Kristin Colberg's fine essay in the December 2019 issue of Horizons clearly lays out the social, historical, and theological context for Pastor Aeternus. The year 1870 was a tumultuous, difficult, even dangerous, time for the Roman Catholic Church as it dealt with rationalism, challenges to secular as well as religious authority, new scientific ideas, and the loss of its own political power. When I have taught historical survey courses, I always stress the significance of context, and Pastor Aeternus is no exception. I also ask my students, when reading about controversial issues, to ask the question: “What is each position trying to protect?” Clearly, Pastor Aeternus is trying to protect the church's independence from secular powers, from perceived errors, and from forces of disunity both in society and in the church itself.
In many ways, the issues dealt with in 1870 remain with us still, although they are now in a much different context and take on very different expressions in 2020. The church is still struggling to deal with the challenges of the secular world, but the nature of those challenges has changed. Instead of fearing the loss of its political power, the church fears the loss of what is now a much more privatized morality. As the late Johann Baptist Metz put it so well in 1980, religion, particularly in the Global North, has become “bourgeois,” in the sense that it focuses not on the disruptive promises of the eschatological, “messianic” future but on maintaining the present, for “those with secure possessions, the people in this world who already have abundant prospects and a rich future.”Footnote 58
The unity of the church is also very much under threat in the present, although in different ways than it was in 1870. Pope Francis’ efforts to advance the pastoral identity of the church are encountering opposition by those who fear that the church is losing its power to confront the world, particularly when it comes to sexual morality. And the crisis of confidence in the church's moral leadership in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis has resulted in mass defections from institutional religion.
I see three ways that the concerns of Pastor Aeternus are still with us in the third decade of the twenty-first century: 1) how the church deals with what it perceives to be the most serious challenges of the modern world; 2) the unity of the church in the face of external and internal division; 3) the church's capacity to accept change and even to admit error. Although these are distinct issues, they are also connected. The events of the past 150 years have resulted in new issues, problems, and challenges for the church to face, but in some ways, the responses of defensiveness and confrontation are very much in line with the church of 1870. Then, as now, there are tensions between progressive and conservative forces in the church.
The Challenges of the Modern World
In 1864, Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors, which summarized the ways that the ideas of the modern world challenged what the church stood for. Rationalism, freedom of religion, political power, civil rights, all threatened the church's self-understanding and position in the world. Pastor Aeternus was in large part a response to the “war on the church” identified in the Syllabus and an effort to shore up the church's defenses. Since 1870, other Vatican documents have taken up what are perceived to be threats to the church, and in recent years, many of those threats also reflect a concern to challenge the ideas of the modern world: Pascendi, Casti Connubii, Humani Generis, Humanae Vitae, “The Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” Evangelium Vitae, Inter Insigniores, and Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, to name just a few. In each of these documents, the point is to emphasize a particular failure of secular society's understanding in relation to human knowledge and especially to theological anthropology. By saying this, I am not denying the significant changes in the church's positions as laid out, for example, in Gaudium et Spes or Dignitatis Humanae, which take a much more affirmative position on the church's relationship to the world or to fundamental human rights. Rather, the focus on conceptions of the person and sexuality seem to reflect what Metz laments as the “legal rigorism” that the church emphasizes as “the way to overcome the contradictions of bourgeois religion in Christianity, and to make the Christian alternatives to a bourgeois way of life really visible.”Footnote 59 Thus, gender and sexuality constitute the main battleground.
There is no question that there are serious challenges to the church in the present that emerge from the secular world. Unregulated capitalism, consumerism, hostility to refugees, a casual approach to sexuality, individualism, the loss of a sense of the sacred, are all, as Metz reminds us, contrary to “the virtues of Christianity which are … conversion and discipleship, love and acceptance of suffering …”Footnote 60 The institutional church has until recently, however, focused its juridical attention (i.e., condemnations, silencing) more on issues related to gender and sexuality than to these other challenges, so that they have come, especially in traditional circles, to symbolize all that the church has to fear from “the world.” Significantly, what has changed under Pope Francis is his greater emphasis on a pastoral approach to church teachings, especially on these issues.
The Unity of the Church
One of the more significant issues raised by Pastor Aeternus concerns the unity of the church through the primacy of the pope. Pastor Aeternus stresses the authority of the pope and his “full and supreme power” as teacher and judge. The language is striking: Pastor Aeternus stresses the obligation of all to recognize “hierarchical subordination and true obedience, to submit, not only in matters which belong to faith and morals, but also in those that appertain to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world” and that “not a few are found who take away from its authority.”Footnote 61 It is striking to read these words now, as serious challenges to the authority of Pope Francis come from some members of the hierarchy itself, as well as some among the laity. In April 2019, a group of bishops and theologians charged Pope Francis with heresy in an Open Letter. Their evidence came largely from Amoris Laetitia and from other statements made by Pope Francis, as well as other bishops and clergy, which suggested that a greater openness to LGBTQ persons and to divorced and remarried couples constituted heresy.Footnote 62
Two things are worth noting here. First, the focus of the letter-writers is largely on sexual morality as the main indicator of heretical views. As I mentioned previously, sexual morality tends to be the main focus of the conflict of the church with the world. It is no surprise that traditionalist groups emphasize opposition to abortion and gay and lesbian relationships, and they promote complementary roles for the sexes. Second, most of the objections expressed in the Open Letter decry a greater pastoral openness to people who, because of their sexual orientation or marital status, find themselves marginalized by official church policy. Unlike Pastor Aeternus, which stresses the juridical power of the pope and of the church, and anathematizes those who disagree, and unlike his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Pope Francis has taken no steps to discipline theologians or bishops on these issues. For his opponents, unity is understood cognitively as being in full accordance with official church teaching, particularly with regard to issues of gender and sexuality. Yet for Francis, unity is understood pastorally, and pastoral issues seldom admit of either/or, black/white solutions.Footnote 63Pastor Aeternus, for many reasons, saw the situation of the church at the time in either/or terms, but clearly Francis does not. The church, he suggests, is a “field hospital,” itself wounded, caring for other wounded members in charity. As John O'Malley has pointed out with regard to Vatican II, this difference of style is not merely rhetorical but substantially significant.Footnote 64
Change and Error
Perhaps nothing seems to threaten the authority of the church more than an admission of error. There is an old joke that when church teaching changes, as it has on a number of issues (usury, slavery, religious freedom), the official church statement begins, “As we have always taught…” To be sure, there is an obligation to the continuity of church teaching, but absolute continuity is nonexistent. Church teaching always arises out of a particular context in relation to events, people, and location.Footnote 65
Gender and sexuality are prime examples of contextual theology. As Michel Foucault and others have shown, sexuality itself has a history.Footnote 66 So the crucial question is how changing understandings of the person and of sexuality can be reconciled with a theological anthropology that is faithful to both tradition and experience. Medieval arguments against the ordination of women were based in women's inferiority to men, ideas that were grounded in the biology of the period.Footnote 67 More recent arguments, especially as spelled out by John Paul II, are based in a complementarian model that sees all of reality, including the divine, in gendered terms.Footnote 68 Arguments against same-sex relationships rely on this gendered conception as well as on allegorical biblical interpretations.Footnote 69 Here, it is helpful to ask the question I raised previously: What is each side trying to protect? What is at stake?
In this case, feminist theologians argue that the maleness of God and of the priesthood are ultimately idolatrous. Men are understood to be more like God than are women, so what is at stake is the full and equal humanity of women as well as men. Complementarian theologians argue that biblical and traditional conceptions of gender are divinely revealed and do not change over time. What is at stake is the authority of the tradition. Maintaining the authority of the tradition safeguards the church from the dangers of the secular world.
Such a strong emphasis on traditional gender roles and sexual morality has proven to be the Achilles’ heel of the church in the sexual abuse crisis. Although only a small minority of clergy were abusers, the secrecy, defensiveness, and disregard for victims on the part of the hierarchy with regard to the most important moral issue the church faces has resulted in a massive loss of trust on the part of the laity. And although the causes of clerical abuse are complex—problems in formation, education, supervision, and abuse of power, to name only a few—the church's willingness to admit error and accept the need for change remains insufficient.
Conclusion
My point in these reflections is to understand how the church's antagonistic stance toward “the world,” its struggle to be unified, and its reluctance to change have taken on different forms in 1870 and 2020. I have said much more about the contexts of Pastor Aeternus and the present time than on the issue of papal authority. So let me close with observing that in 2020, we are now witnessing a very different exercise of papal authority: one that takes on a more pastoral approach to problems, that is more tolerant of different views, and that seeks to reform the institution itself. To what extent the efforts of Pope Francis will bear lasting fruit is a question whose answer is still unknown.
