Paul Collins
There is increasing frustration regarding the 2021-2022 Plenary Council among Australian Catholics committed to renewal. Hedged in by the constraints of canon law and the need for Vatican approval, no action on its decisions can be expected before 2024. This probably suits the large majority of bishops who show little or no enthusiasm for the Plenary. It also promises to be a largely in-house exercise with, according to Peter Wilkinson’s calculations, only around 26 of the 265 people “called” to attend not directly employed by the church.
Australian Catholicism can’t wait until 2024 to act, not least because already 90% or more of self-identified Catholics have abandoned faith practice. We have lost our ability to speak meaningfully of Jesus, the Gospel and the genuine Catholic tradition. The church is publicly identified as an abusive, secretive institution obsessed with sex and gender issues, closely linked to our culpable failure to protect vulnerable children in our communities. The result: Catholicism is largely ignored, even despised by our culture and fellow citizens.
Understandably, early-on in the process, we thought that the Plenary was “the only game in town.” But sad experience has taught us that that’s true if you accept that the only game a Catholic can play is the bishops’ game. But this game was invented by the hierarchy who set the rules, pretty much umpired/refereed the process, decided who kicked a goal or scored a try, and retained the right to change the result if it didn’t suit them.
Jesus’ words “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60) have resonance here. He had just challenged a man to leave all and follow him, but the man said that he had to bury his father first. Jesus’ response is a paradoxical play on words, because the Hebrew word for “dead” can also mean something that is now irrelevant. His message is that if you follow him, you have to leave everything, especially the irrelevant, behind. Perhaps this includes “dead” episcopal games.
This is not as revolutionary as it sounds. It is precisely what Pope Francis proposes when he calls us to leave behind the mustiness of “sacristy faith”. “I prefer a church,” he says, “which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.” Francis is a revolutionary, as the encyclical Laudato si’ (2015) demonstrates. Much more important than his repudiation of much of the politics, economics, technology, capitalist theory and denialist rhetoric of the post-modern world, is the theological, philosophical and ethical revolution that he points towards in the encyclical.
In the light of Jesus and Francis’ words, Australian Catholics need to leave the bishops to “bury their dead.” Many of them think—to adapt the words of Louis XIV—L’église, c’est moi, “I’m the church!” A small minority of them support renewal and the rest have rendered themselves irrelevant by their inability to articulate a coherent spiritual and faith response to the needs of the times. They are also going to be very preoccupied with financial problems resulting from abuse pay-outs and civil cases against them.
While we are thinking accountability, transparency, responsible governance, the rights of the baptized, they are trapped in their own absolutism, leaving us no option but to begin to live out our baptismal commitment to live and preach the gospel, to evangelize. Endless negotiation with bishops over internal issues like governance does nothing for evangelization in contemporary culture, but it does trap us in an episcopal game that is going nowhere. The real challenge facing the renewal movement is to assume ministerial leadership and articulate a new vision.
Where do we find that vision? The first two chapters of the Vatican Council II’s document, Lumen gentium, sketched out the New Testament vision of the church as a local community of the people of God, drawn together by God’s Spirit, and gifted to minister as representatives of Christ in the world. But there was a significant failure after Vatican II, especially during the long papacy of John Paul II, to incorporate that vision into pastoral practice, church structures and the 1983 Code of Canon Law.
Even though Pope Francis clearly favours a more community based, synodal model of church, the bishops’ game still operates out of a hierarchical, clerical mindset under Vatican control. The disjunction between models means that Catholics are caught between two different ecclesiologies, two understandings of church that are incompatible, leading to the toxic disjunction that we live with all the time.
It is the people of God model that reflects the New Testament and early church’s self-understanding. The notion of hierarchy is an import from late-Roman administrative structures that the church adopted in the fourth century, post-Constantine (d.337AD). This was re-enforced by the revival and application of Roman law to the church in the late-twelfth century. Neither of these imports have any resonance with Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God.
The specific hierarchical model that we operate out of nowadays was borrowed from the theory of the divine right of kings in the late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth centuries, which was the prevailing secular model of governance at the time. Think again of Louis XIV. It received its definitive form in the ecclesiology of Jesuit theologian Robert Bellarmine (d.1621) in his Disputations against the Protestants. According to Bellarmine, Christ intended that the church be a monarchy with Saint Peter and successive popes as its monarchical rulers.
This is the church enshrined in the decrees of Vatican Council I (1870) in which the pope has “the absolute fullness of supreme power.” All teaching authority lies with him through inflated notions of papal infallibility. This ecclesiology has, at best, a tenuous relationship with the New Testament.
Most contemporary Catholics operate out of the Vatican II model. They think of themselves as baptized members of a church community on pilgrimage, searching for God and transcendence in and through the world and other people, and committed to discipleship and ministry. As Christians they are incorporated into and are “all one in Christ” where there is “no longer Jew or Greek…slave or free…male or female” and, Paul might have added, “bishop or layperson” (Galatians 3:28).
Contemporary Australian Catholics must take the people of God model as the theological foundation for their communities and ministries. This is not a divine right, hierarchical vision, but one of an outward-looking people journeying toward the kingdom of God. This is an untidy, non-linear vision, one that is going to have to be built from the bottom up by communities of believers. These communities will pray and celebrate liturgy together, but are also outward-looking, intimately involved in ministry. Their leadership would emerge organically from the community, as happened in the early church. Many contemporary Australian renewal movements are strategically well-placed to begin to operate as these new communities; a couple of them are already well along the way to realizing this.
The Cyber Christian Community asked us in a letter in early-August: “Is the current Church culture ‘fit for purpose’ in the 21st century? Does it actually meet the spiritual needs of thinking adults today? Does it clearly express the mission of Jesus to contemporary society?” These are the questions we should be answering ourselves, rather than referring back to the bishops. The ACCCR Call Statement urged Catholics “to act now in ways that reflect the values of the Gospel, the vision of Vatican II and the best values of Australian society.” That is, renewal movements should be engaged in actions to build the church, not patching-up superannuated, dead church structures.
What am I saying in practice here? What would these communities do in practical terms in response to the crisis facing the church?
First, renewal groups would build themselves up as communities through celebrating liturgy, prayer and biblical reflection together. From that foundation, they go out to ministry. They are not discussion, or self-help groups. They exist to serve by living-out the basic meaning of “liturgy.” The word is derived from the Greek λειτουργία (“leitourgia”) which basically refers to “public service,” “work for the common good.” But it also refers to the service of God, what we once called “divine service.” Worship and ministry are intimately linked; you can’t have one without the other. The ministry of these groups would be structured around the gifts of each member.
The challenge is to build-up the church on the basis of the guarantees set-out in the Letter to the Ephesians: “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ himself as the cornerstone” (2:29). As citizens and members of God’s household, the Spirit has given “gifts” so that “some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry for building up the body of Christ” (4:11).
These groups need to maintain strong contact with each other, which we’ve already achieved through ACCCR and our signing-on to the coalition’s Call Statement. Also, if groups are focused on ministry to the community rather than special interest “causes”, it’s less likely they’ll take stances that lead to conflict with other Catholics.
In summary, Catholic renewal movements need to question their focus on Plenary processes and reforming church structures. I think the time has come when we have to contemplate another game, one grounded in the New Testament and the early church and that was articulated in the first two chapters of Lumen gentium.
This is where we should be re-focusing our energy. Even if, in the unlikely event that playing the bishops’ game persuaded them to give some ground, we would still be operating out of a superannuated model that has no future. Given the crisis that the church faces, we have little time for that.
Some fear that a more community-based church with an emphasis on the equality of all believers is somehow “heretical” and non-traditional. Actually, it’s the recovery of a profound tradition by going back behind Vatican I and the divine right monarch-popes/bishops and the medieval application of legalism—as Saint Paul says, “We have died to the law through the body of Christ” (Romans 7:4). It is a return to the early church and the New Testament. “Tradition is not static,” Pope Francis says, “it is dynamic. It is the guarantee of the future, not the custodian of ashes.”
As baptized Catholics we are already equipped and authorized to form communities to minister, to build-up the church and to proclaim Christ to the world, but we have lost our way in episcopal games and forgotten our call to ministry.
Our world is increasingly like the Roman world that the early church faced and our primary ministry is to enter into dialogue with that world, so that we can communicate the message of Jesus and bring something of the richness of the Catholic tradition to our culture. Let’s not waste time playing the bishops’ game of minor adjustments of old structures, but build new communities that are more attuned to the signs of the times and the needs of the culture, with Laudato si’ as the basis for evangelization. That is the real challenge facing us.
©Paul Collins
Canberra, 14 September 2020.