A look at the bureaucratisation of the Church and the Shamazon Sin-od.
From One Peter Five
By Honora Kenney
We’ve heard it before: universities have changed. Professors no
longer teach “Shakespeare 101,” but “Shakespeare and Gender in
Multimedia” or “Elizabethan Bard Culture.” And poets like Milton and
Crashaw have been “canceled.” The classics aren’t just too dead, too
white, and too male — they’re too elitist now, too. To delight in the
grandeur of their language is classist bigotry. Analyzing comic books is
far nobler, a celebration of the proletarian spirit.
As you walk through the halls of a liberal arts building, instead of
hearing rousing classroom debates about the objective merits of
historical texts or works of art, you’ll hear “dialogues” dancing around
relativist interpretations. “Well, I feel that Van Gogh’s
being a bit aggressive in this piece,” a student might say. (No, kid, he
chopped his ear off just for fun.) And papers won’t address beautiful
versus ugly or up versus down. They’ll just explore alternative
horizontal “pathways” for “reinterpreting” art and literature in
“subversive” new ways.
These changes are driven and sustained by university administrations — which have become increasingly bureaucratic.
And the “bureaucratic turn” makes sense if you think about how the
courses operate. After all, it requires multiple lateral “pathways” in
order to sustain exploratory “dialogues” about “building campus
culture,” when you could instead have vertical command chains that
simply execute effectively. (But why pay a starving adjunct professor a
decent wage when you could be paying the campus’s new fleet of
“diversity officers”? And besides, hierarchies may be effective, but
they’re also inherently patriarchal, and we can’t have that.)
The seeds of change within the university were planted decades ago,
with “folks” like Michel Foucault dismissing entire artistic movements
as simple power struggles between oppressed and non-oppressed. The new
“folks” are the students themselves, who scour textbooks looking for
reasons to be offended before running off to bully campus leaders into
action, whether it’s covering murals, razing statues, or banning books.
So too with the Vatican. For decades now, Rome’s faithful have been
subjected to the low rumble of intensifying drumbeats — and I’m not just
talking about the bongo drums that replaced Gregorian chant and
Palestrina at Mass. These are the drumbeats of change — and with this
month’s Amazon Synod, they’re coming to the end of their crescendo.
How best to foster Catholicism among the Pan-Amazonian region is a
valiant pursuit, to be sure: Christ commissioned the faithful to spread
the Gospel across the Earth, and the Amazon presents evangelization
challenges that warrant attention. For example, lack of priests means
administration of the sacraments in some areas is devastatingly scarce.
In the past, when similar obstacles presented themselves, the best
missionaries doubled down on virtue, calling on Christ to strengthen
them in compassion, chastity, and humility so they might best serve
their flocks. Many even shed their blood, dying as martyrs and saints.
One imagines that a renewed emphasis on such heroic selflessness could
help the Vatican fulfill its goal of spreading Catholicism in the
Amazon. After all, we’re seeing evidence that young people in the Church
are responding to challenges
that entail rigor, intensity, and zeal. They like the traditional Latin
Mass, incense, and veils. They’d probably like legendary missionaries
like St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, too, if they had a
chance to get to know them.
Only the Vatican doesn’t see it that way. “The subject of the Synod
we are inaugurating is, ‘Amazonia: New Pathways for the Church and for
an integral ecology,’” said Cardinal Cláudio Hummes during introductory
remarks on Oct. 7. “The theme addressed follows the broad pastoral
guidelines characteristic of Pope Francis for creating new pathways.”
Ah, pathways! Got it.
Among key topics to be addressed, the cardinal listed the role of
women, support for the Earth and the poor, and “the Church’s Amazonian
face: inculturation and interculturality in a missionary-ecclesial
context.” Huh?
The number of social justice buzzwords alone is enough to trigger
PTSD in those who survived “first-year experience” programming at their
universities. Is the Amazon Synod just one big diversity workshop,
swarming with its own version of obsequious campus bureaucrats in
matching collared shirts, armed with PowerPoints, clipboards, and “swag
giveaways” galore?
Only time will tell, but traditional Catholics, many already feeling burned from the last two synods, were already raising alarm bells when they discovered some of the ideas in a working document
that circulated earlier this year. The events that have unfolded since
the synod kicked off on Sunday have done nothing to allay their fears.
Chief among the controversial ideas was that of married priests. Back
in June, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller (one of the two remaining “dubia cardinals”)
warned that the working document posed threats to the tradition of
priestly celibacy. And now his predictions are proving augural. The news
from day four of the Synod (Oct. 9), from Bishop Erwin Kräutler, was
that two thirds of the attending prelates were in favor of ordaining
married men. And where there are calls for married priests, calls for
female clergy are sure to follow. “Many of the bishops are in favor of
the ordination of female deacons,” Krautler told reporters.
It may be fun to debate these topics in a high school theology class
or at Thanksgiving dinner after one too many brandies, but at a synod,
the debate should have no place. The Church has spoken definitively on
this issue for hundreds of years and has provided multiple illuminating
reasons why priests are unmarried, celibate males (chief among them that
they emulate Christ, Himself an unmarried, celibate male). The ruling
is literally set in stone, with the stone being the apostle Peter, on
whom Christ built the Church.
Another issue of concern is that of environmentalism. Yes, Catholics
are called to be stewards of the earth, but their stewardship must
reflect a proper understanding of nature’s place within a vertical
hierarchy. Per Catholic teaching, nature is subordinate to man, and man
is subordinate to God. Yet much of the synod language wants to blend (or
“integrate”) the three, as if nature, mankind, and God were entities
connected across a horizontal plane (as in the structure of a
bureaucracy).
For a visual representation of these conflicting schemas, consider
the distribution of the Eucharist. Historically, the priest, standing —
and acting in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) — would
lower his anointed hand and place the Eucharist directly on the tongue
of the communicant, who would be kneeling upon the ground before the
altar. So, per the doctrine, the divine was literally descending from a
higher plane to the lower plane of man, who was kneeling upon a still
lower plane, the earth. Today’s Eucharistic distribution, though, aligns
more with the types of lateral structures advocated at the synod. A lay
minister (who is not ordained to act in persona Christi)
stands before the communicant, who is also standing, and the host is
exchanged from one mortal hand to the other, moving only horizontally
instead of vertically, from person to person (instead of from divine to
person), and remaining within one plane.
Arguing about Eucharistic distribution may seem like a trifling
matter of style, but as literature professors used to teach (back when
they taught the classics), style informs content. Besides, the synod’s
been open season for jabs against stylistic details since day two, when
Pope Francis quipped against the biretta, a cap favored by more traditionalist clergy.
But such academic analyses return us to the topic of universities,
and their increasingly bureaucratic administrations (with diversity
bureaucrats serving as just one example). As either a catalyst or a
consequence of this bureaucratic turn, their content dissemination
operates bureaucratically as well. When it comes to writing papers or
discussing ideas, there is no right or wrong, up or down, good or bad.
There is no emulating Shakespeare or Hemingway and attempting to elevate
one’s own humbler language to match theirs. There are just horizontal
pathways to new interpretations (Freudian, Lacanian, or otherwise) of
their work.
Now we are watching the Vatican follow suit. The pope has gathered his diversity bureaucrats
to hem and haw over pathways and dialogues for achieving abstract
ideals such as “inculturation and interculturality.” But they’ve made it
clear that like the universities, they want to make their content
dissemination bureaucratic as well. The only problem is that their
content is God’s love, the apprehension of which traditionally entails
embracing hierarchy and objective truth (to put it mildly). Instead, the
approach advocated by the Synod is “decidedly naturalistic and
horizontalist, at loggerheads with the supernatural and vertical
character of the revealed religion of Christ” as Peter Kwasniewski put it.
Against this backdrop, a rumor swirled last Tuesday that Pope Francis denied the divinity of Christ
in an interview with Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari. The next day,
instead of confirming or denying the rumor, the Vatican P.R. gurus took
a page from the college-kid playbook, dutifully reciting possible
“pathways” as to what may have actually transpired. It may be that Scalfari misinterpreted, or it may
be that he’s fudging. It wasn’t until Thursday that another Vatican
official, Dr. Paolo Ruffini, issued a heartier rejection of Scalfari’s
claim.
Unfortunately, when the pope persists in granting interviews to a
reporter who’s already attributed heretical statements to him in the
past, and when he deploys vague responses through multiple bureaucratic
channels rather than through one definitive statement, he risks grave
confusion. The world may just default to the most scandalous
pathway of all: that the pope doesn’t actually think Christ is divine,
but just another man. You know, one of us “folks.”
Honora Kenney is a media professional who writes from Brooklyn, New
York. She has a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from the University
of Notre Dame.
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