At the end of the essay on the case of Giordano Bruno stood a question. Which of today's institutions, it asked, will find itself in the same position four hundred years after our time — having done something it ought to regret but cannot revoke, because the verdict is bound up with the core of its doctrine? Whoever takes this question seriously has understood the Bruno case without having to reduce it to religion.
That question is now to be pursued further. But it shifts along the way. The point is not to identify individual candidates for the Church's position in four hundred years. The point is the constitution itself that produces such positions — and one property of this constitution that has a name and that, unlike the institution as a whole, could be discarded. This property is the claim to absoluteness.
I. What is not being attacked here
Before anything else, it must be clear what is not meant. This essay does not in any way attack personal faith. What a person believes, hopes, fears, expects in prayer, in dying, in the quiet of their home — that is a private matter and remains so. No one owes any outside authority an account of it. No one has the right to talk another person out of this realm, to ridicule it or to classify it as outdated. Whoever holds a God to be real, awaits a transcendence, finds comfort in a sacrament, is not addressed by what follows.
Nor does this essay attack the institution of the Catholic Church as such. It is conceivable that a two-thousand-year-old tradition, a liturgical heritage, a theological language, a social practice, a community is an independent human form that does not derive its existence from a claim to validity. What is attacked here is not the tradition. It is not the liturgy. It is not the community. It is not even the doctrine, insofar as it understands itself as the confession of those who share it.
What is attacked is a specific assertion that this institution has fused with its tradition, its liturgy, its doctrine, and that is not identical with them. This assertion runs: that what it teaches is not one doctrine among others, but the only admissible truth, by which all people must orient themselves and outside of which there is no salvation. This assertion is the claim to absoluteness. It is separable. It is datable. It is made. And in 1,700 years it has produced more misery than any war of that period — because in every one of those wars it supplied the ideological justification.
This determines to whom this essay is addressed. Not the faithful. It is addressed to the representatives of the institution — the hierarchy, the Magisterium, the apologists, the spokesmen of the bishops' conferences, the theologians whose task it is to defend the claim. To them goes a demand. What that demand is will become visible in the course of the essay. It is not immoderate. It is the only demand appropriate to the situation.
II. The two roots
The claim to absoluteness was not invented by Christians. It has two roots, each older than the institution that eventually gave it its effective form. The first root is theological, the second is political. The effective form arose from their combination.
The theological root lies in the Jewish tradition, more precisely in the step from henotheism to strict monotheism, which according to the current state of research took place during the Babylonian exile. In pre-exilic Israel, YHWH is the God of Israel alongside the gods of other peoples. Only Deutero-Isaiah, in the sixth century before Christ, formulates the turn: I am YHWH, and there is no other; besides me there is no God, says the forty-fifth chapter of the book. With this the transition is complete. The gods of the others are not other gods. They are non-gods, a lie, idolatry.
In antiquity this Jewish monotheism does not become missionary. Judaism remains the religion of a people. Non-Jews can be counted among the righteous without becoming Jews. The assertion of the one God remains bound to the boundary of the people. The structural explosive force — exclusive truth plus a universal claim to validity — is only activated by Paul. The Christ event, say the Pauline letters, is for all peoples, not only for the circumcised. With this, Jewish exclusivity is released from its ethnic bond and projected onto the whole world. Before Constantine this is the theoretical assertion of a persecuted minority that can impose nothing on anyone.
The second root is the Roman state. The Roman imperial cult itself was not a positing of absoluteness. It was a political gesture of imperial unity. All subjects paid homage to the genius of the emperor; besides that they could worship whatever they liked. Roman polytheism integrated foreign cults in a practice that antiquity called interpretatio romana — Isis, Mithras, Cybele and Christ were fellow residents in Rome, not competitors. The persecutions of the Christians under Decius in 250, under Valerian in 257, under Diocletian from 303 onwards were directed not at their doctrine but at their political loyalty. Whoever did not take part in the sacrifice to the emperor was regarded as a conspirator against the unity of the empire, not as an adherent of a false metaphysics. The Roman state demanded ritual, not conviction.
This puts the two components on the table. A theological tradition that raises an exclusive claim to truth but has no apparatus to enforce it. A political apparatus that has the power of enforcement but raises no metaphysical claim. In this constellation the two could have existed side by side, as they did for centuries. The combination came about in the fourth century. It has a date, it has authors, and it has a text that still survives.
III. Thessaloniki, 27 February 380
Three dates outline the combination. In 313 Constantine and Licinius issue the so-called Edict of Milan. Christianity is legalised and placed among the permitted cults of the empire. This first stage is not yet a positing — it is toleration, not preference.
In 325 Constantine convenes the first ecumenical council at Nicaea. There the question of the Trinity is decided, which had divided the Christian communities in the preceding decades. The position of Arius — that Christ is a creature, subordinate to the Father — is rejected. The position of Athanasius — that Christ is of one substance with the Father, homoousios — becomes the creed. The council's result is adopted under state patronage, the Arians are excommunicated, the Nicene Creed becomes the norm. This establishes a practice that is new in the religious history of the Mediterranean up to that point: the definitional fixing of dogmatic content with political participation, with immediate legal consequences for those who dissent.
In 380, on 27 February, in Thessaloniki, the three emperors Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian II issue the edict Cunctos populos. It survives and should be read in its wording. Cunctos populos, quos clementiae nostrae regit temperamentum, in tali volumus religione versari, quam divinum Petrum apostolum tradidisse Romanis religio usque ad nunc ab ipso insinuata declarat. All peoples over whom our gentle rule holds sway shall adhere to that religion which the divine apostle Peter handed down to the Romans and which has been passed on by continuous tradition to this day.
With this, a particular theological position — that of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria, the Nicene Creed — is declared the only permitted religion of the Roman Empire. Those who dissent are classified in the same text. Reliquos vero dementes vesanosque iudicantes haeretici dogmatis infamiam sustinere. The rest, however, we declare to be demented and raving; they shall bear the infamy of heretical doctrine. And further: divinae primum vindictae, post etiam motus nostri, quem ex caelesti arbitrio sumpserimus, ultione plectendos. They shall be chastised first by divine punishment, and then also by our own punitive power, which we have received by heavenly decree.
In this sentence, issued on 27 February 380 in Thessaloniki and preserved to this day in the Codex Theodosianus, the claim to absoluteness is institutionally in the world. Three components are gathered in a single statement that had not come together before. First: a particular theological position is posited as truth. Second: deviation from it is classified not as a difference of opinion but as dementia and vesania — as mental unaccountability that deserves punishment. Third: the coercive power of the state is pledged to this position and presented as legitimised by God.
The dates of enforcement follow swiftly. In 391 Theodosius bans all pagan cults. In 392 pagan sacrifice becomes a capital offence. In 415 Hypatia of Alexandria, mathematician and philosopher, is murdered in the open street by a Christian mob; the responsible bishop, Cyril, tolerates the deed and is later canonised. In 529 Justinian closes the Academy in Athens, which had existed, with interruptions, since Plato. In two hundred years — from 313 to roughly 530 — the transition takes place from a tolerated sect to an imperial church, and from the imperial church to a monopoly church with the reach of a police force.
This series of dates is not a collection of historical anecdotes. It is the operative genealogy of the claim that still exists today. Whoever asserts that the Catholic Church's claim to absoluteness is revealed must explain why the Edict of Thessaloniki was necessary. A revealed truth needs no emperor to declare it the only permitted religion. A revealed truth needs no police to classify the dissenters as dementia. A revealed truth needs no mob to murder Hypatia, no Justinian to close the Academy. It needs none of this, because it carries itself.
A made truth does need it. It needs the imperial apparatus, because without it it cannot be enforced. It needs the classification of dissenters as mad, because otherwise its position would be contestable. It needs the mythologisation of its own genesis, because the sober genesis — imperial unity, a court council, a political compromise between Athanasian and Arian bishops — would not bear its supposedly heavenly authority.
IV. The dogmas have dates
What held for religion as a whole in the fourth century holds, over the following millennium and a half, for every single component of Catholic doctrine. The dogmas that are taught today as revealed truth have dates. They have authors. They have majority and minority decisions. They have theological controversies whose winners determined them and whose losers they excommunicated as heretics. In each of these cases, the revealedness is decreed after the fact. That is not an assertion. That is the history of the councils.
The Trinity is formulated at Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. The definition takes place in confrontation with the Arian standpoint, which before that had for at least fifty years been the position capable of commanding a majority in the Eastern Church. The Christological definitions — Christ as true God and true man in two natures — are issued at Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451. The Monophysites and Nestorians, who give precedence to one of the two natures, are rejected and go their own ways; their descendants exist to this day as separate churches.
Purgatory is introduced in the High Middle Ages. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 makes it binding, the Council of Lyon in 1274 confirms it, the Council of Florence in 1439 incorporates it into its official teaching. Before the twelfth century the Christian tradition knows no purgatory as an intermediate realm conceived in spatial terms; it arises in parallel with the building up of the indulgence business and the consolidation of the priesthood's power of mediation. It is a theological object that does not come from the Bible — the relevant passage in the second Book of Maccabees is disputed, and the Greek tradition never adopted it — but from an economic and pastoral logic of the medieval West.
Transubstantiation — the doctrine that in the Eucharist bread and wine change their substance into the body and blood of Christ while the accidents (taste, appearance, consistency) remain — becomes binding at the same council of 1215. It is an Aristotelian construction that rests on the distinction between substance and accident in scholastic philosophy. Before the reception of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this formulation would not have been possible in Christian theology. The doctrine thus depends on a particular philosophical school whose concepts it uses for its statement.
The Council of Trent, 1545 to 1563, is the answer to the Reformation. It defines the doctrine of the sacraments, the doctrine of justification, the veneration of saints, the relationship between Scripture and tradition in a form that excludes the Protestant positions. Trent is a dogmatic bulwark erected in reaction to a particular historical challenge. Its definitions are not timeless truths; they are theological manoeuvres that served the consolidation of the Roman Church at a moment when it had lost half of Europe.
In the nineteenth century two dogmas are added that had not been defined in the preceding eighteen centuries. In 1854 Pius IX declares the Immaculate Conception of Mary a dogma — the doctrine that Mary was conceived free of original sin. In 1870, at the First Vatican Council, the same Pius IX declares the infallibility of the Pope ex cathedra a dogma. Both definitions come at a moment when the Papal States are collapsing and the temporal power of the Pope is coming to an end. Pius IX consolidates internal power to the extent that external power falls away. The gesture can be interpreted; a revealed truth would not be interpretable in such a time-bound way.
In 1950 Pius XII declares the bodily Assumption of Mary into heaven a dogma. The doctrine had been widespread as a pious opinion since the early Middle Ages but had never before been dogmatised. It is dogmatised at the moment when the Church is seeking to assert itself against the secularisation of the post-war world, with a gesture that emphasises its special authority to define articles of faith. Again the timing can be interpreted. Again the definition takes place in the mode of revealedness, although its historical function is visible.
This series could be continued. What it shows is not a single suspicious date. It shows a pattern. Every dogma has a genesis that can be described — a theological controversy, a political occasion, a socio-historical function, a majority that defines it, a minority that rejects it. The assertion that the same dogma is at the same time a revealed eternal truth, formulated only at this point because the Holy Spirit led the Church to this formulation at this point, is an assertion that does not contradict the historical description — but it cannot be derived from the historical description; it is appended to it. It is the retrospective metaphysical charging of a process that, without this charge, could be described as what it was: a council's decision in its time.
V. The record as logical consequence
The Bruno essay documented part of the historical record that has emerged from the claim to absoluteness. It is not to be repeated here. It is to be placed in a new context.
The usual apologetic language speaks of failings, of lapses, of sons and daughters who did not act in the spirit of the Gospel. In this language the witch persecutions, the Crusades, the annihilation of the Cathars, the persecution of the Jews, the Conquista, the Inquisition, the burning of Bruno, the executions in the Papal States up to 1870 appear as individual or local aberrations of an institution whose doctrine and claim remain untouched by them.
This account is untenable as soon as the genesis of the claim is understood. Whoever posits one position as the only admissible truth and classifies the dissenters as dementes vesanosque has supplied the theological framework within which their annihilation is not the exception but the consequence. Whoever makes a religion the only permitted religion of an empire has supplied the legal basis on which the killing of dissenters is no longer prosecuted as murder but justified as the execution of divine punishment. Whoever has the apparatus to enforce this position will use it when the position is contested. The history of the Catholic Church between Thessaloniki in 380 and the loss of the Papal States in 1870 is the consistent application of this logic under changing circumstances.
The witches were burned not in spite of but because of the claim to absoluteness. The Albigensians were annihilated not in spite of but because of the claim to absoluteness. The Jews were locked into ghettos, marked, expelled and periodically murdered not in spite of but because of the claim to absoluteness. Bruno was burned not in spite of but because of the claim to absoluteness. The indigenous populations of the Americas were robbed of their sovereignty, their religion, their livelihood and in many cases their lives not in spite of but because of the claim to absoluteness of the Christianising Conquista.
There is a single analytical point in this section, and it is hard. The brutality of the history of the Catholic Church is not a failure of its doctrine that would leave the doctrine itself untouched. It is the fulfilment of its claim. An institution that asserts it possesses the only truth, and that has an apparatus at its disposal, has a reason, contained within its doctrine, not to tolerate deviation. The representatives of the institution followed this reason for 1,700 years whenever they could. They stopped only when the apparatus was taken out of their hands, as set out in the Bruno essay.
Whoever disputes this must explain where in Catholic doctrine before the twentieth century the duty to tolerate deviation was taught. It is not taught. On the contrary, it is expressly rejected, from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas to Bellarmine. In his dispute with the Donatists, Augustine supplied the theological justification for the use of secular force against heretics; the Compelle intrare from his commentary on Luke — compel them to come in, coined on the parable of the great banquet — remained for over a thousand years the standard justification of the Inquisition. In the Summa theologica Thomas systematically established that heretics may rightly be put to death by the secular authorities. Bellarmine, Bruno's chief prosecutor, held the same position in the sixteenth century. These three are not marginal figures. They are Doctors of the Church, saints, standard authorities. What they teach is the doctrine.
Today's language of gestures of regret cannot draw on this tradition without contradicting itself. The teaching of the holy Doctors of the Church is part of the tradition that counts in Catholic theology as a source of revelation. Whoever wants to declare Augustine, Thomas and Bellarmine mistaken in what they taught about the treatment of heretics must explain in which other doctrines they were likewise mistaken — and by what criterion the one is distinguished from the other. Whoever names this criterion has given up the tradition, because the criterion does not come from the tradition. Whoever does not name it keeps the problematic doctrines as valid.
VI. The inheritance
If the claim to absoluteness is made and not revealed, it also becomes possible to trace that and how it was copied. The Catholic Church is the first manifestation of a configuration that subsequently reproduced itself several times — in religious and in secular form.
The most direct reproduction is Sunni Islam, whose formation as an imperial religion takes place between the Umayyads from 661 and the early Abbasids from 750. The structural parallels are considerable. A scripture is declared uncreated revelation — the doctrine of the uncreated Qur'an, which in the ninth century is pushed through in the Mihna controversy against the Mu'tazilite position of the created Qur'an. A particular school of law is canonised as orthodox, the others are marginalised or persecuted as heresy. The apparatus of the caliphate enforces what is laid down in the councils. Apostasy — falling away from Islam — is punished with death in the classical law of the four Sunni schools of law. In a number of today's states this norm is still law in force.
The splits within Christianity at the Reformation did not give up the claim; they shifted its address. In Geneva Calvin set up a theocratic practice that let Michael Servetus die at the stake in 1553 for a deviant doctrine of the Trinity — exactly the process that would befall Bruno in Rome forty years later, only in the city of the Reformation. Luther did not abolish the brachium saeculare but transferred it to the German princes; in the Peasants' War of 1525 he demanded the killing of the rebellious peasants in a tract whose language scarcely falls short of the bulls of the Inquisition in harshness. The Anglican Church burned heretics into the seventeenth century. The Swedish Lutheran state church recognised religious freedom only in 1860. The Orthodox patriarchates had a comparable practice in the states where they provided the state religion. The claim migrates, the mechanism remains.
In the twentieth century the claim reproduced itself in secular form. Marxism-Leninism declared a particular social-theoretical position — the scientific explanation of historical development through the theory of class struggle — to be the only admissible truth and erected an apparatus of enforcement that scarcely falls short of the Roman one in its reach. The dissenters were called not haeretici but counter-revolutionaries, enemies of the people, revisionist deviationists; the mechanics of classification and annihilation are the same. The Moscow show trials of the 1930s are, in the form of their attribution of guilt and self-accusation, so structurally similar to the proceedings of the Inquisition that the historical kinship becomes visible as soon as it is named.
National Socialism reproduced the same model with a different doctrine. A particular biologistic position — the doctrine of the superiority of a certain group of human beings — was posited as scientific truth, underpinned by an academic apparatus of anthropology, eugenics and racial hygiene, and enforced with the full coercive power of a state. The Final Solution was not a lapse of this configuration. It was the fulfilment of its claim, in the same logic in which the annihilation of the Albigensians was the fulfilment of the Catholic claim in the thirteenth century.
These parallels are not an equation. The historical contents differ, the orders of magnitude differ, the duration in time differs. What is identical is the structure. A claim to truth that posits itself as the only admissible one, plus an apparatus that enforces the positing, plus an ultimate justification that removes the claim from criticism — that is the configuration that arose in the Mediterranean world of the fourth century and has since reproduced itself with ever new contents. The apparatus and the ultimate justification are variable. The configuration is stable.
The Catholic Church is not the worst bearer of this configuration, measured by the victims it has produced. The totalitarianisms of the twentieth century killed more people in a shorter time. But it is the oldest, the historically first, and the only one that still stands today in a continuous institutional line with that constellation of the fourth century. If there is one institution in which the question of whether the claim can be discarded can be put, it is this one.
VII. The separation
The question whether the Catholic Church could free itself from its claim to absoluteness without dissolving itself is open. It cannot be answered in advance. But it can be made more precise by clearly naming the components that would have to be separated.
The first component is personal faith. It is not affected by the claim, and remains unaffected even if the claim is discarded. Whoever believes in God, in the resurrection of Christ, in the real presence in the Eucharist, in the holiness of Mary, in the efficacy of the sacraments, can go on believing it. That belongs to the private sphere, into which no institution and no argument reaches. A person who believes this and understands it as the centre of their life is not affected by what is demanded here.
The second component is the institution's doctrine. It may continue to be upheld. The Church may declare that it holds the Trinity, the sacraments, the saving significance of Christ, the veneration of Mary to be true, that this doctrine is its confession and that on the basis of this doctrine it celebrates its liturgy, pursues its theology, organises its pastoral care. It may proclaim this, teach it, live it. It may also offer it to those who want to hear it. What it may do is everything that a religious community with a confession may do.
The third component is the claim. It is what may not be carried on. The assertion that the Catholic confession is the only truth by which all people must orient themselves, that all other paths are in error, that outside this Church there is no salvation — that is the claim that would have to be discarded.
This separation is not entirely foreign to the Catholic tradition itself. In 1965 the Second Vatican Council, in the declaration Dignitatis humanae, recognised religious freedom as a human right — against the express resistance of the conservative Council Fathers and after a debate that lasted a year and a half. In Nostra aetate the Council formulated its esteem for other religions, namely Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. In theological reflection since the Council, Karl Rahner introduced the concept of the anonymous Christians — the thesis that people outside the visible Church can be saved by Christ without knowing it.
This movement is a shift, but it is not a discarding. Dignitatis humanae recognises religious freedom as a good protected by civil law without giving up the theological claim to truth. Nostra aetate honours other religions without recognising them as equally valid paths to truth. The anonymous Christians are saved by Christ without knowing it — but they are saved by Christ; the Catholic constellation of salvation remains the yardstick that gives their salvation its meaning.
That is the point at which the Council stopped. It chose the form of inclusion, not of recognition. It assigned others a place in its own scheme instead of admitting that its own scheme is one among several. Completing the movement the Council began would be the step from inclusion to recognition: other paths exist not in relation to one's own path, but in their own right.
This step would not abolish the doctrine. It would only discard its universal claim to validity. The doctrine would remain what it is — the theological self-understanding of a particular community of faith, defensible, offerable, liveable, but no longer binding on others. A humility that has held a central place in Christian teaching on the virtues since the Desert Fathers would thereby come into its own. An institution that has presented itself for 1,700 years as the sole steward of truth is not humble. It is constitutively arrogant. To reconcile this property with the virtue it itself proclaims would be no loss. It would be a correction that can be spoken within its own language.
VIII. The firstborn
At this point the essay changes from description to address. The preceding seven sections have established the situation. What follows is addressed directly to the representatives of the institution who could change this situation from their own position.
You are the firstborn of the claim to absoluteness. What was given form in the fourth century in Thessaloniki and in Nicaea has, since late antiquity, shaped the religious and political apparatuses of the Mediterranean, of Europe and subsequently of the world. Others have taken over the claim — the Orthodox patriarchates, the Protestant confessions, Sunni Islam, the Anglican state church, and in secular form the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. They took it over because it was the only model that lay before them. Where they varied it, they measured the variations against yours.
This historical position is not arbitrary. It makes you the only institution in a position to recognise the model as a historically evolved construct and to discard it publicly. None of the successor institutions can take this step for you. If they tried, they would immediately meet the objection that in the end they still had the old mother at their back. As long as the mother holds the claim, every break by the daughters is half a break. If the mother discards it, the model by which the others orient themselves has changed.
What would have to be done has three parts, which cannot be reduced and do not merge into one another.
First, a declaration. You would have to declare that you uphold a doctrine you hold to be true, but that you discard and no longer raise the claim to prescribe this doctrine to all people as the only admissible truth or to call it the only way to salvation. This declaration would not be a pastoral gesture, not a diplomatic formula, not hermeneutically reversible language. It would be a magisterial statement with the same degree of bindingness with which the First Vatican Council decreed infallibility in 1870 and with which Pius XII dogmatised the Assumption of Mary in 1950. It would be a dogmatic act, not a diplomatic one.
Second, finality. The declaration would have to be formulated in such a way that later pontificates cannot repeat it in language that can be read differently under changed circumstances. It would have to be a self-commitment that binds the institution for the future. That is what magisterial definitions claim to achieve in Catholic theology; what would have to be defined here is the revocation of a previous definition. It would be the first definition in the history of the Magisterium whose content is the discarding of a claim that has passed itself off as revealed.
Third, the plea for forgiveness. It would not be directed at the sons and daughters who did not act in the spirit of the Gospel. This formula, with which the mea culpa staging of the year 2000 outsourced guilt to individuals, was described in the Bruno essay as a second burning — words that kill the victims a second time. The plea for forgiveness would have to be directed to humanity, in the name of the institution itself, without outsourcing, without the protection of the brachium saeculare, without the protection of historical distance, without the protection of language that makes the crime smaller than it was. It would have to name the main complexes one by one: the persecution of pagans in the fourth and fifth centuries; the Crusades; the annihilation of the Cathars; the system of the Inquisition; the witch persecutions; the centuries-long persecution of the Jews; the practices of the Conquista; the policies of the Vatican Bank; the structural cover-up of sexual abuse.
We know that together these three parts would demand an act that has no precedent in the 1,700 years of your institution's history. It would be greater than the Council of Trent, which organised the Counter-Reformation. It would be greater than the Second Vatican Council, which moved the Church into modernity. It would be greater than the election of John XXIII, which made the Council possible. Those three events were corrections of individual doctrines or pastoral practices. What would have to be done here is the correction of the structural foundation on which the institution has rested since Thessaloniki. It would be the first self-correction of this depth.
We also know that this act may not be conceivable from within. The Catholic Church is built around the claim to absoluteness. Its sacramental order, its hierarchy, its relationship to Scripture and tradition, its self-understanding as una sancta catholica et apostolica are formulated in turns of phrase that carry the claim with them. Whoever discards the claim would have to examine in each of these formulations what remains and what would have to be reformulated. That is theological work that would take years. The question is whether the willingness for it exists.
We do not claim that this willingness exists today. We do not see it. What we see is an institution that in its public communication has learned the gesture of regret and in its dogmatic substance is unchanged. What we see is a pontificate that is pastorally flexible on many individual questions and remains untouchable in the core of the claim. What we see is the continuation of the position that Sodano and Poupard formulated in 2000 with their statements on Bruno — the method regretted, the verdict upheld.
But we want the possibility to have been spoken. It does not lie beyond what an institution can achieve. It lies beyond what this institution has so far been willing to achieve. That is a question of willing, not of being able. An institution with a two-thousand-year tradition, a differentiated theological language and a practised hermeneutics of its own heritage has the intellectual means for this act. It has the organisational means. It has the personnel. What is lacking is the will of the leadership, the will of the hierarchy, the will of the theologians, the will of the apologists who have defended the claim for a millennium and a half and to whom it appears as the true ground of their existence.
If this will came, the institution would not be destroyed. It would be placed on a foundation it does not have today. Today's foundation — claim plus indulgence from a culture that does not look closely — is brittle. It was so even before the abuse cases, because the claim without the apparatus is an empty form. The apparatus has been lost since 1870; the brachium saeculare has vanished; the formula Ecclesia non sitit sanguinem has lost its legal meaning, because there is no longer any state executing authority to which anyone could be handed over. What remains is the assertion that the claim is revealed and therefore still holds. This assertion stands in a growing vacuum. It is upheld by the rhetorical routine of those who make their living in the institution, by the indulgence of a culture that treats other institutions more harshly, and by the weariness of those who could argue otherwise and no longer do.
If you discarded the claim, you would be stronger, not weaker. You would cast off the empty form and keep what you really have — a two-thousand-year tradition, a rich theological language, a social practice, a liturgical heritage, a community that lives on in hundreds of millions of people. That is more than enough for an institution. It is everything an institution may be without overreaching.
The outward effect of your step could hardly be overestimated. The other institutions that took over the claim from you would be asked why they do not do the same. The Grand Muftis of Cairo and Riyadh, the patriarchates in Constantinople, Moscow and Antioch, the leaders of the evangelical movements, the remaining representatives of the totalitarian state ideologies in one late form or another, the spokesmen of the political movements in which the claim reappears in today's disguise — all of them would be put in the position of having to explain themselves. Not all would follow. Most would not follow. But refusal would be a named position, no longer an unnamed default state. The standard would be set. Comparison would be possible. Whoever holds on to the claim would have to justify why, before a public that has seen the step taken by the mother institution.
That is the historical position in which you stand. You may feel it as a burden. We see it as a possibility. It is your decision which reading you take. But it would be your first decision in 1,700 years that you would make out of your own insight, without a state power having forced you to it. You did not give up the brachium saeculare out of insight; it was taken out of your hands in 1870 along with the Papal States. You did not resolve to recognise religious freedom out of insight; it was wrung from you in 1965 by a modern world whose constitutions guaranteed it anyway. Discarding the claim to absoluteness would be the first decision you would make out of your own insight. It would be the first free act of your institution.
Four hundred and twenty-five years after the day on which Giordano Bruno was burned on the Campo de' Fiori because he had disputed the Trinity; one thousand six hundred and forty-six years after the day on which it was declared in Thessaloniki that all peoples were to adhere to the one religion and that the rest were demented and raving — we are not pleading with you. We are formulating a possibility. It lies before you. It can be rejected, it can be accepted. What it cannot be is suppressed. In a form that can no longer be stopped today — through texts like this one, through investigations, through public memory, through the sheer exhaustion of the previous formulas of retreat — it will lie before you until it is taken up or expressly rejected.
We do not know what you will do. But we have said what we have seen.
The claim to absoluteness is not revealed. It has a date that can be named. It has authors who can be named. It has a purpose, which was the unity of the empire. It has a record that was not a lapse but a fulfilment. It is separable from what the Church otherwise is. The firstborn of this claim stands in a position that no other institution can occupy. What it does will be the model against which the others must measure themselves. What it does not do will be the model by which the others may refuse.