March 3 2013
Clones or clowns?
Some comments on the coming conclave of the Catholic Cardinals.
Last spring I ran a 10 km race and caught up with a runner with whom I talked the rest of the way, an interesting man who had been the head of a provincial police force. When I asked him about the Roman Catholic Church and the sex scandals in his jurisdiction, he was quite blunt: a code of silence on all levels and – his words- affiliation with the Mafia.
Here’s an episode that ties in with that. I noticed it in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s last book. It’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”. It’s a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother, has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.
“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is an important part of Jesus’ teaching: “The Truth shall set you free”. The church of his day and of today rather not gives the people a free hand. Is the result of this the following?
“Whenever God erects a house of prayer
The Devil builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.”
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman
I don’t have television but I can quite well picture the room where the cardinals gather: two rows of figures, from top to toe attired in bright red, reminding me of the sea of red that is the permanent colour of most national budgets. It’s also no coincidence that the Bible uses red to portray our sins. Cardinals are, after all, human, just as the new pope will be, if they choose one.
If they choose one? Why do I say that? I say this because this entire ecclesiastical set-up is wrong, is as outdated as the temple in the Old Testament, is as outdated as the Sanhedrin, chaired by the High Priest, the Pope of his day who condemned Jesus to death.
When Jesus died the curtain separating in the temple the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place tore into two pieces, signifying that the temple no longer had a place in Israel, or anywhere else. The church then needed a completely new structure. Jewish worship also was a ‘from the top down’ affair: from high priest, to priests, to the people. Jesus reversed that order. Jesus wanted to see a church that started from the ground up. And that’s indeed the way it grew: by the word of mouth of the small folk, who created true fellowship through their charitable acts.
Back to the cardinals. It seems to me that this time the princes of the church can no longer resort to half measures. As this election approaches, some hope that the shortage of priests, and their damaged reputation and morale, can be remedied by adding married priests, or women priests, or gay priests. But that misses the point. Whatever their sexual status, they will still be priests. They will not be chosen by their congregations (as was the practice in the early church). They will be appointed from above, by bishops approved for their loyalty to Rome, which will police their doctrinal views as it has with priests heretofore. The power structure will not be changed by giving it new faces.
When the Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official state religion the church organized itself taking the Roman Empire as a model: The Pope resembled the Emperor, the cardinals the consuls, the priests the centurions. Jesus had always resisted this sort of structure, one that his disciples had advocated continuously. Now finally the outspoken aim of the Twelve to have the church resemble a worldly power had been accomplished, to the detriment of the Christian movement until this day. Jesus wanted people to have the freedom to make their own often conflicting, often unwise but nevertheless valid decisions. “My kingdom is not of this world,” was Jesus’ mantra, indicating that his kingdom is “The New Creation to Come” for which we all must strive.
The tragic reality is that the just resigned pope appointed many of the cardinals who will elect his successor. Pope Benedict always was a very conservative and somewhat timid theologian. As Cardinal Ratzinger he was in charge of purity of teaching, and as Pope he appointed to the conclave of electors those who agreed with his views, assuring the status quo: clones of his own mindset.
I believe that Benedict, elected at the age of 78, was meant to be a safe stopgap: with him the church could kick the ‘reform’ can down the road one more time. He certainly had no experience in dealing with people in a businesslike way, dogmatic theologian he was. Now that he has retired I believe he will completely withdraw from the intrigues of the inner church, a world no different from the Congress in Washington, where the budget can too has suffered the same fate, with disaster as the inevitable result. Just as all Western nations are at the edge of the abyss, the same is true in Rome in particular and the world-wide church in general. Now that Benedict – which means ‘well-spoken’ – has said his last words, the real question is whether we will see a clone- a conforming cleric, a party-line proponent, the business as usual advocate – or a clown – a courageous eccentric, who will not first gauge what his ecclesiastical colleagues will prefer, all perfect pictures of pure conformity. The church needs a few fools, clowns who, in the way Shakespeare used them, have the capacity to stir things up, to say things that other characters in their ecclesiastical capacity couldn’t possibly get away with saying, people who cut through the pomposity and tell the blatant truth. The blatant truth is that the current model is no longer valid, if it ever was. What the church needs is a sober look at the world as it really is: godless, at the end of the rope, desperate, crying for guidance in these last fateful years, or in Latin In his ultimis annis fatalibus, which brings me to The Clowns of God.
In 1982 a younger brother, then a project manager in Australia, on his way back to the Netherlands, came via Canada and gave me a book he had bought on his travels: The Clowns of God. It’s all about a pope who – you guessed it – was forced to resign. The pope was in the planning stage to publish an encyclical with the very biblical name of ”In these last fateful years,” or in Latin, the church’s official language In His Ultimis Annis Fatalibus.
A draft of the papal document was lifted from the private papal apartment and given to the Curia, the Vatican cabinet (sounds familiar, doesn’t it). Gregory the Seventeenth – that was the name of the pope in this book – was forced to abdicate because he claimed to have a vision of the end of the world, of the globe going up in flames, and Jesus’ Second Coming. He believed he was called to warn the world that Christ’ return was imminent. The cardinals give the pope an ultimatum: resign for medical reasons, or we will declare you mentally unfit to continue as Holy Father.
The 1981 the world was pre-occupied with the nuclear dangers. Today the perils are far worse, carrying all the features of finality. Morris West in The Clowns of God, which he wrote in 1981, could not have known the extent of the natural and man-made disasters devastating country after country and ecosystems after ecosystem in the world today. Knowing human nature, this process will never be reversed: matters will only get worse.
The next pope may not be the last one, as some maintain, but I believe that this conclave of 115 old men –average age 72 – all bachelors and supposedly ‘undefiled’ by women (or men), are faced with a final choice. Why? Because the institutional church in whatever category, colour, conviction or confession, Protestant, Jewish, Islam, has become dominantly atheistic. I realize that this sounds like a gross over-reaction, but it seems to me – and I may be wrong, of course – that those (the Religious Right comes to mind) who claim to know exactly what God wants, display a form of self-deification, are making themselves equal to god. This more than anything else has made religion rigid, caused by the failure to admit that the Bible expressly states that we ALL see through a glass darkly. This really means that to know the Truth with a capital T is beyond our grasp. We can only say with a great degree of certainty that it is our Christian duty to devote ourselves religiously – with all we possess – to the betterment of creation and its occupants. There’s where faith enters. To be ‘religious’ without having regard for God’s creation is what Bonhoeffer calls “pious secularism.” Christianity in essence knows three truths: (1) God created the universe; (2) we disturbed God’s harmonious cosmos to the point where (see Isaiah 24) “The earth is split asunder, it reels like a drunkard”; or ( see Romans 8): “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pain of childbirth”; (3) Jesus, by his sacrificial death and consequent resurrection, paid the price and will bring back the renewed earth, the Kingdom, commonly called redemption. The rest is commentary.
The End of the World is predicted in the Bible. We are warned, not only by the Bible but by our clergy to always be prepared because no one, except God, knows when the end of the world will come, but there are definite signs, as Jesus himself outlines with the lesson on the fig tree. (Matthew 24).
The College of Cardinals can ignore the signs of the times, and continue business as usual which is probably what will happen. However, we should pray that the princes of the church, by not electing a pope at all, would send the strongest possible sign that it’s not business as usual.
Let’s face it: a pope is like a president: his power is an illusion. He basically is a P.R. guy, a salesman for an important branch of religion. The conclave, recognizing this, should call Vatican Council III and discuss with all religions the state of the world “In these last fateful years.”
There have been two of these Councils before: Vatican I from 1870-71; Vatican II from 1962-65: now it is time for Vatican III. The need has never been greater. Cardinals are not stupid. Times are different for the simple reason, as Morris West outlined in The Clowns of God, that we are indeed In his ultimis annis fatalibus in these last fateful years.
Electing a new pope without any conditions will simply accelerate the death of the church as more and more people get fed up with the empty pageantry of the moribund system.
It only takes a few clowns to initiate this process. We need modern equivalents of what the Apostle Paul wrote (1Cor.3: 18) “we need to become fools so that we may become wise…. (1 Cor. 4:10) We are fools for Christ.”
Fools in that sense are like the clowns of God, people that go against the established practises and dare to be different. “Unless you become like little children you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” That also applies to the Pope and the College of Cardinals and each one of us.
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My next column will deal with “The Future isn’t what it used to be.”