By John C. Klotz

 Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010

 Life is a struggle. <FN1> That can be true even if you have obtained your life’s ambition. Take Pope Benedict XVI for example. He is under attack for reportedly covering-up the burgeoning priest-pedophile scandal. His critics want him to resign – just like Richard Nixon. But he is not the President of the United States, he is the pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Vatican is not Washington, DC. Nonetheless, for the 83 year old Pontiff, it’s a struggle.

 The pope has his defenders, although at least one of them was a little over the top to say the least. New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, in a Palm Sunday homily, equated the pope with Jesus in that the pope was "suffering some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob and scourging at the pillar as did Jesus." But, as the Washington Post reported on Good Friday, some clergy demur from the Benedict-Jesus analogy. The Rev. Thomas Reese, a scholar at Georgetown, asked "Who among us has experienced the betrayal, suffering and torture Jesus felt more than the victims?"

 In some ways, the current uproar over alleged Vatican complicity in the cover-up of the crimes of priestly pedophiles echoes of the Watergate scandal as the inquiry resolves to the issue of what did Benedict (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) know, and when did he know it. And it may be said that Ratzinger shares at least some qualities with Nixon. He is a striver, who pursued a life long dream and won it. But there is one other Nixonian quality that confounds: he can not be readily classified. He is by turns conservative and liberal, progressive and reactionary. Progressive Catholics bemoan what they perceive as rigid orthodoxy and a turn to the right, an apuertura a driritto. Extremist right Catholics label him a heretic and thus not a pope at all. See http://www.patrickpollock.com/101heresiesofbenedictxvitract2.html

 The extremist brand every one of the last five popes, beginning with John XXIII, as heretics and thus not real popes. It was Pope John who convened the Second Vatican Council,. It was also Pope John who encouraged an American-Soviet rapprochement in 1962 and 1963. On his watch, the Vatican gave tacit approval to an Italian political apertura a sinistra, or opening to the left, that ended about the time of John’s death. But the Vatican’s concern for social justice neither began with Pope John nor ended with his death. The popes since John have consistently spoken in support of social justice and against the evils of the elevation of concern for corporate profit over the welfare of the billions of impoverished humanity.

 Pope Benedict has not stinted in his rhetoric supporting social justice. Yet, previously, as head of the Holy Office (once known as the Inquisition) he has objected to the advocates of “liberation theology” which he decried as Marxism. He has also supported emergence of two right wing orders, Opus Dei and the Legion of Christ whose support is drawn from financial and social elites, particularly in Latin America. At the same time the Vatican has averted its gaze from the remarkable Catholic martyrs of Latin American who have given their lives in support of poor and been ruthlessly assassinated by the same Latin power elites.

 And, he has supervised the launching of two investigations of “uppity” American nuns who shed their wimples for civilian dress as they dedicate their lives to service of the poor and needy both here and in Latin America. The man in charge of those investigations is Cardinal Franc Rode who has decried the Second Vatican Council as triggering “the greatest crisis in Church history.”<FN2>

 Opus Dei was founded in Spain and prospered during the brutal regime of fascist Francisco Franco. The Legion of Christ was founded in Mexico by Father Marcial Maciel, but it too gained traction and support from the Franco regime. It is no irony, that both in the investigation of the Legion for charges of pedophilia and seminary seductions by its founder and the investigations of the American nuns are the responsibility of Cardinal Rode, like Benedict the product of World War II childhood with resulting strong anti-Communist predilections.

 Increasing crescendo

 The scandal is not standing still and the Vatican appears totally inept with understanding its depth and has adopted a defensive, circle-the-wagons attitude that only exacerbates the crisis and undercuts whatever credibility it has left.

 ABC News, reported on Thursday, April 1, 2010 that that an initially stalled  investigation of the allegations of pedophilia by the Legion of Christ’s founder Maciel and the current pedophilia outrage crossed  paths with the pope. In 1998, while Pope Benedict was still Cardinal Ratzinger and head of the Holy Office, allegations concerning Maciel were brought to his attention. Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, yielded to pressure not to push forward with an investigation but in 2004 decided to proceed because of Maciel’s embarrassing closeness to Pope John Paul II.

 According to the Washington Post,  on Good Friday, at a service attended by the pope himself,  a senior Vatican priest did Archbishop Dolan one better by comparing the criticism of the Church and pope to the “historic persecution and ‘collective violence’ against Jews.” Then Saturday, there were fresh revelations about a case involving an Arizona priest which languished for years, while then Cardinal Ratzinger and the Vatican bureaucracy dithered over revamping procedures for dealing with the pedophile priests.

 And yet, it is difficult to ignore the fact that Benedict is something more than a bureaucratic conniver.

 The Radical Theologian

 One the “heresies” which the radical fundamentalist lay at Pope Benedict’s feet are his writings about scripture, in particular his recognition that the Genesis is not history but metaphor. For nearly two millennia, Christians have been taught that Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was the cause of the downfall of humanity, the “original sin.” The laying of responsibility for that original sin on Eve for tempting Adam has been one root cause of the anti-feminism that, contrary to Christ’s teachings, developed in His church. Traditionally, it was to redeem humanity from original sin that Christ was sent to the world by God the Father. Christ’s death on the cross absolved humanity of the blot of that sin. Except it didn’t, because the remnants of original sin are responsible for the tendencies of all humanity, save the Blessed Virgin, to sin.

 But Benedict as Cardinal Ratzinger, recognized the human origins of Genesis and expressed his difficulty in harmonizing the scientific facts of evolution with the fundamental concepts of original sin. Nonetheless, Catholic philosophers and theologians who proposed a new Catechism that taught and accepted evolution, were rebuffed by the Church.<FN3>The bureaucratic Ratzinger trumped the theologian Ratzinger.

 And yet, speaking as pope, Benedict has spoken approvingly of some of the analysis advanced by the deceased anthropologist and Jesuit scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Teilhard’s works on evolution, including the evolution of man, were so controversial in the Church that he had been banned from publishing them during his lifetime.

 A loving pastor and/or politician: The Obama reformation

The election of Barak Obama as president of the United States brought a new political reality not only to the United States, but to the Vatican. A little noticed aspect of Obama’s biography is, that as a child, he attended at one point a Catholic school in Indonesia. He can speak knowledgably of Catholic social teachings. When Obama was elected, Benedict sent him a warm greeting. When it was announced that Obama would speak at Notre Dame’s May 17, 2009 commencement, the outrage of the Catholic right filled the airwaves and the blogs. The Vatican kept its silence and the day after the speech, L’Obsrvatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, published a generally favorable review of his remarks.

 On July 10, 2009, Obama paid a visit to the Vatican during a European trip. The pope received him and his family. We did not know at the time that Obama carried with him a letter to the Benedict from Senator Ted Kennedy, then in the final throes of his losing battle with brain cancer, asking the pope’s blessing.

 A month and a half later, as Ted Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick read from Kennedy’s letter and the reply from the Pope which bestowed on Kennedy his Apostolic Blessing. Right wing Catholics were aghast.

 Something’s coming.

 The great struggle of Benedict is the conflicts in himself that have blurred his message and now exposed him to searching questions in the Vatican pedophile scandal. It is the struggle between the bureaucrat and the intellectual, the administrator and the theologian. The tragedy is, that the Church desperately needs much more the leadership of a progressive theologian than leadership by a constricted bureaucratic administrator.

 Something’s coming; something big. That something is the collision, or merger, of science and religion that is now inescapable. There has been for millennia a wary truce between science and religion. Scientists ducked the religious implications of their work by saying they were not involved in theology and theologians insisted on a division of labor which excluded the scientists from theology. No more.

 Outliers of science are dealing with two interrelated phenomenon: the existence of human consciousness and the nature of existence of all matter at the quantum level. One scientific quandary: the nature and form of material existence is not fixed until it is perceived at the quantum level by an observer.

 Some scientists believe they have demonstrated that human consciousness can operate beyond the limits of time and space. At Princeton University, a study is using random number generators located through out the world to demonstrate how human reaction to major traumatic events can vary the application of the law of probabilities in the collective conscience called the noosphere.<FN4>

Teilhard described the step of evolution of the human species that separated it from the other animal species as that point when human consciousness developed the power of reflection, an awareness of self. The relevance of Genesis is that it reflects the earliest literate human attempts to explain that moment.

 What Teilhard is describing in the unique human consciousness is self-love. My best definition of greater love comes from a remark by Tennessee William: the most important moments of life are those when we break out of our selfish shell and really sense the presence of another person. In October 2007, reflecting on the death of my adult son Michael, I wrote a piece that explored the implications of those propositions. http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html In the musical version of Les Miserables the lesson is sung “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

 There are other voices demanding our attention. We have seen the rise of militant atheism propounded by scientist Richard Dawkins, writer Christopher Hitchens and comedian Bill Maher. Others seek to offer a vision of a love-filled humanity without the intrusion of two millennia of organized religion. In The Third Jesus, new age guru Deepak Chopra calls for a rethinking of the Christ’s message as a Third Jesus who is beyond creed or denomination and draws into universal consciousness.

 Robert Wright, an evolutionary sociologist in The Evolution of God, <FN6> traces the development of humanity’s understanding of God from earliest times to the present. Although he appears to be perched somewhere between agnosticism and atheism, he ultimately limns a philosophical direction for humanity that may not be so different, from Chopra, or Teilhard, or Benedict or St. Paul. It was St. Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians on love who concluded, that love never fails but will endure forever. Whether one believes that Christ is a historic personality, or just an empowering myth, the words of John the Evangelist define the Christian faith: “God is love.” It also defines where both Chopra and Wright are heading, whatever their words.

 These are subtle questions as a door is opening to the future. Is the Second Coming a metaphor for the advance of science into the realm of consciousness beyond time and space? Is science with its ability to advance humanity and its ability to also destroy, a metaphor for both Christ and anti-Christ?

 If the Church is to be a part of the changes that are coming as science and theology begin to merge on the essential issues of existence and consciousness, it needs a pope with the mind of a Benedict, but not fettered by bureaucratic loyalty and bungling. So does Christ.

Life is a struggle for us all. We stand at the foot of a mountain, but teetering on the edge of an abyss. The mountain beckons us upwards, but the abyss entices us to oblivion. We can choose to love and climb the mountain or we can lose ourselves and fall. Our choice is the ultimate act of free will.

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 <FN1> Apologies to Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (Houghton-Mifflin, New York 1969)

 <FN2> ”The man at the center of the storm “National Catholic Reporter, (October 28, 2009) http://ncronline.org/news/man-center-storms

  <FN3>Sr. Joan Acker, “Creation and the Catechism”, America (Dec. 16, 2000) http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=2404 and " Daryl P. Domning , "Evolution, Evil and Original Sin, America (Nov. 12, 2001) http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=1205

  <FN4>Global Consciousness Project, http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ Last year, I wrote a highly speculative, and slightly tongue in cheek, piece on how, by applying the law of probabilities to the election result in the 2009 Iranian election, two mathematicians had actually demonstrated the existence of God. http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

 <FN5> Deepak Chopra, The Third Jesus (Harmony Books, 2008 New York)<

  <FN6>Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (Little, Brown, 2009 New York)

For additional articles and postings by JohnKlotz see http://johnklotz.com/publish.htm and http://johnklotz.blogspot.com