I. EASTERN ORTHODOXY#
The Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople left global Christianity divided between East and West. The rise of Islam and its conquest of the Byzantine Empire further drove a wedge between the two worlds. The once unified world of Christianity was no more.
Constantinople had been the bastion of Christianity in the East for more than a millennium (330–1453), but with the fall of the city, the Russian Orthodox Church assumed leadership in the Orthodox world and came to be known as the “third Rome.”
Formal recognition did not come until 1589, when the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church was granted the title of “Patriarch of Moscow” with the same honor and status as the ancient Eastern patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
With the ascendancy of Tsar Peter the Great, the Russian Church found itself under the strong arm of a new master, no less brutal than the Muslim domination of the various patriarchates. In 1700, after the death of Patriarch Adrian of Moscow, Peter refused to name a successor. Twenty-one years later, Peter formally abolished the Russian patriarchy. In its place he created the Holy and Supreme Synod, presided over by the “metropolitan” (the ecclesiastical equivalent of an archbishop) of Saint Petersburg, but ultimately subject to the tsar. The Russian Church was constituted this way for the next two hundred years.
A. The Russian Revolution#
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student, fired the shot heard around the world. He killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. Princip was a member of a shadowy Serb nationalist association known as the Black Hand, a group that sought independence from Austria-Hungary. The assassination in Sarajevo set into motion a series of fast-moving events that eventually escalated into a full-scale world war.
Russia was not at all prepared for war and by 1917 was on the verge of total collapse. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized the moment and launched a revolt in October. A bloody civil war engulfed Russia — during which an estimated 20 million Russians lost their lives, including Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
In the early morning hours of July 16, 1918, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were executed.
According to the diary of Leon Trotsky, another Bolshevik leader, the execution order came directly from Lenin in Moscow.
By 1922 the civil war had run its course, and the Bolsheviks now held the reins of power.
In the chaos of the tribulations of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church restored the patriarchate. On August 15, 1917, Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow (Basil Ivanovich Bellavin) became the church’s first patriarch since it had been abolished by Peter the Great in 1700. Patriarch Tikhon took a bold stance against the Bolsheviks, anathematizing them in January 1918 and in July condemning the killing of the tsar. The Bolsheviks retaliated by imprisoning the patriarch. Although Tikhon was released in June 1923, his health had been severely impaired, and he died in April 1925.
As the first state to have an ideological objective to eliminate religion, the Communist regime of the Soviet Union confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Orthodox priests and believers were variously tortured and sent to prison camps, labor camps, or mental hospitals. Many were executed.
Between 1917 and 1935 an estimated 95,000 Orthodox priests were put to death, and the number of Orthodox churches in Russia fell from 29,584 to less than 500.
When Tikhon died, the Soviet authorities forbade patriarchal elections. The Metropolitan of Nizhny Novgorod, Sergius I (Ivan Stragorodsky), served as an acting patriarch. In an effort to stop the Soviet campaign of terror against the church, Sergius pursued reconciliation. On July 19, 1927, he issued his infamous Declaration, whereby he accepted the Soviet authority over the church and condemned political dissent within the church. However, persecution continued unabated, and by the outset of World War II only four bishops remained.
Only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 did Soviet leader Joseph Stalin scale back the campaign of persecution. In exchange for its support of the new world war, Stalin allowed the church to elect a new patriarch. On September 8, 1943, Sergius was elected as the thirteenth patriarch of Moscow. With a newly restored patriarch, tensions between Communist officials and the Orthodox Church eased for a time. But in 1959 the new Communist leader, Nikita Khrushchev, initiated his own persecution of the church, which continued under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. By 1985 fewer than 7,000 churches remained active.
B. Glasnost and Gorbachev#
A pivotal point in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church came in 1988 with the millennial anniversary of the baptism of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Many older churches and some monasteries were reopened. Coinciding with these historic celebrations was the introduction of a new policy of Glasnost (“openness”) by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Under Gorbachev, Glasnost brought greater openness and transparency in government activities as well as more religious freedom for citizens. For the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, people could see live transmissions of church services on television.
The progressive leadership of Gorbachev eventually unleashed democratic forces, which led to the dismantling of the old Soviet Union in 1991. The new political climate in Russia saw the Russian Orthodox Church regain much of its lost prominence in the nation’s society.
C. Global Orthodoxy#
The Orthodox Church is a worldwide communion of independent, or “autocephalous,” churches, sharing the same theological tradition but retaining their own authority, including the right to elect their own patriarch.
Traditionally the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople is recognized as primus inter pares (first among equals) of Orthodox bishops. He possesses privileges of chairmanship and initiative, but no direct doctrinal or administrative authority. The other ancient patriarchates have an established order of precedence:
The patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt (with jurisdiction over Africa)
The patriarch of Antioch, who actually resides in Damascus, Syria (with jurisdiction over the Arab-speaking Orthodox Christians in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq)
The patriarch of Jerusalem (with jurisdiction over Palestine)
Even though four ancient patriarchates have ecclesial precedence, it is the Russian Orthodox Church that dominates Eastern Orthodoxy, representing the vast majority of the Orthodox Christians. The ancient patriarchates have been reduced to a small constituency of followers.
The autocephalous Orthodox churches exist in Georgia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Albania, Poland, Czech Republic/Slovakia, and the province of North America (although the latter is not universally recognized).
Beyond these autocephalous churches the Eastern Orthodox communion also includes a number of “autonomous” (semi-independent) churches, of which only two have universal recognition — the churches of Sinai and Finland. These autonomous churches enjoy a significant measure of independence, though the election of their primate is subject to nominal approval by a mother church.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, the complex of Orthodox churches numbered about 210 million adherents worldwide. Roughly two-thirds of all Orthodox followers belong to the Russian and Romanian Orthodox churches. Among the ancient patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem, there are fewer than 10 million adherents.
D. Orthodox Diaspora#
One of the most striking developments in modern Orthodoxy is the dispersion of Orthodox Christians to the West. Emigration from Greece and the Near East in the past hundred years has created a sizable Orthodox diaspora in western Europe, North and South America, and Australia. In addition, the Bolshevik Revolution forced thousands of Russian exiles westward. As a result, Orthodoxy’s traditional eastern boundaries were altered.
Orthodoxy had its first appearance in North America in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Russian fur traders made their way to the Yukon. The years 1890 through 1910 saw the greatest wave of Orthodox immigration into North America, and by 1916 there were approximately 100,000 Orthodox adherents. Immigrants from Greece, Russia, Lebanon, Romania, Syria, Bulgaria, Egypt, and Serbia formed ethnic enclaves in the industrial centers of America.
Initially, almost all Orthodox communities, regardless of ethnic background, were united under the Russian Orthodox Church. That church had established the first diocese in the United States, and the Russian churches were numerous and well-organized. But Russian Orthodoxy in America underwent dramatic change with the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Russian Orthodox Church in America has a complicated history of rivalry and sometimes outright hostility. There are two competing jurisdictions: the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the Metropolia, later renamed the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). Both emerged in the wake of the Russian Revolution.
Fearing the Bolsheviks, Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow issued a decree (Ukaz) in November 1920, calling on dioceses outside the borders of Russia to organize themselves autonomously until such time as normal communications and relations with the church in Russia could resume.
ROCOR came into being when a group of Russian bishops fled the country and organized themselves in Constantinople and Serbia. In America, the bishops took Tikhon’s Ukaz as the basis for their own self-administration, organizing themselves in 1920.
The American branch of the mother Orthodox Church in Russia (Metropolia) also took Tikhon’s Ukaz as a cue to declare in 1924 a state of “temporary self-government.”
Both ROCOR and the Metropolia opposed the Moscow patriarchate because they believed it was subservient to what ROCOR called the “Soviet atheistic regime.”
In 1970, during a brief period of Soviet-American detente, the Metropolia reconciled with the Moscow patriarchate. Soon thereafter, the Metropolia (OCA) was officially granted the status of autocephalous. ROCOR repudiated the reconciliation as a capitulation to the Communist-dominated mother church.
With the breakup of the Soviet Empire, relations between ROCOR and the Moscow patriarchate gradually began to thaw. In May 2007 the Act of Canonical Communion was signed, and communion with the Moscow patriarchate was restored. Along with the restoration of canonical links with the Moscow patriarchate, ROCOR and the OCA also resumed full communion.
The patriarchates of the four ancient seats of Orthodoxy (Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, and Alexandria) refuse to recognize the OCA as canonical, averring that only the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in conjunction with the other three patriarchs can bestow autocephaly. This jurisdictional controversy is primarily political, however, and in practice, members of the OCA are in full communion with other Orthodox dioceses.
At present there are eleven primary Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States, representing different mother churches based in eastern Europe and the Middle East.
The Orthodox churches in SCOBA include the following:
Greek Orthodox
Serbian Orthodox
Romanian Orthodox
Orthodox Church in America (OCA)
Russian Orthodox
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)
Carpatho-Russian Orthodox
Antiochian Orthodox
Bulgarian Orthodox
Ukranian Orthodox
Albanian Orthodox
These Orthodox churches, although separate, cooperate in the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA). Founded in 1960, the purpose of SCOBA is to foster unity among the Orthodox churches for a more visible witness to the Orthodox faith. The Orthodox leaders meet semi-annually for dialogue on inter-Orthodox and ecumenical matters and cooperative ventures.
E. Evangelicals and Orthodoxy#
One of the more intriguing developments in the short history of Orthodoxy in North America was the migration of evangelicals to the Orthodox faith. Perhaps most surprising was the journey of disgruntled leaders in the evangelical parachurch ministry, Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru).
In 1968 Peter Gillquist and a handful of other top leaders left the organization in a quest for the “authentic” Christian church, whose historical roots could be traced to the first-century church of Jesus. By 1975, Gillquist and his former Campus Crusaders banded together in a loosely organized religious group, the New Covenant Apostolic Order. The quest for the true New Testament church eventually led Gillquist and colleagues to Orthodoxy. Thus, in February 1979 the group formally established itself as the Evangelical Orthodox Church (EOC), with Gillquist as the presiding bishop.
The leaders of this independent Orthodox church still sought a formal connection to the historic Orthodox Church.
EOC representatives began to meet with various Russian Orthodox theologians and decided to approach the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople to come under his jurisdiction, but were rebuffed.
However, the Metropolitan of the Antiochian Orthodox Church was more receptive, and in the spring of 1987 the EOC was officially accepted into the Orthodox communion through the AOC’s jurisdiction.
Virtually the entire EOC denomination of two thousand former evangelical Protestants and seventeen parishes was welcomed into the Antiochian Orthodox Church. The EOC was renamed the Evangelical Antiochian Orthodox Mission, a title it retained until 1995, when it was completely absorbed into the main diocesan framework of the Antiochian Church.
The entrance of the EOC into the Orthodox Church inspired other individuals and congregations to enter the church.
In 1990 Frank Schaeffer, son of the evangelical apologist Francis Schaeffer, joined the Greek Orthodox Church and became a noted critic of American evangelicalism.
Jaroslav Pelikan, a prominent Yale University historian and lifelong member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, joined the Orthodox Church in America in 1998.
One of the monumental ecclesiastical triumphs in nearly a millennium occurred in 1964, when Pope Paul VI and the Patriarchal Bishop of Constantinople, Athenagoras I, rescinded the mutual excommunications of 1054 that had given rise to the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches. Pope John Paul II furthered the ecumenical efforts in 2004 when he extended a formal apology for the sack of Constantinople eight hundred years earlier (1204) during the Fourth Crusade.
All grievances between East and West were not resolved, and the declaration did not result in unification, although it did herald new possibilities of improved church relations between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
II. ROMAN CATHOLICISM#
A. Historical Arc#
Throughout its long history the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a privileged status among European sovereigns. As the vicar of God on earth, the pope believed the church had spiritual authority over the state, but increasingly that spiritual authority mutated into political power. Especially in the Middle Ages, the pope not only claimed authority over the Catholic kings of western Europe, but actually exercised that authority.
Despite the ebb and flow of papal power, for more than a millennium the papacy proved to be a powerful political force with which every monarch had to reckon.
The Enlightenment presented a challenge to the historic privileges of the Catholic Church. Instead of its traditional position of cultural power and political influence in Western society, the church came under assault. The French Revolution added insult to injury with the Fête de la Raison (“Festival of Reason”), when Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was declared a Temple of Reason and a young woman was placed in the pulpit and hailed as the Goddess of Reason (on November 10, 1793).
A cultural paradigm shift was under way in which reason was exalted at the expense of faith.
Napoleon Bonaparte exploited the weakening political power of the papacy by invading Italy and imprisoning Pope Pius VI, who eventually died in captivity. In the Concordat of 1801, Napoleon later reached an agreement with the papacy (Pius VII) that acknowledged the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church in France, but French clergy were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the state.
Italian nationalism had been enflamed during the Napoleonic period in 1848, when revolutions began to break out across Europe. In 1860, after prolonged civil unrest, Victor Emmanuel II seized nearly all of the Papal States, including a broad swath of territory across central Italy, leaving only Rome under papal control. Then in 1870, Victor Emmanuel captured Rome itself and declared it the new capital of a unified Italy, ending papal claims to temporal power.
The traditionally Catholic monarchs failed to come to the pope’s rescue, and Pius IX (1846–78) withdrew in protest into the Vatican, where he lived as a self-proclaimed “prisoner” (as did his successors) and forbade Catholics on pain of excommunication to participate in elections in the new Italian state. It was not until 1929 that a treaty was signed with the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, recognizing the independence and sovereignty of the Holy See and thus creating the State of the Vatican City.
The loss of the Papal States meant that Pius IX was the last pope who was also a secular ruler of the Papal States. This setback, however, did not stop Pius IX from exercising considerable influence. He centralized the ecclesial administration and, more than his predecessors, used the papal pulpit to address the bishops of the world.
Although one of the most conservative popes, Pius IX is paradoxically considered the first “modern” pope because the spiritual influence of the papacy grew in importance after the 1870 fall of the Papal States. The loss of secular power actually enhanced the spiritual authority of the papacy.
Under Pius IX, the Roman Church maintained its conservative stance. In addition to his issuing the infamous Syllabus of Errors, his antimodern stance was clearly manifested in the First Vatican Council, which convened in 1869.
B. The First Vatican Council#
The First Vatican Council (1869–70) was the first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church since the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. Like Trent, Vatican I was a reactionary council that repudiated modernist ideas and tightened ecclesiastical control of Tradition and biblical scholarship. The modernist challenge was met with staunch resistance in the rise of Ultramontanism, which euphemistically ascribed final ecclesiastical authority “beyond the mountain” — that is, in Rome.
Ultramontanism found its fullest expression at the First Vatican Council in the affirmation of papal infallibility. To counter the advance of modernism, it was asserted that whenever the pope spoke ex cathedra as the universal pastor and teacher of the church, his teachings on faith and ethics were infallible. Pius’s authority was greatly enhanced by having the longest reign in the history of the papacy, more than thirty-one and a half years.
The Ultramontanist spirit of Vatican I was underscored by a revival of Thomism. In 1878 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris (“Of the Eternal Father”), declaring Thomas Aquinas as the eternal teacher of the church.
This encyclical provided a charter for Thomism as the official philosophical and theological system of the Roman Catholic Church
It was to be normative, not only in the training of priests at seminaries, but also in the education of the laity at universities
The twentieth-century legacy of Vatican I was one of intense opposition to modernist trends. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, a series of popes sought to root out all vestiges of modernism, which they judged to be theological and ecclesiological heresy.
On September 8, 1907, Pope Pius X issued the papal encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”), which was directed specifically against modernism. For Pius, modernism was the “synthesis of all heresies.”
That same year he published the papal decree Lamentabili sane exitu (“A Lamentable Departure Indeed”) directed against the French Catholic exegete Alfred Loisy, whose views were thought to endanger some of the most cherished teachings of the Catholic faith such as the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the sacraments, the nature of the church, biblical exegesis, and the divinity of Christ.
Pius was determined to protect the traditional authority of the church. To that end, he ordered all clerics to take an oath against modernism (Sacrorum antistitum). The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) was a prominent advocate of the Thomistic renaissance, which provided intellectual aid and support for the antimodern stance of the church.
Pius also encouraged the formation of the Sodalitium Pianum (“League of Pius V”), an antimodernist network of informants. His aggressive stance against modernism forced advocates to go underground or remain silent. Any theologian who wished to pursue such lines of inquiry would face conflict with the papacy, and even excommunication.
Marian devotion has always been sacred in the Catholic Tradition, but as the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century, popes began to promote the importance of Mary with even more determination as a time-honored bulwark against modernism. Pope Pius IX decisively acted on the centuries-old debate between Dominicans and Franciscans regarding the immaculate conception of Mary, deciding in favor of the Franciscan view.
Shortly after Pius promulgated the doctrine of Immaculate Conception in 1854, new apparitions of Mary began to occur.
In 1858 a fourteen-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, believed that at Lourdes, France, she saw and conversed with the Virgin Mary eighteen times.
In 1917 Mary was reported to have appeared to three shepherd children in Fátima, Portugal, over a period of several months.
Both Lourdes and Fátima became holy sites for pilgrims seeking miraculous healing. For many laity especially, the Blessed Virgin Mary proved to be a safeguard against the antisupernaturalism of the modernists.
C. Persecution of Catholics#
For all of its spiritual sway, the Catholic Church also became the object of significant repression in the twentieth century. In Central and South America, a succession of anti-Catholic regimes came to power.
The strident atheist Plutarco Elías Calles became president of Mexico in 1924, and during his decade of rule he enacted and enforced strict anti-Catholic legislation. The so-called “Calles Laws” prohibited religious orders, denied property rights to the church, and deprived clergy of civil liberties, including their right to trial by jury and the right to vote.
Catholic opposition to Calles led to the infamous “Cristero War” from 1926 to 1929, in which 90,000 Mexicans lost their lives. The Calles persecution resulted in the death or expulsion of more than 4,000 Catholic priests. By the end of Calles’s presidency, the number of Mexican priests had declined from 4,500 to only 334.
In 1954, under the regime of General Juan Perón, Argentina saw extensive destruction of churches, denunciations of clergy, and confiscation of Catholic schools as Perón attempted to extend state control over national institutions.
After Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba in 1959, he reduced the church’s ability to function effectively through deportations of priests, governmental recriminations against Catholics in public life, and discrimination against Catholic education. The subsequent flight of 300,000 people from the island further diminished the influence of the Catholic Church in Cuba.
Harsh persecutions of the Catholic Church also took place in Spain and the Soviet Union.
In Russia, persecution of the clergy began in the Bolshevik Revolution and continued until World War II.
The civil war in Spain began in 1936, during which thousands of churches were destroyed and thirteen bishops and nearly 7,000 priests were assassinated.
After the massive persecutions in Mexico, Spain, and the Soviet Union, communism emerged as a prime adversary of the Catholic Church, which is reflected in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris (“Divine Redeemer”) issued in March 1937. In this encyclical Pope Pius XI described communism as “a system full of errors and sophisms” that subverts the social order and destroys the foundation of faith.
D. World War I#
When Pius X died in August 1914, Archduke Ferdinand had already been assassinated and Austro-Hungarian armies had already invaded Serbia. Every Catholic knew that war would be the dominant issue of the new pontificate.
With Europe plunging headlong into war, the College of Cardinals chose Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa, an experienced diplomat, on September 3, 1914, to wear the papal tiara. Despite having been a cardinal only three months, della Chiesa took the name of Benedict XV amid the gunfire of Europe. His diplomatic instincts led him to remain neutral throughout the war even as the nations of the world were taking sides.
His first encyclical, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum (“Appealing for Peace”), extended a sincere if futile plea to end hostilities, insisting that there are other ways to resolve political tensions. He had hoped the neutrality of the Holy See would allow him to mediate peace, but all parties rejected his initiatives
National antagonisms between the warring factions were accentuated by religious differences
German Protestants renounced papal peace initiatives as veiled support for the Allied powers
Even French Catholics were wary of Vatican motives
Having failed with diplomatic initiatives, Pope Benedict concentrated on humanitarian efforts, such as attending to prisoners of war, exchanging wounded prisoners, and providing food to war-torn refugee populations in Europe.
When the war was over and the Treaty of Versailles was in place, Benedict warned that the harsh economic conditions imposed on Germany could prompt yet another war as soon as Germany regained its military prowess. Benedict’s warning proved to be prophetic.
E. World War II#
Through political acuity, deceptiveness, and cunning, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists — the Nazis — came to power in the fragile Weimar Republic of 1933. In January 1933 an ailing and increasingly senile President Paul von Hindenburg was manipulated into appointing Hitler chancellor of Germany.
Nazi is a short form of the official name Nationalsozialist.
By 1937 Pope Pius XI had learned enough about Hitler to issue, in his encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”), a warning to German Catholics that anti-Semitism is incompatible with Christianity. Smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits, the encyclical was the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any institutional authority. By the time Pius XI died in February 10, 1939, it was clear that war clouds were again on the European horizon.
Given the gravity of the political circumstances, the conclave quickly chose Eugenio Pacelli, who as Cardinal Secretary of State had actually drafted Mit brennender Sorge. By the time he took the name Pius XII, he knew his pontificate would be defined by his dealings with Hitler.
The Nazis retaliated against the encyclical with even more severe measures.
In Germany they staged a series of prosecutions of Catholic clergy accused of debauchery and homosexuality.
The Nazis murdered more than 2,500 monks and priests in Poland and sent another 2,500 to concentration camps such as Dachau.
Although Pius maintained a policy of public neutrality during the war, mirroring the tactics of Pope Benedict XV during World War I, he nevertheless condemned the partition of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in his encyclical Summi Pontificatus (“On the Limitations of the Authority of the State”), issued in October 1939.
The papal policy of neutrality garnered considerable criticism toward Pius for not condemning Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Although he received considerable political pressure from the governments of the United States and Britain as well as reports from Catholic clergy of the massacres of Jews, Pius refrained from a public reproof. Neither did he publically condemn Nazi and Soviet massacres of Catholic clergy and civilians.
Covertly, Pius did endeavor to protect Jews.
Following the German occupation of northern Italy (September 1943), when deportations of Jews from Italy were imminent, nearly 500 Jews were hidden in the Vatican itself and another 4,000 were protected in Italian monasteries and convents.
Similarly, in March 1944 the pope secretly instructed papal legates in Hungary to shelter Jews.
Some Israeli scholars estimate that as many as 860,000 European Jews were preserved from death camps through concealment in church facilities and the issuance of counterfeit baptismal certificates.
Later on, many prominent Jewish leaders, including Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir (1969–74), praised Pope Pius for his relief efforts and opposition to racial persecution.
In addition to the Nazis, Pius had to deal with the rise of communism and its brutal repression of Christianity.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 dramatically undermined the Orthodox Church, but it also virtually eliminated Catholic churches in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era.
Communist regimes virtually eradicated the Roman Catholic Church in Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania.
The communist takeover of China also led to persecution and near eradication of the Catholic Church in the early 1950s.
The legacy of Pius is largely bound up with World War II, but he will also be remembered for invoking ex cathedra papal infallibility to declare the Assumption of Mary as dogma of the Roman Catholic Church in his Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus (“The Most Bountiful God”) in 1950.
The assumption of Mary into heaven without dying became an established teaching across the Eastern and Western churches from at least the seventh century and perhaps as early as the fourth century. But it was Pius who made it an infallible dogma of the Catholic Church.
F. The Second Vatican Council#
No one could have anticipated the sea change that was about to overtake the Catholic Church when it elected the seventy-four-year-old Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli as pope on October 28, 1958.
After the long pontificate of Pope Pius XII, the College of Cardinals chose a man who, it was presumed because of his advanced age, would be a short-term pope. Even Roncalli was caught off-guard by his election. He had arrived in the Vatican with a return train ticket to Venice.
As it turned out, Roncalli, who took the name Pope John XXIII, was more than his fellow cardinals bargained for. Less than three months after his papal election, he called for the twenty-first ecumenical council to meet at the Vatican in Rome — the largest church council in history.
Vatican II opened under Pope John XIII on October 11, 1962, and closed under Pope Paul VI on November 21, 1965. At least four future pontiffs took part
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, later Paul VI
Bishop Albino Luciani, the future Pope John Paul I
Bishop Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II
Father Joseph Ratzinger, who served as a peritus (theological advisor to the bishops), then became Pope Benedict XVI
Notable periti included Hans Küng, Henri De Lubac, Yves Congar, M. C. Chenu, Jean Danielou, Teilhard de Chardin, and Karl Rahner.
Vatican II met in four sessions from 1962 to 1965 and revolutionized the Roman Catholic Church. While it did not propagate any new dogmas or radically alter doctrine, the council “threw open the windows of the church to let the fresh breezes blow through it.” Pope John described his goal as Aggiornamento (“bringing up to date”), which came to define a spirit of change and open-mindedness. Aggiornamento signified that the Roman Catholic Church had emerged from its reactionary antimodernist isolation.
When Pope John died in June 1963, Vatican II was automatically suspended according to the dictates of canon law. But his successor, Paul VI, immediately declared his intention to reconvene Vatican II and see it to completion.
One of the most dramatic events occurred in the final days of Vatican II. On December 7, 1965, Pope Paul and the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras issued simultaneously in Rome and Istanbul a joint declaration of regret for past actions that led up to the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches. The declaration did not end the schism, but it laid the groundwork for further dialogue between the two churches.
From the Second Vatican Council came other changes that reshaped the face of Catholicism:
A new openness to biblical scholarship
An expansive revision of the traditional liturgy
A stronger emphasis on ecumenism
A more engaging view of the modern world
The laity were given greater voice
The role of the bishops was given renewed prominence
Lists of banned books were abolished
Catholic scholars were given freedom to publish exploratory works without prior permission from the Catholic hierarchy
The mass could be said in the vernacular
The council did not actually abolish Latin as the liturgical language of the Roman Rite, but it did grant permission to celebrate the mass in the vernacular — a permission that was accepted worldwide.
III. ECUMENISM#
One of the distinguishing features of Vatican II was its new ecumenical outlook.
Before Vatican II, Roman Catholics defined ecumenism primarily in terms of persuading estranged Christians to return to the mother church and thus restore the unity they had broken.
In contrast, the new ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council stressed first the need for renewal from within the Roman Church itself.
Such renewal would then serve as a basis for earnest dialogue, not only to explain the church’s teaching, but also to understand other viewpoints. This new perspective on ecumenism is illustrated from the decree Unitatis Redintegratio (“Restoration of Unity”), issued on November 21, 1964.
The Aggiornamento of Vatican II denoted a significant shift in outlook toward Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants. No longer seen as heretics, they were now “separated brethren” (fratres seiuncti).
With World War II still a vivid memory, the council issued Nostra Aetate (“In Our Age”):
Jews were no more responsible for the death of Christ than Christians and therefore Jews should not be regarded as accursed by God.
Hindus, Buddhists, and other such faiths are to be regarded with “sincere reverence.” Although differences remain, the Catholic Church affirmed that these religions “often reflect a ray of truth.”
Muslims are to be regarded with esteem, since they share the Christian belief in the one Creator God and regard Jesus and Abraham as prophets.
Nostra Aetate concluded by asserting that all are created in God’s image and that it is contrary to the teaching of the church to discriminate against any person or ethnic group on the basis of color, race, or religion.
In Lumen Gentium (“Light of the Nations”), the true church is specifically identified with “the successor of Peter” but immediately adds, “Nevertheless, many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines.”
A. Theological Dialogues#
After the council, ecumenical efforts between leading Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox theologians led to meaningful discussions.
Emblematic of how historic differences could be resolved was the “Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East,” signed by Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV in November 1994.
The division between the two churches goes back to the Council of Ephesus in 431 and the dispute over whether the Virgin Mary should be referred to as the “Mother of God” or the “Mother of Christ.” Although using different expressions, the Common Declaration asserts, “We both recognize the legitimacy and rightness of these expressions of the same faith and we both respect the preference of each Church in her liturgical life and piety.”
Pope Paul VI set the stage for ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican Church when he referred to it as “our beloved sister Church.” In 1966 Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey made an official visit to Pope Paul.
The following year, the Anglican – Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) was established. Significant agreements were achieved with Anglican theologians on baptism, ministry, and the Eucharist. Despite the progress of these discussions, dialogue was strained by the developments in some provinces of the Anglican Communion concerning such matters as the ordination of women, permissive teaching on abortion, and the ordination of noncelibate gay priests. In 2003 Pope John Paul II temporarily halted the ecumenical talks when the American Episcopal Church consecrated Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop in New Hampshire.
In a controversial move in November 2009, Pope Benedict XVI announced his intention, in his letter Anglicanorum coetibus (“Anglican assemblies”), to create a new ecclesiastical structure called the Personal Ordinariate, designed for Anglicans who return to the Catholic Church. The plan would create quasi-diocesan structures for former Anglicans, which would allow them to retain elements of Anglican liturgy, spirituality, and religious practice, including married priests (but not married bishops).
In a dialogue lasting more than thirty years, Lutherans and Roman Catholics produced a joint declaration on the critical theological issue at the root of the Protestant Reformation. The “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification” was issued in 1999 by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation.
Admittedly, the declaration does not cover all aspects of Lutheran and Catholic teaching, nor does it solve every difficulty, but it does assert that “the remaining differences in language, theological elaboration and emphasis in the understanding of justification … are acceptable.” Furthermore, the remaining differences are no longer the object of mutual condemnation.
The declaration took the unprecedented step of disavowing prior excommunications relating to the doctrine of justification as set forth by the Council of Trent and proclaimed in the Lutheran Confessions. In July 2006 the World Methodist Council, meeting in Seoul, South Korea, voted unanimously to adopt this document as well.
B. Social Thought#
The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century raised serious concerns about the poor working and living conditions of the new urban workforce. In May 1931, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (“Forty Years”), which heralded a new era of Catholic social teaching.
Already in 1891, Pope Leo XIII had published the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), which affirmed the dignity and rights of industrial workers and argued for the establishment of a living wage and the right of workers to form trade unions. But Quadragesimo Anno went a step further and cautioned against unrestrained capitalism and totalitarian communism as major dangers to human freedom and dignity.
Pope Paul’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio (“The Development of Peoples”) affirmed that the economies of the world should serve to benefit all humankind and not just the wealthy. The encyclical added that world peace is contingent on justice for all.
For all of the progress made at Vatican II, some traditional values remained unchanged.
Pope Paul VI published his encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (“Of the Celibate Priesthood”) in June 1967, which reaffirmed priestly celibacy as an ideal state that continues to be mandatory for Roman Catholic priests.
In 1968 he issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae (“Of Human Life”), which reiterated the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church prohibiting abortion and contraception.
On basic church teachings, the papacy was unwavering.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s brought challenges to the post-Vatican II church. Efforts to persuade the church hierarchy to consider the ordination of women led Pope John Paul II to respond with two documents confirming traditional church teaching.
In his 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem (“On the Dignity of Women”), John Paul advocated complementarianism, stressing the equal importance and complementary role of women in the work of the church.
In 1994, he produced another apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (“On Ordination to the Priesthood”), reserving “priestly ordination to men alone.”
Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was not issued as an ex cathedra statement. However, it is considered infallible under the ordinary magisterium as a doctrine that has been held consistently by the church.
C. Pope John Paul II#
When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, he was probably the most widely acclaimed pope of the twentieth century — adored by a billion Catholics and deeply admired by many Protestants. He was the longest-serving pope of the century, and his almost twenty-seven years (1978–2005) was the second-longest pontificate in the history of the church.
Pope John Paul II was born Karol Jozef Wojtyla on May 18, 1920, to a devout Catholic family in the industrial town of Wadowice, Poland, near Krakow. During the German occupation he began studying for the priesthood in an underground Krakow seminary. Ordained a priest in 1946, he was sent to Rome, where he earned doctorates in theology and philosophy. His meteoric rise in the church began in 1958, when Pope Pius XII appointed the thirty-eight-year-old professor of ethics as auxiliary bishop of Krakow. Six years later he was named archbishop of Krakow and then made a cardinal in 1967 at age forty-seven.
When Pope John Paul I died after only twenty-five days in office, the College of Cardinals elected Wojtyla on its eighth ballot (October 1978) as the 263rd successor to St. Peter. He was the youngest pope in more than a century. The conclave had been divided between two particularly strong candidates:
Giuseppe Siri, the Archbishop of Genoa
Giovanni Benelli, the Archbishop of Florence
With the conclave deadlocked, they finally settled on a compromise candidate, the fifty-eight-year-old Karol Jozef Wojtyla.
As pope, John Paul II was more than willing to leverage his influence to achieve political reform. During the first year of his papacy he strategically visited Poland and energized millions of the faithful, much to the dismay of Communist Party officials.
It has been widely acknowledged that his elevation to the St. Peter’s chair was catalytic for the Solidarity Movement in Poland and was instrumental in bringing about the collapse of Soviet communism.
John Paul’s reign was almost cut short in May 1981 when he was critically wounded by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish terrorist. The assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square failed, and John Paul’s life was spared. In one of the most poignant moments of his papacy, he forgave Ali A?ca and embraced him during a prison visit in 1983. In March 2006 an Italian parliamentary commission concluded that the Soviet Union was behind the attempted assassination in retaliation for John Paul II’s support of the pro-democratic Solidarity Movement in Poland.
Ecumenical engagement was a hallmark of John Paul’s papacy.
In 1983 he became the first pope to visit a Lutheran church
In 1999 the churches reached consensus on the doctrine of justification, the key stumbling block between Catholics and Protestants since the sixteenth-century Reformation.
He also reached out to Jews with unprecedented initiatives. He called Jews “elder brothers in faith”.
In 1986 he became the first pope in nearly two thousand years to enter a synagogue
Although John Paul was a staunch opponent of militant Islam, on a trip to Damascus, Syria, in 2001 he became the first pope to visit a mosque.
Umayyad Mosque was once a Christian church dedicated to John the Baptist, who is believed to be interred there.
John Paul not only granted forgiveness, but asked forgiveness for past wrongs committed by the Catholic Church. He made public apologies for:
The trial against Galileo in 1633
The church’s involvement with the African slave trade
The silence of Catholics during the Holocaust
The execution of Jan Hus in 1415
The Crusader attack on Constantinople in 1204
The pope took the unusual but highly popular decision in 2000 to join forces with Irish rock stars Bob Geldof and Bono (Paul David Hewson) in their campaign for wealthy nations to forgive the debt of poor African nations.
Despite his global popularity, John Paul’s relationship with America was sometimes strained. He was a prominent critic of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He condemned American cultural mores such as uninhibited capitalism as well as what he saw as “the culture of death” marked by abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia.
Moreover, John Paul was often at odds with the more progressive American Catholic Church. He consistently resisted:
Calls to open the priesthood to women or married men
Strenuously opposed homosexuality
Insisted that divorced Catholics who had remarried should be barred from the Eucharist
Although John Paul saw his pontificate as fully in accord with the Aggiornamento spirit of Vatican II, he retained some of the more traditional values of the Catholic Church.
The Polish-born activist pope who redefined the relationship of Catholicism to the world died April 2, 2005, at the age of eighty-four, as one of the most popular popes in history. Since his death, a number of clergy at the Vatican and Catholics all over the world have referred to the late pontiff as “John Paul the Great” — only the fourth pope in history to be so acclaimed, and the first in more than a millennium.
D. Roman Catholicism in America#
The American Catholic Church is not governed by a single primate, but by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, each member of which is answerable directly to the pope. The Catholic Church in America has more than 70 million adherents and is the largest single religious denomination in the United States — four times the size of the largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.
Catholicism has a long history in North America
Originated with Spanish explorers in the late fifteenth century.
In the colonial period, only a small fraction of the population was Catholic, primarily in Maryland.
In the nineteenth century the number of Catholics began to grow through immigration.
By 1850 Catholics represented the largest single religious denomination in the United States.
American Catholicism continues to expand in the twenty-first century, due to the dramatic increase of the Hispanic/Latino population, which represents nearly 30 percent of all American Catholics.
In the course of the twentieth century, the face of Roman Catholicism in America changed dramatically. This was largely socioeconomic, as the children and grandchildren of Catholic immigrants began to make their own way in American culture.
The Irish were among the earliest Catholic immigrants, and they sought to assimilate into mainstream America.
For the late-coming Italians, it was much more important to preserve their natal identity. Italian neighborhoods tended to maintain Old World traditions, such as parades and carnivals for saints’ days.
Twentieth-century America was not always hospitable to Catholics. Anti-Catholic prejudice was present in the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in 1915, which included Catholics along with blacks and Jews as targets of hostility. Some Protestant fundamentalists also echoed anti-Catholic sentiments.
But after World War II, animosity toward Catholics began to wane somewhat. Catholics had, after all, shed their blood fighting in two world wars. Their patriotism could no longer be called into question. By the end of the 1950s, most Catholics saw little conflict between being Catholic and American, and most Protestants had stopped thinking that way also. The most visible forms of discrimination against Catholics had all but disappeared.
Widespread acceptance of Catholics into mainstream America was largely accomplished in the postwar era, but two major events of the 1960s brought the trend to completion.
- First, in 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States.
It had been the conventional wisdom that a Catholic could not win the presidency (ever since Al Smith lost his bid for the presidency in 1928). Yet Kennedy, a youthful, vigorous, and charismatic figure, not only won the presidency but became an icon for the nation and embodied a new optimism. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Protestants and Catholics joined together in their grief.
- The other event of the 1960s that brought Catholics more completely into the American mainstream was the Second Vatican Council.
This “updating” of the church had a decisive impact on the American Catholic Church. Not only was the mass now in English, but there was also a new attitude toward Protestants. Before Vatican II, the Catholic Church cautioned against associating too freely with non-Catholics; now the bishops called on Catholics to “build bridges” with Protestants toward common goals.
E. Evangelicals and Catholics#
Evangelicals and conservative Catholics discovered each other outside abortion clinics where they were protesting. They found a shared vision of restoring traditional values lost in the turbulent 1960s.
In 1994, stimulated by the evangelical leader Charles Colson and the Roman Catholic editor Richard John Neuhaus, they formed a group of theologians to explore how they might provide a common witness to the modern world on the eve of the third millennium. They called themselves Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) and produced a 1994 ecumenical document signed by leading evangelical and Roman Catholic scholars in the United States.
The original ECT statement was born out of the common alliance between Roman Catholics and Protestants as cobelligerents against abortion, pornography, and the general decline in moral values in American culture. The signatories were also mindful that Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in Northern Ireland and Latin America, and they hoped to set an ecumenical example for others to emulate.
Perhaps the most important aspect of ECT was the recognition that “Evangelicals and Catholics are brothers and sisters in Christ.” At its core, ECT affirmed the common theological heritage of the Nicene Creed and the theology of the New Testament. The signers of the document recognized that while significant theological differences remained, that did not prevent the two communities from joining together in addressing the important issues of the day.
The signatories to the document represented some of the leading evangelicals as well as prominent conservative Catholics.
The evangelicals included such luminaries as Bill Bright, Os Guinness, Richard Mouw, Mark Noll, J. I. Packer, and Pat Robertson.
Roman Catholic signatories included Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop Francis Stafford (elevated to cardinal in 1998), and Bishops Carlos A. Sevilla and Francis George (elevated to cardinal in 1998) in addition to prominent scholars such as George Weigel, Michael Novak, Avery Dulles (elevated to cardinal in 2001), and Peter Kreeft.
The first document provoked considerable debate in the evangelical community. The controversial statement on the doctrine of justification, “The Gift of Salvation,” did so as well. In this ECT statement, both evangelicals and Catholics agreed on the historic doctrine of justification. Remarkably, this agreement between evangelicals and Roman Catholics was reached (between Lutherans and Catholics) a few years before the 1999 “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.”
ECT continues to meet, even after the death of some of the signatories, to explore areas of common moral concern as well as seek to clarify theological convergences.
IV. ROMAN CATHOLIC CHALLENGES TODAY AND TOMORROW#
A. Pope Benedict XVI#
The successor to John Paul II was his close friend and ally Joseph Alois Ratzinger, who took the name Pope Benedict XVI. Elected at the age of seventy-eight, he became the oldest person to occupy the papal throne in 275 years and the first German in 383 years. Among his first decisions as pope was to begin the beatification process for John Paul II.
Born in 1927 in Bavaria, Germany, Ratzinger had the misfortune of being drafted into Hitler’s German army and was briefly a prisoner of war. After the war, he enjoyed a distinguished career as a university theologian. He taught at the universities of Bonn and Münster and in 1966 was appointed to a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen, where he was a colleague of Hans Küng. In 1969 he returned to Bavaria and the University of Regensburg, where he founded the theological journal Communio with Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac.
During his academic career, Ratzinger was an active participant in the Second Vatican Council. He served as a peritus (theological consultant) to Cardinal Frings of Cologne and was viewed as a progressive reformer aligned with other theologians such as Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx.
In 1977 Ratzinger’s academic career took a backseat to his role as a churchman. That year he was appointed archbishop of Munich and Freising and then cardinal shortly afterward.
In 1981 he settled in Rome as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, one of the most important offices of the Roman Curia. At the time of his election as pope, he was also Dean of the College of Cardinals. When he was elected pope, he had served longer as a cardinal than any pope since 1724.
Like his predecessor, Benedict XVI was theologically conservative, and he consistently defended traditional Catholic doctrine and values. He maintained such traditional views as the primacy of Peter, the celibacy of the priesthood, and opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. He argued that the “central problem of our faith today” is the “dictatorship of relativism,” which must be resisted by recovering the conviction that Christianity is the religion of reason.
Pope Benedict sought to continue the ecumenical efforts of his predecessor, but exhibited a proclivity to create offense rather than reconciliation. His relations with Muslims did not fare any better. In September 2006 the pope delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in which he quoted from a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor (Manuel II Paleologus), saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Islamic politicians and religious leaders registered their protest against what they felt was a mischaracterization of Islam.
During a 2007 visit to Brazil, the pope sparked controversy by stating that the early Catholic explorers in South America proclaimed the gospel to the native population and that this “did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.” Latin American leaders found Benedict’s words deeply troubling.
Pope Benedict took principled stands against consumerism, terrorism, and sexual tourism and strongly defended the rights of migrants and refugees as well as advocated for nuclear disarmament. But of all the controversies, the one that threatened to leave its mark on Benedict’s papacy was the global scandal of priestly sexual abuse of minors.
B. Catholicism and Sexual Abuse#
Since the 1980s the Catholic Church has been plagued by a series of scandals in which priests and members of religious orders have been charged with sexually abusing minors under their care. The scandal emerged initially in the United States and Ireland, but investigations have revealed the scandal extends to various other nations. It has been described as a “global crisis.”
In 2004 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to conduct a study of the nature and scope of the problem of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the United States. The John Jay Report identified 10,667 allegations of sexual abuse of a minor against 4,392 priests between 1950 and 2002. This represented 4 percent of the total number of priests in active ministry during that time. Of the nearly 11,000 allegations, 6,700 were substantiated, 1,000 were unsubstantiated, and the remaining 3,300 allegations were not investigated because the priests involved had died by the time the allegations were made.
Accusations led to criminal charges being brought against 384 priests, of whom 252 were convicted. Victims were overwhelmingly young males:
22 percent were age 10 or younger
51 percent were aged 11 to 14
27 percent were aged 15 to 17
The Irish government also commissioned a study, and in May 2009 the commission released its 2,600-page Murphy Report that found 370 allegations of sexual abuse of children by clerics. The report characterized sexual molestation as “endemic” in some church-run schools and orphanages for boys.
Although nationwide enquiries have only been conducted in the United States and Ireland, cases of clerical sexual abuse of minors have been reported and prosecuted in many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. A college president, an archbishop (who remained a cardinal), and some bishops were among prominent clerics who resigned because of sexual abuse revelations.
Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi issued a statement on behalf of the Vatican in September 2009, acknowledging the extent of the problem: “We know now that in the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5% and 5% of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases.”
1. Crimen sollicitationis#
In view of the global crisis of the sexual abuse of minors by priests, it was often alleged that the church hierarchy had created a culture of secrecy and obfuscation that led bishops to place the interests of the Catholic Church ahead of the safety of children.
The Murphy Report (2009), a three-year public inquiry conducted by the Irish government into the sexual abuse scandal in Dublin, concluded that there is “no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other church authorities.” These reports led many to believe the Catholic hierarchy has a secret code that includes protecting the reputation of the church at all costs.
It further asserted that the Dublin archdiocese was preoccupied with “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.”
Some traced this code of silence to the Crimen sollicitationis (“The Crime of Soliciting”), a 1962 document from the Holy Office codifying procedures to follow in cases of clerics accused of making sexual advances to penitents.
The document (which had its origins in 1922) was addressed to “all Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops and other Local Ordinaries” and gave specific instructions on how to deal with accusations of homosexual, pedophile, or zoophile behavior by clerics.
The document imposed absolute confidentiality on the internal ecclesiastical proceedings.
It prescribed an oath of secrecy for all members of the tribunal.
Any violation incurred a penalty of automatic excommunication.
The Vatican repeatedly denied that this document sanctions a conspiracy to hide sexually abusive priests or to prevent the disclosure of sexual crimes committed by clerics to secular authorities.
2. The Pope and the Scandals#
Pope Benedict’s early years as pope were troubled by repeated accusations that the Catholic Church covered up the sexual abuse of children by priests. Benedict himself, at that time Cardinal Ratzinger, was deemed culpable as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) from 1981 to 2005, which was responsible for handling all investigations and policies surrounding sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
The scandal took a personal turn when a sexual abuse inquiry in Europe landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict. Allegations were made that in 1980, while he was archbishop of Munich and Freising, Ratzinger permitted a priest accused of molesting boys to resume pastoral duties after receiving therapy. The same priest later committed further abuses.
Later claims alleged that while he served as the head of the CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger protected a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting two hundred deaf boys. Court documents show that in 1996 the Wisconsin archbishop alerted Cardinal Ratzinger twice in writing of accusations against the priest.
The priest personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, pleading that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and now was in poor health. Although there is no evidence that Ratzinger responded, the ecclesiastical trial was discretely canceled, and instead of being disciplined, the priest was quietly moved to another diocese in northern Wisconsin, where he spent his last twenty-four years working freely with children in parishes, schools, and a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.
Defenders of Benedict have pointed to the case of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, a Mexican priest and founder of the Legion of Christ, who was repeatedly accused of sexual abuse. Some suggested Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to take action against Degollado, but John Paul II and other high-ranking officials prevented him. However, after becoming pope, Benedict began proceedings against Maciel, who was found guilty of raping underage males. The pope removed Maciel from active ministry, ordering him to spend the rest of his days in prayer and penance.
In 2010 the Vatican issued a statement denouncing Maciel’s “immoral acts,” which represent “true crimes and manifest a life without scruples or authentic religious sentiment.”
In March 2010 the pope sent a pastoral letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland addressing cases of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, expressing sorrow and promising changes in the way allegations of abuse are handled. The pope then promised to introduce measures that would “safeguard young people in the future” and “bring to justice” priests responsible for abuse.
In April the Vatican issued guidelines on how existing church law should be implemented. The guideline dictates that “Civil law concerning reporting of crimes … should always be followed.”
By 2009, U.S. dioceses had paid more than 2.6 billion dollars in abuse-related costs since 1950. In many instances, dioceses were forced to declare bankruptcy as a result of the settlements. Many parishioners left the church as a consequence of the scandal. Others called for an end to priestly celibacy and for the ordination of women priests.
The global crisis engendered by the sex scandal has indeed impacted the Roman Catholic Church, but it remains the world’s largest Christian church, with more than a billion members. The full cost of the scandal will take years to measure.
C. Pope Francis#
In one of the most startling developments in the history of the papacy, eight-five-year-old Pope Benedict XVI announced unexpectedly in February 2013 that after eight years (2005–13) he was retiring as pontiff because he no longer had the strength to lead the church. Benedict was the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415, who was forced to resign to end the Western Schism.
On March 13 the Cardinal Protodeacon declared, “Habemus Papam Franciscum” (“We have a Pope who takes the name Francis”), from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican as seventy-six-year-old Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was proclaimed as Benedict’s successor and the 266th pope. Bergoglio chose the papal name “Francis” in homage to St. Francis of Assisi.
Francis is referred to as the “pontiff of firsts” because
He is the first Jesuit pope
The first from South America, the Americas, and the Southern Hemisphere
The first to take the name of “Francis”
Most significantly, he is the first pope from outside of Europe in more than 1,200 years. (Gregory III was born in Syria.)
The election of an Argentinean pope suggests full recognition of the new Christendom, namely, that the center of Christianity has now shifted to the global South. Latin America has more Catholics than any other continent, namely, 42 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. All indications are that Latin America will retain this demographic superiority throughout the twenty-first century.
1. The Jesuit#
Born in Buenos Aires, Francis was one of five children born to the Italian immigrants Mario José Bergoglio, a railway worker, and his wife, Regina María Sívori. Initially Francis prepared for a career as a chemist, but later decided on the priesthood and was ordained a Jesuit in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Despite his late start, he enjoyed a rapid rise.
By 1973 he was appointed the provincial of the Argentine Jesuits (the highest Jesuit official in Argentina, who serves directly under the superior general), a position he held for six years (1973–79). Over the course of the next decade he held several academic posts and pursued further theological study in Germany.
He was appointed auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 1992 and archbishop in 1998. Pope John Paul II elevated him to the College of Cardinals in 2001.
2. The Dirty War#
Bergoglio’s early ecclesial career coincided with the so-called “Dirty War” in Argentina, which terrorized citizens from 1976 until 1983.
It is estimated that as many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during the country’s military dictatorship. Many Argentines remain angry over the church’s acknowledged failure to confront openly a regime that was kidnaping and killing thousands of people in an effort to eliminate “subversive elements.” Even today, more than two-thirds of Argentines are Catholic, but fewer than 10 percent regularly attend mass.
As the provincial of Argentina’s Jesuit order during the Dirty War, Bergoglio was severely criticized for not doing more to oppose the military dictatorship. Although critical of human rights violations during the dictatorship, he was accused of complicity in the 1976 torture and kidnaping of two leftist Jesuit priests: Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. The two priests had taken up residence in the favela (slums) to advocate for the poor.
Bergoglio had initially endorsed Yorio and Jalics’s work among the poor, but under pressure from the military junta he allegedly ordered them to cease their ministry. Yorio and Jaliacs refused to leave the favela, and shortly thereafter they were arrested on suspicion of affiliating with the leftist guerrillas. After five months of brutal torture, they were found alive, drugged, and seminaked.
Yorio accused Bergoglio of in effect handing them over to the death squads by failing to support them. It was later discovered that both men were freed after Bergoglio had taken extraordinary, behind-the-scenes action and appealed directly to dictator Jorge Videl to show mercy. More than two decades later, Yorio and Jalics reconciled with Bergoglio.
3. The Theological Conservative#
Bergoglio is admired for his personal humility and austerity. Even after he became Argentina’s top church official in 2001, he never lived in the ornate church mansion, preferring a simple bed in a downtown building, heated by a small stove. For years, he took public transportation around the city and cooked his own meals. He is well-known for his concern for the poor and for being a theological conservative, not unlike Pope John Paul II.
Bergoglio has taken a strong stance on social issues. In 2007, as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he presented the Aparecida Document, a joint statement of the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, which linked participation in the mass to acceptance of church teaching against “abominable crimes” such as abortion and euthanasia.
Bergoglio’s views on these issues led to public conflict with Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said the church’s tone was reminiscent of “medieval times and the Inquisition.”
Social and moral issues remain a central focus of Bergoglio’s ministry.
He publically denounced homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and gay adoption.
His outspoken criticism did not prevent Argentina from becoming the first Latin American country to legalize gay marriage or stop President Fernandez from promoting free contraception and artificial insemination.
He condemned child abuse as well as the calloused disregard of the elderly.
Responding to parish priests who refused to baptize infants born out of wedlock, he called them hypocrites “who separate the people of God from salvation.”
Although a surprise to many, the New York Times reported that in a 2010 address to bishops, Bergoglio recommended that the church should support civil unions for gay couples, but not gay marriage or gay adoption. Pope Francis may not be as predictable as expected.
D. The Illusive Future of Catholicism#
When it comes to the papacy, one’s personal history is not always a definitive predictor of future actions. No one would have predicted that Pope Benedict XVI would voluntarily retire or that Pope John XXIII would surprise everyone by calling the historic Second Vatican Council. Only time will tell if the new pontiff has any surprises in store for the faithful.
As Catholicism continues to grow, it will face new challenges. Catholicism represents more than 17 percent of the world’s population and is growing, especially in the global South. Even though 43 percent of the world’s Catholics now live in Latin America, there are just 21 Latin American cardinals among the 117 eligible to elect the next pope. How the church responds to this shift to the global South will be a major factor in determining the future of the Catholic Church.