The Church as Gyroscope, or Counterweight?

St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, Rome

As I indicated in A New Pope, I am like other "liberal" American Catholics who are wary of the reign of the newly installed Benedict XVI. Columnist Jules Witcover of The Baltimore Sun, himself a liberal Catholic, has this article about the situation in this morning's edition.

Of the former Cardinal Ratzinger, Witcover writes of Catholic Americans' concerns with his ...

... rigid adherence to church orthodoxy in barring women from the priesthood and marriage for male priests, in categorical opposition to abortion and to the use of condoms in the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

Moreover, Cardinal Ratzinger, in a memorandum to a leading American cleric during the 2004 presidential campaign, sent at a time when certain American prelates and priests favored denying Holy Communion to Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, because he was pro-choice ...

... appeared to sanction the same denial to any Catholic who supported a pro-choice candidate for that reason.

"A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation with evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion," the German cardinal wrote, "if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia."

Such stands on specific issues fit in with a worldview then-Cardinal Ratzinger expressed as recently as his homily to the conclave of cardinals who would elevate him to pope in the coming days, in which ...

... he warned that the world was "moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires."

Elsewhere [Witcover continues], he equated this relativism with Marxism, liberalism and feminism to be shunned by all Catholics.

I take this ultra-orthodoxy, this aversion to "relativism," as a sign that the new pope, if he had his way, would have the church and the world march in lockstep to a single drummer. That, after all, is what relativism's opposite, absolutism, is all about: there is supposedly one absolute source of values and morals, and if the world doesn't march to its beat, it's on its way to hell in a proverbial handbasket.

But, as I suggest in Emergent Expectedness, Emergent Evolvability in my Beyond Darwin blog, when any "society" composed of semi-autonomous agents coupled loosely together in networks of mutual aid and support starts marching to a single drumbeat, uh oh. Though the uniform drumbeat seems the perfect antidote to rumors of incipient chaos, it too harms the evolvability and survivability of the society in adapting to inevitable change.

I think Pope Benedict imagines the Catholic Church as a counterweight to change. Better he should imagine it as a gyroscope, dynamically spinning out the sort of change society needs today, meanwhile keeping things steady and on course.

Today, the church and the society as a whole need the affirmation of women that would come if women could be priests. Also needed is a recognition that not all good priests need be celibate. And an admission that sheer concern for the lives of millions demands that the church stop opposing condoms as barriers to AIDS.