Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI recently likened the Catholic Church to a capsizing ship.
Benedict's use of the phrase came in an elegant tribute to Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Germany, who died recently. In it, Benedict praised Meisner's faith and "conviction, that the Lord does not abandon his church, even when sometimes the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing."
Conservatives in Catholic cyberspace jumped all over that phrase, seeing it as Benedict's coded critique of Pope Francis. After all, Meisner and others had cast doubts on the theological soundness of Pope Francis' recent apostolic exhortation, "Amoris Laetitia," especially its call for more robust engagement with divorced and remarried Catholics. Benedict must be agreeing! Francis is the misguided captain who is capsizing the ship!
Well, Benedict's closest confidant, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, immediately debunked that sinister interpretation as a "fantasy" being peddled by "stupid people." He should know what Benedict intended: Benedict had entrusted the letter to him.
But if the faux controversy arises from nonsense, it nonetheless illustrates a real problem that is hobbling the Catholic Church.
Yes, the Catholic ship is taking on water, as Benedict put it. Our challenges include declining participation in the sacraments, meager engagement with young adults, clergy shortages in the developed world, and trouble conveying our message convincingly to a secular, relativistic modern world.
Gänswein recently cited Benedict as being worried that "the substance of the faith is about to crumble, above all in his homeland." And Pope John Paul II, decades ago, proclaimed the "urgency" of finding new ways to reach out to the modern world.
Well, every modern institution faces crises in this complex, chaotic century. What differentiates great organizations is whether and how they react, specifically their ability to galvanize a robust, united response to their challenges. Faced with urgent crises, healthy organizations rally together to save the institution they love. Unhealthy organizations play the blame game.
I lived through all that as a longtime managing director in a global investment bank that was regularly racked by tumultuous change. Crises often erupted, and our first impulse was to pillory scapegoats and attack rivals.
But, in time, we invariably realized that our circular firing squad was solving nothing and weakening our collective ability to respond. Meanwhile, our collective house was catching on fire (or, to use Benedict's image, our ship was taking on water).
Rallying together to fortify our ship became more important than tarring internal rivals. Urgency was key, as were creative solutions to new kinds of problems.
We understood that we would have to enlist colleagues further down the ranks, apprise them frankly of our challenges and quash their own blame-game tendencies: Part of any leader's job is to lift subordinates above internecine disputes by articulating some compelling strategy that all can embrace and feel part of.
Unfortunately, that isn't happening in the Catholic Church. The recent Benedict contretemps is not an exception but part of a long-standing, destructive pattern.
Indeed, Catholics have by now settled into their own little progressive and conservative tribes, each with their own favorite bishops, websites, religious orders, periodicals and litmus test issues.
It feels great to be able to scratch one's ideological itch, but that hasn't solved any of the church challenges enumerated above. Rather, those problems have continued to fester, now for decades. It's time for us to wake up, and grow up, and to begin revitalizing the church we love.
To be able to float the sinking Catholic Church under Bergoglio and "revitalize" it is probably more a pipe dream than a reality. There may be those who believe (in Emeritus Pope Benedict's words above) "'that the Lord does not abandon his church, even when sometimes the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing,'" but the question is whether today's Catholic Church is the one Christ had established, or whether it is so "satanized" that it is no longer recognizable as His church.
Benedict XVI was right that the Church that Christ had built, by His suffering, death and resurrection, is not the Church that He will abandon, but in this blogger's opinion, the one now operating under Christ and Catholicism in name only is better sunk and eliminated from existence than have it continue to sail through time to Hell, based on a (forced) parallel drawn using these words of Christ: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea" [2], and these: "If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into eternal fire." [3]
In his analysis, Benedict XVI seemed to have been blinded by his loyalty to the Catholic Church when his loyalty ought to be to God by seemingly putting the blame on relativism and secularism in the modern world when it is the failure of those in the Catholic Church who had taught Catholics and non-Catholics alike that sin is relative, in that pedophiles had been sheltered even though they had sinned and while they had continued to sin gravely without remorse, acting as if they were relativists, secularists or atheists by not obeying Christ to love charitably, but instead had abused sexually to the extent that Cardinal Pell who was charged with sexual abuse planned to plead not guilty, as reported by Vatican Radio in an article dated July 26, 2017, entitled Cardinal Pell to plead ‘not guilty’ in abuse case [4]:
Cardinal George Pell made a brief appearance at an Australian court on Wednesday in a preliminary hearing regarding the accusation of “historical sexual offences”.
His lawyer said he would plead “not guilty” to the charges leveled against him by police in the state of Victoria.
To think that today's Catholic Church on terra firma could recover from this sorry state of sin (pedophilia is only one of its many sins) is to think naïvely. However, the real Catholic Church built by Christ that is in the heart of the individual that is in alignment (as much as possible for sinners) with the Heart of Christ is very much afloat in spirit and is sailing ever so gradually, although not necessarily smoothly, toward Heaven.
[1] http://www.sltrib.com/home/5554386-155/commentary-is-the-catholic-church-a
[2] http://www.usccb.org/bible/matthew/18 at 6, quoted without footnotes.
[3] http://www.usccb.org/bible/matthew/18 at 8, quoted without footnotes.
[4] http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/07/26/cardinal_pell_to_plead_%E2%80%98not_guilty%E2%80%99_in_abuse_case/1327214
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