‘Gestapo’ is the short form of Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police. The Roman Catholic Church has such an organisation, whose depredations upon members of the church is only revealed when someone balks at the high-handed way in which it seeks to put a lid on controversy or even thoughtful questions put by its front line clergy. When the Roman Catholic Church wants to cover something up, like the widespread sexual and physical abuse of children, they sweep it under the door of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, usually called CDF, for short, and the CDF tentacles reach into every aspect of the church’s life around the world, silencing priests, hiding the bad apples in the priesthood from the police, even transferring them to other parishes so that they get to abuse a new crop unsuspecting children. And people whose children may be at risk, as Frank Bruni points out in his column, “Catholicism’s Curse,” in the New York Times, have no say as to who is appointed to their parish. Bishops move priests around at will, and parishes take what they are given, even priests who are likely to prey on their children.
Not surprisingly, the present pope, Ratzinger, who was the former head of the CDF for many years under the pontificate of Karol Józef Wojtyła, finds the CDF, the church’s Geheime Welt Polizei, a useful agent to do his dirty work, challenging nuns (a favourite, according to Bruni), and recusant priests, reaching out with hierarchical veto wherever individualism or thoughtfulness rear their ugly heads. As Bruni points out, the issues at stake are often simply organisational aspects of the church, like the male priesthood or celibacy, which have no particular doctrinal significance, and are merely human accommodations, but the questioning of which the church, with “imperious regularity,” as Bruni says, challenges and condemns, mainly because the church is the one European feudal monarchy left in existence, centuries after feudalism became a dead letter in European society, and popes, sequestered in their fake state, clearly enjoy wielding absolute power bequeathed to it from those ancient absolutisms. And here we are, several centuries later, and the church is still acting with high-handed disregard for human dignity (of which it has made such a fetish in other situations), condemning nuns because they do not spend enough time condemning abortion, and do good works instead, disciplining priests who raise questions about aspects of church order, and yet welcoming into its fold anti-Semitic bishops whose minds are on the same reactionary wavelength as the pope and his curia, which he has stacked with extreme conservatives who will bow to his every whim.
There is a priest in Ireland who has been a thorn in Ratzinger’s flesh for some time now. He has now, after years of raising questions in books and articles read by Catholics who want to see change in the church, been placed under threat of excommunication, for he cannot in conscience simply recant and claim to uphold teachings that he cannot support. Fr. Tony Flannery joined the Redemptorists in 1964, when he was 17. He is the founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, whose meetings he has been forbidden to attend. Although forbidden to have any contact with the press, or to write books or articles, he held a press conference at which he spoke of the threat of excommunication under which he now stands. But the church’s Gestapo will not parlay with him. They want his submission and obedience only, failing which he will face excommunication for his stated views, and his refusal to renounce them. The Gestapo (CDF) has refused to meet with him, though officials of the Redemptorist Order have made it clear to him that the demands are coming straight from this secret organisation. According to the Galway Advertiser:
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is a group of cardinals, monsignors, archbishops, and bishops charged with safeguarding and upholding Catholic doctrine. Fr Flannery said the CDF had not contacted him directly and had refused to engage with him, but he had been made aware that the orders were coming from it.
Like secret police everywhere, they do their work in the background, without fanfare, and they work best if they are unresponsive and threatening. Once they consent to consultation and parlay, their effectiveness of the threat is lost.
As Fr Flannery has said (again, according to the Advertiser):
I could not possibly put my name to such an article without impugning my own integrity and conscience. … The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is orchestrating all this while refusing to communicate with me. I have had no direct communication with them. I have never been given an opportunity to meet my accusers, or to understand why this action is being taken against me when I’ve raised the same issues, consistently, for decades.
He has been asked to write an article, approved by the CDF,
accepting that the Catholic Church can never ordain women to the priesthood, and accepting the Church’s stance on contraception, homosexuality, and the refusal of the sacraments to people in second relationships.
This he cannot in conscience do. Now, notice, those who have suggested that I do not understand the doctrine of infallibility, that, while no pope has actually made an ex cathedra declaration on any of these matters, popes have certainly spoken out concerning them, and they are simply assumed by the CDF to be the unchangeable teaching of the church and parts of its ordinary magisterium. This is the other way in which secret police work. The law is always uncertain enough that unsuspecting persons can be caught in its web. The church makes a great show of its faith and order being subject to reason, and yet, when push comes to shove, it is heavy-handed authority that wins out in the end, not reason.
Flannery says that the CDF’s approach to him is “frightening, disproportionate and reminiscent of the Inquisition.” Well, of course, because it is, after all, the Inquisition. A rose by any other name, and all that. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith used to be called the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Luckily for Fr Flannery, there is nowhere in the world where he is likely to be burned at the stake for recusancy, but for a 66 year old man, who has served his church for nearly fifty years, the threat of excommunication is not a minor threat. According to Fr Flannery, he has been writing thoughtful articles and books for decades without being hindered by the hierarchy, but now that Ratzinger is in control, he is being assailed
by a secretive body that refuses to meet me. Surely I should at least be allowed to explain my views to my accusers. (NYT, “Priest is Planning to Defy Vatican Orders to Stay Quiet“)
The church’s Gestapo, in other words. It is pointless to call it anything else. It has absolute authority. It will not meet with the accused. All it wants is unquestioning obedience, thoughtless compliance to the dictates of der Führer, or banishment (which is the worst they can do). The curse of Catholicism indeed.
But, as Frank Bruni says, it is a curse, because it gives people a puffed up sense of their own importance, the kind of inflated opinion that encourages the kind of cover-up that has been so common throughout the church worldwide in dealing with the sexual abuse scandals. The priesthood is given a larger than life significance in the life of the people, simply by surrounding those who occupy the office with an aura of otherworldly holiness, an aura that abusers take full advantage of in their depredations on little children. It speaks of celibacy — because celibacy, it seems, is holier than matrimony – and then turns a blind eye to offences against the vows that have been made, somehow assuming that breaking the vows with little children is at least better than a committed adult relationship, openly celebrated.
Flannery takes the position that the priesthood was a later development in the church — which it certainly was — and that Jesus never appointed apostles, which would certainly pull the rug out from under the pope and the claims made for the papacy, which was also a much later development in the church, and was based, from the beginning, largely on the False Decretals. Of course, the Catholic Encyclopedia claims that the forger of these papers, Pseudo-Isidore, perhaps, one at least claiming to have come down from the first ecumenical council at Nicaea, quote from earlier popes, which they doubtless do. But to base the universal ordinary jurisdiction of the pope on false papers, no matter how much was copied from earlier popes, and not to acknowledge the fraud up front, takes a considerable amount of aplomb. But if the priesthood was a later development in the church, and if, as Garry Wills says (according to Bruni),
that at the start, Christianity not only didn’t have priests but opposed them. The priesthood was a subsequent tweak, and the same goes for the all-male, celibate nature of the Roman Catholic clergy and the autocratic hierarchy that this clergy inhabits, an unresponsive government whose subjects — the laity — have limited say,
then a major shake-up is in order. (Regarding the celibate priesthood, it is perhaps relevant to remark that when the changeover from married clergy to celibate clergy was being made, priest’s wives were often claimed as the property of the church and were sold as slaves.) The Vatican cannot continue forever to base itself on threats and privileges which have nothing to do with the original order of the church. There are so many problems with the claim, still repeated, that the apostle Peter was the first bishop of Rome, and that the meaning of Jesus’ reported words, that Peter is the rock upon which his church will be built, are to be interpreted as giving that status (whatever was originally meant by them, whoever said them) to his successors to the see (which he only very doubtfully occupied), that it really is time for the church to stop pretending to an authority that it has arrogated to itself all these centuries. (Bruni says “abrogated,” but this is surely a misprint!) That the Roman church is still playing the game of imperial one-up-man-ship which was common in the first few centuries of the church, as different imperial cities vied for the place of primacy in the Roman Empire, is a sign that something is very wrong with the church.
But what is most wrong, it seems to me, is that people still quote the sayings of the occupant of “St Peter’s Throne” (or cathedra), as though they have universal significance in a world which has simply passed them by. Why the attention given to popes? When was the last time the pope did or said a thing that was truly useful? During the Second World War Pope Pacelli (aka Pius XII) had every opportunity to do a good thing. The bishops of the church in Germany objected to the T4 “euthanasia” programme, and intervened, effectively, in the case of Jews married to supposed “Aryans,” but they did not a thing, nor did Pacelli encourage them, to mitigate the terrible crimes that were being committed in the East. In an address, Pacelli made a glancing reference to those who were victimised because of their race, but he never appealed to Catholics in Germany to refuse to take part in the Nazi extermination programme, and, in fact, a large number of SS members at the concentration camps were communicating members of the Catholic Church. That was the last time a pope has had a chance to do something truly worthwhile, and did nothing, and yet we hear about the pope’s prayers for the people or Iraq, but nothing at all about the oppression of women and homosexuals carried out in the name of the church. This is truly appalling. And when a priest comes along to awaken the church to its moral duty, the church refuses to speak with the man, and merely threatens him with excommunication if he does not submit without question to its demands. As Hilary Mantel says, this is not a church for respectable people.
But,but, Eric! “Gott Mitt Uns”
I know he can’t wear the belt buckle anymore so I guess he has it embroidered on his underwear somewhere.
Why can’t he just leave the church and then continue to write, I think that would be a much more solution for him? What do you think Eric?
Why can’t he leave the church? The usual answer is that thoughtful Catholics consider Ratzinger et al to be usurpers and shouldn’t be allowed to force true Catholics out.
I’m tired of that excuse. The RCC behaved badly before Ratzinger abd will behave badly after Ratzinger. Please explain how someone can be “thoughtful” and a “true Catholic.” One cancels the other.
Pingback: Thoughtful True Catholic
It seems to me to be an entirely logical action by the CDF. Once the ‘direct link’ back to Jesus is broken the Roman Catholic Church has no claim to supreme spiritual authority – something they fought hard for in the past. Views on homosexuality, abortion, divorce, contraception are just camouflage for the desire to hang on to ‘authority’.
Whether the RCC wants to hang onto authority for the sake of guiding its flock or for the sake of its business interests is a matter of opinion. What would Jesus do?
“Why can’t he just leave the church and then continue to write, I think that would be a much more solution for him? What do you think Eric?”
How will he live? He is 66 and will lose any retirement benefits he might have earned. I am sure he could do, but it would be a big step with much insecurity.
Veronica,
Everyone who calls themselves catholic considers themselves true catholic. For those of us with the misfortune of having been born into a catholic family there are only three choices, 1) accept the manifest evil of the church establishment by convincing yourself that it’s mysteriously not evil, 2) consider yourself and your benign attitudes as truly representative of the church (a position which, I think Father Flannery has taken) so that you consider Ratzinger a usurper, or 3) realize that the whole edifice is rotten and get out before it falls on you while trying not to lose family and friends who won’t abandon something important that they, and not Ratzinger, own.
I should have added, we in the west especially have become infected with the modern idea of democracy so that we consider ‘We The People’ as representing the community and so not defer to authority. As Eric has pointed out, those who still believe in authority have missed the boat but still want to be captain.
Well, Makagutu, I agree that is sounds a perfectly reasonable thing to do, especially since Flannery considers priesthood a misrepresentation of the founder’s intentions. Of course, the church itself seems pretty distant from his intentions. There is no evidence that Jesus (assuming the gospels have some historical grounding) intended to found a movement. Indeed, it looks as though he expected to come back within the lifetime of at least some of those then living.
I guess the main problem is that Fr. Flannery seems a perfectly decent man who thinks the church has made a wrong turning. He has many predecessors, of course, but his faith could very well be genuine, and excommunication would be, for him, even if his sense of his priestly vocation is one that he thinks should be shared more widely by Christians, like being executed, as Veronica suggests in her post over at the Canadian Atheist. Faith has a way of getting its hooks into you, and if you haven’t wiggled off the hook in your youth, especially if you have followed a supposed call to vocation into the church, being cut off from the fellowship can be quite destructive of one’s sense of integrity and purpose. So, from that point of view, it’s probably not an option that Flannery could consider. Yet he seems, nonetheless, to be faced with a choice between integrity and compromise.
I can’t believe that the Irish church could get away with excommunicating Fr. Flannery without providing him with a reasonable pension, though his retirement would probably be a very lonely one. I should think he would have a case in law regarding his right to a pension.
The main point of Frank Bruni’s piece is that the medieval hierarchical structure of the church is out of sync with the contemporary world, and it causes Catholics, especially catholic leaders, to be arrogant, and so puffed up with self-importance that others don’t count. The idea that there is a priesthood instituted by Christ, and that the Roman Catholic Church has the only valid priesthood — they declared Anglican orders invalid (I’m not sure when) some time ago — so they are the only source of grace for Christians, for the Church is the only mediator between God and humankind (mankind the pope would probably say). Indeed, popes are the vicars (stand-ins) for Christi on earth. It’s no wonder they’re so full of themselves — full of something else too.
Honestly, what strikes most odd is that this churchly gestapo relies on threats of excommunication to work its way. I don’t understand why any decent person remains a member of this international criminal conspiracy anyway. It must be truly dreadful to live in fear of being freed from insanity.
I can’t find it in myself to feel much sympathy for someone who has systematically pandered to the delusions of others for fifty years, even when authority turns round and bites them. Anyone that knowingly joins an organisation whose head exercises absolute despotic power deserves everything they get.
Corio — well, I can. I can feel a great deal of sympathy for such a person, because, while it may be true that religious beliefs and accompanying experiences are delusions, they are delusions that are planted very early, and they are very difficult to throw off, especially if, like Flannery, you are encouraged, let alone allowed, to make a decision at the age of 17, to commit your life to the service of such delusions. Religion does not seem like despotic power at that age, as anyone who knows anything about religious development will recognise. It seems like perfect freedom! And that is the really sad part of this story. A young man, a youth, is encouraged to make a lifetime commitment at 17. He is raised in a religious hot house, and then, as he grows older and wiser, that commitment, to which he has bound himself already for many years, begins to look more and more like a prison house. Then he begins to rattle the cage, and suddenly the cage closes in on him.
There are all sorts of conflicting feelings and thoughts at this point. The closeness and the intimacy of the relationship to the organisation is almost inescapable. Belonging to the organisation defines the shape of one’s life. Leaving it does not seem an option, even knowing there are many defects. The best course seems to be to try to bring about institutional change, so that it resembles the thing you thought you had committed yourself to years before. That sense of youthful expansiveness can be recaptured, if only the organisation were as you saw it with youthful enthusiasm. And so you set about, as Flannery apparently has, to try to capture the essence of what you believed as a youth.
It is hard to separate yourself from that early vision, the truth that had (as you thought) set you free. So, I have a great deal of sympathy for the man. His life has been lived entirely in the shadow of the institution that (though he did not know it then) imprisoned him within the confines of a delusion. To give up on it now is to say that your life has been lived without purpose, and that is hard to do, especially if you can see how (so you think) it might be made to be purposeful and full of meaning.
Religion is a trap, and religions know a thing or two about religious development. Catch ‘em young, that’s the ticket, and they will be bound to you for life. No one should be encouraged, let alone permitted, to make such a commitment so young, but when your family, your community, the whole structure of your life, at that early age, is focused upon the ideal of holiness vested in the church and its officers, and everything and everyone you know tells you what a wonder such a commitment is — I mean, can you just imagine the joy of his family when he announced that he was going to be a priest? To have someone in the family so close to God. For centuries it has been the hope of practically every Catholic family, that one of their sons should be a priest. The aura of the priesthood, its power to bind and to loose, to perform the miracle of the Eucharist, the intimacy with God — all perhaps just seemings, but all, certainly, enormously compelling. Remember that it is this power, this aura, that has enabled priests to prey upon children. Priests are larger than life, given immense respect, and this redounds to the priest’s family, who have so carefully nurtured their son in the faith.
Oh, yes, I have a great deal of sympathy for someone caught in these snares.
That is a comment of one who knows how difficult it can be to escape. Still, difficult as it may be, we adults do ultimately need to take responsibility for ourselves and the institutions we support. It is good that organizations like The Clergy Project are taking this on, offering a path out for some of these folk who realize they are in a trap.
GBJames. No question. We must take responsibility. However, that can be very difficult to do. Facing excommunication has social, financial, even psychological implications that are very difficult to sort out, and there are the beliefs, too, that are still holding on for all they’re worth. It’s a very difficult thing for someone like Flannery, especially since, as seems to be the case, he thought that what he was thinking and writing was welcome in the church.
The problem is, of course, that it may have been welcome in the smaller circle of the church in Ireland, but the church is a worldwide institution, with instantaneous reach, now, into every religious community worldwide. A generation or two ago Catholics from Spain were very different from Catholics in the US or Guatemala or Australia. Difference in emphasis, custom, even ritual, were sometimes pronounced. Now, with the internet, the church has a route into every village, let alone every country. What Flannery wrote a decade or two ago and went unnoticed, is now accessible almost instantaneously to officials in the Vatican (hence the Welt Polizei).
And Flannery is 66 years old. He has been kept apart from his age mates for a lifetime. I expect that almost all his social relationships are internal to the institution he has served. To be excommunicated, effectively shunned by all his closest friends — and priests in the Catholic Church often have no really close friends — at his age is like being sentenced to St Helena after ruling Europe. Responsibility is one thing; social suicide is another. He’s in a terrible fix.
And, of course, what Flannery has been doing, and what got him in trouble, is taking responsibility for the institution he has supported for a lifetime. That’s the really difficult part of this, for he was taking responsibility, and probably still thinks that that is what he is doing.
It is clearly a trap. But traps are to be escaped from, even at a price. I think of Jerry DeWitt’s recent experience. He’s relatively young and has paid a dear price for his freedom from religion. And I don’t know if it is harder or easier for an older fellow… At last fall’s meeting of the FFRF, one of the speakers was a former minister (Lutheran) who waited for retirement day so that he could come out as an atheist. I’ll bet that Flannery has friends and supporters outside church, and likely some inside who would not follow the “shun” directive.
Circumstances vary in many ways from person to person and by situation, but in general it is better to encourage escape than to emphasize the strength of the trap.
Yeah… I know…. Easy for me to say since I’m not personally entrapped.
I didn’t know that – do you have a reference, please.
As a point of information, it is my understanding that in the UK (I don’t know about Eire) pension rights are technically deferred income, and therefore part of the contract of employment. They are held by the trustees on behalf of the pensioner. Usually the employer contributes, and sometimes there is a salary deduction, but in either case it is a legal entitlement.
Haggis. Re pensions, I am sure that that is the case in Ireland as well. It just cannot not be! Re the enslavement of priests’ wives, the reference is Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. I don’t have the page references, but there was more than one synod that so determined, as I recall.
Thanks, Eric. I did a bit of Googling and found this
The website is somewhat doubtful, as the person running it seems to be deeply into woo, but he has given dates and references. So, not just wives, but children as well!
Haggis, thanks. I didn’t remember the children (perhaps Ranke-Heinemann includes them as well, I don’t remember), but Ranke-Heinemann is a reputable source. She was the first woman to be given a missio canonica to teach Roman Catholic theology. She also lost the missio when she questioned the virgin birth (conception) — at least I think that was the reason. I have not checked primary sources, so can only go on what Ranke-Heinemann says, but I believe it to be reliable.
Of the 400+ now in the ClergyProject, mostly active, the number who have “come out” since joining is very small; it may be as small as two. They desperately want to, but they face enormous challenges. They may lose their livelihood, their home, their (family) health insurance, even their spouse and children (often believers, active in their church). Some have pensions, some do not. One, for example, is essentially a self-employed contractor, serving more than one congregation, with no benefits.
Indeed. And the rest of us should do what we can to help them escape. One way is for other atheists to come out whenever possible, making ourself visible, and gradually remove the fear of isolation.