2010: A Look Back

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The human and divine aspects of the Church are revealed in the year's highs and its lows.

By George Neumayr
Reflecting on 2010 in his annual December address to the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict XVI noted that the “Year for Priests” had “unfolded so differently from the way we had expected,” a reference to the abuse scandal that erupted in Europe. As Pope Benedict acknowledged, it was a year of “tribulations” for the Church.
The abuse scandal, alas, stands as one of the major stories of 2010. Fresh media attention to cases of priestly abuse of minors started in Ireland, jumped to continental Europe, then ricocheted back to America via a New York Times smear campaign against the Holy Father. The coverage reached its most feverish point during Holy Week.
Pope Benedict received the brunt of the criticism for the abuse scandal, even though he had shown the most leadership among Curia officials in confronting it. Nevertheless, the Holy Father kept his eye on the essential truth beneath the biased coverage: that the Church still hasn’t recovered from the aftershocks of dissent and decadence from the post-Vatican II period and needs ongoing reform. As Pope Benedict noted in the interview-book Light of the World released in November—a book which represents a singularly unique document in the history of the papacy—the Church’s critics wouldn’t have scandals to use against her if Church officials didn’t commit them.
The aftershocks of 2010 had come from a theological earthquake decades before. Relativism had seeped into the thinking of Church officials and infected policies ranging from seminary admission standards to the application of canon law. “In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” Pope Benedict said to the Curia. “It was maintained—even within the realm of Catholic theology—that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than.’ Nothing is good or bad in itself.”
But for all of 2010’s problems, the year also contained many moments of hope and pride. Among other high points, the Church marked the fifth anniversary of Benedict’s consequential pontificate, held a major synod, launched the historic initiative Anglicanorum Coetibus, and elevated important figures of orthodoxy, like former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, to the College of Cardinals. Pope Benedict continued to plant civilizational seeds within Europe on trips to Spain, Portugal, and Malta, and established a new Vatican department called the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization with the aim of re-Christianizing the West.
During a year when the clash of civilizations continued to rage, with atheists in the West demanding “reason” without faith and extremists in the East clamoring for “faith” without reason, the Church remained the still point of history harmonizing faith and reason for the betterment of the world. Pope Benedict’s trip to Britain, which ranks as one of the chief highlights of the year and a remarkable reversal of English history, drew attention to that synthesis.
As he recalled to the Curia:

My thoughts go first of all to the encounter with the world of culture in Westminster Hall, an encounter in which awareness of shared responsibility at this moment in history created great attention which, in the final analysis, was directed to the question of truth and faith itself. It was evident to all that the Church has to make her own contribution to this debate. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his day, observed that democracy in America had become possible and had worked because there existed a fundamental moral consensus which, transcending individual denominations, united everyone. Only if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function. This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk wherever its place, the place of moral reasoning, is taken by the purely instrumental rationality of which I spoke earlier. In reality, this makes reason blind to what is essential. To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.

This debate over faith and reason will drive many of the issues and controversies of 2011, and the Church will remain at the forefront of it. Secularism has not prevailed in creating a new world order, as the economic and moral crises afflicting many countries in 2010 all too clearly attest. Political and cultural upheaval, both in America (where President Barack Obama’s party suffered historic defeats) and abroad, reveal that resistance to the Brave New World will not disappear any time soon.
Confident secularists wish to consign the Church to the dustbin of history, yet historians of the future will likely look back upon 2010 and marvel at the Church’s resilience. Who, for example, could have imagined over four centuries ago that the Queen of England would greet Pope Benedict on an official state visit? The highs and lows of 2010 are a reminder of what the Church has always taught: it is weak and exposed in its human dimension but indestructible in its divine one.
George Neumayr is editor of CWR.