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The illness of the Catholic Church did not begin yesterday; it started long ago. The Church’s medical history is so old and complex that a detailed anamnesis (Greek: ‘remembrance’) is required. It will be necessary to enquire into the preliminary events leading up to the outbreak of the illness. Just as the doctor, psychotherapist or counsellor attempts, in conversation with the patient, to uncover significant moments of the progress of an illness, so the theologian and historian can discover root causes of the present illness in the history of the Church’s ailing body. However, for this anamnesis he or she will need a non-ideological, carefully diagnostic approach to history.

In any event, the optimistic, harmonious interpretation of church history created by theologians in the nineteenth century is not at all helpful for a serious diagnosis and therapy, although this, of course, is the version preferred and put forward by the church authorities to immunize themselves against all criticism that might suggest pathological developments. According to this version, the Church’s 2,000-year history represents an organic growth of teachings, laws, liturgy and piety. This view allows the Church to justify novel Roman dogmas which in fact were only enforced in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century: the doctrines that the pope enjoys immediate and absolute authority over the Church in all its parts (universal jurisdiction), and that he enjoys guaranteed freedom from error when he solemnly pronounces on matters of faith and morals (infallibility), are specific examples. Further examples are two doctrines on the Virgin Mary, namely her freedom from sin from the moment of her conception (Immaculate Conception), and her bodily assumption into heaven at the end of her life (Assumption). And at the same time, this harmonizing approach to church history makes it possible to explain and take for granted the personal foibles and systematic abuses of power on the part of iniquitous holders of office. According to this approach, the Church is an enormous healthy tree in a state of continual growth, development and refinement, even though it occasionally carries dead branches and discards rotten fruit.

Such an idealized historical account can serve as a palliative, helping to make the disease of the Church psychologically endurable, but it does not face up to the causes of the illness. Often it simply serves merely as a placebo, as pseudo-medication, useful because of its calming effect on pious churchgoers and rebellious reformers. Those who share the lopsided view of the history of the Catholic Church as an organic process of maturation are unable and unwilling to take note of obvious abnormal, pathological phenomena, even when they clearly infect the whole body of the Church. Because the official representatives of the Church have been the ones mostly and primarily responsible for these phenomena and because the Church’s representatives cannot and do not want to admit their existence, over the centuries alarming relapses have occurred time and again, despite intermediate, quasi-miraculous improvements. And the popes in particular have been far from innocent in contributing to these relapses. Instead of admitting the papal involvement in such relapses, the Holy Fathers prefer to canonize even their quite ‘unholy’ predecessors such as Pius IX, Pius X, and perhaps also Pius XII – canonizations which at best can be viewed as a confirmation of the simul iustus et peccator (of the saint and the sinner in one)!

On the one hand, while I reject the optimistic, harmonious view of the Church’s history, I also reject the hate-filled denunciatory interpretation, which does not have a single good word to say about the Church. I agree neither with the uncritical admirers nor with the resentful critics, as both groups see only one side of the Church. Because the history of the Church – like that of all other big institutions – is mixed, I propose instead to make the effort to differentiate.

A detailed anamnesis will start with the historical causes of the illness and at the same time explain how things could come to such a pass. Non-historians may also observe many things on the surface, but cannot explain them. Often, behind the efficient organization stands a powerful financial machine making use of quite worldly methods. The impressive mass celebrations of Catholic unity all too often manifest only a superficial form of Christianity lacking in substance. The conformist hierarchy often consists mainly of clerical functionaries always keeping an eye on Rome for orientation, servile to those above them and autocratic towards those below. Embedded in the closed system of doctrines and dogmas is an obsolete, authoritarian, unbiblical, sterilely orthodox theology. And even those proudly acclaimed Western cultural achievements ascribed to the Church have often been accompanied by excessive worldliness and a neglect of real clerical duties.

Already I can already hear the objections of the apologists of the church establishment: Quo iure? – what right have you to sit in judgement on the institution of the Church? I can only repeat: I am not a judge but a theologian–therapist; I do not wish to sit in judgement but to provide a diagnosis and suggest remedies like a doctor, a psychotherapist or a counsellor. Admittedly, my recommendations, expounded at length in so many books and substantiated there in detail, have not been appreciated by the authorities to whom, along with a larger public, they are addressed. The authorities have found my recommendations so uncomfortable because many of these people are themselves caught up in the pathogenic structures. And they do not want to hear about necessary surgical operations and reforms in the body of the Church.

But, the apologists exclaim, surely it is not just a matter of historical changes within the institution? No indeed, it is a question of something far more permanent, a question of the truth, of the eternal truth. And the question is: what must endure in the Church, what should be the criterion for the truth?