No matter whether it is Paul VI, John Paul II, or Benedict XVI, no pope today can escape the censure of being conservative. The word “conservative” is mild in the extreme. More and more often the current pope is characterized in terms such as “inflexible,” “antimodern,” “antiquated,” or even “fossilized.” The pope is said to build barriers, fight desperately against the currents of the age, set models, norms, and institutions in stone in ways that no one today can understand. The reproach of conservatism is so notorious that it is worth thinking twice about the word itself. What does “conservative” really mean, and why do the popes and the church as a whole appear to have this ineradicable love for conservatism?
Conservative
Often in the case of such problems a look at the dictionary can be a good first step. “Conservative” comes from Latin by way of French. The verb conservare meant for the Romans to “preserve unsullied,” “protect against decay,” “keep alive,” “rescue.” That gives us a preliminary insight. Conservare is not about marginal issues, things one may do or not do. It is about the whole thing, about existence, naked life. Conservare says that something crucially important is in extreme danger and absolutely must be rescued.
Of course, I understand that the concept of “conservative” has acquired a number of different nuances in the climate of modern political parties, not all of them congenial. But that should not dissuade us from uncovering the core concept. No one can stop us from considering it theologically, indeed, seeing it in the light of the Gospel and the church.
What does the church care about? What does it have to keep alive, protect, hand on undamaged—even rescue? At the center of the church’s faith stands Jesus Christ. The New Testament and, with it, the whole Christian tradition confesses that he is the final, definitive Word of God. More than this God cannot say, to all eternity. In Jesus Christ, the Son, God has said everything. In him God has fully and finally spoken the innermost divine essence.
But God has also done everything in Jesus. In him God has given God’s own self to the world in the ultimate act of love. In the risen and exalted Christ, therefore, the world has already reached its perfection. More than the creation perfected in Christ the world cannot receive. But that means that what is decisive in world history has already happened. It is given to us. It comes to us as something that has already come to pass. Therefore that event must be preached as Gospel, mediated through sacrament, preserved unsullied, and so again and ever again be brought into the present in order that the world may be changed toward its future, which has already come into being.
Precisely that is the church’s task, and within the church it is the particular task of the ordained ministry. The church must be conservative from its heart to the tips of its hair—precisely because what is decisive has already happened and has been entrusted to it by God. Those who hold office in the church can only preserve and hand on the “good treasure entrusted” to them (2 Tim 1:12, 14). The church, and its popes, must therefore be conservative. It is not an option for them not to be conservative.
Progressive
But—if Jesus Christ is really the final, irrevocable Word of God, and if in him the whole of evolution has already reached its goal, then what has been given to the world in him surpasses all our concepts and notions. Then Christ is always far in advance of advancing history. Then what he said and did is new wine that bursts all the old skins (Matt 9:17). Then the church is constantly an experience of the new. Then Christian communities, whenever they apply themselves to the task of conservare that has been entrusted to them, are an explosive force within the old society.
If we apply this to recent popes, then precisely to the degree that they have been radically conservative, that is, served with their whole existence what was entrusted to them in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a precious treasure, they were progressive. We can readily envision this in the context of the church’s relationship to the Jews. Over centuries the church, and the papacy with it, had a broken relationship to the Jews. It is true that the church states did not participate in the major persecutions of the Jews; those raged elsewhere. But since the second century the church has been unable to understand what Israel means for it. Its theologians increasingly suppressed the idea that God has not abrogated the covenant with Israel, and that the church is only church to the degree that it participates in the “privilege of Israel” (to quote the third prayer of the Easter Vigil).
It is only the most recent popes who have again understood this to the full extent, and in that they were and proved themselves to be altogether progressive. But with this progressivity they were only reclaiming what Paul had long ago said in Romans 9–11. To that extent they were in this instance not only progressive but conservative at the same time. John Paul II was a conservative revolutionary, and that is not an oxymoron.
Is this not true in many other cases? Was John Paul II perhaps, in seeming to live in the past, actually far in advance of his time? And Benedict XVI, when he (from the point of view of his opponents) became a crusty conservative—was he not in fact shielding the church from postmodern arbitrariness?
Regressive
Moreover, the opposite of “progressive” is not “conservative” but “regressive.” And “regressive” can mean “falling back to earlier, more primitive levels of spiritual development,” according to the dictionaries! Are not the professional critics of Pope Benedict XVI, who claimed he was not progressive enough, perhaps themselves regressive? The church will only survive if it accommodates itself to society, so they decree as they loudly lament the church’s dramatic loss of “ability to relate to society”—and then inevitably there follows the long list of necessary accommodations. They do not take into account that for the people of God, from Abraham through the prophets to Jesus, and then through the saints (despite all their respect for and internalization of the true values of society) there has been a continuity of “non-accommodation.” This last was by no means innocuous. It could be dangerous, for it was always an irritation to those who did accommodate themselves.
Those who hold to the Gospel and the church’s tradition of interpret- ing it are conservative in the best sense of the word: they rescue and preserve God’s project in the world. And God’s project is always progressive. Could it be that those who refuse to see that are the real nonprogressives?
This is an excerpt from the book of Gerhard Lohfink “No Irrelevant Jesus” which will be available soon at Claretian Communications Foundation, Inc. Gerhard Lohfink is also the author of “Jesus of Nazareth.“
