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Blueprint for Vatican III

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Council Preparations Return to the Categories Menu

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Governance & Authority/Decentralization of the Church Return to the Categories Menu

If the church is the people of God as a whole, with all functional differentiation inside the church only serving the common end and mission of the people of God as a whole, then the question of whether the church can fulfill its mission is the question of whether the people of God as a whole are aware of their collective mission and willing to do their share.  The hierarchy of the church may produce wonderful documents, but if they do not either express the sensus fidelium or engage the people of God, of which lay people are the absolute majority, the documents remain merely documents empty of consequences.  When the church is facing many grave issues, the question is compelling whether the laity are educated and empowered enough to engage those issues.  The grave issues are matters of agenda, but the empowerment of the laity is a matter of the agent, those who will actually do something about the agenda.  In this sense, the problem of educating and empowering the agents is more important than agreeing on the agenda or things to be done, which is relatively easy.  However, in the Catholic Church, even in the postconciliar era, we still have a long way to go in empowering the laity.  Clericalism is still very much alive all over the world.
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No bishop or pope will remain in office for more than 15 years, or beyond their 75th birthday.  The fortune of the people of God should not be made so contingent on the fortune of a single individual.

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The need to eliminate all worldly titles from the church such as eminence, excellency, holiness, etc. The only proper NT title is brother or sister. Titles inhibit egalitarian dialogue; the church might be hierarchical in ministries but it is egalitarian in its basic existence which comes through baptism. Why could we not address a bishop simply as "brother Bishop."

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The implementation of Vatican II. We've had a curia dedicated to turning back a council that threatens their power and they have almost succeeded. We need to recommit ourselves as a church to these principles of the 21st century and give the church new life before it is completely mummified.

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The elimination of the notion of infallibility and its implication of ecclesiastical monarchism. We need more of a Theology of the Holy Spirit and less of a theology of papal infallibility, as if any human being ever was or ever will be.

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The elimination of the curia as a locus of control in the church. We have become the captives of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy who not only
run the church and the bishops but the Pope. Enough.

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Parish Life & Catechesis of Youth Return to the Categories Menu
 

The parish pastoral council was the tool used by the Second Vatican Council to empower the laity to participate in the church at the local level.  As it has turned out, however, the operation of the council varies so much from diocese to diocese, often left to the judgments of bishops and pastors.  An active operation of the council should become mandatory for all dioceses.
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The church in the United States does a good job of educating Catholic children up to the 12th grade where it operates grade schools.  Once they go to college, however, unless they go to Catholic college, there is no continuing concern for their growth in faith, a growth appropriate to the level of their secular knowledge.  The Newman Centers are good in terms of sponsoring retreats, but I wonder whether they provide the appropriate intellectual nourishment for the content of their faith.  Admit it or not, Catholicism is intellectually under attack from all kinds of sources, secular press, anti-religious academics, the liberal establishment.  Catholicism is being pushed to the fringes of culture.  We need a program of religious education for college-age Catholic youth to show them that their faith is intellectually defensible.  Right now, there is absolutely nothing being done in this regard.  I feel sorry for young Catholics who face all the tough intellectual issues in their classrooms from the question of evolution, sexual morality, religious pluralism, the historical Jesus, etc., mostly from non-Catholic perspectives, and don’t know what to make of them on their own resources.  No wonder that we are losing young people from the church.  But who cares?

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Care for the Family Return to the Categories Menu

For all sorts of reasons, families have been disintegrating, and people are more and more alienated.  We need a concentrated pastoral concern for strengthening the family as a basic unit of society.  This issue should not be given away to the conservatives.  Liberals should be just as much concerned.  There is a real, silent cry of loneliness and alienation, which drives people to do all sorts of unhealthy things.

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Religious Life Return to the Categories Menu

Empowering the laity should not be construed as excluding this traditional emphasis on promoting religious vocations.  The religious bear a different kind of witness to the kingdom of God, which we continue to need, as a special genius of Catholicism, the loss of which would be an erosion of the integrity of Catholicism.  The promotion of the religious vocation with its traditional vows is also common to Buddhism and other religious traditions.  The religious life is an important religious value which we cannot simply let disappear lightly.

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Priesthood/Ordination of Women & Married Clergy Return to the Categories Menu

Ordination of married men or women presented and recommended by their parish community for service in this one parish. Thus the community becomes responsible for their priest.

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This is not a panacea but still necessary as a matter of equity and empowerment of more people to work for the mission of the church.

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The question of the culture of infallibility that has infected the priesthood, tainted the papacy with a kind of magic, and created a aura of consummate flawlessness throughout the clerical community that is a barrier to the theology of Holy Spirit, the primacy of conscience, the need for accountability and the very  nature of the church.

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 The relationship of a celibate priesthood to a married one. Celibacy is a gift, not a discipline.' We need to recognize the gift, not pretend to enforce it.

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Human Sexuality Return to the Categories Menu

A new sexuality and the implications of the new understandings of sexuality on moral development. We are a sexually sick church. It is time to bring sexuality into the list of graces not dangers, health not 'objective disorders.'.

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Women Return to the Categories Menu

The question of the nature and role of women in church and society. This question involves half the members of the human race. To keep an entire class of people in spiritual bondage on the grounds that God wills such farce is to threaten the very integrity of the church, as well as the vision of the world.

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Peacemaking & Preferential Option for the Poor Return to the Categories Menu

This should be our priority in all our theology and practice.  How is the church, the parish, the individual Catholic doing in this matter?  What are we doing to alleviate the suffering of the poor, the sick, the homeless, the excluded, the minorities, at the level of systemic justice, reform of institutions, parish actions, and individual contributions?  We need another Laborem Exercens and Economic Justice for All.

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Naming the sins of today's world: greed in the first world is destroying the good and positive aspects of western civilization. Organized crime is destroying more people's lives that the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

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Issues surrounding immigration: Promoting the dignity and rights of oppressed minorities around the world

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Church as Teacher for Social Change Return to the Categories Menu

A theology of the Unjust War. The Just War died long ago. We need to call into question the kind of immorality that makes a virtue out of wholesale political violence.

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Concern for the ecosphere and the theology and philosophy that underlie and justifies its wanton destruction and threatens the welfare and survival of the entire globe.

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Right now globalization in the sense of increasing global interdependence, economic, political, and cultural, is going on without resistance largely under the leadership of US capitalism.   We must critically examine and respond to the comprehensive implications of such globalization on the environment, creation of rich and poor among and within nations, concentration of political power on the elite nations, and commercializing trivialization of all areas of life including our moral and religious sensibilities.  We may also judiciously examine the positive implications of globalization in terms of bringing different peoples and cultures together and preparing the material conditions for the unity of humanity, which is also the ideal of all religions.  The problem is how to steer the direction of globalization so as to minimize the negative consequences and promote the positive, the unity of humanity without destroying their diversity.  This is not just a Catholic issue but an issue for all religions and cultures.  Globalization, whether we like it or not, defines the basic context for human existence in its totality today, and deserves a careful examination and response, in much the same that Gaudium et Spes did in the context of forty years ago.  We need a new Gaudium et Spes for the 21st century.

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The relationship between globalism and poverty and the moral implications of international negotiations. We live in a world where corporations, not governments, run the world. New moral standards must be defined before morality is nothing but a religious myth.

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Collegiality and respect for the needs, understandings and enculturation of the local church are crucial considerations.
"Universal" cannot mean "the same." It is time for the Roman Empire of the Church to recognize its own demise 1500 years after the political
empire that spawned it. Otherwise, the church will go to dust in the mind of the population.

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The whole question of what is life is a key element of the 21st century. Euthanasia and abortion are topics in need of development. The effects of bioethics, stemcell research and reproductive technology on moral theology will be phenomenal. Just as there are multiple ways to treat gallbladders these days, there are multiple ways to have babies. Or not to have them, as the case may be. It is the nature of life, not technology, that is in question.

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Interreligious Dialogue Return to the Categories Menu

Coming to terms with the reality of non-Christian religions at the theological level and providing appropriate education to Catholics in this regard so as to clarify the position of the Church in this perplexing are and avoid needless confusion among Catholics.  This will become a more pressing issue as times goes by.

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The question of an ecumenism that transcends ecclesiastical get-togethers in favor of mutual respect for the multiple revelations for God in human society. This common respect is a necessary component of peace in the world.

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Multicultural Realities Return to the Categories Menu

How to cultivate a sense of human unity despite our multicultural diversity in the world and a sense of Catholic identity despite our multicultural diversity in the church, a new consciousness of una, sancta, catholica, et apostolica ecclesia.

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Many changes have been occurring, and the church has to respond to them in a timely and relevant way.  The compelling question is whether the church can maintain a tension between its fidelity to the tradition and its witness to the contemporary world.  Fidelity means constant meditation on the depth and riches of the tradition; contemporary witness means readiness to respond in a relevant way.  The first requires continuity, the second readiness to change.  What we need is neither blind traditionalism nor mindless change but the virtue or habit of being able to maintain a tension between fidelity and relevance rather than complacency in either being traditional or being progressive.  Complacency in either position means onesidedness.  We should learn to be progressive while also being mindful of the tradition so that we do not go to one extreme in a complacent way, and the same way with being traditional.  The ideal result of this consciously cultivated tension will be to nourish relevance itself on the riches of tradition to which we must be faithful, and to deepen and enrich fidelity itself with a careful appropriation of the new.  I propose the cultivation of a theological tension between the old and the new as a basic attitude underlying all our positions on particular issues in the church.

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Liturgical Reform & Renewal Return to the Categories Menu

We need a more lively liturgy and better liturgical music, a combination of the old with its sense of the sacred and the new with its sense of contemporary relevance.  The Gregorian chant, for those who grew up on it, was a marvelous source of inspiration and spirituality.  Do we have a contemporary equivalent?  Why doesn’t someone put the Credo to music so we can sing our creed as a community?  I find most of contemporary liturgical music too flat, introspective, therapeutic.

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Liturgical vestments & vessels  that are so expensive that they are actually a contradiction of the very thing we are celebrating - when a liturgical vestment costs more than an ordinary simple suit for men or women, it becomes a counter-sign.

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Theology & Intellectual Revitalization Return to the Categories Menu

1st is the need for a new creed that fills in what Nicea and others have left out: the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as basic to our Christian-Catholic identity. How can we follow his way if we do not know him. We have way too any dogmas and doctrines which are life-draining and not enough story which is life-giving. Under this new creed the issues of growing world-poverty need to be addressed. Jesus came as poor to the poor. The church is more and more the church of the rich. The marginalization of the poor nations from the new global economy (the giants are mostly the "Christian" Countries) is the very opposite of Jesus' invitation to the poor and the marginalized; the hugging of the world's resources in the very opposite of Jesus' command to give to the poor. The question of our relation to the poor must be a primary issue in today's Christian community.

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The need for a new ecclesiology which focuses in on the sinfulness of the church - the church is a community of sinners saved only by the grace of Jesus Christ. That is the great mystery of God: that so much good can be accomplished by such a sinful church (and I am not referring to just the sex scandals of today). We have emphasized too much the holiness of the church, but we have failed to bring out what the Fathers used to bring out: the mystery of the church that is at one and the same time holy and sinful; virgin and prostitute; source of inspiration and of scandal. This is the real church: a community of sinners struggling for  holiness. The great saints of the Bible were equally great sinners. We want a Church without sin, but that will only come about at the end of time.

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As an intellectual and public force Catholicism has been being pushed to the fringes in both Europe and North America.  It is time that the church should find a way of making its witness count as an important force in modern life by revitalizing its presence in the media, government, business, and the academy.  Learn from the Jewish people!  In southern California, for example, with over four million Catholics, there is not a single credible intellectual forum or publication to express the Catholic voice, no endowed chair of Catholic studies, no major Catholic university.  Sad.

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Identity of Catholic Universities: could only be considered Catholic to the degree their faculty is involved in the work of the local church. Their involvement should be considered in the tenure process.

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The impact of science on theological understandings. Given the new awareness of the nature of the universe and substance of matter we need to look again at the distinctions that have been made between the material and the spiritual. They simply do not exist.

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The elimination of silencings, thought repression and intimidation of individual scholars, speakers and teachers in the name of theology and purity of doctrine. When thought dies, the church dies and it is well on its way to committing ecclesiastical suicide.

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Theological Education for the Laity Return to the Categories Menu

If the laity are going to do their share in engaging all these issues and activities, they must be educated, which means largely theological education.  We need institutional encouragement and financial assistance to enable as many interested lay people to get the necessary level of theological education as possible.  This is especially urgent as the number of parishes without priests increases.  The talk of empowering the laity in the church is empty unless we give them help in getting the appropriate kind of education to do what they are expected to do.  Each parish should be encouraged to set aside scholarship money for this purpose.

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