On April 17, 2010, Hans Kung wrote to Catholic bishops everywhere via an open public letter distributed around the world. He explains his reason for writing the letter this way: “I am motivated by my profound concern for our Church, which now finds itself in the worst credibility crisis since the Reformation.” He articulates clearly why he thinks this credibility crisis exists. But what must be noted is what he does not say: that the Church has had a severe credibility crisis before and since the Reformation because of its ongoing support for, and endorsement of, the killing and maiming of hundreds of millions of human beings by Christians who thought—because they were so taught by the Church—that this was acceptable behavior for a Baptized Christian, that doing these things was consistent with being a faithful follower of Jesus. This credibility crisis is ignored, even though Christians by the tens of millions to this very second are perpetrating these things, promoting these things, and justifying them as faithful discipleship? Hans Kung never even hints at nor suggests that there is, or should be, a crisis of Church credibility over this.
That he does not is, however, consistent with just about every “reform” movement and reformer in the Church—right, left, and middle—before, during, and after the so-called Reformation. Reforming the Church so that the Church teaches what Jesus taught about violence and enmity is not the reform that the overwhelming majority of reformers want—be they Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Evangelical. It is not the reform that Church hierarchs or clerics want, nor is it the reform that Church laity want. They do not even want to raise it as the possibility in their “reform” agendas and—speaking from firsthand experience—they will not do so even when requested to do so with solid scholarly and spiritual reasons presented to bolster the request.
The discordance between what Jesus teaches and what the Church teaches on violence and enmity—a discordance which has permitted and has often encouraged Church membership to engage in slaughter, maiming and mayhem on a grand scale for more than a millennium—is a credibility crisis that most of humanity sees as obvious. It also sees this discordance as vitiating the Church’s proclamation that Jesus is the incarnation of God who teaches the Way to eternal life. The discordance with its resultant credibility gap is exposed with lucidity by the words of the world-renowned Catholic biblical scholar, the late Rev. John L. McKenzie:
We have tried to produce a form of Christianity that will be tolerable to those who believe that the best way to deal with your enemies is to beat their heads in. And, we have done this. We have produced the Christian ethic of the just war. This is not the New Testament and every theologian knows it…
If Jesus did not reject any type of violence for any purpose, then we know nothing of him. No reader of the New Testament, simple or sophisticated, can retain any doubt of Jesus’ position toward violence directed to persons, individual or collective, organized or free enterprise, he rejected it totally…
Jesus presents in His words and life not only a good way of doing things, not only an ideal to be executed whenever it is convenient, but the only way of doing what He did.
If Church reform is not reform in the direction of restoring conformity to what Jesus commanded the Church to teach and to obey (Mt 28:20), and if it is not directed to bringing Church members back to following what Jesus taught by word and deed and commanded his disciples to follow in word and deed —Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you—then just what is being reformed? Furthermore, if reform is not directed toward restoring conformity with Jesus’ new commandment, love one another as I have loved you—the commandment which, according to the Catechism, contains the entire Law of the Gospel and summarizes all others and expresses the entire will of the Father—then what is being reformed? Is Church reformation about a change in who is going to be boss? Is it about who is going to get his or her hands on the levers of power and the spigots that control the flow of money in the Church? Is it about whose philosophy of life is going to be raised above or made equal to the teaching of Jesus regarding the will of the Father, which is to be done on earth as it is in heaven?
No rational person with even a minimal knowledge of the workings of the hierarchy and the Vatican could reasonably conclude anything other than that its members are so enmeshed in a pietistic form of secularism and are so far beyond the pale of witnessing to the truth of the teachings of Jesus as laid out in the Gospels, that they are in dreadful need of epoch-making top-down reform, if they are ever to do the task they were explicitly commissioned to do by Jesus (Mt 28:20).
Let me, however, seemingly digress for a moment, but only seemingly. My friend, Elbon Kilpatrick, a Protestant minister in Tennessee, feels called by God over the last several years to stand silently, every Sunday, on public property outside of Catholic and Protestant Churches in various parts of the state. He carries signs that say something about the Jesus of the Gospel about whom worshippers are hearing on Sunday. The signs say that the Jesus of the Gospels whom they worship and to whom they are praying is nonviolent, teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, and therefore cannot be followed by people engaging in the mass human slaughter and enmity of war. Well, the ferocity of the viciousness, vituperation and vilification, of the threats, meanness and ugliness with which he is universally bombarded Sunday after Sunday, by Christians going into Church and coming out of Church, is such that any non-Christian observer of the scene would be sickened by what he or she heard and saw. Unless one wishes to argue that this vehement, systematic rejection of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and of His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is but a quirk of these Christians and their Churches in Tennessee, then something far more profound and far-reaching than structural reform is imperatively needed in the Church—and it is not just the hierarchy and the Vatican in critical need of this reform, although it is indeed needed there. The time has certainly long since come for priests and laity also to reform, to remove the gigantic beam of grotesque untruth from their own eyes—the beam that permits them to believe that they can faithfully follow Jesus by way of violence and enmity. No one, outside those in the Constantinian Christian war Churches, gives an ounce of credibility to such a logical and spiritual absurdity. It radically and fundamentally undermine not only the credibility of the Church and every Christian who clings to its self evident preposterousness, but also undercut belief in the person of Jesus, who He is, what He did and how He did it.
There is indeed, as Hans Kung correctly states, an exceedingly dour credibility crisis in the institutional Church. But, it is not at root a crisis regarding the institutional structures through which the truth of Jesus should be proclaimed, lived and fostered. Nor, is it primarily a crisis about the type of personnel who oversee the proclamation, the living and the fostering of the truth of Jesus. The credibility crisis in the Church is about the institutional Church—via its personnel and structure—presenting and nurturing as the truth of Jesus the opposite of the truth that Jesus explicitly taught and explicitly commissioned His Church to teach and to obey (Mt 28:20). As Mahatma Gandhi once reflected, The only people in the world who do not see Jesus as nonviolent are Christians! What does this mean in terms of Church credibility. Yet, what Church, Church leader or Church reformer gives a hoot?
The truth of the premise upon which a structure is built or reformed determines that structures validity as a means to accomplished a desired end. Means chosen that cannot accomplish the ends desired are illusions. The ends that the Church and every Christian must desire are the ends that Jesus desires. Therefore, the means that the Church and the Christian must choose to achieve these ends are the means that Jesus chose—not their opposite. Contradictory things cannot be the means of salvation, publicly declares Pope Benedict XVI, perhaps to the detriment of his own earthly self interests. To again note and emphasize what the Gospels note and emphasize without a scintilla of ambiguity: Jesus presents in His words and life not only a good way of doing things, not only an ideal to be executed whenever it is convenient, but the only way of doing what He did.
There lies the rejected truth, premise, cornerstone, the absence of which has generated the culture of violence, of untold forms of justified violence in the Church—from the mass slaughter of war to what Church officers euphemistically called the unseen, covered-up world of the daily piccole brutalita (little brutalities). It is a culture that has gone on in the Church from sunrise to sunset since the time of the Constantinian alteration of the institutional Church right on through the Reformation to today without missing a beat. From that time on popes, patriarchs, bishops, priests, ministers, deacons have had as the premise from which they were operating the title and theme of Frank Sinatra’s song, My Way. And “my way” for them means the use and spiritual justification of violence and enmity, that is the use and spiritual justification of dominative power, the power to get done what one wants to get done by the means of fear grounded in the threat and use of violence. “My way” obviously requires a rejection of His foolish Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies unto death, if necessary.
So, here is the institutional Church’s primeval and overarching credibility crisis today—which non-Christian humanity well knows and rightly fears—writ large in bold upper case letters:
WE, CHURCH LEADERS AND LAITY, BELIEVE JESUS IS GOD, BUT WE DO NOT BELIEVE HE KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE FATHER’S WILL AND HIS FOLLOWERS DOING THE FATHER’S WILL IN THE FACE OF A WORLD DRENCHED IN THE EVILS OF VIOLENCE AND ENMITY. SO, WE, THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH, TEACH AND JUSTIFY DOING THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT HE TAUGHT AND TEACH DOING IT IN HIS NAME.
Talk about a Class-A Church credibility crisis! And yet, no crisis! Talk about required reform! Yet, no call at any level of the Church—by the conservative or the liberal gatekeepers of what is and what is not to be considered needed reform—for reform here!
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
