Holding the Center

In deep reflection after the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, I found myself reading over William Butler Yeats well-known and disturbing poem The Second Coming. The lasting image from this poem is of a civilization falling apart at the seams with the result that the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

On first inspection, the election of a pope from a country and a continent where the churches are empty and vocations nearly non-existent seems illogicalprecisely the reaction of a society that has become untethered and has started the descent into nothingness. I must admit that the selection of Ratzinger came as a surprise to me, where it is clear that Europeans are not, in my mothers words, clamoring for the truth of the Church as are Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Yet it would be unwise to give into the easy reactions of despair and despondency. Benedict was right to begin his papacy with the quintessentially Christian phrase Be not afraid!

For many Catholics such as myself, troubled by a Church that seems to be losing ground and a society that seems increasingly hostile to our beliefs, this message of hope is not an easy one. It can even seem foolish in the face of the kinds of social change we have seen just over the past decade. What hope can we hold in the dignity of man when all around us, every day, we see that dignity violated repeatedly, brazenly, and without consequence? What hope can we hold in the triumph of our faith, when our priests violate our trust and the flock seems to be ever-dwindling?

Ratzinger, to his credit, foresaw with great prescience the grave challenge that the Church would face in a world where moral standards were constantly under attack and true faith was belittled as simplemindedness or mere superstition. His message of hope here was not consoling in the short term; indeed, it might seem harrowing, but is nonetheless realistic and positive. In an interview entitled God and the World he remarked that, especially in Europe, the Church will likely become small, and will to a great extent have to start over again. This should not cause panic, however, because the population of a spiritually devoid and materialistic society was going to be inexpressibly lonely and will, in their search for some greater meaning in life, come across the little community of believers as the answer they have secretly always been asking for.

The process which Ratzinger describes can only occur, though, if there remains a dedicated core of believers: a church that does not doubt its teachings because of their declining popularity. Churches that are not demanding, either philosophically or materially, do not do well in terms of attracting or retaining members. As Michael Barone pointed out recently in Time magazine, the denominations that are growing or maintaining their membership, Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Mormonism, are exceedingly demanding of their members, while the denominations that ask little of their believers and are (rightly or wrongly) seen to blow with the societal windslike Episcopalism, Methodism, and Presbyterianismhave been declining precipitously.

This is why the Catholic Church cannot allow itself to change fundamentally. Critics of the Church have pressed for a pope more open-minded to dissenting views, to views that differ from the orthodoxy that seems to be imposed from a Vatican out of touch with the wider world. Yet if the new pope consents to contraception, abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage, or any of the other issues on which it is behind the times, he will allow the doubt that is so pervasive in modern society to become institutionally embedded in the worlds oldest functioning religious body. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions, because one of the last firm centers of truth in this world would be compromised by the tyranny of relativism which Benedict noted scars our society.

Is this to say that every single teaching now a part of the Catechism is completely sacrosanct and inviolate? No, but the overhaul that some wish to inflict upon the Church would doom it to the same fate that so many other, previously vibrant, Christian denominations have experienced; a leadership that is confident in its own righteousness and a membership that has ceased to exist. One of the things that irks people about Catholicism is its explicit appeal to be a universal arbiter of right and wrong, yet this is also what gives it its enduring strength. Catholicism has seen the rise of innumerable perversions of its doctrine only to see them wither away over time; theologies like Lutheranism that once challenged it for supremacy have come and gone. In order for the Church to be there when our society realizes the terrible emptiness and the ultimate meaninglessness of a world without Godand as a hopeful person I think it willit must maintain its claim to truth, and it must stand firm against the pressures of the society which it critiques so eloquently.

Mark A. Adomanis 07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.