Читать книгу Can We Save the Catholic Church? - Hans Kung - Страница 24

No doubt, many people are of the opinion that the Catholic Church is irremediably, terminally ill and that it does not deserve to be saved. They believe that it cannot be reanimated. Recently, this erosion of faith in the Church’s ongoing vitality has even begun to affect traditional Catholic circles. It has become increasingly clear that the number of people who consider the Church necessary – or even useful – has continually decreased since the peak of public approval at the time of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), and under Benedict XVI it dropped to an all-time low. The results of significant surveys conducted in a number of Western countries show that this decline is not a development restricted to the ‘recalcitrant’ German-speaking countries.

In Italy, the land of the pope, less than half of the population still consider themselves to be Catholic, 20 per cent less than in 2004 (IARD RPS). This is despite the fact that more than 80 per cent consider religion to be important, a drop of only 8 per cent compared to six years previously. But many people want to have nothing more to do with the Church as an institution. Only 46 per cent still have confidence in the pope; six years ago the number stood at 60 per cent. Similar developments have been noted in such bastions of Catholicism as Spain, Ireland and even to some extent Poland. Three-quarters of American Catholics believe it is possible to be a good Catholic without submitting to the pope’s authority.

Such a development of ‘popular Catholicism’ is not surprising, considering the restoration course of the hierarchy described above. In the last few years, numerous Catholics, including wrongfully penalized and marginalized theologians such as Eugen Drewermann and Gotthold Hasenhüttl, Matthew Fox and many others, have had enough of appealing in vain against the course charted by the church leadership and have left the Church: not, indeed, the Catholic community of faith as such, but the public corporation known as the Roman Catholic Church, the community of persons paying the church tax or otherwise conforming to church discipline. People who have left the Church in protest against the German church tax include the Freiburg professor for church law Hartmut Zapp and the Regensburg engineer Dr Andreas Janker. This can set a precedent and should serve as a warning to the church hierarchy – it is understandable that if you have lost your faith in the Church you do not want to continue paying the church tax.

What is more ominous is that a much larger number of Catholics have distanced themselves emotionally from the Church. They remain nominally Catholic, but they have lost all interest in the Church as an institution. I share the assessment of Thomas von Mitschke-Collandes:

Many church members are reading up on how to leave the Church. This type of crisis is unique and unprecedented. Things have not yet calmed down. The numbers of people leaving the Church in 2010 could explode.

And the numbers did indeed explode.

In addition to the loss of faith in the Church among Catholics, we are seeing a growing hostility to the Church within secular society. All too many of our contemporaries feel the recent revelations of abuse have simply confirmed their view of the institutional Church as an unregenerate and power-hungry church hierarchy; they are convinced that local parishes and society in general have suffered immensely from the authoritarianism and dogmatism of church teaching, from the climate of fear the Church has generated, the sexual neuroses and the general refusal to enter into dialogue.

Some Catholics will of course object. Has not Rome recently ‘asked for forgiveness’ for its failures, its mistakes? Yes, but, as pope, Ratzinger did not personally admit his own wrongful involvement in the cover-up, and there were no practical consequences for the present and the future. The cases of sexual abuse and their cover-up have confirmed many people’s impression that the church administration and the Inquisition continue to create new victims and new suffering.

It cannot be denied that hardly any major institution in Western democratic countries treats dissenters and critics within its own ranks so inhumanely. And none of them discriminates so strongly against women, for example by prohibiting birth control, forbidding priests to marry, by prohibiting the ordination of women. No other institution polarizes society and politics so strongly with its rigorously divisive positions on issues such as homosexuality, stem cell research, abortion, assisted suicide and the like. And while Rome no longer dares to proclaim formally infallible doctrines, it still envelops all of its doctrinal pronouncements with an aura of infallibility, as though the pope’s words were a direct expression of God’s will or Christ’s voice.

Given this situation, it comes as no surprise that the more or less benevolent indifference to the Church that began some fifty years ago has in many cases slipped over into outright hostility, cynicism or even open enmity. Some would like to facilitate the demise of this terminally ill Church, to offer ‘assisted suicide’ so to speak. The media are continually serving up topics from the Church’s ‘criminal history’ calculated to appeal to a mass audience, many of which had been described decades ago in the books of the formerly Catholic author Karlheinz Deschner. While we cannot deny that such portrayals may be correct, it is all too easy to forget that a similar method would make it equally possible to write a sensationalist criminal history of Germany, France, Britain or the USA – to say nothing of all the monstrous crimes committed by modern atheists in the name of the goddess of reason, the nation, the race or the party.

However, even in modern-day secular France, Voltaire’s hate-filled dictum about the Catholic Church ‘Écrasez l’infâme’ (‘Crush the infamous thing’) – no longer finds expression in overt persecution; instead, there and elsewhere, it leads simply to the marginalization of the Church. The European Parliament caused quite a stir when the majority refused to include any reference to God in the preamble of the European Constitution; an understandable decision, given the numerous non-believers and believers of other faiths in Europe. But the unwillingness to include any mention of Christianity at all as constituting part of Europe’s cultural heritage alongside the legacies of antiquity and the Enlightenment is symptomatic of the growing malaise, and is incomprehensible in view of the undeniable epochal cultural achievements and humanitarian contributions of the churches in the past. Another example of such marginalization is the advertising campaign on London buses sponsored by militant atheists (admittedly in response to the threats of hell-fire flung at atheists by Christian fundamentalists): ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Often, such reactions simply mirror the Church’s own scaremongering, un-evangelical pronouncements, and the Church would do better to reflect on them critically as warning symptoms, instead of simply rejecting them out of hand.