Essay
Global Pulpit
Are there rational reasons for a political presence of the Vatican on the world stage? The German philosopher and self-described “Rhineland Catholic,” Otto Kallscheuer, thinks there is. But Pope Benedict XVI is not off to a flying start.
Even in today’s modern age, there is a strong argument to be made for the Holy See’s active presence in the international arena. Now that the power of the papacy has long since been reduced to a “minuscule and, as it were, symbolic temporal sovereignty,” as Pope Paul VI put it in 1965, the power politics in which earlier popes actively participated for centuries have been replaced by the papacy playing a metapolitical role. Such a presence in the emerging international public sphere could contribute to mediating religious conflicts—not only because the Vatican, in contrast to nation states, is an institution well suited to deal with the demands of globalization, but also because it possesses professional routines and knowledgeable actors trained in normative politics.
For a good two and a half decades, international politics has been marked by the return of religious motifs, symbols, and conflicts. Ethnic and identity conflicts, civilizational distinctions, and power interests are interpreted much more through a religious lens in the early 21st century than was the case at the beginning of the 20th century. With the rise of religious symbols, conflicts concerning politics, ethnicities, identities, and interests can also be resolved or overcome through religious interpretation.
A Pope for Buddhists?
One question that must first be answered is whether there are international institutions of transnational “religious policy” other than the Catholic Church. In fact, there is nothing of the sort, in Christianity or in any other world religion. In the 1970s and 1980s, at the high point of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the peace movement in Western Europe, the Protestant World Council of Churches was able to raise hopes around the world of a “Christian” means of overcoming conflicts. But even in these years, no theological understanding emerged between the Christian West and East—between more liberal Protestantism and the traditional spirituality of Greek, Russian, and Serbian Orthodoxy. In the face of the explosive worldwide growth of Pentecostalism outside the historical established churches, the Ecumenical Council remains rather powerless, outside of the mainline historical churches or denomination.
And outside of Christianity? Is the Dalai Lama a sort of “pope for Buddhists?” As doubtful as an analogy between the many forms of Buddhism and the Christian churches may be, the combined political and religious role of the Tibetan leader creates a parallel to the 19th century Catholic political crisis, when the pope was simultaneously the sovereign of the papal state in middle-Italy and the spiritual head of a world religion. So far, however, the fourteenth Dalai Lama has not clearly decoupled the spiritual authority of the reborn Buddha from his political role as the exiled leader of a nation and culture fighting for autonomy. Should this separation of religious authority and civil power actually occur, the Dalai Lama or his successor in exile could perhaps become the apostle of a global Buddhism.
No institution comparable to the papacy—a universal monarchy with purely spiritual authority but indirect political power—is found in the Islamic world, aside from the Ismailite Shia, an extreme minority of the “party of Ali,” whose world leader is the Aga Khan. The message of Islam, like the Gospel, is geared universally toward expansion, mission, and globalization. But a billion Muslims have no international form of organization that would offer a starting point to relativize their local conflicts and rationalize their political defeats and identity crises.
Rome as Anti-Modern International?
As an international actor, the Catholic Church has a pre-national systemic memory that prepared it well for the “post-national age” much better than purely national institutions. However, this orientation also involved it again and again in conflicts with Western, liberal-democratic modernity. After all, for centuries the Roman Church formed the ideological state-apparatus for multinational empires like the Habsburg, Spanish, and Lusitanian empires. Only rarely (as in Poland and Ireland) did it provide the cultural code for national liberation movements. In the “long nineteenth century,” the Church saw itself as a fighter against liberal modernity; it tragically experienced the conflict between its own universal mandate and the inexorable victory of the national idea in Europe.
As a temporal sovereign, the papal state was thus on the losing side: Rome lost resources of hard power through the fall of the Catholic ancient regimes in Central and Latin Europe during opposition to the modern great powers of northern Europe: post-revolutionary France, the German Empire, and the British Empire. And Rome’s soft power, its ideological opposition to nearly all the national, liberal, and democratic emancipation movements on the old continent, did not gain support in secular European politics. In return, however, the papacy succeeded in spiritually reorienting and centralizing the Catholic Church at the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), thereby preventing its breakup into national churches. In return, the development of national autonomy took place in almost all non-Catholic Christian churches: the Church of England, various national churches in the Protestant world, and eastern Orthodox churches.
But the ideological price of this hierarchical, centralized, “anti-modern” Rome was very high. Pius IX responded to the liberal Enlightenment with the notorious “Syllabus errorum” (1864). The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) responded to the Italian Risorgimento by theologically dogmatizing the universal clerical monarchy of the bishop of Rome. Not until the following century, during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), did the Catholic Church begin the critical adoption of elementary modern standards of freedom and rationality. The core was formed by the declaration on religious freedom, Dignatatis humanae, which was adopted in the consular commissions and discussions, over heavy opposition. In addition, the relationship to non-Christian religions—especially to Judaism and Islam—can now be approached in a new spirit of openness based on the universal claim of religious liberty and human dignity.
Charisma and Institution
In his opening speech of the Conclave in April 2005, Dean of the College of Cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger, made his “project” for church governance known, and was elected pope based on it. As outlined in his speech, the future Pope Benedict XVI had seen “the small boat of thought of many Christians” tossed by the storms of secular ideologies, “from Marxism to liberalism to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague mysticism; from agnosticism to skepticism,” and so forth. The global church must assert the unity of faith as a “congruence of the will” in order to combat a “dictatorship of relativism” that has been globalized through the modern mass media, if the Church is not to capsize like a ship in a storm.
Read from today, five years after Ratzinger’s election, one can detect criticism of Karol Wojtyla’s practice of leading the Catholic Church. For despite John Paul II’s political genius and charismatic presence, the church as an institution that has never kept pace with the media success of the pope’s “evangelizing.” This discrepancy begs the question: were all the dialogues with Islam—the interreligious peace services, the confessions of church responsibility—“too early,” or did they go “too far,” without the apparatus, the community of the faithful, being part of it in heart and mind? Was an institution that banked everything on the charisma of the pontiff risking an identity crisis as soon as the superstar pontiff was gone?
If the globe-trotting Pope John Paul II set the worldwide church in motion, his successor Benedict wanted to consolidate the institution. The great evangelist Karol Wojtyla had not hesitated to place the church itself in a state of emergency, as exemplified by his spectacular “mea culpa” in the anniversary year 2000—a confession of responsibility for crimes committed by the church against Jews, heretics and nonbelievers, the modern scientific spirit, and freedom of conscience. His advisor at the time, Ratzinger, was skeptical about this dramatic self-criticism—and now the current German pope will not risk new church crises.
It is true that the extraordinary tenure of John Paul II left no unquestioned routine in the regiment of the worldwide church upon which Ratzinger can rely. Apparently, he hopes to strengthen the collegiality of the bishops and to have the College of Cardinals meet more regularly, functioning as a sort of senate of the worldwide church. At the first bishops’ synod of his tenure in 2005, Ratzinger introduced open public discussion, without, however, expanding the synod’s powers. The Roman “Synod for Africa” that ended in November 2009 completed an impressive stocktaking of the enormous transformation in Catholic Christianity, which grew in Africa in one century from 1.9 million to 165 million. But the potential consequences of this growth are entirely unclear.
Like all popes since Vatican II, Benedict has failed to take on a reformation of the Curia. Instead, he has limited himself largely to replacing top officers due to age. Thus the internationalization of the Vatican apparatus continues at the highest levels—of nine congregations, only two are still headed by Italians, and important councils, too, are increasingly chaired by non-Italians. But coordination between the Vatican authorities, on the one hand, and the internal and external church public on the other is “catastrophic,” according to the theologian and political scientist Thomas Reese. There is no monitoring body independent of the curial bureaucracy, let alone an independent judiciary. Political scientist Hans Maier has rightly diagnosed a fundamental error in the existing organization of the Curia as the lack of cabinet discipline among Vatican “ministers,” which would require clear responsibility for individual functions. A monarch’s court may regulate itself at the highest levels through secrets and intrigues, but the spiritual leadership of a worldwide church would be harmed by this.
Explain, Mediate, Repair
This past October, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William Levada, announced a new clerical “reception structure” for traditionalist Anglicans willing to join the church, while the chair of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who was actually “responsible,” was not even in Rome. It should therefore come as no surprise that wild speculation ensued on the possible ulterior motives for Catholic “wooing” of the Anglican Communion.
A good part of the mishaps and faux pas in Benedict’s tenure so far can be traced to this lack of coordination, along with incorrect information and competing clerical “lines” among authorities, interest groups, and factions in the Vatican. In the attempt to improve the Chinese-Vatican relationship, in the past two years, repeated papal letters, commissions, and emissaries have increased rather than eliminated the uncertainty felt by persecuted Chinese Catholics toward the regime-friendly “patriotic church.” Further faux pas include an ambiguous speech by the German Pope at Auschwitz; the dispute over a new Latin Good Friday intercession; and finally the scandal of a Holocaust denier, a member of the schismatic traditionalist bishops of the Pius Brotherhood, whose return to the Catholic Church the Pope hoped to ease. The progression of these crises was generally similar: speeches or decisions by Benedict were not checked in advance; predictable reactions were not considered; and the responsible “ministers,” who were not consulted beforehand, then had to explain, mediate, and repair after the scandal. In the end, “the media” was always blamed. Once Benedict XVI even complained bitterly in public that internal and external church opponents and brothers simply wanted to misunderstand him—a display not exemplary of spiritual leadership.
All these elements can be recognized in the crisis triggered in September 2006 by Benedict XVI’s notorious Regensburg lecture on faith and reason. The pope’s intention was to defend the Christian faith against the widespread secular prejudice that accuses Christianity of irrationality. Like the Apostle Paul, Professor Ratzinger considers the Christian service as logike latreia: rational religious worship. To support this point in the lecture, he quoted a Christian appeal made by a Byzantine Emperor during an interreligious dispute around the turn of the fifteenth century: “God does not derive pleasure from blood, and it is contrary to God’s nature not to act according to reason—syn logo.”
On has to wonder: why in the world did the Holy Father have to refer, in invoking the unity of rational discourse (logos) and divine love, to Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425), one of the last Byzantine rulers of Constantinople, and already at the time encircled by the victoriously advancing troops of the Ottoman Empire? And then one must ask: why did Ratzinger quote, from Manuel’s peaceful dispute with a Muslim intellectual, the Byzantine’s introductory invective against the Prophet Mohammed, which states that the only “new” things Mohammed had proclaimed and prescribed were “bad and inhumane,” and used “to spread by the sword the faith he preached?” The Vatican later corrected this, arguing that the quote had been “interpreted” wrongly, as an expression of “[the pope’s] own position.” After the fact, the Holy See deplored the indignation that had “understandably” arisen “in the Muslim world.” Consequentially, Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to Turkey that followed in November 2006 required diplomatic crisis management in extremis, which could have been avoided.
Greeks and Protestants
The pope spoke in Regensburg at his former university in front of Protestant and Catholic theological faculties. Ratzinger was not addressing Muslims at all, but was speaking of his priorities in the dialogue with Christians of other denominations. His first steps went quite clearly in the direction of the Eastern Orthodox churches, whose primus inter pares, the powerless Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, he visited in Istanbul in November 2006.
In Regensburg, Pope Benedict made clear that on his priority list, “Western” ecumenism, the dismantling of religious differences between Catholics and Protestants, is behind “eastern” ecumenism and improved relations with the Orthodox churches. As a signal to Orthodox Christianity, Benedict gave a quote from the vision of the Hellenistic Jew Paul, which said that a man from the Greek mainland called the Apostle of the Gentiles to Europe. However, his invocation of the last Byzantine monarch, for whom the legacy of Hellenic logos was simultaneously imperial culture and mother tongue, would inevitably be misunderstood. During his trips to the occident, Manuel II Palaiologos failed in his attempt to attract a western coalition of the willing Christian sovereigns supporting an intervention force in order to defend the Byzantine “Second Rome” against the approaching Ottomans.
Since Pope Benedict’s accession to office in 2005, meetings of the mixed Catholic-Orthodox Commission have become more frequent. The new generation of Orthodox patriarchs in Moscow, Belgrade, and Bucharest clearly has fewer qualms about a German professor than about a charismatic Pole. Thus, there may indeed be progress in Rome’s relationship with the Orthodox Christian world. This was most recently demonstrated, during a visit by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Benedict XVI in December 2009, by the announcement of the approaching assumption of full diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Russia.
In contrast, “Western” ecumenism and the search for common ground with Protestants and Anglicans, apparently takes a back seat. Benedict’s Regensburg critique of the “de-hellenization of Christianity,” interpreted as a departure from rational logos, was mainly addressed to Protestants. The critique alluded to the Reformation and its scripture principle, the separation of practical moral reason and cosmological metaphysics by the Enlightenment Protestant philosopher Immanuel Kant, and finally, the liberal doctrinal history of Adolf von Harnack. Yet it was Muslims, not Protestants, who protested the pope’s lecture.
In fact, Benedict’s relationship to Islam is rather different than that of his predecessor. John Paul II preached in the Maghreb before tens of thousands of young Muslims, and he counted on the steadfast piety of Islamic countries and on personal meetings, especially with young people. On the question of whether it made sense to meet with representatives of other religions ritually, the opinion of Ratzinger, the dogmatist, differs greatly from the practice of Wojtyla, the mysticist. In the Common Prayer Meetings in Assisi, attended by Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious leaders, initiated and performed by John Paul II, his successor, twenty years later, did not even participate. Benedict seems more interested in theological argument, but this is not the focus of today’s Islam.
If there was a positive outcome from the Regensburg crisis, it was in the public letter to the pope from high-ranking Muslim scholars, giving rise to the permanent initiative A Common Word, joined one year later by 138 Muslim thinkers, and which has since led to various interreligious conferences and discussions. The mainly Sunni intellectuals referred to the Catholic declaration of respect, as expressed by the Second Vatican Council, for the Muslim Worship of the “God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has also spoken to men.”
So this is the hope: the monotheistic commonality of the Abrahamic traditions is older than any Crusades or conflicts of civilizations. It integrates various forms of philosophical reason. Its rejection of all cruelty and violence in questions of faith must thus reach more deeply into the often-invoked “increasingly interconnected world.”
Identity and Mission
John Paul II, theologically inspired by a strong (and strange) combination of radicalism and orthodoxy, had established his public role as a worldwide spokesman of human dignity and religious liberty with his very personal performance. Lacking his charisma, his successor failed to realize in the first five years of his pontificate the urgent need of institutional reform within the Catholic church as a whole. Joseph Ratzinger instead prefers a more intellectual (and sometimes inspiring) “back to basics” approach of stabilizing the core Catholic doctrine, thereby clearing theological differences with other religions, and stressing possible convergences with the Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
This “Catholic identity-first” approach of Benedict XVI is attractive for the more traditional elements of the hierarchy (and some younger “neoconservatives” both in Europe and the Americas). But for the Catholic Church as a global actor, it might turn out a self-defeating strategy, confining the rediscovery of Catholic identity to its classical theological, even linguistic forms. As world Catholicism is growing more and more in the global South, neither the institutionally centralized canonical rules of the Vatican, nor its intellectual routines and Latin theological language are the natural forms of spiritual growth and religious conversion. To open up these routines (of authority, decision-making, and ceremony) is not so much a question of “internal democracy” (which surely is not the Catholic church’s primary concern) as a possible prerequisite for its mission: the successful communication of its message of peace in a world of growing risks of war and hate.
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Prof. Dr. OTTO KALLSCHEUER, geb. 1950, ist Philosoph, Politikwissenschaftler und freier Autor, u.a. für die FAZ, die NZZ und DIE ZEIT.
