In the history of the papacy, Benedict XVI marks a caesura or a break, something quite ironic, given the fact that many traditionalist Catholics identify his pontificate with the “hermeneutics of continuity”.
This caesura is not only tied to his decision in 2013 to voluntarily resign the papal office but even more so to the fact that he has now been retired longer than he actually served as Bishop of Rome.
This has marked an extraordinary moment in the life of the Church and now Benedict’s recent penitential letter concerning historical cases of sex abuse in the Munich archdiocese he briefly led (1977-1982) must be added to the picture.
The letter was in response to a report on clergy abuse cases between 1945-2019 that said the former pope mishandled at least four such cases during his tenure as head of the Bavarian archdiocese.
Benedict’s letter has been received in different ways in different countries.
Some have criticized the former pope’s attempt to shift his own direct or indirect involvement in criminal actions to the spiritual dimension, and to make personal conscience decisive in a twist that makes a crime a moral fault to be confessed before God – and God alone.
Echoing the ways German Catholicism has dealt with guilt
As in everything that has been published under Benedict XVI’s name in the last few years, we cannot be sure about the true authorship of this letter. We do not know if he really wrote this, or maybe just part of it, or if he is fully aware of what is published with his signature.
But the letter echoes the ways in which German Catholicism has dealt with its historical responsibilities over this past century.
During the years the young Joseph Ratzinger was studying for the priesthood in Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s Germany, there was “collective silence” on the German Church’s participation in the Nazi regime.
Not all Germans were silent, however. In 1946, immediately after World War II ended, the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers published a collection of the lectures he gave at the University of Heidelberg between the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946.
The book, which was called The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage), examined the culpability of Germany as a whole in the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Jaspers, who had to leave his university post in 1937 mainly because he was married to a Jewish woman and was subject to a publication ban, distinguished between four different kinds of guilt.
From criminal to moral guilt
There is criminal guilt, where “jurisdiction rests with the courts”. There is political guilt which “results in me having to bear the consequences of the deeds of the state whose power governs me […] jurisdiction rests with the power”.
There is moral guilt: “I am morally responsible for all my deeds […] jurisdiction rests with my conscience”. And finally, there is metaphysical guilt: “jurisdiction rests with God alone”.
Despite the obvious and enormous differences between the culpability of Germany and of German Catholics as a whole in the Nazi regime on one side and of Catholics in the abuse crisis in the Church on the other side, there are lessons to be drawn which has not escaped German theologians. See, for example, a recent book by Julia Enxing.
Benedict’s letter can be seen as an attempt to reduce the question of guilt to sin, and therefore to metaphysical guilt.
This fits a certain pattern, not just of the German Catholicism in which Joseph Ratzinger grew up, but also of institutional Catholicism as a whole in dealing with the revelations of abuse.
In the Church’s relationship with the public square in the context of the abuse crisis over the past decades we have seen
1.) the dominance of criminal guilt (the legal strategies and courtroom approach) and
2.) especially after the shift of 2017-2018 (from Australia to Chile, to the McCarrick case, to Germany), the rise of political guilt (given the consequences of the nationwide investigations on the relationship between Church and State).
What is still largely missing is moral guilt, because it is something that involves a much larger number of Catholics.
Germany’s fundamental contributions to dealing with abuse
The history of abuse in the Church is not just a history of the small number of perpetrators and Church leaders who knew about the abuse, covered it up and protected criminals from justice.
It’s also the history of the much larger number of Catholics who for a long time knew something about the problem of abuse in the Church, but only much later became touched by those stories and decided to become part of the solution.
German Catholicism has, since 2010, become a model of constructive response to the abuse crisis. Look, for instance, at Germany’s fundamental contribution to the creation in 2012 of the “Center for Child Protection”, now “Institute of Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Dignity and Care” at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
Led by the German Jesuit Hans Zollner, it is the most important centre for forming the future generations of Catholic leaders in best practices for dealing with the issue of abuse.
This initiative happened during the pontificate of the German pope, Benedict XVI. And, to a certain extent, it is fair to say that was also thanks to his pontificate.
German history is instructive in helping us understand the trajectory of the Church’s reckoning with the abuse crisis.
The ways in which Catholics have dealt with the Holocaust are distinctly different from the ways in which they are dealing with the abuse crisis, given the uniqueness of the Shoah. But there are parallels that can teach us a few important lessons.
Lesson No. 1
The first is that the process of elaborating collective responsibility in tragedies involving the Church is a long one, with different phases, and with temporary setbacks due to the tendencies of the institution to defend itself.
A case in point is the major statement the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued on the Holocaust in 1998.
The text, called We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, included some problematic declarations that undercut a clear affirmation of the Church’s responsibility for some of what occurred during the Nazi era.
Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy, the commission’s president, was well aware that some of the additions that that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — then led by Cardinal Ratzinger — insisted be added to his text as a condition for its release were inaccurate, if not outrightly false.
Cassidy decided wisely that the value of that document outweighed the inclusion of what he knew were misleading assertions.
The process of the Catholic Church dealing with its responsibilities in Nazi anti-Semitism has continued. There are setbacks in the Church dealing with the scandal of abuse, but it is no longer possible to go back to the denialism that was typical up until a few years ago.
Lesson No. 2
The second lesson is that the Church dealing with the abuse crisis must take into account different dimensions of guilt.
For Catholicism today, the most difficult is the moral guilt, which must be translated in changes in theology and doctrine. It is the most difficult because it is not something that can be outsourced to the mass media, the police and justice system, or the power of states and governments.
It is something Catholics must do themselves, listening to the victims and survivors, their families, and outside experts (historians of psychological and social sciences, of medicine, of mentalities etc.).
This breadth of expertise is necessary to develop a deep theological comprehension of the phenomenon of abuse in the Church as something that is common to all human communities, but with distinct features in terms of institutional failures and spiritual consequences.
It takes time but this is the right path.
Lesson No. 3
The third lesson is a disturbing difference from the post-World War II period.
Now the question of guilt is not just about what happened in the past.
It is also something like proleptic guilt for what we fear or know is about to happen: more scandals and revelations of abuses in the context of the apocalyptic mood of contemporary culture — especially the looming environmental disaster.
Now the dominant disposition is existential anxiety about the future — not just the future of the Church, but also the future of the world. Vatican II was intent on reading the “signs of the times”, but we are now intent on reading the signs of end times.
Catholics must reject shallow optimism and instead look for hope.
Christian hope recovers the tragic dimension of history, in a deeper appreciation of the past – looking at the past as suffering seeking redemption.
We have barely started to recognize that the tragedy of abuse in the Church is a locus theologicus, a key source for the development of the Christian tradition.
- Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
- First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.
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