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Matthew Fox's Public Pastoral Letter to Cardinal Ratzinger in 1988. To Cardinal Ratzinger, 1989: Is the Catholic Church Today a Dysfunctional Family? In 1989 I sent the following letter to Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation of the Faith. The occasion was his silencing me for a year—a bad habit he was developing at the time, having sentenced Brazilian Franciscan theologian (and his former student) Leonardo Boff to similar treatment. Since he never responded to my letter, I wonder if today he would appreciate another opportunity to do so, especially since so much history has transpired since then between himself and myself and between himself and many other theologians in the church. And since culture and history do keep evolving, one holds out hope that maybe even inquisitor’s minds are subject to the natural laws of evolution….So I reprint the letter here since I believe that issues raised in it are still with us today. August 8, 1988 Feast of St. Dominic Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith Vatican City Dear Brother Ratzinger, For the past four years the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the “Holy Office of the Inquisition”) has been questioning the theological orthodoxy of my work. During this period your concerns have been parlayed through my Masters Generals and through my provincials. At your request a team of competent American Dominican theologians were appointed by my provincial to examine my work and in particular, three of my books: Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality; Whee! We, Wee All the Way Home: Toward a Sensual, Prophetic Spirituality; and On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style. That formal process, conducted over an eighteen month period, resulted in a document that exonerated me of any theological heresy, saying in its conclusion that “there should be no condemnation of Father Fox’s work” and commending me for my “hard work and creativity.” The three Dominicans on that board, all with Ph.D’s in theology, were eminently qualified for this task, and two of them were named Masters of Sacred Theology, the highest honor awarded by the Dominican Order. In spite of this, your Congregation has continued to insist that my work is unorthodox. Your request that my provincial hold a new trial was turned down by him, yet you persist in demanding that I be silenced and that my work at the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality “be terminated,” as you put it in your most recent correspondence. Since the Institute is located in a liberal arts College has been serving a diverse and ecumenical audience from all over the world for the eleven years of its vital existence, your interference in its affairs is a matter of grave concern and could have serious public repercussions. Interference in the tradition of academic freedom in liberal arts colleges is not taken lightly in our country. It is not the Vatican that accredits the school where ICCS is situated but the state of California and WASC, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, a public accrediting institution. I have not only had the full and consistent support of the Dominican Order, but you know as well that the Bishop of the diocese in which I work supports me as does the administration of Holy Names College, an institution of higher education that has been serving the church and society in Oakland for 120 years. Throughout these years of investigation, I have complied with every request of my provincials and Master Generals and I have remained silent about this affair, as I was asked to do. I believe, however, that the issues we treat at ICCS regarding the spiritual crises of our time-issues of the survival of Mother Earth, of the despair of our youth, of the inadequacy of Western worship, of the loss of our mystical tradition, of justice toward women, native peoples, and all of God’s creatures, of the emergence of a living cosmology from the new physics of our time-all these are of such immense moral and spiritual concern that the time for my silence about this investigation has ended. “Obedience” means “to listen”(from the Latin, oboedire). My obedience must be to the suffering of Mother Earth and all her creatures; the four-legged ones, the winged and finned ones, and the tree people of our planet and not to the two-legged ones alone. I am therefore writing this pastoral letter to you and to the People of God, to whom I have dedicated my work as a theologian, in order to discuss the issues at stake. I write you as a brother human being and a brother Christian. I hope that the ear of your heart is opened to hear. It is evident from reading your letters over the years that your concerns are not theological so much as political and pastoral. Beneath all your communications there lie issues of the heart that are not being addressed. I hope to treat them here. My fellow American theologian, Leonardo Boff, addresses some of these issues in his book, Church: Charism and Power, when he writes about pathologies in a church that teaches without learning first. Other theologians have contributed their significant reflections on the issues of freedom of theological inquiry within the church. One thinks of Juan Luis Segundo’s Theology and the Church: A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger and a Warning to the Whole Church; of Hans Kung’s and Leonard Swidler’s The Church in Anguish: Has the Vatican Betrayed Vatican II? to which many distinguished theologians contributed including Bernard Haring, Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff, Rosemary Ruether, and David Tracy; and of Harvey Cox’s, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity. With this letter and the issues it raises I take my place beside my brother and sister theologians who have been under attack for their efforts to incarnate the Good News in a post-European cultural situation. I find—and believe others will find as I make our correspondence public—our “objections” to my writing so theologically thin that I have concluded that the issues between us must be pastoral rather than theological. An example of the weakness of your critique of my work can be found in the document that lists your “major concerns about my principle work,” Original Blessing, which you label “dangerous and deviant.” You object to my calling God “Mother” and “Child.” Let me cite Pope John Paul I—whose life as pope was sadly cut short after one month—who said in a formal statement that “God is both Mother and Father but God is more than Mother and Father.” My work has demonstrated that the great Creation mystics of the Middle Ages such as Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, and Julian of Norwich call God, 'Mother'. They also talk about God as “playmate” and as, “child” thus celebrating the child or puer in all of us. The scriptures, too, talk about God as Mother on several occasions (see Is 49, for example). This same document claims that I “deny the existence of original sin and the doctrine of the Church in its regard.” As my provincial pointed out in his letter to the Master General of April 26, 1988, this statement is totally untrue. I do not deny the doctrine of Original Sin (in fact, I define original sin as “dualism”), but I decry the influenced of this doctrine and its use as a starting point in religion. Sin is anthropocentric—a human invention. God’s creation, on the other hand, has been an original blessing for nineteen billion years and continues to be so for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear the awesome cosmic story of our holy origins. You erroneously state that I deny the validity of infant baptism and give the page number (page 51) where I supposedly do this. I challenge anyone who can read English to find on that page or any other page in Original Blessing a denial of infant baptism. What do I conclude from this misreading of my book? I must keep in mind, of course, that English is not your native tongue and difficulties in reading my books are perhaps understandable. But the real issue is not your inability to read carefully: it is your determination to read with a closed mind. Your Congregation has been similarly closed-minded in dealing with other non-European theologies; for example, when it made a caricature of Latin America and Liberation Theology and then denounced it, silencing Father Boff in the process. Your Congregation prides itself on being part to the “magisterium,” that is, the teaching function of the church. Yet if I have learned anything in seventeen years of teaching it is this: The only true teacher is a constant learner—one who is seeking truth wherever one can find it. Two years ago a Black preacher, who is pastor of the most vibrant Black church in Oakland, held up my book Original Blessing before an audience and said, “My folks need this more than they need jobs. Why? Because slavery took away our pride.” I listen to him; and then I read your report calling the same book “dangerous and deviant.” I must conclude that your Congregation has not done either its intellectual homework or its inner work. I detect a kind of intellectual sloth in those who condemn without studying, and a spiritual sloth in those who accuse without feeling the oppression of others that is addressed in my and other works of liberation theology. What is Creation Spirituality? What is Creation Spirituality? It is the oldest tradition of the Bible. The Yahwist or J source of the Hebrew Bible is creation-centered, as are the prophets and the wisdom literature. Even the Genesis story as we have it begins not with human sin but with the goodness of creation. John’s Gospel begins, “ In the beginning was the word,” not, “In the beginning was human sin.” Creation Spirituality is thus non-anthropocentric; it begins with the amazing news of the gift of the universe over nineteen billion years to us, a creation story now being retold by science that elicits wonder and awe at our being here on this amazing planet with so many generous creatures who give their very lives for us. Creation Spirituality is not found only in the Bible, however; it is the tradition of native people of America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is still very much alive among the native peoples of the Americas, as well as Blacks and Asians in our culture. It is the tradition of the great mystical awakening in Western Christianity that began in the twelfth century and that gave us Hildegard of Bingen, Frances of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Dante, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Nicolas of Cusa, among others. It is the tradition of scientists and of artists, women as well as men. Creation Spirituality celebrates the wisdom of women’s experience of spirituality. Justice is the cornerstone of the spirituality. As Meister Eckhart said, “the person who understands what I say about justice understands everything I have to say.” This tradition speaks deeply to persons all over the world today because Mother Earth is so wounded; the young are in such despair; worship is so one-dimensionally anthropocentric; the human soul is so cosmically lonely; our patriarchal institutions are so arrogant; the artist is secularized an therefore cut off from spirituality; good work is so scarce; women and minorities are so oppressed. Creation Spirituality is in many respects a liberation theology for so-called “First World” peoples because it comes from the deep and ancient traditions of the most oppressed peoples, the native or primal peoples of the world, and from women’s experience. Creation Spirituality liberates peoples and structures from consumerism and materialism, dualism and patriarchy, colonialism, anthropocentrism and arrogance; boredom homophobia; adultism and the trivializing of our lives. Creation Spirituality liberates us from the bondage of Newtonian mechanisms and from one-dimensional education that haunts the “First World.” Creation Spirituality liberates because it moves us from head to body where heart and passion (the source of compassion) will be found. In reawakening the divine child, the mystic within and around us, Creation Spirituality leads persons from self-consciousness to unself-consciousness, and this capacity to let go and to play is vital to the liberation of so-called First World peoples over the most pressing moral issues of our time. THREE PASTORAL ISSUES There are three pastoral issues I wish to address in this letter which are, in my opinion, of great significance for the future of the church and of civilization. A. Is the Catholic Church a Dysfunctional Family? During my four years of waiting and watching while the Dominican Order, my bishop, students and others communicated with each other about my work, I have attempted to observe and analyze what was going on. Over the twenty-one years of my ministry as a priest, I have listened to the wounded ones in our church—women, married couples, divorced people, homosexual people, priests and former priests, sisters and the young. More recently, I also hear deep dissatisfaction from cardinals about your concessions to Marcel Lefevre and Vatican support of Opus Dei; I hear bishops telling jokes about the Vatican and begging that the pope not come to their diocese lest it, too, be thrown into insurmountable debt; I hear leaders of religious orders telling me that your Congregation has “nothing but third-rate theologians in it,” etc., etc. Yet no one tells you these things. Everyone refuses to confront the person who most needs to hear the truth. Recently, in the brilliant work being done on addiction in persons and in organizations by such scholars as Dr. Anne Wilson Schaef, I have found a category and a language for the phenomena I have been observing. This behavior is identical to that which goes on in a dysfunctional family where the alcoholic father, for example, is always appeased and placated in hopes that he will not become violent yet another time. Those who do the appeasing are called, “co-dependents.” Their silence sucks them into that very sickness that has so overtaken their violent father. Yet silence and denial prolong and intensify the suffering of everyone in the family. Indeed, as Schaef puts it, addicts need “*the collusion of co-dependents to maintain their closed addictive system” (Schaef and Fassel, The Addictive Organization, p. 73).* Regarding my own situation as a priest, a theologian, and an educator within the church, some people have cautioned me to continue playing the game; to remain silent and hope that Cardinal Ratzinger will be appeased some day; to be as patient and long-suffering John of the Cross when he was beaten by his brothers or as Teresa of Avila whose Autobiography was forbidden publication during her lifetime by the Inquisition of her day; or as Teilhard de Chardin whose work was largely unpublished until after his death. I believe there is a time for patience and a time for impatience; a time for obedience and a time for disobedience—or a deeper obedience than that exacted by human laws and institutions. There is a time for continuity and a time for discontinuity. Ours are times—because of the unprecedented crises of Mother Earth, of our youth, of the spiritual vacuity of institutional Christianity in Europe, of the boredom that most worship instills in persons—for holy impatience, disobedience, and discontinuity. The Soviet poet Yevtushenko wrote recently to his people that not all blame in recent Soviet history can be laid at the feet of the ruling clique. The people “allowed the clique to do whatever it wanted. Permitting crimes is a form of participating in them, and historically, we are used to permitting them. It is time to stop blaming everything on the bureaucracy. If we put up with it, then we deserve it” (Time, June 27 1988, p. 30). I believe that it is also time that Catholic theologians, ministers, and laity speak out about the injustices occurring within the Catholic Church. Servile patience is a sin. My conscience urges me to speak out, to break my silence. My brother Thomas Aquinas teaches that it is a sin to go against one’s conscience. What will happen to theology in the future if today’s theologians simply remain silent in order to appease the Inquisitor of our day? Or in order to keep their jobs or safe guard their pristine reputations in a church that may, in fact, be quite unwell? I believe that for years I have been protecting you from the consequences of your behavior by remaining silent. To continue to do so would be sinful, for your behavior is becoming increasingly scandalous with greater and greater repercussions for the future of our church. Addictive systems, such as the Catholic church has increasingly become since the open-filled and inspiring days of Vatican II and of leaders like John Paul I, can crumble if either party steps out of the disease process. By this letter I consciously step out of that process and wish to tell the people what is really happening in our church. “To deny or ignore what is going on is to become part of the disease,” notes Dr. Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel (p.93). Basing my analysis on The Addictive Organization, I see ten parallels within the Roman Catholic Church today that convince me that our church is indeed a dysfunctional family, a dysfunctional organization. Addictive leaders have the power to bring an organization to the brink of destruction (see p. 83). I believe that is happening in the church today the Vatican had a deficit of $63 million this year and $54 million last year. Its best priests and sisters are leaving, have left, or simply ignore the folly ensuing form it. The Vatican ignores the advice of its most pastoral bishops and leaders of religious orders. Instead it listens to theologically illiterate fanatics who behave like religious thugs, using violent tactics, spitting on scholars, and making libelous accusations. Instead of consulting sound publications the Vatican reads rabid, ultraconservative newspapers totally lacking journalistic credibility. It is these groups who have initiated your attacks against me and against the many other theologians and religious victims of your regime, such as Archbishop Hunthousen, Hans Kung, Leonardo Boff, and more. 2. The Vatican’s obsession with sex is a worldwide scandal, which demonstrates a serious psychic imbalance. In Ireland this is referred to as the “pelvic morality” of the Catholic Church. Repression and obsession go together. Misogyny in the church grows daily as the hierarchy accepts married clergy from the Anglican Church so long as they are abandoning their tradition over the issue of women’s ordination. Now we have married clergy—not Catholics but ex-Anglicans—who could not accept ordained women. Obsession with sex is characteristic of the dysfunctional personality (Schaef, P. 92). 3. Illusions of grandiosity are a kind of “fix” for the addictive personality (p. 124). The grandiosity of “star mentality” the media lends the present-day papacy is short-lived and full of pitfalls. And the heightened sense of power that members of a modern-day Inquisition feel who share vicariously in the illusion of power is another kind of “fix.” 4. Part of this illusion of grandiosity is an “illusion of control”—games that the Vatican plays that are nothing more than control games. For example, appointing bishops whose only gift is their blind obedience to Vatican edicts. Appointing “ruthless managers” is a sign of an addictive organization according to Schaef (p. 207). Appointing Opus Dei bishops in Latin America is another example of this trend in the Vatican. The desire to control is ultimately the desire to “try to be God” (p. 175). The Vatican—like any organization—is not God, cannot be God, and will ultimately fail in its attempts to be God. It is a “morally bankrupt organization,” Schaef teaches, that finds it necessary to control and to “try to be God” instead of entering into interaction with its members and the wider society. Instead of trying to control ICCS and the amazing response to Creation Spirituality and Original Blessing, why doesn’t the Vatican ask WHY such immense interest has been aroused in our model of education, in our reclamation of the medieval mystics, and in our attempts at constructing a living cosmology? “Control is the prime characteristic of the addictive organization,” Schaef warns (p. 167). 5. A dysfunctional organization communicates only indirectly (p.139). A system of triangulation exists wherein there are no direct communications with the victims, but only indirect ones. There is talk about the victim but never with the victim. This approach has been used by your Congregation regarding me for over four years. Secretiveness is a part of the dysfunctional system. And there is “little or no straight talk” (pp.141-42). 6. A loss of memory is common in addictive persons and organizations (p. 145). Not only has the Vatican lost the memory of the spirit and work of the Second Vatican Council (just one example of this is the failure to practice collegiality between bishops and pope), it has also lost most of the memory of its own mystical roots, the memory of the Cosmic Christ, the memory of a living cosmology in belief and in praxis. These are exactly the contributions of ICCS—we are “going back” to a time in Western Church history when cosmology was alive and the Cosmic Christ was a living spiritual archetype and when education was about one’s place in the universe. One of your criticisms of my work is that I reject Plotinus’ and Proclus' identification of the spiritual journey in the three paths of Purgation, Illumination and Union. You seem to have forgotten what is best within our own tradition. Plotinus and Proclus were neither Jewish nor Christian and their spiritual categories were not inspired by the Scriptures. It would be well if the Vatican would come back with us into the Scriptures where the spiritual journey is indeed presented in the four paths of Positiva (delight and awe), Negativa (darkness), Creativa (creativity), and Transformativa (justice and compassion). Forgetfulness means that we are frequently unable to learn form past mistakes. The Vatican erred in the sixteenth century in missing the point of Luther’s effort to reform the church. Why do you insist on repeating the same error in the twentieth? Creation Spirituality offers an opportunity for renewal to the churches in our critical times. Has the Vatican so quickly forgotten its embarrassment in the Seattle archdiocese in its attempt to depose the saintly peace bishop Raymond Hunthousen? Why is the hierarchy of the church so threatened by creativity that it continually seeks to abort genuine efforts at renewal? 7. The magisterium is failing to grasp its own spiritual heritage and to teach it. Bureaucracy and control and making television personalities of popes is not what the church is meant to be about. As Schaef puts it, “Addictive organizations get into their most serious trouble when they forget to keep the primacy of their mission before them” (p. 146). What is the mission of the church? To preach the Good News, to show people the way out of sin, to excite the Spirit of God within humankind and to offer that Spirit as a creative gift to the cultures of our world. Creation Spirituality has been contributing to the fulfillment of this great mission. “Organizations can keep their mission in focus if they can remember their history and can tell it,” as Schaef puts it (p.147). ICCS is rekindling their memory of Western mysticism. Indeed, we are rediscovering ways to elicit the mystic and prophet from every person as well as to bring together mystical wisdom from all the world’s traditions. What is the alternative to what we are doing? The church’s failure to share the great wisdom of our Western mystical tradition constitutes a grave sin of omission which results in patriarchal cynicism and the loss of hope. It feeds the kind of collective hysteria that arouses the christofascists of our day, those who, in the name of Christ or Jesus, terrorize us. Carl Jung writes, “Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria…[which] leads to an abolition of liberty and terrorization” (Psychological Reflections, p. 161). 8. A dysfunctional family or organization refuses to engage in self-evaluation and self-criticism. In its arrogance it sees all its problems as coming from the outside—as if Protestants, liberation theologians, women, homosexual people, theologians of Creation Spirituality, and the press were the source of the church’s problems. Such an organization “is willing to face anything but itself” (Schaef, p. 148-9). 9. A dysfunctional organization practices isolation. This “allows it to persist in seeing its reality as the only reality” when it stays “out of touch with…those it serves, and with the society at large” (p. 153). The amazing success of ICCS, began with no endowments and at small Catholic colleges that were traditionally women’s colleges, derives from the fact that we are reaching a very deep need in persons’ lives today. So much so that people actually sell their homes and travel thousands of miles to study with us. Instead of resenting this work, the Vatican should be learning from it—if it were in touch with the people it was meant to serve. People desire today—as they did in the twelfth century Renaissance—to learn what science is saying about the universe and how this awesome creation story relates to our religious heritage; they desire ritual that awakens, that truly heals and transforms instead of bores them; in their prayer and ritual, they desire to learn from the ancient and earth-centered ways of the native peoples of American, Africa, Asia and Europe; they want to be empowered by getting in touch with their creativity through art as meditation, which is the most basic form of mystical practice there is. They want to relate their mysticism to the struggle for justice. They want to reground art in spirituality. They seek to recover the mystic child—the Cosmic Christ in themselves and in society: This is why ICCS has such a diverse faculty and why we have so much to teach the churches and synagogues of our day. 10. The dysfunctional organization wants to kill the future. A canon lawyer familiar with Vatican politics told me that what is really at stake between your office and me is that the Vatican knows I am right, that the only future for the church is spirituality and the Vatican’s bureaucratic games are not the future. Nevertheless because your office so resents the future it desires to kill it. To kill the future constitutes the ultimate act of adultism for it renders the young without hope. Artist-philosopher M.C. Richards writes that, “the sin against the Holy Spirit is the sin against new life, against self-emergence, against the holy fecund innerness of each person” (Centering, p.59). I fear that a Eurocentric Vatican will leave behind an ecclesial wasteland when it kills the creativity of the churches in the Americas and elsewhere. Today, the power of the Spirit is moving beyond a European context. Recently, I met a German Jesuit priest who has been a missionary in an African country for twenty-three years. He told me that he no longer reads German or French theology, but “Liberation Theology from Latin America and Creation Spirituality from North American.” He said these are the theologies to which non-European Christians will increasingly look for direction and inspiration. Without a vision for the future—with no eschatology—ministers in the church are burning out. Schaef points out that addictive behavior leaves “employees with a sense of moral exhaustion and deterioration.” This is very sad, for as Schaef points out, “ people are a company’s greatest asset. When organizations refuse to recover, they run the risk of losing their best people” (p. 209). An organization that continues to function addictively “can expect to ‘bottom out’ just like any addict” (p. 211). The Roman Catholic Church is undergoing this bottoming out at this time in history, I am convinced. Notice that Schaef’s language is about recovering. A dysfunctional family is not evil but sick. Yet through this sickness much evil can happen and is happening in the Roman Catholic Church of our time. Like Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Creation Spirituality calls the church to repentance and wellness. In her day, Hildegard wrote the pope the following warning: “O man you who sit on the papal throne, you despise God when you don’t hurl from yourself the evil but, even worse, embrace it and ki |
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