Column
Westley is one Catholic scholar who
isnt gagging on prudence
By TIM UNSWORTH
In the present climate, it is
doubtful that theology departments at most Catholic universities would invite
John Courtney Murray, Bernard Häring, Yves Congar or Edward Schillebeeckx
-- all influential theologians during and after Vatican II -- to speak to
faculty and students.
Invite American theologians such as Charles Curran and Richard
McBrien, and the local chancery would likely sprout more white hairs.
Lets face it; John XXIII would have trouble getting on campus these days
to bless basketballs.
This may explain why Dick Westley, professor of philosophy at
Chicagos Loyola University, had to travel to the Lutheran Bible Institute
outside Seattle a few months ago to talk to a group of resigned priests.
CORPUS, the national association for a married priesthood, was celebrating its
25th anniversary with a group of speakers who were challenging the future.
CORPUS, a 1,000-plus-member organization, is an association of
married priests, celibate priests, laity, religious sisters and brothers. They
respect theological investigation. They are not threatened by a 70-year-old man
who offered the ultimate challenge: Giving Up the Faith -- In
Order to Be Faithful.
Like Bernard Häring, who died just a week after Dick gave his
talk, Westley offered fresh and supple religious ideas that replaced rigid and
traditional approaches. Häring staunchly opposed any legalism that made
God into a controller rather than a gracious savior. Westley, too, is a
powerful unmasker of all false images of God.
Westley is a philosopher and thus out of reach for the theology
police. However, because his thoughts do not involve tiptoeing around a web of
sins, they are generally shared only with audiences on the edge. After all, one
cant be too careful. Prudent pastors and prudent university presidents
are intimidated by prudent bishops.
We are gagging with prudence while academic freedom
suffocates.
Dick Westley is unafraid to pay heed to his life experiences in
order to grasp their deeper significance. He remains a devout Catholic on his
knees at St. Gertrudes Church each Sunday. But he told his CORPUS
audience that for the past five years he has been asking himself a question:
Westley, are you losing your faith?
Westley traced the tension that has grown between the faith
of our youth and the new Exodus that has caused many
Catholics to lose or freely give up the faith in order to be
faithful. He cites a favorite contemporary theologian and friend, John
Shea, who believes that each age is called upon to assess the state of
institutions it has inherited from its ancestors and is charged and responsible
for reconnecting them to their vital source -- Spirit.
Westley told his listeners that Gods ways are revealed to us
primarily through normal, everyday experiences rather than through the esoteric
and specialized experiences of the mystics, the jargon-laden discourse of the
theologians or the authoritative proclamations of our religious leaders.
Life itself is our best teacher, Westley said.
We know from the Judea-Christian tradition and our own lived experience
that our God is the God of life not death ... and that the divine presence at
our center makes our lives authentic fonts of revelation. ... Indeed, as we
mature, become adult and grow older, this lived, experience-based truth becomes
paramount in our lives. ... Thanks to the presence of God in our lives we have
access to a source of sacred truth independently of what our religious leaders
may say.
Westley cited the magisterial proclamations about the immorality
of contraceptive love-making between spouses and the impossibility of ordaining
women as just two examples of what simply doesnt jibe with
communally founded adult experience.
It is experience which should shape our theology, not
theology our experience, he told the group. It was reminiscent of
Häring who wrote: If the church does not listen to the world, then
the world will never listen to the church.
Westley, a Milwaukee native and 1950 graduate of Marquette
University, spent four intense years at the University of Toronto, where he
earned his MA and PhD under the tutelage of philosophical giants such as
Jacques Maritain, Anton Pegis and Etienne Gilson. He has spent a lifetime in
the classroom.
He remains an unredeemed old-style professor who eats lunch in the
cafeteria with his students. In 1980, he was named Outstanding Faculty Member
of the Year, not a bad distinction in a faculty of over 1,600.
Dick Westley has been thinking about the theology of the
incarnation for a long time. I interviewed him in 1993, just after the
appearance of John Paul IIs Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor
of Truth). That thing could have been written by a Southern
Baptist, a Bible-belt American! he fumed. Why, he has cut the
bishops and the theologians off at the knees. Now, weve got a Protestant
pope and a Protestant encyclical!
He is saddened by what he perceives to be a closing of the windows
that John XXIII tried to open in order to bring in some fresh air. He grows
apoplectic at the notion that all revelation ended with the last words of the
gospel.
His words got him into hot holy water. His CORPUS talk, which was
to be part of a new book, has been rejected by his publisher, another victim of
the forest-fire effect of paranoia. He used to get letters from the chancery
that did not respond to his proffered ideas but instead reminded him of his
obligations as a Catholic and his failure to submit to the magisterium.
Cardinal John Patrick Cody, Chicagos bizarre archbishop from
1965 to 1982, used to call him Wycliffe, a reference to the English
reformer, John Wycliffe, who preached that the good offices of the church were
not necessary for salvation.
He was called downtown again in 1984, during the early
years of Cardinal Joseph Bernardins tenure. Cardinal Joseph
Ratzingers office had questioned his book, Morality and Its
Beyond. Westley liked Bernardin. Their meeting was cordial, but Westley
found himself reminding the cardinal that authority is not a one-way
street.
The session ended with Westleys promise not to speak in
parishes for at least a year. He kept the promise but never heard from
Bernardin again and is now undoubtedly on some invisible Index of Forbidden
Speakers.
According to the Encyclopedia of Catholicism, the sense of
the faithful is the intuitive grasp on the truth of God that is possessed
by the church as a whole, as a consensus. It is both an adherence to the public
teaching of the church and an active charism of discernment, a power of
practical and possessive knowledge belonging to the body of the faithful by
virtue of their concrete living of the faith in response to God as Spirit.
It is found implicitly in the writings of the fathers of the
church when they insist that church teaching can never contradict the universal
and corporate faith of the church. John Henry Newman confirmed the concept in
his 1859 essay, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,
and Yves Congar developed it further in his pre-Vatican II book, Lay People
in the Church.
Vatican IIs Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
teaches that the sense of the faithful is infallible. The body of the
faithful as a whole, it says, anointed as they are by the Holy One,
cannot err in matters of belief. The teaching clearly illustrates that
the experience of the faithful is a source for theology.
Of late, however, the church has paid less attention to the
sensus fidelium than the NBA has paid to its fans. Of late, it has made
itself the sole judge of Catholic practice. It has all but forgotten the
traditional theological dictum that the teaching church can only teach what the
believing church believes.
Dick Westleys hourlong talk was basically aimed at trying to
rehabilitate the sensus fidelium, to change the structure of distrust,
now part of the operations manual. Be of good cheer, he told his
listeners, A new, resurrected alternative community called church will
emerge.
For when there is no prospect for change, no openness to
radical newness, he concluded, there is no hope. And without hope,
people die inside.
CORPUS: www.corpus.org
Tim Unsworth writes from Chicago where he has concluded that
Eve was created first, because it just makes more sense that way. You can check
his sensus fidelium at unsworth@mesignet.net
National Catholic Reporter, December 25,
1998
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