During the decades immediately following Pius XII’s 1943 ground-breaking Encyclical, Divino Afflante Spritu, Catholic scholarship erupted in an almost unprecedented burst of energy and imagination. Biblicists and theologians began to work with a new energy and freedom to re-examine the very sources of the Catholic Christian Tradition.

This intense and rigorously honest scholarship became the theological and biblical foundations for most of the theology of the Second Vatican Council. One of the most important and enduring concepts retrieved from the biblical and apostolic Tradition was the People of God. While this is a central motif in the Hebrew Scriptures, Christians developed it further into the notion of the new community in Christ, knowing what it once was and what it was now becoming,

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy. – 1 Peter 2: 9-10

The People of God were called to envision and realise their identity as the Household of  God, the social fringe-dwellers and resident aliens in an often hostile host society. But they were equally called to be an open community, a household of Christ-like welcome and hospitality, with its door ever open to the outsiders. Vatican II was insistent that these marks were the authentic characteristics of the ecclesial Community, the new People of God.

Vat II stresses the prophetic, counter cultural identity and mission of the Church as central to its very being and identity in key documents such as Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes. In those as well as in Apostolicam Actuositatem, Sacrosanctum Concilicum and others the Council emphasised the critical ecclesial role that the non-ordained shared with the hierarchy.

A key point of tension on the floor of the Council from the very beginning and manifested in its documents was the need to reconcile and accommodate the highly structured hierarchical ecclesiology of Trent with a more flexible model. The former represented a structure based on clericalism, in divinely ordered stasis and pyramidal in form. The latter stressed an ecclesiological structure based on equal dignity by reason of Baptism and the confirmed gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Church was called to sit at the common table of partnership, subsidiarity and shared governance. It identified its authority not only in the hierarchy but in the Sensus Fidelium.

These often conflicting and grating concepts of Church did not coexist easily then and they are certainly in heightened tension now fifty years later, particularly in the relationship between the Sense of the Faithful and the Sense of what constitutes Faith itself,

The holy people of God shares also in Christ’s prophetic office; it spreads abroad a living witness to Him, especially by means of a life of faith and charity by offering to God a sacrifice of praise, the tribute of lips which give praise to His name. The entire people of faithful, anointed as they are y the Holy One cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith ‘when from the bishops down to the last of the lay faithful’ they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. (LG, 12).

There is clearly now a discernment problem for the Church both in relation to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and a number of matters judged to be of critical importance: the teaching on artificial contraception and the ordination of women to the priesthood. It is also abundantly clear that the Sensus Fidelium has become so strictly and narrowly defined by the
JP II-Benedict XVI papacies that they are now of little or no importance in ecclesial life. Those at the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid have been stripped once more of their baptismal sense of place and identity in the Church.

The Memory of the People of God was dulled and distorted as the Story has been forcibly re-edited and rewritten. A sadly ironic dimension of this repression of memory is the current institutional amnesia about the actual origins of the new People of God in the Jesus Movement. It was born precisely out of prophetic protest within Judaism against the Pharisaic confusion between unquestioning obedience to the Law and doing the Will of God, between sacrifice and mercy. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God is like the wild, irritating, intrusive Mustard Weed, not a set of tribal laws set in stone.

The genius of the Gospel lay in its power to move people away from the world of slavish, supine, blind obedience and compulsive legalism into the freedom of the daughters and sons of God. Now that very same Gospel has been press-ganged anew into the servitude against which it originally protested and rebelled.

The administered Church of Benedict has unfortunately forgotten the subversive message and energy of the Jesus Movement. Since 1978, the People of God have been witnessing and experiencing at first hand a perverse and dangerous reversal of the foundationally important message of Paul to the Galatians. The meat of that Gospel is far too rich and the paradigm-shifting Paul is far too challenging for this Peter and his legalistic supporters of the new James party.

The Church has once again demonstrated its innate capacity and programmatic need, as an institution, to domesticate and control the very Charism which originally inspired, established and validated it.

This is clearly illustrated in the planned and systematic programme of regression from the radical disturbance of the Jesus Movement to a culture of ecclesiastical pacification and predictability. The retreat was carefully engineered and executed during the pontificates of JP II and of Benedict XVI. It originated in the disquiet of these two men and like-minded bureaucrats in the Roman Curia who determined that the very notion of the Church as the People of God was, as incarnated in the reforms and directions of the Council, too dangerously democratic to be entertained, encouraged or promoted. The Church, in this perspective had to be rescued from itself and from the threats of rupture and discontinuity from the Tradition.

Disconcerting and deeply troubling for a very large number of Catholics throughout the world is the clear drift of the Church into a dangerous kind of ecclesiastical autism. A closed, introspective system of life and governance is now preferred and promoted over a more optimistic and outward looking Church which has as its primary mission to preach good News and to be a light to the world not darkness.

The message being sent from Rome is that its authority and magisterium alone is sufficient for the Church, that the non-ordained are to remain the taught with nothing significant themselves to teach, to be led and not to show leadership outside of the menial. The centralised and gated clericalism of current Church hierarchical governance is in desperate need of liberation from its own moral and legalistic relativism. In the eyes of its own members, ecclesial identity is narrowly defined in terms of the elite, unlistening and self-interested few. In the eyes of the secular world the Church, by word and deed, commission and omission, has become that which it hates and rejects.

If and when the hierarchical leadership of the Church re-appropriates, owns and takes seriously its own foundational identity as the People of God then any lasting hope for a genuine renewal of Spirit and life prophetically envisioned by Vatican II will become a reality.

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.