The Ninth Challenge: The Church and Political Life

by Don Conroy


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod 2010 series . . .


What is the role of the church in political life? In Church: Living Communion, Paul Lakeland begins addressing this question by reminding the reader of the mission of the Church: namely, to preach "the good news." The Church's political activity must follow that mission. He is writing as a Catholic theologian and points out that structures are a necessity in human endeavor, and since we are sinful, without structures in our political life we would have ". . . well-meaning chaos at best, a dog-eat-dog power struggle at worst." (p.112)

Also, without structures our human limitations would relegate love to sentimentality. Cardinal Sin, the former Archbishop of the Phillipines puts it this way:

Strength without compassion is violence.
Compassion without justice is mere sentiment.
Justice without love is Marxism.
And love without justice is baloney.

The separation of Church and state in the United States means that the institution of the Church cannot impose its teaching on the American people as a whole. The church leaders find it difficult to engage in debate and compromise, which is the stuff of political life. Lakeland reminds us that "ethics is about principles, politics is the art of the possible, and there are going to be conflicts." (p.114) The role of influencing public policy in the U.S. falls on the the Catholic citizens and Catholic politicians. The responsibility of the Church leaders is to teach the people Catholic Social Doctrine and that the people are the Church and have responsibility as Catholics. On the whole, he writes, the institution has done a poor job.

Charles Curran, in his recent address to 600 moral theologians from the world meeting at Trent, Italy (cf. National Catholic Reporter, 9/3/10), points out that the hierarchy's insistence on moral themes that are based on "normative solutions" (classical, neo-scholastic, abstract) makes little sense to the consciousness of contemporary men and women. As a consequence, the second largest religious group in the U.S. is former Catholics, and that adds up to one tenth of the population, according to the Pew Research Center. This data is a political concern for Catholics and calls for change for those who love the church.

The failure of the Church leaders to educate the Catholic people in Catholic Social Teaching is addressed in Gary Orfield's article, "Segregation, Inequality, Discrimination and Catholic Social Thought: Moving from Doctrine to Action" (Journal of Catholic Thought, March 2006, 143-177). Orfield emphasizes the power of Catholic Social Teaching against racism and discrimination in the U.S., but also points out the consequences of the Church's overemphasis of procreation policies and ". . . the tacit alliances with political forces that consistently oppose civil rights and minority interests." (Orfield was a professor of Education and Social Policy at Harvard University in 2006.)

Lakeland is not alone in his criticism of Catholic Church leaders and their responsibility to educate the Catholic people in its Social Teaching.


Tomorrow we look at Challenge 10: Building on the Strength of the Church.


See also the previous PCV posts
The First Challenge: Identity and Commitment
The Second Challenge: Ministry - Ordained and Lay
The Third Challenge: The Roles of Women in the Church
The Fourth Challenge: Church Teaching and Individual Conscience
The Fifth Challenge: The Religious Formation of the Young
The Sixth Challenge: The Scandal of Sexual Abuse
The Seventh Challenge: Ecumenism
The Eighth Challenge: Religious Pluralism

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

The Eighth Challenge: Religious Pluralism

by Bernie and Eileen Rodel


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod 2010 series . . .


In chapter two of his book Church: Living Communion, Paul Lakeland focuses on ten challenges that the Church today must address. Six of the ten challenges are internal issues: questions of identity and institutional commitment, authority, the roles of women in the Church, and patterns of ministry. The remaining four issues are concerned with how we think of mission and what sort of public face the Church should present to the world. One of these four external issues or challenges is religious pluralism. The question Lakeland seeks to address is: How can the Church grow into an ecumenical relationship with other great religious traditions of the world?

In order to grasp the critical issues in the discussion of religious pluralism we must have a good understanding of the document Dominus Jesus as cited by Lakeland. On August 6, 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a declaration entitled Dominus Jesus that led to many disagreements about the interpretation of the Catholic Church’s relationship with other faiths and with other Christian Churches. The document gave rise to debates ranging over relations between the Church universal and individual churches, not least other Christian communions, matters of interfaith relations, questions concerning the realities of pluralism, and matters of ecclesial authority and governance.

Dominus Jesus appeared to set further explicit and definitive limits to what actually enables a community to be called a church. Certain aspects central to the Catholic faith are discussed: the uniqueness of salvation brought about through God’s incarnation in Christ; the place of the Catholic Church in God’s plan of salvation; and particular questions relating to religious and ecclesiological pluralism.

Upon closer review the prime target of Dominus Jesus was religious “relativism,” which the CDF believed to be a standpoint that tends to perceive all religions as equally valid paths toward salvation. Consequently, we see a shift in focus – from dialogue as noted in the documents of Vatican II – back to evangelization. The document sought to challenge a “false concept of tolerance” in the field of religious pluralism. Hence Dominus Jesus was concerned with attacking relativistic tendencies, that is, viewing all paths to salvation, even those calling themselves “Christian,” as equally valid and beneficial for their adherents. Relativistic theories endangered the Church’s constant missionary proclamation by seeking to justify religious pluralism. Such is the thinking of the CDF under the leadership of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

After reading the pages in Lakeland’s book on religious pluralism we think there is a real need to acknowledge that Jesus is the “true” but “not the only” bearer of God’s salvation. (See Paul Knitter: The Transformation of Mission in the Pluralist Paradigm.) We think there is a need to re-evaluate this Christological problem within the framework of an estimation of the place of Jesus Christ among other religions. This type of thinking results from the constellation of cultural factors called postmodernity.

Rather than considering in detail some of the negative currents of postmodernity that would form the framework of understanding here, it would be better to look at the positive side of postmodernity and the reception of religious pluralism. Many theologians have passed beyond the tolerance of other religions to a positive appreciation of the religious treasures they contain. They see a breaking down of barriers between people that used to be thought impenetrable. Pluralist theologians do not advocate the reduction of all religions to only one, but they look for commonalities, for the development toward a unification of people, for an ontological unity of humanity. We need to recognize that the universal love of God that is experienced by Christians is, as it were, manifested in the other religions. (See Roger Haight: Jesus, Symbol of God.)

In closing we would now like to quote Paul Lakeland as he describes the role and work of today’s theologians in explaining religious pluralism:

The problem for the teaching Church is that while it wants to treat world religions exactly as we have just described them, and most of the time these days it succeeds, it has to deal with its own and does a poor job understanding the ecclesial role of the theologian. The Church cherishes, proclaims, and lives by divine revelation. The theologian tries to understand. A theologian works liminally, that is, as a kind of frontier person, on the boundaries between what we know and what we do not know. No theologian, any more than any Church leader, can produce new revelation, but it is the theologians’s role in the Church to explore the boundaries of what can be said. It is the role of the teaching authority in the Church to determine, eventually, which of these liminal explorations are consistent with revelation and which are not. And just as the theologian has to respect the tradition and explore it faithfully, so the bishop has to practice patience. Theology is a kind of foraging or scouting expedition into unknown territory, and it cannot be rushed. A theologian carries maps and guides and sends reports back home from stages along the way, but the theologian is not really sure where she or he will end up. Some explorations will result in dead ends, and some will be abandoned. But sometimes you get to the right place by following a more circuitous route than those with direct pastoral concerns find easy to understand. On the other hand, theologians do occasionally need to remind themselves that the objective of their work is a fuller appreciation of the Gospel for the whole community of faith, not just their professional confreres. (p. 110)

Tomorrow we look at Challenge 9: The Church and Political Life.


See also the previous PCV posts
The First Challenge: Identity and Commitment
The Second Challenge: Ministry - Ordained and Lay
The Third Challenge: The Roles of Women in the Church
The Fourth Challenge: Church Teaching and Individual Conscience
The Fifth Challenge: The Religious Formation of the Young
The Sixth Challenge: The Scandal of Sexual Abuse
The Seventh Challenge: Ecumenism

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

The Seventh Challenge: Ecumenism

by Paula Ruddy


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod 2010 series . . .


In the last four challenges to the contemporary Church, Paul Lakeland turns to the Church’s relation to the world. In number seven, he asks how the Catholic Church can fulfill its responsibility to relate to other Christian communities.

Paul dates the first genuine ecumenical break-through in 1937 with the work of Yves Congar. Minnesotans are familiar with the liturgical movement that began in Europe in the middle of the 19th century from the involvement of St. John’s University and Abbey in Collegeville and the great teachers trained there. Paul says that in some ways the liturgical movement laid groundwork for the ecumenical movement in crossing denominational lines. It all led up to the great Ecumenical Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.

Relations have improved with the Orthodox church, the Anglican, and the Lutheran churches. The principal difference between Catholicism and Lutheranism was addressed in a major joint statement on justification in 1999. Paul cites a primer on the status of ecumenical dialogue by Paul D. Murray, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Paul distinguishes between the formal work of dialogue between church bodies and the work of theologians. Church bodies move slowly and with caution for pastoral concerns. The work of theologians, on the other hand, is an investigation of truth within an academic community, not bounded by institutional caution. This difference gives rise to the teaching Church and theologians stressing different interpretations. Different emphases have led to “disagreement over the ways in which we should understand the relationships between the various Christian churches and the Catholic tradition.” ( p. 102)

This disagreement came to a head with the publication of Dominus Jesus in 2000, signed by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Its language and its emphasis on obedience to the teaching authority may have been addressed to Catholic theologians, but it was a bump in the road for ecumenical relations.

Dominus Jesus raises questions but it does not contradict the teaching of Vatican II and the sensus fidelium that other Christian denominations are part of the Church of Christ.

Before and behind the inadequacies of Dominus Jesus is the belief that the Church of Christ is bigger than the Catholic Church and that other Christian traditions also share in it. … So when lay Catholics claim a special status for their own tradition, but do not proceed to assign lesser status to other Christian communities, their beliefs express a solidly ecumenical theology. (p. 104)

The truth of the matter of ecumenical relations is that a posture of humility and service works, while arrogance does not. Theologically speaking this means that the Church has to banish everything from its proclamations on ecumenical relations in which it appears that unity is a matter of other traditions recognizing their need to come closer to the Catholic Church, in which the Church of Christ “subsists. . . . If Christian unity is to be real in the future it will come about when changed Protestant churches and a changed Catholic Church find their way together into a unity within the one Church of Christ. (p. 104)

NEXT: The Eighth Challenge: Religious Pluralism.


See also the previous PCV posts
The First Challenge: Identity and Commitment
The Second Challenge: Ministry - Ordained and Lay
The Third Challenge: The Roles of Women in the Church
The Fourth Challenge: Church Teaching and Individual Conscience
The Fifth Challenge: The Religious Formation of the Young
The Sixth Challenge: The Scandal of Sexual Abuse

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

The Sixth Challenge: The Scandal of Sexual Abuse

by Michael Bayly


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod 2010 series . . .


In Church: Living Communion, Paul Lakeland begins his examination of the sixth challenge for contemporary Catholics by insightfully and compassionately discussing the roots of the clergy sexual abuse crisis:

[A]s far as we can tell the seeds of this problem lie in the 1950s . . . [a time when] the social hierarchy of a clerical/lay Church was taken for granted, and the career structure of the clerical state itself was firmly in place. . . . Fifty years ago many young men entered seminary at the age of fourteen, and most were ordained before they were twenty-five years old, having never lived as adults in contact with laity of either sex, not even their siblings or parents. While it would be hard to argue convincingly that such a seclusion creates abusers, it is equally hard to deny tat it is not the best possible context in which to grow into personal spiritual and sexual maturity. Celibacy, for far too many f these men, was a refuge from their own sexuality and not – as it should be – a way of expressing it. Emerging from the seminary in their early twenties, the newly minted priests were thrown into parish life and often, because of their youth, assigned to responsibilities with the young people of the parish. Suddenly their selfhood as sexual beings was something they had to come to terms with in ways they had mostly not encountered before, and the wonder is that most of them negotiated this difficult transition successfully. Sadly, as we now know, many did not, and the tensions and fears and frustrations of the life of a young priest led them into inappropriate and sometimes frankly criminal behavior. The people they victimized will always remain the Church’s primary responsibility, if only because for decades they were ignored or treated as if they were the problem. But, the classic pedophiles aside, abusing priests should also be seen as victims, this time as victims of a clerical system that signally failed to select and prepare its seminarians appropriately, or to provide young clergy with an adequate affective support system for a lifetime of celibate commitment. (pp. 95-96)

Lakeland contends that it seems not so much the self-deception of abusing priests that angered the laity the most but the self-deception of generations of complacent clerical leaders. “The ire of the Church has mostly been vented upon the bishops,” he writes. (p. 97) He suggests a number of reasons for this, the major one being that very few bishops have been called to account for failing to recognize and act on the problem.

Accordingly, Lakeland states that “not a few Catholics think that the fundamental problem is systemic rather than psychological.” In other words, he writes, “the issue with bishops, as with abusers, is not their individual human weaknesses but a system that ignores and even encourages them.” (p. 97)

This system is labeled as “clericalism” by Lakeland, and is defined as “the social system or subculture that has grown up around the clergy, which has over the years separated them from many of the normal dynamics of ordinary life and kept the weaker among them from ever growing up.” (p.97)

Lakeland also observes that:

When things go wrong in any closed system, be it the clergy or the police or the legal system or Wall Street or Washington, the reform of the system cannot safely be left in the hands of those who caused the problems. Most often in secular society we find a way to conduct independent inquiry and to try to fix the problems. In the Church as presently constituted, this is quite impossible. (p. 97)

A “mostly passive laity over the last century,” has, according to Lakeland, contributed to the climate in which the clergy sex abuse scandal could grow and flourish.

Until fifty years ago most Catholic laity were not well educated and had a habit of almost automatic deference to the priesthood . . . Today laypeople in the Church are neither poorly educated nor likely not to speak up for their rights and responsibilities in secular society. In consequence, their responsibilities to speak in the Church are clear, and failure to do so is a contributing factor, if not to the abuse itself, then at least to the conditions that made it possible and to the continuation of a system in which it will be hard to eradicate it entirely. (p. 99)

Lakeland acknowledges that there are “many structural changes that the Church must consider if the sexual abuse scandal is to be a thing of the past.” (p. 99) Yet he is adamant that the “single most important move that we can make is to do whatever it takes to permeate the Church with the virtue of accountability.” (p. 100)

Accountability is such a simple idea, one with which every member of a family or worker in a company of whatever size is familiar. The health of the family or company requires that all members recognize their responsibility to and for one another, that they act with honor and self-discipline in the best interests of the group, and that they own their failures. If this does not happen the family falls apart or at best limps along, the company fires you or closes down. In an institution like the Church, the accountability we need must work a little like the way it does in the family and must have some characteristics of institutional accountability. As in a family, it must transcend structures, but like the institution, it must have them. It requires a sense of ownership and pride that comes from knowing you count. But it also needs open two-way structures through which the sense of ownership is realized and supported. (p. 100)

All of this will require certain changes within the Church – changes that Lakeland identifies and addresses in chapter three of Church: Living Communion.


Next: The Seventh Challenge: Ecumenism.


See also the previous PCV posts
The First Challenge: Identity and Commitment
The Second Challenge: Ministry - Ordained and Lay
The Third Challenge: The Roles of Women in the Church
The Fourth Challenge: Church Teaching and Individual Conscience
The Fifth Challenge: The Religious Formation of the Young

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

The Fifth Challenge: The Religious Formation of the Young

by Paula Ruddy


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod 2010 series . . .


Writes Paul Lakeland in Church: Living Communion:

The first problem we have to face is the near bankruptcy of the way in which children are taught about and initiated into sacramental life. They are baptized before they know anything about what is going on. They are introduced to first penance before they have anything much to be penitent about and in a way that almost assures that their first confession will be their last. They approach first communion in a somewhat better spirit, but often not in a family context in which Mass attendance will be anything more than sporadic. And, worst of all, they receive the sacrament of confirmation as a kind of license to conclude their religious education just when it should really be becoming significant, and as a rite of initiation in nonparticipation in the community of faith. So confirmation comes to be known as the sacrament after which you no long need go to church if you don’t want to. (p. 87)

Generalizations, of course. There are families and DRE’s working hard and effectively throughout the dioceses to form their children in the Catholic tradition. But the statistics, as well as our personal experiences, back up the generalizations.

The chief recommendation Paul makes to bring youth into the mission of the Church is to practice what we preach, and in particular it is the Church’s teaching about social justice, so well-known to us in theory, that we have to put into practice. We can appeal to youthful ideals to “promote the defense of human dignity and combat the anti-human forces at work in the world.” He adds recommendations for adult leadership modeling and more persuasive teaching about sexual morality.


1. We have to make the faith community into something people might actually want to join.

The best approach for the Church in attracting and retaining young people lies in internal reform in two directions. We must find ways to speak more clearly about the vision of good life in society that is expressed in the body of Catholic social teachings, and we have to show in our practice that we abide by those principles ourselves. The worst turn-off is to be guilty of hypocrisy. And if we think about those two ways forward for even a moment, it is obvious enough that by fulfilling the second of the two we take a big step toward the first, while concentrating on the first without the second will be an utter waste of time. On the whole the Church has tended not to see the connection between Catholic social teaching, which is understood as a program for social reform, and the inner life of the Church itself, far too many of the details of which are asserted to be of divine origin and thus, presumably, beyond reform. But if universal human dignity, the common good, and a consistent ethic of life are important in secular society, they surely ought to be as important in the community of faith. You cannot preach a special concern for the poor and weak members of world society if you ignore your own, and you cannot effectively insist on political leaders attending to the common good if ecclesial life seems to have its own class structure, differentiation of power, and serving of special interests. At that point, you do not even deserve to attract the young. pp. 90-91

2. The way in which people are attracted into ordained ministry must change. ”Most important of all is to break down a clerical structure that rewards ambition more than it does genuine pastoral leadership.” (p. 92)


3. “Education for ministry must change too; any effort to train future priests in isolation from the people they will serve needs to come to an end.” (p. 92)


4. We have to come to grips with changing sexual mores and how we teach sexual morality.

The entrée into a life of self-discipline is going to be so much more likely if it is all placed in the context of a Church at work on its mission to the world and not so focused upon its own internal order that it becomes a barrier to the involvement of the young that the future of the Church depends upon. (p. 95)

NEXT: The Sixth Challenge: The Scandal of Sexual Abuse.


See also the previous PCV posts
The First Challenge: Identity and Commitment
The Second Challenge: Ministry - Ordained and Lay
The Third Challenge: The Roles of Women in the Church
The Fourth Challenge: Church Teaching and Individual Conscience

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

The Fourth Challenge: Church Teaching and the Individual Conscience

by Paula Ruddy


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod 2010 series . . .


Everyone agrees with the primacy of conscience. In Church: Living Communion, Paul Lakeland quotes the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “a human being must always obey the certain judgment of his [/her] conscience.” Everyone also agrees that a person’s conscience may be in error. Sometimes the error is culpable, sometimes not. Writes Paul:

If we cannot dismiss all conscientious dissent as wrong, we also cannot canonize the individual conscience as an infallible guide. (p. 84)

While there are some fundamentals like the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, or the necessity of grace for salvation that claim common assent, many Catholics are all over the board in their acceptance of other Church teachings. Paul sees the growing phenomenon of the “cafeteria Catholic” as a challenge to Church leadership. In the cafeteria mode

the plate each of us ends up with, while it has many items in common with the next person in line, is never quite the same as that which others have selected, and the whole idea of a common tradition is threatened, or so it seems to some. But what one person might see as disastrous someone else could celebrate as healthy pluralism. p. 83

The challenge to the Church leadership as well as for the questioning Catholic is to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit in dialogue and communion with the whole Church.

Once again, a hint about how to resolve this problem is offered by the remark of Cardinal Ratzinger in advance of the conclave that would elect him pope. Since the Church has sometimes chosen bad popes, it is probably wrong to imagine the protection of the Holy Spirit covering each and every decision of the Church, and better to think of the Spirit guiding us through good and bad decisions and good and bad popes toward the reign of God. And this in its turn would suggest that the process by which the Church discerns how best to express the truth it possesses may require debate and even dissension between individuals and magisterium in which the magisterium is not necessarily always in the right. The requirement for the individual is to listen and learn, to inform one’s conscience before proceeding. By the same token, the requirement of the magisterium is to be similarly humble before the possibility that it might just have gotten something wrong. It has happened before; it could happen again. (p. 85)

I would like conversation about what is meant by the word “conscience.” Ladislas Orsy in his book Receiving the Council talks about conscience as “that luminous part of the person where he or she is bound to God.” In that center of myself where I experience the presence of God, I can test the wisdom of a course of action. But in that same center of experience, I know that no human language, no propositional statement about God, expresses the mystery of God—how Jesus is both human and divine, how the inner life of God is a trinity, what salvation means for the human race. So what does conscience have to do with affirming those propositions set down in creed? What is the value of a common tradition of assent to propositional statements about God? Is this a legitimate question for a person of faith?


Next: The Fifth Challenge: The Religious Formation of the Young.


To read about and discuss the first challenge, Identity and Commitment, click here. For the second challenge, Ministry - Ordained and Lay, click here. For the third challenge, The Roles of Women in the Church, click here.

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

The Third Challenge: The Roles of Women in the Church

by Paula Ruddy


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod 2010 series . . .


In his book Church: Living Communion, Paul Lakeland begins his description of the third challenge for Catholics with the bald and indisputable statement that the Roman Catholic Church is a sexist institution. The magisterium has a two-fold-problem.

First, the reasons it gives for not ordaining women are not persuasive to a significant number of the faithful. They have not peacefully and joyfully received this ruling because, it seems, the reasons given for it do not convince them.

What is the argument the magisterium uses?

The case against ordaining women is made today almost entirely on the argument of unbroken tradition. Priesthood, so it goes, can be traced somehow back to Jesus Christ, and despite his well attested and even notorious openness to women he chose only men to be apostles. Faithful to this pattern the Church throughout history has only ordained men as bishops, priests, and deacons. So unbroken is the tradition, it constitutes a fundamental of the Church that could not be changed, even if the Church thought it was a good idea. It is beyond debate. (p. 77)

The argument “it has never been done” is not persuasive to many reasonable 21st century Catholics. Attributing the exclusion of women to Jesus adds weight to the argument from tradition, but it prompts a question about the reasons Jesus could have had for excluding women, which makes the argument from tradition dependent on some other reasons that then have to pass muster. Other possible objections Paul does not elaborate are that Jesus did not establish the communal function of priest at all and that the early Church did accept women in that role when the function was established.

Arguments that cite Jesus’ intentions to link himself in the Eucharist as bridegroom and the Church as bride require us “to get into the murky Christological waters of what Jesus might or might not have intended.” (Not to mention the murky implications of the metaphor.)

The response to this first problem is obvious: either the official Church has to admit that their arguments are insufficient and proceed to ordain women or find more persuasive ones.

The second problem is that the official Church professes the equality of women, but it finds itself in a moral contradiction. Women are equal but they can’t be appointed to leadership positions because only ordained people are appointed to those positions. The magisterium has made rules that prevent it from supporting the values it professes. “Only a second class citizen is excluded as a matter of course from leadership positions.” (p. 82)

Whether or not women are ordained, Paul recommends their promotion in large numbers to roles of leadership in all areas:

(1) gender-blind hiring practices for staffing diocesan seminaries, (2) opening the ranks of the Vatican‘s diplomatic corps to Catholic women diplomats from around the world, and (3) gender-blind staffing of all levels of the Roman Curia….If this did not happen then it would mean only one of two thing: either not enough suitably qualified women came forward for the selection process, which would be easy to determine, or the commitment to equal treatment of women was not being taken seriously. (p. 81)

NEXT: The Fourth Challenge: Church Teaching and the Individual Conscience.


To read about and discuss the first challenge, Identity and Commitment, click here. For the second challenge, Ministry - Ordained and Lay, click here.

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

The Second Challenge: Ministry — Ordained and Lay

by Paula Ruddy


Continuing with our special Countdown to Synod of the Baptized 2010 series . . .


Priest shortage? Lay ministers? Vocation crisis?

Amid all the confusion over the meaning of the word “ministry,” Paul Lakeland first frames the question as he says it should be asked: “What can we do to serve the people of God better and to engage them all in the work of the Church without breaking definitively with some fundamentals of our religious tradition?

Tradition is in service of mission.

Tradition is essential; particular traditions are not. (p. 69)

If we cling firmly to the belief that Church tradition is the way we remain faithful to the Gospel through the changing fortunes of history, then traditions within the tradition can never be set in stone. They must certainly not be changed lightly, but they must equally certainly be changed when the proclamation of the Gospel—the very mission of the Church—is in danger of being compromised. (p. 70)

Paul recommends thinking of ministry on two axes, one of leadership for mission and one of service to mission, rather than in hierarchies or split between clergy and laity. “A bishop’s work is at the intersection of both axes but his position is unique.” There is equality among the ministries on each axis, one is not above another. Some leaders are ordained, some are not. “Holy Orders” is a ministry of service, as is director of faith formation which does not require ordination.

Another way of thinking about ministries is to focus on the talents of individuals and each brings his/her gifts to leadership for mission or service to mission.

Is the Church’s mission being compromised by insistence on a celibate male clergy or is it a fundamental of our religious tradition?

The official position of the Church is that the linking of priesthood and celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church, while neither absolute nor strictly essential, is so long-standing a tradition that to make a change would be a mistake. It would be inadvisable, so the magisterial teaching concludes, to break with long-standing tradition. (p. 69)

We have now reached the deplorable point in most of the worldwide Church when the Eucharist is not as readily available to the community of faith as it should be, and may before long become even scarcer. …In much of North America the shortage of priest s is only beginning to hit a Church that had abundant ministers for at least the last century. (p. 71)

The shortage today is a shortage of a commodity called “ordained ministers” or “priests.” In the distant past this could not happen because there was no such commodity. Today there is a pool of clergy ordained to serve wherever the bishops choose to send them. In the past a community chose someone to be its leader, usually for life. On the older model it would be impossible to have a “shortage of clergy” because each community had its leader. (p.71)

In recent centuries the Catholic Church has distinguished between a call to priesthood by Christ, based on Jesus calling the apostles, and a call by the community to other forms of ministry. This distinction confers a qualitative difference on the call to ordained priesthood. Paul says:

The distinction between calling by Christ and commissioning by the community of faith is an artificial one that does not stand up to any good test. Once we ask the question of how Christ calls the minister to serve the community we can immediately see the problem. The calling is either by some bolt from the blue or somehow by the Church’s ratification of the candidate’s sense of vocation. In the Church of the present day that validation is entirely in the hands of the institutional Church, represented by seminary rectors, teachers, and spiritual directors, and eventually the bishop. But there is absolutely no reason to see this as calling by Christ rather than calling by the community, anymore than for the local community to put a candidate forward would be clearly a calling by the community rather than a calling by Christ. Both approaches are simultaneously a calling by Christ and by the community, because there is no other way than the consent of the community to indicate that Christ has genuinely called this person to ministry. (p.74)

NEXT: The Third Challenge: The Roles of Women in the Church.


To read about and discuss the first challenge, Identity and Commitment, click here.

Theologian and author Paul Lakeland will be the keynote speaker at the Catholic Coalition for Church reform's September 18 Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table." For more information about this event and to register, click here.

Challenges to Us As Catholics

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Part 1 of a special series:

Countdown to Synod of the Baptized 2010

by Paula Ruddy


The Progressive Catholic Voice is a member of the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform, along with seven other local Catholic organizations, and the calendar days are flying fast toward CCCR’s Synod of the Baptized on September 18. We have 450 people registered on this day after Labor Day, with more registering now for overflow seating. The goal is to channel our energies toward the mission of the Church. We realize that to do this we have to be open to our own conversion. No small task.

Paul Lakeland will be our keynote speaker. Paul is a professor of Catholic Studies and director of the Center for Catholic Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut, and in chapter two of his most recent book, Church: Living Communion (Liturgical Press, 2009), he describes ten challenges for the contemporary Church, six internal and four external.

To give those of you who haven’t had a chance to read his book some idea of Paul’s thinking, we will outline one challenge a day in the countdown to the Synod. These are our understandings of what Paul is saying. You can correct or amend and we can dialogue with Paul if he comments online or when he gets here.


The First Challenge: Identity and Commitment

When Paul looks at the Church, he looks at it “from below.” That is, he starts his analysis with what is happening among the people who identify themselves as Catholic.

With data from sociologists, Paul observes that many people identify strongly as Catholic but are not committed to Catholic institutional practices. For example, they say they value Eucharist, but they don’t attend Mass regularly. How do we account for this gap between strong identity and weak commitment to practices that the community values?

Most of us who have lived through the last fifty years, know that fear of God’s wrath and belief in mortal sin with relation to Church practices has changed drastically. Some are happy about it, some not so happy. Why have beliefs changed?

Taking the long view, we can say the whole of Western civilization underwent a change in the way we look at the world from about 1600 to 1900, and the changes speeded up after the World Wars and into the 21st century. And the Roman Catholic Church, already in existence for centuries, reacted negatively to these changes until Vatican II in the 1960’s. The Catholic self-understanding, developed through the Middle Ages, has an emphasis on community. From the Reformation and the Enlightenment onward, with many nuances, the emphasis in the world shifted to the dignity of the individual, his/her rights, duties, equality and freedom. As inhabitants in both Roman Catholic and secular cultures, it is no wonder that we feel the tension.

Here is how Paul puts it:

Through the Middle Ages and succeeding centuries up to the middle of the twentieth, the Catholic Church provided its members with one of the most complete pictures of the meaning of life and a distinctive method for patterning one’s life accordingly. The stages of life, the liturgical year, the practices of repentance, prayer, good works, and the sacraments all came together in a seamless framework of meaning and order. God was in heaven, the members of the Church were heading in that direction, and obeying God in and through the Church would assure a happy death and entry into the presence of God in heaven. … Expressing dissent by living lives different from the vast majority of those around you was difficult if not impossible. …

In the end the apparently impregnable fortress of Catholicism was breached by the modern world’s discovery of the rights and responsibilities of the human subject. (p. 64)

(In chapter 3, following Bernard Lonergan, SJ, Canadian philosopher, Paul goes into how human subjectivity naturally reaches for self-transcendence—conversion—and must be grounded in the “concrete, dynamic, personal, communal, and historical.” The “turn to the subject” of modernity has had deep and pervasive effects on how all of us think and value things. Some of us are still making the turn.)

Here is the challenge that Paul Lakeland points to: this long gradual change in emphasis toward the value of the individual has resulted in many Catholics, particularly young ones, thinking that their subjective experience is enough to direct them in religious living and ethical relating. They don’t believe they need institutions or tradition or community.

Many of us have noticed that when young people feel the need for direction from community they turn to religions that value the subjectivity of the individual. It seems obvious that a response to this challenge has to take human subjectivity into account in the task of passing on the value of community. One key might be to show how the tradition can ground and deepen the inner life of the individual and enrich intersubjectivity. We have communication technology galore with nothing to say to each other.

Paul puts it like this:

The correct response to the divorce between claims to continuing Catholic identity and practices that would indicate ongoing institutional commitment is to strengthen the mechanisms of teaching through which the Church hands on its wisdom to the next generation, and the first step in this process is for the institutional Church itself to learn a few lessons about how good teaching takes place. . .

Education does not happen when people ingest information and simply accept it; it happens when they learn the skills of discernment and analysis so that they can make what they are taught their own, when they can even participate in the educational process and sometimes actually teach the teachers something they did not previously know.

. . . Learning occurs when the tradition collides with, corrects and is corrected by the experience of the learning community. The fabled passivity of the Catholic laity is a result of poor teaching for many, many centuries. Those who have broken the shackles of passivity are not helped by being considered troublemakers or dissenters. They are the vanguard in the struggle to overcome the gap between identity and commitment, and they need to be cherished, even if sometimes their stated positions are short of nuance. (pp. 67-68)

NEXT: The Second Challenge: Ministry - Ordained and Lay.

A Meeting with Hans Küng

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Editor’s Note: John Hushon and Anthony Padovano, members of the National American Catholic Council (ACC) Planning Committee, recently traveled to Germany to conduct a video interview with Hans Küng (pictured at right).

Swiss priest, theologian, educator, author, global ethicist and ecumenist, Küng was an expert advisor at Vatican II and has been a outspoken champion of the reforms instituted by that Council. He is also Professor Emeritus at the University of Tübingen and President of the Global Ethic Foundation.

Following is Hushon and Padovano’s report on the filming of their July 16 interview with Küng – an interview that will be available on DVD at the June 10-12, 2011 meeting of the American Catholic Council in Detroit. As is noted below, Küng himself may be present at this gathering.

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After a long taxi ride, we arrived at the home office of Hans Küng, in Tübingen, Germany, late on the morning of July 16. It was clear from the beginning that Dr. Küng was “protected” by a number of individuals who respected him as an individual and who understood his importance in the development of global religion and ethics.

The house was “Southern German,” that is to say, Swiss, with a compactness, a sense of style, and a grace which only the Swiss can do. It was a modern chalet of three white-stuccoed, tiled roofed stories climbing up a mountainside, set above an empty garage. A secluded garden, dotted with modern sculptures (mostly tributes to Dr. Küng) surrounded planters brimming with summer color. The air was hot, but dry following several days of “global warming” high temperatures in most of Europe. The entire household was getting ready for an Alpine summer holiday. The office of his Foundation is located on the first floor of the chalet. His personal office and living quarters are on the second floor. The third is reserved for another resident and his housekeeper/cook.

We were greeted at the office on the lowest level, although it was clear that the extensive library of religion and theology works ran through the entire residence in corridors, stairwells, and rooms. Wearing a casual Polynesian shirt, Hans Kung was small in stature and relaxed. He had been working on yet another translation of one of his dozens of theological works. His twinkling eyes betrayed both intellect and challenge.

The film crew, which had arrived with us, quickly setup in an al fresco “studio” which Dr. Küng had designed to showcase an impressive collection of South Pacific artifacts presented to him upon the occasion of a series of lectures in Tonga. He set us at ease, confident that his message was global and that his views transcend the temporary actions of the Roman Church. We settled in for the interview. Dr. Küng insisted upon our calling him Hans and disdains the title “Father” as a 19th century “Irishish-ism.”

Anthony Padovano proceeded with the interview. Questions followed a “script” prepared initially by Anthony with comments by various ACC planners. After about an hour of questioning, we agreed to adjourn for lunch in a dining room adjoining the interview space. In a relaxed atmosphere, Dr. Küng expressed his views about the future of the Church. As he sees it, the institution we know will die soon, to be replaced by communities following the gospel of Jesus, with informal liturgies and a sacramentality related to life in community. He is very devoted to developing relationships between Christianity and non-Christian religions, the attempt to discover a global ethical commonality, and ultimately, a global understanding of God. What he sees emerging is a spirituality related to the human condition and stages of life, to replace institutionalized rigidity.

At times, he seemed wistful that the Roman Church had not seized the light of Vatican II. He was remorseful that the Church had “once again” failed to recognize that the Incarnation of Jesus required both a recognition of the world and a reasonable accommodation with that world, and an awareness of the various paths of humanity to understanding life and ultimately, the understanding of the eternal ineffable God that is common to all religions. He believes that the Church has strayed far from the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels and that its struggle with modernity (as its struggle with the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th century) has endangered its relevance. He is not fearful of criticizing the Church and particularly his old friend and colleague, Benedict XVI, whom he hired at the University of Tübingen many years ago. It was apparent that he is saddened by the personal treatment he has received from the Church.

After a long and delicious lunch, we realized that we needed to part, if only to provide his staff with a timely departure for the summer holidays. We recessed to the library under the stairs where there are dozens of his books in dozens of languages. He asked, “What can I give you?” and proceeded to autograph several for us, and agreeing to do many more for the ACC conference in Detroit. He confided to us that the English version of his latest thinking on spirituality, related to the stages of human life, would be available early in 2011.

We asked several times if he would deliver his filmed remarks in person and each time he evaded commitment, citing issues of health and the pressure of his work. But he kept open that he would ultimately consider ACC to be the kind of world event that his presence might enhance, while modestly remarking that his edited film comments would “do so much more.”

Thank you, Dr. Küng, for your time, your insights, your hope for the future, and the symbol you are to those of us seeking to reform the institutions of our Church to make it closer to the Gospel ideal and relevant to the human experience of God.

Küng’s presentation at the ACC in Detroit in June of 2011 will be in the form of this interview, live or filmed, depending on his health. In either event, DVDs of the film will be available at the Council.


Recommended Off-site Links:
The American Catholic Council
Books by Hans Kung at Amazon.com