Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

China's 'dangerous criminal'

One of the great heroes of the 20th century Roman Catholic Church died last month in exile in the United States. Cardinal Kung Pin-mei was archbishop of Shanghai when the communists took over China in 1949. The communists soon set out to eliminate the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, papal authority. While the communists could put up with Christian belief as long as its leaders did not challenge Communist Party orthodoxy, they could not tolerate a Church whose leader is beyond their control.

Eventually, Kung was jailed and ordered to confess his "crimes." He responded by shouting "Long live Christ the King; long live the pope" before a large, startled crowd. Before he finally went to trial five years later, Kung was again urged to renounce his ties with Rome. His response: "If I denounce the Holy Father, not only would I not be a bishop, I would not even be a Catholic." The communist government's response was to label him a dangerous criminal and sentence him to life in prison.

All of this is worth pondering. Were Kung to make such a bold declaration of papal supremacy in the Western world today, he would not be jailed. But neither would he be taken seriously. He would be written off as a fundamentalist, a relic from less enlightened days.

In Western democracies, we do not label the defenders of the papacy as dangerous criminals and lock them up; we rather engage in something Herbert Marcuse called "repressive tolerance." We marginalize them by subtler, yet perhaps even more effective means. The institutions of free speech remain, but all discussion of alternatives to the current system is circumscribed by the pervasive ideology that one person's opinion is no better than another's.

The papacy is outside this closed universe of discourse because it holds fast to the notion of moral and religious truth. For the pervasive subjectivism of the Western society - which blends so well with consumerism - the notion of truth is the ultimate heresy.

But this is precisely why a vibrant papacy is so important. With capitalist ideologues making the Happy Consciousness of consumerism into the new worldwide religion, there is a crying need for a countervailing global force that insists there is such a thing as moral truth.

It is the notion of moral truth, taught clearly by the successor of Peter and adhered to even in the face of unpleasant consequences by hundreds of millions of people, that provides the only real challenge to the ruthless exploitation and environmental despoliation that are part and parcel of capitalist globalization.

One Page 5, Jesuit Father Avery Dulles challenges those who would like to see a return to a more limited papacy as "nostalgic and anachronistic." Dulles' argument focuses on the harmful effects on the Church of a curtailing of the papal role. But the effects on the secular world of such a downsizing are also of grave concern.

Biotechnology, nuclear weapons and the destruction of the natural environment all hold the potential to eliminate the human race. In fact, they will destroy humanity unless they are reined in by a new adherence to universal moral norms. Only the papacy has the legitimate authority to teach such moral norms and to call on competent international institutions to control self-interested economic forces.

Cardinal Kung was labelled a dangerous criminal for insisting on papal primacy. But in the Western world, those who say, "Long live the pope" are dangerous too. We are dangerous because we insist on the supremacy of the power of God speaking through the vicar of Christ - the one public institution which remains beyond the control of the powers and principalities of any age.

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