It is well known that the immediate reason of Pope Benedict’s renunciation was the 300-page report prepared by three cardinals after his request. The document describes the struggle of monsignori for power, the operation of a network of gay homosexuality within the Vatican and embezzlements in the Holy See’s Bank. When added to pedophilia cases involving priests, which have been proven worldwide, these facts are more than enough to demoralize and disintegrate fairly solid institutions. But since they were discovered in the oldest institution of the West, we should not expect such consequences, but ask what new changes they will cause. Boff’s article was an effort to look back to history, in search of the lines of development which will weigh in the reform demanded by the new Pope, by Christians and by the whole world.
Boff travels in rapid flight over the history of the Church of Rome to point practices of the same kind the report denounces, in all its periods. He does not hesitate to repurpose St. Augustine’s saying that the church is holy and sinful, and that her being holy does not prevent her being sinful and vice versa.
This interpretation of the Church’s character is imbued with the power of calling people’s attention. But what most impresses us in Boff’s article is the foundation on which he anchors it. In summary, he says the historical crimes of the Church of Rome (her sinful side) are caused by the pyramidal organization she gave herself. States that this structural design was adopted from the reform promoted by Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century, which aimed to combat and, if possible, to eliminate those crimes. And based on the renowned ecclesiastical historian Jean-Yves Congar, he suggests that the Gregorian reform splitted Catholic history into its two great halves, the first of which lasted until the eleventh century, and was followed by the monarchical period in which power was concentrated in the Vatican.
In order to make Boff’s prosecution against the Church more understandable, it is useful to specify her historical crimes. But the blames are so numerous that we will divide them into classes and mention a few from each category to form a frame, albeit pale, of the main historical errors of the Church.
Let us start from murder. In the fourth century, two parties struggled for the office of Bishop of Rome. Existing reports show that, together, the two factions killed 136 people (FO, Jacopo, TOMAT, Sergio and MALUCELLI, Laura. The black book of Christianity - two thousand years of crimes in the name of God. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 2007. p. 77). Unfortunately, at that time, Christian bloodshed was still in its beginning. Any history book reports that, at its peak, it led to the death of a million people, during the First Crusade.
But from murder, let us pass to the crime of torture. The Inquisition introduced this practice in law, in a form considered "clean", since punishments were inflicted to induce the retraction of the accused. With this purpose, Inquisition officers used to announce the punishment and immediatly postpone it, so that the accused could abjure his errors. They also displayed the instruments of torture to the person before the beginning of the ordeal (COMPARATO, Fábio Konder. Carta Capital. 12/09/2012). Torture was not abolished in the courts of the Inquisition until a papal bull banned it in 1816, six centuries after its adoption.
Consider slavery. When the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil in 1759, they had 17 sugar estates and seven of cattle (with more than 100 thousand heads), all operated by black slave labor (COMPARATO, Fábio Konder. Idem). All major organizers of slave trade in America were priests. An estimated 20 million were brought from Africa by them. The average life span of these people, from landing on Christian soil, was a mere seven years (Fo, Jacopo, TOMAT, Sergio and MALUCELLI, Laura. Opus cited. p. 21). The Church only condemned slavery in 1888, in the Encyclical In plurimis, by Leo XIII.
Debauchery. John XII is often cited as one of the most promiscuous Popes in history as well as in the black century between Stephen VI and Gregory V. His fame is told, but his crimes are usually jumped by Catholic historians (FISCHER-WOLLPERT, Rudolph. Popes - from Peter to John Paul II. 5th ed., Petropolis: Voices, 1999. p. 63-64). It is necessary to resort to complaint works in order to learn his deeds and those of Popes like him. John "slept with his father’s prostitutes and had relations with his own mother. He also regaled lovers with chalices of gold, considered relics of St. Peter's, blinded a cardinal and castrated another, causing his death. Gripped the offerings made by pilgrims to bet on games. During the court’s gambling, he used to evoke pagan gods to have luck when throwing the dice. "Deposed by a synod, John retaliated brutally. Instead of excommunicating, he executed and mutilated all who were part of the synod. A bishop had the skin torn off, a cardinal had his nose and two fingers cut off and the tongue torn out, and 63 members of both clergy and Roman nobility were beheaded. It seems all prayers imploring the death of John XII were heard on May 14th of the year 964, when ‘the Pope was surprised by the husband of a Roman matron, while having sex with her. The enraged husband crushed his skull with a hammer" (Lewis, Brenda Ralph. A secret History of the Popes - addiction, murder and corruption in the Vatican. 4th ed., London: Europe, 2010. p. 31-32).
Looting. In the fifteenth century , Christian monks plundered 18,000 Polish towns (FO, Jacopo, TOMAT, Sergio and MALUCELLI, Laura. Opus cited). Waldensian villages were also looted in 1561, by troops loyal to the Pope.
Exploitation. In the fateful year of 1517, the indulgence called Rate Camarae was sold to the faithful to cancel several sins. Adulterous women and men could pay 87 pounds and three pence to continue their relationship with the blessings of the Church. When a woman commited incest with her son, she should add six pounds to that sum. For the acquittal of manslaughter, 15 pounds four pence were charged. The same amount was paid if a man had killed two or more, since he had done it in the same day. To purge the drowning of his own son, a man should pay 17 pounds and 15 pence. For the murder of a brother, a sister, a father or a mother, he would pay 17 pounds and five pence. For allowance to get married, a friar was charged 45 pounds plus 19 pence. And heresy was taxed 269 pounds (Opus cited. pp. 164-165). "There was no crime, not even the most cruel, that could not be forgiven for a fee", write Fo, Tomat and Malucelli (Opus cited. p. 166).
Falsifying documents. This practice usually had the purpose of forging solemn acts to increase or justify the authority of the Pope. In the ninth century, the most successful of them was carried out: the decretals of Isidore, which were used for the "complete transformation of the constitution and government of the church" (JANUS. The Pope and the Council. 2nd ed., São Paulo:Saraiva, 1930. p. 423). Following the command of Gregory VII, Anselm of Lucca selected forgeries of Pseudo-Isidore and created a number of other false decrees, in order to centralize ecclesiastical power in that Pope (Opus cited. p. 420-421). In the sixteenth century, 100 other decretals were forged and used with the same purpose.
These crimes are no more than a brief report of what the Church perpetrated in the name of God. Similar acts were committed by churches outside the communion of Rome, before she assumed the hallucinated claim of unlimited power that distinguished her. It must be added that, after their schisms, Orthodox and Protestants practiced similar things.
Boff is adamant about Catholic errors. "Political and princely resistance”, he writes, “distorted or prevented all attempts at reform". The resistance alluded was not exercised against injustice, but against justice. It was resistance to the elimination of the evils just mentioned, which indicates that opposition to reform was never diffuse. It never came from many places with the same intensity, but was concentrated in palaces and principalities around the Roman court.
Rather than eliminate crimes, the concentration of power in the Pope, which Gregory promoted and that remains to this day, has always stimulated the multiplication of errors and scandals. Concentrated power leads to madness those who gravitate around it. It leads them to think and practice follies, with a view to approaching the core of the ecclesiastical structure to part the authority, privileges, wealth and customs that abound there.
Boff cites the famous theologian Hans Urs Balthasar, who referred to the Church as "chaste prostitute" (BALTHASAR, Hans Urs. Sponsa verbi. Einsiedeln, 1971. p. 203-325). He also mentions Ratzinger, who in 1969 wrote that, alongside serious sins, there has always existed a tradition of prophetic denunciation of them in the Church. For Ratzinger, the Peter of the period before Pentecost cannot be separated from the one who came after.
We need to remember that, when a Roman theologian speaks of Peter so solemnly, the papal institution is meant. It is thus clear that Ratzinger sees the inseparable mixture of holiness and sin at the background of the entire history of the Church. For this reason, he never failed to mention Balthasar and his doctrine of the chaste whore both before and during his pontificate. And for the same reason, after reading the report on the Curia cardinals, Benedict took the resolution to renounce his throne. He felt he was not a Gregory to lead the Church in the way of a reform always desired and never attained.
This is the picture Benedict’s renunciation recalls. What should we, as non-Catholics, think about it? First of all, as members of the evangelical church, we should no longer view these old problems in the old way, i.e. in the way of conviction. I mean we must not insist on the old verdict that the Church is incorrigible and hopelessly apostate. It is time to remind ourselves that the serious errors of the seven churches of Revelation were pointed by the Son of God, not by men. So, no church has the ground to condemn another superiorly.
Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches are all institutions. And it is as institutions that they must be understood, not as idealizations. The doctrine which preaches that all institutions are impure is tainted by excessive purism. Though institutions provide many examples of contradiction between what they intend and what they do, we should not disregard their role of keeping and transmitting from generation to generation what individuals cannot. Individuals are born and die. Institutions prevent the disappearance of their legacy.
However, an institution is good when it does good; it is bad when it does bad. It is never good in itself or because it is an institution. What unmitigated nonsense it is to say an authority should be followed because it belongs to this or to that institution! The Church is not holy or sinful because it is the Church. It is good because it does good, and bad because it does bad.
That is why we must carefully inquire if the Catholic Church has done good things. And must admit she has done very many. I will give only two examples, whose transcendental importance will suffice as a reason. The first is the preservation of the Bible. If we are able to open the Gospels and read them today, it is because Catholics copied and passed them on from generation to generation. This is a first, strong reason not to lose respect for Catholics and not to tell them with a superior air: you banned Bible reading! Yes, they did it for a long time, and it screwed up badly. But their error was not enough to erase the work of transmitting the Bible to us, so that through it we could become Christians.
Do not say it is impossible to determine whether or not the Bible would have been handed to us without Catholic medieval copyists. We are not here to discuss what our parents would have done if America had not been discovered. Nor are we supposed to finish the balance of Catholic history. We know that America was discovered, and that we received the gospel by means of the Church, despite all the mistakes she made in the process.
We are not here to write the Bible from scratch. We are here because we received it as it is. These two things are very different. However, today’s world is full of Bible infatuated parents, who call themselves Christians in spite of everyone else and against the works of every institution. As if they did not read the Bible these institutions gave them. As if the Bible that touches them and us were not transmitted by human means. For Moses never sat down and wrote the Pentateuch. The history of the formation of the Bible is very different from this,and it keeps the most intimate relationship with Jewish and Catholic institutions.
There has always been and there will always be people dissatisfied with their condition as heirs of institutions. But because they are not happy, they do not have the right to take the Bible as if it had fallen from the sky right in their lap. As if no one had copied, studied, and asked God to enlighten them while doing it. As if no tears had been stored in those wineskins of parchment.
Another example of the great achievements of the Catholics is the relief of the poor, that for many centuries was carried out by the Church in the Western world. In times when the State did not offer services of social care, this role fell to the Church, which performed it almost alone. These are some reasons why we should not consider the Catholic Church a mere abomination, as Protestants to some extent still do. This is why, though historical facts remain the same, our interpretation of them must change.
Do these achievements make the Church a glorious institution? Yes, they do, as long as she understands her good works as divine gifts. This consideration is the glory of a Catholic as well as of an Orthodox or a Protestant. God is the God of all. And if he who glories in the Lord is a Catholic, an Orthodox, a Protestant or a savage, the glory of the Lord is also for him. Or does the glory of God have a party?
We no longer live the fierce, the insoluble Catholic-Orthodox opposition of Photios time, or the division of the XVI century Reformation to rejoice or be astonished at the evils that come out of the Pandora's box of the Vatican. If the Church is holy and sinful, all Christian institutions also are. And if our institutions are, we are. Institutions are nothing other than reflections of the fornications and the glories of individuals. Nobody lives out of them. Nobody is better or worse than they. We are our own misery and the glory of God.
