Читать книгу Can We Save the Catholic Church? - Hans Kung - Страница 28

Few scenes in the recent history of the Catholic Church have troubled me as much as the one that took place on 8 April 2005 in St Peter’s Square in Rome. The occasion was the opulent funeral for Pope John Paul II, staged with a degree of pomp and circumstance that would have befitted a Roman emperor. As always, the camera work had been pre-arranged between the Vatican and Italian television, ensuring that the ceremony was impressively broadcast to an audience of many millions all over the globe. During the ceremony, Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dean of the College of Cardinals, and vested in festive crimson, came down the steps and took his place next to the deliberately chosen plain wooden coffin. Next to the coffin – placed there equally deliberately – stood a huge crucifix realistically representing the cruelly tortured body of the suffering and crucified Christ. I could not imagine a greater contrast. On the one side, one saw the opulently clad head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the modern name for the notorious, former Sanctum Officium of the Inquisition, which, with its authoritarian teachings and secret inquisitorial proceedings, has for centuries been responsible for the suffering of innumerable people within the Church and which to this day, more than any other papal institution, embodies the concentrated power of the new Imperium Romanum – a point underscored by the presence of 200 guests of state from all over the world, including, in the first row, the family of the war-mongering president of the United States, George W. Bush. On the other side, one saw the Man of Sorrows from Nazareth, who in his life had preached peace, non-violence and love, and who represents a last court of appeal for all those unjustly persecuted, tortured or suffering innocently.

Involuntarily, one is reminded of the figure of Christ in the famous chapter on the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. According to the tale, Jesus Christ has returned to sixteenth-century Spain and has been incarcerated by the Grand Inquisitor of Seville with the intention of burning him at the stake as a heretic because he dared to bring freedom to humankind, a freedom that, in the mind of the Grand Inquisitor, human beings are utterly incapable of living. Confronting Jesus, the Inquisitor demands to know: ‘Why have you come to get in our way?’ In response, the prisoner answers not a single word; instead, at the end of the Inquisitor’s reproaches, he gently kisses the wizened old man on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips. Touched by this incomprehensible gesture, the Grand Inquisitor, instead of pronouncing sentence, shows him the door, opens it and sends him away, saying: ‘Go and do not come back … do not come back at all … ever, ever!’

But Jesus does come back – again and again. I have often thought how easy it would be to transpose this story from gloomy sixteenth-century Seville to the friendlier Vatican of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The subject of the freedom of Christians is as topical as ever. And this perhaps constitutes ‘the fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism’, as Dostoyevsky conjectured when he had the Inquisitor say to Jesus: ‘It was all told to you by the Pope and so it is now all of it in the Pope’s possession, and now we should appreciate it if you would stay away altogether and refrain from interfering, for the time being at any rate.’ But then, to many people’s astonishment and dismay, Ratzinger – the head of the Congregation that today, although no less authoritarian than its predecessor, uses more subtle methods of repression – was himself elected pope. In an initial charm offensive, he presented himself as a humane and charitable shepherd, but time and again he revealed his old face as the merciless head of the Inquisition. And after a time, many people noted how Pope Benedict XVI was following a disastrous course not unlike that pursued by George W. Bush. It was no coincidence that, at Bush’s invitation, Benedict happily celebrated his 81st birthday in the White House, together with the autocratic president: both men, Bush and Ratzinger, proved themselves over the years to be incapable of learning anything, for example in their common stance on the issue of abortion. Both have exhibited an antipathy to serious reforms and a fondness for ostentatious public appearances. Both have ruled autocratically and without administrative transparency. Both have been intent on limiting people’s rights and freedoms and justify this with the need to maintain ‘security’.

As a corrective for poor or misguided leadership, the constitutions of democratic countries provide limited terms of office and regular elections. Unfortunately, the authoritarian papal monarchy makes no provision for such democratic correctives: not even the College of Bishops is empowered to curb an autocratic pope. The result is widespread alienation of a substantial number of believers and a moral dilemma for many of today’s most actively involved Catholics. As one prominent Catholic recently put it to me, ‘Ratzinger’s Church is not my Church!’ Many have already voted with their feet. Regularly, I receive suggestions – not just from indignant conservatives! – that I should imitate the many thousands who have left the Church in the last decades. Disappointed Catholics argue that in the eyes of the hierarchy and the conservative clergy and laity who increasingly set the tone in the Church, critical theologians are merely a ‘source of irritation’ to be ignored or silenced. In place of a truly broad, ‘Catholic’ Church reflecting the full spectrum of legitimate opinion and practice, Rome and its neo-conservative allies now dream of reducing the Church to a ‘small flock’ of ‘true believers’ unconditionally loyal to the pope and willing to follow Vatican directives.

But, then, before my mind’s eye, very different images of the Catholic Church take form.