fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Catholic Crisis: This Time, It’s Different

Sometimes it is wise to keep calm and carry on in the face of church problems. For Rome, this is not one of those moments
Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 11.35.10 AM

That above is Pope Francis meeting with Cardinal George Pell, who died this week. Both men's names were much talked about at the table last night with three young American Catholics in Budapest for a fun weekend together. The guys are all theological conservatives, well educated and well informed about things going on in their church. Naturally they're concerned about the situation today. We got to talking about the bombshell "Demos" memo authored secretly by Cardinal Pell, who described the Francis papacy as a "catastrophe." In the memo, Pell called on the cardinals heading into the eventual conclave that will replace Francis to choose someone who will address several grave problems in the Roman Curia and papacy.

One of the guys at the table las night has Italian ancestry. He told us that his relatives in Rome are sanguine about the whole thing. Their attitude is basically: This city has seen the Church's fortunes rise and fall over two millennia. It has seen holy popes, wicked popes, mediocre popes, the lot. We aren't going to get too worked up over the corruption today. This too shall pass.

Advertisement

Sometimes that kind of approach is wise, even courageous. But, as I told my new friends last night, I think it is really dangerous right now, for the Catholic Church. Leaving aside that unaddressed corruption may result in the loss of souls, it is also very risky for the Church itself, in a way that it wouldn't have been in almost any previous era. Why? I told them the story in Edward J. Watts's great book The Final Pagan Generation, which is about the transformation of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Essentially, Watts explains that the pagan elites honestly didn't see that Christianity was overturning paganism. For them, yes, the Christians were an upstart sect, but no real threat to Rome's ancestral religion. Rome had been pagan for many centuries, and always would be. Aren't the temples still open, despite the Christians? People need to calm down about Christianity. This too shall pass.

Well.

We had been talking too about the belief by a certain number of thinkers on the Catholic Right that the way to fix things is to achieve and exercise political power. I brought up the case of Julian the Apostate, who used his time as Caesar in the mid-fourth century to attempt to reverse the growth of Christianity. He died after only two years on the imperial throne, but it is highly doubtful that he could have succeeded in any case. The cultural currents carrying Rome towards the new religion were simply too deep, too wide, and too strong. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to achieve political power and use it for the good. What it means is that political power is not enough if the hearts and minds of the people haven't been converted.

One of the Catholic men brought up the case of Gen. Franco in Spain. He was a strong Catholic who, after his forces defeated the Left in the Spanish Civil War, established a strongman state that gave Catholicism center stage. But after Franco died, Catholicism suffered a huge collapse. The reasons for this were varied, but the point to take away is that the exercise of political power alone not only can't save a religion, but it might even work against the religion taking hold in the hearts of the people. I know Russian Orthodox believers living in Moscow who struggle with their faith because the Church's senior leadership are so close to the State. And look at Ireland, where the Catholic faith is flat on its back. One reason for this is the revelations of how the State deferred to the Church in covering up clerical sex abuse. Again, there are a number of reasons for Catholicism's failure in Ireland, and anyway, Ireland has been a democracy for a long time, not an autocracy like Franco's Spain or Putin's Russia. Still, the very close collaboration of Church and State ended up hurting the Church regarding the abuse scandal -- and, of course, the State, which never, ever should have protected the Church from itself.

I wish I could find the source of the quote I once read from Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, who was asked about his belief that Hungary should be unapologetically Christian (or Judeo-Christian, as his government supports Jewish institutions too). Orban responded that there were limits in what any politician can do to strengthen the faith. He said something along the lines of, "As a politician, I can give you things. I can't give you meaning." His point is that the State can help create the conditions in which religion can thrive, but the health and strength of the faith itself depends on religious institutions and the people that lead them.

Advertisement

I wish I had brought up historian Barbara Tuchman's book The March Of Folly, specifically the chapter on how the folly of six Renaissance popes led to the Reformation. In it, she sums up her case:

Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.

What those Renaissance popes also had to deal with was the advent of a new technology, printing, that allowed ideas to spread much faster than they had before, and made it very difficult to control their advance. They had been formed by a pre-print world. Similarly, the senior officials in the Roman Curia today, including the Pope, was formed by a pre-Internet world. The primary reason the abuse scandal shook the Catholic Church in the early part of this decade, and not before, was the Internet. A legal case in Boston of clerical sex abuse and cover-up (the 2002 John Geoghan trial) would not likely have led to a nationwide reckoning, because Catholics all across America would only have learned about it by reading their newspapers or watching it on TV. They would have received the information as a Boston story. But the Internet changed everything. It made up to date information about the Boston case widely available around the world, at the same time it was available in Boston. It also allowed ordinary Catholics to comment for a potentially worldwide audience on their anger and frustration with the way their bishops handled these grave matters. Information that had to pass gatekeepers to make it to the public in ages past was now instantly and widely available. That changed everything.

I remember being home in Louisiana visiting my folks, in 2004, when it broke that a previous Catholic bishop of Baton Rouge, the very conservative Joseph Sullivan, had been a sex abuser in the 1970s. I went to mass that weekend, and heard a priest read from the pulpit a statement by the then-bishop, acknowledging Bishop Sullivan's crimes. When the priest substituting for the parish's pastor that weekend finished reading the bishop's statement, he instructed the congregation not to talk about what Bishop Sullivan did. I was furious! But later, I had to laugh at the stupidity of that priest, thinking that the laity would obey his order not to talk about the fact that one of their prior bishops had sexually abused a male minor. That might have worked in a past age, but today, it's like King Canute ordering the incoming tide to reverse course.

In looking for that Tuchman quote just now, I came across an old post from my Beliefnet days, which may well apply here. I copied it here, but had to take the link to Shirky's post down, because it has gone dead:

In a post about the future of media business models, Clay Shirky offers the following rumination on an archaeological book by Joseph Tainter, “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” He says Tainter’s thesis is that complex societies of the past collapsed not in spite of being sophisticated, but because they were so sophisticated they couldn’t adapt to changed conditions. Here’s Shirky:

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake–“[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.
When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

I read somewhere, ages ago, that a good definition of institutional corruption is when the leadership class of the institution understands that it has to change to save itself, but is unable to do so. Can the Roman Curia be said to be corrupt in that precise way? I don't know. But it's worth considering.

I wrote this post as a response to what my new friend said about his Roman relatives and the way they think about crisis and corruption in the Vatican. There is deep wisdom in their approach, one that excitable declinists like me should pay attention to. On the other hand, that was the stance the Roman elites of the fourth century took towards the Empire's paganism. It did not turn out well for them.

I'll end by quoting from the introduction to Watts's book. My copy is on the other side of the Atlantic, so I've had to go to the "Look Inside" feature of Amazon. The key thing to note is that by the end of the fourth century, it was the young men, both pagan and Christian, who grasped what was happening. The older men, both pagan and Christian, did not. Today, the Vatican is governed by old men who do not know what time it is, and who persist in the self-destructive folly that Cardinal Pell called out, and that Barbara Tuchman documented in her study of why ecclesial corruption left unaddressed by a series of popes led to the Reformation:

More:

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now
JON FRAZIER
JON FRAZIER
I would suggest the 16th century was a time of great danger for the Catholic Church, yes even greater than today. There was a real danger that public disgust with the debauchery and corruption in Rome coupled with the rise of national monarchies greedy for the Church's wealth and resentful of its power (while the Turks were victorious in much of eastern Europe) could have led to the Church being suppressed entirely. Only the fact some secular powers, notably Spain, chose to ally with the Papacy and prop it up by force of arms saved the institutional Church.
schedule 1 year ago
Tannhäuser
Tannhäuser
Dear Rod,

One thing I would point is that the secular mindset of the long twentieth century would understand both Roman religion and Christian religion as reducible to "superstition" which our mass-produced world of skyscrapers, calculators, and automobiles enable modern people to safely sneer at, whereas both sides of the debate sixteen centuries back understood that religious rites had real power and imparted at least some information about the world to their respective initiates. This idea that Zoom conferences adequately stand in for sacramental worship is probably tied to why the experience machine you mention in your other post is so much more popular than it was in earlier generations, because they all represent the same Weltanshauung

The iconoclasm against the Pagan temples did not result in the gods of Mount Olympus being permanently erased. During the Renaissance Artists returned to the Greek interest in the human form and classical subjects. Poe's Raven perches above a pallid bust of Pallas (Athena). In cities in Guatemala I often walked down "Calle Minerva" or saw temples to Minerva built at the beginning of the twentieth century. Neptune guards the Library of Congress in Washington and the Muses watch over the books inside. A great statue of Diana the huntress stands in the South of Mexico City, six miles south of the hill where the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego. Tales of Mount Olympus, even images of those said to sit in its courts have spread across distances and centuries which "the last Pagan generation" could never have imagined. You and I have never bowed down before graven images of Athena, Diana, or Juno, nor made blood sacrifices to them, but their voices have not been permanently silenced.

More than a millennia after the fall of Rome, you are still discussing what goes on in Vatican City. Rome retains authority and relevance, not because of the fearsome soldiers bearing signs of Triumphant Alphas of Mount Olympus, but because of humble priests bearing the sign of the Alpha and the Omega from the hill of Golgotha. Zeus's daughters and sisters may well have more prominence in the world which worships the Jewish carpenter than they would have if their father the thunderer was still the most important divinity in Rome. What is True and resonant with the human personality survives iconoclasm and can be rebuilt just as ants can rebuild from any destruction of the anthill which leaves enough survivors alive.

What Wesley Yang has called successor ideology poses a threat to Washington DC, just as Bolshevism did to Tsarist Moscow and Christianity did to Pagan Rome. The successor ideology appears to be simplistic, and if that is truly the case its dominion, like that of Bolshevism, will be measurable in terms of decades at most. If the successor ideology actually lasts it will only be because it has the potential to do with the hill of Golgotha what Christendom eventually did with Mount Olympus: spread the imagery and stories far beyond where it could have reached with its existing toolkit. The future you are most afraid of, where the Successor ideology triumphs and suppresses Christianity for more than two generations without something stronger rising up from the ruins is not something I think is possible...and anyway NATO is no more the entire world than the Warsaw pact was.
schedule 1 year ago
Martin Terrell
Martin Terrell
Rod, I like the flit from the 4th to the 16th century, which have a lot in common with our own time. We see the old religion being discarded while its priests carry on as if nothing has changed.
schedule 1 year ago
GArcuri
GArcuri
Rod,
Having been raised a devout Roman Catholic who is now practicing my faith in a Reformed tradition, I always pay close attention to your commentaries on the Catholic church. I find your thoughts helpful and useful. I often reflect on your own spiritual journey from an uninformed, seemingly anodyne Protestant upbringing to the far more ecclesiastical and sacramental world of Roman Catholicism, since it is the reverse of my own journey ( with the exception that I have found the Reformed faith anything but anodyne, and I miss some of benefits of church hierarchy, tradition, and liturgy ).

So, one thing continues to puzzle me, and I don't mean to sound critical here. I am struggling to understand how you can continue to be vocal in your criticisms of the Roman Catholic church which "failed you", but you seem to remain silent on the - in my way of thinking as a Christian - indefensible support of the Putin regime by the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. Yes, I know that the Russian Orthodox Church is but one branch of the Orthodox world, but is it so distinct that it should be given a pass in the current crisis? Are not the position and behavior of the leaders of that church indefensible from a biblical and moral point of view?

The reason I want to understand your position on this is that I have continued to follow your spiritual journey into expressions of faith that are, in my view, increasingly laced with experiences that depend to a greater or lesser extent on belief in traditions which on the surface seem powerful and good, but which I have a hard time squaring with Scripture per se. ( I am a Protestant for reasons. )Visions and miracles and legends and relics, etc. I left that all behind me when I very deliberately and with much thought, prayer, reading the Bible... and trepidation, chose to leave the Roman Catholic church and pursue what I considered to be a pattern of Christian living apart from the trappings of a "mystical" sect. I have never regretted my choice.

I see Orthodoxy as sort of the mirror image of Roman Catholicism, very hierarchical, loaded with tradition, only with additional mystical elements added on top, including a very haunting and beautiful set of ancient liturgies.

So, I ask myself: if a serious seeker like Rod Dreyer is pursuing these more mystical expressions of the Christian experience, who is simultaneously being critical of one of two of the great "mystical" orders of Christendom ( the Roman Catholic church ), why is he silent about the current corruption in the Russian Orthodox church?

Perhaps I missed something.

Best regards.
schedule 1 year ago
    Fran Macadam
    Fran Macadam
    I think you need to learn more about non-soviet Russia both past and present and even more acutely the Russian Orthodox church and its leadership.
    Because of war, propaganda is substituting for genuine news and journalism. The situation we are now in is largely the fault of western leadership, much of it originating with deep state players seeking world conquest.
    schedule 1 year ago
      GArcuri
      GArcuri
      Fran,

      I've read and studied a great deal of both Soviet and non-Soviet Russian history and culture. ( I have read many of the "greats" of Russian literature, a great deal of Russian history, and I am an armchair student of Stephen Kotkin! ) I appreciate the role of propaganda, but I am do not see how that vindicates Russian Orthodox support for Putin - if that is what you are saying - nor do I understand or accept that the "situation we are in" is largely the fault of western leadership. Though I have great respect for John Mearsheimer, the foremost proponent of this viewpoint, I think he and Vlad Vexler should debate this proposition, and may the best man win.

      Perhaps you could extrapolate on these things.

      Best regards,
      Gerald
      schedule 1 year ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    To be fair to Rod, he has criticized the Putin regime and Patriarch Kirill, though he has not made a major theme of it.
    schedule 1 year ago
      GArcuri
      GArcuri
      Thanks, Jon.

      I do want to be fair to Rod, and I don't always get to read everything he writes - he's too prolific by far. I will apply the judgement of charity here and accept that Rod has been critical of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and somehow I've missed it.

      Be blessed,
      Gerald
      schedule 1 year ago
Fran Macadam
Fran Macadam
It's not correct to call Russia's system the same as Spain's under Franco, who was an unelected military dictator for decades. There have been multiple elections with various political parties since 1991. The United States even ran one of them in 1996 in favor of its candidate, Boris Yeltsen. Yanks to the Rescue! Folks like Putin were the Reformation to the corrupt Yeltsin papacy.
schedule 1 year ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    Not unlike Porfirio Diaz in Mexico- a one time reformer who decided to stick around forever.
    schedule 1 year ago