On March 13, 2013, I stood among the thousands gathered in Saint Peter’s Square who witnessed the moment when Jorge Bergoglio, the Jesuit cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires, walked out onto the balcony following his election as the 265th successor of Saint Peter as the bishop of Rome.
As I left the square that evening, I was happy. From the limited knowledge I had of this new pope — who had taken the name Francis — it was reasonable to be hopeful. His purported remarks to the College of Cardinals, which emphasized the need for the Catholic Church to not be self-referential and bogged down in internal debates that distract from its central mission, seemed very much on point.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine, which includes this article and others like it.
Alas, eleven years later, things have turned out quite differently. Over the course of Francis’s pontificate, the Church has become decidedly self-referential. Since the end of 2013, it has been consumed by endless attempts to relitigate questions that are effectively settled matters as far as doctrine is concerned, from who may be ordained a priest to issues surrounding sex. Segments of the Church — or at least the progressives who dominate those parts in visible decline — are keen to relive the chaos and experimentation of the 1970s.
This approach reflects a very different agenda from that of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Both of Francis’s predecessors aimed to establish a definitive interpretation of the Second Vatican Council so as to equip the Church to evangelize the world bequeathed by modernity. The nature of that evangelization is best characterized as “critical engagement.” This requires both taking the post-Enlightenment world seriously and pointing out its deficiencies, demonstrating how the answers to each person’s ultimate questions are found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Integral to that critical engagement was an examination of Enlightenment notions of reason and an acknowledgement that, for all their strengths, their tendency to reduce reason to empiricism leaves humans unable to substantively answer moral questions. Likewise, John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s emphasis on the necessity of arriving at sound answers about the nature of the human person reflected their recognition that the question “Quid sit homo?” — “What is man?” — lies at the core of the highly charged questions that divide humanity, especially Western societies, today.
This article is taken from The American Spectator’s latest print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine.
The end result of the two popes’ work was the reestablishment of the Catholic Church as a central player in the intellectual debates defining our post-Enlightenment world. Certainly, the sexual abuse scandals, coupled by the manifest failure of Church authorities to properly address properly, severely undermined (and continue to undermine) public receptivity to the Church’s message. However, there is no denying that John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor and Benedict XVI’s 2006 Regensburg address had intellectual and cultural significance that resonated beyond the Catholic Church.
The prevalence of theories of moral relativism, combined with widespread angst about the relationship between reason and faith in an age of violent jihadism, could not help but prompt people — believers and nonbelievers alike — to seek coherent and persuasive analyses and responses. While not everyone agreed with all the arguments made by the papacy between 1978 and 2013, no one could doubt their power or saliency.
Those days seem very far away now. In the Catholic Church, intellectual rigor and coherence have given way to emotivism and discussions centered on feelings. There is no question in my mind that the impetus for much of this shift comes from the top down. Clear arguments are regularly dismissed by Francis as mere rationalism, exemplifying rigidity of thought or reflecting ideological mindsets.
That, however, is only one facet of the story. The other is the resurgence of those who believe that the best way for the Catholic Church to address the various challenges associated with modernity is to adjust the Church and its teachings to align with secular progressive priorities.
The rationale behind this approach is that the Church should dispense with anything and everything that its adherents believe impedes the willingness of the world (or, more specifically, the Western progressive world) to embrace it. In effect, this means not only casting aside Christ’s hard teachings but also subordinating the Church’s dogmas and doctrines to whatever happens to be the zeitgeist.
Art by Bill Wilson
The fallacy of this approach is vividly demonstrated by what has happened to every single Christian denomination that has embraced what John Henry Newman denoted as “liberal religion” over the past one hundred years. If a church has nothing to say that is not already being said by any number of secular organizations, its voice becomes indistinguishable and loses its appeal. Pandering to secular progressives also results in the degeneration of such religious bodies into mere NGO-ism, produces a mass exodus of adherents, and reduces clergy to the status of political activists, invariably of the left-leaning type.
For an example of what this looks like in the Catholic world today, consider the Catholic Church in Germany, which has been dominated by progressive bishops, theologians, and lay activists since the early 1980s. The number of Catholics in Germany has continued to plummet rapidly, even as the German Church’s tax-funded bureaucracy has grown such that it is now one of the largest employers in Germany. The Church in Germany may have a great deal of money, but it is also locked into a vision of the world that guarantees its decline.
What’s worse (and, frankly, hubristic) is that Germany’s Catholic bishops seem to think that their model and priorities should be embraced by the universal Church. For them, the future of Christianity lies in the embrace of sentimental humanitarianism. But that simply cannot be the Church’s future, not least because Jesus Christ was as far removed from the sentimental humanitarian conception of man as one can possibly imagine.
To what extent is Pope Francis responsible for this state of affairs? First, progressives have been around for a long time and never went away during the pontificates of Francis’s predecessors. Also, it has never been clear to me that Francis embraces most of the progressive agenda or view of the world.
That said, Francis has certainly given them the oxygen to pursue what one of the greatest twentieth-century theologians, Henri de Lubac, called the “autodestruction de l’Eglise et d’apostasie interne” — “self-destruction of the Church and internal apostasy.” Furthermore, Francis’s Vatican has notably refrained from forcefully refuting progressives’ ideas, and there are instances when Francis succumbs to NGO-ism himself. This is exemplified by his interventions into environmental issues, which are largely indistinguishable from statements that might be issued by a United Nations committee.
But whatever Francis’s role, there is little doubt about the consequences. In many respects, much of the leadership of the Catholic Church is now missing in action from crucial debates at precisely the time when its steadfast faith in full-bodied conceptions of reason, commitment to the idea of moral absolutes, and understanding that there are truths that transcend history are needed more than ever.
That is not only an impediment to the Church’s ability to carry out its fundamental mission of bringing the Gospel to the world. It is also a loss for civilization.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine on the future of religion in America.
