The Vatican Bank, Libido, and a Theology of the Feminine

It’s about 2:00 a.m. and I hear the haunting sounds of a barred owl “woo, woo, woo” outside my bedroom window. I know the oak tree where she lives. I feel some kind of kinship with the owl and in my sleepy state start singing in Latin in my resolute tenor voice the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer: “Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.” I venture into the middle of the prayer until my Catholic school Latin fails me. I return to what is practiced and familiar.

I would like to think I am hearing something of the divine in the melancholy sounds of the owl. Perhaps I just wanted to pray. Perhaps I am trying to wake up the dead. There are many who have gone.

I suspect the real reason is more pedestrian. I had just finished the wonderfully disturbing book, “God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican” by Gerald Posner. The author sets the tone early on by suggesting, half in jest, that the Vatican would rather talk about sex than money. Nonetheless, there appears to be some truth to this unholy coupling. This church narrative that unfolds like a morality play asks a congregation to embrace timeless doctrines and infallible truths while the Vatican Bank did business with the Mafia, Nazis, criminals and a host of unsavory characters in what seemed like sumptuous, unsavory and often sexualized affairs.

Of course, the church and money is an old story, starting with the sale of indulgences and ending, until the last year or so, with the Vatican having literally an offshore bank through which it could engage in financial activities, many of which have been proven to be criminal, without oversight or consequence. Perhaps one of the most disturbing parts of Posner’s fascinating book is the account of the Vatican’s relationship with the Nazis and other war criminals and the church’s help in getting these individuals to South America. The author raises a lot of disturbing questions about the Vatican Bank’s money-laundering of gold and valuables taken from Jews before they were executed. I shuddered when I read Posner’s accounts of the heartless and damning refusal by Pope Pius XII to help the Jews. And this pontiff is on his way to sainthood.

Reading the Posner book was the last, unscheduled stop on a year-long trip that has taken me through more than a thousand years of theology looking for hints of the feminine outside the confines of the Virgin narrative. This was for my own book “Chanting the Feminine Down,” in which a female graduate student Colette pushes through the weight of an archetypal and sometimes frightening theology that is occasionally threatened by eruptions such as the Italian Renaissance or the Protestant Reformation. If Martin Luther were alive today, he might say that there are not enough church doors on which to nail his grievances.

The novel is essentially about the conflict between theology and psychology, allegory and symbol, and monotheism and the pantheon of mythological figures. The novel is about the tension between the ascendant spirit that exists outside of a woman and what is her essence or soul. Colette’s struggle is between a transcendent religion and an interior life represented in her dreams, visions and imaginings. This becomes a life and death struggle. Theology is not to be taken lightly.

One recurrent theme in “God’s Bankers,” especially during the last century, was the need to modernize the Vatican governance and especially the Vatican Bank. But no real change came to the Bank until Francis assumed the pontificate three years ago, and then only when forced by the European Union and other organizations. As one clerical banker noted a few years ago, you can’t run the church on Hail Marys.

For much of the church’s history there has been a tension between councils presided over by local bishops and those run by the Vatican. This issue was essentially settled by 1563 at the conclusion of the Council of Trent which was carefully choreographed from Rome. The bishops who attended the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s warned the pope of another Galileo problem, this time having to do with artificial contraception. With the untimely death Pope John XXIII in 1963, that door was slammed shut.

In my research for “Chanting the Feminine Down” I came across worldwide many hundreds of organizations, many of the kitchen table variety, comprised of lay people, nuns and priests. The individuals and groups are all focused on modernizing the church. They are particularly focused on increasing women’s participation in the church, including becoming priests.

As the character Colette discovers, Catholic theology is a masculine theology, still bearing the fingerprints of Aristotle, Plato, Augustan and Aquinas. What these great men said about the feminine still shocks the ears and sensibilities. Psychologist Carl Jung writes in his “Symbols of Transformation” the fact that “primitive Christianity resolutely turned away from nature and instincts in general and, through its asceticism, from sex in particular, clearly indicates the source from which these motive forces came. So it is not surprising that this transformation has left noticeable traces in Christian symbolism. Had it not done so, Christianity would never have been able to transform libido.” In these brief remarks Jung underscores the psychology that underlies the church’s position on clerical celibacy, contraception and the feminine in general. This transformation of libidinal energies has come with a huge human cost.

Pope Francis has given every indication that he wants to rely less on the Curia and more on the worldwide community of Catholics. We will learn what Pope Francis has in mind when he releases his “Apostolic Exhortation” shortly. This publication is based on the unheard-of polling of Catholics around the world about whether divorced and remarried Catholic should receive communion.

Posner’s book, a masterpiece of reporting, demonstrates how corrupt, venial and power-hungry the Vatican has been over the centuries. There seems no better argument for returning the church to the bishops, local clergy and parishioners. But whatever Pope Francis decides to do, it will be of little value unless Catholic women of the world have a full voice, vote and role in the church. To continue to deny this important source of anima energy, intelligence, wisdom and transformation would be, well, sinful.