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The Vatican’s Nietzschean Moment

Kenneth Houston, Ph.D. - 3/4/2010

The Vatican communiqué issued following the February meeting between Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy and Pope Benedict XVI, which highlighted the Pontiff’s conviction that a ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘weakening of faith’ were significant contributing factors in the abuse of children, was revealing. Some traditionalists and conservatives might well agree that a weakened faith among Catholics, and not just clergy, contributed to the catastrophic failures of morality outlined in the Ryan and Murphy reports, which documented horrendous abuse of children by priests. More critical commentary will dismiss these remarks as a cynical and self-serving rhetorical ploy, designed to shore up eroding belief in the face of scandal and secularisation.

Yet the reported remarks of Pope Benedict XVI, which will doubtless be reflected in the forthcoming pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, point to a more troubling and unstated crisis within the Catholic worldview. The disturbing prevalence of paedophilia among what we might functionally refer to as ‘religious professionals’ has not received critical attention from a deeper, more theological – and perhaps philosophical – perspective.

Vatican remonstrations about Europe’s ‘crisis of faith’ are nothing new, finding its most trenchant articulation in the 2003 Apostolic Exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa. Yet these recent remarks appear – unusually – to be directed at the clergy as much as the laity. If we reconstruct the logic of the argument supporting the statement, it appears that the abuse of children by priests and their cover up by bishops is preventable by reinforcing belief in and adherence to Catholic doctrine. Implicitly, the objectively disordered act of sexually violating children is itself not sufficient as a moral premise and must be augmented by religious training, professional instruction in the catechism and tortuous theological reflection born of an institutional memory stretching back millennia.

Central to Catholicism is the doctrine of Grace: the idea that a life led in conformity with Catholic teachings, particularly through receipt of the sacraments, confers on the individual soul the favour of God and, upon natural death, the promise of everlasting life. The conceptual antipode, which is rarely mentioned publicly by ecclesiastical authority in our more sceptical age, is the inevitable consequence of not living through Catholic teaching: Hell and damnation. In short, the foundation of Catholic morality rests on the cornerstones of threat and promise, fear and redemption. The cleavage opened between humanity and God through the notion of the Fall of Adam and Eve and Original Sin is bridged and mediated by the Catholic Church through its sacraments, teachings and pastoral mission.

Moral conduct is reduced to a cost-benefit calculation: belief and obedience will be rewarded; don’t believe at the peril of your mortal soul. Human actions are defined as either acceptable or ‘deviant’, and the consequences of moral lapse are significant for the individual adherent. As a system of social control it is perhaps more sophisticated than critics of religion might admit. It is comparable to the Islamic concept of taqwa, or ‘God-consiousness’, whereby the subject-believer is encouraged to bear in mind an ‘all-knowing’ and ‘all-watching’ omniscient deity in their daily thought and conduct. When Michel Foucault developed his influential theory of power he identified the Christian confessional as the template utilised by later forms of political rule. ‘I must be good, or else’ best describes the system of internalised discipline that Foucault found reflected in his analysis of modern prison reform and human sexuality. Catholicism, by cultivating the notion of an omnipotent and omniscient deity and connecting it normatively to the consequences of human action, constructed a powerful regulatory force governing humanity’s conduct towards itself through internalised conformity to ecclesiastically defined morality.

Yet a fatal flaw lies at the heart of this divinely guided moral system of fear and reward. What happens when the threat of damnation and the promise of eternal bliss lose their regulating power? What happens when the idea of an omnipotent, all knowing God is eroded, relativised and directly refuted by varieties of thought and belief brought into close proximity in a global age? When the idea of God is subject to doubt the moral system it justifies and supports is imperilled. How, then, is morality to be anchored, and by what criteria is right and wrong determined?

This profound moral crisis was identified over a century ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, when he famously declared that ‘God’, as a metaphor for Christianity’s moral code, was dead. Nietzsche broadly predicted the moral crises that enveloped Europe throughout the twentieth century. Contrary to much myth-making by religious apologists Nietzsche did not provide the foundations of Nazi ideology, nor did he advocate nihilism. But he did identify it. In twentieth century Europe, following the erosion of Christian ethics, all restraint was lost, and with the God concept undermined, the entire edifice of Christian morality crumbled, to be replaced by new utopias of the proletariat and the nation, with catastrophic consequences.

Judging by the remarks of the Pontiff to Ireland’s bishops Nietzsche’s thought has gained no overt credence within his Papacy. Yet Nietzsche’s insight lurks in the evident suspicion of Benedict XVI that believers may not really believe anymore, and that this doubt and scepticism has also penetrated the clerical ranks. Pope Benedict XVI, a theologian with an impressive academic record, is undoubtedly aware of Nietzsche’s warning, and more aware than most that the Church and faith he leads stands at a critical precipice. It has reached that point where the options for re-invention and rationalisation in the face of dramatic social change have run out. The spell of damnation and eternal reward as an effective regulator of human conduct has been broken. The bedrock of Catholic morality lies exposed as inadequate to the task of moral guidance in the late modern, globalised context.

Extensive seminary instruction in prayer, theology and faith did not save countless children from some of those who chose priesthood as a vocation, nor did it provide moral clarity for their vacillating hierarchy when confronted with knowledge of grievious breaches of trust. Contrary to its frequent pronouncements, the human person, in its many complexities, is not really at the centre of the Catholic faith. The horrendous proliferation of moral failings by the Catholic Church, documented by recent independent reports in Ireland, is not merely a failure of vocations or a failure of Church governance. It represents the unravelling of a religiously based morality that hinged on the unsustainable regulatory connection between God and human conduct. The Vatican, and the wider Catholic Church, has belatedly encountered its Nietzschean moment – its own internal ‘death of God’.