Porqué Benedicto XVI NO ES católico - sino luterano

Anthony Mansuetto titula así un interesante artículo en Tikkun, y explica también porqué él aún es católico. Voy a poner el texto entero, y si les da flojera leer sobre la historia de la iglesia católica, dénse esta oportunidad. Mansuetto es profesor universitario y escribe muy claro, y leer este artículo les ayudará a entender porqué vivimos tiempos sumamente peligrosos, y porqué hay que seguir navegando a pesar de la tormenta que se avecina.

"The new pope isn’t Catholic. He is a Lutheran. And he is not the sort of liberal, tolerant, Lutheran we have become accustomed to respecting and engaging in our interfaith dialogues, but rather a dangerous and authoritarian follower of Paul and Augustine whothreatens to lead the Catholic world into fascism. As such he has set himself outside the Church and, even if he has taken most of the Church’s institutional resources with him, he has left those of us who remain faithful to the historic tradition of the Catholic Church to resist, to guard its message of meaning and hope, and to rebuild.

These are audacious claims which require some justification, and there is no way to do this without a bit of church history. Christianity has, historically, been an amalgam of very different socioreligious and political theological traditions which have all been very much in tension with each other. This tension goes back to the origins of the religion. Most scholars, for example, now regard Jesus as essentially a Hillel school Pharisee whose teaching focused on ethical conduct, an emphasis still visible in the synoptic Gospels and the Letter of James. Paul, on the other hand, put forward a new theology which broke radically with Judaism, arguing that it is impossible for a sinful humanity to fulfill the Law and that we can be redeemed only by faith in the Crucified and Risen Christ. This tension was amplified by the differing ways in which the various cultures which eventually gave birth to Christendom appropriated the Christian tradition.

The Celts, whose tradition had always emphasized wisdom and ethical conduct, stressed the message of the synoptics, regarding Jesus as a wisdom teacher and moral exemplar and developing a spirituality centered on learning, penance, and the struggle for social justice. This was the tradition of Pelagius, the British monk whose work captivated the hearts and minds of Europe during the fourth century. The Germans, on the other hand, who were great warriors, regarded Jesus as a victorious warlord who conquered Satan and bestowed the “booty” of eternal life as a free gift on his faithful followers.

North Africans, who lived in one of the most exploited regions of the Empire, regarded Christianity as first and foremost an anti-imperial ideology and gave the Church its tradition of martyrdom. After Christianity was legalized under Constantine, many North Africans (followers of Donatus of Casae Nigrae) refused to recognize the leadership of bishops who had collaborated with the Empire during the last persecution. Rome, and what was left of the old Roman aristocracy, argued that valid office, not personal sanctity, was the criterion for exercising religious leadership. The Byzantine East fused Christian symbols with Neoplatonic philosophy to craft a sacral monarchic ideology which kept the Roman Empire alive for another thousand years.

These struggles all came to a head in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The pivotal figure in this regard was Augustine, who embraced an essentially Pauline theology and won decisions from major church councils against the Pelagians and the Donatists. North Africa, which would have nothing to do with an imperial church, essentially abandoned Christianity, welcoming the armies of Dar-al-Islam as liberators when they arrived some two centuries later. But the Germanic warlords liked Augustinian theology because it treated military force and conquest as at least a necessary evil and because its emphasis on salvation as a free gift from God resonated with their own spontaneous appropriation of the gospel. The Romans, meanwhile, liked Augustinianism, because it defended the legitimacy of office against the claims of the Donatists and others who demanded real virtue as the condition of leadership.

In practice, however, popular Catholicism remained profoundly Pelagian, stressing the essential goodness of humanity and our capacity for wisdom and moral virtue. This trend gradually gained strength as civilization progressed and Christendom prospered and it found its voice when, after Christians took Toledo in the late eleventh century, they began translating the works of Aristotle into Latin from the Arabic and Hebrew in which they had been preserved, along with the works of Jewish and Islamic Aristotelians such as ibn Sina, ibn Rusd, and Moshe ben Maimon. This process eventually culminated in the formulation of what the Church eventually came to regard as its official theology: that of Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas completed the long synthesis between the ascent to God by means of rational dialectics and prophetic revelation –a synthesis which had begun with the work of Philo of Alexandria. For Thomas God is Esse, Being as such, and thus the Good that all things seek. Following Aristotle, he regarded the universe as an expression of the divine nature, naturally ordered to God, but added that each and everything in it had a created share in God’s Being. God is not, in other words, a divine sovereign standing over and against the universe decreeing whatever he wills, but rather the indwelling power of Being, the creative purpose in which all things participate according to their nature.

Thomas stressed the value of human reason, arguing that revelation built on but never contradicted what we know by sensation and abstraction. He also defended the essential goodness of human nature, arguing that we are weakened but not ruined by original sin, which darkens the intellect and weakens the will, leading us to pursue lesser goods than we otherwise might. But salvation is about far more than overcoming the effects of sin. Human beings naturally seek to know and love God, but being finite we cannot know or love God in essence.

Grace creates in us new capacities which allow us to do this, capacities which, however, we must cultivate. The Church helps us along in this regard, providing a framework of meaning and moral discipline. The moral law is whatever directs us towards our end –towards the full development of our capacities, natural and supernatural. A just society is one which promotes such development. And the Church, without in anyway diminishing its role as spiritual guide, also serves as a guardian of natural law, holding the public authorities accountable when they violate the norms of justice and working to transform structures which stand in the way of human development and civilizational progress.

This theology found a powerful popular base among the artisans and other creative sectors of the urban population in the middle ages –a base which was reflected in the rapid expansion of the mendicant orders and especially the Order of Preachers, but it threatened the emerging monarchies of the late middle ages and later the emerging bourgeoisies, neither of which wanted to be held accountable before the court of natural law. Even before Thomas’ death many of his views were condemned by clerics close to the emerging monarchies, even as the papacy sought to defend him. The result was full-blown Augustinian Reaction, a reaction which led ultimately to the Reformation. It is important to understand that Joseph Ratzinger spent the early part of his career as a scholar of St. Bonaventure who, though a personal friend of Thomas Aquinas, was very much a part of this reaction.

Except for a very brief period after the Reformation, when it was only on the basis of Thomas that the Church could defend itself effectively against the Reformers, Thomism was largely ignored by the hierarchy, which had effectively been tamed by the great Catholic monarchies (France, Spain, and Austria), which held an effective veto over papal elections. For the people, however, the Church’s decision against Luther and Calvin was a decision for human reason and human goodness against the doctrine of radical depravity, and for a spirituality of meaning and self-cultivation against a spirituality of authority and submission. While most Catholics had never heard of either Augustine or Thomas, with very few exceptions, at the popular level being Catholic meant being an (implicit) Thomist.

It was only in the nineteenth century, when it became clear that the monarchies on which the Church had relied for support were either dead or dying, that the great visionary Joachim Pecci (Pope Leo XIII) shifted the Church’s alliance policy, seeking to build a new base of support among the working classes. As a quite natural result of this he also embraced Thomism, the theology of creative purpose and of the creative classes, making it the official theology of the Catholic Church (The relevant document is Aeterni Patris.) This was, in many ways, the culmination of a nearly 2000 year long sorting out process, which separated the theology of creative purpose which became Catholicism from the deformations introduced by Paul and Augustine and so enthusiastically embraced by both Catholic reactionaries such as Anselm, Bonaventure, and Scotus and by the Reformers.

The result of this change was a flourishing of Social Catholicism as lay Catholics everywhere took up the struggle for economic justice and world peace. They organized trade unions and peasant leagues, fought side by side with liberals, socialists and communists against fascism, and sent a whole cadre of priests and other pastoral agents to Latin America and other parts of the Third World to swing the Catholic Church behind the cause of human development and civilizational progress. While the shining social democracy which is contemporary Europe certainly also owes a great deal to secular social democrats and communists, it is in large part a creation of the Social Catholicism which flowed out of Pecci’s option for Thomism. This is especially true of the European Union, which was the work first and foremost of Thomist-inspired Christian Democratic parties, not of free-market liberals or secular social democrats.

What happened? When the Church looked around in 1960 it saw a Europe at peace for the first time in ages, increasingly prosperous yet committed to social justice, and at least hospitable to the participation of lay Catholics in the public arena. But it also saw a Europe in which church attendance and other measures of traditional religiosity were dropping rapidly. This was the motive behind the Second Vatican Council, which was intended to fine-tune the Church’s pastoral strategy, lest Europe’s healthy embrace of the saeculum limit its spiritual horizons. This could have been done within the context of an enlarged and updated Thomism which engaged in a more integral dialogue (and struggle) with the modern world, and this was clearly the intent of John XXIII. But the theological trends which emerged as dominant in the wake of the council were profoundly Augustinian.

The emerging liberationist trend opted for a left-wing Augustinianism reminiscent of the Franciscan Spirituals who met God first and foremost in the poor, and ended up valuing poverty itself, rather than the cultivation of excellence. At the same time a new Augustinian Right emerged which regarded Neo-Thomism and Social Catholicism as too focused on the social apostolate and ineffective in communicating what they saw as the essential message of Christianity: human sinfulness and God’s offer of forgiveness. It is here that both Karol Woytila and Joseph Ratzinger must be located, along with others grouped around the journal Communio.

In between, what emerged as the centrist Concilium trend, of which Karl Rahner was probably the most important representative, argued that every human judgment implicitly presupposes the idea of God, and that it is quite possible for people to become “implicit Christians” without specifically either hearing or affirming the Christian gospel. While Rahner understood this as a (Thomistic) affirmation of the ordering of creation to God, the result was that he put a premium on internal, subjective experience without benefit of philosophical or theological training. This subjectivism was precisely what was being demanded by a broad segment of the increasingly literate Catholic middle classes but ultimately destructive of the habits of self-cultivation essential to the Thomistic project. The result of these developments has been not only to divide the Church, but also to render it impotent. The conciliar theology, like other bourgeois Augustinianisms before it, so defers to the private judgments of literate laity drawn from the middle and upper middle strata of society as to utterly undermine the prophetic office of the Church. The difficulty here is not the lay status of the individuals involved, but rather their class position.

The period since the Second World War generally, and the period since 1980 in particular, has witnessed the development of a very large and highly privileged class of “professionals” and managers. Because of their privileged position they are less likely than earlier intelligentsias to challenge the global hegemony of capital from which they derive significant benefit. Because of the overwhelmingly technical character of their education they are less capable than earlier intelligentsias of actually approaching philosophical and theological questions. Liberation theology served primarily as a means of swinging poor peasants and new proletarianized workers behind the modern-civilizational movement of socialism. While it persists as a significant current in Latin America and to a lesser extent in Asia and Africa, the crisis of socialism has left it without political direction, unable to offer much in the way of a concrete alternative to capitalist globalization. And so the Communio trend has become triumphant.

The coming months and years are likely to be disorienting for those who approach them without a sense of the history and theology of the Catholic Church. Joseph Ratzinger has, for example, condemned modern European culture as deeply in contradiction with not only Christianity but all of humanity’s religious traditions. He has also called for lifting the condemnation of Martin Luther. He talks about Christian unity while purging the Church of those who dissent from his theology. Liberals in particular will regard these statements and actions as contradictory and imagine a tug of war between a pope who, whatever his past, wants to be pastoral and a curia intent on maintaining its power and privilege. They will be wrong. Ratzinger’s fondness for Luther and his embrace of the cause of Christian unity are entirely coherent with his attack on modern Europe and on theologians who employ what he calls a “rationalist hermeneutic.” They have common roots in a radically Augustinian theology which regards God as an arbitrary cosmic sovereign, humanity as radically sinful, and the Christian gospel as first and foremost about divine forgiveness for those who submit --a theology shared by most Protestants, if not by historic Catholicism (or most liberal Protestantism and most Orthodoxy).

And what is so bad about such a theology? It is not, I would like to suggest, that it is critical of modernity, but that it fails to challenge modernity adequately. Modernity has, historically, left humanity with two alternatives: a nihilistic relativism which denies meaning and value (and thus, among other things, leaves the market allocation of resources beyond challenge) or these theologies of authority and submission, which actually date to the early modern era, which offer a humanity alienated by capitalist modernization refuge in submission to a divine sovereign. This divine sovereign was, first of all, a reflex of the absolute monarchies of the early modern era and then, later, of the seemingly arbitrary operation of modern forces. Today it is the favored theology of those sectors of capital most afraid of human creativity: those heavily invested in low wage, low technology activities which require strict labor discipline and which shun real competition. It is also the sort of theology which prepares people for fascism, which uses a spirituality of authority and submission as the basis for an authoritarian mass movement.

Joseph Ratzinger has been all but explicit that is his intent. Already in the 1980s he attacked the “new class” of highly educated professionals which was coming to dominate Europe and which had gained so much influence in North America. His argument for “writing off” Europe is a reflection of the fact that the European economy, centered as it is on high-end export products which require a skilled, educated workforce, provides little or no social basis for his theology. No doubt he imagines that he can capture the enormous evangelical upsurge in Africa and in Latin and North America to rebuild a base for a Church which he believes has lost Europe. In reality he will be capturing these regions for those sectors of capital which have opted for a low wage, low technology strategy and which thus do not need –which indeed are threatened by—a literate and creative workforce. He may also swing them behind a fascistoid attack on the centers of modern civilization –a civilization which, for all its flaws, is all we have.

A real critique of modernity would look very different from that proposed by Joseph Ratzinger. Instead of demanding submission to a divine sovereign it would draw attention to the indwelling of that creative purpose which alone explains why there is anything at all and which explains everything as the desire for God. It would not berate modernity for its hubris and over-reaching but rather chide it for underestimating what is really at work in this enormous upsurge of human creativity and gently correct its tendency to dominate nature and take control of human society rather than to nurture their best and most creative tendencies. It would, in short, affirm the essential goodness of everything natural and everything human while lifting the darkness of the intellect which prevents us from seeing their real meaning and combating the structural obstacles to the full development of human capacities. It would understand Europe –the Europe which Social Catholicism did so much to help create-- not as a failure, but as a work in progress.

The real tragedy of Ratzinger’s election is that it deprives the world of this message, which it desperately needs to hear. It is the Catholic message and now it is up to those of us “left behind” by Ratzinger’s departure from the Catholic Church to make sure that it is not lost.