The Religious Consultation
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National Catholic Reporter, June 3, 2005 Suppose this is a papal election not received? By ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER
The recent election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI has beengreeted with choruses of negative comments in the progressive communities where I teach and live. The other night a group of seminarians at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., was preparing a bonfire for a cookout on the campus. As I walked by, one invited me to share the meal, calling out cheerfully, “We’re going to burn Ratzinger in effigy.” A review of the press coverage of the election shows a repeated list of repressive decisions during Cardinal Ratzinger’s 24 years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This list typically includes the following items. He rejects any possibility of rethinking the Catholic teaching against contraception and against women’s ordination. He left the decision up to local bishops but suggested during the recent U.S. election that politicians who are pro-choice could be denied Communion. He also wishes to block public information on priestly sexual abuse, suggesting that coverage of the issue is itself an expression of anti-Catholicism in the media. In a confidential letter to Catholic bishops in May 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger insisted that church inquiries be held behind closed doors, with the evidence kept confidential for 10 years after the victims reached adulthood, seeking to prevent legal cases against the perpetrators. Cardinal Ratzinger is also seen as hostile to any form of interreligious dialogue that suggests equal truth in other traditions. He wants to renew a monolithic Christian Europe, questioning the admission of Turkey, a Muslim nation, to the European Union. He insists that homosexuality is intrinsically evil and opposes any opening to gay marriage. He is hostile to feminism, dubbing it an expression of women’s hostility to men, while he seeks to restore traditional “complementarity” of masculine/feminine dualism as the proper relation of the sexes. Cardinal Ratzinger is also cited as having initiated a long string of investigations of theologians, creating an atmosphere of fear of open discussion in Catholic theological seminaries and departments of religion. Key thinkers of our time, such as Leonardo Boff in Brazil and Charles Curran in the United States, have been banned from teaching as Catholic theologians. Fr. Curran found employment at Southern Methodist University while Leonardo Boff left the priesthood to write as a layman. Brazilian feminist Sr. Ivone Gebara was silenced and told to study Catholic theology for a year, during which she wrote another book. The overall picture is of an authoritarian who not only defends particular positions in current theological and moral debates but insists that there is only one right view and any dissent or even discussion is forbidden. Some Catholic friends of mine have insisted that the pope should be given the benefit of the doubt, and that he might “surprise us,” that is, turn out to be not as rigidly one-sided as these moves seem to suggest. While I would be more than happy to see some evidence for such surprises, the track record established over the last quarter-century seems unlikely to be broken now that he is pope. This means that in a highly polarized global Catholicism and Christianity, the pope’s policies are very likely to deepen this polarization. While Pope John Paul II’s charisma and advocacy on behalf of the world’s poor and against militarism and unchecked neoliberal capitalism allowed progressives to nuance any critique of his conservative side, this seems unlikely to be the case with Pope Benedict XVI. Might we have in the offing the possibility of a pope whose papacy will not be “received” by a substantial sector of Catholics and who will forfeit the respect that modern popes have won from the non-Catholic world? When the anti-birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae was released in 1968, negating the overwhelming majority view of Pope Paul VI’s own birth control commission, the response was one of such negativity and noncompliance on the part of most Catholics (about 80 percent of married couples consistently report that they believe they can practice contraception and still be “good Catholics”) that some suggested that this was a case of a church teaching that had not been “received” by the people. Could this be a case where a pope who has hitched his wagon to the right-wing side of these sexual debates might not be “received” by the majority of Catholics? Could many Catholics, while continuing to see themselves as Catholics, implicitly, if not overtly, say “No habemus papam”; this is not our pope? I believe that progressive Catholics should do more than dissent in private. They should find out in some detail what the new pope’s views and actions are and formulate their objections to those views publicly. They should also formulate the agenda that the church needs to pursue to be authentically faithful to the Gospel. They need to organize for alternatives at the grass roots and in their local and national churches and communities. In short, there needs to be a real debate and action that defies the strategies of silencing and forced submission. Rosemary Radford Ruether is the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. She is a Participating Scholar in The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics. |
