UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
by Jamie L Manson on Apr. 02, 2012 Grace on the Margins
This is the second part of Jamie Manson’s interview with theologian and writer Matthew Fox. Part I can be found here.
You begin your most recent book, The Pope’s War, by taking a look at the childhood of Pope Benedict XVI and his time in Hitler Youth. How do you think that experience might have impacted his view of the church?
In fascism, there is always an obsession to control and to make obedience the first priority. That’s why fascism was allowed to thrive in Nazi times. As I point out in the book, the wonderful priest and moral theologian Fr. Bernard Haring, who was also conscripted into the Nazi army, did not learn from his experience that obedience is a primary virtue. He saw the horrible price that Europe paid for this distorted notion of obedience. So, he built his entire moral theology on the idea that the real meaning of obedience is responsibility.
We hear that there are some bishops who do not agree with the Vatican on some issues and who see how some of the Vatican’s positions do harm to people, but they obey and cooperate with the Vatican anyway. Do you see parallels to fascism there?
So often it comes down to preferring one’s job security or career advancement to the truth or to Jesus. Susan Sontag defines fascism as institutionalized violence: violence in the name of institution and the act of hiding behind an institution. A good example of this, of course, is the pedophilia crisis. I use the word fascism in the book because all fundamentalisms, not just the Catholic kind, are about freezing power.
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