Garry Wills - Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit

Contents

To Joseph P. Fisher, S.J.
the sanest guide

Introduction

C atholics have fallen out of the healthy old habit of reminding each other how sinful Popes can be. Painters of Last JudgmentsAndrea Orcagna (c. 13081368), for instanceused to include a figure wearing the papal crown in the fires of hell, presenting the Pope as a terminal sinner damned forever. This was not only a topos (commonplace), but a preachers toposa lesson of the faith, not an attack on it. Authoritative as a Pope may be by his office, he is not impeccable as a manhe can sin, as can all humans.

Of course, there is nothing either new or important about saying that all human leaders are imperfect. If the sermons meant not much more than thisand usually they did notthen they were orthodox but not very searching on the nature of papal sin. But there have been times when the papacys role in the world created a sustained bias toward a specific kind of sin, when structures of rule or teaching fostered or protected sinful ways, signifying something more than the failings of any individual Pope. The Catholic poet Dante thought that was true of the medieval papacy, whose overriding sin was greed, venality, the desire for wealthwhat medieval moralists called avarice. In the first part of The Divine Comedy, Dante sees two groups in hellthe misers and the avariciousrunning toward each other along opposite sides of a circle. After they run into each other with a crash, they turn about and run back along the circle, only to crash again on the other side of it, and they continue this back-and-forthing through eternity. Prominent in the scene are shaven heads of clergymen:

Here Popes and prelates butt their tonsured pates,

Mastered by avarice that nothing sates.

INFERNO 7.4648

The structural bias toward papal sin in the Renaissance was, according to the Catholic historian Lord Acton, a political desire for earthly power. Most people are familiar with Actons famous axiom, Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Acton 2.383). Fewer people remember that he was speaking of papal absolutismmore specifically, he was condemning a fellow historians book on Renaissance Popes for letting them literally get away with murder.

Happily, those kinds of corruption no longer corrode the papacy. Though there have been financial scandals in the modern papacy (especially that having to do with its involvement in Michele Sindonas Banco Ambrosiano), the spectacle of individual Popes amassing huge fortunes for themselves and their families is no longer the shame that caused Dantes disgust. Similarly, Popes no longer have secular kingdoms for which they are willing to murder and torture and conquer, in ways that Acton illumined with the fierce light of his scholarship. Nor do sexual scandals reach as high up or as deep down as when papal bastards ran the churchs bureaucracy. In the tenth century a dissolute teenager could be elected Pope (John XII) because of his family connections and die a decade later in the bed of a married woman.

Indeed, the state of the church is generally so much improved from the past that it might seem to have achieved impeccability after all. The level of scripture scholarship, of liturgical participation, of social concern, of personal holiness, is very high by every comparative measure we can call on. Is it a thing of the past even to think of ecclesiastical sin? One would hesitate to claim that in any case; and there are indications that some things are still not perfect. Even at a surface glance, one finds odd discordant signs. There is, for instance, a kind of double consciousness in the church revealed by this fact: News reports about Catholicism seem to return again and again to matters like birth control, abortion, clerical celibacy, or whether women can be priestsyet in twenty years of regular attendance at Mass in one church, followed by twenty years in another, I have never heard a sermon that touched on any one of those things. What can that mean? That the press is out of touch with what really matters to Catholics in their faith? There may be something to that.

On the other hand, those subjects are not beyond Catholic awareness or concernespecially the marital status of priests as that affects the shrinking numbers of them in the Catholic community. And obviously young couples, and especially young women, are affected by attitudes toward birth control and abortion. I am sure, as well, that priests who are sought out for counseling in those sensitive matters are willing to discuss them in private. But they do notat least at the campus churches I have attendedmention them from the pulpit. I have asked others at my current church if this impression accords with their memories, and it does. Can this apply to us only because campus churches are liberal? Perhaps that is one factor at work. But even so, one would think that some of the young people most affected by such issues, or people with intellectual careers, might be especially attuned to what non-Catholics and the secular press are saying about them. Then why this silence about what the media tell us are burning issues in our Catholic life?

One answer could be that the gospels do not have anything to say about birth control or abortion, married priests or women priests, and that the great truths of the faiththe Trinity, the Incarnation, the Mystical Body of Christare more central to our belief than are these controversial items of the day. This answer might be a liberal way to one-up people mired in newspaper sensationalism. But, to tell the truth, I do not hear much about those mystical doctrines of the faith in our ordinary course of Sunday sermons. A priest was almost apologetic when he had to refer to the Trinity, a rather abstruse matter, just because it was Trinity Sunday. I wondered what he thought we were there to hear about if the central doctrines of the faith were irrelevant.

Conservative Catholics claim that the laity are too resistant to the churchs teaching on controversial subjects to want them discussed in their presence, and that priests are too cowardly to bring up anything distasteful to their audience. Certainly the silence in the pulpit does not come from any failure of the Roman Curia, the Vaticans papal bureaucracy, to demand that its teachings be passed on. If the laity is not listening, it is not because the hierarchy is not loud or insistent enough in its emphasesits demands are, after all, what is being reported in the press. Pope John Paul II, and influential figures around him like Cardinal Ratzinger, have ratcheted up the degrees of obligation on favorite points of doctrine, calling them definitive and irreversible. Yet there is still a gap, a widening lacuna, between the teaching organs in Rome and the laity in the pew. The transmission through priests is faulty or disconnected. Rome has tried to remedy this by severer discipline in seminaries and Catholic universities, insisting that church teaching be taught. The effort has so far not succeeded. This surprises some people, who have considered the Catholic church the last authoritative institution in the world. The left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm thinks that religion itself must be fading from modern life if there is a breakdown of docility in the strictest religion of them all.

What can explain this disparity between what is sent out by the loud maximizers in Rome and what is received by the quietly minimizing lay people in their churches (where they still do turn up in healthy numbers, despite their deafness to Romes urgencies)? It is not enough to say that lax Catholics have been cafeteria patrons, picking and choosing what dogmas they will have for their Sunday brunch. It is often the most devout lay people (and clergy) who are most serene in tuning out the passionate signals from abroad. We should look to the lines of transmission from one point to the otherto the priests who do the actual preaching, who hear (in dwindling numbers) confession, who minister at weddings and baptisms and deaths. Why do they seem unwilling or unable to bring the high demands from their superiors into contact with the low receptive condition of their congregations? Is it a simple lack of courage or clarity or loyalty on their part? Once again, some conservatives make this charge. For them this