The Church, A Demon Lover
A Sartrean Analysis of an Institution

Roberta Imboden

About the Book

"I have never read a book which sets out so powerfully the corruption of the Catholic Church from its ideal as community of love, to its present largely sado-masochistic reality. Everyone who is concerned about the future of the Church should read it." Hugo Meynell, University of Calgary

Imboden applies Sartrean analysis to the Roman Catholic Church and shows how the current sado-masochistic structure of that institution deviates from and distorts the Gospel message of love. The abuses of the Church are traced from the excesses of the Medieval and Spanish Inquisitions to Church censure of such contemporary theologians as Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Leonardo Boff, Charles Curran, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. The analytical framework for this critique derives primarily from Sartre's major works, Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason.

The New Testament message of love has been distorted in the process of being mediated by the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Through interweaving Sartre's theory of historical categories in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, and his concrete personal relations in Being and Nothingness, one sees that the structure of the institution breaks the structure of love, a sovereign, free, reciprocal relationship among equals, and establishes in its place a structure of domination, that of sado-masochism. The intentions of those who are involved in Church praxis are subsequently deviated. But herein lies the hope. The ability to reason dialectically, rather than analytically, offers the possibility of transcending the various distortions of the Gospel message, for dialectical reason helps one to understand the structure of Leonardo Boff's Trinity, which is analogous to that of Sartrean love in Being and Nothingness. Through the use of Boff's paradigmatic Trinity, it is then possible to postulate a concrete structure for the "new" Church that is capable of being a proper vehicle for the expression of the Gospel message.

About the Author

Roberta Imboden is Professor of Literature, Department of English, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto, and the author of From the Cross to the Kingdom: Sartrean Dialectics and Liberation Theology.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Inquisitions: Sado-Masochism
3. The Inquisition of the Twentieth Century: Sado-Masochism
4. Sartrean Analysis of the Church's Failure of Love
5. Sartrean Analysis of the Institution
6. Critique of the Structure of the Present Church through Sartrean Analysis
7. Deviation and Circularity
8. Deviation and the Church
9. What is to be Done?

Orders

For information on how to order this book, please click here.