How Pope Benedict XVI dealt with disagreement

In 1988, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) consecrated four bishops against the express orders of Pope John Paul II.  The Vatican declared that the archbishop and the new bishops had, by virtue of this act, incurred a latae sententiae (or automatic) excommunication.  This brought to a head years of tension between the Society and the Vatican, occasioned by the Society’s disagreement with liturgical and doctrinal changes following Vatican II.  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the chief doctrinal officer of the Church and later to become Pope Benedict XVI, had worked strenuously, if in vain, for a reconciliation.

 
On July 13 of that year Cardinal Ratzinger addressed the controversy in a talk in Santiago, Chile to that country’s bishops.  Naturally, he was very critical of the Archbishop, and insisted that the fault was ultimately Lefebvre’s rather than the Vatican’s.  Yet Ratzinger also called upon Lefebvre’s critics to consider how their own actions may have needlessly alienated those sympathetic to the SSPX.  Events following Vatican II, he suggested, had understandably “[led] a great number of people to ask themselves if the Church of today is really the same as that of yesterday, or if they have changed it for something else without telling people.”

To the extent that churchmen had fostered this impression, they bore, in Ratzinger’s view, some responsibility for the crisis with the SSPX.  He said:

[I]t is a duty for us to examine ourselves, as to what errors we have made, and which ones we are making even now…

[S]chisms can take place only when certain truths and certain values of the Christian faith are no longer lived and loved within the Church… It will not do to attribute everything to political motives, to nostalgia, or to cultural factors of minor importance…

For all these reasons, we ought to see this matter primarily as the occasion for an examination of conscience.  We should allow ourselves to ask fundamental questions, about the defects in the pastoral life of the Church, which are exposed by these events…

[W]e want to ask ourselves where there is lack of clarity in ourselves…

End quote.  So, according to Cardinal Ratzinger, churchmen can be guilty of scandalizing the faithful by virtue of (a) apparent surreptitious departures from truths and values traditionally upheld by the Church, (b) a lack of clarity, and (c) a tendency to dismiss criticism as politically motivated, an expression of mere nostalgia, etc.

Ring any bells?

After becoming pope himself, Ratzinger would lift the excommunications of the SSPX bishops, affirm the right of all Catholic priests to use the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (i.e. the “Latin Mass”), and begin doctrinal talks with the SPPX -- all in compliance with the conditions the SSPX had set on regularizing its position within the Church. 

This solicitude for critics of papal policy may seem odd coming from the man whom liberal journalists liked to describe as the “Panzer Cardinal.”  But the image of Ratzinger as a grim inquisitor ruthlessly quashing dissent is an urban legend.  As he complained in the 1988 Santiago talk:

The mythical harshness of the Vatican in the face of the deviations of the progressives is shown to be mere empty words.  Up until now, in fact, only warnings have been published; in no case have there been strict canonical penalties in the strict sense.

It is true that heterodox progressive theologians like Hans Küng and Charles Curran are not permitted to teach Catholic theology in an official capacity.  But these famous dissenters were never excommunicated or defrocked.  They maintained their academic careers, their influence within the Church, and the fawning attention of the media. 

In 1990, the CDF under Cardinal Ratzinger issued the instruction Donum Veritatis, addressing the issue of dissent among theologians.  As I had reason to note in a recent post, despite insisting on fidelity to the Magisterium, Donum Veritatis is very generous in recognizing the legitimacy and value of certain kinds of criticism of magisterial statements.  (See the passages quoted in that post.)

So, both as head of the CDF and as pope, while Ratzinger by no means gave away the store either to the SSPX or to the progressives, he did strive as far as possible to understand and accommodate their concerns. 

Naturally, he was no less reasonable when dealing with criticism and queries coming from more mainstream quarters.  An example: In its teaching on the morality of lying, the 1994 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church gave the impression that one was bound to refrain from lying only to “someone who has a right to know the truth.”  This seemed to depart from the more traditional teaching that lying is always and intrinsically wrong, whether or not the person lied to has a right to the truth.  Many Catholic theologians wrote to then-Cardinal Ratzinger at the time, asking that the text be changed to conform with the more traditional teaching.  He did not dismiss this criticism as rigid, or as insufficiently sensitive to the complexities of concrete circumstances requiring discernment, etc.  Rather, in the revised 1997 edition of the Catechism, the text was indeed changed to remove the problematic non-traditional formulation.  (I had reason to discuss the details of this case in an earlier post.)

Another example: In 1995, Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae appeared, and took a very restrictive position on the application of capital punishment.  Concerned about the impression that traditional Catholic doctrine on capital punishment was being overturned, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger asking for clarification.  Ratzinger did not accuse Neuhaus of a bad spirit, of dissent, of trying to put the pope into a difficult situation, of quibbling about what was already perfectly clear, etc.  Rather, he straightforwardly answered the question, reassuring Neuhaus that “the Holy Father has not altered the doctrinal principles which pertain to this issue” but was merely “appl[ying the]… principles in the context of present-day historical circumstances.”  And in 2004, Ratzinger further reaffirmed the continuing validity of traditional teaching by making it clear that“there may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about… the death penalty” and that a Catholic could even be “at odds with” the pope on that subject – something that could not be the case if the relevant doctrinal principles had been reversed.

This willingness to allow for diverse opinions wherever that is consistent with orthodoxy, and as far as possible to engage those who are critical of papal policy and teaching non-polemically and at the level of rational argumentation rather than by authoritative diktat, plausibly stem from Benedict’s high regard for reason.  In his famous Regensburg address of 2006, Benedict emphasized the centrality of reason to the Catholic faith and to the Christian conception of God, contrasting it sharply with the voluntarist tendency to see God as an unfathomable will who issues arbitrary commands.  He approvingly quotes Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’s remark that “whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly,” and endorses the emperor’s view that (as Benedict paraphrases Manuel) “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”  Benedict added:

[T]he faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy… God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos… Consequently, Christian worship is… worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.

This attitude toward reason contrasts sharply with that evinced by many of the critics of the four cardinals and others who have formally and politely asked Pope Francis to clarify Amoris Laetitia and to reaffirm the traditional Catholic teachings that some think are contradicted by that document.  Most of these critics have refused to address the substance of the four cardinals’ concerns.  They have preferred to question the cardinals’ motives and to issue insultsand threatsand false statements.  They have expressed scorn for the cardinals’ “intellectual discussion” and “sophisticated arguments.”  One critic opines that those who sympathize with the four cardinals tend to be “intellectuals” and “educated” people, “who put great store in their reason” and in “arguments, logically developed from absolute first principles… building to a case that cries out to be answered” – as if these were bad things!  Even Pope Francis himself has in the past criticized “trust in clear and logical reasoning” as a kind of “Gnosticism”! 

And yet it is only fair to note that Pope Francis has, like his predecessor, been surprisingly generous even to the SSPX.  Evidently his motivation has less to do with concern for doctrinal continuity and rational engagement than with charity and mercy.  But perhaps this same charity and mercy will, ultimately, lead him to respond to the four cardinals.