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Cover
story Church in Crisis: Viewpoint To save the church, make its problems our
own
By DAVID OBRIEN
Catholics, myself included, surely
do love their church. Love accounts for the anxiety we feel as we pick up each
days paper, for months now, and for the deep sadness that informs our
conversations about the evil of clerical sexual abuse those papers report.
Angry as we are at the lifelong suffering inflicted on so many innocent
children and young people, few of us will leave the church.
Membership in the church is not like that. We are not in the
church as much as the church is in us. When we gather, with our priests,
at Mass, we are not part of a club we have joined but more like a large
extended family. We are less familiar with each other than our parents were in
the old country or the old neighborhood, but we are family still. Bad music and
dull sermons and crying children and even an occasional feeling of being alone
in a crowded church, all of that is there, but with it a taste of communion.
The bond among us is rough and incomplete, with ever so many broken places. Yet
still, for so many of us, it is an essential expression of who we really are.
Or, perhaps better, a reminder of the kind of people we hope to become. Our
attendance at church may be irregular for long periods of life, we
may have grown skeptical about one or another church pronouncement, but at the
key moments of our lives, at marriage and childbirth, at separation and death,
we come back to church and, sometimes at least, we know we are home.
Harvards distinguished literary scholar, Robert Kiely,
writing of our current scandals in The Tablet, the British Catholic
newspaper, reminds us that these acts of violence against children, this
corruption of respected traditions of pastoral care, these are not simply
problems for bishops and church officials; they are problems for all the people
of God. He cites the breathtaking words of St. Paul: So
then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the
saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of
the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone
(Ephesians 2:19-22). Kiely suggests that we look beyond bishops and prominent
advisers and remember those ordinary Catholics, known to all of us, who
figure out, day by day, little by little, how to keep the faith and the
practice of it. Now they must save their church.
In big trouble
These are not pious words. Our community is in big trouble. All
those problems we have worried about, declining numbers of priests and sisters,
chronic indignities inflicted upon women, the erosion of moral authority in
matters of human sexuality, the inability to develop an effective witness on
questions of human life and public morality, pastoral failures of all kinds, we
Catholics knew these were our churchs problems, and therefore somehow our
problems, but we never provided ourselves with a way to make them our own. Now,
facing a far greater problem, we will have to make them our own, probably
without an invitation from those we have trusted to care for our
communitys common life. At stake is the integrity of the Catholic church
in our own hometowns. For the sake of the community, we will have to put aside
for now many real differences among us and issue to one another a modest but
serious call to action.
What is needed, in part at least, can be discerned from the
experience of sister churches across the country. Here are some of the ways
Catholics take responsibility for the life and work of their local church:
A diocesan pastoral council, gathered with the bishops and
representatives of the clergy, religious and laity of the diocese. To work
effectively, this council must have a clear mission, by-laws providing for
regular meetings and open procedures, access to all information, including
financial information, authority to review and revise diocesan policies, and
management oversight for diocesan administration. Provision can be made to
insure that the bishop has the authority he needs to fulfill his pastoral
responsibilities, which he shares with his priests and people, for the unity
and integrity of the local church. To get there may require independent action,
organization and pressure from outside, but structures of such shared
responsibility of this sort are an essential element of reform.
Shared responsibility
A successful diocesan pastoral council requires as a foundation
effective parish councils with real power in all matters related to the life
and work of each of the diverse congregations across the diocese. It requires
as well a strong Senate of Religious to insure that the voices of sisters,
brothers and religious order priests are heard in the shaping of diocesan
policies and priorities. Each diocese already has a presbyteral council of
priests who are supposed to share fully in the pastoral care of the local
church. So far most of these bodies have failed to develop clear standards of
pastoral practice, or even reasonable policies governing the recruitment,
training, assignment, evaluation and professional standards of priests (and
neither have bishops, for that matter). Bishop and priests together must do
that, now.
They are unlikely to do so unless these goals are worked out in
partnership with others in ministry and with lay people in their parish and
diocesan councils. Finally, the many new ministers who do so much of the daily
work of the church, deacons, lay professionals, experienced volunteers, also
need to organize, develop a sense of professionalism, and share responsibility
for church policies and priorities through team ministry and their own
independent professional associations.
There is more to the church than parishes and chancery offices.
The same spirit of shared responsibility must inform all church-related
institutions. Catholic colleges and universities, with their independent but
deeply committed boards of trustees, provide the rest of the church with
successful models of shared responsibility applicable to other Catholic
institutions of education, medical care and human services. Only a few
Catholics, preoccupied with submission to the Vatican, doubt the value of these
autonomous Catholic institutions. They distrust that same independence and
personal responsibility when it expresses itself in the lives of most lay
Catholics. Most Catholics respect the work of Catholic hospitals, social
service agencies and colleges and universities. Leaders of those works of the
church should be represented in diocesan planning and governance.
Finally, the church needs vigorous, independent lay movements.
Institutions naturally tend to bureaucracy, and nonprofit institutions often
end up staff- dominated. Equally important, the parish system naturally
inclines toward moderation, to comfort more than challenge its members.
Revivals and parish missions, popular devotions associated with religious
orders or local traditions, and apostolic movements aimed at vigorous witness
to the truths of faith are thus necessary components of a healthy local church.
A well-organized local church will welcome the challenges of dissatisfied
voices, be they charismatics worried about the depth of faith, pacifists or
pro-life activists worried about the moral integrity of the church, advocates
for one or another group feeling ignored or disrespected, or traditionalists
worried about the authority of the pope or the theological illiteracy of the
people. A healthy local church welcomes movements and make provision for
regular dialogue with those who warn the church of complacency or corruption.
In a church like St. Pauls household of faith, all voices
need to be heard.
These reforms have precedents and even working models in place in
this country. There are first-rate, respectable theologians and canon lawyers
who can explain how this way of being the Catholic church is better than the
unaccountable hierarchical structures we have struggled with too long. There
are organizations and experienced professionals who help parishes and dioceses
develop collaborative structures. Obviously these reforms are no substitute for
ongoing renewal of faith and worship and prayer and social ministry. Organizing
the church in forms of shared responsibility will not solve all our Catholic
problems, but it will make those problems our problems, problems we can work on
together.
Hands and heart of Christ
Why bother? Because Catholics, and many other Christians, have
strong convictions about the unity and integrity of the church, which is
supposed to be, most simply, the body of Christ, the very presence of Christ in
each particular time and place. That is not an abstraction but the heart of
eucharistic sacramental practice. That translates into two practical,
communitarian goals. One is to be in fact the people of God by
working together to build the church and carry out its mission of service to
the human family. To be credible as a people of God, Catholics, for
all their differences, have to work with one another to make the church and its
ministries flourish; they cannot just show up occasionally to help
Father. Our second goal arises from the fact that the church does not
exist for its own sake, any more than Jesus did. It is not simply a vehicle to
get us into eternal bliss. Its mission is to be, in this place, at this time,
the hands and heart of Christ, caring for one another and for the least among
us, making visible and believable the promise of the kingdom of God, the hope
for a future of peace, justice and freedom.
Revelations of abuse disclose genuine evil at the heart of the
institutional church. Many will question why Christians need such institutions
anyway. For Catholics who have long seen papacy, hierarchy and ordained
ministry as crucial to the historical, human character of the Christian
vocation, there is now a clear need to face the truth of genuine corruption.
Reform of organization and renewal of mission form together the vocation of
being Christ for everyone. Lay people once left the leadership of both
organization and mission to bishops, priests or religious orders. Now they have
no choice but to join forces to bring the changes that are needed. Here in our
community the only real question is, who will issue the invitation to get
started?
David OBrien is director for the Center for Religion,
Ethics and Culture and the Loyola professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Holy
Cross College, Worcester, Mass.
National Catholic Reporter, May 31,
2002
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