Which Counterculture?

A few weeks ago The Big Issue had a piece penned by Peter Seewald, Pope Emeritus Benedict’s biographer, about his forthcoming book about the retired pontiff and his work. Only a couple of paragraphs in, it’s clear that Benedict XVI Last Testament isn’t going to be exactly hard-hitting. ‘It has made me angry to see how a silly understanding of him has encroached on public perceptions,’ says Mr Seewald, ‘this not only contradicts the historical truth, it is also dangerous. It prevents us from engaging with Pope Benedict’s important message.’ ‘From the beginning’ he goes on, ‘I was impressed by his realism, his courage and his strong-heartedness’.

That's all fair enough. And this message is? ‘Ratzinger sees his Church as a resistance movement against the bedevilment of this age, against the Godforsakenness of fundamentalist atheism and new forms of paganism. He encourages us not to be bedazzled or carried away by the latest contemporary trends, yet at the same time he sets us against being rigid or narrow-minded’.

I would also like to see the Church that way. It would be energising and invigorating to see oneself as part of a battle-line in the combat for hope and love; even more, a sort of underground, countercultural one, as implied by the term ‘resistance movement’ with its suggestions of laconic women in macs and berets, secret caches of arms and crackly radio sets operating under the noses of the powers-that-be. I think that is, indeed, how many Christians see themselves. I’ve spoken here about rowing against the tides of the times, and what I see as the demand of the Gospel that power, complacency and socially-accepted delusion are exposed and called to account.

But it doesn’t wash, does it? This age may be subject to bedevilment, but all ages are: there’s nothing unique about the times in which we find ourselves. The radicalism of Jesus lies in his questioning, his elevation of heavenly standards beyond earthly ones, and his refusal to tabulate what he was talking about into easily-assimilated statements. That’s why the manifesto of the early Church wasn’t a doctrinal essay but an account of a life, and eventually four mutually-conflicting if complementary accounts of it. None of this was authoritarian or even stable: none of it could easily be corralled into a system which gave clear and unequivocal guidance how human beings should manage their lives or societies. It would always be turbulent, disruptive, no matter what the world around it was like. It would always, will always, demand more than human culture can ever deliver. The Gospel will always be at odds with the age.

Of course Pope-Emeritus Benedict knows all this well enough. What he leaves out, as Roman Catholic thinkers (and to an extent Christian thinkers more generally) usually do, is history. Notwithstanding the inescapably disruptive power of the Gospel at its core, the Church has been far from inescapably disruptive. It has crowned and approved of worldly power, used the secular sword to fight its battles and enforce its ideas – and less high-mindedly, its grubby self-interest – and showed only occasional bursts of conscience at its collaboration with the forces that nailed Christ to the cross. It has done very well out of it, thank you. And now, deprived of that long power, for the Church to make a virtue of necessity and suddenly to discover a counter-cultural mission is a bit rich.

One suspects that Benedict (and plenty of other Christians of all sorts of types) only see this age as especially bedevilled because Christians are not in charge of it. And no reverential biography of the retired Pope is likely to question him about that.