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The
pope or the inquisitor?
By
Rabbi Moshe Reiss
The "modern" world is
often called "secular", as if "religion" is
inconsistent with a modern world. These three
words in quotations require understanding before
we can discuss "fundamentalism".
Modernity
is a process developed from the Industrial
Revolution. Alvin Toffler noted the way the
process "shocked" the world (Future Shock).
Modernity was required for the 20th century to
become the most developed - in terms of health,
education and reduced poverty - as well as the
most murderous.
Secularism, an ideology,
was introduced by the French Revolution, also a
very bloody affair. Secularism came out of the
enlightenment based on reason. In its origin,
secularism was anti-religion; as Voltaire stated,
"If God did not exist we would have to invent
him." It was long considered that religion and
reason conflicted; the two can and do, in
modernity, co-exist. Secularism as an ideology is
similar in principle to capitalism, communism or
democracy.
Secularism assumes a world that
is neutral, detached, objective and sometimes
rational. For a religious person, the world may
operate that way and God still will be above it
all. A religious person may, on the other hand,
assume God is responsible for what happens to him,
good or bad. Job assumed that; but for him, God
had become devilish. Indeed, he was right - God
did allow Satan to torment him (see the Book of
Job Chapter 1).
Peter Berger, one of the
outstanding sociologists of religion, once claimed
the irreversibility of secularism (The Social
Reality of Religion). He has more recently
reversed himself, stating he had been wrong: the
world "is as furiously religious as it ever was"
(The Desecularization of the World). Harvey
Cox, in his famous The Secular City,
considers that "secularization is the liberation
of man from religious and metaphysical tutelage,
the turning of his attention away from other
worlds and towards this one".
Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel noted that while "it is
customary to blame secular science and
anti-religious philosophy for the collapse of
religion in the modern society, it would be more
honest to blame religion for its own defeats.
Religion declined not because it was refuted, but
because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive and
insipid. When faith is completely replaced by
creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when
the crisis of today is ignored because of the
splendor of the past, when faith becomes an
heirloom rather than a living fountain; when
religion speaks only in the name of authority
rather than with a voice of compassion, its
message becomes meaningless" (God in Search of
Man).
Pope
John Paul II opposed US President George
W Bush's war in Iraq. (It is interesting, although
perhaps irrelevant, that George Bush's close
brother Jeb, the governor of the state of Florida,
and British Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife are
both Catholics.) Despite the pope's position, he
agreed to help the president retain the "key to
his kingdom". On Bush's visit to Pope John Paul
last June, he explained the importance of his
right-wing Christian-oriented administration to
Vatican officials. They agreed that despite the
pope's opposition to the war they would help
Bush's re-election campaign. Bush complained that
not all the American bishops were with him. A week
later Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a letter to
US Catholic bishops with a subtle but clear
reference to John Kerry, the presidential
candidate opposing Bush. It said that those
Catholics who were pro-choice on abortion were
committing a "grave sin" and must be denied
communion. He pointedly mentioned "the case of a
Catholic politician consistently campaigning and
voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia
laws". It was obvious he was referring to Kerry, a
Roman Catholic. If such a Catholic politician
sought communion, Ratzinger wrote, priests must be
ordered to "refuse" him. Any Catholic who voted
for this "Catholic politician", he continued,
"would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil and
so unworthy himself for Holy Communion" (National
Catholic Reporter and Salon magazine).
In
the 1960s, two Johns (pope John XXIII and
president John F Kennedy) represented what the
pope called his aggiornamento, his
transformation; they liberalized the cultures in
both the United States and Europe. There is now a
new pope, Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal
Ratzinger; nobody believes he is likely to become
another Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformer who with
the help of the previous pope felled the Berlin
Wall. However, it is doubtful that the new pope
and the president will ever be compared to the two
Johns.
All three of the Abrahamic
religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -
have become more fundamental. We can symbolize
this change by six events that occurred between
1976 and 1980.
1) In 1976 Jimmy
Carter, a man who publicly identified himself as a
born-again Christian, was elected president of the
United States. (Remember John Kennedy's problem
with his Catholicism 16 years
earlier.)
2) In 1977 Menachem Begin
became the prime minister of Israel. He was and
remains the only prime minister who strictly
followed Jewish kosher dietary laws. He also
signed a peace agreement with the
late Egyptian president
Anwar Sadat.
3) In 1978 John Paul II, the Polish
pope, was elected. While for the Jews he was the
best pope, in other ways he was far more
conservative than all but one of his predecessors,
John XXIII.
4) In 1979 Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini took over Iran and founded the
Islamic Republic of Iran, a fundamentalist Shi'ite
regime.
5) That same year the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan. Muslims reacted by
beginning a holy war against the Soviet Union. The
liberal West saw this as a fight against atheistic
communism; Islam saw it as a war against the
West.
6) In 1980 Ronald Reagan, backed
by the Christian Right - the Moral Majority -
became president of the United States.
These six events in five years changed the
modern world.
In the homily Ratzinger gave
just before the conclave that chose him for the
papacy, he said, "The small boat of thought of
many Christians has often been tossed about by
these waves - thrown from one extreme to the
other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to
libertinism; from collectivism to radical
individualism; from atheism to a vague religious
mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so
forth ... Having a clear faith, based on the Creed
of the Church, is often labeled today as a
fundamentalism ... Relativism ... looks like the
only attitude [acceptable] to today's standards.
We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism
which does not recognize anything as for certain
and which has as its highest goal one's own ego
and one's own desires."
Everyone quoted
the "dictatorship of relativism" as the key phrase
from this homily. Is a dictatorship of the
absolute better? Are they the opposites; are there
no other choices? Does Ratzinger foster the
dictatorship of absolutism - his truth? What if
his truth is different than mine? Can absolutism
tolerate relativism? Does absolutism require
zealotry? Is any form of zealotry good?
The model of zealotry in my Bible (Old
Testament) and his is Phineas. He killed a Hebrew
man and a Midianite woman having sexual relations
in front of God's Tent in the desert. God bestowed
upon him a covenant of peace (Numbers 25:8-12).
Despite God's apparent approval, the Talmud did
not think his action should be considered a model
of behavior; it suggested a trial would have been
more appropriate.
In 1999 the Vatican
published a document called instrumentum
laboris (not under the "direct" imprimatur of
Cardinal Ratzinger) in which it compared pluralism
to communism, both condemned. One understands the
Polish Pope John Paul II condemning communism; but
is communism a form of pluralism and not in fact
an absolutist doctrine? Is not pluralism required
for a democracy? Was the Vatican therefore
condemning democracy?
Cardinal Ratzinger
stated the following when asked about the US
problem with pedophile priests: "I am personally
convinced that the constant presence in the press
of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the
United States, is a planned campaign, as the
percentage of these offenses among priests is not
higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is
even lower" (Catholic News Service, 2002).
Is the problem the free press or
pedophiles, whether priests or otherwise?
Why did Ratzinger, who was "acting pope"
as dean of the College of Cardinals, approve
Cardinal Bernard Law leading a mass in honor of
the dead pope John Paul, despite Law resigning his
archbishopric in Boston as a direct result of his
mishandling of the pedophile problem? Does this
come from a person who believes in a dictatorship
of the absolute?
The same Ratzinger
excommunicated seven women ordained in June 2002
by a dissident archbishop in Europe and declared,
with John Paul II's approval, that opposition to
female ordination was an "infallible" teaching of
the Church. Are female priests more "defective" -
Benedict's word - than pedophiles? Is not
pedophilia a sin against the infallible teachings
of the Church?
Fundamentalists see the
world as a holy war (like a jihad) between the
Sons of Evil and the Sons of Righteousness. As
cardinal and executor of the Vatican's
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
formerly known as the "Holy Inquisition",
Ratzinger favored the doctrines found in the
Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul (see the
Gospel of John and Romans 2-8). These concepts
resulted in a fundamentalist streak to be found in
parts of the New Testament, anti-Semitism and the
seeking after heretics. (I recognize that other
scriptures, including my own, have similar
statements with similar implications. Both
scriptures also contain opposing views.) The motto
of the Holy Inquisition was stated by the 16th
century Christian King Philip II of Spain, the son
of Queen Isabella, of fame for beginning the "Holy
Inquisition" and for the murder or expulsion from
Spain of hundreds of thousands of Jews and
Muslims. "I would rather sacrifice the lives of a
hundred thousand people than cease my persecution
of heretics," King Philip said. And he and his
mother did. Is this still the motto?
Jews
no longer worry about another Holocaust; not since
Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli (later pope John XXIII)
said of the bodies at Auschwitz, "We have
crucified him again." Pope John Paul II later went
to Auschwitz and called it the "Golgotha of the
modern world". Both were recognizing the
connection between Christian anti-Semitism and
Nazism. Because of the recognition by these two
popes, the Holocaust will not happen again, at
least not in the Christian world.
Although
it's been renamed, the Holy Inquisition still
exists, as does its Index of Forbidden Books. And
Lolita (by Vladimir Nabokov) is still in
it, although Reading Lolita in Tehran
(by Azar Nafisi), which tells of an
inquisition state called the Islamic Republic of
Iran, is not. (The latter book does have a
fatwa forbidding it to be read by Muslims.)
The Talmud, Judaism's holiest book, for centuries
was on the index and as a result was burned -
along with Jews - all over Europe; it has since
been removed.
In Ratzinger's letter
introducing Dominus Iesus (2000), a
declaration on the unicity and salvific
universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, he
states that "the declaration presents the
principal truths of the Catholic faith in these
areas; such truths require, therefore, irrevocable
assent by the Catholic faithful". The document
appears to state that Jesus is the one road to
salvation; although Jews as an older covenant and
as brothers of Jesus are an exception. The letter
reads like a statement of infallibility for the
Roman Catholic Church. What are Muslims, let alone
Hindus or Buddhists, to think?
As prefect
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Cardinal Ratzinger excommunicated some priests and
silenced others who did not assent irrevocably to
his definition of absolutism from teaching at
Catholic universities. One of those was the
world-famous Catholic theologian Hans Kueng, who
was banned from teaching at the Catholic
Theological Faculty of the University of Tubingen
in Germany. Kung described Dominus Iesus as
"a hotch-potch of medieval backwardness and
folie de grandeur". One of Ratzinger's more
famous excommunications was that of Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre, who continued the Latin liturgy
after Vatican II changed the liturgy language to
the vernacular. Yet Ratzinger stated in an
interview in 1998 (National Catholic Reporter) and
again in 2003 that he himself favored a return to
some Latin in the liturgy (Raymond Arroyo - EWTN).
Was he willing to follow the older tradition but
felt forced to follow papal instructions?
Ratzinger's view may be appropriate for a
cardinal inquisitor; but is it for a pope? Will
the change in function change the person?
According to an old colleague, as prefect
Ratzinger once stated, "I understand the
obligations of my office in the sense of a
religious obedience to the pope." This may suggest
that as pope he would have different obligations.
Pope Benedict XVI was installed on a very
auspicious day, April 24; in the Jewish calendar
it is the 15th day of Nissan, the first day of
Passover when, according to the Gospels, Jesus was
crucified. It is a changing day for the world -
and for the pope.
To Benedict XVI: I will,
as you requested in your installation homily, pray
for you to become a servant "of unity ... [and]
not be afraid ... of freedom". I will pray for a
pope of renewal and not of restoration. As such, I
hope you will speak not only with other religious
leaders but also with the secularists. As you
stated, "My real program of governance is not to
do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to
listen." We all need to listen.
Rabbi Moshe Reiss is a graduate
of Oxford University and was assistant rabbi at
Yale University. He was the first rabbi invited to
teach in the Department of Theology at the
Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (founded
1425), and has lectured in various countries. He
has posted three books on his website on Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. His book on Judaism is
being published by sections in the Jewish Bible
Quarterly. He now lives in Israel.
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