Backwards in Credulity

Today in the Bodleian I was looking for something online and happened across a live broadcast of the cardinals' Mass before they are locked away. I didn't have the sound on, but it seemed a very subdued occasion indeed; the faces were grim. Outside the Mass was broadcast on giant screens, but very few people seemed interested; the great space in front of St Peter's held only dribs and drabs of people scurrying here and there, no-one paying attention to the images flashing pointlessly into the emptiness. The lack of interest may in part have been due to the black clouds sitting over the Vatican spitting rain on all and sundry, one drop like a tear on the lens of the broadcasting camera. Or it could be due to other causes.

When Ratzinger was elected to be Benedict XVI, I heaved a jaded sigh, my body adding a large French-style shrug, knowing that the Roman Catholic church had condemned itself to further irrelevance—in fact, it felt as though with Ratzinger's election, the church had passed the point of no return. Ratzinger had some good ideas theologically—which he invariably put to very destructive, even at times, diabolical, applications. Over the years, rumours have leaked out of the Vatican of his fondness for dressing up in old (e.g., 17^th century) pieces of ecclesiastical tat, while his wanderings through the vast corridors were accompanied by a herd of cats. His resignation brought another shrug, a much smaller one this time, since I have more or less lost interest at the level of involvement—good riddance, but much, much too late. The lukewarm accolades he received after the fact seemed to smack of relief more than anything else, and his role as pope—though not his previous role as rottweiler—will doubtless quickly be forgotten.

Now we seem to be about to witness the same process all over again, a quickening march further along the road to oblivion. There are several threads that run through press accounts of preparations for the conclave.

One of these threads is simple astonishment at the grandiose and archaic rituals that are being enacted in Rome. These rituals are all the more bizarre in the face of scholarship that has exposed fault lines in the official mythology of church origins and prerogatives, not to mention the vast gulf between them and the poor Christ, whom the cardinals claim to represent. And that word claim is a key to the hypocrisy: '. . . he did not claim equality with God but emptied himself . . .'(Phil 2.6)—the core text of the season of Lent leading to Easter that we are currently celebrating.

Another thread running through press accounts  is a sometimes barely concealed revulsion at the whole charade. Plump cardinals sweetly smiling waddle across the piazza while stabbing opponents in the back—figuratively speaking, of course, though it doesn't take much imagination to see in the mind's eye the quick thrust of a stiletto—or misericordia as it ironically came to be known—that one cardinal might push unseen into the rolls fat above the red bellyband, under which beats a supposedly human heart. The Guardian has published a rogues gallery of the cardinals going into consistory, and a very depressing set of faces it is.

A third thread, and one I most identify with, is the subtext, ‘This is quite amazing, but in this day and age, who cares?’ Tired old men electing one of their number to be yet another ho-hum, tired old pope, issuing dicta that destroy people’s lives—if anyone pays attention; old men living in a mad fantasy world whose ethos is perhaps best signified by the Borgias. It’s the ‘destroy people’s lives’ that I do care about, and one of my primary motivations for working in theology has been to discover why, and expose the means, and false beliefs, by which the church causes so much pain; its dehumanizing, degrading manipulative tactics in the process of pursuing its stated goals of ‘salvation’. This last, I hasten to say, refers to all institutional religion, not just Rome. Christians have been cheated of their spiritual inheritance for far too long.

Some of my Catholic friends try to hold out hope. The problems in the church are so dire, they say, that the electors will be forced make a radical shift. The consistory that elected John XXIII was conservative, too, and look what happened. To which I can only reply, yes, look what happened: all the hopes raised by Vatican II have been dashed, as his successors try to turn the clock back to the Council of Trent, and pretend as if Vatican II never happened. I’m afraid that for me hope does not figure into the equation. Is it the Buddhists who say that until hope dies there is no possibility of growth?

In any event, whatever happens will be interesting—in the sense of the Chinese curse. From where I sit, it is much too late to save institutional Christianity, and perhaps it is a mistake to try. The present institutional forms are burdened almost to a standstill by their mad, bad mistakes of the past, which hang around their figurative necks like Marley’s chains studded with a filigree of Ancient Mariner's albatrosses—and for many of the same reasons in fact that beset those two old reprobates in fiction.

Christianities—as in the early churches—will survive here and there, but institutional forms have always been antithetical to the message of salvation: salvation that originally meant freedom from a debased culture  and the persecution of one’s self-conscious mind, so that one might enter into the Christian community, a paradise of mutual support and service overflowing from the wellspring of life made available by the work of silence—or at least that was the ideal for the first nine centuries or so. 

What today passes for Christianity—the idolatry of experience and the grandiosity of institutions that are for, by, and of the clergy—may continue to thrive for a while as fashions do, but in the end people will become bored of them and drift away. Much of Christian heritage has already been lost; unless there is a miracle of some sort, this election may cut the moorings that still attach us to the rest.