October 14, 2012       David Timbs (Melbourne)    David's previous articles  

                                   Some thoughts for the Men in Red

 It is regrettable that in the past few decades it has become increasingly difficult for the laity to have their voices heard in the Church beyond the local community. Parish councils or parish leadership teams, finance committees, liturgy and social justice groups are common and seem to function well. They have become a normal element in day to day parish life. Happily too, this profitable involvement of lay co-responsibility in the local Church has been extended, at least in some part, even into the domains of national church governance and policy making. This is all an authentic fruit of Vatican II. [1]

Having ears but not hearing

It is, however, on the national and international levels that lay Catholics are experiencing the most difficulty in being acknowledged and having their voices heard. This represents an unfortunate regression from what the Council promised in its vision of the Church. An example or two might help.

In many countries around the world, especially in the West, Catholics have, in recent years, put their names to petitions addressed to the Pope, Curial Departments and national Episcopal conferences voicing their pressing concerns about Church life in its many dimensions but especially on the level of governance, accountability and co-responsibility. It has turned out to be largely a conversation with the unwilling and a dialogue of the hearing-challenged. Ordinary Catholic laywomen and men who have pleaded to be heard have often had to bear the humiliation of being treated with apprehension, suspicion and fear. At times, to their grief and disgust they have been greeted with what appears to be dismissive contempt. A principal reason for this can be traced back and attributed to the inherent competing and grating theologies of Church which were allowed to be embodied in the Council documents. Unfortunately, the Council left these blurred and unresolved. It was perhaps the price of compromise. [2]

In the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church (Lumen Gentium) there are two quite different structural models of Church which are described: the stratified, hierarchical pyramid structure – reflection feudal society - alongside the more biblical notion of the People of God. The first structure envisages the laity in a subservient role at the bottom of the pyramid while the second envisages all gathered together as a community of brothers and sisters. All are gifted, all are needed and all need one another. This community can only function when all members manifest their baptismal call as collaborators and co-servants of Christ and his Gospel. This is a very Pauline notion of the believing community as a human body and I think admirably mirrored by John Henry Cardinal Newman. He stressed in particular that while the Church teaching and the Church taught are distinct and have different functions, they are complimentary and interdependent. [3]

Unfortunately the Church, under the weight of a regressive conservatism, has been forced back into the fixity of the pyramid structure. It is time enough now for the Church taught to switch roles and do some serious teaching of its own.

 Restoring equilibrium

The sheet anchor of the last forty years has to be winched in if the Catholic Church is to move confidently and credibly into the future. It has, in effect, to break free of the entropy and stasis of the last two pontificates. What needs to be faced and honestly addressed is that during this era, a culture of restorationism has become entrenched and supported by an apologetic rhetoric of caution, insecurity, second guessing and re-interpretation. A recent editorial in The Tablet offers some sobering thoughts about what amounts to a rear guard action by those who have not only not received Vatican II but who want it either definitively dumbed down or conveniently forgotten,

“If a return to the texts leads the Church to rediscover that vision and resolve to make it come alive at last, a new and exciting chapter may be about to be written. The Church must be set in motion again. But the forces of anti-Conciliar reaction have yet to be defeated. They did not like the Council then and they do not like it now, and they will do everything they can to frustrate it.”

There is a vast clerical sub-culture which has perpetuated itself and which has a great deal to lose in a radical and systemic reform of the Roman bureaucracy. Careerism, opportunism, nepotism, corruption and all of the bitter resentments that are part and parcel of the corporate world are evidently flourishing in the ecclesiastical world as well. These Vatican officials have been able to get away with preserving the status quo of the privileged mainly because, foolishly, too many of the people they push around actually take them seriously.  Those both at the top and lower levels of the authoritarian Curial pyramid have also been very liberal in manipulating and using the ruse of creeping infallibility in furthering the pretence of authority and credibility. Self interest abounds.

Some correctives to authoritarian centralism - Diocesan synods

In Australia, lay groups have for many years been urging the national Bishops Conference to establish permanent de-clericalised structures to promote, facilitate and accelerate the work of reform and evangelisation. The mechanisms they envision are regular or ongoing structures wherein genuine consultation, conversation and debate might take place in a spirit of transparency, trust, subsidiarity and co-responsibility. These structures, warmly encouraged and even prescribed by the Church, are known as diocesan synods. In Greek, syn –‘odos means, ‘(travelling) on the (same) road together.’ Diocesan Assemblies, on the other hand, are easily orchestrated in order to control membership, limit conversation and predetermine results. More often than not, it can mean, ‘guides and trekkers travelling separately on different roads’.

Properly planned, organised and managed according to the requirements of Church law, diocesan synods have certain in-built safeguards to guarantee that manipulation and red-carding, or excluding topics regarded by authorities as too controversial, are avoided. The canonical requirements for synods are intended to minimise restrictions, to afford freedom of discussion and transparency and to maximalise the integrity of the whole process. The entire enterprise requires nerve, patience, trust and, above all, faith in the Holy Spirit.

 The Conclave – helping the Holy Spirit

With a post Vatican II re-emergence of a monarchical and absolutist papacy, there has been a commensurate, almost unprecedented resurgence of clericalism. This ossified subculture which feeds off its own inherent narcissism is one of the most enduring obstacles to reform of any kind. It is now time for the whole Church to pause, reflect and re-embrace the express will and teaching and vision of the Council for all not just the few.

Of first importance, the People of God, especially the laity, needs to be consulted on exactly what kind of leadership it expects from the Pope and those immediately around him. Does the Church anymore need or deserve the equivalent of a corporate CEO as leader or one who is Servant of the Servants of the God both in title and in fact?

To facilitate a renewed and optimistic vision in a do-able and realistic way, there needs to be a reassertion of courage on the part of the electors at the next Conclave. They need to be seen to be representing the intentions of Christ, not their own manufactured or contrived agendas to suit the interests of the clerical sub-culture. They need to realise urgently that their task is to represent and serve the genuine needs and aspirations of their sisters and brothers in the faith and not those of an elitist few.

Reality test and the challenge of the truth.

It is imperative that they sit down together and debate, in all candour and transparency, and assess the true extent of the ecclesial breakdown and collective despondency JP II and Benedict have bequeathed the Church. If the cardinals were mesmerized and wooed by Joseph Ratzinger before the last Conclave with his litany-length condemnation of ‘isms’ afflicting the Church and society, they need to look at the ‘isms’ the last two popes have inflicted on the People of God. Chief among them is a Church leadership typified by entrenched, systemic papalism, clericalism and dogmatism. The ‘isms’ of the Church are the plank in its own eye.

Perhaps as a way of going about this work of reflection and reappraisal, electors might even draw up a charter for the new Pope and even ‘persuade’ him to swear an oath to uphold it. They might demand that he delicately but speedily distance himself from the regressive Magisterium of the two former Popes just to ensure that he is not operating out of some kind of contrived, inauthentic continuity with his immediate predecessors.

Integral to this suggested charter should be a requirement – ‘agreements’ have surely been struck  before - that the new Pope recommit to Vatican II and those legitimate developments and reforms flowing from the vision and intention of the Council as guaranteed by the two thousand bishops who participated and who set in place its reforms. This is the real interpretative tool for understanding what the Council meant and intended, not the Catechism of the Catholic Church or the personal teaching offices of the preceding two Bishops of Rome. [4]

The discerning Cardinals should also revisit and reform the Canonical protocols which govern membership to the electoral college with a view to establishing a much more inclusive and diverse body which reflects the makeup of the entire Church. There is absolutely no doctrinal reason for example why laywomen and men cannot be members of the Conclave and also become high ranking, permanent officials in the day to day governance of the Church. A more comprehensive perspective on the needs, aspirations and challenges of the People of God would be a refreshing change from an almost exclusively clerics-eye view of reality.

The Cardinal electors might do well to reflect on what absolute and autocratic power can do to the psyche and behaviour of a Pope – Newman was not at all subtle about Pius IX. The ‘elected one’ needs to be reminded that it was Christ who chose the apostles, not Peter, and that being Bishop of Rome does not mean that he is bishop of the entire world. It is not only the Memory which derives from the Scriptures which provides a corrective; so also does the teaching authority of thousands of successors to the Apostles who attended the Council.

One of the great fruits of Vatican II was the rediscover and reaffirmation of the collegiality and co-responsibility of all the bishops with the Pope. Lumen Gentium unfortunately left this relationship far too vague and unfinished thus leaving the door open to a new and assertive pan-authoritarian papalism – which, in fact, has happened. Unless a serious and substantial corrective is made to the historical and theological aberration of papalism and mirco-managing bureaucracy, the Catholic Church will be bogged down in the morass of entropy, complacency and presumption for another century or more.

Conversion, a turning of the believers’ faces to Christ, will only have substance and power if the  leaders turn their collective face towards their sisters and brothers in Christ and are converted in some deep way to them. When and if this happens, then all the rhetoric about a new beginning in Christ and a New Evangelisation might assume a surprising reality.

[1] The 1965 Vatican II decree on the Laity, Apostolicam Actuositatem can be found here.

[2] An example of a recent international declaration by Catholics calling for systemic organisational reform in the Church, here.

[3] For (Bl) John Henry Cardinal Newman’s On Consulting the Laity in matters of Doctrine especially section 2 click [Here]

On the legitimate rights of the faithful to have a voice in the Catholic Church, see Thomas Doyle OP, The Voice of the Faithful here. For my v2catholic, 04/12 article on The People of God?, click here.

The great debate on the Universal and local Churches originally published in America Magazine between Cardinals Walter Kasper (Congregation for Christian Unity) and Joseph Ratzinger (CDF) is analysed and evaluated in a rather long article in Theological Studies 1, 2002 by Killian McDonnell osb. The article can be found here.

[4] For insightful comment on the authority of post Vatican II reforms, sometimes referred to as the fabrications of subversive dissenters, see the UCAnews article by William Grimm MM, here.

See The Tablet editorial on Pope Benedict’s wisdom in calling for a detailed study of the documents of Vatican II to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its commencement, with pertinent comment on further challenges in Church reform, especially in the area of episcopal Collegiality and co-responsibility in Church governance which is still bitterly resented and opposed, click here.

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.