They still don't get it

It may be old news here but it isn't in continental Europe. The reports of clergy sex abuse in Catholic schools have rocked Germany and are spreading to other countries, as well. The wrinkle this time is that now the pope himself has been at least indirectly implicated in his previous capacity as archbishop.

The New York Times had a summary story on Friday. As it reports, one obvious potential casualty is Benedict's campaign to "re-Christianize" Europe. What glorious Catholic past would he have Europe to return to? Andrew Sullivan, in two posts yesterday titled "The Current Vatican's Death Throes," reports in amazement that the church hierarchy is responding with the same reflexive defensiveness seen previously in the US and Ireland.

In the second of Sullivan's posts, he prints excerpts of a reader's report of German press coverage of the unfolding story. The reader reacts with incredulity to an interview with Regensburg Bishop, Gerhard Mueller, who says:

"Leutheusser is a liar," referring to Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the Justice Minister. He goes on to says that the justice minister is part of a dark and secretive conspiracy led by Free Masons who want to bring the church down. This guy is just nuts. But how revealing of their strategy. Presented with undeniable evidence of abuse, they claim to be the victims!

The reader then quotes an editorial in the Bavarian newspaper Sueddeutsche:

The crisis of confidence affecting the church has not occurred because the church is an association of abusers. The church is in crisis precisely because, confronted with undeniable evidence of abuse, it expresses concern for itself instead of offering to help the victims of the abuse....

Repudiating Christ's call for self-denial, when under threat institutional Christianity time and again retreats behind walls of denial, blame and slander. It is unable to imagine its own welfare as not being identical with the mision of its founder. Nor can it imagine that its behavior could actually be that mission's greatest obstacle.

From the people who gave us Aquinas: Dumb-as-a-post mediocrity

Andrew Sullivan writes the blog The Daily Dish for The Atlantic magazine. Sullivan is British by birth, gay, HIV+, politically conservative, and Roman Catholic. In short, he is a very interesting person. He is also very intelligent and writes a fine blog. Sullivan is a committed Christian first and Catholic second. He is very aware of contemporary Catholicism’s shortcomings and does not hesitate to expose them.

Here he provides excerpts from a public debate in London of the question, “Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?” It opens with a mind-numbingly dull affirmation from Nigerian Archbishop John Onaiyekan. This is followed by a jolting onslaught from world-renowned journalist and atheist Christopher Hitchens. Sullivan sees this battle of unequals as a direct consequence of the Vatican’s policy of elevating obedient yes-men to leadership positions.

You can forgive the pro-Catholic side for losing the debate…. What you cannot forgive is the sheer intellectual shallowness of the defense. Just listen to the small speech above, I mean: really, this is the best we've got?

In Onaiyekan, you have a classic Benedict/JP II Archbishop: dumb as a post, sheltered from the actual debate in the West, incapable of argument, and pathetic as a spokesman. The problem with the theoconservative take-over in the Catholic priesthood is not so much its extremism as its mediocrity. And it is mediocre because it has been trained not to think, not to argue, and not to engage the modern world. It has been trained solely for obedience - blind, dumb, unquestioning, intellectually moribund obedience.

Modern Christianity? Not so bright

Andrew Sullivan interprets the ARIS results (see March 14 post) for a British audience in an article in the Sunday Times of London. He corrects the common European stereotype of US religiosity: Yes, Americans are more religious than Europeans but the US is certainly not immune from the forces that have been devestating religious involvement in other Western countries. In offering one explanation for the decline of American Christianity he notes its increasing shallowness.

The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming. As one evangelical noted in The Christian Science Monitor last week, “being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence”.

Sullivan hopes for a new Christian "middle way" that recognizes both Christianity's historical limitations and the new challenges of the modern and post-modern world. He gives no indication he expects such a development or has any idea how it might come about.

What one yearns for is a resuscitation of a via media in American religious life – the role that the established Protestant churches once played. Or at least an understanding that religion must absorb and explain the new facts of modernity: the deepening of the Darwinian consensus in the sciences, the irrefutable scriptural scholarship that makes biblical literalism intellectually contemptible, the shifting shape of family life, the new reality of openly gay people, the fact of gender equality in the secular world. It seems to me that American Christianity, despite so many resources, has ignored its intellectual responsibility. And atheists, if this continues much longer, will continue to pick up that slack.