A HARD
FAITH
How the New Pope and His
Predecessor Redefined
By Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker Magazine, May 16,
2005
For many Catholics, the white smoke that curled into the
Now McBrien urged patience. There was some
chance that Benedict might raise to his new station; in any case, McBrien said,
“he is seventy eight. We’re not talking about a long
pontificate.”
Such evident discomfort was widely voiced by liberal
Catholics, and was reflected in the early portrayals of the new Pope in the
press and among the cornmentariat. The German Ratzinger was depicted as a rigid
dogmatist, whose election foreshadowed possible schism, if not the destruction
of the Church. Ratzinger had earned such derision by the fact of his service,
nearly a quarter century long, as the Church’s guardian of the faith. In that
role, he had enforced Church doctrine with a rigor that many Catholic
theologians found chilling. But the animus directed at Ratzinger (who said he
had prayed not to be elected) was also aimed, at least implicitly, at the
pontificate of the man newly entombed in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope John Paul
II.
Because Karol Wojtyla’s outsized presence so neatly suited
secular description he was the media age
Vatican II had
acknowledged the validity of what is “true and holy” in other religions, which
had led the Church toward what John Paul II saw as a dangerous acceptance of
religious indifferentism. His 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio, warned
against the “incorrect theological perspectives” that led to the idea that “‘one
religion is as good as another.’“ The eternal mission of the Church, he wrote,
was Christian evangelism to the world.
In his manifest, and deeply
spiritual, Christocentrism, John Paul 11 had been the sort of Roman Catholic
that even an evangelical Protestant could admire. (The Catholic writer Michael
Novak quotes a Southern Baptist friend as having once remarked about John Paul
II, “I’m as anti-papist as you can get. But you’ve got a Pope who knows how to
Pope!”) in an age he constantly decried for its relativism, Wojtyla proclaimed
an absolute Truth, based on a fundamentally orthodox theology. Ratzinger’s job
was to hammer out the administrative details punishing dissident theologians,
framing the Pope’s exclusion of women from the priesthood as infallible
teaching, discouraging liturgical novelty, and so on.
It was this
fundamentalism of John Paul that Cardinal Ratzinger was defending in his
instantly famous homily at the Mass for the election of a new Pope, on April
18th. “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism,” he said, “which does
not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s
own ego and one’s own desires.”
Ratzinger’s quick election by the
College of Cardinals a Vatican version of a landslide victory was an
unwelcome signal to “issue” Catholics that Wojtyla’s protracted era of orthodoxy
had been granted an extension. Progressives had lived in a suspended mood of fin
de régime for a very long time, which was occasionally expressed as an
impatience with the old man’s stubborn postponement of the inevitable. Now he
was dead, and still his regime lived.
The new Pope clearly shares
the view of his friend and predecessor that the Church must stand against
modernity, to resist what he called “the waves of today’s fashions or the latest
novelties.” The West, ever more faithless, is now considered mission territory,
but Ratzinger has suggested that the Church itself must first undertake a
process of purification. “Lord, your Church often seems like a boat about to
sink, a boat taking in water on every side,” he said in a Good Friday prayer at
the Colosseum. “In your field we see more weeds than wheat. The soiled garments
and face of your Church throw us into confusion. Yet it is we ourselves who have
soiled them!” George Weigel, a biographer of John Paul II, noting Ratzinger’s
choice of papal name, has observed that one of the Benedictines’ mottoes is
Succisa viresci “Pruned, it grows again.” The Church is shrinking in Europe and,
to a lesser degree, in the
There is much to suggest that the pruning
was already well underway during the pontificate of John Paul II. In the
American Church, the remnant taking shape can already be clearly seen in the
growing, fervently evangelical new movements encouraged by John Paul II, and in
a resurgent orthodoxy in the seminary’ This renewal, as it calls itself; is led
by a rising group of churchmen who are unashamedly orthodox and who were
fiercely loyal to the person, and agenda, of John Paul II.
In the
secular press, the shorthand way of distinguishing progressive Catholic ideas or
individuals from conservative ones is by their orientation to Vatican II.
Progressives pressing the case for a particular reform will often cite “the
spirit of Vatican II.” Conservatives, at the mention of that ecumenical council,
tend to smile tightly and change the subject (unless the moment is seized for a
full refutation). The Second Vatican Council ran in four sessions, from 1962 to
1965. Pope John XXIII, who called the Council in the hope of renewing the Church
for its mission of presenting Christ to the world, died after the first session,
in 1963. His successor, Pope Paul II, presided over the final three sessions,
and eventually came to the conclusion that the Council may have loosed within
the Church an impulse of self-immolation. “Satan’s smoke,” he said in 1972, “has
made its way into the
Pope John’s call for a council,
only the twenty first in Church history, had been a surprise. In the years after
the Second World War, the Church was, by conventional measure, quite strong.
Mass attendance was high, and on the surface, at least the Church seemed stable.
This was owing partly to the lingering effect of Pope Plus X’s 1907 condemnation
of Modernism an amorphous movement that examined fundamental Christian doctrine
(the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Holy Trinity) in the light of science
and history, and doubted its objective reality. The condemnation, and two world
wars, discouraged theological adventurism through the first half of the
twentieth century, but by the nineteen fifties signs of ferment began to
reappear.
A young American seminarian named Charles Curran
experienced that ferment directly, when he went to
By the time
Curran left
Atmosphere was a key component of the Second Vatican Council.
The world’s bishops, Catholic intellectuals, and journalists had descended upon
“I was in
The conservative/progressive taxonomy was true, as far
as it went, but the more meaningful divide at the Second Vatican Council was
that which eventually split the progressive wing into two philosophical camps.
One school of thought was known as aggiornamento (“updating”), which imagined a
new Church open to modernity; The other school, dominated by French and German
theologians, called for a ressourcement, or refreshing of the faith by
re-exploring its sources Scripture and the early Church fathers. This group,
which included the young German theologian Joseph Ratzinger, came to see
aggiornamento as an accommodation to the modern world, which would weaken the
faith without improving the world.
Vatican II was a historic turn,
which was felt in the daily lives of the faithful through such changes as the
new Mass, said in the vernacular, and the way in which the sacraments, such as
Baptism and Penance, were practiced. Fish on Friday was no longer the rule. The
Council produced breakthroughs on ecumenism, which brought the prospect of unity
with the “separated” Christian faiths, and new bridges were built between the
Church and Jews.
However, the Council had not produced anything
like radical change in fundamental Church teachings (on such a matter as
contraception, for example) or structure. The idea of Vatican II as a
revolutionary manifesto arose not from any documentary product of the Council
but from the notion of “the spirit of Vatican II.” That was largely the
construct of an Irish American priest from the
This idea of a catalytic “spirit of Vatican II” was embraced
by liberals as a kind of license for new Catholic thought and practice. It was,
perhaps, partly to curb this impulse that Pope Paul VI issued his 1968
encyclical Humane Vitae, reaffirming the ban on contraception. If so, the move
backfired, as it triggered open dissent by Western theologians, led in the
United States by Charles Curran, who was by then an associate professor at
Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Curran openly asserted, and taught his
students, that Catholic teaching on sexual matters was wrong.
Curran’s
“Kids in college? Well, won’t it be nice to have them
home? mentor, Bernard Häring was among the many who joined in the
dissent.
Other theologians pushed the faith into new speculative
realms, some reminiscent of Modernism, others overtly associated with secular
political movements. The most notable of these was liberation theology, which
applied a Marxist interpretation to Christian doctrine, casting Jesus as
revolutionary liberator, the Christian obligation to lift up the poor sometimes
led clergy to support, and even participate in, the “people’s liberation” wars
in Latin America. Leonardo Boff, a leading liberation theologian, who had been a
student of Ratzinger’s in Germany, cited Vatican II as “the best possible
theoretical justification to activities developed under the signs of a theology
of progress,” and developed his own Marxist critique of the Church an
unjustified hierarchy, as he saw it for which he was twice ordered by Ratzinger
to maintain a year of silence. (Boff eventually left the
priesthood.)
Through most of the nineteen seventies, during Pope
Paul’s decline and death, and then the month long pontificate of John Paul I, in
1978, “the spirit of Vatican II” was ascendant, especially in the
From the start, John Paul II claimed the mantle of Vatican
II, interpreting the Council in a radically new way by a literal reading of its
work. As a young bishop from Kr “w, Wojtyla had participated in all four
sessions of the Second Vatican Council; through his long pontificate, his
favored reference was Vatican II. The Council was, he insisted, a purely
spiritual, not a political, event, which prepared the Church for the great task
ahead: the evangelization of the world. His view of Christian salvation was
individual redemption and eternal life, which more or less invalidated the idea
of Jesus as an activist in class struggle. Yet John Paul II carried the
ecumenical mandate of the Council beyond what even some of the “spirit of
Vatican II” people might have hoped (too far, conservatives thought), even as he
reined in those theologians who had wandered too far afield in the name of the
Council’s mandate. “He, in effect, said, ‘No, that’s not what we meant at all.
Here’s what the Council meant,’“ Father Richard Neuhaus, the editor in chief of
the magazine First Things, told me. “He has placed an abiding hermeneutic, I
think, on the interpretation of the Council. This may be the biggest single
contribution of this pontificate.”
In his reinterpretation of
Vatican II, and its attendant quelling of dissent, John Paul II relied heavily
on the help of his friend and fellow Council veteran Joseph Ratzinger, who
served as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for
twenty-three years.
Charles Curran says he felt the breath of
Ratzinger on his neck in 1984, when he read an interview Ratzinger granted to
the Italian magazine Jesus in which Ratzinger catalogued what he considered the
crisis of faith as it manifests itself in various parts of the world. “He said
the trouble in
Soon
after John Paul II became Pope, Curran heard from a friend in
“It
seemed to me that what the
Curran said that after the revocation
of his license his he suddenly changed. “I don’t get invited to anything
sponsored by official Church bodies of any type,” he said. “I could not get a
job at a Catholic college or university that was unavailable to me.” On the
other hand, he remains a priest, and he continues to teach.
Evidence for the traditionalists’ argument that those corners of
the Church which cling to tradition have fared better, even prospered, tends to
be anecdotal, because Church records do not distinguish between “conservative”
and “liberal” parishes or seminaries. It seems clear, however, that some
“conservative” religious orders have suffered no shortage of vocations, or
callings to serve the Church.
“The more you present Christ
faithfully, they’re going to come,” Raymond L. Burke, the Archbishop of St.
Louis, told me. “Young people, particularly, are very responsive. And they don’t
want a watered down version. In some sense, if it’s not hard they suspect it and
they’re right to do that, because our faith is demanding.”
The hard
faith preached by John Paul II, posed as a call to moral heroism, struck a
startlingly responsive note with young people. By the millions, they made
pilgrimages to his World Youth Day events chanting, “J.P. II, we love you!” and,
in the end, they jammed St. Peter’s Square to bid him farewell. Skeptics suggest
that the big crowds reflected the youthful urge to participate in a huge group
experience, and that the kids who showed up at a papal rally didn’t necessarily
show up in church. Most didn’t, perhaps, but John Paul’s pontificate undeniably
shaped a generation of young Catholics that are more orthodox, and have a
clearer understanding of the faith, than the generation they succeed. In the
seminary, in religious orders, and on Catholic college campuses, they are
referred to as Generation J.P. II.
“There’s a change going on,”
Father Benedict Groeschel, of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, in the
Groeschel’s
religious order is orthodoxy unplugged. He and his young friars wear long beards
and gray medieval habits, girded by a rope tied into three knots reminders of
their vows of poverty; chastity, and obedience (“No bling¬bling, no sweet thing,
Christ is King,” in the community vernacular). The friars live primarily in a
converted convent on
Some credit this growth to the personality
of Father Groeschel, a psychologist, a prolific author of inspirational books,
and a gifted preacher. But Groeschel, who is seventy two, credits the spiritual
rigor of the order. “Poverty, chastity, and obedience that’s the foundation of
religious life,” he says. “And chastity means chastity; You know, it means no
voluntary sexual acts, including autoeroticism, or anything like that. And when
kids have grown up in this sexually explicit culture that’s a bit of a
challenge. But they know that’s what’s coming. And they embrace
it.”
There is about the friars the air of an elite corps,
reflecting a distinct sense of quest. “They are very idealistic,” Father Bernard
Murphy, who is in charge of the novices, says. “They want the real thing, they
want the truth. And so they’ll search for it wherever they can find it. They
want things that are authentic, they want things that will challenge them beyond
themselves.” Responding to John Paul’s challenge to “preach it from the
rooftops,” the friars preach the Gospel with an evangelical fervor, in their
street encounters and in their revivalist parish missions.
Many
come to such an order after a radical conversion experience an experience that
is not uncommon within the many new Church movements that John Paul encouraged.
In the spring of 1998, on Pentecost Sunday, more than three hundred thousand
members of the apostolic movements were welcomed in St. Peter’s Square by the
Pope, who proclaimed them to be “providential expressions of the new springtime
brought forth by the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.” Some worried that
the Pope was too ready to grant affirmation to any group showing signs of
vitality; But the new movements evangelical and orthodox, like the Pope himself
offered a stark contrast to some of the established orders of the Church, such
as the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits, known for their intellectual rigor, were
not always in favor with John Paul, partly because of their inclination to
dissent. Now the order seems to be nearing a point of crisis. Since Vatican II,
the worldwide number of Jesuits has fallen almost by half, to fewer than twenty
thousand. Last year, the Jesuits received five hundred and twelve new members,
but eight hundred and thirty two Jesuits either died or left the
order.
Archbishop Charles Chaput, of Denver, is a compact sixty
year old of Native American descent whose manifest loyalty to the Pope and to
the magisterium (Church teaching) makes him an exemplar of a group of American
bishops who have been called the “John Paul II bishops”; that is to say, a group
of bishops who give progressive Catholics hives. Referring to the progressive
agenda, Chaput (pronounced “sha PEW”) told me, “The lack of orthodoxy has
already proven that it’s empty. So I can’t understand why people want to move in
that direction. I mean, all the things they’re pushing for have already been
tried by mainline Protestant churches, which are shrinking in numbers. And these
religious orders, where they’ve abandoned the tradition, there are no vocations,
but they still talk like they’re the future. Why would They? You just have to
open your eyes and see.
Chaput argues that orthodoxy has a growth market
(“It’s huge”), and can
cite as
evidence the case of the seminary he runs in
The new
seminary's rector is an intense forty two year old priest named Michael Glenn, a
The
While theological inquiry is a
valued Catholic tradition, there is not likely to be much dissent on Chaput's
campus. "This is a seminary where people love the Church, and they love Jesus
Christ," the Archbishop says. "And dissent is not part of that kind of love
here. I think there's real serious theological reflection, and we study all the
issues of the time. But we don't see them as being equal opinions. The opinion
of the Church is the opinion. The others, it's just important to know them so
that you know what the Church's challenges are."
At the mention of
Chaput's name, Charles Curran, the American theologian chastened by John Paul,
seems, momentarily, at a loss for words. Then he sputters, "He's, he's
terrible!" It was John Paul II's selection of bishops that inspired the most
pointed criticism in Thomas Cahill's summation of his pontificate in the Times
shortly after the Pope's death. "In order to have been named a bishop, a priest
must have been seen to be absolutely opposed to masturbation, premarital sex,
birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion,
divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests and any hint of
Marxism,” Cahill wrote. “It is nearly impossible to find men who subscribe
wholeheartedly to this entire catalogue of certitudes; as a result the ranks of
the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual
incompetents.”
Father McBrien, of Notre Dame, is unsparing in his
view of the loyalist bishops appointed by John Paul. “His greatest deficiency,
in my judgment,” McBrien said a few weeks before the Pope’s death, “is when it
comes time to make bishops. Promoting bishops within the hierarchy to high
ranking positions in the hierarchy, he has named and I’m not exaggerating he has
named the worst group of bishops in modem Church history.” Of Chaput, McBrien
says, “He’s one of the worst.”
It would not surprise any of these
critics of the late Pope that, on the day Cardinal Ratzinger was elected John
Paul’s successor, Charles Chaput gave thanks to God. “There’s a special kind of
joy knowing that I don’t have to be anxious about the care of the Church,” he
said. “Any of us would have been if we didn’t know the new Pope very well. And
we know this man very well.”
Chaput has had several dealings with
Ratzinger over the years, most notably in regard to a matter that greatly
complicated John Kerry’s campaign for President the question of a Catholic
politician’s duty, to his faith and to his constituency, on the issue of
abortion. Chaput was one of several bishops who challenged the propriety of
Catholics in public life presenting themselves for Communion while advocating
policies favoring abortion rights. The resulting controversy exposed a deep
divide among American bishops, and posed, in its way, as big a problem for
Kerry’s candidacy as the Swift Boat Veterans. Perhaps the most arresting fact
about the last election is that the Roman Catholic Democrat from
The abortion question has
tested Catholics in public life for thirty years. The reading of Vatican II that
understood the Gospels as a call to social action animated a progressive impulse
in the
In the
early years after Roe, outspoken pro life activism was consigned to the margins,
and those Catholics who were confrontational on life issues, such as the
“If one contends, as we
do, that the right of every fetus to be born should be protected by civil law
and supported by civil consensus, then our moral, political, and economic
responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth,” Bernardin said in a 1983
speech. “Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be
equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the
old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and
the unemployed worker. Such a quality of life posture translates into specific
political and economic positions on tax policy, employment generation, welfare
policy; nutrition and feeding programs, and health care. Consistency means we
cannot have it both ways. We cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous
public policy to protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion
and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber
of the society or are beyond the proper scope of governmental
responsibility.”
This line of reasoning came to be known as the
“seamless garment” concept (a metaphorical allusion to the garment Christ wore
to the Cross), and allowed Catholics who didn’t wish to be identified with
single-issue politics to contextualize abortion. Catholics in public life, such
as the former
The pontificate of John Paul II challenged that construct
and transformed Catholic politics. The Pope’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae,
“The Gospel of Life,” addressed the issue squarely: “Abortion and euthanasia
are... crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation
in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation
to oppose them by conscientious objection.”
John Paul seemed intent
on specifically foreclosing any interpretation of Church teaching that allowed
politicians to sidestep abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic research. Some
Catholic legislators explained their pro choice votes by stating that Roe v.
Wade was law, and by citing the inappropriateness, in the context of American
political culture, of imposing personal religious beliefs upon the public body.
Such behavior in office, the Pope argued, was cooperation with grave evil. “This
cooperation can never be justified either by invoking respect for the freedom of
others or by appealing to the fact that civil law permits it or requires it,” he
wrote. “Human life, as a gift of God, is sacred and inviolable. For this reason
procured abortion and euthanasia are absolutely unacceptable.”
The
encyclical did not necessarily convert the Bishops Conference, but it energized
and legitimatized the pro life activists, such as Bishop Vaughan. Deal Hudson, a
conservative Catholic publisher, who helped sell George W. Bush to Catholics in
2000 and 2004, said, “Now these strident voices that the bishops used to label
as fundamentalists, or fanatical, were embraced by the Pope.”
The
Pope’s “culture of life/culture of death” refrain gave courage, too, to those
bishops, growing in number and influence, who considered themselves John Paul
loyalists. The Bishops Conference continued to advance the seamless garment
proposition, but the dynamics of the episcopacy were clearly changing, and
cleavages were widening. Bernardin died in 1996. In 1998, Chaput and others on
the Conference’s Pro-Life Activities Committee managed to produce a statement,
speaking for the Conference, that essentially mirrored the Pope’s “Gospel of
Life” encyclical. In 1999, in its pre-election “Faithful Citizenship” report
offering guidance to Catholic voters, the Conference again enunciated its
consistent ethic of life. Now there seemed to be two distinct and, to a degree,
competing teachings on the life questions, emanating from the institutional
Church in the
In the fall of 2002,
Joseph Ratzinger stepped in, clarifying Church teaching in a “Doctrinal Note” to
the bishops on “some questions regarding The Participation of Catholics in
Political Life.” Ratzinger emphasized that “John Paul II, continuing the
constant teaching of the Church, has reiterated many times that those who are
directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a ‘grave and clear obligation to
oppose’ any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is
impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.”
The following
year, in anticipation of the 2004 elections, the Bishops Conference issued a new
“Faithful Citizenship” guidance report. “We are convinced,” the report repeated,
“that a consistent ethic of life should be the moral framework from which to
address issues in the political arena.” And the bishops once again advised
against single issue voting. “The Christian faith is an integral unity, and thus
it is incoherent to isolate some particular element to the detriment of the
whole of Catholic doctrine,” their report stated. “A political commitment to a
single isolated aspect of the Church’s social doctrine does not exhaust one’s
responsibility towards the common good.”
In November, 2003, one of
the John Paul II bishops openly contested the official position of the
Conference. If it was a grave sin to cooperate in abortion by supporting it
through legislation, as the Pope had declared and Ratzinger
had
reiterated, what was to be the consequence to those politicians who continued to
support abortion? “They are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, should they
present themselves,” Bishop Raymond Burke wrote, in a Notification to his
diocese, until such time as they publicly renounce their support of these most
unjust practices.”
Burke had been involved in a long dialogue with
three pro choice politicians in his diocese, who would patiently listen to his
pastoral advice and then go vote for abortion rights. ‘All of a sudden, I
realized they were not interested at all in talking about this,” Burke recalled
recently. “Their minds were made up. And they, somehow, were convinced that it
was perfectly all right for a Catholic to vote for pro abortion legislation. And
the whole thing has really touched me in the depth of my soul, to see how
serious the situation is.”
Two weeks after Burke’s notification,
the
In the course of the campaign, Kerry described himself as a
faithful Catholic, a former altar boy who continued to attend Mass and receive
Holy Communion. He said that he believed, with the Church, that life begins at
conception; he would not, however, impose his religious beliefs on the American
public by trying to change abortion law. It was a modification of the
reassurance offered by John Kennedy forty four years earlier, when he went to
In April, Archbishop Chaput wrote a
column in the archdiocesan newspaper, headlined “How to Tell a Duck from a Fox,”
which seemed to address not only the Presidential race but the tight Colorado
race for the U.S. Senate, between the pro life Republican Pete Coors and the pro
choice Democrat Ken Salazar, who prevailed. Both men are Catholics. “Candidates
who claim to be ‘Catholic’ but who publicly ignore Catholic teaching about the
sanctity of human life are offering a dishonest public witness,” Chaput
wrote.
In May, Chaput’s colleague, Bishop Michael Sheridan, of
The press began to pay more careful attention
to Kerry’s church visits the “wafer watch,” some began calling it.
Such was the mood when, in June, the bishops came
together for their annual spring conference, this year held at the Inverness
Hotel, near Denver. The retreat, which was closed to the press, was to have been
a time of quiet reflection, but the Communion issue inevitably imposed itself.
Earlier, McCarrick had been chosen to head a task force considering the issue of
Catholic politicians, their voting records, and the appropriate Church response.
He had said that his report would be released in November, after the election.
Chaput and his allies insisted that the subject be engaged there and then, and
it was.
According to several bishops and others attending the
meetings, McCarrick reiterated the Conference’s official position against single
issue politics, and said that he had received a communication on the subject of
Catholic politicians from Cardinal Ratzinger, in
in agreement with the Conference’s
position. Several bishops later expressed their pointed dismay at discovering,
some time after the retreat, what Ratzinger had actually said in his
communication to McCarrick. (The letter was leaked to the Italian magazine
L’Espresso.) “Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and
euthanasia,” Ratzinger wrote. “For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds
with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision
to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present
himself to receive Holy Communion .... There may be a legitimate diversity of
opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty but
not, however, with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”
For those
Catholic politicians who persist in supporting abortion, Ratzinger wrote, a
bishop should offer pastoral guidance, including a warning that denial of
Communion might be a potential consequence. If those measures fail, he added,
“and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself
to receive the Holy Eucharist, the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to
distribute it.”
Raymond Burke learned of the actual content of
Ratzinger’s letter when he was in
As it happened, Chaput had a pretty
good idea of Ratzinger’s position. He’d been in contact with Ratzinger on the
subject, and got himself attached to McCormick’s task force, along with Cardinal
Francis Eugene George, of Chicago, an ally and a man who commands broad respect
in the Conference. A compromise statement was worked out on the basis of an
interim report from the task force, and at the end of the retreat the bishops
announced that the decision of whether or not to deny Communion would be an
individual pastoral one, to be made by each bishop.
Through the
rest of the campaign, John Kerry found himself answering questions about his
faith, and Catholic voters were advised by their bishops that Kerry was in grave
error or, depending upon the bishop, that he was not. More bishops joined the
fray, arguing both sides of the case. “A lot of Catholics don’t know squat about
their own faith tradition,” Father McBrien says. “I mean, there are a lot of
Catholics who probably thought it was a sin if they voted for Kerry. They didn’t
know what to think They were confused.”
After the election,
President Bush told Archbishop Myers that the influence of the outspoken J.P. II
bishops had decided the race. Now Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI and orthodoxy
is in the ascendant. Vatican II generation priests are retiring, many with the
lament that the young priests who are replacing them are too wedded to
tradition. Democrats, meanwhile, have already begun to reorient themselves on
the moral values plane. Hillary Clinton has declared that abortion is “tragic,”
and revived the “safe, legal, and rare” formulation employed by her husband in
1992. It had been at Bill Clinton’s nominating Convention that year, in
If the introduction of Holy Communion into the political
arena in 2004 was, for many American Catholics, a divisive and regrettable turn,
it was no less regrettable for Chaput according to Chaput who criticized the
press for a shallow understanding of the Eucharist and its centrality to the
Catholic faith. But Chaput, like Ratzinger, also believed that such controversy
might ultimately prove salutary. “Whenever the Church is criticized, she
understands herself better and is purified,” he wrote last spring. “And when
she’s purified, then she better serves the Lord. We’re at a time for the Church
in our country when some Catholics too many are discovering that they’ve
gradually become non Catholics who happen to go to