The Struggle Within the Church Will Intensify

The Struggle Within the Church Will Intensify
Joel Rocamora
Institute for Popular Democracy, 12 May 2005

The best that the defenders of Pope Benedict XVI can say about him is that he might surprise us yet. That may very well happen, but if it does it will be more because of what means he uses or does not use to push an already established theological line. I do not expect to wake up one morning to find out that the new Pope has abandoned his well established anti-feminist and anti-gay views, his dangerous demeaning of other religions as "gravely deficient".

The whole point of religion is belief – in something, in Someone other than what we experience in everyday life. Belief enables (wo)man to reach deep within himself to produce an Angkor Wat, a Notre Dame, the Sistine Chapel. At home, a Christine Tan, a Bishop Labayen, a "running priest". Together, believers produce a Church, an organization, a set of rules for maximizing the potential of communing with God. Churches produce moral rules, about how people should relate with each other, within marriage, within families, in communities.

Members of communities have the right to determine group rules. What creates problems is when churches attempt to impose their community's morality to a whole society through the government. It is perfectly legitimate for Catholics to believe that they should not use "artificial" contraception. But they should not prevent government from giving non-believers the information and the means to avail of contraception.

It is difficult for "true believers" to see this distinction because at the heart of every religion is a fundamentalist temptation. Fundamentalism is a claim to being the only source of religious truth. The more fundamentalist a Church, the more authoritarian, within and, when possible, outside.

It is the struggle within the Catholic Church that for sure will intensify under Pope Benedict XVI. Then Cardinal Ratzinger's years as the Vatican's guardian of theological correctness will carry over, with more power, into Pope Benedict's rule. While I will feel bad for friends in the Church – priests, nuns, lay people – I do not see how they can fight within a very authoritarian Catholic Church structure. Whatever individual decisions will be made, there will be more communities of belief on the margins. If Pope Benedict constricts even these spaces, there will be schisms, and whole sections of believers will break away.

Pope John Paul was conservative on theological issues and on questions of morality. But he sustained the Catholic Church's "preferential option for the poor" and for peace and non-violence. He spoke truth to power – to Ferdinand Marcos about human rights violations when he visited the Philippines in 1981, more recently to George W. Bush about his opposition to the war in Iraq. Pope John Paul II was loved by many in the way that prophets who tilt with the powerful are. He also had an intense personal charisma and the kind of deep spirituality that, for those with less, made him a medium to the spiritual world.

Pope John Paul II's charisma and spiritual power enabled him to roll back the liberalizing reforms of Vatican 2 without major opposition. Because I do not see these personal qualities in Pope Benedict XVI, he may use more authoritarian methods. Instead of spirituality, what is projected of Pope Benedict XVI is "intense intellectuality," precisely the quality that makes for sectarian fundamentalism.

While Pope John Paul II firmly asserted theological conservatism, he allowed individual Catholics to live their more liberal interpretations of their faith as long as they did it quietly. What I'm afraid of is that Pope Benedict XVI will close even these private options.

The Pope has been quoted as saying that he would prefer a smaller Church as long it remains pure, an extension, as it were, of monastic life to the whole Church. I may cringe at its extension into "mortification of the flesh," but I am fascinated, even admiring of those who choose monastic life. What I abhor is the blurring of the distinction between personal choice and imposed Church-wide morality. Priests and nuns take the vow of chastity as a personal choice. The rest of us should not be made to carry the burden of these choices in our own sexual lives.

I am afraid for the Roman Catholic Church, the Church I was baptized into. I have not been a faithful son of the Church, but, through the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship, I often had reason to appreciate its existence. I know that what sustains the self-sacrificing lives of many priests and nuns is belief in a loving God. I know that to sustain religious communities, belief is translated into doctrine, that obedience and ritual can make up for weak individual belief.

But belief is also sustained by living in the world, doing God's work among the poor. When the distance between doctrine and the real world widens, when the Church forces believers to straddle this chasm, the danger of religious rupture comes near.

First published in Newsbreak, May 23, 2005.