Letter to Pope Benedict

AN OPEN LETTER TO POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INDULGENCES
February 12, 2009

Dear Holy Father Benedict,

First I greet you as former colleague of the 1960s (I as Visiting Professor) on the Catholic Theology Faculty of the University of Tübingen! In that same vein I also greet you as the Founding Editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies which had the privilege of publishing an essay yours in our very first issue (1964); I am also happy to recall that we also published in that first issue an essay by your then good friend Hans Küng, who hired you at Tübingen University.  Second, I wish you well in your most demanding responsibility as the Pope of the Catholic Church. Thirdly, I address you as the co-founder and current president of the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC), which was founded in 1980 in the wake of the Vatican attack on our former University of Tübingen colleague Professor Hans Küng.

It is about the most recent episcopal actions being taken with your approval that I would like to engage you in a theological and pastoral dialogue. I am speaking of the renewed promotion of Indulgences, which your predecessor Pope John Paul II also advocated. (see February 11, 2009 New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/nyregion/10indulgence.html?scp=1&sq=indulgences&st=cse). I must confess that I am deeply disappointed in this new development, which appears as the latest in a series of restorationist efforts to roll back the joyful renewal accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council in 1962-65.

I am especially disappointed because you as a creative young theologian were deeply involved in that effulgence of Catholic creativity and renewal. You participated with eagerness in the wonderful “throwing open the windows of the Vatican,” as was said by your earlier predecessor Pope John XXIII—and in his Aggiornamento, “Bringing up to date” of the Catholic Church.

In your earlier role as theologian you were very aware of the “quantification” of God’s love for humankind in the medieval notion of Indulgences. Perhaps one could have made a case for such “simplifying,” such “thingifying” moves in a time and culture when very few people could read. But as you, and the bishops of Vatican II who you, Hans Küng, and the other Agiornamento theolgians counseled well knew, such a mentality no longer speaks to modern people who live in a mental world of scientific, historical thought categories. Surely a return to such medieval thinking is not going to draw back to an active Catholicism the current 30 million(!) former American Catholics, nor is it going to spiritually nourish the rapidly shrinking 65 million current American Catholics, who include many thousand more lay Catholic trained in contemporary theology than there are active Catholic priests!

A return to Tradition? Yes, we are looking for your theological and pastoral leadership in a return to your creative Aggiornamento Vatican II theology!

Sincerely, 

Leonard Swidler, Ph.D., S.T.L., LL.D., LL.D.
Professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligious Dialogue
Co-Founder and Editor, Journal of Ecumenical Studies
Co-Founder and President, Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church