The City of God

Bearing the Cross

David Van Biema's "The Turning Point" in the May 2, 2005, issue of TIME magazine gives much insight into the intellectual and spiritual formation of our new pope, Benedict XVI.

It also helps me understand why he and I — though I am a Roman Catholic — don't sing from the same hymn book.

At the root of our disagreement is a different attitude toward "ordo, God's all-inclusive order." Pope Benedict, as Joseph Ratzinger before he became a cardinal and then Holy Father, lionized saints Bonaventure and Augustine. Augustine postulated The City of God, the name of one of his two major books (the other being his Confessions). "A key concept" of that book, Van Biema writes, "is that the Christian church is superior and essentially alien to its earthly surroundings."

As such, the "eternal, divine truth" of the church seems to represent to His Holiness the only true foundation for worldly order: "the only bulwark against man-made 'truths' ranging from the mischievous to the murderous." Faith in the "city of man," by way of contrast, can be a recipe for chaos.

Not that "experimentation" with "free and liberal thoughts" within the church is always forbidden. During the mid-1960's Ratzinger was in fact a key architect of Vatican II reforms, including the earth-shaking 1965 document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), also called "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." It has since been cited by liberals and reformers

... as a mandate for the church to come into synch with modern Western culture. That means loosening its hierarchical authority, encouraging internal debate and external outreach and honoring individual freedom of conscience ... .

But then in 1968, while Ratzinger was a teacher at the University of Tübingen in Germany, dialogue with the left turned to disruption. Student strikes, Ratzinger's former friend and now-antagonist Hans Küng reports, "triggered a huge fright. Ratzinger believed that he was in some way responsible, guilty of the chaos, and that the university and society and church were collapsing."

Since then, the less-liberal in the church have re-envisioned Gaudium et Spes as being "far less expansive than liberals imagine." Meanwhile, as a cardinal, Ratzinger became prefect of the Vatican's "heresy-hunting office," which had since been renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and which he had once been critical of as "an all too smoothly functioning [body] which prejudged every question almost before it had come up for discussion."

In that role during the 1980s — even if his various decisions and pronouncements on the subject of "liberation theology" were shaded and nuanced, and not necessarily simplistic — Cardinal Ratzinger "effectively crippled the philosophy's influence and wounded the prestige of sympathizers like the Jesuits." (Liberation theology was a movement, primarily in Latin America, in which Catholic priests sided with local Marxists on behalf of the poor and against their repression by entrenched rich oligarchies.)

When the man who would one day become pope was traumatized by the German academic upheavals of 1968, according to his former assistant and friend Wolfgang Beinart, "at that moment Ratzinger the reformer decided the necessary conditions for reform did not exist." Ratzinger apparently concluded that the City of God needed rigidity, not openness. That rigidity has been the story of his career for over three decades.

The fact that I resent this rigidity says as much about me as it does about objective truth. I was some 20 years younger than the forty-something Ratzinger when, also in 1968, "liberal" protest against the war in Vietnam turned ugly and "radical" here in this country. I never bought into the rationale for that change ... and as a result I have never felt particularly "mugged by reality" in the wake of that development. It was a tragic mistake to go "radical" ... but that was no reason for me to stop hoping for a "liberal" world of greater justice and freedom.

In those days, I was not a Catholic. As the child of lapsed Protestants, I was attending Jesuit-run Georgetown University despite my lack of religious affiliation. I accordingly imbibed the heady spirit of Gaudium et Spes and the rest of Vatican II at a slight distance, since I had known little of the heavy-handed ways of the earlier church.

But from what I heard, I knew that the Gaudium spirit spoke to me. Little surprise that when some three decades later I converted to Catholicism, I considered myself a "Vatican II Catholic." Never mind that the current pontiff, John Paul II, was a "conservative." For me, Catholicism is a faith of liberation.

In examining my own basic assumptions over the last decade or so, I have become ever more convinced that there are lawful, if hidden, sources of order in the world itself. This is why, for instance, I am so taken with the evolutionary theories of researcher Stuart Kauffman as discussed in his book At Home in the Universe (see Welcome to Beyond Darwin and the other posts in my Beyond Darwin blog).

Kauffman posits that "order for free" just nautrally emerges in systems poised at the "edge of chaos." Neither rigid order nor rank chaos is the natural state of such systems. Rather, they gravitate to that fecund boundary between the two, so to evolve with greater and greater complexity. "Self-organization" accounts for the evolution of life forms and of human cultures.

I would liken the Vatican II Gaudium et Spes church to the fertile edge of chaos, the rigid church of yore and today to the frozen order which harms evolvability, and the 1968 upheavals which traumatized Ratzinger to the chaos which likewise harms evolvability.

Still, I take the erstwhile Cardinal Ratzinger's point that there are times when rigidity is a necessary ploy to conquer chaos. I just don't agree with his underlying metaphysics: that the City of God and the city of man are essentially alien to one another. I think our faith, hope, and joy transform the city of man into the City of God. I think the spirit of Vatican II is just what the doctor ordered for such a transformation.

I admit, however, that I can't explain why that spirit curdled so rapidly into hateful radicalism in the late 1960s. Nor am I quite certain what, if anything, would keep that from happening again, should the Holy Spirit move the new pope to resume his mid-1960s openness.

But that is exactly what I pray for today. Am I being too rigid?