The Pope and the 'heretic'
Peter Nichols
Rome A group of three or four boys broke into the house of a woman in a small town near Rome and stole some money and a few not very valuable possessions. She found out who they were, telephoned their mothers and came to a rapid agreement. The mothers would give her back the money and the value of the stolen objects and they would bring their sons back into the women's house, beat them in front of her and the matter would go no further. Who was the great absentee? Father, of course.
What brought the incident back to mind was one of the statements made by the Dominican professor Edward Schillebeeckx just before he came to Rome for his interrogation. He was talking about the critical state of the world, politically, economically, socially and culturally. He added: 'People need a father figure. Of any kind. For the moment the Pope provides it. But when the masses 'adore' a Pope, this means that the. masses themselves are scattered. And so there are big problems over and above the Wojtyla papacy.'
If I were the Pope, I would be much more inclined to have Schillebeeckx condemned for saying that than for his doubts about the nature of Christ's divinity. Christians have never been able to make up their minds for long about their Founder. Quarrels in the early Church were frequent on this very subject. The pretext for the split between Eastern and Western Christianity was on Christological issues. Jesus himself was not a great help in defining exactly who he was. There is no greater lack in history than the absence of any great ringing self-defence by Jesus himself at the approach of death, or even one single letter about himself of the type that St. Paul was so adept at writing. He left plenty of space around him for the theologians to practise their science.
Father Schillebeeckx happens to be the one who has taken the headlines for the moment. There will no doubt be many more if the second Christian millennium does not coincide with some tragedy to the whole planet which the disastrologists keep reminding us is nearer than we think. What is surprising about the summons to Schillebeeckx to come to Rome is the publicity surrounding it. Ironically enough, there are signs that the Pope himself, whose mastery of the headlines and the arc-lamps is complete, underestimated the use to which they could be put by someone else with a question of faith to put to the world. This would explain why the Vatican broke precedent by issuing a conciliatory statement about the Schillebeeckx hearings and actually revealed the names of the theologians questioning him.
Schillebeeckx himself made little complaint. And quite understandably. He had everything going for him. He happens to be Belgian, but he works at Nijmegen which is one of the intellectual centres of Dutch Catholicism. Schillebeeckx said here that he saw no objective connection between his summons to appear before the theologians of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome and the summons delivered by the Pope of the whole Dutch episcopate to come to Rome in January and try and settle their differences at a special Synod. There is in fact no direct connection between the two summonses except that the Schillebeeckx ease has filled the Dutch press a matter of weeks before the bishops are supposed to settle their differences in front of the Pope. If I were Pope, I would have done whatever was possible to delay the Schillebeeckx hearings until I made a final effort at bringing peace within the Dutch hierarchy.
The Dutch problem is serious and I believe that it is the one case of trouble in the Roman Catholic world where blame can be placed unequivocally on the Vatican's back. The issue is simple. Much of the Dutch Church after the Second Vatican Council took a highly progressive line which the Vatican found unacceptable. The main method which the Vatican chose was to nominate two conservative bishops in order to break the hitherto united stance of the Dutch bench. At the same time, Cardinal Willebrands was made Archbishop of Utrecht, the see which gives him the leadership of the Church.
Cardinal Willebrands retained his chairmanship of the Vatican's Secretariat for Christian Unity. This placed him from the beginning in an impossible situation. Utrecht was in itself a task requiring immense tact. Willebrand's predecessor, Cardinal Alfrink, had very brilliantly managed to keep the confidence of his bishops and priests while doing his best to persuade Rome that Dutch affairs should be treated with tact and without fear. He was not altogether successful with Rome, but in retirement he remains a revered figure in Holland. Willebrands is not revered. The idea that he is supposed to manage a crucial job in Rome as well as dealing with the Dutch crisis is felt by the Dutch to show insensitivity towards their own problems.
Moreover, conservative opinion in Rome is inclined to see the position of Cardinal Willebrands, as head of a national Church in which ecumenism has gone far beyond what the Vatican accepts, as incompatible with his chairmanship of the Christian Unity Secretariat. And the Dutch feel that he does not sympathise enough with their situation because his post in Rome constantly teaches him caution. It is a regular item of gossip these days that' the Rome conservatives would like to see the end of the Christian Unity Secretariat as well as those established after the Second World Vatican Council to deal with relations with the non-Christian and the non-believing worlds.
The Dutch, however, cannot be erased from the slate just like that. Whatever one may think of Dutch Catholicism, it has tried to apply in the most advanced way what the Second Vatican Council decreed. The experience is light years away from what the Pope knew in Poland: in fact, the best / heard about him in Amsterdam was that he was a fine Pope, for Poland. Dutch Catholicism has gone beyond the need for a father figure. And that must be galling for the Vatican, too. The Pope is the trump card, or he is nothing. He must inspire elemental loyalties, or the magic goes. He is a man for all seasons only so long as unseasonal ardour can be maintained. And the sudden eruption of what must be called the Schillebeeckx/Willebrands case should have brought this home. Schillebeeckx is an uncomfortable reminder that the Second Vatican Council which he attended as a theological expert inaugurated an extremely shortlived era. The Dutch have felt that more than anyoir else. The Pope constantly reiterates .lus regard for the Council's teaching, f11.51, among which was the relative diminution 01, the Papacy's position within the structure et, the Catholic Church for ecumenical as well as other reasons. No modern Pope has bees as actively monarchical as this one, an none in history has had so great a popular following from the masses.
But Willebrands too has turned out to be less erasable than was thought. He is not a warm personality: he could never be the father figure. But he has a lot of expertise in the field of ecumenical relations, especially concerning the Eastern Orthodox Churches; and he was with the Pope throughout the visit last month to Turkey and to the ecumenical Patriarch of the East in Istanbul. That meeting was something out of Bunuel: security guards in quite smart lounge suits sat near the Pope in the Patriarch's Cathedral with machine-guns on their laps while the cheering for the arrival of the Pope was drowned by the Turkish Army's helicopters. Yet it was important for Vatican .policy, a policy which in its present phase goes back to the period immediately, preceding the start of the second Vatican Council when Willebrands went to Moscow to persuade the Russian Orthodox Church to send observers to Rome's Council.
Schillebeeckx says that he had expected a neutral position from Willebrands about his case and was surprised when the Dutch Primate went on television to support him openly. There are possible explanations for this: one is that Willebrands was annoyed by admittedly disgraceful but not untypical action of one of the three theologians due to examine Schellebeeckx — Father Jean Galot — who labelled him a heretic on Vatican Radio without bothering to wait for the hearings to begin.
And that leaves only the conjecture that the Dutch Primate felt that the Pope would be satisfied with his open support for Schillebeeckx. That is not a position which one attaches to John Paul II. But he went to Turkey because the criticisms had reached him that he was not regarded as ecumenical. This means — and Schillebeeckx confirmed as much — he listens to criticisms. And if the main criticism of the moment is that he is an arch-conservative and so cannot hope for an agreement with the more flexible thought processes of Eastern Chrisianity, then a gentler handling of the Schillebeeckx affair would be in order.
That would represent a move away by the Pope from the rock-like father figure, strong in his simplicity and in his respect for solid beliefs of the past. The affair might mark the beginning of a change in the Pope's attitude and a closer regard for what Schillebeeckx called the problems over and above the Wojtyla papacy, which cannot be settled by a private beating behind father's back.
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