Feature Article

The lost continent

When the cardinals enter the conclave to elect the next pope, one of the most urgent issues they face ? as will John Paul II?s successor ? is how the Church can connect once more with Europe, its former heartland

PREACHING as principal celebrant at the solemn funeral Mass for John Paul II in St Peter?s Square, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had to pause several times for prolonged waves of applause from the largely youthful crowd to subside. It must have been with mixed feelings that he stood stiffly waiting, his normally impeccable coiffure blown everywhere by the wind. The death of the Pope had drawn some three million young people to Rome for the final farewell. But they came and took part on their own terms. Although a recent ruling from the Vatican had banned applause during the liturgy as unseemly, even on this most formal of occasions, they hadn?t taken any notice.

The cardinals soon to gather in conclave will have been puzzled and challenged by what they saw and heard that day. High on the agenda of the next papacy, everyone agrees, is the ?crisis? of the secularisation of Europe, the falling Mass attendances and empty seminaries across the continent, the decline in Christianity as a guiding force in European culture, and the actual antipathy towards it in growing sections of the population. Even the countries of Eastern Europe, recently liberated from atheist Communism, have seen nothing like the renaissance of faith that many in the Vatican, including the late Pope, were expecting and praying for.

Was this it, at last? Did the surge of affection towards this one man, the Polish Pope, tell the Church how to counteract these ominous trends? How then to interpret one young man from east Germany, asked on television why he and his friends felt such a love for the late Pope, who replied that it was because to them ?he didn?t seem like a priest, more like a human being?. Is that really the word of hope the Vatican was waiting for?

This postmodern, post-Enlightenment, European generation has learnt to apply to religions what it takes for granted in all other spheres ? the right to reinvent itself as it thinks fit. It chooses to be what it wants to be. In this dispensation, Catholicism, whether liberal or strict, becomes one more lifestyle option, another way of expressing autonomous individuality. But is this freedom to create their own lives automatically and necessarily incompatible with the message of the Gospel? Can it be a quest for spiritual growth? Could it somehow be incorporated into a richer Christian understanding of humanity, where expressions of personal creativity are welcomed as part of God?s creative purposes? Is it possible, even, that previous moral approaches just do not work when applied to this phenomenon, just as the Japanese language significantly does not have a word for ?self-esteem?. Or is this ?self-creation? sheer relativism, the rejection of the very possibility of truth?

This is the crucial question at this time, when the Church looks questioningly at Europe over the coffin of the Pope, and Europe looks questioningly back. Is it the parting of the ways or a new opportunity?

The cardinals have been here before. In the past half-millennium Europe has thrown up fundamental challenges to the Catholic faith at the rate of at least one a century: first the Reformation, then the Enlightenment, then liberalism and capitalism (and their polar opposites, Marxism), then fascism and nationalism ? and now secular democracy, spiced with anticlericalism and feminism. Modernism, as an ideology rather than an artistic fashion, was another; and postmodernism, the ultimate rejection of all meta-narratives, the most recent. In most historical cases, before the Church withdrew to its traditional posture of rejection and condemnation, an accommodation was briefly attempted, but abandoned usually when the Church felt its own authority had come under attack.

The geology of European culture shows layer upon layer of these ideological deposits, and modern Europeans are the inheritors of almost all of them while laying down a new layer of their own. In only one area has the Catholic Church seen fit to reopen the debate it closed down with the condemnations of centuries ago, to see if the negative conclusions it reached then still stood or needed to be re-examined. That is in the area of ecumenism, where the anathemas of the sixteenth century, especially towards Lutheranism and Anglicanism, have been, so to speak and somewhat belatedly, overturned on appeal. The method, explicitly endorsed by Pope Paul VI at the outset of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), was to go behind the doctrinal disagreements of the past and their historic formulations, to see what they were really trying to say and whether or not that really had to be repudiated for the sake of the truth. This ?ARCIC method? produced a dramatic series of agreed statements, including some on topics that had seemed intractable at the outset, even on such touchstone issues as the Eucharist and the priesthood.

The inquiry was essentially an intellectual one, but issues of intention and goodwill were clearly relevant to its success. The question was posed not as ?What is there in the other side?s position that we must oppose?? but as ?What is there in the other side?s position that we can embrace?? This proved immensely fruitful, although it ran into snags when those attached to the former adversarial way of doing things ? Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger?s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith among them ? did not gladly enter into this new irenical spirit.

Although ecumenism was the only area where a formal process allowed the Church to revise the judgements of the past in this way, something similar has been attempted less explicitly in other areas. Thus Pope John XXIII?s encyclical Mater et Magistra stepped back from the Church?s opposition to Communism by recognising that in some circumstances Catholics and others committed to social justice (including Communists) were working towards similar aims and could cooperate. His encyclical Pacem in Terris embraced the concept of human rights, hitherto regarded as a poisoned fruit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. Not long after, the Second Vatican Council decree Dignitatis Humanae reversed the verdict of Pius IX in his Syllabus of Errors by committing the Catholic Church to the concept of freedom of religion, another Enlightenment inspiration.

However, unlike the ecumenical case, the Church was loath to admit that it was reversing its former judgements, and there was no sense of apology when the Church borrowed and then baptised ideas it had repudiated not long before. It preferred to act as though it had always believed them. But this enabled it to duck a serious theological issue that has remained to haunt the Church ? how can ideas that are good and true exist in the secular or non-Catholic world before the Church takes them into its own bloodstream? Is not the Church itself the source of all truth?

There is a strong resonance here with the choice the Church is sometimes said to face between the theological direction of Karl Rahner and that of Hans von Balthasar. Rahner was the key progressive theologian of the Second Vatican Council; von Balthasar has since emerged as the hero of those who wanted a far more conservative interpretation of the council. Does the Church take truth to the world, or find truth in the world? To put the question at its most embarrassing, has the Holy Spirit gone ahead of the Church to breathe the spirit of truth into non-Catholic or non-Christian systems of thought, perhaps even when they are at loggerheads with church authority? Rahner saw the possibility that there were ?anonymous Christians? who could have genuine Christian insights. Von Balthasar ridiculed the idea, and claimed it led to the Church being contaminated by secular ideas, alien to the Gospel.

On the answer depends the possibility that the Church might open a new chapter in its relations with European culture, no longer triumphantly asserting that it was right about everything but humbly admitting it had got many things wrong and had done harm. In connection with the Reformation, that confession has already been made. The Church has equally admitted that it wronged Galileo. The Jews have had an apology.

But it is not enough. The Church must also honestly admit that it misunderstood many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, even Voltaire and Rousseau, for all their anticlericalism. Could the Church come to see that their demand to install reason in place of superstition, say, was at root a desire to break the spell by which the clergy kept the simple faithful in ignorance and fear, in defence of clerical and feudal privilege and power that had nothing to do with the Gospel? Were not Voltaire and Rousseau ?anonymous Christians? too? And is not contemporary feminism, say, even at its most secular, true for what it affirms, untrue only for what it denies (to use G.K. Chesterton?s definition of heresy).

The ARCIC method could even be applied to atheism. Indeed, that was exactly what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was implying when he suggested, in last year?s public dialogue with the novelist Philip Pullman, that what atheists denied was not what Christians actually believed.

It is in all these areas that the sources lie of the deepening alienation between Catholicism and European culture, which will not be overcome by shouting louder nor even by patient and honest listening ? but by a profound review of the whole relationship. It needs renegotiation. The time has come: and it is up to the cardinals to decide whether to let it quickly pass, or to make a re-encounter with Europe a lasting ambition of the next papacy.