In 1523, Pope Adrian VI wrote to the counts and princes of Germany who were meeting at Nuremberg to express their outrage at the sorry condition of the Catholic Church.
As they saw it, too many clergy treated the priesthood as little more than a cushy job. Some were so woefully ignorant, they couldn’t have preached a decent sermon even if they had a mind to. Others were absentee landlords–bishops who never set foot in their dioceses but enjoyed the considerable income that came with them. Far from denying the charges, the pope traced such inequities to his own doorstep.
“There has been great spiritual abominations and abuses in the Holy See for many years,” he acknowledged.
But as for what to do about the problem, Pope Adrian offered only a two-word remedy: “Be patient.”
With the church’s leadership alerted to the crisis, the pope argued, he and the cardinals surely would do something about it. He couldn’t promise they would solve the problem anytime soon, but they would work on it, methodically and in their own way. They didn’t need any help from the laity, because responsibility for reforming the church is the province of those who wear priestly vestments.
Change a few nouns in Pope Adrian’s letter–for “financial abuse” substitute “sex abuse”–and his message sounds eerily like the line taken by Cardinal Bernard Law, Boston’s embattled archbishop. Ever since a former priest of the archdiocese was convicted of fondling a young boy, demands for the cardinal’s resignation have grown increasingly louder.
Law has repeatedly apologized for shuttling the abusing priest from one parish to another, even though the archdiocese was aware of his misconduct. Yet the cardinal has refused to step down, arguing that he can resolve an issue in which he had at least a minor role. So, too, have other church leaders, such as Brooklyn Bishop Thomas Daily, who served in the Boston archdiocese when the abuse took place, and New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan, who formerly was bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., which also has been touched by the widening scandal.
An impatient flock
Almost in chorus, the church hierarchy has asked lay Catholics to wait patiently on the sidelines while bishops and cardinals tackle the problem. If the past is any guide, the clergy’s argument may well fall on deaf ears. Almost 500 years ago, a lot of Germans felt they had already waited too long.
Instead of heeding Pope Adrian’s request, they listened to the countermessage of Martin Luther, who argued that it was only lay leaders, not the clergy, who could bring about meaningful change in the church.
To a historian’s ears, the dilemma of contemporary Catholicism daily is sounding more and more like it might be headed toward a rerun of the Reformation.
It is probably incumbent upon a non-Catholic saying something like that at a moment like this to append a bit of resume to his diagnosis. Please trust that the church’s predicament is a source of sorrow, not joy, to me. I just might have become Catholic, except that I follow the biblical injunction by honoring my father’s and mother’s religion.
I respond to the church’s strong feelings for the necessity of preserving tradition. Outside of a synagogue, the house of worship where I feel most at home is a Gothic cathedral. Even the smells have a comforting familiarity: A priest prepares the altar with the same pungent incense my people use during havdalah, the ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath.
Similar feelings inspired me to become a medievalist, the scholarly specialty focused on the period when the Catholic Church was the heart and soul of Western civilization. As a student, I was thrilled by the stirring description of that role in the books of the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson.
“When St. Paul sailed from Troy in obedience to a dream and came to Philippi in Macedonia,” Dawson wrote, “he did more to change the course of history and the future of European culture than the great battle which had decided the fate of the Roman Empire on the same spot more than ninety years before.”
In my imagination, I went along on the missionary voyages of St. Columbanus and other Irish monks of the 6th and 7th Centuries. In the chaos that followed the fall of Rome, it was largely because they were willing to endure self-imposed exile from their native land that a measure of civilization was restored to the European mainland. Throughout the Dark Ages, it was the clergy who kept literacy alive. Generations of monks patiently copied and recopied manuscripts of the classics, preserving the learning of the Greeks and Romans and making possible the rebirth of literature and science during the Renaissance.
Indeed, the medieval clergy did their job so well that they sowed the seeds of their own undermining. The schools they founded eventually restored a class of lay people who again could read and write. By Pope Adrian’s day, those literate Christians were quick to read the religious tracts in which Luther proposed a new kind of church that wouldn’t make the traditional distinction between clergy and other believers.
Welcoming newcomers
The American Catholic Church might just be reaching a similar point on its historical trajectory. Like its medieval ancestor, the American church didn’t limit itself to offering mass. It was long an immigrant’s church. For generations of Poles and Czechs, Italians and Irish, it offered a welcoming hand to newcomers. It provided a range of social services in an age when government had yet to take up that responsibility.
St. Stanislaus Kostka, on Chicago’s Near Northwest Side, was for decades the Polish community’s formative institution. It offered English-language instruction for newcomers and business-college courses for parishioners about to move into the middle class. It also ran a savings and loan that enabled immigrants to buy homes.
So it is no wonder that when its great pastor, Father Vincent Barzynski, died in 1899, newspaper accounts of his funeral said that when the hearse reached the cemetery the last of the mourners’ carriages had yet to leave the church.
When St. Stanislaus published a parish history, it described a priest as a “shepherd, who here in a foreign land is not only a representative of his brothers before the altar of the Lord, but leads them in all worldly affairs, is in the whole sense of this word, a social worker.”
By now, though, many fewer Catholics need a social worker priest. The descendants of those who worshiped at inner-city churches have moved into the middle class and out to suburbia. America is no longer a foreign land they need help in navigating, and as the church has been relieved of some older functions, the defects that plague all human institutions have been thrown in high relief–disproportionately so, just as in Pope Adrian’s day.
Not all priests then were selling indulgences, the promise of forgiveness for sin that originally sparked Luther’s protests. Yet once he had opened the doors of criticism, a lot more issues quickly emerged: whether clergy could marry, the relationship of church and state, etc.
Similarly now, only a tiny fraction of priests are sexual abusers. But once the issue surfaced, other issues followed. There have been calls for releasing priests from vows of chastity and demands for opening the priesthood to women. The result of that is as yet unclear. History provides only an outline, not a blueprint, for the future.
The church might be diminished in numbers by the current scandals, or it could be reinvigorated by the crisis.
Both occurred in the wake of Luther’s revolt: Many Christians opted for the new Protestant churches, but Catholicism received a new spiritual vigor from its own reformers, such as St. Ignatius Loyola and members of the Jesuit order he founded.
One thing seems likely though. The church will find new leaders willing to make almost any sacrifice for the sake of the faith, just as it did during the Dark Ages. One of those Irish monks who then labored to restore a measure of civility to a world in turmoil was St. Columba. After decades of missionary work he reached his last days in a little church he founded on the bleak island of Iona, off Scotland’s shores.
At the moment of his death, he was faithfully copying passages from the Bible. When his pen was stilled, he had just written a verse from Psalm 34: “They that seek the Lord shall want no good thing.”
