“Brief über die KIrche”
Die Kontroverse um Ida Friederike Görres’ Aufsatz – ein Dokumentationsband
A Letter on the Church
The Controversy surrounding the Essay by Ida Friederike Görres – a Documentary Collection.
Paraiso, Jean-Yves (Editor)
(2005 Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna)
Last year I wrote a review of the 1951 book The Church in the Flesh of Ida Friederike Görres. Now that book prominently refers to a prior essay of hers, A Letter on the Church, (the “Letter”) from 1946, which at the time had created an uproar in the German Church.1) I felt it was incumbent upon me to examine the Letter and assess its significance. Fortunately, in 2005 Jean-Yves Paraiso – who seems to have impeccable progressive credentials – had published the Letter along with other source documents relating to it. He also provided notes and an introduction.
I do have to confess that I find Görres’s prose to be somewhat tiresome. Her style is now enthusiastic and emotional, now dogmatic and pontificating. It reminds me of what someone once wrote about the writings of Eric Gill (who, among other things, was a Catholic publicist): it’s like being harangued in a pub by someone who’s speaking too long and too loudly. It is somewhat unfortunate, however, to judge Görres by these post-World War II writings. They leave the impression that she is first and foremost a commentator and polemicist on ecclesiastical issues. Her most famous works, however, published during and before World War II, dealt with spirituality and hagiography, such as her lives of Mary Ward and St. Theresa of Lisieux.
The Letter takes the form of a dialogue between a ”Protestant” and the author. The Protestant speaks of his admiration for the Catholic Church: its liturgy, splendid and understandable for the common people; the beauty of Corpus Christi processions; the high educational level and exemplary conduct of the clergy; the sacrificial service of the nursing sisters. Görres, however, feels compelled to point out that his “outsider’s” understanding may be superficial. She then launches into a catalog of the woes afflicting the Catholic Church at that time.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Letter is its focus upon the deficiencies of the Catholic clergy, particularly the diocesan clergy. In the post-1870 Church such public attacks on the clergy by Catholics of course had been few and far between. According to Görres, the conduct of the German clergy may indeed be “correct,” but that is inadequate. Görres provides a long list of clerical deficiencies: their education, their personalities, their worldliness and the leadership of their parishes. Why are there are so few pious priests? The priests often rattle off the Mass without any thought. To hear a decent sermon is an exception. “Celibacy, instead of freeing up the priest for fraternal encounters, locks the individual rigidly and icily in his unmastered self.” Clerical authoritarianism can reach an extreme that Görres qualifies as “clericofascism!“ These problems – and worse – are even more rampant in her homeland of German Bohemia (the Sudetenland).(By 1946 the German population there was either dead or in exile).
Certainly, the diatribe against the German clergy in the Letter attracted the most attention at the time, but other aspects of the Church are not spared. The German monastic orders are impressive in choir, but such monks, according to Görres, should be “angels.” Catholic charitable organizations can be cruel and disrespectful to those in need. The laity, at least in certain 100% Catholic rural districts, are narrow-minded and anything but Christian – after all, are they not the source of the clergy? Catholic schools are all too often characterized by a “narrowness bordering on fanaticism, perpetuation of the inadequate and substituting competence with zeal.” Moreover, Görres suspects these issues of the German-speaking countries may also be prevalent elsewhere in the Catholic world.
Görres’s imaginary dialogue partner, after hearing all this, inquires why she remains a member of the Catholic Church. She answers, not inappropriately, because the Church is the bearer of the Truth. Therefore, she loves the Church. In fact, she says all these things against the Church because she loves it so much. This love enables her to see everything clearly without any cover up. Her anger and sorrow are prompted by her conviction of how great a presence the Church should be. For the Church is the Church of Christ. These sentiments are set forth in a lengthy, emotional peroration.
Now, surprisingly enough, you do not find in the Letter certain things that you might have expected based on the polemics of subsequent decades. There are only tangential references to the war or the Third Reich, and the role of the Church in that time. There’s no real analysis of how the desolate situation of the Church came about and no examination of the role of the (current) hierarchy or the papacy, nor are any solutions offered. Curiously, she cites as a major issue that the Holy Saturday services take place in the morning of that day, which represents to her a logical absurdity. I don’t know if raising this point would make much sense in a dialogue with a real, as opposed to an imaginary, Protestant, but it does reveal the influence of Liturgical Movement agitation. Otherwise, as elsewhere in her writings, Görres devotes surprisingly little attention to the liturgy. At times Görres’s recitation of ecclesiastical ills declines into nonsense, such as when she cites real or imagined anecdotes from the life of aristocratic priests in the 18th century.
The Letter demonstrates that in that “pre-conciliar” era the blunt critical speech of Catholics could match anything found online today. And Görres’s Letter provoked a response no less vehement. Indeed, the editor of this collection claims a statement of Pope Pius XII was specifically directed at Görres’s remarks (without expressly naming Görres).
Of the critical responses quoted in this volume, I find most persuasive that of the Catholic archbishop of Freiburg, who pointed out how utterly inappropriate it was for Görres to publish the Letter at that time. For Germany in 1946 was not like the United States in 1965. Many German Catholics and their pastors were living in bombed-out cities or refugee camps, many families were still hoping for the return of their loved ones who were prisoners of war. The economic and political situation remained chaotic. Moreover, in the total German collapse of 1945, the hierarchy and clergy of the Catholic Church had played a great role in stabilizing society to the best of their ability – just as the bishops of Gaul did during the barbarian invasions in the 5th century. And what of the witness of a not insignificant number of clerics during the Third Reich – many of whom paid with their lives?
I of course do not have direct experience of what the German Church was like at the parish level in 1946, but I think there are independent witnesses of that age that offer a stark contrast to Görres’s depiction. Such as Peter Seewald’s Benedikt XVI: Ein Leben, which describes the youth of Joseph Ratzinger in the 1920s and 30s. For Poland, George Weigel’s Witness to Hope tells a similar tale about Karol Wojtyla’s younger days. Do we need to mention the situation of the Church in the United States in those immediate postwar years, which Catholics at the time thought was a “golden age?” This evidence at a minimum demonstrates the “black legend” given us by Görres is a one-sided caricature.
This is unfortunate because there were there were significant issues with the Catholic Church in 1946. Görres hints at some of these when she writes about priest-bureaucrats. Or when she comments on the worldliness of some priests, their desire to fit in with the laity and ingratiate themselves with the world. These were harbingers of what was to come. Now, of course, in prior ages saints like Benedict and Bernard, Dominic and Francis rose up to reform the Church even when everything seemed to be in flourishing condition. For in earlier eras, the response to mediocrity or worse in the Church was not just to denounce, but to reform one’s own life, and then attract others to the same cause – in other words, to found monasteries and orders.
But I do not think the Letter‘s dark image of the Church necessarily has anything to do with historical truth. It is the start of a myth – like the myths of the decadence of the Church before 1517 and the Reformation, or of the French state and society prior to 1789 and the French Revolution. Such myths serve to delegitimize the establishment, in Church and state, to call its rule into question. They also justify political action against the establishment
Am I mistaken in seeing the vehemence of the Letter the consequence of the exalted notions of the author regarding the clergy and the institutional Church? Ideals that were derived from the excessive glorification of the institution that the Church inculcated after 1870. It seems Görres expected the clergy could be “angels.” Such an image inevitably would lead to disappointment when it collided against the actual condition of the Church in the world (no matter what that might be). In Görres’s case, the reaction was rage – and eventually, the dream of a future total transformation.
Now, in a way her subsequent book, The Church in the Flesh, 2) can be seen as atonement (Sühne) for the Letter. For The Church in the Flesh has as its stated purpose the defense of the Church as it concretely exists, as opposed to some disincarnate spiritual entity. However, she did not at all renounce the Letter. Indeed, The Church in the Flesh leads off with a dialogue that is clearly modeled on the Letter. This time the “Protestant” is replaced by a “convert” and the author is replaced by a “bold” representative of the worker priest movement in France. (pp. 3-4) The emotional indictment of the clergy and the Church is absent or subdued in The Church in the Flesh. Yet Görres states:
“(In the Church today- SC) [t]here is also ‘the dying of the Church in souls’ ….the slow , creeping imperceptible dying from catching a cold and from impoverishment, from spiritual malnutrition and hardening.” (p. vii)
And she hopes for a new age of the Church:
Do you not feel how much has begun to flow that still seemed to our parents petrified in unchangeability? …It is a pleasure to be a part of this unique adventure of becoming new! … So often it seems to be as if the Church is once again in early spring, in the very early part when nothing could be seen but snow, ice, mud and floods. (p.48)
Görres in 1960 published Zwischen den Zeiten ( Between the Eras or Ages, titled Broken Lights in the English translation).3) On the one hand, she returned to blanket denunciations of the Catholic Church of her day and restated her faith in a ‘Church to come”:
Nothing saddens me more at the moment than the pitiable mediocrity and flatness of Catholic Christendom – I can hardly find one redeeming feature anymore.
The Church of Today, which is as much my concern as the Church of Tomorrow is that of the reformers. In me the present Church in changing if only in one tiny fragment, into the Church to come – that is the nucleus and meaning of my destiny.
On the other hand, in this book she already was distancing herself from the concrete positions that were dominating Catholic progressive circles, like revolutionary criticism of the liturgy and unbounded admiration for the United States.
During and after Vatican II, Görres took up these themes once more in private letters. 4) She acknowledged the frankly mythical character of these dreams of destruction and renewal by invoking an image of the Church as the phoenix, arising from the ashes of the existing Church, thanks to the creative destruction of the Council. Yet early on she challenged this image and then expressly repudiated the entire idea of a total rejection of the Church’s past:
I know, the Church is a phoenix. She has already died many deaths. But by suicide? Is there resurrection after that? If that’s so, then I wouldn’t really want to live any more. I can’t in such a wicked way separate myself from the whole past, to throw it overboard as a tissue of mistaken developments, of disappointments and wrong interpretations of the Gospel…. I simply can’t believe that the Lord incarnated in such a wrong way….( Letter of February 23, 1965. p. 89)
Yet the myth lived on. Have not we not heard the stories about the bad old days of the pre-conciliar Church? In the 1960s the specific target of progressive condemnation shifted from the clergy, who after all were the agents of the Conciliar revolution, to the laity. The Catholic laity does remain a target of progressive abuse even today. But Pope Francis, in his repeated attacks on “clericalism,” has redirected the criticism back to the clergy. And the progressive forces advocating women priests and the abolition of clerical celibacy have no hesitation in excoriating the current clergy, 60 years after the Council, using terms not unlike those of Görres!
But is there not an element of truth here ? Did not the revolution of the 1960s indeed create a clergy with problems very much like those Görres describes – and far worse? She did, after all, concede to the German clergy of 1946 “correct” behavior. Since 1965, that has clearly no longer been the case. Not with $5 billion having been paid by the Church to victims of sex abuse since 2004 in the United States alone. Frankly, the clergy today, aside from a dedicated minority, is totally inadequate to the monumental evangelical task facing the Church. Indeed, in the advanced West, it is increasingly difficult to find any candidates at all for holy orders and a large percentage of clerics must be imported from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Poland.
As Paraiso concedes, Ida Görres was no ”left-wing” Catholic. As she herself wrote, she indeed stood between the eras. But by that she first had meant her position between the existing Church and the Church to come. Later, the expression took on a different meaning. Görres had shared in the prerevolutionary ferment of the progressives. Eventually, however, she could no longer follow either their concrete recommendations or their myths of destruction and renewal. The result was, at the end of her life, a public confrontation. But by that time a general revolution was shaking the Church to her foundations!
- First published in Frankfurter Hefte, Number 8, November 1946 pp.715-733.
- https://sthughofcluny.org/2024/09/the-church-in-the-flesh.html
- https://sthughofcluny.org/2020/03/is-it-really-a-phoenix-ida-gorres-and-the-collapse-of-german-catholicism-part-i.html
- https://sthughofcluny.org/2020/03/is-it-really-a-phoenix-ida-gorres-and-the-collapse-of-german-catholicism-part-ii.html