Family Synod – Were Indian Christians fooled by their self styled ‘Excellencies’?

It was with great expectations that Pope Francis initiated a grand Synod on the family. Now it is clear that it was usurped at least in India. Unmarried Bishops deliberating on family problems? Unbelievable! But it was what exactly happened in India.  Shri Verghese Mathew Pamplani (75), is reviewing the situation from a layman's desk.  Joseph Mattappally (Asso. Editor)

The Princes and Lords of the Catholic Church of Kerala would have already reserved their business class air tickets to Rome ostensibly to attend the Family Synod of the coming October . Let us wish them a jolly good time in the salubrious climate of the Mediterranean Italy with the choicest wines and exotic food and other good things. What we can expectantly wait for is their “DATA” (Daily Allowance, Travel Allowance self declared claims). It is also possible that the citizens of the Church would be inundated with the verbal diarrhoea of inanities of these self styled “Excellencies”.

Our Eminences seem not interested is keeping the general members abreast of the emerging tendencies and perceptions about the teaching of the Church. Hence it may be worthwhile to make an independent assessment of the situation. The decisions which may be taken in the ensuing Family Synod could have a bearing on the life of people who got divorced through the civil legal process and remarried thereby denied of the sacraments, couples who married from other Christian denominations and religions, same gender married couples and a host of others. There is very little chance of the bishops informing the citizens of the Church of the deliberations in the Synod. In this context it may be germane to revisit the Second Vatican Council and the consequential developments thereof during the past five decades.

Good intentioned Pope Francis is trying to lift the Catholic Church out of the morass of obscurantism to which it has fallen during the course of the last one thousand and six hundred years of the Catholic Church’s existence. Judging from the reactions seen in Catholic publications such as the Catholic Herald, U. K. the entrenched interests in the Vatican may not allow him to have his way in liberating the Church from the shackles of the past and synchronising it with the realities of the modern world.

My submission is that time and place impact the social milieu including the contours religion and the belief system. What was believed two thousand years ago as eternal truths may not be pertinent in this time and environment, despite the claim that these things are God given and immutable. One can subscribe to certain universal principles that are relevant to our time. The Catholic religion doesn’t have any theology of its “own”. What it has is a rehash of ancient Greek philosophy and theology , a distorted version of stoic philosophy, a discarded Platonism and a defunct Aristotelean world view and a time wrapped understanding of the universe built on Semitic myths paraded as “God Revealed Absolute Truth”

The pioneering steps initiated by John XXIII to converge the Church to the ethos of the modern age could not fructify because of his demise before the entire process could completed. The Second Vatican Council was inspired by the belief that the Church should engage with the world. Some of the kneed successor. The long tenure of the “actor turned zealot”, the authoritarian autocrat and conservative John Paul II ensured that the Church is reverted to the mind set of the Middle Ages. He was duly supported by the “Panzer”Cardinal Ratzinger (the later pope) , the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith under John Paul. Ratzinger, the liberal turned conservative, looked with suspicion all things worldly. He clung to the medieval superstition that the world is fundamentally evil, a view which no respectable theologian of the day would subscribe to.

The foundation of Catholicism is not on love but fear. Its whole edifice is built on its lope sided preoccupation on human sexuality, the struggle for power in the temporal domain, and a futile and elusive search for the “meaning of life”. Superstitious nostrums and formulations on the concept of God are the means to keep the unenlightened in its sphere of influence. The Faith was built on the blood of befuddled, ignorant lumpen masses who threw away their lives at the bidding of the clever manipulators. This happened throughout the history of every religion and movement whether it is the Catholic Church or the Marxist set up. The Vatican II tried to alter the mind set of the world’s oldest institution. There are many who judged it a reckless gamble. Even today, some argue that the events of the decades after the Council have proved them right that John squandered the Church’s inheritance.

If one pauses to survey the intellectual landscape a century ago, it would show that Christianity was destined to become an irrelevant curiosity. The Church found itself on the losing side of the intellectual arguments for centuries. The ideas thrown up by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Intellectual Revolution, the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Darwin, the Declaration of the American Independence and its Constitution that separated the Church and the State, the the French Revolution with emphasis on liberty, equality and fraternity and basic human rights of all people put the Church out of synch with the ideas that emerged in the Western Europe. The future seemed to belong to new way of thinking that apparently strikes at the very root of religion. Darwin, Marx and Freud were the prophets with history on their side. Nietzsche had confidently pronounced that God was dead. Yet in the 1960s, Catholicism was the only major ‘ism’ left on the intellectual field of battle. Most other ideologies have been sent scurrying for cover by the forces of free markets , liberal democracy and globalisation . In Latin America, the engagement of a few socially committed clergy with the challenges of poverty and oppression led to a deep split within the Church and open conflict between the them and the State resulting in martyrdom on a scale almost unprecedented in the long history of Catholicism.

Faith requires the acceptance of facts even when they fly in the face of reason . It is in this sense that religious truths are for ever alien to the deconstructive procedures of rational enquiry. It is claimed that religious truth is about otherness, about mystery, about the impalpable. God and his interpreters are not generally susceptible to reductivist simplicities. It is difficult now to recreate the lost world of faith, which was swept away by the flood of change. The lofty intentions and best efforts of Vatican II to have paradigm shift in alignment with times were sabotaged and nullified by the clever mechanisations and scheming of , secretive manipulative all powerful ultra conservative and senile Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (The Holy Office ) Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the baker’s son.

The way in which the Church understood its claim to be the possessor of Revealed Truth meant it could never admit to having been erred in its history. The understanding of the Church is that it is a perfect society which could do no wrong. The tortures sanctioned by the Church of Rome which made full use of the instruments of Inquisition on apostates, such as burning alive at stake, using the strappado or the pulley by which the victim’s arms were dislocated, the rack, the pouring of huge quantities of water into a linen bag and thrusting it down the throat, the application of live burning coals to the soles of the feet, iron dice forced into the feet by screws, the application of red‐hot irons to the breast and the sides of the body and many other cruelties. The Church tries to escape the responsibility for these inhuman atrocities by resorting to semantics.

Censorship was an automatic Church reflex. Rome has never really shaken off the habit. The Church believes that it speaks the Absolute Truth; it also believes it owns the truth. It's emphasis is on the mythical and the divine. The Church invariably condemns scientific conclusions that do not square with its understanding of the world and persists with that condemnation even after it becomes ludicrous to do so. Its worship is excessively addicted to ritualism and an obsession with seemingly meaningless prescriptions . The Church exhibits an obsessive and ferocious intolerance to dissent.

By the time John XXIII became the Pope, Vatican coffers were almost empty. The person who set the Church on the ruinous course was Pius IX, Pio Nono who was elected on 1846. The 1848 European Revolutions challenged and churned the established order in the entire continent. Pio Nono fled Rome disguised as a servant to escape from the mob besieging his palace and went into exile to Milan. The loss of the Papal States of around sixteen thousand square miles in Central Italy, a major source of revenue to the Church, as result of the Italian Unification compounded the already deteriorated situation. All these developments turned Pius IX from a champion of liberalism into a scourge His long reign of thirty years was utilised by him for totally isolating the Church from the out side world by erecting an impregnable wall around it. He codified and formalised the blue print for the rejection of the world. In 1854 he defied rationalism with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Virgin Mary and a decade later published the Syllabus of Errors and condemned the modern world. In 1869 he prevailed upon Vatican I to accept the dogma of Papal Infallibility. The Council set the tone of triumphalism and intolerance of modernism, thus freezing the Church to the mentality of the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church, by and large continues to cling to those regressive paradigm even now.

In 1907, the Church reiterated the condemnation “ Modernism “ and started ferociously to hunt heresy among its own members, even the ‘ Their Eminences, the Cardinals’. The Pope, the “pontifex”, the absolute monarch of the smallest sovereign state in the world with 108 acres of land and less than one thousand citizens, is both a temporal and spiritual ruler. This dual role encourages centralisation of authority in the papal person. The temporal power of the Pope has its roots in the Middle Ages.

The office of the Cardinal is the relic of the Roman Empire and it has no biblical foundation as with other ecclesiastic offices . The Cardinal’s role is to elect the popes and also function as his special advisers much like the favourites of a medieval monarch. The balance of power between popes, cardinals and bishops had shifted back and forth over the centuries. Whatever happens, the Roman Curia is a force to be reckoned with and it is a permanent fixture of the Vatican It is more an imperial civil service than a group religious persons. The Curia comprises of a Secretariat of State, the Pontifical Councils and Sacred Congregations. The Secretariat of State is akin to the Cabinet in a Prime ministerial set up or Executive Staff in a Presidential form, which in effect runs the Church as an institution. Its head, the Secretary of State is the Church’s Chief Executive. The Curia runs the affairs without the necessity to answer anything similar to a democratically elected assembly or an executive arm of a government. The Church claims to be the sole interpreter of God’s Will on earth and the Curia believes that it is the instrument through which the interpretation is achieved. The Curial officials can obstruct the the pope’s intentions and plans, which is quite often the the case,especially if the man at the top is of weak disposition and more particularly, if he is a non‐ Italian. JohnXXIII’s vision of his Council most definitely had not squared up with the ideas of the Church’s civil servants. At the heart of the Curial system is the Holy Office otherwise known as the Holy Office, the successor to the notorious, intolerant avatar of the Inquisition. In all its incarnations its role has been to perpetuate orthodoxy.

The views of the Church on the question of birth control had been set by Pius XI in 1930. In the encyclical ‘Casti Connubii he hurled anathemas such as “base”, “indecent”, “sin against nature”. “intrinsically vicious” at artificial contraception.

The Pontifical Commission for the study of Population, Family and Births dealt with the matters concerning contraception. By the summer of 1964, the debate about the position of the Church on contraception as means for controlling births were fought out in speeches and articles in the Catholic and secular press all over the world. In October 1964 the Second Vatican Council deliberated on the chapter on marriage. Inevitably the issue of contraception was raised. It prompted one of the most fervent interventions of Vatican II, a passionate plea for change by the Belgium Cardinal Suenens. In a challenge to the lopsided understanding of sex that lay at the heart of the Church’s position, with reference to the book of Genesis, he queried “Hasn’t there been too much emphasis on the passage ‘increase, and multiply’ without considering ‘ And they shall be one flesh’ . “ I beg of you, my brother bishops, let us avoid a new ‘Galileo Affair’. One is enough for the Church’, he pleaded. To many Catholics the Church’s continued ban on artificial contraception seems just as absurd as it's making Galileo to recant his discovery . The hope of a change in the stance of the church appeared to be a possibility with the opportunity given to lay people to participate in the discussions of the Council from the scientific view point. “ The man and woman in the street – or the man and woman in bed – ought also to have a say in the matter” was the view that emerged. “It isn’t just high theology or science, it was human involvement and feelings and experience as well”, many opined. It was the first time in the history of the Church that ordinary people, non ‐specialists as well, women included had an an opportunity to join in a discussion that would help to determine the stance of the Church on such a vital matter touching their daily lives. The middle aged Chicago couple Patty Crowley and her husband Pat were invited to join the Council in November 1964. The Church assessed them to be safe ; Patty had been left sterile after the birth of her fourth child in the late 1940s . The couple were grass root level Catholic activists ; had a record of unwavering loyalty to the Church; deeply involved in the Christian Family Movement to make the Christian Message relevant to modern marriage. Patty and her husband had never even thought of questioning the teaching of the Church on birth control or disobeying the Church in any way. That was the way grew up by going to Catholic schools. To them “You follow what the Pope says and that is it”. The Pontifical Commission consisted of fifty five members. The Vatican had not worked out how to deal with married couples invited for the meetings of the commission. Pat was accommodated at the Spanish College while Patty was required to stay with nuns a few miles away.

They were asked to to do a survey of couples about their opinion on the ‘rhythm method’. Utilising the net work they had built up through the Christian Family Movement, the Crowleys quickly produced the widest survey ever made of grass root Catholic opinion on such a sensitive issue by collecting responses from three thousand couples in eighteen countries. They came across heart‐rending stories of women, some of them having three pregnancies in two years; abusive and violent alcoholic husbands because of denial of sex whenever they wanted it; women scared to death of further pregnancies after having a number of kids; the total unreliability of the notorious “Vatican roulette”. While presenting the survey results to the commission in April 1966, Patty Crowley in a long and detailed speech narrated the evidence of the anguish experienced by many faithful Catholic women. She refrained from quoting a letter from a couple with six children to the male celibates “ any priest or bishop who advocates rhythm should take his rectal temperature for a few weeks”. The irony is that the celibate academics had no understanding of what the ordinary Catholics were suffering . The powerful empirical evidence of the true state of the anguished feelings of men and women in the street about birth control in the wider Church came not from dissidents but from loyal Catholics.

There were heated debates on the subject. Fr. Marcelino Zalba, a conservative Jesuit, voiced the perennial Vatican objection to change : that the Church would have to admit that it had got it wrong in the past. “ What then with the millions we have sent to hell, if these norms were not valid”,he demanded. Alfredo Ottaviani was snoozing during the discussions.“ He really just sat there “ says Patty “I don’t think he participated very much ….They’d have to end meetings because he was asleep” John Marshall of Richmond, Britain, an active participant in the Commission observes “Cardinal Ottaviani never gave the impression of really listening to the debates or realising that a new thinking was afoot” Marshall believes that the head of the Holy Office disapproved of the commission’s very existence. “ He regarded it as a kind of aberration in the life of the Church”.

Cardinal Karol Wojtyla ,who was appointed as an expert in the field and who had published a philosophy of relationships named” Love and Responsibility” dealing with the modern approach to sex with traditional teaching and accepting that sex could be for pleasure, not just procreation, but reasserted the stand of the Church on birth control. The future pope never took his seat on the Pontifical Commission .

Cardinal Ottaviani waited to fight his battle on the field of his own choosing. The commissions deliberations lasted about three moths in 1966. The bishops endorsed the modern view among the theologians, lay people and academic experts . On 24th June 1966, the voted on three issues. (a) Is contraception intrinsically evil? Nine said no, three yes, three abstained. (b) Could contraception be squared with the teaching of the Church's and its traditions? Nine in favour, five against and one abstention. (c) should the Church give a definite answer to on the issue as soon as possible? Fourteen said yes and only bishop voted against. Later that day the bishops endorsed ‘Responsible Parent‐ hood”, the majority report of the commission, which recommended that the Pope should change the teaching of the Church and explained why. After four days it was presented to Paul VI. The text was published the world over.

The Catholics of the entire world thought it was a done thing and hoped to enjoy their marriages without making the choice between happiness and obedience to the Church. But the Vatican remained silent once the commission ceased its work. Everyone assumed that the Pope’s would accept the commission’s report. On 29 July 1968 the bomb exploded in the form of Humanae Vitae. The whole affair was a hush hush operation. With the dispersal of the commission, Ottaviani had started his clandestine moves. Three days after Responsible Parenthood was presented to Paul, Ottaviani gave him the minority report prepared by his small gang of theologians who dissented from the conclusions of the commission. Their case was not about birth control, it was about authority arguing that for centuries the Church had taught the purpose of sex was solely for procreation; the Holy Spirit protects the Church from error and hence could not have allowed the Church to be wrong for so long. This existential angst elevated the preposterous view into a theological formula. This argument held a special appeal for Paul who had already exhibited his Hamlet‐like character to prevaricate. Paul did not believe himself competent to change the teaching of the Church which had sustained for ages. Even to many bishops, Humanae Vitae is regarded as the Church’s dirty secret; two Latin words to be whispered if it was spoken at all.

At the heart of the encyclical lies the claim of the Church to papal monopoly on Truth. “ Jesus Christ, when He communicated His divine power to Peter and the other Apostles and sent them to teach all nations His commandments, constituted them as the authentic guardians and interpreters of the whole moral law”, the encyclical argues. The Church claims that its teaching on sex is an interpretation of a moral law given by God, and could not therefore be changed. Contraception had always been,and always be “intrinsically evil”.

Some of the theologians who had tried to initiate reforms In the Church felt cheated. Humanae Vitae gave new edge to the questioning the way in which authority was exercised in the Church. The encyclical opened the flood gates of rebellion across Europe and America. The Church’s doctrine of infallibility to teach absolute truth was questioned as never before. The centuries of Church pronouncements on contraception had acquired the status of infallibility. The kind of circular argument that the Church often resorts to ceased to have the respect of thinking people. The banning of contraception by the Church has no takers now. The world’s bishops were asked to promulgate a teaching that most of them found it impossible to sell. The Catholics all over the world have taken matters to their hands unwilling to undergo any further martial misery . Some bishops and priests challenged the Church in public. The voice of thunder of the Church of bygone days accustomed to hurl its anathemas and condemnation against modern world has lost its bite. The Council threw away many of the certainties with which people had grown up. It led to something entirely new in the history of Catholicism, a wave of conscientious dissent from a major Church teaching. A great majority of people who consider themselves as faithful members of the Church chose to disobey the equivocal papal instruction. The overwhelming mass of Catholics the world over resorts to contraception when it suits them. Thousands of Catholics left the Church over Humanae Vitae. Those who are still Catholic, pickup bits of moral theology that appeal to them. While the Church is agonising about bells, smells and sex, incense and condoms, the rest of the world is locked in a struggle for food and freedom and survival.

In the developed world of Europe and North America the debate over artificial contraception has been about self fulfilment versus obedience. The crisis in Catholicism’s traditional heartland can be traced to the great failure of the Church in the 1960s , the birth‐control encyclical Humanae Vitae. In Europe and America sex is driving a wedge between the leaders of the Church and the led. The gap between the teaching of the Church and the realities of Catholic life is growing wider all the time. Unlike the situation in Kerala, the Church members in other parts of the world stand up to be counted. The people here may grumble at the uppity ways of the Ecclesiastics but not prepared to assert their rights. Bred on superstition and inculcated with fossilised ideas and in mortal fear of the clergy because of its alleged capacity to bring misfortunes in their lives they lumber along the trodden path nonchalantly . The vast majority are lulled into inaction and seem to be satisfied with rituals, novenas, festivals in honour of saints and carnivals and other circuses offered in plenty by the Church.

“Responsible Parenthood” In the Indian ethos is the sum total of the love and care and emotional inputs given to a child from the moment of its birth till the parents’ departure from life. It means the physical, mental and financial strain undergone by “responsible” parents to nurture a child till it is able to stand on its own legs capable of leading a life with dignity. This responsibility doesn’t end when it leaves home to charter its own course in life and its challenges. The so called celibate priests have no experience of dealing with a child crying for food or shivering in the cold, nor do they carry a sick child in the dead of the night to knock at the doors of a doctor. They have not faced the situation in a technologically backward undeveloped region devoid of opportunities for decent employment for sustaining livelihood. A good number of the priests are Shylocks demanding their pound of flesh. Engaging in sex is not an activity similar to the renewal of the ration card. Sex is not Augustine’s fornication. It is an act which confers physical and emotional benefits to both the man and woman concerned. It is the nature’s way of bonding the relationship between pairs. The pleasure in the act of sexual union is that which motivates the couple in the arduous task of perpetuation of the species. A male in his life time produces billions of sperms and female produce eggs in their hundreds but all of them do not end up in pregnancy. Today’s men and women members of the Church are not prepared to meet the fate of the couple in George Orwell’s 1984 where the “Big Brother” subjects them to untold cruelties for their clandestine sex act.

In the developing world, the bottom line is survival and a life with dignity. Ordinary people are required to face too many odds to achieve this. We better realise that it is an unpardonable crime to cause the birth of innumerable children in a situation where the parents are unable to provide them with basic necessities such as nutritious food, shelter, clothing and above all education empowering them with skills to lead life with dignity. But the Church leadership living in the ivory tower, enjoying comforts and luxury beyond the reach of the vast majority of its members, refuse to acknowledge and accept the stark reality. One of the major problems facing the developing world is the uncontrolled exponential population growth unmatched with the resources on hand. The future method of production will be done by automatic machines with the intervention of a very few specialists shrinking employment chances for the non‐specialists.

Even among Kerala Catholics denied of the knowledge of the rapid changes elsewhere, by the logic of nature, there is deceleration in the growth of Catholic population,as shown in periodic censuses, calling the Church’s bluff. The old days of the world catching cold when Rome sneezes does not exist any more. Nowadays, the roars of the Church is heard like a whimper of the ineffective and the powerless. If the Church refuses to read the writing on the wall , it may end up as an unmourned, insignificant appendage of human history. Homo Sapiens emerged on earth between 600,000 and 100,000 years ago and not in October 2004 BCE as calculated by bishop Usher. The Christian religion’s existence of 2000 years is a mere dot in the human story. May be it is a sobering thought.

Vergese Pamplanil
Mob. 9447152533.
Email: Pamplanil@mail.com