Le Monde , March 20, 2009.
The Catholic Church is experiencing a crisis of unprecedented magnitude for several decades. This crisis is all the more profound because its credibility has been undermined in all circles: among non-Catholics, among cultural Catholics, and among practicing faithful. The Church is not the victim of an external aggression: the causes of its current ills are not the work of "enemies of the faith" or anticlericals. Two serious cases, which are the responsibility of its hierarchy, have brutally exposed its contradictions: the lifting of the excommunication of four fundamentalist bishops, including one who held Holocaust denial views, and the excommunication, almost simultaneously, by the Archbishop of Recife, of a mother and a medical team who had performed an abortion on a 9-year-old girl pregnant with twins, a victim of rape, and whose life was in danger.
Added to this were the words of Benedict XVI on the plane taking him to Africa, the continent most affected by the AIDS pandemic: "We cannot solve the problem of AIDS by distributing condoms; on the contrary, their use aggravates the problem." The first affair was especially scandalized by the odious negationist remarks of Bishop Williamson and the triple fault of the Vatican, which did not inform the Pope of comments known to informed circles since November 2008; which promulgated the decree on January 24th while these remarks had been making the headlines in the world's media since January 22nd; and finally by the slowness of their condemnation.
But this "unconditional" lifting of excommunication, a preamble to a process of reintegration into the Church, has also deeply troubled many Catholics attached to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and its values of religious freedom and dialogue with other religions, constantly denied by fundamentalists. In the letter to the bishops made public on March 12, the Pope acknowledges errors in the handling of the Williamson affair and attempts to justify the lifting of excommunication using the argument of mercy: "Whoever proclaims God as love pushed "to the end" must give witness to love: devote themselves lovingly to those who suffer."
One might understand that, in the name of the Gospel message, the Pope wants to forgive and give a new chance to lost sheep who have been speaking extremist and intolerant words for years. But then why does the Church continue to forbid communion to divorced and remarried people? Why does it condemn with such harshness the relatives of a raped girl who saved her life by having her aborted? Should mercy only apply to fundamentalists? And how can the rape of a child be considered less serious than an abortion, especially one carried out for vital reasons?
The scandal is such that several French bishops have risen to condemn an unjust decision that contradicts not only common morality, but also the Gospel message. Suffice it to cite the episode where Jesus refuses to condemn an adulterous woman, who, according to the law, must be stoned, and tells the ultra-legalists of the time: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" (John 8). He himself transgressed religious law several times. Dostoevsky had imagined that if Jesus had returned to Torquemada's Spain, he would have been condemned to the stake for having preached freedom of conscience. One wonders, in the Church of Benedict XVI, if he would not be excommunicated for having advocated surpassing the law through love?
No one is asking the Church to renounce asserting its convictions. But what is not acceptable is the theoretical and sometimes brutal way used by the hierarchy to reaffirm the norm, when only concrete, singular, and complex situations exist. As Bishop Yves Patenôtre, Bishop of the French mission, pointed out, the decision of excommunication pronounced by the Archbishop of Recife, confirmed by Rome, "ignores the traditional pastoral practice of the Catholic Church, which is to listen to people in difficulty, to accompany them, and, in matters of morality, to take into account the 'lesser evil'." The same can be said for the fight against AIDS. The use of condoms is undoubtedly not the ideal solution, but it remains, in fact, the best defense against the spread of the epidemic for all those who have difficulty living the abstinence and fidelity advocated by the Church. African priests know something about this.
The history of the Church is marked by this permanent tension between fidelity to the message of compassion for each person of its founder and the attitude of its leaders who often end up losing sight of this message to favor the interest of the institution - which has become an end in itself - or to lock themselves into a punctilious, absurd and dehumanizing legalism.
The pontificate of John Paul II was marked by a profound ambiguity: intransigent and traditionalist on moral and doctrinal levels, he was also a man of dialogue and heart, multiplying strong gestures towards the humble and other religions. Benedict XVI is the heir only to the conservative side of his predecessor. And there are no longer in the Church Abbé Pierre or Sister Emmanuelle, these "believable believers," to raise a rant in the face of dehumanizing dogmatic decisions, thus playing a cathartic role and serving as valuable mediators between the faithful and the institution.
A silent schism threatens the Church on its left, far more serious than that of the traditionalists. Benedict XVI intended to re-evangelize Europe. He may have succeeded only in winning back a handful of fundamentalists, at the expense of losing many faithful attached to evangelical values and individuals in search of meaning to whom Rome seems no longer able to offer anything but dogma and norms.