Cover
story No
turning back
By ANTHONY T. PADOVANO
Hope is the oxygen of the soul.
Many today are afflicted with fear and hopelessness and find it
difficult to breathe in the church. Air is such a striking image of grace. How
do we find air to breathe in the church again?
This is a tale of two churches. Many of us have lived in both of
them. All of us need to know what that was like. The fortified church of the
Counter Reformation was very different from the pilgrim church of the Catholic
renewal. In discerning the difference one learns how to survive and to serve
and to breathe the air of freedom and peace.
Church of Counter Reformation
We might date the Counter Reformation from 1517, when Luther
posted his 95 theses, to 1962 when John XXIII opened the Second Vatican
Council.
One of the most telling features of this church was massive
building. We built with pride and prejudice: proud of the structures,
prejudiced against all who were not Catholic. We thought we were building out
of strength rather than fear, but, indeed, fear was everywhere. One false step
and we might not recover. What if we died before we got to confession? What if
we fell in love with someone who was not Catholic? What if we left ministry?
What if our marriages did not last?
I remember an incident from this period. A priest friend had died
young, tragically. He was waked in Mass vestments. The mother of a priest who
had left ministry entered the funeral parlor, and there was an audible gasp in
the room. The shame on all sides was painful. She was like a sinful woman
entering the place where Jesus was, but no one knew how to receive her as
easily as Jesus would have. We simply did not know what to do. She sobbed at
the casket in anguish, confusion, embarrassment and loss. She walked to the
mother of the dead priest and could be heard in the silence: My heart
aches for you. But at least your son died a priest. If only my son could be in
Mass vestments! I would rather he were dead and a priest than as he is
now.
This woman and her son were outside the walls of the fortress we
had built. There was no room for them inside. We blamed the priest for having
done this to his mother. We found nothing in the gospel or in the life of Jesus
that could explain or justify such a decision. We went home and thanked God
that we were not like that priest. We felt security and peace within the walls
the church had built around us.
In the movie, Shawshank Redemption, the prisoners
identify with the massive walls that surround them. Eventually they prefer the
walls and cannot do without them. After release from prison, many become
confused, depressed, suicidal.
We would not have been surprised if the priest who left the
ministry had taken his own life. One understood such things then.
There were happy moments in the church of the Counter Reformation
as long as one stayed within the walls. And there were holy moments. God pays
no heed to walls and brings us grace wherever we are.
One might add that the walls served a purpose. If there were
excesses in the Catholic system justifying a Reformation, there were excesses
in the Reformation explaining a Counter Reformation. If the assault by the
church on scientific inquiry was sometimes unrelenting, the scientific attack
on religion was unwarranted. And so walls were built.
The first tentative steps when the walls come down are unsettling
and exhilarating all at once. It must have felt that way in the Exodus as the
captives faced a limitless horizon and breathed hungrily the air of freedom.
Not long after, however, the beleaguered community asked for the walls again
and the chains and the slavery. Certitudes and walls can be comforting and,
after a time, necessary. It is not that either is bad; it is the assumption
that they are enough that is toxic.
Allow me another story. It was late January 1959. We were in Rome.
It was early morning at the North American College. Later in the year I would
be ordained a priest. The chartered Vatican City busses were ready, as they
were on all school days, to drive us across the city to the Gregorian
University. I was in third theology. A classmate shared a copy of the Rome
newspaper, Il Messagero. I read the headline: Pope Calls for An
Ecumenical Council. I was stunned and confused.
We had been taught that there would never be another ecumenical
council. Since the Vatican Council of 1870 had defined papal infallibility,
there was no need to continue the cumbersome procedure of convening councils of
all the worlds bishops. Indeed, Pius XII had recently shown how this
could be done, in 1950, when he defined the Assumption of Mary as Catholic
dogma. Pius had surveyed the worlds bishops in a process called an
ecumenical council in writing and then created the definition in his own
name. The era of the ecumenical council was, therefore, finished. It had
stretched from the first Council at Nicaea, Turkey, in 325, to the Council at
the Vatican in 1870.
There was another, more telling reason for my confusion, and this
is the point of the story. I could not imagine why the pope would call a
council. There were no overt critical problems to solve, as had been the case
in convening prior councils. The church seemed powerful and successful by every
institutional standard. In the United States, the Catholic church had built an
empire, almost a parallel nation, with schools and colleges and hospitals, with
publishing houses and seminaries and cathedrals, with parishes and convents and
orphanages. One could have all ones needs met in a Catholic ghetto of
agencies and institutions. Vocations to religious life were massive. Men and
women, lay and clerical, were obedient, loyal and disciplined. So what would a
council do? How could things improve?
Theologians speculated on what a council might address but they
did this to give the meeting an agenda so it would not be idle. Three issues
surfaced. Mary would be given another title, Mediatrix of All Graces, perhaps
even Co-Redemptrix. Whether a bishop became successor of the apostles at his
nomination or consecration could be clarified. A fuller and harsher
condemnation of communism might be in order. None of the issues had anything to
do with scripture unless one attempted a tortured exegesis. There was not a
thought about lay concerns, liturgical reform, ecumenical unity, marriage,
ministry, social justice, collegiality. Later, creative theologians and
pastoral bishops would move the council in this direction. They would be able
to do this because the pope, John XXIII, did not believe he knew more than the
church universal.
The vast majority of the church expected the council to be a large
ceremonial assembly, colorful, innocuous, sentimental, pious, a retreat for the
worldwide episcopate. The system seemed to be working, and an alternative to it
was unthinkable. The system supported us, nourished us, made us part of
something grand, divine, infallible, invincible.
The system worked, once we granted its assumptions and intent. To
work it generated an illusion of perfection, sanitized history, idealized the
papacy, demonized other Christians, subordinated women, exalted, in practice,
law over gospel and created an aristocracy built on celibacy and
clericalism.
We felt no need for change because the end result of the system
was the church as a splendid temple, intoxicatingly beautiful, and we were
Gods favored people. To say that someone would destroy this temple and
build another in the Spirit was blasphemy. We would have died for this temple,
for its purity, its grace, its elegance, its truth. And we would have believed
we were dying for God. For the church had become almost a second Incarnation of
God. God did nothing without the endorsement of the Catholic church.
The council, we reasoned, might be a ceremony staged within the
temple walls if the pope felt a need for pageantry and display. Let the world
see how great we are.
Allow me one more story, one everyone knows.
Jesus once took Peter, James and John to a high mountain, apart by
themselves. There they saw God in Jesus, transfigured, transformed. God was
there, more beautiful than the temple and with no need for it. Peter saw Elijah
the prophet and Moses the lawgiver and a Jesus who was different from the one
he knew. His first instinct was to build something permanent, to preserve the
moment and control it, a structure, a tabernacle, a temple for each of the
three. In our terms, there would have been a theological center for Elijah the
prophet, a canon law institute for Moses the lawgiver and a cathedral for
Jesus, founder of a church.
Peter was all of us in the church of the Counter Reformation. We
were as strong as our structures then and we could not imagine God or Christ or
the Spirit or ourselves without them.
The New Testament tells us Peter was talking nonsense, and he was
talking that way because he was afraid. He had yet to learn that this Jesus of
the transfiguration would do away with temples and reign from a cross; this
Jesus of translucent glory would abolish structures and systems and find his
place in the sanctuary of the human heart.
I left our Vatican City bus and entered the great lecture hall of
the Gregorian University. The professor, a young German Jesuit priest, lectured
in Latin about the council the pope had called a day ago. He informed us that
John XXIII wanted to open a window and let fresh air into the church. Hope is
the oxygen of the soul. The pope was ready to take down the walls and embrace
all Christians and even communists of good will. The pope believed the church
did not have to be a temple. It was enough if it were Gods people.
Johns council destroyed the temple in three years. God and
truth and glory and grace had to be found not within the temple precincts
necessarily but wherever the Spirit led us. It would be difficult to leave the
temple and become a pilgrim. But for all those who began the journey, there
would be no turning back. To turn back was not only impossible; it was not even
desirable.
Without a sense of history, hope easily becomes fantasy.
In the light of recent history as outlined above, it is time to
speak of hope and the troublesome issues that unsettle our souls. I would like
to explore four questions: (1) Why has the resistance to reform been so strong
and, one might say, so cruel? (2) Will the opponents of reform prevail? (3) How
do we cope as we await the dawn of the new era we were promised? (4) Is hope
believable anymore, or does realism require that we admit the dream has
vanished, the vision has passed?
Why the resistance?
The resistance has been so virulent because the stakes are so
high. We are not dealing with titles of Mary and condemnations of communism. We
did not realize fully at Vatican II that what started out as a ceremonial,
polite council escalated quickly to a reformation and a revolution. It
challenged the system, its authority and power, at radical levels. When this
was last done, four-and-a-half centuries earlier during the Reformation,
violence and bloodshed followed as people tried to recover what they lost or
seize what they wanted.
It is ironic that Catholic reformers today feel hopeless. The
strength of the resistance to reform is a sign of how deep the challenge is and
of how successful it has been. It should not surprise us to discover that a
powerful institution will resist as we question the way it has defined itself
and exercised power for centuries. It will resist strongly if the critique is
credible and if it feels threatened by the strength of the opposition.
The present reform movement seeks a change in the entire system,
its structures, its sacramental norms, the papacy, sexual teaching, ministry,
marriage, official policy, the way history has been written and the way the
Bible has been interpreted. The resistance is staunch because what is being
dismantled is the temple on which many depended for their life, their meaning,
their encounter with God, their salvation.
There is fear, at times paranoid and hysterical but also pathetic,
painful and understandable. Fear leads people to destroy what seems to be
assaulting them. Was this not why Jesus was crucified? He took away the temple
and he also redefined power and sex and ministry and history and scripture.
The first disciples felt some of the same fears the
restorationists now experience. They rejected Easter in the beginning and
believed in the cross and the tomb. The church began with apostolic apostasy
struggling to become apostolic faith. One can understand this. The new
boundaries drawn by Easter abolished former certitudes and made impossible the
church of power and privilege the apostles preferred. There were tears for the
lost securities, frustration at the loss of the system of Judaism that was
comfortable and secure. A generation after Easter, ongoing debate about
abandoning Jewish practices is documented in the Acts of the Apostles.
It was agonizing to leave the past, and such a past.
Easter was as much agony as it was joy. The disciples did not
proclaim Easter until Pentecostal fire and the winds of hope sent them forth,
with no endorsement from the past. Easter would not allow the disciples to
build their faith around memories of all that was. It made it impossible for
them to restore the past and fit Christ into it. Easter made Christian faith a
restless, future-oriented experience.
Did we truly believe there would be no resistance to the reform
called for by Vatican II? Did we suppose the resistance would not be massive,
desperate, unrelenting? Are we not, however, unwilling to learn from history
when we doubt the outcome? When people experience freedom, a freedom supported
by persuasive ideas and structures that prevent anarchy, there is no turning
back. This is why the Reformation succeeded and the Enlightenment and the
American Revolution. This is why slavery ended, and women were liberated and
the Second Vatican Council prevailed. The Jews did not go back to Egypt, and
the disciples did not remain with the Temple, and there is no one in the world,
including those who first built it, who wishes to construct the Berlin Wall
again.
No return is possible for a number of reasons. The older system
had good things in it. Many of its strategies and decisions were
understandable. It brought faith and comfort. It might even have done what it
needed to do for its own time in history.
But return is impossible, because three of the key elements needed
to make the old system work no longer have the endorsement of the church at
large. These elements are belligerence, exclusion and censorship.
The old system needs belligerence to work. It was born in battle,
in the wars of the Reformation, and it waged a cold war with its adversaries in
the centuries after it was no longer acceptable to kill. The first draft drawn
up for Vatican II by Cardinal Ottaviani and the Holy Office was called
The Church Militant. It later became Lumen Gentium, A
Light for the World. Such a gentle title! The old system used military
metaphors readily. We became soldiers of Christ in confirmation; Marian
apparitions at Fatima led to the creation of a Blue Army. We were
an army of youth flying a banner of truth; the language with which we denounced
communism was the language we once used to justify wars and hostilities against
Jews and Muslims, against other Christians and even the scientific
establishment.
Silent women, docile theologians
The unreformed system also requires exclusion and victimization on
a large scale. For it to work again, women must become silent and theologians
docile. Catholics must remain in marriages even when there is no meaning in
them, and priests must never fall in love. Protestants must be kept at a
distance, and the pope must be seen as always wise and altruistic. Papal
documents must be read more eagerly than scripture, and homosexuals must
disappear. I suggest there is no longer the will, the heart, the energy to
recreate such a world of exclusion and subordination.
The unreformed system is invested heavily in censorship. When
Jesuit Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and Fr. John Courtney Murray were silenced in
the 1950s they stopped writing. Censorship was not only ordered by the
institution; it was also self-imposed, and the church at large endorsed it.
Things are different now. No one of the major theologians censured
by the Vatican in the last 20 years has stopped writing or lecturing. Indeed,
the community at large has rushed to their sides.
For the Counter Reformation church to prevail it must gain the
support of Catholics at large for belligerence, exclusion and censorship.
Indeed, in the strangest of ironies, those who resort to these means isolate
themselves rather than their targets.
We cope by abandoning the temple and the papacy as the substance
of our hope. The restorationist agenda is exhausted and this must be dealt with
whether the pope is liberal or conservative. Restoration simply cannot give
life to the church. That agenda requires high levels of theological ignorance
and pastoral insensitivity for it to function.
We cope by stressing three values: our connections or faith, our
need to belong and our right to communion.
The logic of the Spirit
We begin with our faith and our convictions. We must not be
deluded into thinking that there is any future in the dull mediocrity of
compliance we are being urged to accept. We believe in precisely the right
things in affirming a reformed church. It has about it all the logic of the
Spirit. No other church can emerge from Vatican II than a reformed church. No
other church has a future and no other church will have our allegiance and that
of people at large.
The second of these strategies for survival is belonging.
Isolation is terrifying. For this reason, small communities and our reform
groups are healing, sacramental experiences. They bring us God and grace in
relationship and community. This sense of belonging is essential, especially
for Catholics, who find God in community more readily than in individualism. So
such groups as Call To Action; CORPUS, the national association for a married
priesthood; the Womens Ordination Conference; Dignity; Catholic
Organizations for Renewal; and We Are Church play a substantial role in our
ecclesial, ministerial and spiritual lives. Since the temple is closed to us,
and indeed, since its time is over, these small communities and reform groups
are the synagogues of the renewal. In Jesus time, synagogues were an
addition or an alternative to the temple. They gathered the laity and the
marginalized and allowed the laity to preside at services. The synagogues
outlasted the temple, made the Diaspora possible, rescued Judaism and helped
give birth to the new church we call Christianity. Belonging is our baptismal
and sacramental right. We must gather in the communities we require for our
life. The institutional church, which created this crisis, is not likely to
solve it if we take no action. Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, the Dutch theologian,
reminds us of that.
The third strategy for survival is communion. By communion I mean
a relationship to the gospel, the tradition of the church and the sacraments.
We need to enter into communion with all three. All are interconnected. The
gospel becomes more urgent for us as the temple is destroyed; the tradition
becomes the way we struggle together to preserve and hand on the gospel; and
the sacraments assure us we are fully the church. Every Christian community has
the right to the gospel, the tradition and the sacraments it requires for its
life. This is especially true because the churchs law is always less than
its life.
We cope, then, by faith, by belonging, by communion.
One must be concrete here. There are only two churches to believe
in and work for: the church of the Counter Reformation and the church of
Catholic renewal.
Do we really believe that there is a future for a church that
seeks to return to the past and, indeed, does not have the supports of the
past? If this church of the past were so right, why did people abandon it so
readily and why did an ecumenical council fail to endorse it as it was?
History is a guide here once again. Nations do not return to
monarchies once they create democracies; slaves do not seek their former
masters once they are liberated; Egypt had no appeal for Israel after the
Promised Land; the former Soviet Union has no allies seeking to reconstitute
it.
In our church the reformers are in the overwhelming majority. The
reform is endorsed on the highest levels of biblical, pastoral and theological
studies. What holds us back may be ourselves, for the most part. Our faith in
our own cause weakens; our bonds of belonging are not always strengthened; and
we lose communion with the gospel, tradition and the sacramental life.
The church of the Counter Reformation was a temple church, a Palm
Sunday church, glorious, awesome, beautiful, elegant. But a temple church is an
anachronism after the missionary journeys of Paul. A temple church can never be
a truly Catholic church since it excludes so many and confines God so much. And
Palm Sunday is nothing compared to Easter and Pentecost.
We last saw Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, eager to build
monuments and cathedrals. We see him for the last time in Johns Gospel,
back in Galilee, with James and John once again his companions. Easter has
already touched their lives.
Peter and the others are fishing, and there on the shore, in the
shadows of dawn, is the Risen Christ. Peter rushes into the water desperately,
touchingly. He comes near Christ and he is filled with unasked questions. Who
are you? You are not the same as once I knew you, and yet I know it is you.
Once before you seemed so different, on the mountain a year ago when we were
with you. And yet I knew then it was you and I know you now. It is good to be
here as it was then.
An Easter faith
Peter has questions because Christ is not a temple, recognizable,
unmistakable, predictable, stationary. It takes more faith and hope to be loyal
to such a Christ. But the consequence of such loyalty is an Easter faith.
Peter is silent, looking for signs that his faith is not misplaced
or his hope in vain or his love wasted. Christ breaks bread for Peter, and
painful, soaring memories rush in and carry him to the past. Christ, however,
urges him down new roads to the future. You must go, Peter, not where you
choose. You must follow me, not your own preferences. I have but one question
to ask you and if you answer it rightly you will always be safe and you will
never be lost. You dont need a temple now, only a mission.
Peter, do you love me?
Yes, you know that, you most of all.
It is Peter now who is transfigured and who becomes the herald of
Easter glory and a martyr for a church of the future in a land not his own, far
from Jerusalem and the temple but not far from Christ.
This is the church tradition Peter leaves us, not an office in the
church or the papacy as an institution but love in a person rather than a
temple, the kind of love that always leads us into the future unafraid while
bringing us out of the past unharmed.
This has been a tale of two churches. Because I have lived in this
new church, I would know now what to do for the woman whose heart was broken by
her sons abandonment of ministry. I would also know what to do for him.
For the new church has room for both of them.
Because I have lived in this new church I will no longer be
confused by a call for a new council and I shall not assume we have no
needs.
The pain is worth it. Every step of the way. Who would ever go
back? Only the terrified and the frightened. My heart goes out to them, but we
cannot heal them by returning to the dead past, the confining temple, the rigid
certitudes fashioned from fears and insecurities.
We lost a church along the way, a temple of rare beauty, a
fortress, a buttress. But we did not lose God.
The pain we feel now is the pain of Incarnation.
We trivialize that Incarnation when we make God into a church
system or a temple or a code of law. This is too easy an Incarnation. It is
much more painful and substantial for the Incarnation to take place in human
life and for Gods people to be the only temple we have. God makes a
covenant with human hearts, not with institutions. The Incarnation into human
life is a crucifixion but its end result is Easter glory. The reform of Vatican
II seeks to make the Incarnation not a temple reality but a human one, an
Incarnation of Gods presence in human life itself. And this is a painful
process.
For Vatican II, the church is not the church militant or a perfect
society; the church is a mystery, a pilgrimage; it is the People of God. We
lost a church along the way but found a family. It is a family composed of
friends but also former enemies. It is made up of those we once excluded and of
those who embarrassed us and made our institutional life difficult.
The risen Christ is always on the shore of our future hopes, in
the gathering light where we are invited to come with fewer certitudes but
deeper loyalties.
We lost an older version of church along the way and entered into
the turbulent life of a family where bread is broken and needs are diverse and
exclusions are simply not allowed and loyalty to one another counts for much
more than agreement with one another. In the midst of a familys fears and
guesses and hopes and piece-meal lives Christ appears on the shore of its
future. A family does not have the elegance of a temple. It has something more.
It is alive. A family lives by its answer to one fundamental question, a
question once asked of Peter: Do you love me? The way we answer that question
determines whether we have a temple or a church, whether we have an institution
or an incarnation.
Anthony T. Padovano is a Catholic theologian. His most recent
book is Hope is a Dialogue, published by Caritas Communications, Mequon,
Wis.
National Catholic Reporter, November 12,
1999
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