Do you also know such statements from conversations with friends and acquaintances?
"If the church doesn't change fundamentally now, it's over for me and the church!" Over?
Exit and turning away. "Exit and voice" (Albert Hirschman). There is exit with voice and turning away without exit. Which is worse? That was before the pandemic, when the "synodal path" was seen as a departure for new shores. When I look around at my friends and acquaintances, there's not much sign of that anymore.
For whom can the church still be saved?
The Catholic Church lost more than half a million members last year. However, there are still around 22 million left. Worldwide, there are 1.4 billion Catholics.
The quoted sentence captures a picture of a relationship: disappointment about a lack of reaction, a feeling of being stained by rather unpleasant facts and the confrontation with a contact debt in relation to an institution that has become alien to you, but is possibly still important.
According to Max Weber, the church is an institution of salvation. It provides the faithful with goods of salvation in the form of statements and practices that enable them to deal with questions of ultimate meaning in such a way that they find meaning, consolation and an escape route for their becoming in time. In doing so, Christianity should bring forth the simultaneously proud and humble awareness of incomprehensible grace through faith, which is a gift and not a duty. If I take the title of our conference first, it stands for
Everything is at stake.
As the other side of the glory of which one can experience when singing the Gloria, when visiting Cologne Cathedral
or when listening to a Psalm of David ("the heavens declare the glory of God"), the wretchedness of the church in dealing with the abuse of young, vulnerable and dependent people has been revealed.
You don't even want to imagine the crime scenes. The sacristy, the first-aid rooms in the boarding school, the showers on the youth church outing, the smiles that slip away in a stare. What is almost worse is the cover-up of the events, the recycling of the perpetrators, the lies in the events, the reprimanding of the witnesses and the disregard for the victims by the officials. And when you realise that the next wave is still to come with the case of the Catholic Church in Poland, you want to hand in your cutlery immediately. No third-party facilities (competitive sport, the Odenwald School or the children's day care centres), no sense of repair (after all, we have commissioned reports and consulted experts) and no desire to forget (organisations of a certain size always build up a secretive underground) will help. Apologies and compensation for victims are important, but nobody seriously believes that this can save the church. Benedict probably realised this in the end and therefore took early retirement.
There is no question today that, in addition to narcissistic problems ("shiny megalomania"), the lack of intimacy over many years and a malignant empathy (targeted man-catching), the spiritual power of a priestly class endowed with notions of exceptionalism encouraged the abuse of addicts and minors. But is this not why the ecclesiastical institution of salvation needs other priests, but does it need to replace the individualised priesthood with a general priesthood? Of course, this would then bring with it the probably unstoppable Protestantisation of the Catholic Church. It looks as if the Church has been overwhelmed by the gates of hell and the question arises as to whether the Church can still make its promise of salvation credible under this condition.
Rescue measures
The person who could have made the statement quoted at the beginning of this article would of course have to accept the question of what fundamental change could enable the church to credibly offer its goods of salvation again. We could probably quickly agree on three prerequisites for the church's production of goods of salvation:
Civil jurisdiction, especially with regard to criminal law, must also apply within the church. Civil law breaks church law.
Then a separation of spiritual-pastoral and social-care-charitable competences is necessary. The bishops and the vicars-general who work with them are obviously overburdened with their all-encompassing competences. This does not mean that Caritas, for example, can do without Christian inspiration.
The expansion of a system of deacons alongside priests, rather than below them, has also been overdue since the Second Vatican Council.
Finally, the self-examination of candidates for the priesthood must be professionalised. The pupils from the good families and the gifted educational climbers seem to have died out. Pious and free would be a good formula for such a "self-assessment".
But these measures will not convince anyone that the Church can regain its ability to save finite people with their infinite questions. On the contrary, we are witnessing a self-absorbed institution of salvation that is primarily seeking to save itself on a journey with the people of God. With a little distance, the Synodal Way does indeed appear to be the expression of an introverted church that has lost contact with the world and with people. It is about the validity and mission of a church that has long since ceased to be at the centre of public life. Basically, since the secularisations following the French Revolution, it is no longer at the centre, but on the fringes of modern public life. People are far more interested in what the state does, how the economy works, what science has to offer and what is going on in sport than in the missionary and apostolic task of the church.
Christianity as a bone of contention
What does this insight mean for a credible positioning of the church in our social world?
It is not part of society, but makes a difference to society by addressing people not as citizens, economic subjects, media users or sports audiences, but as mortal, needy and anxious people.
And it does not do this in a therapeutic, social care or culture-building attitude, but refers to the Holy Scriptures and administers liturgical worship. The Church transmits readings and celebrates assemblies, thereby preserving a long-lasting memory of the human approach to questions of ultimate meaning: what is written about them and how we can come together around them. The Mass is reading and consecration. However, the priestly person as the central celebrant must not imagine too much. The homily, which Catholics know should not last longer than ten minutes, offers a proxy reading of the Word that is intended to help the listeners' own reading. And in the Eucharist, the priestly person opens the circle in which the congregation is to gather in view of God and in remembrance of the many who have looked to God in this way before and who will look to God in this way afterwards. In this way, the church becomes the governor of a double reference to time in its practices of salvation:
By referring to changing readings of the one scripture, it illustrates the passing time of historical existence as a collective and as an individual and, through the common cult, it also makes it clear that those gathered are in a line with those who came before and those who will follow. In other words, it familiarises the faithful with the ontological facts of the temporal time limit and the supratemporal references of their lives. It lets us know and experience that we will all die, just as all have died before us and all will die after us.
It does this as a world church, which has somehow allied itself with all regional religions and local cults in the course of universalisation, globalisation and colonisation from Europe and in this way has formed a transverse structure of world society. Everywhere and at all times, people ask how their limited lifetime connects with the other, possibly also limited, time of the world. This does not have to be as intimidating and world-denying as in Europe and post-Europe; one can imagine it to be more joyful or more relaxed and world-affirming. But the fact that our existence in the world is questionable cannot be upheld or condemned as a European speciality, where Christianity is seen as the result of an accidental and transient constellation of historical circumstances on non-European soil.
Hopefully, Christianity will remain a bone of contention and an object of contradiction until the end of time. Until then, in the words of Karl Rahner, hopeful patience in the opacity of temporary existence remains the only way to eternal life.
