Confession of a Partisan

The joined offensive of dominion theology and imperial politics is lethal. Indeed, by culture and genetic hard-wiring, male domination continues to be a mortal threat to personal/social wellbeing. The aggressions of the Holy Roman Empire, prosecuted in God’s Name, caused at least five schisms with traumatic effect that lasts to the present time. A prior and universal schism is that between men and women driven by the male herd-instinct for dominance. Holy exuberance or irrational terror, call it what you will, male-hyped activism is anti-social, chaotic and entropic.

The world war, which the Crusades were, was waged under authority of imperial Roman theology/politics. The Crusades caused two schisms, the split of Christianity into the Eastern Byzantine Church and the Western Roman Church, and the still widening, intractable breach between Islam and Christianity. Also, there was the schism of the papacy itself into the split of the Avignon Popes and their Curia with the Roman Popes and theirs, the enduring divide of conciliarism and infallibilism.

Church/State militarism in the kingdoms of Empire impoverished Europe and fomented high corruption in Church and State. The Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, and others in the Church challenged the corruption and pretense of imperial Church, which came to a violent head at the Council of Trent. It was the de Medici Pope Leo X who excommunicated Luther. It was the same Pope who authorized the sale of indulgences to finance the construction of St. Peter’s Church of Rome and other less worthy ventures. The Council of Trent refused out-of-hand to consider the 95 theological propositions of Luther and plunged Europe into the Wars of Religion (1618-1648). The outcome of the Thirty Years Wars was the splintering of Church into competing Christian ideologies.

The havoc of Christian fragmentation was further aggravated by the zealous and sometimes violent proselytizing of Christian sects in the colonized lands.

A fifth great schism now happening is within the Church of Rome. It is the schism between the First Vatican Council and the Second Vatican Council. The Church of Vatican I is an endorsement and enlargement of the theology and ecclesiology of the Council of Trent. The Second Vatican Council on the other hand, acknowledged the scandal of Church history and the global desperation that descended on Europe and the world. Overwhelmingly, Vatican II decreed a renewed ecclesiology and theology; an ecclesiology of a “People Church of God” and a theology of Liberation from historical dark enthrallment. Vatican II refocused on the Christian mandate to promote peace and love, not belligerent intolerance.

We Roman Catholics are complicit in the manner in which Church history projects violently on present and future times. THIS IS MY CONFESSION of complicit sin in the continuing wrongdoing done in God’s Name. I am a partisan Roman Catholic who is saddened, chagrined and frustrated by violence done against women and by cultural complicity in global dominion. I am sorry and I apologize for this continuing sin. I now stand up against it.

With respect for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I plead for repentance, healing, humility and integrity. There is an alternative to dominion/aggression — the better way of Love that seeks to enable peace to break out. People of all faiths are invited to join the option of Love and to abandon violence and intolerance. Intentional symbiosis is intelligence by natural design, the supposition and essence of authentic religion. War and violence are antithetical to symbiosis. All are called to symbiotic habitation.

Sylvester L. Steffen