For a recent birthday, a very close friend (who, for twenty-three years, had been a member of a religious order before marriage and family life) gave me a gift of John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness. Boyne is best known for The Boy In Striped Pyjamas and the movie of that book. Loneliness, which I read in a matter of days, is an extraordinarily good piece of writing, by any standards, and I recommend it to readers.
The novel’s main character is Odran Yates, a priest of his time, and John Magee, before he became Bishop of Cloyne, is clearly the main, but not exclusive, inspiration for Yates, which I suspect Magee may have very mixed feelings about. Yates, in 1978, finds himself in Rome’s Irish College whose rector manages to place him in the Apostolic Palace as “tea boy” to the three popes of that year, with the job of attending to the pope last thing at night and first thing in the morning, by providing him with a warm beverage (and a few significant biscuits, as it turns out).
Three Popes
1978 was, of course, The Year of Three Popes (the title of Peter Hebblethwaite’s book about them), and I was studying in Rome at the time (the Angelicum). On 9th May, some friends and I had been making our way to the Irish Embassy when a deathly silence descended upon the city. We thought the pope had died, but no: the body of Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister and friend of Paul VI, had been found on the Via Michelangelo in the trunk of a Renault car, following his kidnap some fifty-five days earlier by the Red Brigades.
By that time, the pope, whom I once glimpsed snoozing (a long story), was failing in more ways than one. He never recovered psychologically from the debacle that was Humanae Vitae (it was really about authority, not sex), and Paul’s indecisive personality (‘the Hamlet of the Vatican’, Angelo Roncalli had once quipped) was unable to counter the Curia’s resistance to the reform agenda of Vatican II.
Ambivalent
Indeed, he was himself ambivalent about it, a character trait not shared by Paul’s successor but one, “the Polish Pope”, as he is called in Loneliness, who turned his path away from reform and embraced a kind of superstar papal magisterialism (to paraphrase a term coined by Edmund Hill, OP), of which Pius X, the third worst pope since 1846, would have been envious. (Pius XII is not one of the remaining two.)
Two words (French and Italian), ressourcement (“return to the sources”) and aggiornamento (“updating”), encapsulate the spirit of the Council, which rose in the Church like daybreak, forerunner of a splendid light and herald of a new dawn, to paraphrase John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli) on 11th October 1962. Sixty-one years later, it is now clear that John’s hopes for a ‘new dawn’ have failed to bring forth that ‘splendid light’.
Instead, Catholicism faces its greatest crisis since the Reformation, failing to address properly the pressing needs of the faithful in a world, to paraphrase Paul VI, requiring prophetic witnesses and not “mere teachers”, despite the best efforts of Pope Francis’ Synod to stem the tide of disaffection and defections (German Catholicism is haemorrhaging its “paid-up” membership at an alarming rate, to give but one example).
The (official) Church has lost people’s trust Francis’ objectives for the October Synod, to advance Communion, Participation and Mission, will have a chance of success if, and only if, radical structural changes, with women at their centre, are implemented as a matter of urgency.
Terminal
The UN stated recently that our problem is no longer global warming, but global boiling and the institutional Church, by analogy, is facing a similar, probably terminal, catastrophe: the challenge is to reverse many habits of centuries, or perish.
During the late 1970s, I also lived in what was then West Germany and part of my work at an ecumenical centre in the Rhineland necessitated travelling to Berlin on a regular basis, which involved liaising with the persecuted Church across the infamous Wall. (Irish passports were very useful at Check Point Charlie.)
It was quite an experience, and all of the people I encountered there were convinced that it would take generations, if at all, before Communism would collapse and the Wall collapse with it. They (and I) were wrong; it happened more quickly than anyone had thought possible, and the same will be the fate of Catholicism, because it – like post-Stalinist Communism – has been enfeebled by excessive reliance upon a model of authority that is no longer fit for purpose; and it probably never was, truth be told.
This is the proverbial elephant in the room at the October Synod, which will not be addressed in any substantive manner, unless Francis begins the process by making some radical and bold gestures (after all, he is an absolute monarch).
Francis could tell the world that popes are not “infallible”, for starters, in recognition of the disastrous consequences of Pastor Aeternus (1870), thereby putting to bed that old canard: the Church’s “revealed teaching” can never change.
And, for good measure, why not have the words ‘on the night he was betrayed’ deleted from the Eucharistic Rite? Everyone assumes they refer to Judas, but he probably died in his bed, having betrayed no one, no more than Jesus “ordained” anyone at the Last Supper, or “founded” a church, notwithstanding the official spin on Mt. 16: 18-19 (You are Peter …).
Timothy Radcliffe, OP, who knew the late Edmund Hill, will no doubt be addressing “change” in the course of the retreat he will be leading for the Pope and Synodal delegates at the beginning of October, and he is an inspirational and wise man, a prophetic witness for our time, but Radcliffe is no Ezekiel, and that is who is needed at this time of crisis.
In the “Old Testament” (first testament is preferable), a prophet’s task was to interpret the signs of the times in light of God’s will for his people, and Ezekiel had the unenviable job of proclaiming that the Babylonian Exile (587 to 538 BCE) was God’s punishment for the Jews’ worship of false gods, after which he and others had to rethink their past by re-imagining God’s plan for new circumstances.
Part of that re-imagining introduced Judaism to the notion of resurrection of the dead, which culminated for some Jews, about 500 years later, in what Christians term the Easter Experience. Sr Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM describes it as a saturated event, by which she means that the first Easter was overwhelming, unexpected, without precedent and inexplicable: the disciples were “blown away” by the experience.
What also characterises saturation events (Schneiders is adapting the phenomenological methodology of a German philosopher, Hans G. Gadamer) is that they are full of meaning which continues to be sifted, argued over and unpacked long after the originating events themselves. They are realities from which there is no going back – Vatican II, for example.
Overwhelming
These “overwhelming events” generate what Gadamer called effective histories: a progressive deepening of the events themselves by what flows from them and back over them. Judaism has had six such “events”: the Calling of Abraham, the Sinai Event, the Babylonian Exile, the Great Jewish Roman War of 66 to 73 CE, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel (1948).
Christianity, since the fifth century, has had only one major “event” so far: the Reformation, and Catholicism has had a number of sub-events, so to speak: typically the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563) and the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965).
After 73, two “new” religions emerged: Rabbinic Judaism, heir to the Pharisees, and Christianity, also heir to the Pharisees (they popularised resurrection belief from c. 160 BCE), inspired by the life and death of Jesus, born in Nazareth. He was, and always remained, a loyal son of the covenant; the religion about Jesus is Christianity.
In Ireland, a good example of this phenomenon is how the Easter Rising has become a saturation event, one that, for better or ill, will define the nation for as long as Ire[1]land exists. And the untimely death of Michael Collins (1922) fits a similar pattern.
Catholicism is in urgent need of its twenty-first century blow-away saturation event, but it is not going to happen because the institutional Church is trapped in a theological paradigm incapable, probably despite Radcliffe’s best expectations, of ridding itself of the “false gods” of dogmatic rigidity, misogynistic tendencies and an inadequate philosophy of sex still too reliant upon Aristotelian metaphysics. No “Ezekiel” is to be glimpsed on the Catholic Horizon.
Consequence
The consequence of this failure in imagination to realise aggiornamento will be its own Berlin Wall Collapse and, as dawn follows night, a few generations from now, there will be left two broad camps of Christians in the West, having moved across what will be left of today’s denominational boundaries: fundamentalist Christians and liberal Christians.
This fate will be avoided only if Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular can embrace ressourcement, with a genuine commitment to listening to and encountering the other, to paraphrase Pope Francis in a homily of October 2021.
But this strategy will work only if there is a ruthlessly honest effort to re-anchor Jesus in the flow of history, in such manner that his apocalyptic-eschatological message, heralding the end of all religion(s), is permitted to be heard again, liberated from the doctrinal constraints we have imposed upon him.
Goethe, perhaps, had a point:
Jesus felt purely and thought only of the One God in silence; Whoever makes him into God does outrage to his holy will. (Poems of West and East, 1819)
No one expects the October Synod to endorse this sentiment (now, that would constitute a blow-away saturation event!), but Goethe’s moving words, ‘echoing Judaism, Jesus and pre-Nicene Christianity, as well as the theology of Islam’, observes Geza Vermes, serve to remind us that, if ressourcement is to be a genuine undertaking, it must, in the spirit of Vatican II, embrace the imperative that ‘truth can impose itself only by virtue of its own truth’ (Dignitatis Humanae, n. 1), reflecting the famous words of Simone Weil:
“If ever it comes to a choice between Jesus and truth, we must always choose truth, because disloyalty to truth will always prove in the long run to have been disloyalty to Jesus”. If faith is important, it’s even more necessary to have faith with integrity.
Odran Yates, in Loneliness, “tea boy to three popes”, comes to a gradual awareness of how his life as a priest has been an exercise in truth avoidance, lacking integrity. It remains a dangerous temptation for those who are about to participate in Synod 2023, one that – should they succumb to it – will hasten the demise of Catholicism in the West, despite these words attributed to the resurrected Jesus: I am with you always, to the end of time. (Mt. 28:20b)
Our (known) universe is about fourteen billion years old, and if we compress that time span into one calendar year, this (half) verse was written at 23.59.55 on 31st. December, after the Big Bang; and the projected life span, to scale, of everyone reading this article is about one tenth of one second, explains Peter Enns, in his little gem of a book: How The Bible Actually Works (Hodder & Stoughton, 2019).
May Pope Francis, Timothy Radcliffe and all who participate in the Synod make the best possible use of what remains of their one tenth of that one second, so that all of us ‘may have life, and that life in abundance’ (Jn. 10:10b).
Peter Keenan, holds a degree in Theology specialising in history and religious studies. Peter has lectured extensively at gatherings for clergy, students, laity and teachers. In 1986, Peter was appointed an adviser to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales where he served for many years as secretary to its Committee for Catholic-Jewish Relations. His latest release, The Death of Jesus the Jew, is available to buy at columbabooks.com.
