JPII & Paul Ricoeur vs Masters of Suspicion

With news of scandal plaguing the Church’s every level in current events; an understandable reaction could continue to gain considerable traction, namely Donatism.

This is a heresy that raged in the time of St. Augustine, when Emperor Constantine reinstated former apostates (Traditors) to the episcopacy, etc. 1 The Donatists held firm to the belief that not only these reinstated Church leaders, but all clergy who were potentially in mortal sin could not administer valid Sacraments.

Under St. John Paul II, extreme situations arose with a range of men like Archbishop Lefebvre to Marcial Maciel. Some deem Lefebvre as saintly in his rejection of the Second Vatican Council, and most rightly deem Maciel as a scoundrel. In either case, there is room to question the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Church, and to even reject certain aspects or persons in authority as a result of mistrust. An outright rejection such as with Archbishop Lefebvre’s unlawful ordination of SSPX bishops in 1988, could easily be judged by objective behavior as Donatism, especially since the original Donatists were named after a bishop who was also consecrated out of rivalry against the Traditors 2 .

In the Theology of the Body, I believe that St. John Paul II addressed Donatism under a different guise, and he identified it as the “hermeneutic of suspicion” after philosopher Paul Ricoeur. 3 JPII pointed out three men in particular who propagated this way of approaching the world as Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. 4 In our day, this constant suspicion has run rampant in the Church, even to the point of certain scholars accusing the Pope of heresy without substantial proof or outright defiance on his part. I am not proposing that a healthy skepticism is out of the question, rather, I am pointing out the similarity between Donatism and even Manicheanism and being a “Master of Suspicion”.

 The opposite of suspicion, according to St. John Paul II, is the “Ethos of Redemption”. This is a trust in the Redeemer of man who has the power to dynamically transform the sinful human condition into that which is even able to overcome concupiscence. 5 While I am not excusing abuse in any way, I do find abundant consolation in the “Ethos of Redemption” because it Christologically orients my gaze away from the fallen world to the Redeemer.

 It may be said that naïveté may have caused St. John Paul II to elevate men like Theodore McCarrick or Marcial Maciel to positions of authority in the Church. More importantly, it was his confrontation with a suspicion propagated by the Communist innovator Marx and others that helped him to see men as innocent until proven guilty. In Communist Poland, so many false accusations against priests could easily have brought one to the same suspicious attitude that pervades today. Instead, JPII stood fast against it while also administering justice as seen in the case of Archbishop Lefebvre.

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1 Cantor, Norman F (1995), The Civilization of the Middle Ages. P. 51
2 Ibid.
3 Paul Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 13
4 St. John Paul II, Theology of the Body 46:6-
5 Ibid.