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The Church in the Light of the Enlightenment

Tuesday 17 March 2009

by: The Chronicles of Favilla  |  Les Echos

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The author(s) writing as Favilla assert that "by reopening the door to fundamentalists - and not only the extreme case Mgr Williamson incarnates, the Vatican is privileging an authoritarian concept of religion over the dialogue and humanism the Vatican II Council" promoted. (Photo: DPA)

    A large segment of public opinion, Catholic and not, is shocked by two recent episodes in the life of the Church. Recall that the first decision consisted of lifting the excommunication covering members of a fundamentalist community, including the bishop, Williamson, author of "Shoah," denials he has never renounced. The second decision, made at the initiative of the Archbishop of Recife, consisted of excommunicating the mother and doctor of a nine-year-old girl for having undertaken an abortion after the child was raped by her stepfather.

    The emotion aroused by these two cases is such that - an extraordinarily rare occurrence - the Pope himself believed he had to write a letter to the bishops in which he acknowledged having committed an error of judgment with respect to Mgr Williamson, while, as for the Brazilian episcopate, it repudiated its Recife representative. Faced with these two affairs, many wonder how it was possible to attain such political blindness with respect to the first point and such human blindness in the second instance. It would be misguided to impute any anti-Semitic grounds to the first case or indifference to human misery to the second. The present Pope is, in fact, one of the most philo-Semitic for a long time, and the Church's many and strong positions against the injustices created by economic and social exploitation show its sensitivity to the issue of human misery.

    In truth, the crisis goes back much further. It's a doctrinal crisis. By reopening the door to fundamentalists - and not only the extreme case Mgr Williamson incarnates - the Vatican is privileging an authoritarian concept of religion over the dialogue and humanism the Vatican II Council at the beginning of the 1960s called for. By declaring that the law of God must trump that of man under all circumstances, the Archbishop of Recife clearly expressed that doctrinal option dear to all fundamentalisms. Moreover, this vertical and intangible conception of divine law is not without resonance with the theses of Muslim fundamentalism. Such a conception is obviously incompatible with the horizontal option maintained by democratic societies that emanated from the Enlightenment, which submit religious values to the test of human reasoning. To emerge from this crisis, the Roman Catholic Church will one day undoubtedly have to say clearly which of these conceptions is its own.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

  

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Comments

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The only hope is that this

 Wed, 03/18/2009 - 22:41 — David Spaethica (not verified)
The only hope is that this Vatican Stinker will fall down into the dust along with G.W. Bush in the annals of history.

I have difficulty with the

 Thu, 03/19/2009 - 00:05 — Texas Aggie (not verified)
I have difficulty with the statement that "It would be misguided to impute... indifference to human misery to the second." So much of what the catholic church has done through history has shown a total indifference to human misery. They were responsible for supporting the policies of the Spanish conquest in Latin America that brought only death and misery to the inhabitants, not just the original inhabitants, but the poor who came afterwards. Then the present pope has the nerve to say that they were "longing for the church to come to them." The church has fought programs in Mexico designed to help poor women because they require attendance at health classes that discuss family planning. The Mexican hierarchy has chastised the bishop who supported the Sandinistas in their struggle to get out from under the oppression of the politically powerful. The pope recently essentially said it was better that Africans should die of AIDS than use condoms. The church has too long a history of support for the power structure to maintain control of the poor and living off the misery of the powerless to believe that it is not indifferent to human suffering.