Quote of the Day

Roman Catholics in the United States say that their bishops are out of touch, and that the next pope should lead the church in a more modern direction on issues like birth control and ordaining women and married men as priests, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Seven out of 10 say Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican have done a poor job of handling sexual abuse, a significant rise from three years ago. A majority said that the issue had led them to question the Vatican’s authority. The sexual abuse of children by priests is the largest problem facing the church, Catholics in the poll said.

Three-fourths of those polled said they thought it was a good idea for Benedict to resign. Most wanted the next pope to be “someone younger, with new ideas.” A majority said they wanted the next pope to make the church’s teachings more liberal.

With cardinals now in Rome preparing to elect Benedict’s successor, the poll indicated that the church’s hierarchy had lost the confidence and allegiance of many American Catholics, an intensification of a long-term trend. They like their priests and nuns, but many feel that the bishops and cardinals do not understand their lives.

. . . Even Catholics who frequently attend Mass said they were not following the bishops’ lead on issues that the church had recently invested much energy, money and credibility in fighting — artificial birth control and same-sex marriage. . . .

– Laurie Goodstein and Megan Thee-Brenan
"Poll Shows Disconnect Between U.S Catholics & Church Hierarchy"
New York Times
March 5, 2013

Save the Date!

Call To Action Minnesota
invites you to . . .

Out of the Ashes:
Birth of a New Community

with

Michael Crosby, ofm

WHEN: Saturday, April 6, 2013
Registration: 9:00 – 9:45 a.m.
Program: 9:45 a.m – 2:30 p.m.

WHERE: Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church
511 Groveland Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55403.
(For map and directions, click here)

COST: $35.00 (lunch included). After March 25, $40.
For information about scholarships, contact Sharon at 651-457-3249.
Checks to CTA-MN, PO Box 19406, Minneapolis, MN 55419.

An Apocalyptic Moment: Grieving the Old will be Michael's morning topic, while his afternoon topic will be Belonging to the Beloved Community of the Cosmic Christ.

Michael understands the Apocalypse as meaning "the end of an era that contains within it the seeds of something new and better."

The Church, as we have known it, is crumbling. The patriarchal, clerical, institutional model of Church, while alive and well for some, is dead for many more. It is a time of Apocalypse – when, out of the ashes, something new is being revealed. That revelation will fuel the building of a Church renewed. In the wake of a “restorationist” Church, we are Catholics grieving – grieving over the lost promise of Vatican II, especially in regard to church governance. We are Catholics “in exile”. We long for a church where all are welcome and where there is equality and collaboration among all its members. Some of us have left our parish “homes” where we were once nourished. We search in other places for open and joyful and participatory liturgy. Some have come together and formed intentional communities. Others have simply walked away.

There is perhaps no contemporary Catholic speaker and author better equipped than Michael Crosby to help us, through the eyes of faith, to see and understand the present crisis in the Church. Over a period of more than 30 years he has spoken brilliantly and prophetically about this Church that he loves.

Michael is a Capuchin Franciscan with degrees in economics and New Testament spirituality. He is the author of 18 books, including Spirituality of the Beatitudes, The Dysfunctional Church, Finding Francis, Following Christ and his most recent publication, Repair My House: Becoming a ‘Kindom’ Catholic. He has lectured at conferences all over the world and many of his talks are on CD’s and DVD’s. Since 1982, under the auspices of his order, he has worked in the area of socially responsible investments by religious orders.

For more information, including about scholarships,
call Sharon at 651-457-3249.

A Vatican Spring?

By Hans Küng


Note: This commentary was first published February 27, 2013 by The New York Times.


The Arab Spring has shaken a whole series of autocratic regimes. With the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, might not something like that be possible in the Roman Catholic Church as well — a Vatican Spring?

Of course, the system of the Catholic Church doesn't resemble Tunisia or Egypt so much as an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia. In both places there are no genuine reforms, just minor concessions. In both, tradition is invoked to oppose reform. In Saudi Arabia tradition goes back only two centuries; in the case of the papacy, 20 centuries.

Yet is that tradition true? In fact, the church got along for a millennium without a monarchist-absolutist papacy of the kind we're familiar with today.

It was not until the 11th century that a revolution from above, the Gregorian Reform started by Pope Gregory VII, left us with the three enduring features of the Roman system: a centralist-absolutist papacy, compulsory clericalism and the obligation of celibacy for priests and other secular clergy.

The efforts of the reform councils in the 15th century, the reformers in the 16th century, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries and the liberalism of the 19th century met with only partial success. Even the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, while addressing many concerns of the reformers and modern critics, was thwarted by the power of the Curia, the church's governing body, and managed to implement only some of the demanded changes.

To this day the Curia, which in its current form is likewise a product of the 11th century, is the chief obstacle to any thorough reform of the Catholic Church, to any honest ecumenical understanding with the other Christian churches and world religions, and to any critical, constructive attitude toward the modern world.

Under the two most recent popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, there has been a fatal return to the church's old monarchical habits.

In 2005, in one of Benedict's few bold actions, he held an amicable four-hour conversation with me at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo in Rome. I had been his colleague at the University of Tübingen and also his harshest critic. For 22 years, thanks to the revocation of my ecclesiastical teaching license for having criticized papal infallibility, we hadn't had the slightest private contact.

Before the meeting, we decided to set aside our differences and discuss topics on which we might find agreement: the positive relationship between Christian faith and science, the dialogue among religions and civilizations, and the ethical consensus across faiths and ideologies.

For me, and indeed for the whole Catholic world, the meeting was a sign of hope. But sadly Benedict's pontificate was marked by breakdowns and bad decisions. He irritated the Protestant churches, Jews, Muslims, the Indians of Latin America, women, reform-minded theologians and all pro-reform Catholics.

The major scandals during his papacy are known: there was Benedict's recognition of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's arch-conservative Society of St. Pius X, which is bitterly opposed to the Second Vatican Council, as well as of a Holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson.

There was the widespread sexual abuse of children and youths by clergymen, which the pope was largely responsible for covering up when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. And there was the Vatileaks affair, which revealed a horrendous amount of intrigue, power struggles, corruption and sexual lapses in the Curia, and which seems to be a main reason Benedict has decided to resign.

This first papal resignation in nearly 600 years makes clear the fundamental crisis that has long been looming over a coldly ossified church. And now the whole world is asking: might the next pope, despite everything, inaugurate a new spring for the Catholic Church?

There's no way to ignore the church's desperate needs. There is a catastrophic shortage of priests, in Europe and in Latin America and Africa. Huge numbers of people have left the church or gone into internal emigration, especially in the industrialized countries. There has been an unmistakable loss of respect for bishops and priests, alienation, particularly on the part of younger women, and a failure to integrate young people into the church.

One shouldn't be misled by the media hype of grandly staged papal mass events or by the wild applause of conservative Catholic youth groups. Behind the facade, the whole house is crumbling.

In this dramatic situation the church needs a pope who's not living intellectually in the Middle Ages, who doesn't champion any kind of medieval theology, liturgy or church constitution. It needs a pope who is open to the concerns of the Reformation, to modernity. A pope who stands up for the freedom of the church in the world not just by giving sermons but by fighting with words and deeds for freedom and human rights within the church, for theologians, for women, for all Catholics who want to speak the truth openly. A pope who no longer forces the bishops to toe a reactionary party line, who puts into practice an appropriate democracy in the church, one shaped on the model of primitive Christianity. A pope who doesn't let himself be influenced by a Vatican-based shadow pope like Benedict and his loyal followers.

Where the new pope comes from should not play a crucial role. The College of Cardinals must simply elect the best man. Unfortunately, since the time of Pope John Paul II, a questionnaire has been used to make all bishops follow official Roman Catholic doctrine on controversial issues, a process sealed by a vow of unconditional obedience to the pope. That's why there have so far been no public dissenters among the bishops.

Yet the Catholic hierarchy has been warned of the gap between itself and lay people on important reform questions. A recent poll in Germany shows 85 percent of Catholics in favor of letting priests marry, 79 percent in favor of letting divorced persons remarry in church and 75 percent in favor of ordaining women. Similar figures would most likely turn up in many other countries.

Might we get a cardinal or bishop who doesn't simply want to continue in the same old rut? Someone who, first, knows how deep the church's crisis goes and, second, knows paths that lead out of it?

These questions must be openly discussed before and during the conclave, without the cardinals being muzzled, as they were at the last conclave, in 2005, to keep them in line.

As the last active theologian to have participated in the Second Vatican Council (along with Benedict), I wonder whether there might not be, at the beginning of the conclave, as there was at the beginning of the council, a group of brave cardinals who could tackle the Roman Catholic hard-liners head-on and demand a candidate who is ready to venture in new directions. Might this be brought about by a new reforming council or, better yet, a representative assembly of bishops, priests and lay people?

If the next conclave were to elect a pope who goes down the same old road, the church will never experience a new spring, but fall into a new ice age and run the danger of shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect.

Hans Küng is a professor emeritus of ecumenical theology at the University of Tübingen and the author of the forthcoming book Can the Church Still Be Saved? This essay was translated by Peter Heinegg from the German.


See also the previous PCV posts:
An Open Letter to Josef Ratzinger
The Best Choice for Pope? A Nun.
Quote of the Day – February 11, 2013
Church Reform Group Applauds Benedict for "Wise Decision to Resign"

Goodbye, Catholic Moment

By Rod Dreher


Note: This article was first published February 17, 2013, by The American Conservative.


In his column today, Ross Douthat — who, you should know, is an orthodox Catholic — observes the end of what the late Fr. Neuhaus once called “the Catholic Moment,” a time in which Catholics, once marginalized in American society, could make their mark on public life by bringing a distinctly Catholic vision to bear on our affairs. That’s definitely over now, says Douthat. More:

The fact that the Second Vatican Council had left the church internally divided limited Catholic influence in some ways but magnified it in others. Because the church’s divisions often mirrored the country’s, a politician who captured the typical Catholic voter was probably well on his way to victory, and so would-be leaders of both parties had every incentive to frame their positions in Catholic-friendly terms. The church might not always be speaking with one voice, but both left and right tried to borrow its language.

If this era is now passing, and Catholic ideas are becoming more marginal to our politics, it’s partially because institutional Christianity is weaker over all than a generation ago, and partially because Catholicism’s leaders have done their part, and then some, to hasten that de-Christianization. Any church that presides over a huge cover-up of sex abuse can hardly complain when its worldview is regarded with suspicion. The present pope has too often been scapegoated for the sex abuse crisis, but America’s bishops have if anything gotten off too easily, and even now seem insufficiently chastened for their sins.

The recent turn away from Catholic ideas has also been furthered by a political class that never particularly cared for them in the first place. Even in a more unchurched America, a synthesis of social conservatism and more egalitarian-minded economic policies could have a great deal of mass appeal. But our elites seem mostly relieved to stop paying lip service to the Catholic synthesis: professional Republicans are more libertarian than their constituents, professional Democrats are more secular than their party’s rank-and-file, and professional centrists get their encyclicals from Michael Bloomberg rather than the Vatican.

I think Ross is right, up to a point. It is too convenient to blame the execrable behavior of the bishops in the abuse scandal for the end of the Catholic moment (to be clear, Ross is not doing that here, only pointing to that behavior as a contributing factor; I know some readers will not be so discerning). The rotten behavior of the bishops, among others, hastened the decline of Catholic authority in American life, but if we’re honest, we will have to admit that even if the bishops had been luminous saints to the man, the second coming of the Apostles, things wouldn’t be all that different from where they stand today.

The fact of the matter is that Roman Catholic Christianity (also Orthodox Christianity, and some forms of Protestantism) cannot be reconciled with the expressive individualism that is the hallmark of late modern civilization. Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill, a former Catholic turned atheist, lamented Pope Benedict’s resignation as a kind of capitulation to our degraded culture:

What the resignation really points to – or rather what the congratulatory reaction reveals – is how uncomfortable our society is with the idea of vocation. In the back-slapping for Benedict we’re really witnessing the breathing of a mass, global sigh of relief that pretty much the last institution which elevates its own needs over the needs of its occupant, which demands unwavering, total, literally Christ-like commitment, has now allowed the reality of frailty to creep into its hallowed halls. Today’s fashionable allergy to the pope, and to the Catholic Church more broadly, is driven more by a petit-bourgeois disdain for firm commitment to a cause and belief in something bigger than ourselves than it is by a grown-up critique of Catholic theology. Ours is an era in which people are implored to cultivate their self-esteem, or to focus obsessively on preserving their bovine physical wellbeing, rather than to give themselves fully to a cause or a mission or even another individual. We’re so hostile to the idea of vocation, and to its underpinning: commitment, that we have pathologised self-sacrifice, now referring to it as the psychological ailment of ‘co-dependency’: ‘placing a lower priority on one’s own needs while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.’ In such a narcissistic era, where ‘one’s own needs’ are everything, the idea of a man remaining married to his mission forever is extraordinarily alien, and so we cheer like crazy when even the moral descendant of St Peter elevates his own physical wellbeing over his devotion to something bigger.

I don’t think that’s a fair judgment of Benedict’s act, or an accurate consideration of his motives, but I take O’Neill’s general point, and it’s akin to Ross’s more generous (to Benedict) conclusion in his blog reaction to the papal abdication:

Yet these benefits need to be balanced against the longer term difficulties that this precedent creates for the papacy’s role within the church. There is great symbolic significance in the fact that popes die rather than resign: It’s a reminder that the pontiff is supposed to be a spiritual father more than a chief executive (presidents leave office, but your parents are your parents till they die), a sign of absolute papal surrender to the divine will (after all, if God wants a new pope, He’ll get one), and a illustration of the theological point that the church is still supposed to be the church even when its human leadership isn’t at fighting trim, whether physically or intellectually or (for that matter) morally.

Leaving Benedict’s resignation aside, who will argue with O’Neill that our culture is hostile to the idea of vocation — and, more broadly, with the idea of sacrificing individual desire to higher truths, or causes? Our entire culture is built around the apotheosis of the Self, of the self’s will, the self’s desires, the self’s autonomy. This has required a progressive liberation of the Self from rules, mores, institutions, and customs that bind the Self. We are well within a cultural era in which truth is believed — whether or not people recognize it — to be determined by emotion far more than reason.

I don’t entirely condemn this, because in some cases, it has resulted in a more humane condition, and in any case I am as personally formed by and implicated in this condition as anybody else. The point here is neither to condemn nor to praise, but simply to recognize it for what it is. This is not something temporary or sudden, but rather the culmination of centuries of social development in the West. Philosopher Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, writes of the rise of “expressive individualism” as central to our collective understanding of the moral order now embedded in our culture. Taylor observes that the emergence of expressive individualism — that is, the emancipation of the Self — has been a gradual process in the West since the Enlightenment, but really took off after World War II, and, with the Sexual Revolution, became general in society. “This is obviously a profound shift,” he writes. He describes the religious manifestation of this shift thus:

The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this. This takes us farther. The choice of denomination was understood to take place within a fixed cadre, say that of the apostles’ creed, the faith of the broader “church”. Within this framework of belief, I choose the church in which I feel most comfortable. But if the focus is going now to be on my spiritual path, thus on what insights come to me in the subtler languages that I find meaningful, then maintaining this or any other framework becomes increasingly difficult.

The end result of this process has been the severing of what was widely considered to be the necessary connection between faith and civilizational order. Taylor says religious conservatives still assume this connection, and much of their (our) political anxiety is a reaction to this cultural revolution.

This is why, on same-sex marriage, both sides talk past each other. We religious conservatives believe that the secular order must be dictated by the sacred order, however attenuated. Many others — most others, I would say — believe that there is no such thing as a sacred order, at least not one knowable to and share-able by all. The desiring Self is the sacred thing — something I say not as a criticism, but as an observation. In this worldview — which I believe is thoroughly mainstream — to deny the legitimacy of the Self’s desires is felt as a denial of personhood, and of rights. The moral order, then, must be built around the ongoing expansion of individual rights, especially when it comes to sex and sexuality, because Truth emerges from the individual’s heart, not from an external source of authority, such as the Catholic Church. We can’t have a meaningful conversation because we cannot agree on the source of moral order.

I’ve gone a bit far afield here, so I’ll close with this conclusion: there never was a possibility for a Catholic moment in America. Not even American Catholics agree on what it means to be Catholic, and what is required of them as Catholics. From the outside, Catholicism looks unitary, but from the inside, Catholicism (in America, at least) is just about as fragmented as Protestantism. This is why you have the spectacle of Garry Wills denying the sacramental priesthood and the Real Presence, but still presenting himself as a Catholic, and being received by many Catholics as Catholic. Catholicism in this country has lost its distinctives, because many, probably most, actual Catholics have no sense that the faith they profess calls them to accept and to live by a set of theological and moral precepts that they may struggle to accept, but must accept because God revealed them authoritatively through His church.

One may say this is a good thing, this Protestantization of Catholicism, or one may decry it as a bad thing. But I don’t see how one can credibly say that it doesn’t exist. Catholicism, understood on its own terms, is radically opposed to American culture, and to the essence of modernity. Catholicism, as understood by most American Catholics, is not. There’s the problem with the Catholic moment, and why it was never going to happen. Of course, the behavior of the bishops in the abuse crisis didn’t help, but ultimately it was beside the point.

Though no longer a Catholic, I would have dearly loved to have seen a Catholic moment. The thing for non-Catholic Christians to understand is that we are past the point of there being a “Christian Moment,” in the Neuhausian sense. Many Christians don’t understand this yet, but they will.

A Call for Dialogue in the Catholic Church

.

A Position Statement
by the Council of the Baptized

February 16, 2013

The Council of the Baptized respectfully calls for Roman Catholic leadership to be open to the Spirit speaking in the people of God. Silencing people or in other ways punishing those who are calling for open discussion of the Church’s positions on the role of women in sacramental ministry, on optional celibacy for the ordained, and on sexual identity and morality is detrimental to the mission of the Church to proclaim the Gospel message. We call upon our local church leaders and the leadership of the universal church, the bishops, to encourage the faithful to speak, as Canon Law provides:

212 §3: According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

We make this appeal to our bishops now, as the College of Cardinals contemplates electing a new pope, because they have the power by their choice to move the church toward the openness promised at Vatican II, and because there are currently many Catholics suffering from the exercise of coercive power:

Locally, there are priests, deacons and parish staff who “stay under the radar,” reluctant to speak prophetically for fear of reprisals. There are Catholics in good standing, individuals and groups, who are prohibited from speaking in this Archdiocese and from meeting on church property.

Nationally, there are congregations of religious sisters who are “investigated” and micromanaged; Roy Bourgeois, Maryknoll priest, who lost his community and priestly ministry because he did not recant his statements of conscience; and theologians whose freedom of inquiry is threatened by public censuring of their work.

Internationally, there are bishops and priests who have lost their ministries for raising questions about matters of governance and ethics. Most recently, there is the case of Tony Flannery, Irish Redemptorist priest for thirty-nine years, who has been suspended from priestly ministry and instructed by the Vatican to be silent. The author of six books and a regular contributor to the Redemptorist magazine, he questioned official church teaching on clerical celibacy, contraception, homosexuality and the ordination of women. He also helped to establish the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP), representing more than 850 priests in Ireland. After a year of discernment, Flannery has decided he cannot in conscience accept the restrictions on his speaking and writing decreed by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Interviewed by Michael Enright of the Canadian Broadcasting System on Sunday, February 3, Flannery said he does not know who made accusations against him and has not been contacted personally by the Vatican or by Irish bishops. The CDF sent the threat of excommunication to him through his Redemptorist superiors in Canada, on documents with no letterhead and no signatures. Flannery expresses his fear for the future of the church in Ireland in a radio interview.

Flannery’s supporters include the Irish Association of Catholic Priests, National Council of Priests of Australia, the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, with four signers from Minnesota, and the Catholic Church renewal group We Are Church Ireland, initiator of this petition to be sent to the Vatican.

The Council of the Baptized supports an open and collegial reasoning together among laity and clergy on all questions that affect the life of the Church.

Our website is www.councilofthebaptized.org and we can be contacted at info@councilofthebaptized.org.

An Open Letter to Josef Ratzinger

.
Professor Josef Ratzinger
Pope Benedict XVI


Dear Josef,

Besides personal communications, I have written you two open letters since we were colleagues on the Catholic Theology Faculty of the University of Tubingen, Germany.

I am writing you once again openly, this time not to pose an objection to an action of yours. Rather, I am writing this time to congratulate you upon the bravest and wisest act of your life: Your decision to resign from the papacy because of failing health for the good of the Church!

As a fellow academic who almost matches you in age, I wish you many good years of quiet reflection, scholarship, and writing after February 28, 2013.

But, before you go into that grey world of quietude, I urge you to take one more brave stand for the good of the Church, and the world at large. As the cardinals, and, indeed, the whole world, gather at your feet at the end of this month, I hope that you will send them into the Consistory to elect your successor with a visionary commission – this time not as Dean of the College of Cardinals as you did eight years ago, but this time as reigning/resigning pope.

In your vision I hope you will portray a Catholic Church which is also catholic with a small as well as a capital “C,” that is, a Catholic Church that not only holds to the best of its Catholic tradition, but also opens itself out to the entire kat’holos, the “whole” world. I and many, many other Catholics believe that vision must be of a Church that welcomes and strives to help the “outsiders” of society, as modeled by our “Outsider” Founder Rabbi Yeshua ha Notzri, Jesus of Nazareth.

Who are these outsiders? First of all, that majority: Women! You have written books about Jesus, and so you doubtless know that Jesus Was a Feminist! I am sure that you have not had time to read my 2007 book of that title, but you know the facts that, if we never had the testimony about Jesus’ life passed on to us by his women followers and promoted by the rest of the women named in the New Testament, we would have no Christianity today! The Catholic Church needs to follow the example of our Founder and bring women fully into the life of our Church.

Jesus also gave us a model of how to care for and protect another great outsider group – children. The Church’s shameful sacrificing of these “little ones” must not only cease, but its new, cleansed reality must lead the way in a world which is full of the oppression of children, which doubtless has been happening since Cain and Able.

Then there are the poor of all sorts in all societies. Here, fortunately, the Catholic Church has a more than century old tradition of preaching and acting in favor of the poor, marginalized. But it must make this tradition much more effective among its members, especially those who have leadership roles in government and business. For example, not all American Catholics put the principles of Catholic social justice into political and business practice!

That means that the Church leadership must cease it obsession with sex! It must stop oppressing homosexuals, recognize that Jesus did allow for divorce and remarriage, cease forcing the priesthood into the straightjacket of celibacy and maleness. Stop denigrating the body, but stress the beauty of all matter as created by God, which at the end of each day of creation was said in Genesis to be tov, good, and even mod tov, very good!

So Josef, this should be the greatest sermon of your life. Give it your best shot!

Vergelts Gott!

Len

Leonard Swidler, Ph.D., S.T.L., LL.D., LL.D.


Leonard Swidler is founder of the Association for Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC), one of the coalition members of the Twin Cities-based Catholic Coalition for Church Reform (CCCR).

The Best Choice for Pope? A Nun.

By E.J. Dionne Jr.


Note: This op-ed was first published February 15, 2013 by The Washington Post.


In giving up the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI was brave and bold. He did the unexpected for the good of the Catholic Church. And when it selects a new pope next month, the College of Cardinals should be equally brave and bold. It is time to elect a nun as the next pontiff.

Now, I know this hope of mine is the longest of long shots. I have great faith in the Holy Spirit to move papal conclaves, but I would concede that I may be running ahead of the Spirit on this one. Women, after all, are not yet able to become priests, and it is unlikely that traditionalists in the church will suddenly upend the all-male, celibate priesthood, let alone name a woman as the bishop of Rome.

Nonetheless, handing leadership to a woman — and in particular, to a nun — would vastly strengthen Catholicism, help the church solve some of its immediate problems and inspire many who have left the church to look at it with new eyes.

Consider, first, what constitutes the church’s strongest claim on public respect and affection. It is not its earthly power, the imposing beauty of St. Peter’s Basilica or even its determination to preserve its doctrine whole. Rather, the church impresses even its critics, and inspires its most loyal and most dissident members, because so many in its ranks walk the talk of the Gospel. Hundreds of thousands of nuns, priests, brothers and laypeople devote their lives to the poor, the marginalized, refugees, the disabled and the homeless, simply because Christ instructed them — us — to do so. Matthew 25:40 contains what may be the most constructive words ever written: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these my brethren, you did for me.”

More than any other group in the church, the sisters have been at the heart of its work on behalf of compassion and justice. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times made this point as powerfully as anyone in a 2010 column. “In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches,” he wrote. “One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch. . . . Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.”

Kristof went on to say that “there’s a stereotype of nuns as stodgy Victorian traditionalists. I learned otherwise while hanging on for my life in a passenger seat as an American nun with a lead foot drove her jeep over ruts and through a creek in Swaziland to visit AIDS orphans.”

There are certainly bishops and cardinals who have done this sort of godly work and many more who have supported it. But those who have devoted their lives to climbing the church’s career ladder tend not to be like that nun in the jeep in Swaziland. What a message the cardinals would send about the church’s priorities if they made such a woman pope.

A sister as pope could also resolve what might seem a contradiction in Catholic theology. More than Protestants, Catholics are profoundly devoted to the Virgin Mary — and few were as devoted as the late Pope John Paul II, who declared that Mary “sustains the spiritual life of us all, and encourages us, even in suffering, to have faith and hope.” A church for which the Blessed Mother plays such an important role should certainly be comfortable with female leadership.

While support for a stronger role for women in the church tends to be a “liberal” cause, many faithful conservatives also cite the work of nuns as reinforcing their devotion to the church — from the sisters who educated them in parish schools to the work of Mother Teresa’s religious order.

The cardinals who will gather to elect a new pope know that one of the church’s central and most wrenching problems is the sex abuse scandal. An all-male hierarchy adopted policies to cover up the abuse and seemed far too inclined to put protecting the church’s image ahead of protecting children.

Throughout history, it’s not uncommon for women to be brought in to put right what men have put wrong. A female pope would automatically be distanced from this past and could have a degree of credibility that a male member of the hierarchy simply could not.

In the United States and other Western countries, the church is suffering a huge loss of younger female members who cannot understand why it continues to resist the progress women have made in so many other spheres of life.

The church should not find itself in this position. It was, after all, Pope John XXIII who wrote in 1963 (the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique”): “Women are gaining an increasing awareness of their natural dignity. Far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument, they are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons.”

Electing a nun as pope would electrify women all over the world. And those who think that Catholics in the developing world would object to a female pope should note that women have been elected to lead governments in, among other places, India, Chile, Brazil, Liberia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Argentina and Dominica.

And a church that has made opposition to abortion a central part of its public mission should consider that older men are hardly the best messengers for this cause. Perhaps a female pope could transform the discussion about abortion from one that is too often rooted in harsh judgments (and at times, anger with modernity) into a compassionate dialogue aimed at changing hearts and minds rather than changing laws.

Unborn children are vulnerable. So are pregnant women. In my experience, nuns are especially alive to these twin vulnerabilities. Nuns are also the people in the church who work the most with pregnant women, the mothers of newborns, and battered women and children. They know better than anyone that a concern for life cannot stop at the moment a child is born.

Some will object to the idea of a female pope on the grounds that it is legally impossible. Yes, it would require a real openness to change. But the rules for electing a pope are much more flexible than many realize. As the Catholic News Service has noted: “In theory, any baptized male Catholic can be elected pope, but current church law says he must become a bishop before taking office; since the 15th century, the electors always have chosen a fellow cardinal.” Under canon law, CNS reports, if a non-bishop or a layman is selected, he must receive episcopal consecration from the dean of the College of Cardinals before ascending to the papacy.

If the college were inspired to elect a woman, it could arrange for her consecration and leave the broader question of whether women should become priests — a change that I both hope and expect will happen someday — open for debate during her pontificate.

I hardly expect the cardinals to follow my advice on this. But I hope that they at least consider electing the kind of man who has the characteristics of my ideal female pontiff. The church needs a leader who has worked closely with the poor and the outcast, who understands that battling over doctrine is less important for the church’s future than modeling Christian behavior — and who sees that the proper Christian attitude toward the modern world is not fear but hope.

Last summer my 18-year-old daughter, Julia, worked at a Catholic-supported program for the homeless in Silver Spring. Like many women her age, Julia has a long list of problems with the church, but she loved the program and deeply admired everyone who worked there.

She came home one night and said: “Why doesn’t the church talk more about this work and less about the stuff it usually talks about?”

I have a hunch that a nun just might understand what Julia was saying better than most cardinals.

E.J. Dionne Jr. is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. He is the author of Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent.


See also the previous PCV posts:
Church Reform Group Applauds Benedict for "Wise Decision to Resign"
Quote of the Day — February 11, 2013

Recommended Off-site Link:
Papal Retirement: A Matter of Conscience — Mary E. Hunt (Religion Dispatches, February 11, 2013).

Quote of the Day

“What’s the difference between a flute and a stick in the mud?” our priest asked on Sunday. He then went on, “The stick in the mud is full of itself. The flute has been emptied of itself so it can make music.” That’s a good image for Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday.

. . . Our priest did an incredible job reminding us that in a world where many of us are “full of ourselves” we need to be emptied of ourselves – so that our lives can make better music. All the major world religions have an element of self-denial at their core. Jews have Yom Kippur. Muslims have Ramadan. Christians have Lent.

In a world filled with clutter, noise, and hustle, Lent is a good excuse to step back and rethink how we think and live. In a world of instant gratification, it’s a chance to practice delayed gratification – to fast — so that we can truly appreciate the blessings we have. In a world where virtual friends are replacing real ones, it is an invitation to turn off TV and computer screens so we can spend time with real people again. It’s an opportunity to give up something that is sucking the life out of us so that we can be filled with God, with life, with love again.

– Shane Claiborne
"Becoming Like a Flute:
Meditations on Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday"
Patheos.com

Why Priests?

A review of Garry Wills' latest book,
Priests? The Real Meaning of the Eucharist

By Kevin Madigan


Note: The following review was first published as "Why Priests Have Power" on February 11, 2012, by the New Republic


The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI has given new life to some very old myths about the papacy: that Saint Peter was the first pope and that Benedict, like all popes, was thus his successor. In fact, various popes forged this particular myth to harness the apostolic power, prestige, and affection associated with Peter. (This claim is easily falsified by examination of the non-biblical texts of the first century.) Later, popes claimed to be successors to Christ to augment their power even more.

In his recent book, Why Priests? The Real Meaning of the Eucharist, Garry Wills turns his critical gaze to the nexus of priests, power and Eucharistic piety. The driving question of Why Priests? is how early Christianity, which operated without priests, evolved into a tradition that made their role central and even indispensable. As the ex-seminarian Garry Wills correctly observes, almost no book of the New Testament even mentions priests; the one that does, Letter to the Hebrews, imagines only Jesus as a priest. Although the Catholic Church has for centuries maintained the opposite position, it is simply false from an historical perspective to assert that Jesus instituted the priesthood. Not only was Jesus not a member of the priestly class; it is simply anachronistic to say that any of Jesus apostles were imagined in priestly terms, either by Jesus or the apostles themselves.

How, then, did priests become dominant and then essential in Catholic Christianity? And why, Wills asks, in this provocative, historically rich, and slightly quixotic book, does the Vatican continue to sustain such falsehoods? Even more provocatively, Wills asks why the Church, at this moment of priestly scandal and diminishing numbers of parish priests, does not return to its ancient origins and simply dispense with priests altogether?

Wills' convincing thesis for the ascendancy of the priest is that it originated in the Eucharistic celebration: the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus of Nazareth. The Eucharist as a miracle of transformation, Wills shows, is officially a sixteenth-century invention. In the early Christian movement, from about 35 to 200, there were no consecrations of bread and wine, nor did anyone imagine the meal as a sacrifice, the sacrifice of the Mass, as Catholics still call it. Nor did Jesus intend, as the entire Catholic historical tradition since the Middle Ages has ludicrously tried to argue, that Jesus instituted the Catholic Eucharist at the Last Supper.

The power and originality of this book stems from the link that Wills establishes between priestly power and the priests believed ability to transform the bread and wine of the liturgical celebration into the physical body and blood of Jesus Christ. Priests, who have a monopoly on this ability, become, in effect, God-makers. Equally important, Wills dispels the many historical myths about the origin and powers of the priesthood, most of them conceived and sustained, for over a millennium, by the Roman church.

Wills' scrutiny of early Christian sources proves particularly compelling in service of his argument. One of the documents that he examines is an ancient writing called the Didachç. The document, discovered in the nineteenth century, purports to be The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, didachç means teaching in Greek. Scholars speculate that this document was written in Syria in the second half of the second century (though this remains only a strong hypothesis), and it gives a clear window into second-century Christian ritual practices, especially the communal Eucharistic meal. The most striking thing about the document is that it lacks the so-called words of institution found in each of the first three gospels that frame Jesus last supper as a memorial and sacrificial meal and are thus often interpreted as providing one of the foundations for the Eucharist as sacrifice. But Wills' analysis of the Greek Didachç proves that Christians in the second-century eastern Mediterranean did not imagine their thanksgiving meal in the evangelists' terms, even roughly a century after the gospel writers composed their account of Jesus last supper. So the Eucharist has not always been imagined in sacrificial terms.

The status and authority of the priesthood has stood or fallen with the claim that Jesus instituted the Eucharist as a sacrificial meal and that priests, following Jesus ancient command and example, offer Jesus' body and blood as a sacrifice to God on behalf of their parishioners. Given Wills' conclusion that the Christian Eucharistic celebration was not conceived as a sacrifice offered by the priest, the question then becomes, why does Catholic Christianity need priests at all? Neither questions like these, nor the title of the volume, should lead us to believe that Wills is hostile to priests. In addition to spending five years in the seminary himself, he has dedicated three of his books (including this one) to the great priest-scholars and priests-prophets, like Dan Berrigan, of his generation.

Wills intriguingly suggests that, rather than argue for the ordination of women priests, or married priests, or openly gay priests, the most logical and historically honest response would be to imagine Catholicism without priests. A priestless Catholicism, Wills argues, would more truly mirror early Christian practice than modern Catholicism. (As a Catholic, Wills has sympathy for the evolution of religious traditions, but for all branches of Christianity, origins remain normative.) As Wills concludes, much of [the] condemnatory, accusatory, persecuting impulse of popes through the ages came from the jealousy of prerogative [and] the pride in exclusivity of the priesthood. Set apart from all other human beings by their unique power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the priesthood has thus kept Catholics at a remove from other Christians and from the Jesus of the gospels. Why priests, then?

While quite intriguing to contemplate, Wills' suggestion will never be seriously considered, either by Catholic priests or many parishioners. It is likely to be dismissed, therefore, as unrealistic, impractical and possibly unkind. This is a shame. Whatever one thinks of his proposal, Wills' demolition of the many myths surrounding the origins of priestly status and function is in itself crucially informative and enlightening, especially for practitioners of Catholicism.

Kevin Madigan is Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard and author of the forthcoming Medieval Christianity: A New History (Yale University Press).

Quote of the Day

. . . [T]here’s something in Benedict’s resignation statement that bears noting: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.”

Conscience, Benedict reminds us today, is still primary for Catholics. Examination of conscience: that is just the formula millions of us use to explain why we use birth control, enjoy our sexuality in a variety of ways, and see enormous good in other religious traditions. Conscience is the ultimate arbiter, and the Pope relied on his. Good on him, and good on the rest of us.

There has been a lot of fudging on the matter of conscience in recent decades. The post-Vatican II hierarchy has claimed that conscience is primary if, and only if, it is informed as they see fit. But Pope Benedict XVI is giving conscience a new lease on life. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander — the appeal to conscience cannot be denied now that the Pope himself has had recourse to it.

. . . Rank and file Catholics want a new Church, not just a new pope.

We know that change is in the air because we put it there. Progressive Catholics all over the world are creating new forms of church since the old is so thoroughly discredited. No institution can withstand the onslaught of negative publicity that the Vatican earned over clergy sexual abuse and episcopal cover-ups without major changes. No hierarchy however fortified can hold out forever against spirit-filled steps toward equality and justice. This time, just electing a new pope will not do. Nor will closeting away a group of elite electors responsible to no one but themselves cut it for an election process.

Catholic people have consciences too. We expect to have a say in how we organize and govern ourselves. We cannot in conscience abdicate our authority to 118 mostly elderly men. Those days are over. If a pope can abdicate before he goes out feet first without the sky falling in then new egalitarian models of church can and will emerge too. . . .

– Mary E. Hunt
"Papal Retirement: A Matter of Conscience"
Religion Dispatches
February 11, 2013