Dubious Demonizing. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Nov 3, 2000 by Joseph A. Komonchak

Cardinal Ratzinger
The Vatican's Enforcer
of the Faith
John L. Allen Jr.
Continuum, $24.95, 328 pp.

A French priest got into trouble during the antimodernist repression of the early 1900s when he suggested a radical reform of the Roman curia that would reduce it to two offices, one a congregation for the defense of the faith and another to defend Catholics against the actions of the first congregation. One can sympathize, particularly when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) is making unprecedented claims to near-sovereign authority in dealing with a host of problems in the church today.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger once said that the CDF has the sadly necessary duty of dealing with "the pathology of faith." Under his leadership it appears to have found a good deal of illness. In recent years it has been more noted for its warnings and punishments than for the positive promotion of doctrine that Pope Paul VI proposed as its chief purpose when, at the close of Vatican II, he set out new norms for what until then had been called the Holy Office. The CDF's recent actions have made Cardinal Ratzinger the target not only of criticism but of downright vilification.

John L. Allen tells us in his preface that he was startled by the CDF's actions because they ran counter to the Vatican II Catholicism in which he, born in 1965, had been raised. He set out to discover what might have led Ratzinger, one of the progressive theologians at the council, to the series of positions he has expressed both in private speeches and articles and in the official actions of his office. Allen wanted his book to avoid the polarization in the contemporary church that he nicely describes: "Neither side is willing to spend the intellectual effort to deeply understand the concerns that drive their opponents, the arguments that have led them to the conclusions they hold, the alternatives they have considered and rejected."

Rome bureau chief for the National Catholic Reporter, Allen presumably counts himself among those journalists who he says, with greater confidence than many can muster, "instinctively seek 'all sides' of a discussion." Unfortunately, Allen seems to think that there are only two sides on most of the issues he raises, and he finds Ratzinger regularly on the wrong one.

In his preface, Allen has a few lines about Ratzinger's personal kindness and sincerity and near the end of the book almost three pages on four points on which he thinks the cardinal worth listening to. But Allen sees himself as a product and representative of what he calls, with a reference to Michael Harrington's famous book, "the other Catholicism," inspired and shaped by Vatican II. It is the "evolving, socially engaged, compassionate Catholicism that was the incubator of my faith," and what he thinks Ratzinger is trying to curb. He contrasts Catholic "reformers" with "restorationists" and a "traditionalist camp" in which he includes Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Theologians are divided into "a minority reflexively loyal to Rome" and a majority "who are instinctively suspicious of church authority." There hardly ever appears to be, in any of these contrasts, a middle ground.

The same oversimplifying framework controls Allen's detailed treatment of Roman actions with regard to liberation theology, women and homosexuals, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, and moral theology. Because the issues at stake are most often presented in either-or terms and the points at debate are reviewed with little depth or nuance, the drama of the confrontations is reduced to a series of power plays by an "enforcer" and the consequences are described hyperbolically. The end of one chapter will give a sense of the whole treatment: "Like Ratzinger's crusades against liberation theology, feminism, and gay rights, the pall that he has cast over ecumenism and interreligious dialogue has had consequences beyond the borders of academic theology. It has contributed to making the world a more fractured, and therefore a more dangerous, place."

These descriptions are preceded by chapters in which Allen reviews Ratzinger's youth under Hitler's regime, from which he believes the cardinal has not yet learned all the lessons ("Having seen fascism in action, Ratzinger today believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism"); superficially discusses the chief theological influences on Ratzinger's thought; explores his role at Vatican II, his disappointment at the council's aftermath, and what Allen considers the decisive experience of student unrest at the University of Tubingen in 1968. He also selectively reviews three of Ratzinger's major works, and rapidly describes his brief term as archbishop of Munich before he was appointed head of the CDF. Much useful information can be found here, but the treatment is very uneven, inadequately documented, and marred by historical and bibliographical mistakes.

The most convincing section offers evidence that, contrary to the cardinal's repeated claim, his views on a number of important issues (collegiality, episcopal conferences, tradition, liturgy, ecumenism, divorce and remarriage) have changed over the decades. Allen finds continuity, however, in an enduring Augustinian counterposing of church and culture. There is something to this, and its roots lie in an anthropology and epistemology that profoundly shape the fashion and the terms in which Ratzinger spontaneously frames an issue. Had this theological key been explored at greater length and with greater subtlety, Allen might have been more successful in situating Ratzinger within the history and variety of twentieth-century Catholic theology and in analyzing the tensions that divide Catholics. Instead he is content with the kind of Manichaean journalism from which Catholics suffer so much today.