The Church in the Modern World

Before we moved to Major St my “library” underwent a massive restructuring. Literally dozens of LCBO cartons filled with books were sent to my grandson’s school library, to a used book store in Orillia, to the Sally Ann, and to respondents for free books on Kijijji. The seriously pared-down remainder sits with me in our new and lovely digs, all in one accessible living room area. Since, I have quite rigorously adhered to my self-imposed admonition to refrain from purchasing more books. One site of temptation manages to slip under that determination, however. Along the strip of Bloor running west from Major to Christie where my feet often take me, there lie three used book stores, two of which position bins of remaindered books for $1 each outside their doors. What is a woman to do in the face of such easily attained riches? And so I succumb.

Recently I have brought home my copy of Mary McCarthy’s memoir of her Catholic girlhood of which I recently wrote. As well I have purchased a very good Thesaurus – always fun to flip through; a book about the Arabs in history for Mark who has long been interested in the Shiite/Sunni split; a copy of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a story in poetic form that intrigues me even though I am unlikely ever to see it all the way through; a brief history of Canada since 1867, a handy and quick reference; a book of cartoons for Billie; and, a book about which I would like to say a few words, entitled The Trial Of Pope Benedict by Daniel Gawthrop.

I was reflecting recently about how over many decades I have experienced an instinctive dislike and distrust of particular political or religious figures. Granted these folks (as the Americans are fond of saying) lie mainly on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But, it has not been simply a matter of their political ideology or actions. When I have watched and listened to these people on television, I have found it painfully difficult to put together their words and something else that I sensed about them that was at odds with their presented personas. Nixon, Reagan, and Mulroney come to mind. As later facts about their secret dealings have come to light, I have felt some justification of my original evaluations of their characters. I didn’t feel this way about Margaret Thatcher. I didn’t like some of her actions and attitudes but I didn’t sense duplicity in her essential being.

Joseph Ratzinger, the former Pope Benedict, is another person whom I more or less instinctively did not like. John Paul II before him had been profoundly conservative with respect to the Church’s teachings on faith and morals as well. But, because of his encouragement of the Polish Solidarity movement and its subsequent successful confrontation with the communist regime, I cut him a fair amount of slack as a human being. However, when Ratzinger was elevated to the papacy, his decades-old role of controlling the public face of the Church became known to more than just Vatican watchers. His repression of theologians espousing practices and ideas contrary to his own more rigidly formulated thoughts and the systematic hiding and denial of the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy became open knowledge. I and many others could in no fashion accept him as a “man of God.”

Gawthrop’s book is a revealing narrative of Joseph Ratzinger’s influence as head of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the role that he played over decades of reversing and repressing many of the most important components of the opening of the Church to the modern world put in place by Pope John XXIII through Vatican II. Because I gradually walked away from any connection with the Church in the mid-1960s and the 1970s, I followed few of the events that he documents. Nonetheless, I was aware that the sense of the Church and its directions conveyed to me during my most intense period of Catholicism, immediately before, during, and after my four years in a religious order, were being greatly altered. In the early sixties I knew and was influenced by some wonderful Catholic men and women who in themselves were intelligently devout and thoroughly humane. I think, for example, of Sister Mary Coderre and of Father Hendricks, the idiosyncratic pastor of Wolff Island parish. I had also the opportunity to read works like Hans Kung’s The Church in the Modern World. These pointed me toward an ecumenical future, consistent with the mixed religious culture in which I had grown up, one which embraced all peoples in a spirit of understanding and tolerance.

In the period of the mid-60s after I had left the convent life my connections with the Church were loosened but not left behind. At St Mike’s in Toronto where I completed my BA degree and in the Therafields community of which I became a member in 1966, I continued to meet, like, and respect nuns and priests (actual and former) who embodied all that was best in the spirit exemplified by John XXIII. Gradually, however, I became aware that the Church’s hierarchy was taking a substantial turn toward conservatism, actively repressing the significant openness and toleration that had been the hallmarks of Vatican II. I didn’t like it and I didn’t like the people who were clearly enacting the repressions that followed. This period marked my true walking away from the Church. It had briefly appeared a place of inclusion and of caring for issues of social justice. That promise seemed to die the death of a thousand repressions.

Gawthrop’s research outlines the processes that over several decades tightened the control of the Vatican over “dissidents” like Hans Kung and others who attempted to keep the spirit of John XXIII alive within the Church. Theologians who disagreed with Ratzinger’s hierarchical, magisterial version of the Church were silenced, their publications disallowed. Rather than entering into a meaningful dialogue with the modern world and its laity, the Church became ever more reactionary and insular, leading to the explosive confrontations of recent years as issues of sexual abuse and financial fraud in the Vatican bank have been pushed to the fore of public awareness. Whatever the cause of Ratzinger/Benedict’s resignation as pope, many former Catholics, like myself, are taking note of the changed atmosphere currently emanating from Rome and are interested to see in what it might eventuate.