Putting aside all the clichés about Catholic popes in the land
of Luther, Benedict XVI’s forthcoming trip to his native Germany
later this month comes at a crucial time for that country. Having
just swept all before him in Zapatero’s Spain, Benedict may very
well find Germany to be one of his bigger challenges.
In some respects, contemporary Germany is a victim of its
own success. Economically-speaking, Germany is Europe’s powerhouse
these days. Thanks to the persistence of a rather un-European
work-ethic but also economic reforms implemented from 2003 onwards,
Germany has largely escaped the sclerosis presently disfiguring
Western Europe.
That’s both a blessing and a curse. Germany’s economic
dynamism has prevented Europe’s problems from becoming far worse.
Yet it also means Germany finds itself propping up a political
experiment (otherwise known as the euro) that’s tottering under the
weight of its internal contradictions. As the German tabloid
Bild put it: “Will we finally have to pay for all of
Europe?”
Looking beyond the present, however, grave challenges lie
ahead for Germany — not all of which are economic.
Germany has, for instance, one of Western Europe’s worst
birthrates. That spells trouble for Germany’s future productivity
and its welfare state. A second issue is Germany’s struggle with
the questions of immigration and non-assimilated Muslim minorities
and the subsequently-inevitable always-awkward debates about what
it means to be German in modern Europe.
These and other issues will make particular demands upon
some of Germany’s biggest culture-shaping institutions. Not all of
these, however, are well-positioned to respond. That includes
Germany’s Catholic Church.
On the surface, the German Church’s problems are
manifested in the large numbers of German Catholics who say they’ve
left the church in recent years (the very liberal Protestant German
churches are shedding members even faster). Then there are the sex
abuse scandals which emerged when ugly stories began circulating
about what had really gone on in a now not-so-prestigious
Berlin-based Jesuit school in the 1970s and '80s.
There is, however, another dimension to German
Catholicism’s present problems: a story of the follies of
accommodation to whatever counts as “modern” or “contemporary” at
any given moment.
Here I’m not so much thinking of the agenda of obvious
figures like Hans Küng (who’s increasingly an angry-old-man parody
of himself). Rather, I have in mind the way much of German
Catholicism decided to engage society after Vatican II.
In one sense, the Church is extremely present in everyday
German life. It is after all one of Germany’s biggest employers.
Amply funded by a church tax levied on all Germans who identify
themselves as Catholic, the Church runs thousands of educational
institutions, hospitals, retirement homes, foreign aid programs,
and so on.
It has, however, also become heavily bureaucratized —
something to which Benedict alludes in his interview-book
Light of the World. Nor is it clear
what distinguishes many German Catholic institutions from those of
a more secularist bent. Moreover, by no means do all the people
working in the Church’s numerous agencies profess to be faithful
Christians.
Some years ago, Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne openly
wondered why the German Church employed so many people who were at
best indifferent, if not quietly hostile, to Christian belief and
evangelization. For asking this commonsense question, Meisner was
pilloried by the secular press and assorted
celebrity-theologians.
From this standpoint, bureaucratization is symptomatic of
a deeper malaise in German Catholicism. And that problem boils down
to one thing: a failure on the part of many German Catholics to
teach the Catholic faith because of the distance they’ve put
between themselves and the truth-claims of that faith.
Anyone who reads German theological journals will tell you
that much of Germany’s Catholic theological establishment sits
rather loosely towards orthodox Catholicism. Much of it seems more
intent on deconstructing that faith than illuminating its
principles.
It’s also true that they and many other German Catholics
are now essentially liberal Protestants in the way they view
Christianity and the world. And liberal Protestantism is, as the
legal historian Harold J. Berman (himself a mild Baptist) once
wrote, merely one step away from agnosticism.
To such minds, evangelization is hardly a priority.
Instead, their focus is upon two things. The first is
power within the structures of German Catholicism because
(sotto voce) “we all know” life is really about acquiring
power rather than knowing truth. The second is upon changing
Catholicism to make the Church look much more like “the world”
because (sotto voce) “we all know” the fullness of divine
truth is “out there” rather than in the Revelation of Jesus
Christ.
This state of affairs has been worsened by many German
Catholic bishops’ abject failure to provide evangelical leadership
in the Church. Over the past forty years, German Catholicism has
not had anyone like a Jean-Marie Lustiger in France or George Pell
in Australia who — through formidable combinations of intellect,
personality, strategic thinking, and, above all, sheer
fearlessness — almost singlehandedly shakes a Church out
of its sterile complacency and sullen defeatism.
By contrast, some German bishops’ attitude is one of
“don’t rock the boat otherwise important people won’t talk to us.”
Unfortunately, there’s no strong evidence that secular German
elites pay much attention to what progressive Catholics have to
say. After all, it’s virtually indistinguishable from
progressivist-secularism. In fact, prominent left-inclined
secularist Germans such as
Jürgen Habermas and, more recently,
Gregor Gysi, have indicated they’re far more
interested in what Joseph Ratzinger thinks.
Fortunately, like everywhere in global Catholicism, German
Catholicism is changing. Younger bishops, priests and laity are far
less worried about upsetting those tenured theologians who aren’t
sure if Christ is God but who are absolutely convinced no sin could
possibly be mortal. The epicenter of German Catholic life is
shifting away from what Benedict once called “the spent and tired”
bureaucracy and is increasingly with what he describes as
initiatives that “come from within, from the joy of young
people.”
And that, perhaps, is what Benedict will bring to the
German Church: a sense of the joy of living a full
Christian life, a message that contrasts sharply with the
Götterdämmerung of a fading generation of Catholics in
perpetual rebellion against anything which suggests modernity
doesn’t have all the answers. And in the contest of hope versus
despair, we all know who ultimately wins.
