We have previously written that the crisis of the institution-hierarchy-Church is rooted in the absolute concentration of power in the person of the pope, power exercised in an absolutist form, with no participation of the Christians. This creates practically insurmountable obstacles for ecumenical dialogue with other Churches.

It was not that way at the beginning. The Church was a fraternal community. The figure of the pope did not yet exist. The Church was led by the emperor, rather than by the bishops of Rome or of Constantinople, the two capitals of the empire, because he was the Supreme Pontiff (Pontifex Maximus). Thus, emperor Constantine called the first ecumenical council of Nice (325) to resolve the question of the divinity of Christ. Even in the VI century, the primacy of right was claimed by emperor Justinian, who reunited the Western and the Eastern sections of the Empire, rather than the bishop of Rome. Nonetheless, since the tombs of Peter and Paul are in Rome, the Roman Church had special prestige. Her bishop, before the others, had the “presence in love” and “performed Peter’s service,” that of “confirming in the faith”, but not Peter’s supremacy in leadership.

Everything changed with pope Leo I (440-461), a great jurist and statesman. He copied the Roman form of power, namely, the emperor’s absolutism and authoritarianism, and began to interpret strictly in juridical terms the three texts of the New Gospel related to Peter: Peter as the rock on which the Church would be built (Mt 16,18), Peter as the one who confirms in the faith (Lk 22,32), and Peter as Shepherd, who has to care for His flock, (Jn 21,15). The biblical and Jesuanic meaning follows a totally different path: one of love, service and renunciation of any honor. But the absolutist reading of Roman law predominated.

Consequently, Leo I assumed the title of Supreme Pontiff and Pope in the proper sense. Thereafter, other popes began to use the imperial insignia and apparel, the purple, the mitre, the golden throne, staff, stoles, pallium, and cape. Palaces with their courts were established, and palatial habits were introduced that cardinals and bishops still retain to the present. This scandalizes more than a few Christians, who read in the gospels that Jesus of Nazareth was a poor laborer, without pomp. Thus it began to be clear that the leaders are closer to Herod’s palace than to Bethlehem’s manger.

But there is a phenomenon that is hard to fathom: in the drive to legitimize this transformation and guarantee the absolute power of the pope, a series of false documents was forged. First, a purported letter from pope Clement (+96), Peter’s successor in Rome, addressed to James, the brother of the Lord, the great pastor of Jerusalem, in which he said that before he died, Peter had determined that he, Clement, and evidently the others who would come after, would be the sole legitimate successors. A still greater falsification was the famous Gift from Constantine, a document forged in the period Leo I, according to which Constantine made a gift of the entire Roman empire to the pope of Rome. Later on, during the disputes with the French kings, there was another great fabrication, the Pseudo decrees of Isidore, a collection of false documents and letters that reinforced the juridical primacy of the Roman pope, presented as if they were from the first centuries. It all culminated in the XIII century with the Codex of Gratian, that became the basis of canon law, but which derived from falsifications and norms that reinforced the central power of Rome, together with actual canons that had circulated among the churches. Of course, this was all unmasked later on, but without a single modification of the absolutism of the popes. Still, it is lamentable, and mature Christians should know the tricks used and conceived to create a form of power that is totally contrary to the ideals of Jesus, and that obscures the fascinating Christian message,which is the carrier of a new type of exercise of power, one that is helpful and participative.

Subsequently there was a crescendo of the power of the popes: Gregory VII (+1085) in his Dictatus Papae (The Pope’s Dictatorship) proclaimed himself to be the absolute lord of the Church and of the world; Innocence III (+1216) declared himself the vicar-representative of Christ and finally, Innocence IV (+1254) elevated himself to the representative of God. As such, under Pius IX in 1870, the pope was proclaimed infallible in the areas of doctrine and morality.

Curiously, none of these excesses has ever been denounced or corrected by the hierarchical Church, because they benefit the hierarchy. They continue to be a source of scandal for those who still believe in the Nazarene, a poor, humble artisan and Middle Eastern peasant, persecuted, crucified and resurrected to rise up against all grabs for power and more power, even within the Church. The contrary understanding clearly omits something: the true vicars-representatives of Christ, according to the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth (Mt 25,45) are the poor, the thirsty and the hungry. And the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church exists to serve them, not to take over from them.

In a recent book of the same title, Can the Church Be Saved? (2012), this question was posed by Swiss-German Hans Küng, one of the best known and prolific theologians in the Catholic fold. Along with his colleague from the University of Tübingen, Joseph Ratzinger, he enthusiastically advocated for a renewal of the Church. Küng has written a great deal about the Church, ecumenism, religions and other relevant topics. Because one of his books questioned papal infallibility, he was harshly castigated by the former Inquisition. He did not abandon the Church, but pushes like very few others for her reform, writing books, open letters, and calls to the bishops and the Christian community to open up a dialogue on the modern world and the new situation of humanity on the planet.

The sons and daughters of our time are not evangelized by showing them a model of Church, turned into a bastion of conservatism and authoritarianism and appearing like a fortress that is threatened by modernity, which is deemed responsible for all types of relativism. Let us say, by the way, that the ferocious criticism the present pope launches against relativism arises from the opposite pole, an invincible absolutism. This is the tone imposed by the two last popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI: NO to reform, and a return to tradition and a strict discipline, orchestrated by the ecclesiastic hierarchy.

The present book: Can the Church be Saved? reads as an almost desperate cry for transformation, and, at the same time, as a generous manifestation of the hope that if a sad institutional collapse is to be avoided, such transformation is possible and necessary.

To start, let’s be clear, when Küng and I speak of Church, we mean the community of those who feel committed to the figure and cause of Jesus of Nazareth, whose focus resides in unconditional love, in the centrality of the poor and invisible, in the brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings and in the revelation that we are sons and daughters of God, since it was Jesus himself who showed us that he was the Son of God who took on our contradictory humanity. This is the original and true meaning of Church. But historically the word Church has ben appropriated by the hierarchy (from the pope to the curates); that identifies itself as Church tout court and presents itself as the Church.

Well then, it is this second conception of Church, that Küng calls “the Roman system” that is in a profound crisis, this, “the hierarchical-institutional Church” or “the monarchic-absolutist structure of power”, whose seat is in the Vatican and is centered in the figure of the pope with the apparatus that surrounds him: the Roman curia. This crisis began centuries ago, and the cries for change run throughout the history of the Church, culminating in the Reform of the XVI Century and Vatican Council II (1962-1965) of our times. In structural terms, the structural reforms were always superficial, or delayed; or simply aborted.

Recently, however, the crisis has acquired a special gravity. The heart of the Church as institution, (pope, cardinals, bishops, curates), I repeat, not the great community of the faithful, has been affected, in that which was its great pretension: that of being “guide and teacher of morality” for all of humanity. Some already known facts have exposed this pretension, bringing discredit to the institutional Church, and causing a great flight of the faithful:

The financial scandals involving the Vatican Bank (IOR), that was transformed into a sort of off-shore money laundry; the secret documents that were taken, perhaps even from the papal desk by his own secretary, and sold to newspapers, revealing the power intrigues among cardinals; and particularly the question of the pedophile priests, thousands of cases in various countries, including priests, bishops and even Hans Hermann Groer, the cardinal of Vienna. A very grave mandate was given by then-cardinal Ratzinger to all bishops of the world to cover up, under pontifical secrecy, the sexual abuse of minors to avoid pedophile priests being denounced to civil authorities. Finally, the pope had to recognize the criminal character of pedophilia, and accept the judgment of civil tribunals.

Küng shows, with irrefutable historical erudition, the steps taken by popes as they passed from being successors of Peter, to vicars of Christ, to representatives of God on Earth. The titles that canon 331 confers on the pope are of such magnitude that, in reality, they only fit God. An absolute papal monarchy with a golden staff does not comport with the piece of wood of the Good Shepherd who cares for his sheep with love and confirms them in the faith, as the Master requested (Luke 22,32).