Creating a Liberating Church (Part 3)

By Rosemary Radford Ruether


Editor’s Note: Following is the third and final installment of the transcript of the talk delivered by theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether at Lake Elmo Park Reserve, MN on July 6, 2010. This text is reprinted with permission. To start at Part 1, click here.


Once we have sketched something of our vision of authentic Christian community, the key question is how do we get there from here? What are the ways of moving toward that vision, given a present church polity and ideology which mostly institutionalizes and sanctifies the opposite? I would like to talk about four ways we can begin to change ourselves and some ways of building organizational bases to support such alternatives.

First, we need to grow up. I say this with no intention of demeaning an audience of mainly middle aged and older adults, including myself, who regard ourselves as already pretty grown up. Rather I am pointing out the great difficulty we have really liberating ourselves from the residue of a spirituality of infantilism which was deeply bred into our psyches in our traditional Catholic socialization.

Catholicism, like all patriarchal hierarchical institutions, recreates relationships of domination and submission, modeled on a fusion of male over female with parent over child relations. We learn to dominate those below us and submit to those above us, but not how to be equals in mutually affirming relationships. We are not encouraged to become genuinely autonomous adults, but rather to remain always the dependent child under some kind of higher authority. These patterns of relationship are central to clerical patriarchal culture.

This socialization into paternalistic dependency fixates us between rebellion and submission, ever reverting back to forms of submission as a way of assuaging feelings of guilt for rebellion, but not really being freed to be a responsible adult. By responsible adult, I mean someone who has a confidence in one’s own autonomous mind and agency, without either self-inflation or self-negation, and who is able to take responsibility for helping to develop the future of a community, without needing either to assuage guilt or assert power relations through such service. This is the kind of maturity required for real ministry, but it is difficult to develop in a paternalistic system.

Secondly, we need to be people of prayer. This also means we need to overcome of the kind of split between social action and spirituality which has been endemic in our culture. Real ability to stay the course of reform and service for the long haul is only possible if we have a deep grounding in the disciplines of daily prayer, meditation and cultivation of the presence of God in our lives. This means resisting the demands for workaholism and endless achievement to find time for this kind of quiet meditation on a regular basis, and from these disciplines to then begin to cultivate a sense of this presence of God even in the midst of activity.

Third, we need have critical knowledge about church history and theology, able to sort out with adequate tools of historical and theological reflection what Christian themes are really meaningful and what truth claims need to be questioned as assertions of power that is not conducive to spiritual health. As theologically trained people who have been in ministry, it may seem beside the point to say that we need to be better educated in theology and church history. But one of the things I learned from a dialogue which the women’s Ordination Conference conducted with the Catholic bishops of the Bishop’s committee on women some thirty years ago was that their seminary education was woefully inadequate.

The bishops did not have a critical education in the Bible or Church history, which enabled them to sort out the questions being put by feminist theology vis a vis the assertions of the Papacy that topics like women’s ordination were against church tradition and so could not be discussed. In fact their general tendency was simply to say this could not be discussed because church authority had said so, without even being able to conceive of independent investigation of this claim from Scripture and church history.

Fourthly, we need to be socially committed. Like taking time for prayer, this calls for some rearrangement of our lives, and sometimes the way we make a living, to find ways to connect at least part of our wealth and energy to solidarity with those less fortunate and living more sustainably with the earth. Preferential option for the poor and an ecological life style cannot just be a rhetorical slogan. It has to relate to the way we live our lives.

It has to be part of an organized effort to create an alternative society against the present global (dis)order being imposed by the World Bank and the powerful nations. We need a global uprising against the triumphalism of the rich and powerful who wish to make it appear as if there is no other alternative possible to the neo-liberalism economic system which is impoverishing the earth and the majority of people of the earth.

We need to take ecological impoverishment as seriously as the poverty of humans. We need to recognize that these are not separate topics, but part of one and the same picture. This means bringing the ecological question home to our daily lives; it means examining how the way we live everyday is part of the problem of global impoverishment of the earth and all its inhabitants. Obviously ecological sustainability cannot be accomplished solely by changes in private life style. It is basically a macrosystem of production, consumption and waste. But we need to cultivate a certain awareness of how we participate in this system by examining and making some adjustments in how we transport ourselves, consume food and goods, use energy, discard wastes.

We need to find ways to build some of these shifts into our households, schools, offices and other local institutions, including churches, over which we may have some influence. From this base in consciousness and concrete struggles for ecological sustainability, we may then be able to build larger networks to change the patterns of earth-destruction that is diminishing the life of regions and the globe on a macro-level.

These four projects of maturity, prayer, knowledge and social and ecological commitment need to be fleshed out in our social relations and, most particularly, how we live as church. It seems to me there are two levels of living as church in a way that cultivates mature and liberating spirituality and social commitment to which we have access and power, regardless of what the official church institution is allowing or not allowing. These are base communities and parallel organizations.

Base Communities: Whether or not we have reasonable parish communities where we feel nourished in weekly worship, it seems to me that base communities in which a small groups of 10-15 people covenant together for regular prayer, study, worship, discussion, and mutual support are an important base for Christian life. Such base communities was an integral part of the vision of the church created by liberation theology in the last two decades. But in my experience many of these base communities remained too clerical, too dependent on bishops and failed to really address many of the real issues of daily life, particularly issues of women and of sexual and domestic abuse. We need to recommit ourselves to developing these communities in a way that will be deeper and more long lasting.

Parallel organizations: In addition to the small covenant group, parallel organizations are important for projects of both church reform and social action. North American Roman Catholicism, with its tradition of volunteerism, is particularly rich in parallel organizations, which work to extend the boundaries of Roman Catholic activity in a way that is not dependent on hierarchical approval. Call to Action, Peace and Justice Centers such as the Quixote Center in Washington D.C., the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, the Women-Church network, CORPUS and Pax Christi, including the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform of Minnesota, are parallel organizations which are increasingly bonding together in national and international networks.

Parallel organizations are also developing all over the world among Catholics, the Catholic Women’s Network in Britain, the Eighth of May movement in Holland, feminist theology networks in India and other Asian countries, Catolicas por el Direcho a Decidir in Latin America, among others. Such parallel organizations might be seen as the Catholic expression of the creation of civil society. Such parallel organizations of Catholics operate within the Catholic community, but not under the juridical power of the hierarchy. They are vital expressions of democratization in the church.

Why call such groups Catholic? Basically such groups see themselves as Catholic both because the membership is rooted in people of Catholic roots and also because they see themselves as addressing reform issues in the Catholic Church, as well as doing the direct work of ministry which is understood as inspired by Catholic Christian faith and life. In short those in such groups see themselves as being the church. Their Catholic Christian identity is self-chosen out of a sense of taking responsibility for both being the church and calling the institution to open itself to such concerns, while at the same time being free of the sort of institutional control that could close them down or dismiss their leaders.

Ultimately we are engaged in a process the future of which cannot be predicted. It may be that Catholics concerned with such reforms will grow tired of institutional intransigence and go elsewhere, or it may be that at least parts of the official institution will open itself to more acceptance of such movements. We hope that we are engaged in a process that will lead to eventual transformation of the official institution sufficiently to allow legitimacy to the broader range of thought and life. But meanwhile we can and must carry on living ways of being Christian community that satisfy our vision of what is authentic and truthful; in short we need to insist on being the church today and not just waiting for it to be allowed to do so tomorrow.


For Part 1 of Rosemary Radford Ruether's "Creating a Liberating Church," click here.

For Part 2, click here.



Above: Approximately 300 people gather July 6 at Lake Elmo Park Reserve to hear theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether speak. The event served as a fundraiser for the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform (CCCR).


Above: Mary Vaughn (center) with CCCR organizers Jane Collova (left) and Eileen Rodel.


Above: CCCR co-chair Michael Bayly stands besides a banner highlighting the coalition's upcoming Synod of the Baptized: "Claiming Our Place at the Table."


Above: Rosemary Radford Ruether converses with an attendee of CCCR's July 6 event.

Creating a Liberating Church (Part 2)

By Rosemary Radford Ruether


Editor’s Note: Following is the second of three installments comprising the text of the talk delivered by theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether at Lake Elmo Park Reserve, MN on July 6, 2010. This text is reprinted with permission. (To start at Part 1, click here.)



My vision of the future church is shaped by the effort to respond to the Kairos of this period in human history, a time when the hopes released by the end of the Cold War have been betrayed by a new American imperialist militarism, a time when we must stand in horror at the increasing gaps between wealth and poverty in the world as a whole, and at the increasing devastation of the earth caused by profligate and unjust materialism, as well as our sense of both urgency and helplessness before these challenges. In this moment is it unclear whether the Obama administration can make a significant dent in this direction. It is also shaped by what I believe to be the perennial meaning of the gospel, rooted in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ, ever new and yet ever one in a wisdom beyond passing historical changes in society and thought.

To me that liberating vision is summed up by the word ‘grace’; the grace that is the authentic being of God made present to us in creation renewed in Christ, which both liberates us from all the deformations of our power and security grabbing, and returns us to our deeper and authentic self and calling as God’s good creation. To me being the Church, the body of Christ, is basically about being the community who lives in and through that life of grace.

In discussing some of the characteristics of such a church – the church we need now, the church we have always needed, the church we were called to be from the beginning, both as local churches and as world church – I would like to explore briefly five elements.

1. Multiculturalism: We are called today to be authentically Catholic, not hegemonic white male EuroAmericans who confuse white male Western European culture with normative human and Christian culture to be imposed on Indigenous peoples, on Africans, Asians, Arabs, Polynesians and women of all groups. This means really exploring, claiming and celebrating the actual cultural diversity of our Catholic people in the world. This also means paying particular attention to the peoples who are the descendents of those subjugated by brutal colonization and enslavements imposed by European conquests over the centuries; the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Pacific and elsewhere, and the African peoples brought in chains to the Americas and the Caribbean.

Globally, Catholics are a people increasingly Hispanic, African and Asian, even as the old heartland of European Catholicism in Italy, France, and Spain grew apathetic and their offspring in North America are following suit. Yet we are a people till wedded to cultural patterns shaped in the European Middle Ages, and a church polity shaped by fourth century Roman imperialism and eighteenth century absolute monarchy seeking to live on as ecclesiastical fossils after the political substance has died. We need to acknowledge the relativity and even demonic character of these hegemonic cultural and political forms of the past and, at the same time, embrace a rich dialogue between the many cultures that make up the Catholic people, for the transformation and mutual enrichment of our whole cultural and social life.

2. Commitment to the Poor and the Oppressed: Since the birth of liberation theologies in Latin America, Africa and Asia, brothers and sisters from these regions have been calling the church to renew itself in the preferential option for the poor. The Christian church is authentically the body of Christ by living in solidarity with those of our community who are treated most injustly, who are most marginalized, despised and destitute in the existing system of power and wealth. The foundational call of Christ to repentance, ministry and service was and remains “good news to the poor, the liberation of the captive, the setting at liberty of those who are oppressed.” Only by living that good news do we live the gospel.

Yet to live that good news after twenty centuries of Catholic Christianity is also to live by repentance, to live in deep mourning and contrite struggle to change what has overwhelmingly been and still is a primarily contrary reality; the institutionalization of ecclesiastical power and privilege rooted in preferential option for the rich and powerful. Since at least the Constantinian establishment of the early fourth century, if not before, Catholic Christianity has grown in wealth and power by blessing the power of aristocracies, of emperors and kings, of merchants and capitalist corporations, and their economic, political and military might. It has mostly advised the poor and the oppressed to win favor with God by obeying their masters. If Christ calls us to be faithful by solidarity with the poor then Christ calls us to be a repentant counter-sign to much of what we have been in history.

3. A Church liberated from Sexism: To contemplate a future church liberated from sexism, a church that truly lives as a community of equals, of mutuality of women and men, that is liberated from sexual pathology into healthy, loving sexuality, that is liberated from homophobia to acknowledge diversity of sexual orientations, this indeed is to be deeply repentant and transformed from much of what we have been through our history.

At a time when sexism and sexual pathology seems more than ever rampant in church leaders; when the past and present Popes cling to a misguided concept of unchanging truth by insisting on a male celibate priesthood against any possibility of married priests, women priests, or acknowledging the existence of gay priests, while actual male celibate priests are increasingly discredited by charges of sexual abuse of youth, male and female; at a time when these same Popes regard rejection of contraception and the ordination of women as if these were the first articles of faith; there does not seem to be much hope for repentance of the church's historical sins of sexism.

Yet it is precisely at such a time when we need to deepen our new recognition that Christian community means a community of equals, a community in which the distinctions of male and female, slave and free have been indeed overcome in the new Humanity, where we can celebrate that women as much as men are images of God and representatives of Christ. We need to affirm women as both preachers, as sacramental ministers and as theologians, bringing women's gifts of ministry fully into the church for the first time. We also need to affirm that being in Christ restores us to, and does not alienate us from, the fullness of our embodied selves and the ability of our whole body to give love and pleasure to one another, without fear, and also without irresponsibility or exploitation.

4. A Democratic Church: Here too we seem to be on the horns of a contradiction, seeking a participatory and egalitarian church polity which has been the opposite of the historic church polity that patterned itself after patriarchy, aristocracy and monarchy from the late first century to its incorporation into the system of the Roman empire in the late fourth century and on through the medieval and early modern periods.

When Bishops thunder that the “church is not a democracy,” they do not intend merely to speak about historical and social facts, but about divine intentions. In their mind Christ founded the Church to be a centralized feudal monarchy, of Pope over bishops, bishops over priests, priests over laity, men over women and children. They believe that this is what Christ intended.

That this whole pattern of hierarchy might have been historically accidental, modeled on existing political systems, and even worse, a betrayal of a deeper vision of the church as a community of equals better expressed in patterns of life where all members have a voice and a share in ministry, this is unthinkable to such bishops. But it is precisely this unthinkableness of the historically accidental and non-normative nature of such a monarchical hierarchical structure which not only must be thought today, but is in a real sense obvious once one has a minimal acquaintance with the New Testament and Church history.

5. A Church which acknowledges its Fallibility: A church which believes itself infallible in the pronouncements of its monarchical ruler is a church which has encapsulated itself in its own apostasy and made that apostasy irredeemable. In my view every other sin is forgivable except the sin of infallibility, for this is the sin against the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that we cannot repent of the mistaken claim of papal infallibility, imposed at a particularly bad moment in late l9th century Italian Catholic history. Rather it means that we cannot repent of this or any other mistake that we have ever made, or are making, unless we acknowledge that we indeed can err, not simply as individuals, but as a institution acting in its formal and public institutional capacity. We need to clearly analyze and critique in detail these many mistakes, for examples in teachings about birth control, about the non-ordainability of women, about the spiritual superiority of celibacy, about the divinity of patriarchal hierarchy, and finally the doctrine of infallibility itself, specifically, and not just in vague and abstract terms that leave in doubt what it being said.

To repent of the error of infallibility that fixates all other errors is also to liberate ourselves to be human, knowing ourselves to be finite, fallible, seeing in part and not totally, absolutely or with final certainty. It is also to liberate ourselves to be Christian, to live by faith, repentance and the grace of transformation without which we cannot be in authentic continuity with the new life in Christ. For new life in Christ can only be born and continually reborn through death to our idolatries and resurrection of a life that we hold only by not holding it, by being upheld by the one in whom alone we have ultimate trust. This ultimate trust excludes not only formulaic certainties of doctrines and teaching authorities, whether of Pope or Bible, but also liberates us from infantile needs for such certainties. It liberates us to search intelligently for the perspectival truths that we can construct, without needing to cling to them absolutely and literally as the basis of our life.

All this is to say once again that the church we seek, in which alone we can have life, is the church that lives by grace, not in the sense of a grace that excludes knowledge, experience, historical change, but a grace that upholds us and supports us in and through both our searches for meaning and justice and our freedom to repent, liberating ourselves from misplaced ideas and systems and renewed in the miracle of life that wells up anew every day.


Next: Part 3 – How Do We Get There from Here?


Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Creating a Liberating Church (Part 1)

By Rosemary Radford Ruether


Editor's Note: On July 6, 2010, approximately 300 people gathered to hear theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether speak at a special "evening in the park" fundraiser for the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform at Lake Elmo Park Reserve, MN. Following is the first of three installments comprising the text of Rosemary's talk. It is reprinted with permission.


My theme for this talk is “creating a liberating church.” This is given at a crucial time in the history of the Roman Catholic church. Let me begin by saying something of my context and intellectual history in relation to the Catholic Church. I come from an ecumenical family: a Catholic mother, an Anglican father, a Jewish uncle, a Russian Orthodox great-aunt and Quaker relatives. There was never any doubt about what religious identity was strongest in this mix, namely that of my mother’s Catholicism which was at the same time strongly committed and yet intellectually sophisticated. But it was also clear that the other family religious traditions were to be respected. This combination of being both catholic and ecumenical is one which I have cherished, which I have expanded, rather than rejected.

There was only one serious moment when I considered leaving the Catholic Church. This was about forty years ago when I realized that I did not believe in the doctrine of papal infallibility. It was not simply that I doubted this idea, but rather that it became clear to me that this was a serious ecclesiological error, theologically. I explored joining my father’s Anglican church with which I was familiar having occasionally accompanied him to church as a child. In this process I became clear that I was simply uninterested in becoming an Anglican, much as I appreciated many aspects of this church. The only church that interested me, that held and still holds my concern, is Roman Catholicism.

My recommitment to Roman Catholicism is not based on the idea that it is the only true church or even the best church, but simply that it is a very important expression of historical Christianity in the west and that its reform and renewal is vital to Christian and human betterment. It is not that I expect that it is totally reformable according to my own vision of what the church should be, but rather than the reform vision of Catholicism that has been birthed in the last forty-five years needs to be defended as a vital option within world Catholicism. I see this as my particular commitment to keep this reform option alive and to support that wing of Catholicism which expresses this vision, even while recognizing that other options will remain within it and seek to contest and even drive out this option. Today I would locate myself as an ecumenical Catholic Christian, who also acknowledges the truth of other world religions, while at the same time being committed to this particular church as my immediate church context.

I give this talk for the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform with painful awareness that in the last thirty years in the pontificate of the previous Pope and his present successor, it seems unlikely that institutional Catholicism can move in any direction except backwards, not back to the gospels, but back to Vatican I, back to the defensive posture of an infallibilist papal monarchy seeking to impose its will upon the world church and even upon the world outside the Catholic church. Opus Dei members have been placed by the Vatican in episcopal positions in country after country and also in delegations to the United Nations and the European Union, in a bid to control world affairs in a reactionary way. This has meant not only an effort to place reactionary Catholic leaders in places of influence around the world, but also to dismantle those institutions and programs that have been developed to promote a Christian liberative vision of justice. In Los Angeles the present archbishop is about to be replaced by an Opus Dei Mexican.

Many former Catholics that I know see any effort to stay committed to reform such a church as increasingly futile, perhaps even masochistic, certainly a waste of energy better spent doing other more productive things. I think we need to look the negative character of this reactionary drive of the hierarchical church government full in the face without minimalizing its seriousness, but also without confusing it with the ultimate ground of our faith, hope and love in and for the church. It is a firm rooting of ourselves in this ultimate ground that we most need, if we are to be able to stay the course as prophetic reformers in the Catholic Church at this time.


NEXT: Part 2 - Five Characteristics of the Church We Need Now.



Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Save the Date!

. . . for an "Evening in the Park" Fundraiser with

Rosemary Radford Ruether

Date: Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Time: 7:00 p.m.

Place: Park Pavilion at the Lake Elmo Park Reserve (South Shelter),
Washington County Parks, MN.

For map and directions, see below.

Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether is one of the most widely read feminist theologian in North America and is among the leading Catholics of her generation. Her most recent book is Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican: A Vision for Progressive Catholicism. (For a review, click here.) She lives in Claremont, California.

The Catholic Coalition for Church Reform (CCCR) is sponsoring this event as a major fundraiser for its Synod of the Baptized (“Claiming Our Place at the Table”), scheduled for September 18, 2010.

If you are unable to attend but would like to make a tax-deductible donation, make your check payable to CCCR and mail to:

CCCR, 2080 Edgcumbe Road, St. Paul, MN 55116

Please Note: Refreshments will be served. Seating is at picnic tables. Feel free to bring a lawn chair if that would be more comfortable. This site has been reserved for the day, so feel free to arrive early and enjoy the park. There is no car fee for entering the park.

You may reserve seats on a bus that will leave from South Minneapolis for the evening. Call Paula at 612-379-1043 for reservations and more information.

Map and Directions

1515 Keats Ave. N.
Lake Elmo, MN 55042
651-430-8370

Located 1 mile north of Interstate 94 and 2.5 miles east of Interstate 694 at the intersection of County Road 19(Keats Avenue North) and County Road 10 (10th Street North) in the City of Lake Elmo, Minnesota.


Directions

• From Interstate 94, take exit 151 or County Road 19. Follow County Road 19 to the north for one mile to County Road 10. Cross County Road 10 and proceed into the park.

• From Interstate 694, take exit 57 or County Road 10 (10th Street North). Follow County Road 10 east for 2.6 miles. Turn left (north) into the park.

• From State Highway 5 in downtown Lake Elmo, follow County Road 17 south for 2.5 miles to County Road 10 (10th Street North). Turn right (west) on County Road 10 for one mile. Turn right (north) into the park.