Viewpoint Church must embrace world
By EUGENE KENNEDY
An influential Roman Catholic bishop
recently told a symposium audience that we cannot allow the world to set
the agenda for the church.
This prelate spoke as if such tough-love theological shorthand
expresses the true sentiments of Vatican Council II. It is shorthand, but it is
not theology, for his intention was to call back to life an ungodly trinity of
notions entombed longer than Lazarus.
This invocation parlays the World, the Flesh and the Devil into a
triad intrinsically dangerous to Catholics. In this view, the world is an
occasion of sin from which we must turn away in order to save our souls.
The church, this bishop intimated, sets its own agenda against
that of the world whose secular cities stand arrayed like Sodom and Gomorrah
against us.
Before we start marching to the background martial music of this
Church Militant vision, we may ask a question going to the heart of Vatican II
and, indeed, to the very core of Catholic life and theology:
What could possibly set the agenda for the Catholic church except
the world, whose blight of imperfection rivals the light of its glory? The
church exists for sinners, for the lost sheep, for all that is human and
unfinished about us, to serve our world rather than itself. The Catholic church
is not true to itself unless it embraces the world and its people as Damien did
Molokai and its lepers. You cannot save the world if you are afraid of its
contagion; you cannot be holy if you are fearful of sin.
Nothing is more fundamental in the teachings of Jesus and in the
best impulse of Christianity than the world as the subject of its love rather
than the object of its wrath. The bishop fashions the world into an object, as
impersonal and abstract as a Calder mobile, that can be cataloged but never
warmed by the coldness of his curators touch.
This bishop speaks for some other bishops who feel that they are
saved and we are not.
They do not rise to praise Vatican Council II but to bury it. They
have willingly destroyed the effectiveness of their own National Conference of
Catholic Bishops by accepting Romes demand that they must agree
unanimously on any project before submitting it to the Vatican for approval.
Irony is too mild a word to describe their apparent conviction that the best
way to be leaders is to be followers.
Their imagery is military as they rally themselves against the
world they see as sinful by taking stands, fighting
battles, training for sacrifice, and drawing lines in
the sand, laying down their law that it would be mutinous for Catholics even to
think of stepping across.
Even to think -- has a sadder or less Catholic
qualification been imposed since medieval times on the possibilities of
legitimate theological investigation?
And widows, having known the sorrows of loss, stand in church
clutching more than mites for the collection basket. They have questions about
what they know in their hearts about life that differs from what they have been
told by such self-complacent bishops.
Are they allowed to give their mite but not to ask their
questions?
Bishops are not generals but pastors who are on easy terms with a
sinful world (the only way it comes), because the churchs call is not
that of a bugle sounding an attack but of the gentle whisper of understanding
that reveals the possibilities of grace to all men and women.
Of course, the world -- sick, lost and needy -- sets the agenda
for the church. The church makes no sense disdaining Gods creation while
congratulating itself on its own purity and goodness. The gospel settles
that.
The prayer Have mercy on me, for I am a creature of
sin excels by far that of the man proud of his closely managed
virtue.
Pope John XXIII was speaking to these contemporary bishops in his
opening talk at Vatican II in which he so simply put aside fear of engagement
with the world: To them, the modern world is nothing but betrayal and
ruination. They claim that this age is far worse than previous ages and they go
on as though they had learned nothing at all from history. ... We feel bound to
disagree with these prophets of misfortune who are forever forecasting calamity
as though the end of the world were imminent. And yet today providence is
guiding us toward a new order of human relationships that, thanks to human
effort ... will bring us to the realization of still higher and undreamed of
expectations; in this way even human opposition can lead to the good of the
church.
Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic
church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and
author of My Brother Joseph.
National Catholic Reporter, October 29,
1999
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