Der Spiegel interviewed Hans Küng, who continued his criticism of the way the Church is being governed and what he thinks is the resulting decline of the Church in Germany.. He thinks it is being recentralized in the Curia at the expense of the bishops, but Der Spiegel pointed out
You don’t just want to reduce the power of the pope. You are also calling for an end to celibacy, you want women to be ordained as priests and you want the Church to lift its ban on birth control. Catholics loyal to the pope say that these elements are part of the core values of the Catholic Church. If you peel all of this away, how much of the Church is left?
Whatever the merits of these proposals, clearly adopting them would not stem the decline of the Church in developed countries. The Evangelical Church, the Anglican Church, and the Episcopal Church have all these and are in massive decline. Moreover, adopting them would alienate Catholics who have tried to remain faithful to Church teaching.
King looks like he is mired in the past and is fighting the battles of his youth, a common failing as people age. My late father-in-law could never be convinced that Communism had indeed fallen in eastern Europe.
The same criticism could be made of Benedict, with his focus on Nazism and Communism. However, it would be unseemly to say the least, of a German pope to ignore the phenomnenon of Nazism. Benedict, unlike Küng, shows that he is aware of changes in the world situation. He pointed out to the Lutherans that the traditional churches were faced with erosion of two fronts: on one hand, to secularization which disregards all religion, and on the other hand to charismatic movements which are weak on institutions and rational inquiry.
The pope said this common witness of the Gospel has been made more difficult by the rise of fundamentalist Christian groups that are spreading with “overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways,” leaving mainstream Christian denominations at a loss.
“This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and little stability. This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: What is this new form of Christianity saying to us — for better and for worse?” he said.
Kung and most progressives ignore this religious phenomenon: it does not fit in with their ideas that the Church must be adopted to the modern world, the modern world consisting almost exclusively of academic central European types.
Kung and most progressives ignore this religious phenomenon: it does not fit in with their ideas that the Church must be adopted to the modern world, the modern world consisting almost exclusively of academic central European types.
Bravo, Leon! I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
This is the fundamental problem with the liberals’ reaction to the clerical sex-abuse crisis. They fail to realize that none of their proposed solutions addresses the fundamental problem: the failure to vett or perform due dilligance on candidates for the priesthood effectively and properly.
“This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and little stability. This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: What is this new form of Christianity saying to us — for better and for worse?” he said.
It says that the institutionalized church has failed to preach Christ and the Gospel in a manner that makes an impact in people’s lives, and that the institutionalized church has stifled (if not ignored outright) the Holy Spirit’s work. That work is less about charismatic melodrama than about personal sanctification and accompanying the believer as an “advocate” and “comforter.” Do those terms sound familiar?
Catholicism has overdosed on arcane theology, intellectual vanity, secular prestige and collective control for so long that it has lost contact with the average layman. Rituals and traditionalist atmospherics — in, of and by themselves — will not reverse the trend because the Church has forgotten what the Gospel means.
If you want an example of what I’m talking about, just investigate the phenomena of Muslims converting to Christianity based on personal visions of Jesus. If true, those visions indict an institutionalized church that has become so focused on ecumenism, it has lost any appreciation for who Jesus really is and what His death and resurrection really mean.
Or, as Jesus Himself put it…
“When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the Earth?”
The implications of that hypothetical should make any Christian soil his underwear.
A good friend of mine who teaches theology at one of the more orthodox Catholic institutions here attended a conference in the US where many bishops were in attendance. She publically asked why the Church continues to churn out documents that only peopel with post graduate degrees can understand. She wondered whether at least some documents could be written with the average man and woman in mind. No one answered the question and John Allen in his report on the conference made no mention of it. Joseph wrote that the institutional church has failed to preach the gospel in a way that impacts ordinary peoples’ lives. I fear he’s right in far too many cases.
“… the institutionalized church has failed to preach Christ and the Gospel in a manner that makes an impact in people’s lives….”
Exactly.
The Catholic Church has to stop criticizing and being threatened by Evangelicals and has to start learning from them.
I rather think the pope is attempting to deflect not only the dissidents but also the pedophile, vocations, and cover-up crises with this tack. In other words, he is saying that even if all of these things are addressed according to dissident theologians and priests, we would still be in the same crisis of culture.
What he and other pundits are ignoring is that the real crisis is, in fact, that of leadership. Churches of enthusiasm are drastically gaining in numbers and not because they are fundamentalist, have strong leaders or are weak on reason.
Both Catholic and mainline Protestant pastoral identity models suffer from the same rejection of charism-centered leadership over charisma-bound ideology.
Leaders of the growing Spirit-centered churches allow the Spirit to annoint lay people with gifts they are allowed to use to the fullest. Miracles, conversions, healings, deliverances abound. Community is the result.
Benedict calls for a return to the small community model such as the one JohnPaul put in place in the form of Renew. I belonged to one such group that is still strong today after almost 30 years. Members are all over the age of 70.
What has happened is that hyper-orthodox priests entering parishes are dismantling these kinds of organisms right and left: removing parish councils, for example.
I do not see how the model that current Vatican documents posted on ZENIT propose currently for pastoral identity (spearheaded in large part by the Legionnaries institute for priestly formation in Rome) will allow for the communities Benedict now hails. There is a major cognitive dissonance. Secularization did not cause the crises in the Church. leadership has failed catastrophically to bring the apostolic Gospel to life for 500 years except in the form of the occasional saint – thus leading to the triumph of rationalism.
Since John Wesley the Spirit has finally started to break out of the chains we have Him in under the pews and is moving where He will.
Benedict sees these movements as a threat. We should rather be on our knees begging them to teach us where we have strayed.
Father Michael, that’s not just a Catholic problem. Mainline Protestantism lost its spiritual credibility a long time ago when it decided to embrace intellectual and political fashion. The Russian Orthodox Church did the same when it sold out to the idea of Moscow being the “Third Rome” that will never fall.
There’s a serious reason why evangelicals and charismatics are growing, especially in the Third World. People in those regions don’t have the quasi-political and quasi-intellectual baggage that institutionalized Christianity in the West has (though they certainly have their own problems).
I was part of a strong and solid charismatic community fo years. It changed my life and what I gained there has remained with me. It all made me a better catholic, though it also opened my eyes to what certainly seemed the working of the Holy Spirit among people of all Christian backgrounds.
The Catholic Church has to stop criticizing and being threatened by Evangelicals and has to start learning from them.
The problem, Croyhill, is that the Church believes it has it all and knows it all. I can’t tell you how many Catholics I’ve run into who told me, “We have the Eucharist!” (as if that alone will solve all problems) or who think the Church is “all that” because of its intellectual depth or artistic splendor, or have even used the term “protestant” as an epithet, deliberately putting the “p” in lower case as a sign of contempt.
I mean, if you believe that you’re in the “One True Church” that maintains the “fullness of the Gospel,” then who can tell you anything…unless, that “who” is Muslim, of course?
This is why the Barque of Peter is running aground: institutional arrogance that has clouded its moral (let alone theological) compass.
Here’s an interesting quote from Lord Acton, the British Catholic who covered Vatican I:
“Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.”
The more times change….
The future of Catholicism is Latin America, Africa and Asia.
People like Kung r the past, he represent what’s wrong with the church.
If you want another possible explanation for what’s happening with charismatic movements and churches, read Joel 2: 28-32.
Pope Benedict grew up during the growth of Nazism in Germany. Has he written any memoir of those days detailing the interaction of Christian culture, Churches and the deterioration of the State? Such a memoir would greatly aid church historians, and I would like to know what he thinks about that very turbulent time.
Why did so many church leaders be they Catholic, Protestant or Reformed support the Third Reich? Can it be said that such support was the beginning of the deterioration of church life in Europe?