I could easily go on and talk, for example, about the use of public money without official controls; or about financial scandals in Rome, Chicago, and other places. I could mention the nomination of bishops, contrary to ancient Catholic tradition, without the participation of clergy and people,or of priests and diocesan councils; or the continual disregard paid to the age limit of 75 for bishops, a principle solemnly laid down by Vatican II; and so on.
I mention all this so openly, not because it gives me any pleasure to do so, but simply because it is the theologian's duty and responsibility to speak the truth, whether it is opportune or inopportune, even if punishments might follow.
To that you could add the destruction of the infrastructure of local parishes serving The People of the Church which is one of the direct results of the policies and practices and appointments of the last two popes.
In addition to the general decline of Christianity in Europe, to some extent the contents of Kung's book indict the then growing scandals of John Paul II's papacy, a trend that reached its climax in the papacy of his hand-chosen successor Benedict XVI. Benedict's most responsible act while in Rome was his resignation of the papacy. A large part of the papacy of Good Pope Francis has been trying to clean up these and other scandals and crimes, some of which were of even longer standing than that. His choice to try to work within the confines imposed by Benedict's decision to remain in the Vatican in his retirement, especially that his chief henchman Georg Ganswein (aka Gorgeous Georg) worked with some of the worst of the JPII Benedict XVI era cardinals and bishops and filthy rich Catholics to sandbag the reforms of Francis and him, kept some of those reforms from really taking hold. A lot of the lingering problem is that Francis has had to deal with concerns of schismatic cults encouraged by, specially, some of the more foolish policies of Benedict, such as his perhaps unintended creation of a Latin mass cult as he sought to make overtures to the fascist schismatics of the Pius X cult who he should have known would never really accept the reforms of Vatican II.
I recently posted a link to an article which noted that when the Cardinal electors made Benedict pope, they thought they were voting for the smartest man in the room. What their folly proved is that intellectual genius (especially when it's spent its entire life in the artificial grow-house of university life and then the even worse one of the Vatican) is often a far cry from wisdom. I think that any positive inclination that Benedict had was more than matched by his complete cluelessness as to who to put his trust in and how to do things in the real world. Not to mention his cowardice when he must have known how corrupt things were becoming, not only under John Paul II, who he served as chief henchman, but during his own disastrous papacy.
But, although I am aware of the sinister nature of much of what is called Christian, and although I am aware also of the most important scientific, scholarly, or popular objections to Christianity -historical, philosophical, psychological or sociological- I should nonetheless like to stay this: that in this disorientated age I receive my essential values from Christianity, despite everything. Not from what is called Christian, but from what is truly Christian; from the Christian message itself, from a Christian faith that is not merely believed but actually lived,from being a Christian.But here a question arises which must form the theme of our next section.
The Christian message is, ultimately, based in the reported words and acts of Jesus in the Gospels, in the reports of his followers in Acts and the Epistles, anything that is called "Christian" and especially which is claimed to be Christian that cannot be squared with the teachings of Jesus, his reported actions and the testimony of those who transmit those to us is legitimately rejected as, in fact, being Christian.
One of the foremost facts of Western history is how much of the history of "Christendom" is a bald and blatant contradiction and rejection of the teachings of Jesus and the opposite of what we are told that Jesus did. As I've noted, that's hardly unique to Christianity or of religion, the entire history of the American republic, minus a few years of partial compliance with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are not only a failure to live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence, the preface to the United States Constitution, they are a conscious and purposeful rejection of those idealistic claims of intent, even in the very Constitution that follows the lofty claims of the purpose of government, the very things that possibly make a government legitimate, the rights asserted are an automatic, equal and permanent endowment on all People by God and their consent to be governed.
The same can be said, over and over again in area after area, country after country. Hardly any government lives up to the lofty words of their most basic legal documents. But it is only in the case of religion that it is held to be a capital crime against the Gospels, Paul, James, etc. for the violated foundation of Christianity that those who profess it don't act in accordance with it.
Imagine if various rules and laws governing the profession of the law had to pass a similar test based in the conduct of lawyers, if the repute of "the law" had to live or die based on the behavior of those licensed to practice law and to act as judges and "justices." Imagine if the profession of medicine had to depend on the behavior of those it licenses, and on down the entire edifice of secular, civic life. Imagine if journalism was held to a rule that journalists only report the truth as it can be supported with factual evidence - that the ass end of "opinion journalism" that now wags the dog were abolished out of "journalistic ethics." The same for the practices of scholars and intellectuals who, when you fact check them, are permitted to be incredibly lax considering the repute they are supposed to be held in. Including scientists and the popularizers of science. Imagine if they really had to stand up to real, skeptical critical professional review. What would stand? Little to nothing.
A Personal Note
I have spent most of my life from my adolesence as a socialist, I still have a high opinion of much of Christian and other religious socialism even as I have forced myself to face the sheer rottenness of most of what is considered socialism. It's only since coming to understand that socialism, rightly, will never live down the association of the word with Marxism, Nazism, such vile things as Fabianism, various and many other socialisms that have earned both the skepticism of those who have been the victims of those things when they have power and those who have witnessed those gargantuan crimes and the frequently putrid assertions of those within Fabianism and other largely impotent ideological clubs. George Bernard Shaw was only one of the brite-lites of Fabianism who were advocating mass murder in the very style of the Nazis more than thirty years before the Nazis started their scientific-technological mass murder machine, entertaining and exciting the "radicals" at Fabian meetings in London with advocacy of mass murder by gas chamber as early as 1910. H.G. Wells was advocating racist genocide in the same period. And other socialists in other places were saying similiar things. I ignored those associations until I realized that nothing about the actual core idea of socialism contained the refutation of that epic immorality, unlike the crimes of the Christians which were, in every way, a violation of the Gospels and Epistles which are the absolute essence of what any real Christianity is.
I also ignored the fact that socialists I took to have clean hands, not infrequently, especially after 1917, were active apologists and, as hidden files became available, paid agents for some of the greatest criminals in the history of the human species exactly because they claimed to be instituting socialism where they violently held dictatorial power. That their socialism was, in no way socialist, didn't seem to bother their supporters. I can remember where I was and what I was reading the moment that I realized that anyone murdered under Stalin or Mao, etc. was as murdered as anyone murdered under Hitler or Mussolini or the various U.S. client-fascist states in Latin America and that my own socialism was implicated in it. Since then, especially as huge amounts of raw pdf and other files of old Marxist and socialist material became available to read online, I've been repeatedly shocked and disgusted with what people I used to admire actually advocated or tacitly supported in that regard. It is always a mistake to rely on secondary, tertiary and other cleaned-up source materials to judge the actual character of those you are supposed to hold as heroes. None of them stand up in the way Jesus does in the canonical Gospels, especially if you go back to the original Greek texts.
Since I found out what capitalism is supposed to be, I have never not believed that the ownership rights of investors under capitalism is legalized theft, that usury is evil. I have always believed that those who produce wealth rightfully earned the ownership of the means of production through producing any wealth that are generated with those means. I am, by strict definition a socialist because I believe those things but I don't consider myself a socialist anymore because I have come to see that, first, The Law of Moses, in regard to its economic justice, containing, among other things, a prohibition on usury which is the basis of capitalism, is vastly superior to and more radical any socialist scheme. And, secondly, the Gospels, Acts, Paul, etc. build much farther on The Law in the radicalness of their charity. They are more radical than socialism is and, unlike socialism, what makes them far more radical are the actual religious foundations of them as contained in the texts that lay out their substance and the assertion of the source of their authority.
As it was from its beginning, secular socialism would have always failed because it lacked the religious faith that would be necessary for it not to devolve into abusive oppression, what deputed Christianity has to ignore to do that. That is the honest lesson of the scandalous history of Christendom, that without that basis in The Law and The Gospel, any government will become unjust and oppressive no matter its professed foundations. That is how, for example, Ferdinand and Isabella could produce the horrors they did in the name of Christianity. But you don't have to claim a religious foundation to ignore the Gospel. If you deny The Law and The Gospel, it's far easier to do the same thing in even bigger ways. The "enlightenment" could produce the Reign of Terror followed by Napoleon's imperial military despotism (which "enlightened" idiots all over Europe mistook for a force for good, till they couldn't deny it) and the often violent, turbulent and seldom democratic French governments after that. Also a United States which didn't devolve into monarchy but which continued genocide and slavery and, after the Civil War, continued those under Jim Crow, which is being resurrected under Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court even as we watch. That they also had some marginal progressive features, especially when those were profitable or at no economic cost, doesn't mitigate their effects by as much as the propagandists of "enlightenment" would have you believe.
The secular republics of the late 18th and 19th and 20th centuries, the self-consciously and professed science-based regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries have proven to be even more dangerous and ruthless than the Christian deniers of what Jesus said of the middle-ages, those who did exactly the opposite of what he said should be done in his name. Though as monarchs such as the late 19th century Kings of Belgium had access to modern technology, their ability to do the evil they profited from, made them far more deadly.
It will always be a serious danger whether under a "most Christian monarch," in any scheme of democracy and every non-democratic so-called "republic" in which an effective majority of voters or The People don't share those radical religious ideas as determining their political choices especially as a basis for the economy. Administrative secularism necessary for the even-handedness of governance is always going to be in tension with the rejection of the religious foundations of egalitarian democracy, especially the vulgar materialism that will result from that unless some religious faith acts as an effective counter-measure to it. The dangers of cultural secularism and Republican-fascist style anti-Christianity in the West are something I predict will become a major topic because events will force that, as well as addressing the decadence of Biblical Fundamentalism (turning, mostly, the KJV into an impotent idol) which was, as well, based largely in a racist-capitalist rejection of the justice of Moses and the universal Charity of Jesus with a large dose of plain dishonesty thrown in.
That those who hold religious titles such as the current Patriarch of Moscow, the apparent majority of those in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are in thick with thieves with the world-overlord billionaires shouldn't deceive anyone as to their entirely worldly motives and, clearly, their real beliefs and their clear devotion to Mammon. For now, since this is getting long, I will leave it to Muslims to criticize the corrupt rulers and clerics in majority Muslim countries and Jews to point out the corruption of the rulers and some of the chief Rabbis of Israel in this regard.
NOTE: I expect to lose electricity in the storm they're predicting, under the foreign ownership of the electric grid in my area of Maine, things are worse than they used to be in that regard than in the 1950s. If you don't see anything posted here for a while, that's the reason.
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