All the Pope's Men (24 page)

PRIMACY

The tool Vatican officials believe Christ gave the papacy to promote fidelity and accountability, thus understood, is known as
primacy
. This refers to the “supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power" that canon 331 of the
Code of Canon Law
says belongs to the Pope, and to the Pope alone. He has primacy over other bishops and the entire Catholic Church. In reality, as Catholic writer Russell Shaw has noted, it is not so much papal infallibility that creates controversy within the Catholic Church as primacy. Officially decreed at the First Vatican Council in 1870, papal infallibility is the doctrine that states that when popes make a solemn pronouncement on matters of revealed faith or morals and invoke full authority as the Successor of Peter, the Holy Spirit preserves them from error. Only rarely have popes formally exercised this teaching authority. Moreover, canon 749.3 of the
Code of
Canon Law
states clearly that, “No doctrine is understood to be infallibly defined unless this is manifestly demonstrated."

Popes, however, make constant use of primacy. They establish dioceses, name bishops, promulgate laws, and perform numerous other acts of supreme and universal jurisdiction. This is the everyday business of the papacy, and it tends to be what gets the attention of Catholics for whom one or another decision rankles. In some sense, papal primacy goes back to the era of the primitive Christian communities. Writing to Christians in the Greek city of Corinth midway through the last decade of the first century, St. Clement, according to tradition Peter’s third successor, wanted to bring the Corinthians in line. Clement complained about “impious and detestable sedition" and demanded that they obey the leaders of the local church. “But if some will not submit to them," Clement added, “let them learn what He [Christ] has spoke through us, that they will involve themselves in great sin and danger." Whether Clement was writing as a “proto-Pope" or a sort of “foreign minister" within a college of Roman Church leaders is a debated point, but the letter reflects an early exercise of primacy centered in the see of Rome.

In fits and starts over the centuries, men who would later be known as the first popes asserted their authority to intervene in the affairs of other churches, to settle doctrinal disputes, and to establish patterns of ritual and moral life. This was not a linear development, and theological reflection always tempered the growing power of the papacy with an emphasis on other centers of authority—ecumenical councils, local councils, synods, the bishops, and the local churches.

The ecumenical Council of Florence in the fifteenth century defined papal primacy as a dogma of the Catholic Church. The doctrine was elaborated by the First Vatican Council (1869–70) and reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Vatican I, in the same document that defined papal infallibility,
Pastor Aeternus
of July 18, 1870, provided a clear statement on primacy. It declared, “that the Roman Church, by the disposition of the Lord, holds the sovereignty of ordinary power over all others, and that this power of jurisdiction on the part of the Roman Pontiff, which is truly episcopal, is immediate; and with respect to this the pastors and the faithful of whatever rite and dignity, both as separate individuals and all together, are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, not only in things which pertain to faith and morals, but also in those which pertain to the discipline and government of the Church spread over the whole world." Vatican I also taught that the primacy was instituted by Christ, with St. Peter; that the primacy is transmitted in perpetuity to Peter’s successors, the popes; and that there can be no appeal from the Pope to some higher authority. This marked the end of a centuries-long debate as to whether the bishops in an ecumenical council constituted a power superior to the papacy.

At the same time, it is also important to understand what Vatican I did
not
teach. In the wake of the council, Chancellor Otto Bismarck of Germany attributed to it the view that the Pope had absorbed all episcopal jurisdiction. The German bishops insisted against Bismarck that the council did not in any way undermine the legitimate authority of the local bishop. The Pope’s jurisdiction implied only that he had the responsibility to ensure the welfare of the churches, intervening only because of the incapacity of the local bishop or because the good of the church required it. Pius IX immediately applauded the German bishops for their response and officially confirmed the authenticity of their interpretation.

Vatican I’s definition of primacy is nevertheless a sweeping assertion of power, and many critics of the Vatican would charge that it induces the Curia to pride, to the delusion that they in Rome know better than the local churches how things ought to be done. Once again, no doubt there’s reality to this temptation. Yet at least on the level of personal spirituality, it can break the other way. Curial officials who take most seriously the powers of the Holy See tend to be the most conscious of their own unworthiness of such an immense responsibility. They tend to regard their share in the authority of the primacy as a lofty vocation, one of the most important responsibilities that can be entrusted to someone within the Church, and this can produce a kind of idealism about their work. This is often what gets Vatican officials through the long hours, the low pay, the anonymity, the slow pace of change, and the sometimes cold and impersonal atmosphere in their office. Seen from the outside papal primacy can appear to create an exaggerated sense of self-importance, but understood from the inside it can have precisely the opposite effect. Rather than an invitation to pride, it can be an occasion for humility and an acute sense of one’s limits.

THE CASE FOR A STRONG POPE

Curial officials, by the nature of their global responsibility, have to think through the consequences of policy choices for every sector of the worldwide 1-billion-strong Catholic Church. Speaking with these officials, what becomes clear is their perception of just how fragile this global communion can be, how many centripetal forces are constantly pushing the Church toward fragmentation. They include:

Theological movements trumpeting “inculturation" threaten to produce a kind of weak Catholicism, in which the only thing really uniting Catholics is the name. The experience of the faith, its content and modes of expression, fragment to the point of being unrecognizable, especially in places such as Africa and Asia.

Hostile governments in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and in parts of the Arab world are constantly trying to decouple their national Catholic communities from the rest of the Catholic world, especially Rome, in an attempt to minimize the capacity of those churches to threaten the regime.

Hostile cultures, especially in the developed First World, that don’t approve of the moral teaching of the Catholic Church encourage individual believers to “do their own thing," be Catholic on their own terms—so-called “cafeteria Catholicism."

Against these forces, Vatican officials tend to believe, the only real defense the Church has is its strong center of authority in Rome.

This conviction that it is a strong papacy that will see the Church through times of crisis is deeply rooted in Catholic history. The battles that have been waged by popes over the centuries to defend the prerogatives of their office are the stuff of legend. One thinks of Pope Gregory VII, for example, who in 1076 excommunicated the German king Henry IV and deposed him during their bitter struggle over lay investiture. This was the practice by which lay lords under the feudal system symbolically conferred ecclesiastical office upon bishops and abbots, reinforcing their claim to be superior to the ecclesiastical authorities and to have the power to decide who held ecclesiastical office. The underlying issue was the subjugation of church to state, which in some ways stretched all the way back to the fourth century and the declaration by Theodosius that Christianity was to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. The question was whether Christianity was to be subject to the secular power, in effect an instrument of state policy, or whether the Church would chart its own course. Secular powers in the West never forgave Pope Gregory for his victory. He was not canonized until 1606, and even then nearly another century and a quarter had to pass before Pope Benedict XIII extended his feast to the universal Church. When he did so, many of Europe’s Catholic princes objected. In fact, the feast of Gregory VII, which falls on May 25, was banned in Catholic Austria until 1848.

Eventually the popes prevailed in Western Christianity, allowing the Church to function as a supranational “voice of conscience" and to remain united, juridically and theologically, across national boundaries. In the East, on the other hand, Caesaropapism, or domination by the state, took the upper hand. Eastern Orthodox churches have thus tended to be dependent upon, and thus uncritical of, the civil power. Even today, the bond between Orthodox Churches and the nation is sacral and quasi-absolute. Some critics would observe that the leaders of the fifteen autonomous churches across Eastern Europe and the Balkans are often identified with the most ultranationalist political elements within those countries, and this may be in part because there is no strong supranational authority in Orthodoxy as in Roman Catholicism. The argument runs that Catholicism’s sense of universality has acted as an antidote to exaggerated nationalism in a way that Orthodoxy’s loose, confederated structure has not.

In the 1937 encyclical
Mit brennender sorge
, Pope Pius XI laid out the argument for papal primacy in the face of a hostile regime that sought to subordinate the church to the state. The Pope said there are four reasons for defending the primacy of the Roman Pontiff as defined by Vatican I:

The primacy is assigned to the Pope in Scripture. When Peter confessed Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the Living God" in Matthew 16, Jesus responded with the pledge that Peter was the rock upon which the Church would be built. This passage, Pius argued, shows the intimate bond that unites Christ, the Church, and the primacy of the Pope.

The primacy of the Pope is a “guarantee against division and ruin."

Only a world church, held together through the primacy of the Pope, is “qualified and competent for a universal evangelical mission."

The primacy of the Pope assures that the Church retains its supranational character. National churches, Pius wrote, result in “paralysis, domestication and subjection to worldly powers."

The fact that these arguments were laid out with such clarity in response to the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany illustrates the close association in the Roman mind between papal primacy and the capacity of the Church to resist totalitarian, secular regimes.

Consider the experience of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, when Communist regimes did everything in their power to break the ties that connected the Catholic communities with Rome. In Hungary, for example, the state-sponsored Free Church Council promoted an autonomous “Hungarian" Catholic Church. The theological arguments advanced were strikingly similar to some of those from today’s left-leaning reformers in the West: that the Vatican is an authoritarian institution determined to foist its own cultural patterns upon local churches. The Hungarian government sponsored a “patriotic priests" organization, called Opus Pacis, that was intended to transfer the loyalty of the Catholic clergy from Rome to the socialist cause and, ultimately, to the Hungarian government. The policy had some success. Lutheran Bishop Zoltan Kaldy developed the so-called Theology of
Diakonia
, or service, which in essence identified Christianity with socialism and the Church with the socialist regime. Some Catholic priests in the Opus Pacis circle endorsed this theological perspective.

The pattern was replicated across the Communist bloc. In Czechoslovakia, a priest’s association called Pacem in Terris, named cynically for Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical that marked an opening of the Catholic Church to the socialist world, encouraged Catholic clergy to distance themselves from Rome. Again, in some cases the strategy worked. Catholic priests such as Fr. Joseph Plojhar became leading figures in the regime, ending up defending policies that saw faithful Catholics tossed in prison. The Czech government’s Office for Ecclesiastical Affairs approved clerical appointments, paid their wages, checked the budgets of Catholic organizations, and actually ran the seminaries in an attempt to control the ideological formation of future priests. Priests and nuns were required to take the following oath:

I promise on my honor and conscience that I shall be loyal to the
Czechoslovak Republic and its People’s Democracy and that I shall do
nothing that is detrimental to its interests, its security and its integrity.
As a citizen of the People’s Democracy I shall honestly and sincerely
carry out all duties which are incumbent upon me in the position which
I occupy, and I shall support with all my strength the e forts towards
reconstruction which are being made for the welfare of the people.

The unstated premise of the oath was that this loyalty to “people’s democracy" trumped one’s obligations to Rome or to papal authority. Between 1950 and 1955, the bishops of all fourteen Czech dioceses were removed by the government, and five were imprisoned. Administration of the dioceses was handed over to a mixed clerical/lay commission loyal to the government. In the 1960s, new bishops were approved who were chosen from the ranks of the Pacem in Terris movement, who could be counted upon to keep their distance from Rome. In the end, these bishops abandoned thousands of clergy and believers who did not wish to be assimilated to the gulags.

These historical episodes are still within the living memory of many Vatican officials, some of whom experienced them personally. The conclusion they usually draw is that fidelity to Rome, and the capacity of the papacy to withstand these sorts of pressures, made the difference between integrity and collaboration, between the survival of the faith and its co-option by a secular power for its own purposes.

Moreover, these officials would argue, the same sort of phenomenon is observable in China today, where the Communist government’s Patriotic Association has long aimed at creating an indigenous Chinese Catholic Church independent of Rome, once again because it would pose less of a threat to the government’s authority. In 1999 alone, five Chinese bishops who refused to register with the Patriotic Association were jailed, three of them men in their eighties who had already served twenty-year prison sentences. The suffering of Chinese Catholics for their fidelity to the Pope at times defies belief. Bishop Peter Joseph Fan Xue-Yan, for example, was arrested in 1958 and imprisoned for thirty-four years. In April 1992, security officers returned his frozen and broken body to his chancery in a plastic sack. It is precisely the power that Catholic tradition and the
Code of Canon Law
assigns to the Pope, defenders of a strong papacy argue, that allows faithful Chinese Catholics to withstand the pressures of the state. A system that put the premium on the local church would collapse under this kind of pressure.

Of course, one can make a theological argument for decentralization of the papacy without serving the interests of hostile regimes or being an enemy of the Church. The sense that the distribution of authority and responsibility is today out of balance is widespread, even among bishops, heads of religious orders, and mainstream theologians—the very bedrock of loyalty to the institution. Vatican officials are keenly aware, in fact, that some of the most forceful arguments for greater respect for local churches comes precisely from Eastern Rite Catholics who suffered terribly during the era of Soviet persecution and who now want their legitimate autonomy recognized. The point, however, is that from the perspective of many in curial service, the bitter experience of the twentieth century is that a strong papacy is the Church’s best guarantee of survival in times of crisis. That was what Christ had in mind, they believe, when he said that Peter would be the rock upon which the Church was built.

Nor is it the case, by the way, that the only threat to the Church in today’s world comes in the form of overt government hostility as in China. The cultural hegemony of Western-style consumerism and secularism, fostered by liberal democratic governments, especially in the United States, may pose an even more serious danger to authentic Christianity. In the face of this challenge, many would argue that there is a much greater need today for Catholic counterculturalism than there is for inculturation. In other words, this argument runs, Catholics in this moment of history need to recover their capacity to be critical of the dominant culture rather than adapt themselves to it. This countercultural instinct is at the heart of the Communio school associated with Catholic thinkers such as David Schindler, Tracey Rowland, and Kenneth Schmitz. In this effort, a strong papacy is seen as an essential bully pulpit, able to break through the cultural noise to propose an alternative understanding of life.