Roman Catholicism at a Crossroads

▪ 2006

by R. Scott Appleby

      The death on April 2, 2005, of Pope John Paul II (John Paul II ) (see Obituaries) put an end to the third longest pontificate in two millennia of Roman Catholic history. The Polish pontiff left to his German successor, Pope Benedict XVI (Benedict XVI, Pope ) (see Biographies), a global church whose demographic, spiritual, and theological centres had shifted dramatically during the 26 years of John Paul's papacy.

      Demographically, Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are now the areas of dramatic growth and vitality. Catholic practice and affiliation, however, have waned considerably in Europe, especially in the historic Catholic communities of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Austria. The largest Catholic populations in the world reside in Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, and the United States; the total number of Catholics worldwide is estimated to be approximately 1.2 billion.

      While the seeming loss of Europe is much bemoaned (and a particular concern of Pope Benedict XVI, who has pledged to reverse the tide of secularism and Islamism now shaping the continent), even the good news of growth elsewhere comes at a cost. The increasing number of lay Catholics needing pastoral care poses a profound institutional challenge because it has been accompanied by a startling decline in the percentage of priests and religious.

      For hundreds of years prior to the 1960s, numerous and well-enrolled religious orders of priests, brothers, and nuns served with little or no material reward (most took vows of poverty and lived celibate lives under the direction of a religious superior) while building and staffing Catholic parishes, schools, colleges, seminaries, hospitals, and orphanages. As their numbers have dwindled (along with the numbers of diocesan or “secular” priests, those who work under the direct authority of the local bishop), concerns have arisen about the ability of the church to provide even the sacraments to all the faithful—not to mention Catholic education, catechesis, and health care. The sacramental crisis revolves around the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, the bread and wine that, Catholics believe, is transformed at mass into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The mass is the foundation of Catholic worship, but increasing numbers of Catholics worldwide are being denied access to the Eucharist on a weekly basis owing to the shortage of priests, who alone can consecrate the bread and wine.

      In the U.S., for example, the “full pews, empty altars” phenomenon is reaching crisis proportions. One-fourth to one-third of the country's 19,000 parishes no longer have a priest in residence. In 1960 approximately 55,000 priests and 160,000 women religious (i.e., “ nuns” or “sisters”) served 40 million American Catholics. Today the number of Catholics has grown to 65 million, while the number of priests (average age: 60) has fallen to 35,000, and the number of women religious (average age: 70) has been cut in half, to approximately 80,000. Catholic colleges and universities, feeling the absence of the clergy who once taught in the classroom and served as chaplains, struggle with their religious identity, as do Catholic hospitals now led by Catholic laity or by health care professionals with little or no personal connection to Roman Catholicism.

      Pope John Paul II will go down in history as one of the church's greatest evangelists, teachers, and world leaders. He preached the gospel to more people and in more nations than all of his 262 predecessors combined; he authored almost 60 encyclicals and apostolic letters as well as several best-selling books; and he will be remembered for proclaiming religious freedom around the world and for his role in inspiring the Solidarity labour movement in his native Poland, which eventually brought down the communist regime. He will not be lauded universally, however, for his governance of the church itself.

      Rather than support and expand lay ministries in their own right, as authentic and permanent forms of ministry in the church, John Paul curtailed them and insisted on an exclusive policy of attempting to foster more priestly vocations. This policy has enjoyed only modest success. A new clericalism (emphasis on clergy as the sole spiritual religious leaders, with laity in a passive or merely “temporal” role) was the dubious result. Rather than empower his fellow bishops, in line with the Second Vatican Council's affirmation of collegiality (shared authority among the bishops), he treated them as his subordinates and stifled innovation and creativity that might have led to needed reforms. Rather than appoint women to positions of real authority within the church bureaucracy, John Paul emphasized and reinforced their exclusion from the priesthood.

      Pope John Paul II also moved to shore up traditional Catholic teaching after a period of experimentation and theological pluralism that followed Vatican II. During his reign prominent departures from the ethical positions and theological approach favoured by the pope were seen as “dissent” and silenced.

      The doctrinal enforcer assigned the task of overseeing and sometimes rejecting the work of fellow Catholic theologians was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, a brilliant German theologian whom John Paul appointed in 1981 as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Ratzinger quickly established a formidable reputation as a doctrinally conservative, unbending “inquisitor” who brooked no dissent and seemed, with John Paul, to steer the church away from some of the more progressive implications of Vatican II. Ratzinger, for example, presided over the weakening of national episcopal conferences, the elimination of gender-inclusive language in Catholic liturgy and in the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the attempted termination of theological discussion on controversial issues such as the ordination of women.

      When Ratzinger was elected to succeed Pope John Paul II after the latter's death, however, he took the name Benedict XVI in an effort to convey his intention, he explained, to emulate the role of peacemaker in the world and reconciler in the church that Pope Benedict XV had embraced before and during World War I. As was his predecessor, Benedict XVI is a virulent opponent of war; he has been a strong critic of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and of the doctrine of preemptive war that was developed to justify the invasion and other aspects of the administration of George W. Bush's “global war on terrorism.”

      Within the church Benedict XVI was expected to focus much more energy than his predecessor had on its internal life and administration. Whereas John Paul was a natural performer who loved the stage and skillfully exploited the world spotlight, Benedict is retiring and professorial. He eschews the cult of personality that seemed the birthright of John Paul II. Rather than crisscross the globe as a cultural superstar-evangelist, Pope Benedict XVI is more likely to focus on fortifying the morale of the clergy and restoring the proper authority of the college of bishops. Indeed, the relatively open and deliberative procedures of the International Synod of Bishops held in Rome in October 2005 (and devoted to the question of the Eucharist) raised hopes that Benedict would restore a measure of collegiality to the church.

      Benedict is unlikely to depart, however, from his predecessor's policies forbidding birth control, a married clergy, or women priests. Yet it is far from certain that these policies, which both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI consider to have deep foundations in Christ's original example and teaching, will serve the goal of solving the “full pews, empty altars” crisis afflicting not only the American church but, increasingly, the church universal.

      The scandal of the sexual abuse of minors by a small but nonetheless appalling number of priests has served only to exacerbate the crisis in the priesthood. Though the United States was the epicentre of the scandal that broke in 2002, the sexual-abuse scandals had an international dimension. Sexual abuse, a crime that stretches across decades and national boundaries, has already cost the Catholic Church hundreds of millions of dollars and invaluable prestige and trust (“social capital”) built up over generations. Many American Catholics were dismayed by the Vatican's initial response to the crisis, which fell short, they believed, of fully acknowledging and addressing both the causes and the consequences of the scandal. In light of the fact that Pope John Paul placed Cardinal Ratzinger in charge of formulating that response, it will be important to see how Pope Benedict XVI addresses its subsequent phases.

R. Scott Appleby is a Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame; he is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation.

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