The Pope’s anti-liberal
revolution has begun Piers Paul Read says that Benedict XVI’s new statement on the Eucharist shows how conservative the Pope truly is and how irreconcilable he is to Anglicanism The election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005 caused dismay among liberal Catholics throughout the world. As Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger had enforced a conservative line on almost every issue — the ordination of women, intercommunion, birth control, gay sex, Liberation Theology. He was a scourge of moral relativism and seemed sceptical about uniting the Catholic and Protestant churches, describing the Church of England as not a Church ‘in the proper sense’.
As time passed, however, these bien-pensant, Tablet-reading Catholics warmed to the new Pope. The stern, moralising Prefect seemed to have been transformed by his elevation into an amiable, non-judgmental pontiff who liked cats and played the piano. There were some changes in the Curia but none suggested a new hard line.
Pope Benedict’s first Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), seemed to confirm this metamorphosis. Here at last was a Pope who gave erotic love its due. ‘Love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined ... would seem to be the very epitome of love.’ Some commentators glossed over the Pope’s use of the word ‘seem’ and his reference to ‘a man and a woman’: an articulate priest in a west London parish told his congregation that the Encyclical could be said to establish a theological framework for civil partnerships.
Now it was the turn of traditional Catholics to be dismayed. Had Pope Benedict forgotten what he had said in his address at the funeral of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, about the danger posed by moral relativism? Surely a Pope of his age, whose reign could not be long, should act with more urgency? Was their Rottweiler now an old spaniel, happy to doze in front of the fire?
Or was Pope Benedict biding his time? Last week he published an Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis — The Sacrament of Love. In part it is a summary of the conclusions of the Synod of Catholic Bishops held in Rome in October 2005 — the start of the liturgical Year of the Eucharist promulgated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — and as such carries the authority of the whole Church. But it is also a theological tour de force showing the clarity and cogency that are particular to the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.
Sacramentum Caritatis opens with a lucid exposition of the Catholic belief on the Eucharist. The priest’s words of consecration during the Mass turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — a transformation Pope Benedict describes as ‘a sort of “nuclear fission” which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world’.
This belief, with its connotations of cannibalism and human sacrifice, has always been hard to take. Even in Christ’s lifetime, many of his disciples, according to Saint John, regarded the idea as ‘intolerable ... and stopped going with him’. It was a defining bone of contention between Catholics at the time of the Reformation. Luther downgraded the change from transubstantiation (the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ) to consubstantiation (bread and wine remain bread and wine but co-exist with the flesh and blood of Christ), and Calvin disbelieved it altogether.
Thus the first of the threefold challenges posed by the Eucharist, Pope Benedict writes, is belief in this mystery of faith. The second is to celebrate the sacrament with the dignity and beauty it merits: ‘everything related to the Eucharist should be marked by beauty’. And finally, the Eucharist must be an inspiration to those who partake in it to a commitment to the betterment of mankind.
On the face of it, these would seem to be things upon which all Catholics would agree. However, in his exhortation Pope Benedict rejects most of the items on the liberals’ wishlist. Conjugal acts must be open to the transmission of human life; marriage and the family must be defended ‘from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature’ (i.e. civil partnerships). Non-Catholics may not partake of the Eucharist; nor divorced and remarried Catholics unless they promise to live together as brother and sister. He calls for the Mass to be said in Latin at all international celebrations, forbids banal ditties and recommends Gregorian chant. If, as expected, Pope Benedict is to allow the saying of the Mass in the Tridentine rite, one can envisage a revival of a liturgy not seen since Vatican II.
This revival of Latin and the return of the Tridentine rite, together with unambiguous restatement of traditional Catholic teaching on contentious issues, will no doubt dismay not just liberal Catholics but many of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales: certainly the muted response by the Bishops’ Conference to the Sacramentum Caritatis has caused indignation in some Catholic circles. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has devoted his life to the reunification of the Church of England and the Church of Rome; yet in this document Pope Benedict talks of transubstantiation and indulgences — both anathema to the Protestant Reformers. Priestly ordination is necessary for the celebration of the Eucharist but Anglican orders remain invalid: therefore, by implication, the Anglican Eucharist is no more than a facsim-ile of the real thing.
The Orthodox Churches are a different matter. ‘The Eucharist,’ the Pope writes, ‘objectively creates a powerful bond of unity between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, which have preserved the authentic and integral nature of the eucharistic mystery.’ There is a sense in which Sacramentum Caritatis can be read as an apology to the Orthodox for the liturgical excesses that followed Vatican II, and a promise that they will not recur.
Two further straws in the wind. At the retreat preached before the Pope and top Vatican officials shortly before the publication of Sacramentum Caritatis, Cardinal Biffi, the former Archbishop of Bologna, repeated the apocalyptic prophecies of the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev at the end of the 19th century. When the Antichrist appears, he warned, it would be as a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist promoting the shared ethical values of all the world’s religions at the expense of the person and sacrifice of Christ.
Also last week, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now headed by the former archbishop of San Francisco Cardinal Levada censured two books by the popular and charismatic Liberation Theologian Jon Sobrino — not for what they said about Liberation Theology but for suggesting that neither the Evangelists nor Christ himself believed in Christ’s divinity; and that his death on the Cross should be seen as a moral example rather than a sacrifice for the salvation of mankind.
None of this amounts to a repudiation of Vatican II: there are many laudatory references to it in Sacramentum Caritatis. But it is clear that Pope Benedict XVI will be even more insistent than his predecessor Pope John Paul II on a conservative interpretation of its decrees. It will not lead to a return to the status quo ante, but clearly the Church of the future will be more like the Church of the past than many had feared.
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