"When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms [of the Vatican], it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia" -- Gabriele Amorth, Vatican exorcist for 25 years.
Se non e vero, e ben trovato--"If it's not true, it's well rhymed."
In 1139, the Archbishop of Armagh crossed the sea to the rock-earth of Scotland, whereby he passed down through Norman England and French valleys to the ever-reincarnating Rome. What an exciting time to be an ambitious churchman of noble birth. The Cistercian order confronted religious decadence. The plague would not sweep away the Middle Ages for another two centuries. So unprecedented population growth led to real cities in Europe, highly sophisticated communities for the West. Louis VII pushed little Paris closer towards greatness; later in 1160, he would order the construction of Notre Dame de Paris. Máel Máedóc, Archbishop of Armagh, remembered as Malachy, witnessed a world globalizing--lusher, mysterious and harder--that's scarcely imaginable today. Yet one ancient institution has passed through the fires of history to come to this moment of choice.
For all the green shoots Amargh, Ireland remained the periphery of the world. A quiet land of moderate hills. What awe for Malachy then, to see the great abbey of Clairvaux and an Italy literally consuming its Roman self to rebuild with chimney-like towers and churches. Yet the Archbishop would leave Rome having gone through an ecstatic series of vision that viewed the Church not just through a millenium of expansion. In the most fabulous setting in his entire life Malachy envisaged the Vatican's future decay and annihilation. Modern believers of his Prophecy of the Popes say that time near, with Benedict XIV as the penultimate, or next to final pontiff.
Prophecies aside, we're now in a time when humanity is so much more intertextual and aware, and closer to becoming something actually humane. Able to reconcile to its past and future. Here we find the Church is both the enemy of progress and equality--threatened to its very foundations by it--and a force for mercy in the most stagnant, cruel parts of the world. How can the Church survive when pressed between the vise of scientific discovery and the mob?
I am not predicting anything. If anything, I'm only making a case for a case that the Church's future dims. The problems I'll deal with:
- legal & financial trouble,
- cultural gaps that may prove to large to span.
- historical dynamics at work.
Ah, history. True, rumors of the Church's imminent demise are about as ancient as the Church herself. The Moors crossed the Pyrenees. Cathars and Albigensians. The 1347 Black Death spared Pope Clement VI but brought the Church to its knees, killing scores of monks and unleashing all sorts of subversion and backlash against orthodoxy. For the Church, its implications were so grave that the closest--but by no means good comparison--we could make today is the shattering impact of the Shoah for Jewish theology. The Reformation halved and diced the Church's imperial reach. And if you thought that time was bad, how about the 1600s, when religious wars and witch-hysteria really took off? A 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck Lisbon in 1755, and a tsunami, and the collapse of the Spanish and Portuguese mercantile economies sent the Catholic world crashing down again.
Yet today, it's a body of about 1 billion members from 6 continents. That number sure looks pretty strong. Without qualification, anyway.
But that's not the whole story. One wonders in the modern age, how the Church's credibility can survive when it depends on hypertexted, well-funded, sophisticated western donors made aware of these sorts of happenings revealed this week:
VATICAN CITY – Germany's sex abuse scandal has now reached Pope Benedict XVI: His former archdiocese acknowledged it transferred a suspected pedophile priest while Benedict was in charge and criticism is mounting over a 2001 Vatican directive he penned instructing bishops to keep abuse cases secret.
The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict's handling of abuse claims both when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977-1982 and then the prefect of the Vatican office that deals with such crimes — a position he held until his 2005 election as pope.
What did Benedict know, and when did he know it? It is entirely possible, as clergy say, that he was unaware of the scandals in their early stage. But by 2000 then-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was almost as powerful as Pope John Paul II at the Vatican compound, right at the outbreak of the sex abuse scandal. Lest we forget, the ironically-named Cardinal Law fled the US and sought refuge in papal jurisdiction after his role in Boston's sex abuse ring came to light. The Church has had scandals for a long time. But we're not in the days of the Borgias and anti-popes.
As far as those billion Catholics, many of them never go to Mass and some don't even really believe. Not uncommon in Latin America, France or Italy. Do all Jews believe? Even among those Americans who keep attending, donors reel and peel away from the collection basket in protest of the sex abuse scandal. Now, Catholics in the U.S. are sizable. But American Catholicism is bolstered because of its poorer immigrants, and still waning. In Rhode Island, Catholics "dropped from 62 percent in 1990 to 46 percent today". Numbers problems:
Church attendance is way down... There is a serious "priest shortage" and an equally serious shortage of religious sisters. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Catholic elementary and high schools have closed down.
And in nearly every other white, developed country Catholicism diminishes rapidly. Even in Malachy's Ireland, scarce are Catholics to commit to life as a priest or as a nun or monk in a lay order. The only problem with the browning of the Church is that Africa and developing Asia don't have the money to keep the Church viable, in my estimation. American and British Catholics are absolutely essential to keeping the Vatican flowing, along with Catholic Charities and its other divisions.
But we're modernizing, becoming more reconciled to secularism and at least more tolerant of sexual freedom (outside Utah). Barring an upheaval, push will come to shove and make the church reevaluate when it can't find celibates for the priesthood.
More important, Catholicism may face the storm but Christianity won't.
Worldwide, secularism grows a bit but those who remain religious are more zealous, thanks to Islamic fundamentalism and... American fundamentalism. There were many countries in Latin America and Europe where Catholicism had a true monopoly on religion. Those countries are probably down to a dozen now with the influx of American missionaries. And don't assume that what comes is better than what came before, as more vocally homophobic evangelical and Mormon missionaries make indigenous people ashamed of nudity, root out the latent homosexuality of the Sotadic zone and encourage anti-witch hysteria in Nigeria, Sudan, et al, on a scale that you'd forget we're in the 21st century. Recall, Sarah Palin's own witch-inquisitor the Nigerian Thomas Muthee. In his home country stoning and burning witches to death and gay lynchings are commonplace, aided by American malfeasance. There are camps populated by dozens of child-witches who've survived the batterings, beatings and murder attempts of their parents. The Catholic Church's destructive influence--especially against condoms and abortion, and negligence during the Rwandan genocide--tends to be moderating compared with the religious violence, Christian against Muslim, husband against bride, mother against daughter, neighbor against gay, breaking out in Africa.
As a person educated by members of not one, not two, but three religious and lay orders, I try my best to maintain a nuanced understanding of how the Church conducts itself: where it comes from, where it is, what it's doing. Despite the fact that my socialist forebears viewed the Church as one of three antagonists to all that is good and decent, wedded to 2) the state and 3) capitalism. There's good and bad to the church. The church's many victims and many critics often don't look at its actions in context. It's capable of patronizing the arts and science and suppressing them. It is one the greatest institutional forces for religious tolerance today though violently not until recently, and is still bloodily against the scientific understanding of sexuality. But there's troubles, undeniably.
The reality is complicated. One of the most antisemitic events of the last two millenia was the Jewish pograms in reaction to the Plague. In Germany, entire Jewish communities were annihilated totally, 2000 in Strasborg, more in Cologne and Mainz. In the wake of the Shoah few cite this time with the weight merited, a footnote perhaps to the zealousness stemming from the Crusades. And fewer note accurately that the previously named Pope Clement VI condemned both the scapegoating of Jews for the plague and their massacre in two papal bulls. Furthermore, Clement directed clergy to shelter Jews from persecution. History is not tidy. His decision to oversee plague treatment at the Avignon palace led to the composition of the Chirurgia magna, the most important medical text until the Renaissance. Today, we have to admit that what John Paul II and Benedict XVI have done for for inter-religious dialogue something that, were it not for Vatican II, would be almost unprecedented. Despite "maddening inconsistencies", relations with other churches, Judaism and Islam are more harmonious, drastically, than they've been for a long time.
So we see, there may be a good or bad shepherd in the Vatican, but that is not the sum of the Church's effects in the real world. Can the CEO of a mighty corporation be a decent, tolerant, kind person in his or her own life? But the corporation is still an inhuman thing that will plunder and behave indifferent to the rights of the individual, and ruthlessly protect itself from reprisal for its own wrongdoings. And may, in the pursuit of its rational self interest, end up causing its own reversal:
Germany's justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, has cited the document as evidence that the Vatican created a "wall of silence" around abuse cases that prevented prosecution. Irish bishops have said the document had been "widely misunderstood" by the bishops themselves to mean they shouldn't go to police. And lawyers for abuse victims in the United States have cited the document in arguing that the Catholic Church tried to obstruct justice.
For the Church, we see that the pope's credibility strains, due to his role in the sex abuse scandal going back farther and deeper than imagined previously. Severe numbers problems with recruitment, attendance and maintaining (affluent) membership in the secularizing world, and the tide of fundamentalism threaten the Church's power.
Are the Church's beneficent and practical actions enough to outweigh practically the alienation, harm and resentment it's caused? Time will tell, maybe within our lives.