Can We Save the Catholic Church?

The Arab Spring has shaken a whole series of autocratic regimes. With the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis, might something like this be possible in the Catholic Church as well – a ‘Vatican Spring’?

Of course, the system of the Roman Catholic Church is quite different from those prevailing in Tunisia and Egypt, to say nothing of the absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia. In all these countries, the reforms that have taken place until now are often no more than minor concessions, and even these are often threatened by those who oppose any progressive reforms in the name of tradition. In Saudi Arabia, most of the traditions, in fact, are only two centuries old; the Catholic Church, by contrast, claims to rest on traditions that go back twenty centuries to Jesus Christ himself.

Is this claim true? In reality, throughout its first millennium, the Church got along quite well without the monarchist–absolutist papacy that we now take for granted. It was only in the eleventh century that a ‘revolution from above’, started by Pope Gregory VII and known as the ‘Gregorian Reform’, gave us the three outstanding features that mark the Roman System to this day:

• a centralist–absolutist papacy;

• clericalist juridicism; and,

• obligatory celibacy for the clergy.

Efforts to reform this system by the reforming councils in the fifteenth century, by the Protestant and Catholic reformers of the sixteenth century, by the supporters of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, most recently, by the champions of a progressive-liberal theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, managed to achieve only partial success. Even the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, while addressing many concerns of the reformers and modern critics, was effectively thwarted by the power of the papal Curia and managed to implement only a few of the demanded changes. To this day the Curia – in its current form a creature of the eleventh century – is the chief obstacle to any thorough-going reform of the Catholic Church, to any honest ecumenical reconciliation with the other Christian Churches and the world religions, and to any critical, constructive coming-to-terms with the modern world. To make things worse, supported by the Curia, under the previous two popes, there has been a fatal return to old absolutist attitudes and practices.

Had Jorge Mario Bergoglio asked himself why, until now, no pope had ever dared to take the name Francis? This Argentine Jesuit with Italian roots was, in any case, well aware that in choosing this name he was calling up the memory of Francis of Assisi, that famous social dropout of the thirteenth century. As a young man, Francis, the son of a wealthy silk merchant of Assisi, had led a high-spirited, worldly life like other well-situated young men of the city; then suddenly, at the age of 24, a series of experiences led him to renounce family, wealth and career. In a dramatic gesture before the judgement seat of the Bishop of Assisi, he stripped off his sumptuous clothing and deposited it at his father’s feet.

It was astonishing to see how Pope Francis, from the moment of his election, clearly chose a new style quite different from that of his predecessor: no bejewelled golden mitre, no ermine-trimmed crimson shoulder-cape, no tailor-made red shoes and ermine-trimmed red cap, no pompous papal throne decorated with the triple crown, the emblem of papal political might.

Equally astonishing is the way the new pope consciously refrains from melodramatic gestures and high-blown rhetoric and speaks the language of ordinary people, just as a layperson would do, were the laity not forbidden to preach by Rome.

Lastly, it is astonishing how the new pope emphasizes his human side: he asked people to pray for him before he blessed them; like every other cardinal, he paid his own hotel bill after his election; he showed his solidarity with the cardinals by taking the same bus back to their residence and then cordially taking leave of them. On Maundy Thursday he went to a local prison to wash the feet of young convicts, including a woman – and a Muslim at that. Clearly, he is showing himself to be a man with his feet on the ground.

All of this would have pleased Francis of Assisi, and it is exactly the opposite of everything that his papal contemporary – Innocent III (1198–1216), the mightiest pope of the Middle Ages – stood for. In reality, Francis of Assisi represents the alternative to the Roman System that has dominated the Catholic Church since the beginning of the end of the first millennium. What might have happened had Innocent III and his entourage listened to Francis and rediscovered the demands of the Gospel? Without question, one need not take them as literally as Francis did; it is the spirit behind them that counts. The teachings of the Gospel represent a mighty challenge to the Roman System – that centralistic, juridicized, politicized and clericalized power structure that has dominated Christ’s Church in the West since the eleventh century.

What, then, should the new pope do? The big question for him is: where does he stand on serious church reform? Will he carry out the long-overdue reforms that have become log-jammed in the past decades? Or will he allow things to go on in the way they have done under his predecessors? In either case, the outcome is clear:

• If he embarks on a course of reform, he will find broad support, even beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church. Many Orthodox and Protestant Christians, Jews and believers of other faiths – to say nothing of many non-believers – have long awaited these reforms, which are absolutely imperative if the Roman Catholic Church is to realize its potential to give convincing witness to the Gospel and to voice the urgent demands for peace and justice in today’s world. The Church can only give such witness when it ceases to be turned in on itself, fixed on defending its institutional structures and its traditional manner of speaking.

• If he continues the present course of retrenchment, the call to rise up and revolt (exemplified in Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage: Indignez-vous!, [2011]) will grow ever louder in the Catholic Church and increasingly incite people to take things into their own hands, initiating reforms from below without hierarchical approval and often in the face of all attempts to thwart them. In the worst case, the Catholic Church will experience a new Ice Age instead of a new spring, and it will run the risk of shrinking down to a mere sect, still counting many members but otherwise socially and religiously irrelevant.

Nevertheless, I have well-founded hopes that the concerns expressed in this book will be taken seriously by the new pope. To use the medical analogy that serves as the leitmotif of this book, the Church’s only alternative to what would amount to assisted suicide is radical cure. That means more than a new style, a new language, a new collegial tone; it means carrying out the long-overdue, radical structural reforms and the urgently needed revision of the obsolete and unfounded theology behind the many problematical dogmatic and ethical positions that his predecessors have attempted to impose upon the Church. If Pope Francis commits himself to such a radical reform, he will not only find broad support within the Church, but he will also win back many of those who, publicly or privately, have long since abandoned the Church. Such a renewed Roman Catholic Church could once again become the witness to the Gospel of Christ that it was meant to be.

Hans Küng

Tübingen, July 2013

Note on the Present English Edition

This book originally appeared in 2011 under the title Ist die Kirche noch zu retten? For this revised version, the first in the English language, material of interest only to the German audience has been omitted and the text has also been updated to reflect events which have occurred since 2011, especially in connection with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and appointment of Pope Francis earlier this year.

This English translation was generously supported by a grant from the Herbert Haag Foundation for Freedom in the Church, Lucerne, Switzerland.

Let me begin by saying that I would have preferred not to have had to write this book. But with the appointment of Pope Francis we have an unprecedented opportunity, not seen since the days of John XXIII, to fulfil the aims and promises of his Second Vatican Council, and truly bring the Church into a meaningful dialogue with the modern world.

I would have preferred not to write this book because, despite this time of great hope and promise, it will not make pleasant or comfortable reading for many Catholics. And it is not at all pleasant for me, either, to address such a critical publication to the people who make up the Church, because, despite my often painful and bitter experiences with the merciless Roman System which up to now has governed the Church, the Catholic community of faith remains my spiritual home. But it is my hope that the recommendations in this book will aid the Church’s recovery from what I see, and what I will go on to describe, as a debilitating and potentially terminal illness from which the Church is presently suffering.

For decades now, with mixed success at best and with virtually no impact at all on the Church’s hierarchy, I have repeatedly called attention to the serious, growing crisis within the Catholic Church, pointing out that it is primarily a crisis of the Church’s leadership and not of the faithful, as many in the hierarchy would have us believe. In recent years, however, the revelations of countless cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergymen – cases that have been occurring for decades and which have been consistently hushed up both by Rome and by bishops around the world – has made this systemic crisis clearly visible to the world at large, and calls for a well-thought-out theological response. With Pope Francis’s appointment of a panel of cardinals to advise him on a reform of the Roman Curia (the machinery of power surrounding the pope in the Vatican), such a theological response is now more urgent than ever to support the voices of many people within the Church who have long been crying out for change.

A reform of the Curia presents us, at this fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, with an opportunity to effect a paradigm shift in the Catholic Church. Under Popes Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, over the last three decades, a course of restoration to pre-Council times, rather than reform, was pursued relentlessly and this continues to exert an increasingly dramatic and deadly influence not just within the Catholic Church but also within the whole Christian ecumenical movement. Benedict XVI’s pontificate was, for me, a pontificate of missed opportunities. None of his triumphal appearances and journeys (whether staged as ‘pilgrimages’ or ‘state visits’), none of his brilliant encyclicals, nor his communication offensives, could hide the existence of the long-standing crisis in which the Church now finds itself. In the Federal Republic of Germany alone, in the last five years, hundreds of thousands of people have left the Church, and the population generally is becoming increasingly estranged from church institutions of any kind.

I repeat: I would have preferred not to write this book. In fact, I would not have written it, if:

• my hope that Pope Benedict would lead our Church forward in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council had not been so thoroughly destroyed. Back in 2005, in our four-hour, private and friendly conversation in Castel Gandolfo, my former Tübingen colleague seemed to hold out such a promise. Instead, however, Benedict obstinately adhered to the path of restoration pursued by his predecessor, distancing himself from the Council’s spirit in important points and from the many faithful Catholics whom the Council inspired. Furthermore, Ratzinger signally failed in his handling of the sexual abuses committed by Catholic clergymen all over the world.

• the bishops had exercised their collective responsibility for the Church as a whole – a responsibility explicitly acknowledged and encouraged by the Vatican Council – and had themselves vigorously spoken out and taken effective action against the scandals in the Church. Instead, however, under Wojtyla’s and Ratzinger’s rule, most of them became subservient once again to the Vatican, only too eager to toe the line without attempting to voice opinions of their own or to act independently. At best, they gave only hesitant and unconvincing answers to questions raised by the modern challenges facing the Church.

• the theologians had, as in former times, strongly and publicly stood together to oppose Rome’s new repressive measures and its attempts to control the selection of the next generation of teachers in university faculties and seminaries. Instead, however, most Catholic theologians, fearing censure and marginalization, now skirt around taboo topics of dogmatic or moral theology rather than face up to them in an unbiased and critical manner. Only very few, therefore, dare to support the global and grassroots Catholic reform organizations such as We are Church, Call to Action and, in Ireland, the Association of Catholic Priests.

To make matters worse, the advocates of reform in the Roman Catholic Church receive little support from Protestant theologians and church leaders, many of whom consider the reform issues to be a purely internal affair of the Catholic Church. All too often, they are content to cultivate cosy, friendly relations with the Vatican instead of exercising the freedom of a true Christian to speak out when needed. In the latest disputes about the Catholic Church and other churches, just as in other public discussions, lively theological discussion and fruitful controversy play only a minor role; thus the theologians miss their opportunity to issue a vigorous call for much-needed reform.

From many quarters, I have been urged to take a strong and clear stand on the current and future condition of the Catholic Church. And so, rather than writing individual newspaper columns and articles, I have decided to pen this compact summary to set forth and justify my carefully considered view of the crux of this crisis: namely that the Catholic Church – this great community of faith – is seriously ill, suffering under the Roman system of rule, a system which developed during the second millennium and which, despite opposition, remains in place today.

As I will show later, this Roman system of rule is characterized by a monopoly on power and truth, by legalism and clericalism, by hostility to sexuality, by misogyny and by clerical use of pressure on the laity. This system is not exclusively responsible for (though it does bear the main responsibility for) the three great divisions, or schisms, of Christianity: first, the East–West schism in the eleventh century, dividing the Western from the Eastern branches of the Church; then, the Reformation schism in the sixteenth century, dividing the Western (i.e. Roman Catholic) Church from the Protestant churches; and, finally, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the separation of Roman Catholicism from the enlightened modern world.

The Cause of the Illness

To begin, let me make one thing clear: I am an ecumenical theologian concerned with the Church in all its manifestations, and I am by no means fixated exclusively on the figure of the pope. In my book Christianity: Its Essence and History (1995), I devoted over 1,000 pages to a description and analysis of the history of Christianity as a whole. But it cannot be denied that the papacy is the central element of the Roman Catholic paradigm, and it is the papacy and its power that is primarily and urgently in need of reform.

The papacy as it took shape in the Christian Church of the first centuries, i.e. as a ministry in succession to St Peter, was and remains to this day a meaningful institution for many Christians, not just Roman Catholics. But, from the eleventh century onwards, this institution gradually morphed into the monarchical–absolutist papacy that has dominated the history of the Roman Catholic Church ever since. It is this monarchical–absolutist papacy that has been responsible for the three great schisms mentioned above. Ever since the Middle Ages, the growing power of the papacy within the Catholic Church, notwithstanding numerous political setbacks and cultural defeats, has become the crux of the Roman Catholic Church’s history. Thus, Catholicism’s contemporary neuralgia is not a problem of liturgy, theology, lay piety, monastic rules or art, but rather a problem linked to the very constitution of the Roman Catholic Church. In traditional histories of the Catholic Church, however, far too little critical attention has been given to the problems generated by how the papacy has developed. For this reason, I will examine these problems with special care in the present book, not least because of their explosive ecumenical significance, for their consequences are not confined to the Roman Catholic Church alone; they also affect the other Christian denominations, the dialogue with other religions and ideologies, and the relationship of the Catholic Church to the modern world as a whole.