A response... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Wednesday, June 20, 2012, 03:50 (366 days ago) @ James

James,

Thanks again for a fascinating contribution. In recent days, partly triggered by Chris Geraghty's book — by the way it is selling like hot cakes. Geoffrey Robinson's book on Power and Sex also did well but I wouldn't be surprised from the early indications if Chris Geraghty's book might exceed that at least in the Australian market. Geoff Robinson's book had the advantage that it eventually reached a large international audience. The other factor influencing my thinking has been the sort of stuff covered in that flash animation I published yesterday. The thought occurs to me that (a) the Catholic institution is in a profound leadership crisis; and (b) there are two aspects to that leadership crisis. It's essentially been brought about by a curious coalition of two main forces. One is what I'd call the Benedict-Burke mindset which sincerely and genuinely does believe that God is telling them to take the Church back to some conception of Catholicism and a conception of Jesus and theology rooted somewhere in the Middle Ages. The other half of this curious coalition are the bullies. I quoted a passage from Geraghty a few days ago of the priest he had difficulties with at Avalon. It's worth repeating a part of the quote:

They were all the same, clerical versions of Bruce Ruxton – the Tosi brothers, Lou and Frank, the Paine boys, Frank Mecham, Les Baggott, Bishops Bull Muldoon, Jimmy Carroll, Algie Thomas and Bishop Bill Murray – Abo Haseler and his push. They all presumed they had been blessed with the common touch and that they had their fingers on the pulse. They had the answers (all supplied years before in the seminary). But only a handful of their parishioners were asking the dusty questions for which they had the formula. Their clerical life had isolated them. The sweet, fawning talk of a coterie of their special parishioners had spoilt them. Ordinary people communicated with them in ritualistic jargon. The collar, the cassock and the pedestal, had removed these black-coated men from the grubby, complicated realities of life. There was no table at which they sat, where people could look them in the face and tell them "the God's honest truth". They saved up their personal lives for Monday's at St Michael's Golf Course, or the local squash court, or Lewisham tennis courts where Abo and his episcopal mate, Bill Murray, and others played together. For the remainder of the week they were clerics on duty, stiff agents of the Roman Catholic Church which was centred in the Eternal City and which was, in turn, the spokesman for God himself.

See the full excerpt at: www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?id=104965

One of the consequences of this "coalition" is that it has become virtually impossible for anyone to have an intelligent conversation anywhere within the institutional church these days. On the one side you have the likes of Benedict believing "The Christian believer is a simple person: bishops should protect the faith of these little people against the power of intellectuals." On the other hand you have these "finger in the wind" bully boys, many of whom have never read another book since they left seminary who are anti-intellectual in a completely different sense. I honestly cannot fathom why these people exist in the priesthood. One would have thought they could have had very successful careers in politics and other fields of human endeavour. One wonders what "jollies" they get out of being priests or bishops, particularly given the "sacrifices" that people have to go though in order to join the clerical state (and I think there are some "sacrifices")?

I suspect we were a bit more "protected" from these sort of characters in Western Australia. Thinking back I can see some who would fit into that mould but I suspect there were few, if any, bishops cut from that sort of cloth in my lifetime.

Now I don't want to rattle on about that much more than I have in recent times but principally mention it as having some direct relevance to the observations you have brought us from Klaus Ziegler. I suspect that Catholicism — the entire "culture" of Catholicism (i.e. embracing the entire movement in the world not just the hierarchs, or what we think of when we say "the institution") has long had this "tension" between two very different notions of what the entire "Catholic" enterprise or endeavour is all about. In reality it is more than two but for the purposes of this discussion I want to highlight these two in particular.

The first might be described as "popular Catholicism". All the people who were basically connected to it for tribal and identity reasons and into all the superstitions, popular pieties and devotions, for most of history largely uneducated and who were accurately described by Benedict as "little people" and "simple people". For them God does answer their prayers. They made up this massive congregation into novenas, rosary crusades, worshipping relics and who deeply and sincerely did believe God could reach down and cure their bunyons and cancers if only they were obedient and docile and said all their prayers the right way. I'd argue though that Catholicism, from right back at its earliest beginnings, has also had another arm or constituency that has been highly intellectual, which has "seen through" all that "populism" and this is the sector that has contributed some of the great intellectual, theological and sociological insights to this massive enterprise called "Catholicism" for want of a simple lable.

The great theological insights of Catholicism — and despite your scepticism, I think there are quite a few — were the product of this numerically much smaller constituency within both the "culture" and within the "institution" (i.e. its leadership and management ranks). Part of the problem with theology is that the language it uses often has to be metaphorical and symbolic, even mythological. The problem often comes, as has been discussed by a number of people here in recent commentaries, is what happens when mythology, metaphor, symbol, theology and mystery becomes literalised for "the popular mind".

I think it could be argued that one of the reasons (amongst a complex of many) for the evangelising "success" of Catholicism down through the centuries is that it was successful at managing the inevitable "tension" between the two ways of "understanding life". In recent times, and by that I mean since the Reformation or since the French Revolution or since the rise of "universal education" the institution has become far less successful at managing this tension. Part of the reasons is simply that the great stroke of genius she had to set up a two-tiered education system that ultimately became a recruiting stream to find "the best and brightest minds" in society and corralled them eventually into the management structures of the entire institution is no longer delivering the "best and brightest" minds into the institution. They've been heading off to fulfil their life's dreams and ambitions in other professions and callings possibly for a couple of centuries' now. The second problem has simply been "the education of the masses". Many people have simply "stopped listening" to the "fairy tale, infant Jesus in a manger" version of Catholicism but that is largely all you get from the institution these days unless you are privileged enough to work in some sections of the "professional church". The reason why a website like ours exists today is because it has become effectively impossible to have decent conversations within the walls of the institution.

What strikes me about Klaus Ziegler's argument, and for that matter the arguments of the likes of Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, is that they are arguing against all the superstition and "pious nonsense" that has become predominant within the religious endeavour in recent times. Mind you, I think they have some justification for that, in that the more intellectual and "inquiring mind" form of belief that also has a rich, if seriously marred at times, tradition within the "culture" of Catholicism is almost dead today (and certainly far less visible from the outside world).

My overall sense these days is that institutional Catholicism as we knew it is now effectively cactus. The momentum is gathering all around the world that is turning it into a laughing stock. Ziegler's article from South America is just another example. I have absolutely zero confidence that the institution can be reformed. The fascinating question today, to me, is what this now huge population in the world who have given up on the institution eventually do to nourish the spiritual side of their lives. I sense the answers to those questions are still "up in the air" but these sort of conversations going on in the world at the moment, including these highly critical ones from the likes of Klaus Ziegler or Richard Dawkins, are in some way contributing to whatever might eventually emerge.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]