As leaders of all Western nations descended upon Vatican City early last month, there was little doubt they had come as much to pay respects to the departed Pope as to ensure that a White European succeeded as Bishop of Rome. In the weeks preceding Joseph Ratzinger’s elevation, some Cardinals hinted to religious correspondents of Western news agencies that they were under pressure. The surprise, if any, was that many Christians across the globe actually expected the election to reflect the numerical superiority of Catholic communities in other continents.
Those seriously hoping for a Latin American or African Pope, something akin to a non-Arab becoming Grand Mufti of Mecca, simply failed to comprehend the relationship between faith and power. Misled by post-Second World War rhetoric of universalism, secularism and multi-culturalism, they could not see the abiding kinship between the Church and political power in all Christian nations, notwithstanding a formal separation of powers. Christianity powerfully undergirds Western civilization, a fact its ruling elite never loses sight of, unlike India, where it is fashionable to use Euro-centric jargon to undermine the native ethos.
Monotheistic traditions are definitionally religious imperialisms in which power is a tightly controlled affair, rarely, if ever, departing from the aims and ambitions of their core sponsors. In the West, the rise of secular authority took the Church to the far corners of the globe. From failed leader of the Crusades, the Church allied to secular power virtually wiped out the native populations of the Americas and Australia, enslaved large parts of Africa, and battled native resilience in countries like India and China. It is certainly no accident to always find the Church in close embrace with genocidal dictators like Adolf Hitler or Papa Doc.
The half-billion Catholics scattered in different developing countries have political, economic and social aspirations opposed to those of the dominant Western world. Belief in Jesus and his unnamed Heavenly Father (could scarcely be the Jewish Yahweh) could hardly compel Western powers to accept a Pope who might confront them with a contrary political agenda.
Ratzinger was a natural favourite as he was the Cardinal who closed Latin American seminaries preaching “liberation theology,” a home-grown mix of Christianity and Marxism that enthused the region’s poor in the 1960s and 1970s. Ratzinger came down heavily upon priests like the Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez, who fathered the movement, and drove his own student, the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, out of the priesthood.
A Latin American Pope could have triggered off a revival of liberation theology. This could even cause the monolithic Catholic Church to fragment along national lines, ending its centuries-old transnational power and reach. Little wonder that Ratzinger, holding the (renamed) office of Grand Inquisitor, handled it with such exemplary intolerance. An African Pope may similarly have spawned a mushrooming of Pentecostal Churches (the old African creeds reworked under the garb of Christianity).
An European Pope was certainly reassuring to Western nations that use the Church as an instrument of political intervention, notable examples being Poland and East Timor. Paradoxically, this may make the Church more brittle and hasten its much-prophesied end, as the virus unleashed by liberation theology has mutated in a deeply unsettling manner. Unknown to most Indians, a growing body of theology in the West argues that non-Christian faiths are a legitimate part of the Divine scheme, and that the Church should curb its evangelical thrust. Rooted in the Greek philosophy of kinosis, this school argues that at Creation God emptied His powers into the universe and withdrew. The Church should similarly empty itself of its ambition for universal dominion, and care only for the flock already under its charge.
To my mind, this view marks the beginning of the unravelling of the evangelical church, both Catholic and Protestant. Unsurprisingly, Western nations that use evangelization as a tool to subvert nationalism in other countries wish to keep kinosis theology at bay. Ratzinger is their man because he condemned priests espousing this view. Protestant America favoured his ascension despite his calling other Christian denominations spiritually deficient, because a Catholic Church that accepts the doctrine of non-conversion for the sake of inter-faith harmony would amputate the right arm of Western political diplomacy.
Predictably, at his very first Papal visit outside the Vatican to the Basilica of St. Paul in southern Rome (once you leave St. Peter’s Square you are in Rome), Benedict XVI committed the Roman Catholic Church to a fresh conversion drive: “The Church is by its very nature missionary, its first task is evangelization… the missionary mandate from Christ is more current than ever.”
Ratzinger, it may be recalled, had overruled a written accord at the Millennium Peace Summit 2000, in New York, where 1100 representatives of different faiths pledged that there should be no bloodshed in the name of religions, as they were but different routes to one God. He released a 36-page doctrine, Dominus Jesus, stating that placing any religion at par with the Roman Catholic Church was “crossing limits of tolerance.” Non-Christians, he declaimed, cannot get salvation because they don’t accept Jesus Christ as the son of God.
We in India can expect Benedict XVI to go on the offensive. He is already on record calling Buddhism an “auto-erotic spirituality” that offers “transcendence without imposing concrete religious obligations.” Hindu dharma, on the other hand, offers “false hope” as it guarantees “purification” based on a “morally cruel” concept of reincarnation resembling “a continuous circle of hell.” Ironically, modern Christian scholars claim that the Church in the fourth century purged Christianity of a deeply held belief in reincarnation in order to impose totalitarian control upon the faithful!
Still, it will be interesting to see how Benedict XVI deals with Islam, the sister monotheism that he cannot avoid confronting head-on. Dialogue seems an unconvincing route to take, given his past record. Yet as Islam batters Christianity in both its old and new pastures, the new Pope will have his task cut out trying to reassure the faithful.
Already Europe is realizing that unilateral gestures to Islam only whet its appetite for more. A decade ago, Europe’s largest mosque came up within a mile of the Vatican. Yet in Saudi Arabia, as many as one million Catholic workers, mostly from the Philippines, do not receive church services as the kingdom does not permit the practice of any religion other than Islam. Ancient Christian communities in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Turkey have declined steeply. Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem were once Christian majority cities. Baghdad had a robust Christian community, and Lebanon was 70% Christian till the 1930s, but is now only 30% Christian. The community is under siege in northern Nigeria, southern Sudan, Indonesia, the southern Philippines and Pakistan.
Islam, however, is marching ahead in Europe. Many European cities have either become or are slated to become Muslim-majority cities due to rising immigration. These include Bradford in Britain, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Marseilles in France, and some German towns. Should Turkey join the European Union, its Muslim population will rise by algebraic proportions. Many Europeans now want the Pope to make conciliatory gestures towards Islam conditional on Christians receiving greater liberty in Muslim countries. Apparently it is only in India that religious freedom degenerates into license at the cost of the native community.
The Pioneer, 3 May 2005