Molnar Church at Centurys End

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The Church at Century’s End

“Remember,I am sending you out to be like sheep among wolves; you must bewary, then, as serpents, and yet innocent as doves.” -M atthew 10:16

A VAST SUBJECT like the one proposed bythe editor of Modern Age requires whatthe Germans call an Ortsbestimrnung: arealistic, unadorned overview of theplaceof Christianity on the threshold of its thirdmillennium. A striking, but generally ig-nored facet of such an overview is the fol-lowing: While during most of the first twomillennia (from313A.D. to the nineteenthcentury) Christianity and the CatholicChurch in particular appeared in associa-

tion with the State, around 1900the sepa-ration o the two created an altogethernew situation. For about fifteen centuriesState and Church had their distinct areasof authority (unlike the Palace and theTemple before Christianity which fused inan ethnocentric cult); yet they alsocooperated in the preservation of moraland public order, the one inconceivablewithout the other in Christendom. To be

sure, the State was not called upon tosupervise the citizen’s ethical conscious-ness, but it was supposed to provide theframework within which the Church mayguide the souls to their supernatural end.Medieval thinkers, up until William oOckham, could not imagine another but aChristian civitas; it was not shocking, itwas normal that the citizen’s loyalty wassolicited by both Church and State, but theclaim each had on him did not coincide.They shared the citizen’s guidance anddivided accordingly their mission andvocation. It is noteworthy that althoughmoral and political cooperation betweenpope and ruler was not devoid of deep andviolent conflicts-at times shaking the

christiana republica to its foundations-the interests of public and moral order re-mained uppermost: The Church relied onthe “secular arm,” and the State countedupon the clerical discipline under Roman(or Protestant) authority.

We may regard the separation ofChurch and State (the former’s “disestab-lishment” is amore adequate term) as anevent of greater importance in modernhistory than, let us say, the French and the

Russian revolutions or the two worldwars. The separation did not takeplace asa spontaneous move; it had been for cen-turies on the agenda of liberal ideologyand the civil society shaped by it. Civilsociety as such always existed; next toState and Church, it consisted of transac-tions among citizens whether in business,education, or culture. The striking thing isthat civil society, while its activities were

always regulated by the State (laws, issu-ance of money, supervision of contractsand of corporations) and by the Church(prohibition of usury, the placing of guildsunder patron saints), never became apolitical institution with a manifest politi-cal power of its own. T he monopoly ofpolitics belonged to State and Church, thejoint guardians of the res publica.

The latter’s main thrust in moderntimes has been directed against these

guardians. Ever since the ethical valoriza-tion of economics, starting with the seven-teenth century, and the concomitant sub-stitution of the ethics of interest (M ande-ville, Montesquieu, Adam Smith) to Chris-tian morality, liberal civil society became

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conscious of itself as a political power: apower no longer exercised indirectly byholding the purse for kings, princes, andchurchmen, but directly, by organizingthe social space according to the main ac-tivities of economic articulation. The lasttwo centuries witnessed the successful ef-forts by civil society to reduce the State tothe “nightwatchman” status, and theparallel efforts to marginalize the Churchby privatizing it as a mere pressure group,a signatory of the “social contract” likeany other lobby in a pluralist society.

The many centuries-long triangularrivalry-State, Church, civil society-thus

temporarily ended with the latter’s vic-tory. There is nothing strange in this: theChurch (papacy) triumphed in the elev-enth and consecutive centuries; the State(absolute monarchy), from the sixteenth totheeighteenth; civil society isnow the un-disputed holder of monopoly in the politi-cal space, itself transformed into a socio-economic space of theoretically equal andcompeting groups. I t is natural that the

Church, separated from the State and de-prived of public power, has entered upona different relationship with civil societythan it had had with the State. In spite oftheallegedly ill-sounding expression,“alli-ance of throne and altar,” this all iance,also described as the “ConstantinianChurch,” was beneficial to the latter. Thebishop-statesmen of the fourth to sixthcenturies-Eusebius, Ambrose, Augustine,Gelasius, Gregory-were not prompted bypolitical ambition when they opted forpartnership with the secular power. Theyknew that that was the only way of mod-erating the latter’s methods of governingand power-engendered arrogance.

It isobvious that the invisible contractsigned by the Church with civil society isessentially different from the all iance withthe State. The idke r epe in this respect isthat the Church gained thereby a genuine

freedom for the first time, a better condi-tion than subservience uis-h-uisthe State.Almost the opposite isthe case. We do notspeak here of State-managed churches:the Anglican, the Russian since Peter theGreat, the L utheran State Church of Den-

mark so vigorously castigated by K ierke-gaard in the person of Bishop Mynster. Wespeak of the Catholic and even of theByzantine Church, the latter by far not assubmissive to the Eastern Roman em-perors as some historians used to pointout. In the West the Church was in posi-tions either of too much power over theState (from Pope Innocent to Bonifacius)or in an unstable equilibrium with it, butnever docile-except when coerced byregimes where totalist ideology began stir-ring, whether of J oseph I1 of Austria or ofNapoleon. Generally the Church was freeto implement ecclesiastical interests and

the magisterial teaching. The relationshipwith the State secured the amount ofpower that is indispensable for any institu-tion in charge of human beings, even incharge of their souls. In the Church’s case,the dogma of incarnation actually dictatesinvolvement with mundane affairs and,therefore, with a measure of politicalpresence in the area of power.

What has changed when the new rela-

tionship was “contracted” with liberal civilsociety? The latter’s concept of the com-mon good is not the same as that of thetraditional State. Liberal ideology positsonly individuals and voluntary associa-tions; out of their inevitable clashes theredoes not arise what wewould consider thecommon good, but a pragmatic modusuiuendi with “freedom” as a vague yetsupreme value. This is a formal conceptapplicable to business deals as well as tomoral and legal relations. it is blind toassociations based on tradition, hereditaryloyalty, non-rationalistic premises, beliefs,and discipline; it is, above all, hostile tosystems of transcendence. As a conse-quence, the Church is regarded as acounter-society, inimical to liberal this-worldliness, democratic choice, and reli-gious pluralism. I f a contract with it isnevertheless signed, it can only be a pro-

visional one since mankind, tending, inthe liberal perspective of history, towardthe maximalization of individual freedom(“human rights”), is expected sooner orlater to desert the cult and its irrational,mythical object; Christianity, together

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with other myths, constitutes but aphasein the annals of this one-directionalprogress.

While the contract remains valid, the

Church is expected to behave like anyother pressure group; she may lobby forher constitutional rights, but not for theuniversal rights of God and thus not asGod’s representative. In other words, theChurch is tolerated as a temporal institu-tion (likeasportsclub or a literary circle)on condition that her spiritual activity re-mains private, keeping out of the publicspace. The reason why this central fact of

our century has scarcely been commentedupon isthat until recently civil society wasmanaged by men still formed by the reli-gious world view; they were liberal andnot Christian (for example, free-masons oragnostics), but their so-called values hadbeen shaped by centuries of Christianity.With Vatican I 1 it suddenly seemed thatRome itself authorized its own liquidation(the expression used by Paul VI, who alsospoke of defacement, in F rench

dknaturer), pluralization, and democrati-zation, briefly its aggiornamento in thespiritof liberal society. The recent Councilput the seal of approval on the process ofaccommodation with the world, acceptingin effect society’s new religion-secularhumanism-as the early Christians neveraccepted the cult of Caesar! (Consider, forexample the ambiguous attitude of theAmerican and many other episcopates

before the mass-murder of embryos andother obscene sexual laws.)Confronted with a situation stamped

largely by her own sins of commission andomission, the Church finds herself in theworst posture of her history: subservienceto the politics of liberal civil society whoseavowed ideological objective, not unlikethe objective of Marxist regimes, is theliquidation of faith in a transcendent

God. The liberal processis

less overt andexpeditious than the Marxist one; it ismore subtle, it promotes the gradual ex-tinction of Christianity through relativisticmorals, scientific (“factual”) education,technological progress and its ideologicalderivatives. Its culture is permeated by

“values” opposed to religion, from thefreemarket of pornography to films degrad-ing Jesus Christ. The sporadic protests bythe Church are silenced in the name of

pluralism. There can be, therefore, no sys-tematic resistance because in recentdecades the Church has erected adjust-ment into a quasi-conversion to the liberalenvironment and world view. Attractionto the world always existed, Christ warnedagainst it. Now it isstronger than it used tobe in feudalism, in Renaissance human-ism, in the absolute monarchy, in the cen-tury of Enlightenment. Adjustment is

fueled by the flimsy but widely advertisedevents of the fifties and sixties: decoloniza-tion, the unification of the planet, de-Stalinization, socialist humanism, a Catho-lic president in America. Such occurrencespersuaded many that utopia is on thethreshold. The Protestant theologian,J urgen Moltmann, admitted in an auto-biographical work that he and his col-leagues had been carried away by enthusi-asm, believing that residual Christianity-

with standard-bearers like Dietrich Bon-hoeffer, Teilhard de Chardin, the newtheologies of the “death of God” and “lib-eration”-would fuse with secular socialmovements. Many believed they stoodbefore a decisive and marvelous mutation.

Part of the accommodationist optionwas accredited by the Church’s desire toavoid losing new social classes. The lessoncame from far: Rome had lost the Enlight-

enment philosophes; in the next centuryshe lost the Voltairean and Darwinianbourgeoisie, then the proletariat; thetwentieth-century mass-middle class is sodangerously de-Christianized that a fur-ther loss was envisaged, after which, inPaul VI’S words, the Church would shrinkto a remnant. His words are worth quot-ing:

The Church will continue to open and con-

form itself to the world, thus to disfigure itsown nature. Yet its supernatural substancewill be preserved, limited toaresidual rnini-mum, and its supernatural end will be pur-sued faithfully in the world by this remnant.There correspondsto the Church’s falseex-pansion, as she dissolves herself in the

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world, a gradual contraction and impover-ishment in numbers. They will form aminority, seemingly insignificant and dying,but this minority contains a concentration of

the elect, giving firm testimony of the faith.

Hence we witness the policy of dialogue,ecumenism, and finally the espousal of lib-eral and leftist causes, in politics and cul-ture, and a desperate clinging to theworld, wherever it leads. In other words,the Church seems to have elaborated herown “Gramsci-ism”: courtship of youthculture, espousal of syndicalist aspirations,and the searching out of masses in theframework of organized spectaculars

(papal visits, etc.).It is arguable whether Rome has two

options or only one. Until recently wehave seen liberal societies and socialistregimes with distinct programs. As thecentury draws to its close, the two soci-eties with their respective ideologies at-tain a fusion, thus displaying similar fea-tures: vacuous values and spectaculartechniques, laxness in educational and

sexual matters, dissolution of authority.The Church’s choice becomes graduallynarrower, in proportion as itsclerical per-sonnel adopts the bureaucratic modusoperandi of the secular/technologicalworld. Priests, theologians, bishops, nuns,and, in fact, entire orders call faith, doc-trine, and morals into question, urging theChurch to renounce her illusory primacy,exclusivity of offering salvation, and claimto represent more than just another myth

that has run its course at one stage of theevolution and now ought to vanish. Catho-lic faithful are meanwhile bewildered,losefaith, become indifferent, and insist onwriting their own bill of fare of what theyare willing to believe and practice. TheChurch itself is split-according to theprinciple of pluralism preached by civilsociety-between official Rome, whichgoes through the movements of govern-ing, and the counter-Church, which claimsto speak for the Council. Cardinal Ratz-inger summed matters up when he saidthat the “conciliarists” have turnedVatican I 1 into a dogma close to theirheart: the utopian schema of sacralizing

the world and the simultaneous desacrali-zation of the Church. This is,after all, thesubstance of most heresies.

The Church finds herself in an ever-renewed dilemma: the choice between themission that the Founder assigned and theways of the world. The first lifts up tograce, the second pulls toward gravity, anatural pull, or, asSimone Weil called thetwo, la pesanteur et la griice.The dilemmais inevitable because Incarnation dictatesboth supernatural and this-worldly in-volvement, that is, the pursuit of faith andsalvation and also the moral interest withwhich the Church accompanies men and

women in the life of their communities,Politics is therefore inseparable from theChristian religion, but the question is,Howmuch of it and by sacrificing what else?

From the time of Constantine, theChurch welcomed political power becauseshe regarded it as the condition of pre-serving a Christian commonwealth. I t iseasy to declare that there occurred manyexcesses in the alliance with the throne,but we have seen that partnership withcivil society also leads to excesses. In thepast, facing powerful secular rulers, thepopes were obliged to create a politicalnetwork of their own and resort to mun-dane instruments of power in the variousconflicts. We are told that the situation isdifferent now, that the Church lives inpeace, that the humanitarian ideals whichpermeate society amount to a secularizedChristianity. The truth is that today’s

neutralization of the Church is moredamaging to her integrity and missionthan were past confrontations. Evennominally Christian princes and govern-ments ruled within the Christian culturalframework and the overarching normswere set by Christian concepts and values.The social mimesis functioned in thegeneral interest of religion.

We saw that things drasticallychanged when political power came intothe hands of civil society.The latter is ad-dicted to change (Christopher Dawsoncalled it a “half-way house”), although itstabilizes tself with thehelp of rigid liberaldogma. Even revolutionary regimes-lib-

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era1 as in 1789, socialist as in 1917-installa set of dogmas the morning after cele-brating freedom of thought and action.The hidden dogmatism and its monistic

philosophy are essentially hostile to theChristian religion and its two-layeredworld, the sacred and the profane, thesupernatural and the workaday human.

Y et the Church pursues her politicalvocation as if no basic change has takenplace since the time of separation from theState and her present membership in civilsociety. She wishes to ignore the latter’sradically mundane character and ideologi-

cal orientation; she acts as if civil societywere another Roman empire, ready forChristianization. For one thing, theChurch does not want to sustain anothermajor loss, social and civilizational; foranother thing, she has been exaggerated-ly attentive to thinkers like J acques Mari-tain and J . Courtney Murray who believedthat modern liberal democracy wouldrespect the Christian faith and allow Chris-tians to pursue their otherworldy voca-tion-provided they abstain from evangel-izing the public square.

It may well be that the Church’s wageris justified and that her survival in theseperilous circumstances without a loss ofsubstance opens new vistas. But it mayalso happen that these entirely new cir-cumstances require on the Church’s part awithdrawal from politics, a benign neglectuis-&uis liberal civil society. Let us empha-

size that the leading social models of theage, the liberal and the socialist, have ac-tually excluded (privatized, marginalized,persecuted) the Church from their agenda.The latter lives on sufferance, as a targetof vulgar and blasphemous attacks from“private citizens” and “private groups,”and from the quasi-monopolistic owners ofwords, shapes, and ideas: the universities,the media elites, the opinion-leaders. The

Church’s non-resistance to, the offensivesof the latter can only be explained by herown liberaldemocratization, her desire toblend with the milieu, an operation con-ducted by an ecclesiastical nomenklatura,a self-directed bureaucratic class which nolonger obeys doctrine and magisterium.

In the kind of monarchic/aristocraticsociety that the Church was until 1960,bureaucracy was an integrated branch ofthe total operation; the present democrati-

zation in the Church, for example, thenew structure of “episcopal conferences,”brought with it centrifugal assemblieswhich deal with matters that lie outsidethe bishops’ competence and discretion,and for this reason require a swollenbureaucracy whose objective is to renderitself indispensable. The consequence isthat the Church becomes entangled in thebureaucracies of civil society and cannot

sever the daily, routine links. She not onlyaccepts a subordinate role in this unequalpartnership but also lives by it parasiti-cally, as if fascinated by the social modelthat reduces her to impotence. A self-induced loss of memory forbids her toremember the dayso alliance with politi-cal power.

Withdrawal from partnership withcivil society and the kind of politizationthat this partnership imposes would not be

a betrayal of the Church’s mission to bepresent to men. Clearly, liberal society isbeyond spiritual rescue, it is a quagmire inwhich all institutions, including theChurch, are trapped. We have heard ofthe “naked public square” that PastorNeuhaus believes the Catholic Churchwould be able to fill with potent messagesto other religions, to national culture, tothe nation’s sense of political vocation. Iconfess I see absolutely no such silver lin-ing on the edges of the accumulating darkclouds. In Western countries the Churchhas become a lobby, not necessarily forthe rights of God, but for the moment’s fador her own material interests: buildingprojects and tax exemption. The Churchin today’s Western world is a kind of toler-ated association-tolerated for the auxil-iary social services she renders-which

has no sociological justification or a per-manent place in society. Her contributionto schooling, to culture, and public moral-ity presents a mediocre record. We nolonger hear of the Church’s sponsorship ofgreat music, architecture, or philosophy;what she builds is in atrocious taste, not

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distinguishable from the neighborhoodcinema, firehouse, or factory; her greatmusic has been jettisoned together withLatin and the Gregorian; and the philoso-

phy she produces consists of the faddisttracts of her rebels. Paul VI himself admit-ted the degradation of Church art and thedrift toward mass culture when he de-clared: “The Church is sacrificing her ownlanguage, sacred, beautiful, expressiveand elegant. . . . It isthe sacrifice of manycenturies of tradition, the unity of lan-guage that all her people used to share. . . ”

Letus assume that this is not the deca-dence that bites into once great institu-tions, corporations, and empires. Y et, ashistorians, we observe all the symptoms ofdecay in the contemporary Church, mani-fested in their classical forms. The alterna-tive diagnosis suggests an exaggerated,near-pathological state of adjustment tocivil society (the irresistible attractions ofpluralism, prosperity, progress), a morethorough form of accommodation thanhas ever been practiced uis-d-us other

civilizations. From the fourth to the eigh-teenth century there was no talk of doctri-nal accommodation, and the Protestantcrisis itself was met by a vigorous CounterReformation. Today the Church is toopanicky to counterattack, even to defendherself. Society, to which she ought atleast to present a better moral model,practices the whole gamut o public sinswithout a word of condemnation from

church authorities. When sporadic butvague reminders are sounded by popes,episcopal bureaucrats shelve them, awarethat the secular power-media, univer-sities, a conditioned public opinion-willeagerly offer to them a soap-box and amicrophone.

The question in its nakedness is,Canthe Church renew herself? But not, let usadd, through such tools of accommodation

as dialogue, ecumenism, and grotesquespectaculars like the one at Assisi in Oc-tober 1986.Such performances are symp-toms, not remedies. Remedies can be ob-tained only from spirituality, sacrifice,discipline, and the use of authority. But issucharenewal possible in a Church which

is too deeply immersed in Westernsocieties? Does the “social contract” theChurch has signed with them allow herany spiritual affirmation? It seems that the

modern experiment recommended bythinkers like M aritain, Bonhoeffer,Schillebeeckxs,and many others has beenan immense failure. Doubtlessly theChurch needs a certain amount of power.Only her adversaries and her hereticshave claimed that the jewel of spiritualityneed not be set in the hard metal ofpolitics.

Soon after 1945 Romano Guardini joy-fully stated that the world is ready forspiritualization; unfortunately, he phrasedhis statement in such a way as to suggestthat, at long last, the Church was openingherself to charity. Twenty years later, the“opening of the Vatican’s windows”showed what kind of charity it was to be:kneeling to the world. The Church alwayshad an abundance of charity, she did nothave to wait for 1945 or the Vatican Coun-cil to learn it from her Founder. Y et, Guar-

dini’s words can be put to a better use thanwhat his meaning suggests. The non-Western world still possesses spiritualresources, unsuspected in the arid waste-land of the West. It is still receptive, inmany places, to the divine breakthrough.Let us be careful, however, in our assess-ment: The world outside the Westernheartland has been immemorially in-vested by a few large blocks of traditional

religiosity. They are Islam, Buddhism, Hin-duism, Animism, and some other, syn-cretistic ones. These blocks are verystrong, with deep roots, and are set intheir resistance to Christian penetration.Nevertheless, the cultural areas in whichthey operate are still sacralized, in con-trast to the totally secular character of theWest. Across the theological and philo-sophical barriers, the Church’s spirituality

and charity are still better apprehended inAsia and in Africa than among the Euro-pean and American intellectuals in whomKarl Rahner wanted vainly to resurrectthe hidden divine magma. The languageof the sacred and man’s dependence on acosmic or extra-cosmic (divine) mystery is

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better understood by Moslems and Ani-mists, and even by Hindus, than by West-ern professors for whose majority nothingis comprehensible except the fantasies of

their own cerebrations.Catholic missions among adherents ofnon-western religions and credal systemsare nothing new. L ong before MotherTeresa, thousands of missionaries fecun-dated not only the spirit but also the localsocial structures which gratefully re-sponded to Christian charity combinedwith practical ideas and realizations. Thischarity was the first to organize institu-tions unknown to many lands: orphan-ages, hospitals, homes for unwed mothersand the old, trade schools to train theyoung, centers for the handicapped andthe mentally malformed. In the presentcircumstances, new tasks could be addedto the traditional ones, as summed up inthe word modernization. When the West-ern industrial-technological impulse ar-rives, it upsets conditions mercilessly, withno regard to family structure, neighbor-

hood, sexual mores, and the often invisi-ble hierarchy. All these seem backward tothe Western, “Faustian,” mentality, whichthen works with special local interests, ig-noring the levels on which people live. Inshort, aware or not, Western penetrationbribes a particular stratum, and togetherthey destroy the traditional, including thereligious, networks. As far as local reli-gions are concerned, they are generally

unable to offer resistance to savage andhaphazard modernization, and their even-tual efforts are overcome by their own im-memorial ways, now seen as inadequateto meet the challenge. Their doctrinal ossi-fication is easily ridiculed by the newgenerations.

The Church would be the natural

mediator between the old, rigid ways andthe drive for modernization, just as shewas in post-Roman times when she builtbridges between the empire’s administra-

tive genius and the barbarian-tribal com-munities. T he positive aspecto Vatican I 1was to carry out the earlier-planned indig-enization of the clergy, a reality today.The Church understood-and this shows amarvelous vitality-that the West has suc-cumbed to materialism and atheism, thatis, a rapid decline, and that her own mis-sion field in the third millennium is therest of the planet.

The true meaning of the new empha-sis is not the desertion of the West wherethe Roman Church remains anchored. It israther the liquidation of the “Constantin-ian” legacy, in fact a second chapter ofthat liquidation since 1870 when theworldly rule over the Papal States wasgiven up. What the Church then did geo-graphically, she will have to do now spirit-ually: Her devastating experience with thealliance of “the altar and the office build-

ing,” as Carl Schmitt sarcastically but aptlycalled it, must be followed by a soberingrevaluation, an Ortsbestimmung. TheChurch cannot renounce political involve-ment since, as Aristotle taught, the politi-cal is the continuation of the ethical. This,however, is not recognized by non-West-ern regimes which have neither theHellenic nor the Hebrew heritage. In theirmidst the Church will be far less politicized

and its energies will be turned in otherdirections. This is not a utopian program,only a reasonable forecast that the Churchwill again learn from history while impart-ing lessons to it.

-Thomas Molnar

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Molnar Church at Centurys End