Lunatics, Heretics, and Mystics: Is There a Difference?

Sandro Magister, always worth reading about matters ecclesial and Catholic, has a round-up of some things lunatics are saying about the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. (One can only imagine what Yves Congar would say about these types! He had scathing comments about them in his own day as recorded in his diaries.)

The prize has to belong to Enrico Maria Radaelli who attempts to claim with a straight face that papal resignation “is not permitted metaphysically and mystically, because in metaphysics it is bound up with the kernel of being...and in mysticism is bound up with the kernel of the mystical Body which is the Church, through which the office of vicar...places the being of the elect on an ontological plane substantially different...: on the metaphysically and spiritually highest plane of Vicar of Christ.” That has to be about as neat a definition of contemporary papolatry as we are likely to find, though I'm keeping the contest open for a while yet because doubtless there are bound to be other contenders. It is also, I maintain, a thinly veiled heresy of the old school: a species of ecclesiological monophysitism. Ecclesiology, as has often been remarked, tends to ricochet between Arianism on the one hand (i.e., an overemphasis on the exclusively human nature of the Church) and monophysitism (i.e., an overemphasis on the exclusively divine nature of the Church).

When discussing the pope, we have, as two recent and splendid histories make clear--Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (Yale Nota Bene) and John O'Malley's A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present (both of which are, one may say, perfectly "Chalcedonian" in maintaining a sober "dyophysite" view of the papacy and Church as both divine and human), suffered for a little over a century now under an increasingly "sacralized" notion of the popes and their office which tends towards precisely this monophysite notion: the humanity of the pope is severely downplayed, and his status as some kind of demiurge is exalted. This began at Vatican I, whose absurdly misunderstood doctrine of infallibility can and should be "re-received" (as Walter Kasper argued in That They May All Be One: The Call to Unity Today and other places), though in a very different form today--something I suggest at the end of my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

Thankfully since Pope Paul VI (1963-78), and certainly under John Paul II in some ways--though in others, perhaps unwittingly, he certainly reinforced it--this sacralized notion of the pope (replete with tiarra, sedia gestatoria, use of the royal "we," and other nonsense) was increasingly set aside, and it has now definitely changed with Benedict's resignation, a gesture that, perhaps more than anything else he has done, will deal this notion the death-blow it deserves. As I have asked many Catholics over the last week: if all other bishops in the world are required to retire at 75, why should the bishop of Rome be any different? There is no coherent theological case to be made for treating him differently, and so we are treated, as above, to "metaphysical" and "mystical" emoting that is both dangerous and risible. Radaelli and too many Catholics have spent the last 10 days reacting to the papal retirement with mawkish mewling as though they were helpless kittens whose mother had just been flattened by a truck on the highway. This de trop devastation seems to be one of the lamentable features of our time--as witnessed, e.g., with the faux hysterics of millions in the streets in 1997 at the death of that erstwhile princess of Wales (what was her name?). To all such ululaters, I reply, as the famously taciturn Clement Attlee did in a one-line letter to the endlessly agitated Harold Lasky: "a period of silence from you would be most welcome."