This crisis is all the more thought-provoking because its origins arose during two, as some commentators say, great pontificates: John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
The pontificate of Karol Wojtyła began with hope with the Second Vatican Council (11 October 1962 — 8 December 1965), which is referred to in the Church as a ‘Copernican Revolution.’ The Church, in line with the teaching of its fathers, opened up to the world. It no longer wanted to merely condemn or instruct it, but to engage in creative dialogue.
The pontificate of a Polish Pope, the first non-Italian to come from behind the Iron Curtain, also began with hope. Pope Wojtyła, in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis (1979), written a year after assuming the See of Peter, upheld the reformist course of the Council, stating that it is not the Church that is the way of man, but man that is the way of the Church. This was a key change that placed at the centre of salvation not the Church but man, created in the image and likeness of God.
Sinking Ship
When John Paul II died in 2004, the Church was already in a state of tectonic internal upheaval. The crisis was tearing it apart from within. It was torn apart by paedophilia scandals, revealed by the media, involving clergy who — taking advantage of their position and power — sexually abused children. For a while, the Church defended itself by claiming that these were isolated incidents, that paedophilia was committed by ‘rotten fruit’. Today, we know that this is window-dressing — The Church has created ‘structures of evil’ that enable clergy to rape minors and to cover up the crimes.
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These were the circumstances in which the almost thirty-year pontificate of John Paul II. A new one was beginning — that of Wojtyla’s right hand, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who, next to the Polish Pope, played the role of an ‘armoured cardinal,’ guarding the doctrinal purity of the Church as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine and the Faith. Pope Benedict XVI knew the Church like the back of his hand, with all its ills and sins.
That is why he often used the metaphor of a ‘sinking ship’ with regard to the Church. However, while Ratzinger was intellectually correct in his diagnosis that the Church was in crisis because of its own sins and the moral decline of the clergy, he turned out to be an even worse leader of this corrupt religious organisation than Pope Wojtyla.
Under Pope Benedict, a subtle intellectual and lover of classical music, the Vatican had already become an open Augeas stable dominated by intrigue, power struggles, money and prestige. As a result, the pontificate of Benedict XVI will be remembered for two things. The first one is the unprecedented leak of secret documents from the Pope’s closest environment, showing the scale of corruption in the Vatican institutions, hailed as the Church’s Vatileaks.
The second was the pope’s sudden and unexpected abdication in 2013, which was de facto an admission of surrender. A statement that the ‘armoured cardinal’ had lost in the clash with the Vatican Curia, having neither the strength nor the tools to reform it. The Church has lost — on the one hand — credibility in proclaiming its moral teaching. On the other hand, it faced a crisis of confidence of the faithful in its own institutions and hierarchs.
The Culture of Secrecy in the Church
What mechanism, both in the West and in Poland, has led to the crisis from which the Church still cannot recover? Firstly, the culture of respect for priests which the Church, especially in Poland, has instilled in the faithful has meant that many priests have enjoyed not only authority but also a conviction of their own impunity. Perhaps this is the kernel of darkness in this whole religious culture — the conviction of one’s own position, which gives the feeling that you can do whatever you want — that you can hurt innocent children, because any way you know that — in the case of a confrontation — even the parents are ready to side with the abuser and not with the victim.
But there is also the other side of the coin — the ecclesiastical side. For the Church has developed mechanisms to cover up the sins and crimes of her faithful sons — priests and bishops. Every sin of a priest, every iniquity of a bishop was treated by the Church authorities as a sin which should be hidden from the little ones and the public opinion. According to the principle: ‘The enemies of the Church are waiting for our weakness.’ That is why all the dirt was swept under the carpet by the Church authorities. This is how the culture of silence was born.
The trouble is that it gave clerical sex offenders an even greater sense of impunity. For every paedophile in a cassock knew that in the worst-case scenario he would be transferred to another parish. This was the greatest punishment for sex offenders. That the more powerful the perpetrator, the greater the chance that his point of view will prevail is confirmed by psychologist Judith Lewis Herman, who deals with rape, child abuse and war trauma. In her book ‘Trauma and Recovery’ she writes: ‘His (the perpetrator’s) main allies are secrecy and silence. If the secret is discovered, the perpetrator tries to undermine the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence them, he tries to make sure that no one will listen. (…) After every act of violence, you can expect the same explanations; it didn’t happen at all; the victim is lying; the victim is exaggerating; the victim is to blame; in any case, it is time to forget the past and start living a normal life. The more powerful the persecutor, the more influence he has in creating and interpreting reality and the more likely it is that his point of view will prevail.’
‘The culture of silence’ and the cover-up of sexual crimes has led to one of the greatest crises of the Church in recent decades. Thanks to it, perpetrators of rape in cassocks could sleep peacefully, being transferred from parish to parish, from country to country, while victims remained alone, tormented by the guilt that they had done something wrong because they had allegedly provoked a clergyman to perform sexual acts.
This ‘culture of secrecy’ Francis wanted to replace with a ‘culture of openness,’ breaking with the ‘papal secret’ in 2019. A kind of shift from ‘just do not tell anyone’ to ‘let us tell everyone.’ And above all, law enforcement agencies. The lifting of the pontifical secret applies, among other things, to the crimes of sexual acts or sexual violence committed under threat or abuse of power; sexual exploitation of a minor or helpless person; obtaining, storing or distributing child pornography; failure to report or covering up for perpetrators by a bishop or the superior general of a religious institute.
Disobedience of Clergy
The Church — most evidently in Poland — has received blows from the weapon with which it was so eager to fight its, usually imaginary, opponents — moral doctrine. The bishops turned out to be sinful moralists, who put burdens on people’s shoulders but are not ready to carry them themselves. Therefore, not only public opinion but Catholics themselves say directly: ‘Before bishops start lecturing us, they should put on a penitential sack’. Does it mean that Catholics are returning their tickets to the Church and that we are facing, as in Ireland, the scenario of accelerated laicisation in the country of St. John Paul II?
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Yet, not so long ago, we were supposed to be a green island of religiosity on the secularised map of Europe. Polish priests were to be an ‘export commodity’ to countries where vocations are scarce. Politicians of the religious right — led by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki — dreamed that they would re-Christianise godless Europe. Meanwhile, Poland, like Catholic Ireland a few years earlier, has become a country where people are abandoning their attachment to the Church without regret, and some are even spurning the faith of their parents. This is confirmed by the latest research by the governmental laboratory CBOS, where we read that between 1992 and 2021 there was a serious decline in the level of faith and religious practice.
What is the nature of this native version of secularisation? Its source is not what we saw at the turn of the century in the West, namely a reaction to modernity. Western societies, confronted with rapid modernisation, turned away from the faith and traditional religiosity. This type of secularisation was not present in Poland. This is why people spoke of the Polish religious phenomenon.
While the West was undergoing profound changes, we were fighting side by side with the Church against the Communist dictatorship. But also it was John Paul II, as Pope, leader of the Church and of the Western world, who showed that it was possible to combine traditional Polish religiousness with modernity. At least, this is how it seemed to us when we were closed behind the Iron Curtain and looked at Pope Wojtyła through the prism of the media. This is why, as we read further in the cited report, ‘over the course of almost thirty years, the percentages of declarations of faith, although declining, have remained at a very high level: in March 1992, believers and deep believers together accounted for 94 per cent of the total number of respondents, and in August 2021 — 87.4 per cent.’
On the one hand, we have a faith lined with the sentiment of our parents; on the other, it is clear that children and grandchildren are abandoning the Church and faith: the number of practising 18 to 24 year olds is falling most rapidly: from 69 per cent to 23 per cent. Polish secularisation, however, is not a reaction to modernity as it was in the West, but is to the iniquities and corruption of the Church, which are happening in a situation where the Church, priests and the presence of religion is so intense in the social and public space as never before since 1989.
The trouble is that — especially young people — experience the presence of the Church in a depraved form: in religion classes, instead of hearing about evangelical love and forgiveness, they hear about condemnation and exclusion — especially of their peers who are LGBT. In public life, they see right-wing politicians who use faith and the Church to cover up their sins, iniquities and scoundrels, and who secure the support of pastors by subsidising church institutions with state funds. In the Church, they see bishops who, instead of taking the side of harmed victims by paedophile priests, focus on defending the good name of Church institutions or condemning the young.
The native bishops, took the Catholic message contained in one of the most important commandments, ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ and have basically reduced it to the so-called theology of the body. This theology is associated with denial — for contraception, for in vitro, for premarital sex. These are mainly bans aimed at controlling the body — let us underline, the female body. In a situation when young Polish women are undergoing a rapid course of emancipation and equality, the Church appears as an institution not for them — although, as the CBOS report shows, our mothers and grandmothers still maintain the vitality of the Polish faith.
All of this adds up to an unprecedented phenomenon in Poland: we are dealing with an open declaration of disobedience by the faithful not so much to Christianity, but to the ground personnel managing the Church today. The bishops who instead of preaching the ‘good news’ have restored the alliance of the throne and the altar. This alliance —as history shows — always ends badly for the Church. And the Church, which loses credibility because of the anti-testimony of its leaders, becomes an annexe of the ruling party and cannot effectively proclaim its message. A Church that is not trusted by her faithful is simply in a state of agony.
At the same time, the Church’s agony today is its opportunity. As Winston Churchill used to say, one cannot ‘let a good crisis go to waste.’ Therefore, all those who have the good of faith at heart should pray for secularisation, so that only those seeds of the Christian message survive as a result of it, which will be the beginning of a revival of authentic religious life. Faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A Church which, as Pope Francis dreams, will in the first instance resemble a field hospital, where before a suffering person is asked about a Church commandment, he is surrounded by care and understanding. There will be no lack of people in such a ‘resurrected’ Church.
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Originally published in Polish by Respublica.
Picture: Stefan Kunze / Unsplash.
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