I’ve been following with great interest the latest church
scandal in Germany. This one involves
the revelation that a prince of the church decided he wanted to actually live
more like a prince. As can often happen
with news events, this is turning out to be a veritable Rashomon of a story,
with so many ways of telling it and a list of implications as long as your arm.
I’m talking about the Roman Catholic Bishop of Limburg,
Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst. You
can tell from the Dutch-looking name that his roots are in the low German
lands. Also Dutch-sounding is the name
of his birthplace, Twisteden – low German for Twin Cities. The “Elst” in his name is the Dutch city of
Elst, a town just the other side of the Dutch university town of Nijmegen, about
35 miles to the Northwest.
All of these facts are totally irrelevant to the
scandal. It’s just that when you’re
digging around for background information on somebody these days, you come up
with all sorts of curious trivia. My
North German mother came from Plattdeutsch speaking people who counted to ten –
een, two, tri, vier, fif, sex, seven, acht, negen, tin and asked the time with
“Vo feel klock hev vi” (How much clock have we?) instead of standard German,
“Wieviel Uhr ist es?” I have always felt
some kind of connection with lowlanders, whether German, Dutch or Flemish folk.
Franz-Peter is interesting to me much more, however, because, like his
fellow German Catholic Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, he began his life as a
liberal cleric and had a crisis of faith at some point which turned him into a
conservative. Ratzinger was turned off
by watching the students of the sixties run wild. I don’t know what turned Franz-Peter. That’s another trivia tangent to chase down
some day if I ever run out of things to do.
In any case, Franz-Peter bought the line of the
traditionalists that authority in the church needed to be restored and respected, that his
word as a bishop required unquestioned obedience, and, it would seem, that he
could enhance that authority by living like a prince. What got him into trouble was his decision to
spend over forty-two million dollars on a residence in a town with only about 33,000
inhabitants. (There are several Limburgs
– one in Holland, one in Belgium. This
Limburg is usually distinguished by the river it’s on, and the town is commonly
called Limburg-an-der-Lahn.) Moreover,
I’d have to dig some more to find the latest census for Limburg, but the 2011
figures for the state of Hesse, where Limburg is located, shows it has fewer than a quarter of the population
listed as active Roman Catholics. These
are rough hasty calculations, but doesn’t that suggest an outlay of $42 million
for about 8200 local citizens? Even if
you consider the importance of the cathedral (it appeared on the back of a 1000
Mark bill at one time), that’s a lot of bucks for not a lot of people. Particularly when you consider these 8200
people, most of them, would never actually get to take a bath in the 15,000
euro bathtub. or sit at the 25,000 euro conference table.
Or, for that matter, even worship in the 2.9 million euro chapel.
 |
| Bishop Tebatz-van Elst has brought his own chair to the audience, Holy Father |
Headlines in this morning’s papers reveal that the pope has
relieved him of his duties. Church
officials appear to be greatly relieved, thinking this decision by the Poverty
Pope will quiet things down. Maybe the
story will go away.
Don’t bet on it.
The cat’s out of the bag.
Not only are people like me entertaining themselves with all sorts of
trivial information – the number of towns called Limburg, for example – but
some people are asking far more piercing questions. Like where the hell did all this money come
from in the first place. And what on
earth gave this bozo the idea that he could spend it on his own digs?
Why, many are asking, did Franz-Peter break down the
projects into small pieces, each costing less than five million. It couldn’t be that if a project costs more
than five million you have to get Vatican approval, could it?
Why did Franz-Peter take a first-class plane trip to India
to have his picture taken caring for the poor?
His own excuse, that he needed to arrive well rested, because it
wouldn’t do the kids any good to have him arrive with bags under his eyes,
might be excused as an exaggeration, but not a lie. But then why did he insist he went Business
Class when he actually went First? And
why, for heaven’s sake – is the guy stupid? – did he submit two false
affidavits to this effect to the Regional Court of Hamburg, thus make himself
guilty of perjury?
Like many drunk with the power of their office, Tebartz-van
Elst seems to be clueless about how many of his flock have his number. He has issued statements which suggest he was
guilty of little more than a peccadillo here and there. And
the arrogance knocks your socks off.
“Even a bishop,” he notes in a letter to his flock about the
scandal, “is not immune to doubts and
must be able to bear criticism,” as if it were about his doubts and not about
deception and stunning malfeasance.
It’s all over when a bishop becomes a laughing stock. Light artist Oliver Bienkowski yesterday projected a caricature of the
bishop onto the facade of the cathedral with "Thou shalt not steal"
underneath. One German TV comedian on the Heute-show (The Today Show), evidently realized the best way to satirize the bishop was to let him hang himself with his own words. At minute 3:57 it shows him explaining why he needed to sleep in a first class bed on the plane. Speaking of
the folks he went to visit in India, he says, “You have to see it
through their eyes. I kept these people waiting for four years. Imagine if I arrived overtired. That would be no fun for them.”
At least one conservative Catholic blogger has come to his
defense. According to Mark de Vries of In Caelo et in Terra, Archbishop Jean-Claude Périsset, the
former Apostolic Nuncio to Germany, was
not only aware of the construction plans but also agreed to the splitting of
the plan into ten smaller pieces. De
Vries cites the German press agency KNA as the source of this information. Curiously, Archbishop Périsset retired eight
months early. Could be another
coincidence.
And, by the way, you’ve got to love the comment to this
article, “Let’s pray for the Bishop.”
Yeah, right.
To get back to the questions people are asking, on the Anna
Will talk show the other day where a
panel of guests discussed the “Bishop of Bling” and all the goings-on, somebody
implied that this was money paid for by Catholics through their church
taxes. But that misconception quickly
got clarified. Only part of the church’s
expenses (and this goes for the Protestant Church in Germany, as well) is paid
by church taxes assessed on its members.
There is also this thing known as the Dotatio.
For history buffs, this is where the plot thickens. Apparently when Napoleon took
the lands from the church west of the Rhine he agreed to compensate the
churches east of the Rhine. Details make your eyes spin in their sockets, but somehow the state inherited
that obligation which obtains to this day. Church taxes, which
amounted to €4.3 billion ($6 billion, U.S.) in 2011, go only so far. A great deal of money for clerics’ salaries
and church property upkeep comes from that Dotatio, which came to €480 million
($661 million, U.S.). That means that
every German taxpayer, Jew, Muslim, Protestant, non-believer as well as church
members, is paying for that 15,000 euro bathtub. And to put numbers to that group, some
30.8 million Germans are not members of a church. That’s a lot of people to piss off, if they
ever get wind of what’s going on here.
Two facts behind these figures twist the knife in the back
of those the church has no use for. One
is the church tends to get credit for all the Catholic schools and hospitals,
even though in many cases 100% of the costs are picked up by state. They do not come from church funds. Second, despite using
general taxpayer funds, the Church can still keep gay people from working at
those institutions or fire gay employees on the spot if they reveal they are gay. It can also fire at will
a man or woman who divorces. Keep birth
control information under wraps. The
argument runs that this is a church-run institution and it therefore has the right
to dictate how it is run. Many people
have made it their life’s work to correct this form of taxation without
representation. One such person is Ingrid Matthäus-Meier, for example - who points out (the lecture is in German) that although many people think there are two official state churches in Germany, one Catholic and one Protestant, in fact neither of these, according to the constitution, is official. Germany has official separation of church and state. Now that
Tebartz-van Elst has brought Ms. Matthäus-Meier's cause into sharp relief, who knows what will
come of this story in the days to come.
There’s a new pope and he’s embarrassing everybody by
focusing on things like Matthew 19:21 where it says, (using the Douay-Rheims
version approved by the Catholic Church): “Jesus saith to him: If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what
thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and
come follow me.”
Bishops
in silks and satins have been around as long as anybody can remember. Bishops with jewel-encrusted fingers are old
news. Much as people would like to take
them away from them, too many people still labor under the conviction that
clerics deserve veneration, despite a few bad apples “on the periphery.”
Even
with the child-abuse albatross around their necks, the Roman Catholic
clericalists (those who argue clerics are a cut above normal people and have earned special benefits) still miss
the point it isn’t the bad apple priests with stunted sexualities at the heart
of the story but the clericalist idea of a solution: to hide the problem under
the rug, pay victims to keep silent and shuffle the victimizers around
where they can continue to commit sexual abuse.
Sex
and deception scandals have done great harm to the institutionalized
church. But in the long run, it might
just turn out that widespread anger and resentment over church finances will be even harder for
the church to deal with. The church rode out corruption in the Vatican Bank and suggestions of Mafia involvement. But that was some time ago, before the current disillusionment with the state of the hierarchy set in. People today have a shorter fuse.
“A mark, a yen,
a buck or a pound – money makes the world go ‘round” sang the Berlin host in Cabaret.
It
could also be the thing that stops the church from going around and brings the
princes of the church to their knees.
And
I’m not talking in a Hail Mary kind of way.
two shots from the Heute-show from German television
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