Thursday, July 12, 2012

Crisis of trust in the Vatican


If all publicity is good publicity, the Catholic Church has certainly prospered over recent years.

Clerical abuse and its handling, the new translation of the Roman Missal, the Bishop Bill Morris affair, the reining in of Caritas, the censure in the United States of the group representing religious sisters and of the work of two women theologians, the silencing of prominent Irish priests and the cleaning out of the Irish College in Rome, the public disquiet expressed by clergy in Austria and Ireland, the sacking of the head of the Vatican Bank, the steady leaking of confidential Roman documents, and the conflict between the Obama Administration and the USA Bishops over health care are just some of the recurrent stories. 

Most of these stories have raised questions about how central authority is exercised. For many critics the answers are self-evident. Just as the actions of Orcs and other forces of Mordor reflect what Mordor is, so  arrogance and misbehaviour are what you expect from the Catholic Church. 

They are as much a fact of life there as others would find them in News Limited, the Greens, the Unions or any other organisations they may want to identify as part of the Evil Empire.

If you want to address the way people in any organisation behave, however, you must first understand why they act as they do. 

In the case of the Catholic Church the account it gives of its foundations is of critical importance. 

In this account faith is passed on by Christ through the Apostles to the early Christians. 

The Apostles live on in later generations through the bishops. The place of Peter who was charged with strengthening his brethren in their faith, is subsequently held held by his successors, the Bishops of Rome. 

The weight of this account and of two thousand years of history explains why the Bishops and Popes feel such an enormous sense of personal responsibility for handing down faithfully the faith they have received.  

They will always respond cautiously to alternative understandings of faith or morality and demand that their continuity with the faith of the early church be demonstrated. 

But the handing on of faith is not like the reading of the will that distributes family possessions:  that is entirely top down.  Faith is at heart a relationship to God.  

In all Catholics of any generation, including Bishops, it needs to come alive and its implications to be seen and weighed.  This involves a shared process of wondering, learning and reflecting.  

The sharing of faith engenders the mutual trust that provides the space for Bishops and Popes to teach authoritatively.  

Where mutual trust is eroded, teaching is met with reserve and comes to be seen as imposed.

This is the background against which the listing of papal news items should be seen. 

In addition, however, these events reflect a reading by the Vatican of the contemporary Catholic Church.  

The Vatican judges that secularism and relativism are a serious threat to the integrity of faith and have infected the ways in which many Catholic individuals and groups see the substance of faith and the governance of the Catholic Church.  

The mistrust that follows from this judgment expresses itself in the desire to create from above a strong and authentic Catholic identity without exploring the local conditions in which this must be forged. 

The combination of responsibility and mistrust lie underlies what critics see as lack of due process in decisions that are detrimental to Catholic individuals and groups. These include Bishop Morris, the United States Sisters, the Irish priests, the Caritas council, English language liturgical commissions, and perhaps the head of the Vatican Bank.  

Because they see these people as untrustworthy in their grasp of faith and of Catholic life, those responsible for the faith of the Church judge it  reasonable that they themselves should act as investigators, prosecutors and judges in their regard.    

All this is understandable.  

The problem is that mistrust is contagious. In any group it corrodes governance and ultimately renders sterile the projects that the group initiates. The corrosive force of mistrust can be limited when processes are kept secret. 

But in a world where what is spoken in secret will be shouted from the housetops, mistrust is revealed and met with reciprocal mistrust. Its corrosive power on governance itself can be seen in Vatileaks. 

To the extent that mistrust characterises relationships between Catholics the more difficult it will become to commend the Gospel. 

It is common to speak of a crisis of faith in the Catholic Church. 

The crisis is not only that people do not believe, but also that they are not believed.