November 18,
2012 David
Timbs
Straining
out a gnat and swallowing a camel
The
recent spate of Vatican crack downs in various local churches is not going
unnoticed anywhere across the Catholic world and beyond. In the thinking of many
people it is a massively asymmetrical over-reaction and yet another indication
that the upper levels of leadership in the Catholic Church are so disturbed,
even rattled, by the negative attention the Church has been attracting that it
has had recourse to any means available to distract attention away from itself.
The
process of micromanagement in the Church has recently cranked up a number of
gears. With very few high profile theologians to investigate for heterodoxy the
CDF seems to have by passed completely the procedures of local Church governance
and targeted peripheral ‘problem’ areas. The Doctrinal Office, for its own
reasons, perhaps to deflect attention away from the clerical child abuse
scandal, has gone after the Irish and with a vengeance.
So
far this year, five Irish priests have been silenced and censured for holding
and promoting views at odds with official Church teaching on a range of issues
most notably, birth control, the availability of sacraments to remarried
divorcees, homosexuality, clerical celibacy and the priestly ordination of
women. Tony Flannery and Gerard Moloney, both Redemptorists, have been silenced;
84 year old Marist priest-theologian Prof. Sean Fagan has been threatened with
forced laicisation if he speaks out any more and his books are to be removed
from circulation; Conventual Franciscan Owen O’Sullivan and most recently,
Passionist Brian D’Arcy have also been silenced.
Response
These
are good men, loyal priests and very effective pastors of God’s People. What
they have accomplished in their ministries, and very successfully so, is to have
articulated with skill, integrity and with clarity the pressing concerns of a
great many people. The Vatican campaign to isolate these men has had the
opposite effect to what was anticipated. Instead of imposing command and
control, the Roman Curia has forfeited both influence and credibility. The
treatment meted out to these Irish priests has left them all personally
bewildered but not angry or embittered. It’s clearly a different story with
the people they have served. Most of them are scandalised and left seething with
indignation. The ecclesiastical policy of prescription and compliance does not
have significant purchase any more. Church governance has lost not only its
moral authority but, even more importantly, respect.
The
disproportional nature of authoritarian coercion is now increasingly obvious to
both insiders and outsiders and is being assessed accordingly - yet another
example of an often reactive paranoia. The Vatican doctrinal bureaucracy, in the
public eye, has elevated gnat straining to an exotic new art form.
Further
to the Irish saga, the most recent episodes involving American theologian,
Elizabeth Johnson and British colleague, Tina Beattie have consolidated the view
that a vast sub-culture of institutional fear, ineptitude and irresponsibility
prevails at the top.
The monitors of doctrinal purity in the Vatican are looking more and more
like a pack of bullies.
Significantly,
the normally reserved, conservative Church historian, Eamon Duffy has rather
dispassionately described this authoritarian behaviour of silencing and
disciplining dissent as a form of totalitarian suppression of Catholic thought
by the Vatican and its franchises. About the (Catholic) University of San
Diego/Tina Beattie affair, Duffy remarked, “I fear that by publicly
withdrawing the invitation, the University of San Diego has brought academic
ignominy on itself, and is colluding in the sovietisation of Catholic
intellectual life which many feel is one of the saddest features of the
contemporary Church.” [1]
An
even more disturbing phenomenon has re-appeared in the post-Vat II Church. It is
the behaviour of the Roman Curia in its appropriated role as global doctrinal
policeman. Ottaviani’s Holy Office has been reincarnated under Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger’s tenure at the CDF and its intrusive power has become nothing short
of pervasive and largely free of the checks necessary to rein it in.
The
recent crackdowns in the US and Ireland are clearly cases of aggressive micromanagement
of the local Church by a centralised, authoritarian Vatican bureaucracy.
These interventions, furthermore, probably constitute a serious violation
of Vat II’ Lumen Gentium # 27. This
Dogmatic Constitution teaches that collegiality and subsidiarity are of the
essence of the Church. The leadership of the local church is exercised by the
bishop whose authority derives from Christ through ordination. The bishop is not
the vicar of the Pope. The Bishop is the overseer of his local church and it is
his responsibility to deal with doctrine and discipline within his jurisdiction.
This Conciliar doctrine was once enthusiastically embraced and championed by
none other than a young German theological advisor at Vatican II by the name of
Joseph Ratzinger. That seems to have undergone a rather profound re- interpretation during
the past thirty years or so.
A
useful reminder
Eamon
Duffy, in the cited Tablet letter, evokes the memory of John Henry Cardinal
Newman who, in his own day, vigorously opposed theological censorship and
controls on academic freedom and discussion. Newman was a great advocate of
consultation and conversation not only within the world of theological
speculation but especially between the hierarchy and the people. He believed
that truth could be arrived at from many quite different starting points and
paths along the way.
This is quite pertinent here.
A
contemporary of Newman, Jesuit academic George Tyrrell, feared greatly that on
becoming a Cardinal, Newman might forfeit his individuality and be subsumed into
the narrow vision and almost ossified theological categories of the Roman
school. In another Tablet article,
this time on Newman himself, Gabriel Daly has observed,
“Tyrrell
also reacted instinctively and strongly against the co-opting of Newman into the
neo-scholastic establishment. The fact is that Newman, in spite of his undoubted
orthodoxy, remains uncomfortably non-establishment in respect of any attempt to
co-opt him on to any ecclesiastical programme whatever. One of Newman’s most
attractive qualities is that he never fitted completely into any
ecclesiastical setting, whether evangelical Anglican, High Church Anglican,
or Ultramontaine Catholic. That is his glory; and in this age of theological
conformity the Catholic Church has never been in greater need of his spirit of
independence.” [2]
Tyrrell,
Daly writes, need not have worried. Newman continued writing in the same
theological style after he was created a Cardinal as he did before and much to
the consternation of his overseers within the Roman
School (the theological system which promoted the normative role of the
Vatican worldview). Newman somewhat enjoyed being monitored for his orthodoxy as
his watchers were in an almost permanent state of bewilderment at his
idiosyncratic methodology and reasoning. Fr Perrone, one of most preeminent
members of the Roman School, once
declared in an assessment, “Newman miscet
et confundet omnia” (“Newman
mixes up and confuses everything”).
It
is quite likely even now that much is still lost and distorted in translation
between the modern legion of the watched and those who are so closely
scrutinising their every word.
A
skewed ecclesiology
Under
the aegis of the past two pontificates in particular, unity has often been
confused with conformity, responsible discipleship with compliance and blind
obedience to directive and norm. This culture of compliance was given extra
authority by one of Pope Benedict’s favourite Ambrosian expressions, the Magisterium
of Discipline. People in growing numbers have revolted against the highly
regulated and homogenised forms of Catholicism. They find them offensive to
their sense of adulthood and baptismal dignity.
A
growing conundrum for the Roman School
and its Vatican patrons is the way serious theology can be done by people with a
critical apparatus different from its own. The same goes with pastoral theology
and praxis. Problems, often extremely complex ones in specific cultural contexts
and far removed from the protected environment of the CDF, are faced and dealt
with on a daily basis. Often all that the doctrinaire bureaucrats see is
heterodoxy and heteropraxis and condemn it as moral relativism and cooperation
with secular humanism. Sadly, it is often the case that the Incarnation itself,
in its many realisations, is sacrificed on the altar of Roman expedience.
While
the Irish and American episode amounts in reality to little more than a series
of local spot fires, best left to local churches to deal with, the Vatican has
mistakenly treated them as uncontrolled forest fires endangering the whole
Church.
Patsy
McGarry, in an April 18, 2012 article in the Irish Times quotes an unnamed but respected priest, perhaps one of
the banned and silenced, who comments on the deeper implications of the
Vatican’s punitive policy and behaviour,
“It
is not possible to speak about reform in the Church, be it in Ireland or
elsewhere, without bearing in mind the ever-present elephant in the room, namely
the Roman curia and the papacy.
.... it
has come to the point where the bishop of Rome is regarded less as a bond of
unity and charity in the Church than as an oracular figure to be reverenced in
his person with quasi-sacramental fervour.
It
has become a tyranny whenever it successfully creates an atmosphere in which
open inquiry and honest dissent are construed as disloyalty or worse.” This is
“a form of fundamentalism” which “trivialises debate, particularly in the
theological field by reducing all issues to questions of authority and
obedience.” [3]
[1]
For a response to the disinvitation of Tina Beattie by the University of San
Diego, see Eamon Duffy’s letter in
the Tablet, here.
[2]
See Gabriel Daly’s article on Newman in the 03/03/01 Tablet, “Breaking the mould”, here.
[3]
McGarry’s article on Fr Tony Flannery and other issues can be found here.
For a report on the disciplinary action against Fr Sean Fagan, click here.
See another Patsy McGarry item featuring the response of Fr Peter McVerry to the
tactics employed by Vatican authorities against alleged ‘dissenters’; it can
be found here.
David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.