Here's an excellent essay on the importance of papal authority for the moral leadership that the Catholic Church has in the world, and the ways in which the recent Popes have reinforced and promoted their moral authority and thereby the Magisterium of the Church - and how all this applies to the American situation.
The Papal Difference
by Joseph Bottum
Issue for February 2010
It was Norman Mailer, I think, who once quipped that most contemporary social criticism is the desperate attempt to find something to say about America that Alexis de Tocqueville hadn’t already said. It can get a little tiresome, the constant Tocquevillian citation in every writer’s effort to speak about the American experience.
[De Tocqueville's]
Democracy in America sometimes seems the nation’s equivalent of the Sibylline Scrolls — a text to go dowsing in, with closed eyes and a pin, in the hope that something portentous and prophetic will emerge.
Nothing more sibylline — nothing more oracular and scrying — appears in Tocqueville than his oft-cited 1830 prediction that “our descendants will tend more and more to be divided into only two parts, those leaving Christianity entirely and others entering into the bosom of the Roman Church.”
Not that he was alone in such nineteenth-century visions. “Rome and the atheists have gained,” Herman Melville added in 1876. “These two shall fight it out — these two; Protestantism being retained for base of operations by Atheism.”
The current condition of the United States hardly bears out the prediction. The Protestant Mainline may have grown more than a little shaky as the stable guarantor of the American experiment.
But the nation remains a deeply religious one in its messy way, with evangelical Bible churches scattered out across the prairie, and Pentecostal storefronts filling the inner city, and a rising tide of Jews turning to Modern Orthodoxy, and Mormons in their temples, and even Muslims in their mosques.
Of course, there is no real unity among them: a surprising lack of antagonism, perhaps, but nothing that one could point to as the kind of grand ecumenical agreement symbolized, once upon an American time, by President Eisenhower’s flying up to New York to lay the cornerstone of the bravely new modern headquarters for the National Council of Churches — the home and the synecdoche of Mainline Protestant concord.
There does exist, however, the curious fact that all the contemporary religious look, in their own ways, to the Catholic Church for the institutional weight to anchor the public role of religion in America - through the Catholic schools, and the Catholic hospitals, and the Catholic bishops, and, most of all, the Catholic intellectual tradition.
The Church’s social teaching, while often misread through the familiar polarities of 1970s right and left, stands as the only comprehensive and politically significant religious vocabulary on public offer in America today — the only vocabulary that has much chance of transcending polarities and appealing across sectarian lines.
Even after the post–Vatican II decades of confusion, division, and cultural decay, the Catholic Church seems to retain enough cohesion to form the way American religion needs to speak.
For historians and social critics — for all of us plodding along the path that Tocqueville blazed — the question, of course, is why? And an answer may lie in that curious phrase Benedict XVI introduced as a rallying cry: the “dictatorship of relativism.”
The epistemological and moral relativism of secular liberalism is very American, in certain ways, but, on the level of national rhetoric, it undermines and constricts the American experiment in ordered liberty.
And where else besides Catholicism can we look for intellectual and even political support of the still-pervasive public conviction that we stand under a historically manifest source of moral authority beyond ourselves?
For a long while, Americans thought Catholicism was an un-American form of religion, but in our current situation, Catholicism alone appears able to synthesize faith and reason long enough, broadly enough, and deeply enough to avoid sectarianism. John Courtney Murray, the American Jesuit who influenced the Second Vatican Council’s decree on religious liberty, made essentially this argument, and the thirty years of debate over abortion has confirmed it. Catholic thought now defines the nonsecularist terms of American discourse — and does so, at its best, without threatening either the religious freedom or nonestablishment clauses of the First Amendment.
The Question of Authority
No one but a fool would say that Catholicism is certain to win the American public debate. Secularism may be out of gas, but it is still rolling forward, its inertial momentum carrying it onward.
We are surrounded by the ubiquitous, reflexive propaganda that dismisses as “sectarian” and “theocratic” any religious voice that clashes with the dominant secular view of any social issue.
For that matter, Catholic politicians have internalized the propaganda as much as anyone. Many of them used to say, for instance, that they had to support legal abortion despite their religious belief that abortion is immoral; yet to hear such figures as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden tell it, Catholic politicians must now support legal abortion precisely because their religion tells them it is immoral.
As my friend Paul Mankowski, S.J., once remarked, the Catholic Church’s moral agenda would be much advanced if every Catholic in Congress was replaced with a Mormon or a Muslim.
All this may be proof that the vaunted Catholic culture of the 1950s was not as healthy as pride and nostalgia have led many to believe. By the early 1970s, most of the educated Catholics who had come of age between World War II and Vatican II had thoroughly surrendered to the sexual revolution and, driven by that revolution’s inner logic, acceded to the legality of abortion.
Think of poor, lost Ted Kennedy as a clear example of what Chicago’s cardinal, Francis George, meant when he wrote:
“The greatest failure of the post–Vatican II Church is the failure to call forth and to form a laity engaged in the world politically, economically, culturally, and socially on faith’s terms rather than the world’s.”
The bishops themselves have not recovered the moral authority that disappeared in the wake of the revelations, still ongoing, of the sex-abuse scandals of previous decades.
And, jurisdictional considerations aside, the bishops’ failure to adopt a coherent policy on the giving of the Eucharist to pro-abortion Catholic politicians has retarded that recovery, at least among the most faithful Catholic laity.
Taken one by one, such obstacles seem vincible, if only with the energy and courage that spring from an urgent sense of the need to unite around what’s rightly held in common. It helps that the Catholic Church is the largest single religious denomination in America, even if that is now due largely to Latino immigration.
Yet Catholic voting patterns aren’t much distinguishable, statistically, from those of the general population.
What makes the most difference is the kind of authority the Catholic Church strives, however fitfully, to exercise. There is a kind of power that can come only from speaking “with authority, not as the scribes,” even when the authority is not clearly recognized and acknowledged as such.
And this is what we might call “the papal difference.”
I do not mean simply the papacy’s unmatched ability to speak urbi et orbi. Nor do I mean even the First Vatican Council’s dogma of papal infallibility in matters of “faith and morals.” That dogma functions almost as a bogeyman and a warning to children among non-Catholics, more an obstacle than an anchor for Christian unity.
The papacy itself has invoked it only twice in the last century and a half—both times on questions of no political moment.
The relevance of the dogma lies not so much in its sparing, formal application as in what it signifies about the Catholic Magisterium’s overall self-understanding.
Consider the topic that the Church’s critics seem to care most about: sexual morality. At its 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Church broke with the historic consensus of Christendom by allowing the use of contraceptives by married couples in “extreme cases.”
Pope Pius XI reacted fiercely and at once with the encyclical
Casti Connubii, rejecting the Anglican decision while developing Catholic teaching on marriage to a greater extent than had any previous Pope.
In the years that followed, almost all Protestant denominations followed the Anglicans on contraception - and, unsurprisingly, many of those same Protestant denominations continued on to abandon all the other equally ancient teachings about sexual morality, marriage, divorce, and procreation.
Yet in 1968, against much pressure even from intramural dissent, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion with
Humanae Vitae. Since then, only the Catholic Magisterium has continued to uphold every one of the ancient Christian prohibitions.
Even more important, it has continued to develop the positive vision that explains the prohibitions. That vision is focused by John Paul II’s “theology of the body,” presented in a series of catechetical audiences from 1979 through 1983.
Though vulgarized by some of its popularizers today, the theology of the body was the first serious attempt, at the highest level of the Catholic Church, to provide a spiritually energizing account of what sexuality is for.
Benedict XVI has contributed distinctively with the first part of his encyclical
Deus Caritas Est, and on the life-and-death questions of bioethics he has been vigilant and voluble since he arrived in Rome to help John Paul II.
Of course,
the needed sort of theistic morality cannot regain political force in America if it appears as moralism - Catholic or otherwise. As Benedict has often pointed out, the morality must be, and be seen as, motivated by love and beauty: exemplified by witnesses who rejoice in the Lord, not just by teachers who rejoice in being right.
Central as it is to his projects, Benedict’s reasoned defense of reason will not persuade those who acknowledge neither the basis nor the scope of reason. For reason alone has never been enough to motivate reliably the embodied soul and ensouled body that is a human being.
Religion would be necessary for morality even had we not fallen with original sin. And in an era when even reason must find credentials outside itself, holistic evangelization is more necessary than ever.
Which bring us to the papal difference of authority. Not just geopolitical authority, though that is sometimes quite important, as, for instance, when John Paul II exercised it against communism; not even intellectual authority, indispensable as that has proved for Benedict’s papacy.
The papacy’s possession of those kinds of authority has waxed and waned over the centuries: occasionally falling to the point of risibility, and never rising to the point of irresistibility. Behind them, however, lies a kind of authority that makes the papacy unique: its claim, at least, to divinely granted and protected authority, charismatically institutional, over the Body of Christ on earth.
Benedict knows that, of course - which is why, even during the 1990s, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he nurtured doctrinal developments whose significance few Catholics, and even fewer non-Catholics, have noticed.
Most of these developments are about authority, especially the authority of the Magisterium exercised by the college of bishops, of which the Pope is head.
Consider just one fairly recent doctrinal development raising the question: Benedict’s endorsement of the International Theological Commission’s 2007 downgrading of limbo from the status of de facto doctrine to that of mere opinion.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church had already addressed the issue, albeit rather obliquely; for many of those who care about such things, however, the Pope’s endorsement of the commission’s white paper elicited plaints of confusion: How can a doctrine that almost all Catholics had believed since the Middle Age - and most thought they were bound to believ - be tossed aside as a needless “hypothesis” (in the Pope’s word)? Indeed, what does that say about the authority of the Magisterium?
Benedict explained why limbo is unnecessary either for Catholics to believe in or for its putative beneficiaries to enjoy. But the explanation mollified neither the traditionalists, still wedded to medieval propositions, nor the progressives, who wanted to know why other, still older propositions about sexuality could not also be jettisoned.
The limbo controversy replayed, in a minor key, the questioning and confusion that followed Vatican II’s apparent reversals on such things as religious liberty, ecumenism, and the idea of a vernacular liturgy — all of which had, in their turn, reminded scholars of earlier changes on such points as usury.
Many conservative Protestants in America, concerned about what seems to them Catholic wobbliness and woolliness, have echoed such concerns.
We could explain the papal difference by appealing to the intellectually and historically steadying influence of the papacy - but it would be ridiculous if no cogent reason beyond historical accident could be given, particularly for Americans, in our culture where the change that does occur is usually taken to be the change that ought to occur.
Any conservative appeal to religious authority must first show that the authority in question distinguishes consistently between permissible and impermissible change.
Before he became Pope Benedict, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was the intellectual figure in Catholicism most concerned with this point. We could speak here of women’s ordination and other loudly noticed issues. But it’s not hard to see what, in intra-Catholic terms, is really at stake.
If the progressives are right, then any doctrine that has not been “solemnly defined,” in the technical sense of that phrase, is legitimately revocable. That holds even for important doctrines peaceably held and taught for as far back as we have records - for instance, that contraception is intrinsically wrong.
To treat such an ancient doctrine as
revocable leaves open the possibility of bringing Church teaching into line with popular American progressive views today - which is almost certainly why so many theologians hope for such theological developments.
Indeed,
they hope that “development of doctrine” will give them all the issues they want. But it is just such possibilities that the work of John Paul II and Benedict XVI seems designed to rule out.
Consider the events of 1998, when John Paul II promulgated the Apostolic Constitution
Ad Tuendam Fidem, accompanied by Ratzinger’s Doctrinal Commentary. Aimed at setting forth, as a matter of canon law, an oath of fidelity from Catholic theologians and clergy,
Ad Tuendam Fidem specified two categories of doctrine calling for “definitive” assent from believers.
Pertinent here is the second: “each and everything definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals.”
In his accompanying commentary, Ratzinger remarks:
Such doctrines can be defined solemnly by the Roman pontiff when he speaks “ex cathedra” or by the college of bishops gathered in council, or they can be taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium of the Church as a “sententia definitive tenenda” [belief to be held definitively].
Every believer, therefore, is required to give firm and definitive assent to these truths, based on faith in the Holy Spirit’s assistance to the Church’s Magisterium and on the Catholic doctrine of the infallibility of the Magisterium in these matters.
Whoever denies these truths would be in the position of rejecting a truth of Catholic doctrine and would therefore no longer be in full communion with the Catholic Church.
The subsequent explanation notes that the teaching on women’s ordination falls into that category. But so does the doctrine of the “illicitness of euthanasia,” which John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical
Evangelium Vitae had characterized as “based upon the natural law and the written Word of God, transmitted by the Church’s Tradition, and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”
Other examples Ratzinger gives are the traditional condemnations of fornication and prostitution.
They are, however, only examples. The days are long past, if they ever existed, when Vatican documents could quell all dissent. But so also are the heady, post–Vatican II days when everything seemed up for grabs.
The issue of what constitutes authority is, in some ways, an arcane intra-Catholic meta-magisterial issue. But it is not the sort of thing Rome ever unsays, especially now that the word infallible has been used. In that sense, it remains true that
Roma locuta, causa finita(Rome speaks, case closed).
And,
over time, this should suffice to quell doubts, among religious conservatives of various bodies, that what’s unique about papal authority is eroding. Much to progressive chagrin, it is objectively strengthening.
More than geopolitics, and as much as reason itself, that is what’s needed to check the dictatorship of relativism. It’s the papal difference that, in the longest term, makes the most difference.
In the American context, however, doctrinal authority, even combined with geopolitical and intellectual authority, still isn’t enough. For one thing, it doesn’t restore de facto moral authority to a Catholic hierarchy tarnished by the sex-abuse scandals.
That is a major reason Benedict’s 2008 trip to the United States was so important. His well-publicized statements of sorrow about the sex-abuse scandals, and his unprecedented pastoral meeting with victims, at least assured Americans that he cares enough about the “filth” that he had identified in his conclave homily to the assembled cardinals in 2005.
Combined with the American hierarchy’s draconian new vetting and reporting procedures, and the massive monetary payouts that continue, that is enough at least to begin the road to recovery.
Of course, Benedict did much else on that trip.
His White House address expressed the congruence of the American experiment with the Church’s developed conception of human rights:
From the dawn of the Republic, America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator. The framers of this nation’s founding documents drew upon this conviction when they proclaimed the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights grounded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
And in that speech, Benedict went on to express the hope that the Catholic Church would make a distinctive contribution to the American experiment.
That, in turn, is why his address to Catholic educators at the Catholic University of America combined
his characteristic emphasis on the synthesis of faith and reason with an equally needed reminder that its faithful transmission to the young is a sine qua non of maintaining Catholic identity.
Catholicism can make no distinctive contribution to the culture without agreement among its educated elite about what makes Catholic education distinctive and about why that element should continue defining its major semi-secular institutions: not only schools of all levels but charities and health-care institutions as well.
The vast array of such institutions founded years ago by the Protestant Mainline have long since been secularized. That has not yet entirely happened with the majority of Catholic institutions, which nonetheless struggle in a peculiarly American way to maintain their religious identity.
The papal difference is needed for these limicole institutions to maintain an identit - and the papal difference is also needed if those institutions are going to matter to American public life.
The papal difference is needed, in other words, if these institutions are going to aid the odd, in-but-not-of-the-world role that America needs religion to play.
Over the next decade, the most visible battlegrounds of American religion are going to be the Catholic colleges and hospitals. The battle over President Obama’s visit to Notre Dame last spring was only the beginning. And this shouldn’t surprise us.
The Catholic institutions are places where religion obviously impinges on public life in this nation — and public life impinges on religion.
Which is all rather the point. We need, to maintain the American experiment, the support and the criticism that religion alone can express. And, as Tocqueville predicted,
Catholicism provides the only viable vocabulary in which that support and that criticism can still be cogently and publicly expressed.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/01/2010 14:27]