such a move is being moved from below by the very fallible human factors that we have been charting. Further, is it possible that the pope was locked in hidden combat with a feminist world of excessive reactions and dissent? The year before the pope’s letter came out, for example, Women-Church held its third conference in New Mexico and, as Peter Steinfels writes: “appeared to have abandoned anything resembling traditional Roman Catholicism except, perhaps, its taste for ritual, now transposed into an inventive New Age key.”³⁷ There were more than 30 Sunday services, including Sufi dancing and a Native American pipe ceremony, but no Catholic Mass. The conference presented itself as rooted in Christianity, “but not committed to remaining Christian.”³⁸ And the prayers were focused on what one reporter called “an undefined deity.”³⁹ Just who made up the audience? It was largely a white, middle-class affair of women in their 50s and 60s with Catholic backgrounds, and included a significant number of sisters and ex-sisters. What we are faced with is another example, albeit a rather extreme one, of the kind of Vatican II reactions that we have encountered before, and Steinfels points to one of the real challenges facing Catholic feminism in general. “Today Catholic feminist theology remains fluid, amorphous, and unfixed. That is significant because it would be disingenuous to ignore the radical nature of some feminist theology and the difficulty of reconciling it with anything remotely continuous with Catholicism and maybe of Christianity, too. Much Catholic feminist thought is relatively uninterested in the whole question of differentiating what is compatible with Catholic Christianity from what is not, and at present under-equipped to do so. To many feminists, that question seems at the very least premature, if not a downright preemptive move to quash threatening ideas. Their energy has gone into exposing the feminism-adverse elements in Catholicism, not the Catholicism-adverse elements in feminism.”⁴⁰ Steinfels is right on target here, and we would need only to change his language slightly to apply it to other areas of modern Catholic theology which, themselves, have been shaped by the old and not so old waves of repression. Despite how easy it is to be sympathetic to those who have suffered under these kinds of repressions, it is not possible in the long run to overlook the critical issue of whether what is being brought forth is a counterfeit, or a genuine reflection on the faith, an issue we will return to in the next chapter.

I certainly wouldn’t want to claim that there was some sort of direct connection between the Women-Church meeting and the pope’s letter, but only the possibility there was a deeper, less conscious one. They are locked together in a struggle that generates more and more extreme positions on both sides. The one insists, with increasing rigidity, on the faith, and the other insists on the freedom to leave the faith behind.

 

The Mystical Intuitions of John Paul II

 

The pope’s experience of the church under Communism had not fostered collegiality. “The Polish Bishops Conference met every two months behind closed doors. No whisper of dissent or clash of opinions ever leaked out. In the face of relentless pressure from an atheistic state, the bishops presented a front of total unanimity. Above them all, Primate Wyszynski reigned like a monarch.”⁴¹ Even his exposure to the great intellectual ferment of the council had not led him to bring that kind of open discussion back home with him. At a time when criticism of the church was widespread he did not countenance it. “I remember very well,” recalled Karol Tarnowski who had been one of the young people who had surrounded the future pope in earlier days, “that he didn’t approve of my – or anyone else’s – critical attitude toward the Church.”⁴² Later Tarnowski had argued with the pope about contraception, and the pope had told him, “I can’t change what I have been teaching all my life.”⁴³

The experience of the council hadn’t transformed the pope’s attitude toward the synods of bishops. When Cardinal Villot had asked him early in his papacy, “Is Your Holiness thinking of giving permanent representation to the Synod Council?” that is, delicately asking whether it would have any deliberative power, the pope had no hesitation saying: “No, that would be a synod in the style of the Eastern Churches.”⁴⁴ This response was not only in line with his earlier experience of how the Polish episcopate worked, but with his temperament, as well. Wojtyla came to the papacy with well-developed ideas that he had formed over a long period of time, and while he would listen and read, that does not mean that his ideas would substantially change. Even someone like Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka who admired the pope’s philosophical acumen and worked to make him better known, and had collaborated closely with him in rewriting his The Acting Person, when asked whether he ever changed his mind, responded: “I have the impression he does not. He’s very interested in new ideas. He’s open to new ideas when they are consistent with his. He is a very systematic person. This is not a man who acts by trial and error. He’s not experimenting. He entered the papacy as a mature man in possession of a system. The rest of his life is about implementing it.”⁴⁵

The future pope had made a favorable impression at the Vatican Council and afterwards, an impression composed of an almost charismatic openness and physical vitality, but it is unlikely that the cardinals who elected him really knew what they were getting. One conclave member is reported to have approached Cardinal König after the election, and asked him, “Who is this?” And the pope, himself, commented early in his reign, “They don’t know who they elected.” In short, John Paul II had been at the council, but his conception of the papacy was much closer to that of Pius XII than John XXIII.

There certainly was an attractive side to the pope’s personality. He resolutely opposed the denial of human rights by the Communists in Poland and the rest of the Soviet empire and helped to bring about its downfall. He wrote penetrating critiques not only of state socialism, but capitalism, as well. But while the pope has spoken eloquently and incisively about the faults of these major institutions of our times, he failed to see how the same analysis could be applied to the mega-institution which is the church, itself. His critical powers seem to fail when it comes to the faults of the present church structures, and the papacy, itself. He was a man who instinctively understood authority and obedience, and comfortably sat on the throne of a highly centralized papacy that has grown up, especially in the last 150 years, and while the pope wrote clearly about the principle of subsidiarity in society, it didn’t occur to him to see that the kind of papacy he inhabited impeded a deep thoroughgoing subsidiarity from taking root in the church. Instead, we are left with the pope and his initiatives backed up the curia. In response to criticism of the curia, the pope reportedly said: “The curia is the pope.” In short, the pope had little visible hesitation of making the church over in the image he thought it should have.

While it is difficult to discern interior states in outer deeds, John Paul II left the impression that he had a sense of communing with God, and being guided by Providence so that the ideas he brought to the papacy and had while being pope were somehow divinely sanctioned, and therefore he was compelled to act accordingly. 

The American theologian Ronald Modras felt that the pope did not believe “God had chosen him to change his mind, and therefore he was stubbornly ideological rather than pragmatic. He did not read the signs of the time.” On the Sunday before John Paul issued his first encyclical (Redemptor Hominis, 1979), Modras said, the pope declared, “God has chosen me and my ideas. He’s chosen me for this universal pulpit to proclaim these ideas that I have had for some years.”⁴⁶

Anthony Kosnik, an American Catholic priest of Polish extraction, who had known the pope when he was the Archbishop of Kraków and had been disciplined by the Vatican for editing the Catholic Theological Society of America’s study on human sexuality in 1977, had come to similar conclusions about how the pope operated. “The way (Wojtyla) arrived at the truth – he didn’t read a lot, he didn’t seem to have time for it – was to take his ideas into prayer every morning. There’s no question he was a very prayerful man. He spent his first hour at a daily meditation before Mass, and he came out of that convinced that through that kind of process the truth is found. If you’re speaking for God, God is inspiring you, there’s no opposition.”⁴⁷

Peter Hebblethwaite extends this kind of analysis and approaches the kind of inner dynamics that we have been trying to examine. The pope, he felt, believed his election was providential. He had known the poem of Roman Slowacki that predicted a Slav pope, and the failed assassination attempt in 1981 increased this sense of providence. Hebblethwaite comments: “What all this means in practice is that John Paul has been increasingly confined within the private world of his own mystical intuitions… The problem is that the sense of personal mission can threaten to engulf and overwhelm the primary and essential papal ministry. Its essential function is quite clear. It is to express and embody the unity of the church.”⁴⁸ The point that Hebblethwaite is making is crucial. If the pope mistakes his personal feelings of messianic mission for what his office demands, then in what way will he be different from the genuinely holy people who believe that their visions and revelations are somehow sanctioned by God? What happens to the petrine ministry, Hebblethwaite continues, “if the pontiff’s unargued personal opinions are allowed to become the norm of Catholic doctrine?” “It remains to ask the most redoubtable question of all: What does “the providential meaning” of a given pontificate really entail?”⁴⁹

This can perhaps be illustrated by the strange case of the beatification of Pius IX. We could be excused if Pius IX does not readily come to our minds as a candidate for the canonization whether because of his alleged personal eccentricities or his anti-democratic attitudes, or his handling of Vatican I and the issue of infallibility. But although two previous attempts of his canonization had failed, John Paul II in 1985 approved his heroic virtue, and a year later a miracle wrought by his intercession, clearing the way for his beatification. But even then apparently the political problem of how this was to be received in Italy still posed a daunting obstacle, and the pope created a secret commission to advise him on its “opportuneness.” Carlo Snider, a Swiss layman, had been appointed in 1975 to defend Pius IX against the criticisms that his process had subjected him to. Kenneth Woodward in the course of the research for his book, Making Saints, managed to get a hold of a copy of this positio. Some of its arguments make interesting reading, and possibly shed light on why John Paul II would be interested in promoting a cause that appears so out of harmony with the contemporary world. Snider saw a providential design in the fact that Vatican I was cut short because “it actually reinforced the universal prestige of the mission of the pope as a necessary condition for the life of the church in the course of history.”⁵⁰ And he applied this same kind of reasoning to Pius IX, himself, as if he, too, somehow served God’s providential plan and was thus sanctified by it. “One has to ask oneself,” he writes, “whether as a matter of fact the doctrine of papal infallibility was not of incalculable importance for the future history of the church, (an event) in which is seen expressed the supernatural and historical reasons for Pius IX’s pontificate.”⁵¹ In this way Pius IX’s unacceptable behavior in the management of Vatican I is transmuted into sanctity because he is wittingly or unwittingly serving God’s plan, and perhaps John Paul II could relate to those sorts of providential musings. He beatified Pius IX in 2000. All this is not a way of implying that there are no grounds for the petrine ministry, or infallibility, but only to indicate that it is important not to confuse the human limitations of the pope, and even the pope’s inspirations, with his office.

The same kind of “providential meaning” may have propelled the pope to institute Divine Mercy Sunday in which the devotion to divine mercy found in the revelations of Faustina Kowalska was imposed on the universal church. Sr. Faustina had died in Kraków in 1938 at the age of 33, and the city had become the center of her divine mercy devotion. The future pope’s former teacher, Fr. Ignacy Rózycki, had done the first scholarly analysis of her diary, and Wojtyla, as the Archbishop of Kraków, had defended her orthodoxy when it had been questioned in Rome, and had promoted the cause of her beatification. As pope he felt, “very near” to Sr. Faustina, and had been “thinking about her for a long time.”⁵² He was to beatify her in 1993, and canonize her in 2000, saying in his homily, “By divine Providence, the life of this humble daughter of Poland was completely linked with the history of the 20th century, the century we have just left behind.”

In terms of “providential meaning,” the pope, himself, had said in regard to his elevation from the archbishopric of Kraków to the papal throne, that because of his “confidence in the Holy Spirit, who was calling to the See of Peter a cardinal with this experience, with this background,” therefore “this background is useful for the universal church.”⁵³ It is reasonable, then, to assume that in the case of Sr. Faustina a similar logic was at work of the sort that said, “God knows my devotion to Sr. Faustina, and has chosen me to be pope, and therefore it is my providential duty to promote the cause of Sr. Faustina and her Divine Mercy devotion.”

But this kind of reasoning can easily blur the distinction between the pope’s private devotions and what is appropriate for the entire church. It is somewhat disconcerting to see, as it sometimes is done, the prayer of Sr. Faustina recited within the Mass, itself, and interspersed in the recitation of the rosary elsewhere. This prayer reads: “Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world. Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

We have only to recall Karl Rahner’s interpretive principle for revelations to see how problematical the use of such things are in general, and Sr. Faustina’s prayer proves to be no exception. It is identical in substance to the one that Sr. Lucía of Fatima learned from an angel, making us wonder where Faustina got the prayer. Sr. Lucía’s appears to reflect the Portuguese or Spanish catechism where it was answering the question, “What is the consecrated Host?” But more importantly, the prayer of Lucía is, according to Rahner, because of its offering to God the Father the divinity of Jesus, “theologically impossible.”⁵⁴ When Sr. Lucía was questioned about this, she replied that perhaps the angel had not studied theology.

What is the result, therefore, of the pope’s “mystical intuition?” Do we now have people all over the world reciting at Mass and when they say the rosary a theologically impossible prayer? The point of this story is not to belittle the genuine piety of Sr. Lucía and Sr. Faustina, still less of John Paul II, but to see the difficulties that arise when even genuine faith becomes mixed with its human counterparts. We can go on and wonder whether John Paul II’s ideas about Humanae vitae, as well, underwent the same sort of process of sanctification when he was elected pope, leading him to feel that God in this way was speaking to him about the rightness of his views on this matter.

 

Joseph Ratzinger: From Counterreaction to Restoration

 

Was John Paul II one of the counterreactors? No. He was very much at home in the world of papal centralism we have been seeing. But Joseph Ratzinger was very much part of the counterreaction, and we need to understand the role he played in the restoration as the head of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith. We will look at the actions of the Congregation in the next chapter, but here we want to try to understand something more of his inner evolution, a task all the more important since his election as Benedict XVI. We are faced with a genuine theologian who has published in many areas of theology, including an extensive study on eschatology.⁵⁵ Particularly important have been his reflections on the limits of the historical-critical method, and the deformations that theology undergoes if this method is taken as the only way to know about revelation, as we saw before. Without the church, he tells us, the scriptures, themselves, disintegrate into a collection of historical sources that one draws upon to try to find some contemporary application.⁵⁶ When an excessive dependence on the historical-critical method invades New Testament exegesis, then it sees its job as peeling back the layers of the text and identifying “the truth with the conjectured antiquity of origin.”⁵⁷ Then “the image of Christ is progressively impoverished until in the end nothing is left but a few hypotheses.”⁵⁸ In this context he sets forth a lofty spiritual view of the teaching authority of the church: “The essence of the Magisterium consists precisely in the fact that the proclamation of the faith is also the normative criterion of theology: indeed, this very proclamation is the object of theological reflection.”⁵⁹ 

There is much to admire in these kinds of reflections, and focusing, as he has done, on the crisis of faith in the postconciliar church is of the greatest importance. But when it comes to addressing concrete pastoral problems, his lofty understanding of the spiritual nature of the church seems to impede him from focusing on the serious faults that exist in the institutional church, and he leaves the impression that he must defend the church’s current practices lest somehow the sublime spiritual nature of the church as the body of Christ be called into question.

When it comes to the question of contraception, for example, he admits in his Report that at the time of Humanae vitae, “the demonstrative basis of the theology faithful to the Magisterium was still relatively slim.”⁶⁰ But now “it has been broadened through new experiences and new reflections so that the situation is beginning to reverse itself.”⁶¹ Yet while he makes the important point that in regard to sexual morality after the council “personalism began to be understood in opposition to ‘naturalism’,”⁶² he leaves the deeper questions about the morality of contraception untouched. Elsewhere he will talk somewhat abstractly about the value of the child, the separation of sexuality and procreation, and the need to keep people human, that is, not to have their morality dictated by technology. But an exchange he had with Peter Seewald shows him not to be completely closed about the matter of contraception itself. Seewald asked: “The question remains whether you can reproach someone, say a couple who already have several children, for not having a positive attitude toward children.” And the cardinal replied: “No, of course not, and that shouldn’t happen, either.” Then Seewald responds: “But must these people nevertheless have the idea that they are living in some sort of sin if they…” And Ratzinger answers: “I would say that those are questions that ought to be discussed with one’s spiritual director, with one’s priest, because they can’t be projected into the abstract.”⁶³ 

In regard to the remarriage of the divorced, and their reception of the Eucharist, despite earlier statements he had made in which he saw a possibility of change, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith he talked around the subject without truly coming to grips with the pastoral implications of this enormous problem. He will say, for example, the remarried are not under penalty of formal excommunication, and they ought to feel like they are accepted by the church, or even that they bear witness to the uniqueness of marriage. But still and all, the judgment that they cannot communicate holds “definitively.” He does, however, hold out one possibility: “perhaps in the future there could also be an extrajudicial determination that the first marriage did not exist. This could perhaps be ascertained locally by experienced pastors.”⁶⁴ But this solution by local annulment is but a stop-gap measure that does not come to grips with the problem, theologically or pastorally.

Unfortunately, we recede farther away from genuine pastoral engagement when the cardinal looks at the link between celibacy and the priesthood. He feels bad when people talk about compulsory celibacy, for haven’t priests taken this burden freely upon themselves? Further, giving up celibacy “basically improves nothing; rather, it glosses over a crisis of faith.”⁶⁵ One can’t make an argument for the abolition of celibacy simply by pointing to the Protestant clergy or the priests of the Orthodox Churches, and the argument he makes in this regard is worth reading closely: “In the Orthodox Churches we have, on the one hand, the full form of the priesthood, the priest monks, who alone can become bishops. Alongside them are the “people’s priests,” who, if they want to marry, must marry before ordination but who exercise little pastoral care but are really only liturgical ministers.”⁶⁶ And when asked whether the church will have married priests in the future, he answers: “At least not in the foreseeable future. To be quite honest, I must say that we do have married priests, who came to us as converts from the Anglican Church or from various Protestant communities. In exceptional cases, then, it is possible, but they are just that – exceptional situations. And I think that these will also remain exceptional cases in the future.”⁶⁷ These are rather remarkable responses, for the church has always had married priests in the Eastern rites, as the cardinal well knew, as a member of the Congregation for Oriental Churches.⁶⁸ While it is true that Eastern rite married priests were at times treated like second-class citizens,⁶⁹ it has to be asked whether this was the result of them being in some way inferior priests – which unfortunately the impression that Ratzinger’s remarks leave – as if their ordination had imprinted less well on their married souls than it would have if they were celibate, or are we looking once again at the inability of the celibate clergy to see clearly when it is a question of marriage and women.

When Ratzinger is asked whether mandatory celibacy should be dropped in order that there would be more vocations to the priesthood, his response here is not very pastorally inspired, either. Vocations are down, he tells us, because families have less children and different expectations for them, and thus “the main obstacles to the priesthood often come from parents.”⁷⁰ Perhaps we have been looking at the shortage of vocations from the wrong perspective. “Looked at relative to the number of children and the number of those who are believing churchgoers, the number of priestly vocations has probably not decreased at all.”⁷¹

What is going on as the counterreaction meets the restoration? The British theologian Adrian Hastings thought that Ratzinger’s “road back to traditionalism could appear the only way to escape a theological disintegration which threatened not just Vatican I, but Chalcedon and Nicaea as well.”⁷² Hansjürgen Verweyen – one of Ratzinger’s earlier progressive students in contrast to later more conservative ones – felt that his teacher’s “moderately progressive position at the council lost its constituency in the years afterward, as the culture, inside and outside the church, moved toward the left. People like Ratzinger and von Balthasar thought they had nowhere to go but into the traditionalist camp.”⁷³ 

When the cardinal talks about the new movements, this distance from pastoral realities takes a particularly acute form. He sees them as one of the bright spots in the bleak landscape of the postconciliar church: “What is hopeful at the level of the universal Church – and that is happening right in the heart of the crisis of the Church in the Western world – is the rise of new movements which nobody had planned and which nobody has called into being, but which have sprung spontaneously from the inner vitality of the faith itself.”⁷⁴ He goes on: “Here new vocations to the priesthood and to the religious orders are now growing spontaneously. What is striking is that all this fervor was not elaborated by any office of pastoral planning, but somehow it sprang forth by itself… They don’t fit into their plan. Thus while tensions rise in connection with their incorporation into the present form of the institutions, there is absolutely no tension with the hierarchical Church as such.”⁷⁵

It is hard to imagine the ex-members of these movements, whose lives have been severely disrupted by them, agreeing with this assessment. The new movements from the perspective we have been taking are the farthest thing from something “nobody had planned,” and instead of having “sprung from the inner vitality of the faith itself,” strike one as a counterfeit of it. Elsewhere Ratzinger compares the movements to the rise of the mendicant orders in the Middle Ages, and writes that they “cannot be reduced to the episcopal principle, find their theological and practical support in the primacy, a proof that it continues to foster living and fruitful pluralism in the Church precisely by making ecclesial unity a concrete reality.”⁷⁶ This puzzling statement comes into sharper psychological focus when we see it as a recognition of the common characteristics shared by the movements and the papacy, but far from them validating the movements, should make us question, as we have been doing, the modern shape of the papacy.

From our own perspective we can ask whether Ratzinger’s counterreaction, and even more, his taking a leading position in the restoration, did not blur the distinction between the faith and the current positions of the institutional church. A determined defense of the substance of the faith is an admirable and necessary thing, but here it seems to have been taken up within the deeply traditional vision of the papacy and infallibility of John Paul II. When we recall the Cardinal’s remarks to the effect that the permanent structure of the church is not democratic, but sacramental, consequently hierarchical, and this view of the church is linked to obedience to the legitimate ecclesiastical hierarchy,⁷⁷ we can be pardoned if we wonder if this is not another potent mixture of faith and things less lofty. Even the nouvelle théologie that had inspired the council could be taken up after the council into the old church structures and coexist with old patterns of repressive behavior.

As the pontificate of John Paul II developed, even some moderate men were disturbed by his conception of the papacy. Bernard Häring, for example, writes of the hope that sprang up in his heart for a renewal petrine ministry with the installation of John Paul II, but 20 years later his feeling is quite different. “An increasingly uncompromising Vatican centralism, together with punitive control mechanisms, have dashed my expectations.”⁷⁸ The church has taken on over the course of history “monarchical – even at times absolutistic – structures, worldly trappings, triumphalistic pomp, and ridiculous titles of honor.”⁷⁹ The pope, for example, “calls himself “My Holiness”!”⁸⁰ “Many people believe that the Catholic church, in view of its ecumenical commitment, should courageously reconsider the two dogmas defined by Vatican Council I, namely, infallibility and papal primacy. In my considered opinion this is not necessary. It would suffice – and be universally useful – if the entire church, and in particular the pope, realistically recognized the principle of subsidiarity.”⁸¹

Cardinal Franz König, a leading light of the council and an important supporter of John Paul II’s election as pope, dared to break the code of silence among high church officials and speak of Rome’s “inflated centralism.” “In the postconciliar period… the Vatican authorities have striven to take back autonomy and central leadership for themselves… The style of leadership of the universal church which is being practiced today is not entirely in keeping with the council’s intentions.”⁸² 

The conclave of cardinals that elected Benedict XVI had been the focal point of the world’s attention. Would they elect a pope who would continue the conservative restoration, or even intensify it, the media speculated, or would they choose someone who would recapture some of the openness of Vatican II, or at least someone who would be conciliatory and attempt to heal the divisions of the church? But if we reflect on the conclave in the light of the cult of the pope, then the central issue is not really who will be elected. What the real issue is is the papal centralism that has inflated the papacy all out of proportion to the rest of the church as if what was at stake during the conclave was the election of a new absolute monarch, a new holder of the power of infallibility.

  

Chapter 11

The Dynamics of Dissent

 

The Roll Call

 

The Holy Office plied its trade throughout the course of the first half of the twentieth century and right up to the eve of the Second Vatican Council. After the council it got a new name, the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, (CDF) and new regulations. It was quiescent during the papacy of Paul VI, but in John Paul II’s pontificate and with his appointment of Joseph Ratzinger as its Prefect, it regained its high profile and busily set about correcting the abuses that both the pope and the cardinal saw in the postconciliar period. A long line of priests and religious, both men and women, have been subjected to its none too kind attention. Hans Küng, August Bernhard Hasler, Paul Collins and Leonardo Boff all came under scrutiny for their incisive analyses of topics like the papacy, infallibility and the structural faults of the institutional church. Küng could no longer teach as a Catholic theologian, and Hasler, Collins and Boff all left the priesthood. Others were censored for venturing into politics like Ernesto Cardinal who became Minister of Culture in the Sandanista government of Nicaragua, and resigned from the priesthood to continue at his post, as well as religious sisters in the U.S. like Mary Agnes Mansour, Elizabeth Morancy and Arlene Violet, all of whom resigned from their religious orders to continue their government work. Then there were those who were called on the carpet for their teaching in the area of morality: Anthony Kosnik for Human Sexuality that came out under the aegis of the Catholic Theological Society of America; Charles Curran for his dissent to a variety of moral teachings starting with contraception, but to his mind because he championed the right to dissent to non-infallible teachings; John McNeill, Robert Nugent and Jeannine Gramick over their views on homosexuality, with McNeill expelled from the Jesuits, Nugent silenced, and Gramick switching orders; and Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey for their support of abortion rights, and who eventually left their religious order.

There were also a number of high-profile cases: Edward Schillebeeckx questioned about his views on Christology and the virginity of Mary; Bernard Häring for his dissent to Humanae Vitae, and Jacques Dupuis for his Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, all of whom endured extensive bouts with the CDF, yet remained in the priesthood. Even bishops were not exempt, for example Raymond Hunthausen in Seattle, Pedro Casaldáliga in Brazil, and Jacques Gaillot in France. The roll call goes on and on: Matthew Fox for his views on original sin and pantheism – Fox decided to become an Episcopalian; Eugen Drewermann expelled from the priesthood for his views on the virgin birth and the resurrection; Reinhold Messner censored for his ideas on liturgical history; Luigi Sartori restrained from teaching at the Lateran University after being denounced to the CDF by the Padua branch of Communion and Liberation; Willigis Jäger, priest and Zen master, silenced for his understanding of the relationship between spiritual experience and doctrinal statements; Josef Imbach suspended from teaching because of his book on miracles; Thomas Aldworth, censored for a number of positions he advanced in his books for a popular audience; Lavinia Byrne in hot water because of her book on women’s ordination written before John Paul II’s Ordinatio sacerdotalis; Ivone Gebara for her views on abortion and later for her theological writings, and Tissa Balasuriya whose case we will examine in a bit more detail in order to begin to come to grips with what is going on.

 

Tissa Balasuriya: A Case Study

 

Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan theologian belonging to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, had a deep interest in interreligious dialogue, as well as liberation theology in service of the poor. After a long process he was excommunicated for his views on original sin and Christology expressed in Mary and Human Liberation, and then later the excommunication was lifted.

Balasuriya had attended the Gregorian University from 1947 to 1953, studying philosophy and theology. At the time of the council he wanted to “look critically” at the Thomism he had been trained in, and spent time in 1963-64 at the Institut Catholique in Paris. “By 1964 I was writing in favour of openness to other religions. In a sense, I and others had already moved beyond Vatican II, although that was the source of much of our hope.”¹ This kind of  intellectual trajectory is by now familiar to us, but it holds the risk of becoming excessive. Here is how he frames the issue of salvation outside the church that got him into trouble first with the Sri Lankan bishops, and then with the CDF: “Many Christians in Asia are increasingly unable to think of salvation exclusively in terms of the Church, or as only mediated by Jesus Christ. We have come to realise that such a view would imply that the vast majority of the people of Asia were not saved. The point has slowly dawned on us that this is not acceptable. Vatican II pointed to some openings concerning the salvation of non-Christians, but even in the 1970s the leadership of the Church in Rome was retreating into itself. The more I studied the issue of salvation, the more I was impressed with the serious inadequacy of the Church’s doctrinal thinking. It gradually became clear to me that what we have presented for a thousand years as dogma and doctrine is not really from Jesus Christ. Certainly Catholicism and Vatican II have clearly said that the Church is not the sole means of salvation. The real problem is that the Church usually denies this in practice and acts as though you need to be baptised in order to be saved.”² 

He felt that the only way to solve this problem was to change the doctrinal foundations upon which such a view rested. “By 1990 I had realised that the idea of original sin was basic to the concept of salvation, and that once you posit the idea that original sin infects everyone, some form of universal redemption is required.”³ Here his story, like the stories of many of the people examined by the CDF, becomes a mixture of doctrinal issues and how he was treated by church authorities. In fact, the way he was treated was to overshadow what he was saying. Balasuriya complained of a whole series of abuses that marred his chance of getting a fair hearing. “The burden of proof is always put on the accuser,”⁴ he tells us, and he complains that his views were distorted, his words mistranslated, and continues with a litany of abuses of due process and human rights that has become familiar in such cases so that any new case is seen against this wider background and evokes feelings and memories that stretch back the length of the twentieth century.

We need only recall the pain of someone like Leonardo Boff who was censored for his Church: Charism and Power to see how destructive such procedures are. Boff’s own process lasted on and off for some 20 years, and when he left the priesthood it was to escape a pressure that he described “like an ever-tightening tourniquet rendering my work as a theologian, teacher, lecturer, adviser and writer almost impossible.” “My personal experience of dealing those last 20 years with doctrinal power is this: It is cruel and merciless. It forgets nothing, forgives nothing; it exacts a price for everything. To achieve their end – the imprisonment of theological intelligence – the doctrinal powers take all the time necessary and use all the means necessary.”⁵

Therefore it is not surprising that the news of Balasuriya’s excommunication was immediately met with an outpouring of support for him. Charles Curran, for example, wrote a warm letter of solidarity with Balasuriya in the National Catholic Reporter, and while saying that doctrinal matters were important, concentrated on the issues of due process, and admitted that he had not read Mary and Human Liberation. In all probability the vast majority of Balasuriya’s immediate supporters had not read his book, either. Certainly it is possible to distinguish the process of due process from that of the truth or falsity of what is being said, but it is symptomatic in the context of the repression-reaction cycles we have been seeing that the doctrinal issues at stake are often pushed far into the background. This attitude is partially unconscious, and engendered by the repression wrought by the imposition of elaborate conceptual structures imposed as if they were the only way to express revelation. The result of the work of the CDF has been to create a theological climate in which it becomes more difficult for theologians to examine objectively and critically those who stand accused. They are understandably reluctant to criticize the work of their accused colleagues for fear they will be seen as condoning the way the CDF has treated them. Therefore, one of the very roles of theologians becomes subverted. They are meant to serve the church community by attempting to explore the Christian mysteries and to point out, as well, what goes against the church’s self-understanding.

But on the other hand, what Balasuriya is saying is important to understand. Edmund Hill sums up Balasuriya’s position in his introduction to Mary and Human Liberation and the ensuing controversy. Balasuriya’s general argument runs like this: the old classical theology is “patriarchal, male dominated, and governed by Western, Greco-Roman cultural presuppositions.” And so we ought to turn to a “new feminist, liberation, inculturation dialogue theologies.”⁶ There is certainly a sense in which it is easy to agree with this, but of course, the issue is to determine just what that sense is. Balasuriya eloquently argues that Mary needs to be seen in solidarity with the human race, to be seen as a real woman, a woman of the Gospels, and not just raised above everyone else. But the road he takes to do this is fraught with difficulties. He argues that at the heart of devotion to Mary are qualities attributed to her, like the Immaculate Conception, but these qualities are, in turn, based on the qualities we attribute to Christ, especially in terms of redeeming us from sin, and in this way he is led to deal with the question of original sin.

This is a doctrine that he thinks lacks internal coherence, and “is based on unproved and unprovable assumptions.”⁷ But such a comment immediately raises a theological red flag. In just what way can we expect the Christian mysteries to be provable? Are they provable in some historically verifiable way? Or are they provable because they are found in full form in the Scriptures? Or are they provable because they psychologically resonate with us, or say something about how we should treat each other?

There is no doubt that the question of original sin poses a great challenge for contemporary theology, and Balasuriya touches on some of the elements of this question that need to be examined: the traditional link between original sin and sexuality, the injustice of punishing all people for the sins of our first parents, the apparent injustice of God towards the unbaptized, and so forth. But he doesn’t really deal with them. Instead he will say: “the whole doctrine of original sin is built on the assumptions of a particular medieval Western European philosophical understanding of the human person, nature and the supernatural, which is not necessarily valid for all times and places.”⁸ If he had said that the Church’s teaching on original sin was heavily conditioned by the historical circumstances within which it arose, one could only agree with him, but there is an overemphasis here that is disturbing.

  The question of original sin becomes a springboard to the issue of the role of Jesus in the salvation of the human race. “Such dogma of original sin implied that Jesus, the universal savior, conferred the graces merited by him, through the Church which he founded.”⁹ But Balasuriya, apparently motivated by a desire to enter more deeply into dialogue with other religions, questions this. Even if salvation came through Christ, he tells us, that does not mean “…Jesus Christ wanted a Church – say the Catholic Church – to be the mediator of that salvation.”¹⁰ This, to his mind, reduces the chance for salvation of people of other religions, or no religion at all, and is therefore unacceptable. What he is going to do is remove this problem by transforming basic Christian doctrine. It is as if he does not see the basic Christian mysteries as the foundation for all theological activity, but rather, as humanly conceived doctrines that can be altered. He will write: “Traditional theology has defined Jesus as one person having two natures: the divine and the human. This is the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon.”¹¹  But then he comments: “Yet, who is able to know these things with any degree of acceptable certitude?”¹²

A final example highlights this misunderstanding of the nature of theology. “If the doctrine of original sin and its consequences are questioned, then the concept of redemption is also questioned. If we do not understand human nature as essentially fallen, then there is no need of an ontological redemption by Jesus Christ…”¹³  And Balasuriya appears not to shrink from accepting such a line of reasoning under the guise that it is necessary for interreligious dialogue: “The traditional understanding of redemption, in which Jesus Christ is considered the unique, universal and necessary redeemer in an ontological sense which transforms fallen human nature, is one which it is not possible to use in our multi-faith context, as well as among secular people.”¹⁴

What is taking place here is that a genuine desire for openness in dialogue is obscuring the true nature of theology and leading to unacceptable transformations of the Christian mysteries. Do we really need to do this? Even more critical is the question of whether faith itself is being lost in various instances of this kind of reaction theology.

The dynamics of dissent unfold within the larger dynamics we have been seeing. Doctrinal repression in the preconciliar church gave rise to a variety of theological reactions, some of which went off the rails. The demolition that Cardinal Döphner spoke about was not just in his imagination. The same image came to mind when I examined the postconciliar theology of original sin. There, after the demolitionists had leveled the old theology of original sin, they left to ply their trade elsewhere, but the builders never arrived.¹⁵ In Christianity in the Crucible of East-West Dialogue I examined much of modern Catholic thought in regard to dialogues with Buddhism and Hinduism, and allowed myself to raise questions about what, for example, Willigis Jäger or Anthony DeMello, among many others, were saying, not because they had been censored by the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith – both sections were written before that happened – but because it was clear that there were doctrinal questions that could be raised about their writing. It dawned on me that what could be found in the world of East-West dialogue was part of a larger reaction theology, that is, a theology that has been shaped by the reactions to the repressions that have taken place both before and after the Second Vatican Council. Therefore, concentrating on doctrinal issues, I looked at the work of Ivone Gebara, Tissa Balasuriya, from which part of the present section was taken, Michael Morwood, Diarmuid O’Murchu, Daniel Maguire, and John Dourley.

Much of this book focuses on what could be called the unconscious attitudes of the right, while Christianity in the Crucible looks at the defects of a reaction theology, but concentrates more on the objective content of these reactions rather than their subjective roots. But a largely unconscious atmosphere, however difficult it is to articulate, infiltrates progressive theology as well. In the field of East-West dialogue we see an excellent example of this phenomenon. Its Catholic participants set off on an exciting adventure, immersing themselves in Hinduism and Buddhism, but there existed within this adventure a mood created by a reaction to the old narrowly drawn theological categories of the past which, by way of reaction, sometimes led to these pioneers reinterpreting Christianity in Buddhist or Hindu categories. The case of Abhishiktananda comes readily to mind. If here I have left the impression that I have been harder on the conservatives than the progressives, this chapter and the reading of the Crucible will redress the balance.

 

The State of Our Theological Conversations

 

If the council can rightly be said to be the council of the nouvelle théologie, and even the realization of the legitimate aspirations of the modernists, and if both Montini, Wojtyla and Ratzinger cannot be called rigid Thomists of the old school, then we are faced with a puzzle. This council, instead of ushering in a long and glorious era of theological peace and prosperity, appears to have led to yet another cycle of repression and reaction under John Paul II. But this cycle cannot be blamed on Thomism which had been swept aside as a punishment for its sins. Therefore, we need to take a look at Thomism after the council, and then, at this latest cycle, to try to discover what drives it, although the answer is by now becoming quite familiar to us. 

Thomism after the council, when it did not simply disappear, again showed a variety of faces. It sometimes became a historical Thomism compensating for the ahistorical Thomism of the past, but this turn to history went hand in hand with a turn away from a properly philosophical Thomism.¹⁶  It is as if Thomism had lost its philosophical self-confidence which would have allowed it to tackle pressing contemporary questions, and it retreated into its history. But Thomism, itself, is not bound by nature to either an ahistoricism or an overcompensating historicism.

Another face of contemporary Thomism is one in which it seems unable to profit from the lessons of its own past, and so it continues to ally itself with Roman authoritarianism and right-wing politics. It has not profited from Maritain’s move from an unreflective alliance with the Action française to a consciously articulated social philosophy independent of the political passions of both left and right.¹⁷  

Thomism had been pressed into service as an instrument of repression, but this latest cycle of repression under John Paul II demonstrates that it was not an intrinsic element of these cycles. Thomism as a whole paid dearly for a certain complacent acceptance of its privileged institutional position, and for the actions of those Thomists who exploited that position to oppress their opponents. The good news, however, is precisely this distinction between an institutional Thomism and Thomism, itself, which means that if Thomism could shed these previous historical incarnations and reimmerse itself in its fundamental intuitions, and use them to engage the pressing problems of the day, it could rise again.

If Thomism is not the culprit in this latest cycle, then what is? We might argue with considerable justification that in the postconciliar period the council fathers went home, and the conservative element in the curia did what they could to hold and even reverse the process of renewal. But what I would like to look at are the energies that drive this latest cycle. Our latest cycle is certainly shaped by the past ones, but it has its own unique characteristics. The turn to the modern world and the use of the historical-critical method, so much at stake before, succeeded in gaining a certain measure of official acceptance, but at the same time vast reservoirs of repressed thoughts and feelings began to vent themselves. And because they were the products of repression, these thoughts and sentiments sometimes came out in rebellious and/or doctrinally questionable ways. This outburst alarmed church authorities who, in various ways, tried to put the lid back on the boiling-over pot, an exercise of the old style of control they were used to, but this time it proved impossible to do. The very basis of their control in the way the members of the church perceived Roman authority had shifted. Time could not be turned back to the old patterns of authority and obedience, so instead of another old style of repression and reaction in which the reaction remained subterranean, biding its time, an open polarization appeared between the Roman authorities and a conservative minority on one side, and on the other, a more progressive theological community. The pontificate of Pope John Paul II illustrated these new dynamics well. Despite the pope’s forceful insistence on any number of issues, and the punitive actions of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the result has not been the same as in the days of Pascendi and Humani generis. Therefore, the polarization that we have been living with for more than 40 years can be looked upon as a kind of stalled cycle of repression and reaction. The old style repressive attempts have failed, but the cycle, itself, is still with us.

Let’s look at each side of the cycle because each one hinders theology in its own way. On the repressive side, a certain authoritarianism emanates from Rome and elsewhere that quickly recalls to the long and sensitive theological memory of past repressions like the one that we saw Yves Congar so graphically describing. This authoritarianism is often short on dialogue and due process, and even when it makes what could be called an accurate doctrinal judgment, it can do so in a language that tends to alienate, and in a maladroit manner that further alienates it from the theological community. Its disciplinary actions may succeed on the surface, but it is much less successful in winning minds and hearts.

The other side of this cycle, that is, the reactive element, is much less remarked upon. What is repressed can be by that very fact radicalized and take a negative and combative form. Put in another way, creative theological activity can be twisted out of shape by the reactive emotions of the theologian who has suffered repression. Then repression in the name of doctrinal correctness, even when it is valid, can actually foster the kind of extreme theological statements it most fears. The breaking of this cycle is a difficult challenge that would demand much from either side. Roman authoritarianism is outmoded. This certainly doesn’t mean that Rome doesn’t have a central role to play in safeguarding the faith, but rather, the form of doing this needs to change. Even on pragmatic grounds, calling a long line of theologians onto the carpet has yielded little fruit unless we want to count the chilling factor it has had on the public discussion of many issues.

There is a reactive side, as well. It is entirely possible that previous repressions, even if not directed specifically at Balasuriya, helped shape some of his expressions that appear hard to defend, and they, in their turn, drew down upon him a heavy weight of direct repression. A tremendous amount of energy was surely expended by Balasuriya and his superiors, as well as his interlocutors in Rome, but we would have to be quite optimistic to believe that the issue was genuinely resolved.

There are many stories like that of Balasuriya in which repression in its various forms leads to reaction, and sometimes inadequate theological formulations, which in turn lead to direct and explicit repression, and more reactions so that repression and reaction are locked in a spiral that generates an atmosphere in which theological conversations – which certainly ought to include Rome at some stage – become more difficult. If Rome ought to reflect on how it can enter into these conversations, the theological community needs to look at the reactive side of the equation. Despite repressive measure that draw the lines of doctrinal correctness too narrowly, there is still the issue of good theology and bad, true theology and false, despite how difficult it might be to consider those qualities in the current theological climate.

Roman authoritarianism is rooted in an elaborate institutionalization of the primacy of Peter, and an excessive centralization of church administration in the curia. These kinds of institutionalizations tend to turn in upon themselves and blend with a conservative attitude that Étienne Borne once summed up in regard to the attitude of the integralists by saying that they confused “devotion to the past with fidelity to the eternal.”¹⁸ The result is a certain sacralization of human arrangements as if they were of divine origin, and so those who theologically challenge the way things are are not only disruptive and disturbing of good order, but are tinged with an aura of evil. Thus, even the nouvelle théologie, or any theology, when put in that setting begins to exhibit the traits so despised in the old neoscholasticism. What is needed is a thoroughgoing de-institutionalization of the church from Rome on down, but that, however urgent, will be a long and difficult process. Institutionalization goes hand in hand with a desire for power and control, which in turn breeds repression, and repression breeds reaction. And a theology that is colored by this kind of reaction can become so sensitive about its freedom that its powers of self-criticism begin to be clouded.

The case of Roger Haight gives some hope that the polarization between the CDF’s high-handed ways and the theological community’s reluctance to admit, at least in public, that things are being said that with the best hermeneutic will in the world appear contrary to the understanding of the church community, might be lessening. Haight’s book, Jesus: Symbol of God, presents a Christology from below that not only the CDF has problems with, but some of his fellow theologians, as well, and they have not been afraid to state their reservations in public. Gerald O’Collins, for example, of the Gregorian University who had defended Jacques Dupuis, called Haight’s book a “triumph of relevance over orthodoxy,” and went on, “Dupuis took Jesus as the incarnate Son of God, and for him that was not debatable… That Christ rose from the dead was nonnegotiable. This isn’t the case with Haight.”¹⁹ Hopefully this willingness of the theological community to speak up will be met with a willingness of the CDF to modify its procedures.

 

The Education of the Laity

 

The subjective attitudes we are exploring are to be found not only in Rome or the theological community, but in popular theological education, as well. Jeannette Cooperman, for example, in a column for the National Catholic Reporter, “Going beyond the kiddie version of God”²⁰ described the stir created by a scripture scholar connected to the Jesus Seminar when he raised all sorts of provocative questions about the infinite nature of God and the divinity of Jesus in front of a theologically unsophisticated audience. Half of the listeners left angrily, but Cooperman was exhilarated and decided she needed to learn more about the Jesus Seminar. But when she read a remark by Marcus Borg that such questions had been commonplace in Protestant seminaries since the 1950s, she recounts, “I felt my face go hot. Words gathered in the back of my throat and flew out unchecked: How dare they? I envisioned clergy all over the country whispering the latest thinking to each other but never raising their voices loud enough to carry to the pews.”²¹ She felt that people were “sick of being patronized, patted on the head and told the kiddie version.” Upon further reflection she realized the serious challenges that these kinds of views posed for Christian faith, and she resolved to take responsibility for her own education in the matter. But the disjunction between the emotions and the rational response is significant.

Cooperman’s initial emotional response is analogous to the responses to the CDF of the sort “How dare they abuse the rights of Tissa Balasuriya,” which then often continues, “Why haven’t I heard about him before?” which leads to “Let me put him on my reading list.” (In fact, most of these condemnations seem to boost the book sales of those condemned.) Or, “Let’s invite him to address our group.” And finally, if we are not careful, to “This must be the latest theological breakthrough.” If we arrived at this final conclusion we would be attributing to the CDF a kind of reverse infallibility of the sort, if they say it is bad, it must be good. Actually, the judgment call about some of the statements made in this atmosphere of reaction theology does not call for rocket science theology. The errors are visible to the theological community if it cares to look, but after a century of theological witch-hunting by the Vatican, it is understandable if it is inclined not to say anything.

It is precisely the lack of theological education on the part of the laity that can make some mediocre theology, especially if it comes wrapped up in adolescent rebellion, seem attractive. One of the saddest aspects of the great exodus of religious and priests after the council is that some of them, having been force-fed Catholicism in rigid institutional forms, when they rejected the forms they rejected the faith as well. In an allied phenomenon there were people teaching in Catholic institutions, or having some sort of official position in the church, who underwent the same kind of reactive loss of faith, but remained at their posts, broadcasting a corrosive rejection of the faith. What drives this kind of project, which goes beyond the inertia of finding another job, might at times be the feeling that, having been abused at the hands of the institutional church, this is a way to strike back at it. On one occasion I heard a noted Catholic theologian describe how he would enlighten his young theologically unsophisticated students by telling them about all the dying and rising gods that inhabited the Middle East at the time of Jesus, the point of which appeared to be that Jesus was one of the crowd. Not only was this a quite problematical view of history, but it was said with a breath-taking, but perhaps unconscious, negativity of feeling, and it resonated with many people in the small audience who laughed knowingly. This kind of enantiodromatic reversal of belief is not a rare phenomenon. Colman McCarthy, for example, who directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and writes rather belligerent columns for the National Catholic Reporter, in one of them commented on the policy of some bishops to refuse Communion to Catholic pro-choice politicians. His disapproval of such a policy became a springboard for venting his feelings about the church and those who have remained in it: The refusal of Communion “would have been enough to get me rushing to leave the church. Except that I departed decades ago, and without a day of regret since.” The communion-refusing bishops are right, we are told: “Obey or go.” “Instead of a faith-based life, I’ve tried to live a peace-based life. No doctrines, no dogmas, no credos, no artificial ties to a headquarters, no “one true church” smugness. Questions about God’s existence or nonexistence are irrelevant: In our daily lives, what would we do differently if we knew one way or another?” McCarthy is friends with Catholics, and admires some, he writes, but is puzzled. “How they square their spiritual fidelity with theological dissent is, to me, beyond understanding – another mystery of faith, I suppose.”²² But the real question here is why he feels compelled to spend his energy attacking Catholics who, according to him, haven’t had the backbone to leave the church yet. Perhaps this is another instance of outraged feelings seeking expression. Another question is why the National Catholic Reporter invites him to abuse its readership.

It would be a sad occasion if someone were to come to the conclusion after much thought and soul-searching that the Catholic faith in its essentials doctrines was simply untrue, and they could no longer be part of the Catholic community. But it is quite another matter that, having been mistreated by the institutional church – which, itself, confused the substance of the faith with its human forms – to keep that confusion intact and react to this abuse by leaving both the old forms and the substance behind.

 

The Reaction

 

A similar pattern of reaction shows up in the field of Catholic theological studies. In preconciliar America, Catholic colleges often looked to neoscholastic philosophy for the centerpiece that would give their students a unified Catholic outlook. Theology was something done in seminaries, and made its appearance in the colleges as an occasional course in religion which served as a kind of advanced catechism. The whole Catholic college world was sustaining serious criticism by the mid-1950s. Catholic intellectual life, according to John Tracy Ellis, “could barely be said to exist and had no discernible influence whatsoever on American culture in general.”²³ In the Catholic intellectual world there was, to his mind, a “self-imposed ghetto mentality.”²⁴ According to another critic Thomas O’Dea, Catholic tradition suffered from formalism, authoritarianism, clericalism, moralism and defensiveness, all qualities that not surprisingly remind us of those applied to scholastic philosophy, itself, the criticism of which had also begun in these preconciliar years. The advent of the council accelerated the whole process – whether in regards to scholastic philosophy or the Catholic college world – of breaking out of this Catholic ghetto. The beginning of the council had given a strong impetus to the formation of college theology departments, and in some places doctoral programs of theology. But this world of academic theology was to be carried along by the same kind of reaction to the liberating event of the council that we have been examining. Frank Shubert, for example, depicts its trajectory like this: from 1955 to 1965 there existed what he called the Catholic sacred order, or a sense of Catholic identity that expressed itself in courses on essential Catholic themes like the Trinity or the sacraments. From 1965 to 1975 Catholic identity gave way to Catholicism as one among many points of view with courses on ecumenism or comparative religion. From 1975 to 1985 the majority of courses were not directed to any sacred order at all. They went not only beyond Roman Catholicism, but theism, itself. There was a movement, Shubert believed, at least at the particular Catholic universities he was examining, that Avery Dulles sums up as “from theology to religious studies and beyond.”²⁵

If the general lines of such a trajectory can be said to be true, then we are faced with another example of a reaction theology, that is, a theology reacting to the Catholic ghetto in which it lived that becomes a theology in dialogue with other religious traditions, and then a rather amorphous religious studies program. Maritain no doubt would see here another example of what he called kneeling before the world. Even in places where things did not reach this kind of extreme, Catholic theology could suffer from a number of potentially debilitating paradoxes. Many future Catholic scholars, for example, having done their undergraduate work in Catholic institutions, for variety and economics turned to non-Catholic universities for their post-graduate studies. This left a smaller number of Catholic students to do their doctorates in Catholic universities which ended up teaching many non-Catholics and people from abroad. Students, however, trained outside of Catholic schools, faced a job market which funneled many of them back into teaching at Catholic institutions which was something their graduate training had often not directly prepared them to do.²⁶

What is at the heart of the question of Catholic theological identity is the nature of theology, itself. If we model theology as another subject, searching for academic excellence, then theology will be judged by the customary norms of the academic world. Then it becomes entirely possible to have non-Catholics and even non-believers teaching in Catholic departments of theology, not to mention Catholics who disagree with the fundamental doctrines of the church. But this view of theology is already a major departure from the traditional one in which the theologian’s task is to reflect about the faith of the church that he or she possesses, and the results of that reflection are put at the service of the church and judged by it.

In an interesting talk, Joseph Kunkel, at the time of his retirement from the department of philosophy at the University of Dayton, illustrates the problems involved. Like so many others, he moved from a Thomistic orientation to addressing more contemporary issues. While he agreed “that Catholic universities to be Catholic need to maintain a Catholic identity,”²⁷ he was unsure what that meant and how to achieve it. He contrasted the attitude of some bishops to whom Ex Corde Ecclesiae, i.e., the process of a theologian securing from his or her bishop a mandate to teach, means holding to a whole catechism of views to the prevailing attitudes about tenure and academic freedom. One administrator summed up the latter point of view as it existed in 1967 by saying: “the professors could teach as they see fit as long as they pay due reverence to the Magisterium and their competence is attested to by their colleagues.”

Should a professor have to get a new mandate whenever his or her state changes, Kunkel asked? What happens if some of the faculty members come as Catholics and become agnostics, or as priests and get married? “Our competence as professors,” he tells us, “is not supposed to be judged by these types of changes, but by the quality of the teaching and research that we do.”

It would be unfair to single out Professor Kunkel as holding extreme views in these matters, but let’s look at the consequences in terms of his own career. He, himself, came to hold for reincarnation, and the illusory nature of the ego. “Is there a God?” he asked. “Yes. God is that Absolute Consciousness of which we all partake… We achieve absolute consciousness to the extent we remove egoic attachments… When they are all gone nothing of separate substance remains.” And he goes on to argue, “This may not sound like the stuff of which a mandate is made, at least not as interpreted by some of our conservative bishops. But whether I am right or wrong I think it is important in Catholic universities to allow theologians and philosophers some room within which to develop their views on the nature of soul, afterlife, wisdom, and God.”²⁸

While we can appreciate Kunkel’s candor, we can certainly wonder about a philosophy, and especially a theology, taught in a Catholic setting that has all the appearances of being difficult to reconcile with the Catholic faith. Someone might, indeed, come to teach as a Catholic theologian at a Catholic university, and decide that they no longer believed in some of the essential teachings of the faith, but then does it really make much sense to continue teaching in that setting, tenure and academic freedom not withstanding, if we understand theology as a reflection on the faith of the church? Nor is it readily understandable why someone would want to continue teaching in such a position which is somewhat analogous to a priest who no longer believes but who desires to continue to administer the sacraments.

Peter Steinfels paints much the same picture, that is, the preconciliar roots of the problem followed by a movement to join the larger academic world that meant leaving the old distinctive Catholic identity behind. “Nostalgia for a supposed Golden Age,” meant in the eyes of many Catholic educators a return to “a defensive, isolated ghetto Catholicism.”²⁹ This reaction, much like the other reactions we have been charting, was at times excessive. Catholic candidates for positions in Catholic schools were sometimes almost, or, in fact, were actually, at a disadvantage. This was particularly true where philosophy departments “at many Catholic schools felt pressed to distance themselves from any religious coloration that might threaten their academic respectability – some of them to the point, I was told, that anyone with a background in Catholic philosophy was at a positive disadvantage in seeking a position.”³⁰ The result was not only a loss of the old Catholic identity, but a certain loss of Catholic identity in itself, leading the students, not surprisingly, to a counterreaction of their own in which they complained about the weak training in the faith they had received with a refrain that went: “Teachers aren’t prepared.” “Nothing in depth, just Jesus is love.” “No content; touchy feely.” “A baby-sitting session.” “Emphasis was on social issues.”³¹

 

Theological Orientations

 

I have insisted that our proper focus was the discovery of the hidden dynamics surrounding the topics we have been examining. It is only fair, however, to look at some of these issues briefly in themselves to illustrate, I hope, that once the passions of reaction and repression have quieted, it would be possible to resolve these contentious issues. 

Thomism. Thomism has paid heavily for its privileged position in the preconciliar church and its alliance with the forces of repression. Unfortunately it often makes its way today as if there is a natural alliance between it and conservative theology and right-wing politics. This kind of Thomism has nothing to do with Thomism in itself, and could certainly limit its appeal in the future. Thomism has great reserves of creative energy waiting to be tapped in regard to dialogues with Hinduism and Buddhism, paleoanthropology and quantum physics, and many other areas. The fact that it has not made much recent headway in doing so is due to the past burdens it still carries.

Birth Control. Could the church actually change its mind on this matter? Yes. The tradition of the church on the use of the marital act is much richer than is usually supposed, and could accommodate such a change. Humanae vitae was a tragedy for the church for all the reasons that Avery Dulles enumerated, and for the fact that it closed the doors of hope that the council had opened, and solidified the polarization that had already begun. This tragedy was made even sadder because it was unnecessary. The church’s position on contraception had already substantially changed in 1950 with Pius XII’s approval of rhythm. Unfortunately, the deeper implications of this change seemed to have usually gone unremarked upon, but there had been exceptions. One of them was Charles Davis who, while attending the council as a peritus in an address to the council fathers from England and Wales, told them that this change had not been a minor point, but “a profound change in the theology of marriage…”³² But this issue was never aired at the council, itself, for it had been forbidden to discuss birth control. Nor does it seem to have played a central role in the deliberations of the Birth Control Commission, yet it held the key to answering Pope Paul’s major preoccupation with the continuity between any change and the statements of his predecessors. The Birth Control Commission, as well as the bishops of the commission, had voted in favor of the proposition that contraception was not intrinsically evil, for they realized that if they said it was, the doctrine could not be changed. But what if they had been asked whether married couples could in certain circumstances make use of the conjugal act and not intend to conceive new life? This is the question that Pius XII had answered back in 1950, although it does not appear that he saw the full implications of what he was saying. In making this decision about rhythm, however, he drew on a whole tradition that had allowed the old and the sterile to make use of the conjugal act even when there was no hope of conception.³³

The condemnation of contraception has a long and venerable history in the church, but it represents just part of the total tradition. The other part about the use of the marital act without the intention of procreation is equally if not more ancient. The decision whether to permit certain non-abortive contraceptives was seen by the conservatives and the pope only against the background of that part of the tradition that condemned contraceptives. The other part of the tradition was ignored. If the import of what Pius XII had done had been recognized, then the way would have been open to show how a change in the church’s teaching, while certainly in discontinuity with one part of its tradition, was in continuity with another.

Once contraception was condemned, then it was inevitable that this decision would be in tension with the decision of Pius XII to approve rhythm, and so an enormous effort was going to be expended to show how rhythm was not the same as other non-abortive forms of contraception. This led to all sorts of semantic contortions, and the results were unworthy of the esteem reason should have been accorded in this matter. In other words, people out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to the pope tried to do the impossible in regard to natural family planning, which was to show how a person might make use of the marital act, intend to avoid conception, and still claim that the act was, indeed, open to conception. No wonder Cardinal König had talked about “this irritating distinction.”

Does changing the