Why should Unitarian-Universalists care about challenges to the Roman Catholic Church? It is, after all, a Christian church and only 10% of UU’s identified themselves as Christian in a movement wide poll taken in 1997.

Also, the RCC is a global church while UU’s have only a nominal global presence.

UU’s identify themselves as liberal in faith and politics (for the most part) and the public perception of the RCC is that of a conservative institution that became even more so during the papacy of the late John Paul II. Many expect more of the same during the papacy of the conservative former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.

Several key teachings of the RCC stand over against positions taken by most UU’s and the movement’s national body, the UUA, e.g.

Against homosexuals in the ministry and against homosexual practice

Against abortion and a woman’s choice

Against euthanasia

Against women’s ordination

John Paul II and Benedict XVI both drew a bright line between the magesterium and the forces of humanism and modernity:

a. "The true contrariety which characterizes the world of today is not that among diverse religious cultures, but that between the radical emancipation of man from God, from the roots of life, on the one hand, and the great religious cultures on the other. …Thus, even the refusal of a reference to God is not an expression of tolerance which wants to protect non-theistic religions and the dignity of atheists and agnostics, but rather is an expression of a conscience which would want to see God definitively cancelled out of the public life of man and chained in the subjective ambit of the residues of past cultures. The relativism, which constitutes this point of departure , has become such a dogmatism that it believes itself in possession of the definitive understanding of reason, and that it has the right to consider all other viewpoints as a stage in this history of man which has been superseded and which can thus be reinterpreted." Pope Benedict XVI, "Europe in a Crisis of Cultures"

We disagree on important social issues and stand on opposite sides of the Modernist divide. The RCC stance articulated by Pope Benedict XVI is a vigorous, brook no disagreement rejection of the theological modernism that defines us: application of reason to matters of faith, investigation of sacred textsin the light of higher criticism, and the rejection of the supernatural so central to the faith of many UU’s.

So, if the RCC is this distant from the UU movement why spend anytime with them at all?

There are at least 4 good reasons to consider the RCC from within our movement’s perspective:

I.  In the demographics of world faith traditions there are over 2B Christians, 1.1B Muslims, 850M Hindus, 225M Buddhists, and 14M Jews. Of those 2B Christians, some 1.1B of them are RCC.

    US #’s are: 72M RCC

                                                             47M Baptists

                                                              19M Methodists

                                                              13M Lutherans…

II.   On the world stage and within the US, the RCC voice has enormous weight, both politically and ethically.

Though over against us on certain social issues and, for now, on the matter of Modernity, the RCC church remains a powerful advocate for the poor and the oppressed.

Both the current Pope and JPII did squash the liberation theologians, but they cannot escape—nor do they want to—the fact that 2/3’s of RCC congregants live in Earth’s southern hemisphere, where poverty and authoritarian regimes are rife.

Ever since Rerum Novarum, On the Conditions of Labor, an Encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, the church has had an active role in support of laboring people, labor unions, and for decent working conditions.

The RCC also stands against capital punishment, for peace (Just War theory makes a justified conflict difficult.), and for economic justice in such areas as affordable housing, universal health care, and care for the poor.

 

III.  The RCC and its culture has woven itself into the fabric of Western Civilization. To not understand the RCC and its future would ignore a substantial driver within the Zeitgeist of today and for foreseeable tomorrows.

IV.  The RCC also has a 1600 to 2000 year long existence, a very long, if not the longest, institutional track record on earth. This alone makes it an important factor in any look at world culture, and global faith traditions.

As this long history suggests, the RCC is both old and successful in an institutional sense; it is important to see how this church has dealt with challenge in the past and what kind of challenges it has faced.

A prominent Catholic theologian and author of many books on the RCC, Richard P. McBrien wrote an article for the World of Council of Churches that gives a helpful overview.

As McBrien points out in his opening sentence, there is a theological issue with where one begins the history of the RCC.

Remember the comment about a 1600 to 2000 year old history? This is where the discrepancy comes in and understanding it helps us understand much of the RCC’s later history.

The RCC position is that the church, the Catholic, that is, universal, church began on that day when Jesus revealed to Peter, a humble fisherman among his original apostles, that on this rock he would build his church, and, furthermore, that the keys of the kingdom of heaven would be given to Peter and he would be given authority to bind on earth and loose on earth, and the parallel would happen in heaven. This same power and authority, the Petrine authority, was also given to the other apostles in Matthew 18:18. In Ephesians the writer names the apostles as founder, along with the prophets, of the church, of which Jesus is the cornerstone.

It is, further, the RCC position that Peter, by tradition martyred in Rome, was the first bishop of the Church of Rome.

Though the first church was in Jerusalem and the first churches after Jerusalem were in the Near East, not Rome, it was the Roman church, even before Constantine that began to insert itself into disputes among and within churches throughout the Roman Empire. One of those early disputes involved the accuracy of teachings and stories about Jesus and his ministry.

The Roman Church solved this dispute by insisting that the apostles, who had lived and walked with Jesus, certainly had the accurate and true version. This argument trumped the version put forward by many Gnostics, at least in the minds of the early church; thus laying a foundation for the doctrine of apostolic succession, that is, only churchmen who were taught by the apostles or by persons taught by the apostles, could have the true Christian faith.

When you marry apostolic succession to the doctrine of the keys, you get the concept of the magesterium; only the Catholic church, the church descended from and taught by Jesus’ own apostles, is the true church, i.e. the only church with saving knowledge.

Though much later than the time of Jesus some scholars place the emergence of the RCC at this still early juncture; but, at this point the Christian faith in Rome was under siege, persecuted for various reasons, and hardly a powerful actor in the Roman world.

That changed for good when the Emperor Constantine signed the Edict of Milan in 312 AD making Christianity a faith protected by the Emperor, and, for practical purposes, a state religion. Later, Leo I (440-61) made clear that Peter continued to speak through the bishop of Rome. These two events, taken together, do put on the scene the Roman Catholic Church.

It is important here to go back to the Catechism. Apostolic succession made the RCC treat tradition as coequal with scripture. This is the crucial difference between the RCC and the Protestant Reformers who reject apostolic succession and refer all questions of doctrine back to the Bible.

The first challenges involved authority among those claiming allegiance to Jesus. A second challenge was simultaneous: how can a small outlaw sect begun in a backwater province survive in the capitol of the world’s most powerful empire? A third challenge, again one of authority, saw Leo I link the episcopacy of Rome to the Petrine authority.

Other challenges followed. The eventual decline of Rome made imperial protection less and less important. How could the church survive?

There was a solution of sorts in 860 when Charlemagne received the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The RCC had moved out from under imperial protection and become an imperial power itself, one with the power to create and destroy kings. Throughout the Middle Ages and even past the Renaissance, the Papacy and the RCC held enormous power over the political life of Europe.

In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII issued the papal bull Unam Sanctum. This bull established papal primacy and asserts "Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff." This bull resonates later in the words of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his "Europe in a Crisis of Cultures." The challenge to which Unam Sanctum responded occurred when Britain and France, both Catholic powers, disputed the Holy See’s ability to raise and collect certain taxes.

The 16^th century saw the challenge most familiar to American Protestants, the Reformation. The reasons for the Reformation included the investiture controversy, the sale of indulgences, and the rising power of small states in such places as the area now known as Germany.

Catholics responded at the Council of Trent, which affirmed the tradition and authority of the RCC.

It was this post-Tridentine church, defensive and turned back toward its roots, that encountered the next major challenge and one which, in some senses, brings us to today.

The Enlightenment.

Ultimately, from a slew of scientific, cultural, social, and political developments in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emerged three fundamental ideas that encompassed everything the Enlightenment would stand for. First among these was individualism, which emphasized the importance of the individual and his inborn rights. The second, relativism, was the concept that different cultures, beliefs, ideas, and value systems had equal merit. Finally, rationalism was the conviction that with the power of reason, humans could arrive at truth and improve the world.

These three ideas reveal the fundamental concepts that would pervade the Enlightenment—man’s ability to reason, to look past the traditions and conventions that had dominated Europe in the past, and to make decisions for himself. Moreover, these ideas represented the separation and autonomy of man’s intellect from God—a development that opened the door to new discoveries and ideas and threatened the most powerful of Europe’s long-standing institutions.

Even though the RCC took exception to much of the Enlightenment, the post-Tridentine RCC did end unhistorical and classicist theology, according to McBrien.

The French Revolution, coming soon after the American, created real problems in France for the RCC. A strongly nationalistic movement, Gallicanism, grew up and challenged Rome.

The Romantic movement reacted against the Enlightenment elevation of reason and insisted on attention to the emotional, the irrational, the natural. A Romantic French Catholic counter to the E and Gallicanism was Ultramontanism, that is, literally, looking beyond the mountains to Rome for religious authority.

Ultramontanism influenced the mid-19^th century Pope, Pius IX, who drafted a Syllabus of Errors, among them these:

Only a few years later Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, a response to the Marxist critique of capitalism.

In the 20^th century Pope Pius X responded to ecclesiastical modernism. This perspective, rooted in the Enlightenment, and really underway since the first part of the 19^th century, asserted that neither dogma nor Bible were absolute or unchangeable, rather, they are affected and shaped by historical conditions.

Pius X issued an encyclical titled Pascendi, which, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "…expounds and condemns the system of Modernism."

Without going in to the controversy over the Papacy and the Nazis it is important to observe that the attitudes and biases of both JPII and Pope Benedict XVI formed against the troubled Europe that saw WWII, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the Iron Curtain. Both Poland and Germany had pivotal roles in the drama of these times. It is no wonder both men feared absolutist ideologies of either the right or the left, and, perhaps, no wonder that they would, in turn, conspire to turn away the liberation theologians.

The era of the post-Tridentine church finally came to an end, or so many hoped, when Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council.

In 1959 this Pope, a man who, like JPII, captured the heart of the world, issued Ad Petri Cathedram. It was the first year of his papacy and with Ad Petri he seemed to persons close to the RCC to move away from the notion first codified in 1302 in Unam Sanctum. He referred to non-Catholics as "…our separated brethren." Then, in 1963 he issued Pacem In Terris in which he wished for all people of good will, human dignity and freedom in a world of peace and justice.

The Second Vatican Council had a then young theologian in an advisory role, Joseph Ratzinger. It seemed to open the Vatican to consultation and to other Christian churches. A list of some its precepts gives us a sense of the challenges members of that Council felt faced the church in the 1960’s and the distance VCII put between itself and the anti-Modernist positions of Pius IX and Pius X:

1. Authorization of a vernacular liturgy and greater lay participation

2. A renewed emphasis on the importance of bishops

3. the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World acknowledged the need for the church to adapt itself to the contemporary world

And, 4. the Decree on Ecumenism and the Declaration on Religious Freedom which together present a church that is primarily a worshiping and serving community open to various points of view and religious traditions.

The documents produced during VCII stretch out for hundreds of pages, but these four points alone, cast alongside the history we have discussed above make it clear that a new wind pressed the sails of the fisherman’s boat.

John XXIII died before it completed its work and even by the time Paul VI declared it finished in 1965 some had begun to question its emphasis on aggiornamento, the updating and renewal of the church.

The coming years would divide the RCC between those who saw VCII as a welcome and needed new wind and those who saw it as spawning a potentially dangerous storm.

Those who wanted to continue aggiornamento discovered opposition from many who saw VCII as having gone too far, and too fast. This group, exemplified by a magazine called Communio, considered themselves the true heirs to VCII. Its call was to renewal, yes, but renewal through a careful reappropriation of the tradition, a ressourcement, a return to the sources. This latter group included Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla.

In the years after VCII troubling signs began to emerge within the church, in spite of the charismatic popularity of the rockstar pope, JPII, as some of his critics dubbed him.

Perception of challenges depends on many factors. Are you inside or outside of the church? If inside, are you on the side of aggiornamento or ressourcement? If inside, where are you? The challenges look different from, say, the Southern Hemisphere, Europe and America. If inside, are you clergy or lay, clergy or bishop/cardinal/pope?

If you are outside the RCC, do you view the RCC as a potential ally or a potential enemy? Or, both? If you are outside the RCC and outside the Christian community, in what way does the RCC impact people or issues that matter to you?

Early in his papacy JPII identified communism as a major challenge. Whatever combination of forces pressed the Soviet Union into glasnost, JPII’s eloquent defense of Solidarity in Poland and his campaigning for human rights in Communist bloc countries helped to hasten its demise.

This was seen as a high point of his papacy by many inside and outside the church. (He also traveled widely and spoke out forcefully for peace in the Middle East. This essay does not intend to be a critique or an accounting of his papacy.)

As the article on opposition to JPII’s beatification said, though, there were substantial negatives during his papacy: scandals involving the Vatican Bank, the sexual abuse issues in the US, his opposition to contraception, and his silencing of liberation theologians.

It is no surprise that certain parties within the RCC see these very negatives as challenges, especially with the ascension of Joseph Ratzinger, subject of a National Catholic Reporter article titled, "The Vatican Enforcer." He is seen as both a custodian of JPII’s initiatives and as a formidable conservative intellect in his own right.

Under his papacy the centuries old institution will face challenges. None of them seem to rise to the level of, say, the loss of imperial protection during the fall of Rome, the struggle over taxation that resulted in Unam Sanctum, the Reformation, or, especially, the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is a challenge the RCC does not feel it has met. (see remarks early on and in Ratzinger’s "Europe in a Crisis of Cultures.") It may yet prove the most difficult challenge of all.

The period just prior to the conclave held in April of this year was a rich one for analysis of the RCC’s near term future. A transcript of a public television interview program hosted by Chicago’s WTTW records thoughtful responses by several prominent Catholics.

Elizabeth Brackett interviewed several members of the hierarchy April 18^th, 2005, one day before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. Here is a summary of their answers to the challenges ahead for this pope.

Msgr. Liam Bergin broke his answers up geographically:

Africa faces questions of enculturation. How can I be Christian and Nigerian?

Latin America needs to talk about the love of Jesus in situations of oppression and injustice.

Asia has inter-religious dialogue on the top of its list.

Europe is a post-Christian world.

The US church faces pressure from feminism.

Francis Cardinal George said the main challenge is secularism in the West. People in the US see religion as a hobby, something to do in their spare time.

BARBARA BLAINE: Survivors in other countries are coming forward in large numbers now as we have never seen before, and right now it seems as though the majority are coming from the developed nations as well as English speaking nations. And we believe that when there's an environment where victims can feel safe, we think that more will come forward.

VITTORIO ZUCCONI: The number of priests is dwindling dramatically.

VITTORIO ZUCCONI: This bio-medics and euthanasia, it's the big question. … because the science are (sic) advancing so fast that they're posing so many questions and they really do not know how to answer.

A Ray Suarez show on April 20^th, a day after Pope Benedict XVI’s election, produced a different kind of analysis. He spoke with John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and author of "The Vatican Enforcer."

Allen based his pre-conclave article featuring Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on reading thousands of pages of his written work and interviewing his colleagues in Germany and in Rome. He hypothesized the new Pope would see countering the "dictatorship of relativism" as job one. This correlates with Msgr. Bergin’s remark about Europe as a post-Christian culture and with the concerns expressed in Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors and in Pius X’s Pascendi.

Ray asked Mr. Allen if there was a dialectical tension between a local, pastoral response for congregants, especially in the "failed states" of the global South, and the push to re-centralize power and authority in Rome, an effort initiated and prosecuted by JPII and by Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. (Like the notion of a "dictatorship of relativism" this refocus of power is contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of VCII.)

Allen agreed the problem existed, but that the new pope, same as the old pope, wanted to draw a careful distinction between politics and religion though he would, like the old, speak out on behalf of poor congregants.

When it came to ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue, Allen remarked that Ratzinger found RCC superior to all other Christian communions and Christianity superior to all other religions. In fact, he opposed the admission of Turkey to the EU because it would alter the Christian identity of Europe.

Closer to home two Catholics responded to the question: What do you see as the most urgent/critical issues facing Roman Catholicism in the next 25-30 years? Paul, an ex-Catholic seminarian with a brother in the hierarchy in Tyler, Texas and Dick, a Jesuit, offered these answers.

Paul:

The American church needs priests. He cited his brother’s diocese based in Tyler, Texas. 40% of the priests in that diocese are foreign born, most from India. "In East Texas, the priests are considered "colored" (to put it politely.)" As a tandem issue he cites the role of women in the church and the blocked possibility of married clergy.

AIDS, he goes on, a disaster in its own right, also highlights the church’s position on contraception. "It becomes a very pragmatic issue if your parishioners are dying faster than you can create new ones." Again, a tandem issue is abortion and, he says, "Abuse by priests is only one example of the Church’s unwillingness t o admit and grapple with the fact that people are sexual beings."

This produces a crucial conflict between belief and practice. "What Father says is not good enough anymore."

Poverty is a major challenge for the global and American church. He sees the laity pressuring the Church "to act as Jesus would act."

He also sees theological struggle with the world’s other faiths e.g., Judaism, Buddhism, Islam as a challenge in and of itself, but again driven by the laity who seem to be "…much more accepting that there are many paths to the divine."

Dick:

Do we really believe Jesus, a child of God, fully became human and one with us in the human condition? With all the implications that has?

As church do we want unity in diversity or are we going to insist on uniformity in everything from Liturgy to dogma to morality?

Do we really want to be a community of Word and Eucharist and who will we have to ordain to make that possible? At the moment we are sacrificing our Eucharist to the preservation of a male, celibate clergy.

Do we want to be a Church concerned about the common good or only concerned about personal morality and private privilege?

These two, both more within the ambit of the RCC than out, see challenges that correspond to the one’s identified in the Brackett and Suarez interviews.

Considered against its 1600 to 2000 year long history, most of the challenges to today’s church seem manageable, though certain to create conflict and continued strain in the near term future. Several commentators noted both JPII and Pope Benedict XVI believed they have time on their side.

Those that seem manageable include the role of women in the church, celibacy, sexual abuse, sexuality, standing for the poor and the needy, and the question of enculturation in Africa. It will not be easy to address these questions, but it lies within the church’s power to do so, if it will.

The challenge that may not have an answer lies in Ratzinger’s "dictatorship of relativism"—Msgr. Liam Bergin’s Europe as post-Christian culture. This is the Enlightenment in contemporary dress. The acids of modernity work to dissolve the rationale for the church itself, that is, faith in a supernatural God and confidence in the magesterium as an unassailable source of truth.

An adjunct challenge lies in the RCC’s relation with other Christian communions, and, even more difficult, its relations with the world’s other faith traditions. Globalization and the RCC’s global presence means it cannot ignore the world’s faith traditions, especially Islam, which is often as dogmatic in its exclusive claim to truth as the RCC.

Even with these extreme challenges though, it’s a good bet that the RCC will be a world force in the next millennium, as it was in the last two.