Benedict Speaks Out

Benedict XVI has published a letter dealing with the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. Surprisingly, it has turned out to be controversial.

I have long believed Benedict is the brightest mortal alive. I agree with his basic analysis. I am amazed and alarmed that his letter has met with much opposition, instead of being embraced by all Catholics.

Here’s the best part:

“A world without God can only be a world without meaning. For where, then, does everything that is come from? In any case, it has no spiritual purpose. It is somehow simply there and has neither any goal nor any sense. Then there are no standards of good or evil. Then only what is stronger than the other can assert itself. Power is then the only principle. Truth does not count, it actually does not exist. ...”

This is what we now face. He continues:

“But a God who would not express Himself at all, who would not make Himself known, would remain a presumption and could thus not determine the form [Gestalt] of our life. For God to be really God in this deliberate creation, we must look to Him to express Himself in some way. He has done so in many ways, but decisively in the call that went to Abraham and gave people in search of God the orientation that leads beyond all expectation: God Himself becomes creature, speaks as man with us human beings….”

I think this is the essential objection to the common modern position that one can be “spiritual” without being “religious.” To accept that God exists has certain inevitable consequences in how you live your life.

“A society without God — a society that does not know Him and treats Him as non-existent — is a society that loses its measure. In our day, the catchphrase of God's death was coined. When God does die in a society, it becomes free, we were assured. In reality, the death of God in a society also means the end of freedom, because what dies is the purpose that provides orientation. And because the compass disappears that points us in the right direction by teaching us to distinguish good from evil. Western society is a society in which God is absent in the public sphere and has nothing left to offer it. And that is why it is a society in which the measure of humanity is increasingly lost. At individual points it becomes suddenly apparent that what is evil and destroys man has become a matter of course.”

Welcome to the 20th century and the continuing era of genocides.

I would quibble myself on a few points. I think Benedict dates the problem too readily to the 1960s and by implication to Vatican II. It goes back before that. Benedict himself refers to the “God is dead” idea. That was big in the 1960s, true, but dates to Nietzsche in 1882. What we call the “sexual revolution” dates not to the 1960s, but to the “Playboy philosophy” and Kinsey reports of the 1950s. Kinsey’s first report was published in 1948. Playboy launched in 1953. The Sixties was a popularization and exploration of the implications of this earlier shift, not a break from it. Vatican II was an effect, not a cause.

What sort of man reads Pope Benedict?

I also do not grasp what Benedict is referring to in seeing a transition in the 1960s and after from a morality based on natural law to one based on the Bible. As far as I can see Catholic morality has always relied on both, and this has not changed. Nor can I see how a morality based on the Bible would sanction homosexuality, pedophilia, and so forth.

He is certainly right to say that pedophilia was very close to being generally considered fine and good during the sexual revolution. How has this one made it down Orwell’s memory hole?

One might also fault Benedict for offering no practical suggestions. But that would be presumptuous. He has no administrative position now in the church. That’s Francis’s role. To give his own ideas would be stomping on the latter’s holy toes.

Dealing with the various dissents:

Fr. James Martin is a leading spokesman for accepting homosexual practices within the church. He objects:

“The idea that the sexual mores of the 1960s were to blame (a common refrain in many of Pope Benedict’s earlier writings) neglects the fact that sex abuse happened in the church during the 1940s and 1950s, and far earlier.”

This is necessarily literally true. Sex abuse has obviously been with us through history. Nevertheless, studies, notably the Jay Report, suggest that it was very rare up until about the 1950s. Fr. Martin is surely aware of this, and is deliberately suppressing that finding here. Benedict is not quite spot on, by my watch; but he is simply a decade late, and that may be due to his own experience focusing on Germany. The sexual revolution started in the US, and no doubt took a while to get to Europe.

Martin:

“Finally, it blames the sex abuse crisis on the culture, not the church. It focuses on the outside rather than the inside, failing to look at the deep structural flaws and sins within the church (specifically, a clericalism that privileged the word of the priest over the victim.”

This is blatantly untrue. Benedict states plainly that one part of the problem was a judicial attitude and procedure within the church that favoured the accused to the extent that it was impossible to convict anyone. Martin is lying about Benedict’s position.

More broadly, consider what Martin is saying here: the culture is virtuous, and the church is by comparison sinful. The church must change to conform to the culture. If this is true, then the church is a moral liability. It ought to be simply abolished. One no doubt has a right to such an opinion, but how can someone hold this opinion and honourably claim they are Catholic?

There is no way Martin avoids being convicted of dishonesty here.

Benedict addresses this attitude directly as well, in arguing that it is pure human presumption to declare that we need a “new” church built by us to replace one God gave us. Martin needs to address this argument, not ignore it.

Michael Sean Winters writes, in the National Catholic Reporter:

“On the whole, this is a regrettable text that will only harm the reputation of the former pontiff.

Towards the end of his life, I had a long interview with Cardinal Francis George. The diagnosis that his cancer was terminal was known to us both. It became quickly obvious to me that he was deeply depressed, as well he might be. His usually careful reasonings — we had spoken a number of times before, and he enjoyed talking to me about my columns — were replaced by extremely gloomy assertions and predictions. After a few minutes, I put down my pen. I was never going to use the words that were coming from his mouth because they were things he would not have said were he not in that condition. Reading this document from Pope Emeritus Benedict reminded me of that moment and raised this question: Was there no one who loves him enough to save him from the embarrassment that this will cause?”

This comment is truly despicable. Leave aside the fact that Cardinal George is no longer here to defend himself against the implied charge that he feared the hereafter. Instead of addressing Benedict’s points, Winters dismisses them ad hominem. This is profoundly dishonourable. And with a former pope!

One falsehood I have also read in reaction to Benedict’s letter is that he is endorsing the “right-wing” position that homosexuality is the problem against the “left-wing” position that the problem is with the bishops and “clericalism.” This is at least a partial lie. Benedict neither endorses the idea that homosexuality is the root problem, nor rejects the claim that clericalism is involved. Nor is supporting the bishops the right-wing position. The very traditionalist “Church Militant” media operation is very aggressive about blaming the bishops. I am too. The real right-wing position is that the problem is with a lack of sincere commitment to Church teaching at all levels; the left-wing position is that the Church teachings, like that of priestly celibacy and sexual continence, are themselves the problem. In that sense, it is true, Benedict’s views represent the “right wing.”

In sum, I’d say the different reaction to Benedict’s comments are a good indication of who the good guys and the bad guys really are.

I am heartened, therefore, to hear they were apparently approved by Pope Francis.