"CORPUS is a ministerial faith community, rooted in a strong Eucharistic commitment, promoting an expanded and renewed priesthood of married and single men and women in the Catholic Church. Celebrating thirty-five years of service to the people of God, CORPUS is one of the oldest reform groups in the Catholic Church, and is active in reform movements both in the U.S. and abroad." [http://www.corpus.org]
David Gawlik is the editor of Corpus Reports , its journal, and of Mirabile Dictu, its daily email newsletter of what is going on in the church in this world of ours. Spurred on by an article that the priesthood may be obsolete in Catholica, another favorite journal of "A vigorous discussion on Catholic Spirituality" out of Australia – http://www.catholica.com.au/-- I had written a couple of notes to him about a subtle change in my attitude about the Roman Catholic Church. The church had become the chief focus of my retirement study, research, writing and concern since 2002.
Rather than whip the two letters over into a rewritten article, they are here as letters with some editing. At least, there might be a certain spontaneity to both the thoughts and the writing.
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First Letter to David, Sunday, November 2, 2008
Over several months now I have been getting a very, very deep-down intuition -- insight? – that the Roman institution, a/k/a The Roman Catholic Church, may become obsolete. Not merely irrelevant. Obsolete. Along with that intuition comes the flat, obvious, clear realization that no proof for its obsolescence will be needed. Once it happens, it is simply obsolete.
I looked up the word "obsolete" in MS WORD's Encarta Dictionary, and to my astonishment, got these definitions:
- not used any more - no longer in use
- out-of-date -- superseded by something newer, though possibly still in use
- undeveloped – BIOLOGY describes a part or organ of an animal or plant that is undeveloped or no longer functional
All three fit. So much so that an emotion brought on by the words "Roman Catholic Church" begins to vanish. Anger. Each time I had read a headline in VIS, ZENIT, CNS, about the doings of Rome, scanned one in NYT, CNN, NCR about the latest crackdown by martinets in gowns, I'd burn inside and struggle to beat down my own wrath. Now, I may soon see just another nstitution way back there in the dim, distant past, "no longer in use, superseded by something newer, no longer functional."
And surprise! there is no surreptitious emotion taking the place of anger. Don't feel, as I thought I might, pity, sorrow, a certain forlornness, for a church I used to know as a child. Come to think of it, I never had those feelings either when reading the history of ancient civilizations, city-states, empires, also as a child in early high school years. They are all historical facts, events, no longer around, but a part of the past that brought us to this present. Like Sparta, Gaul, SPQR, -- could never understand why the "que" in "Senatus Populusque Romanus" had its own capital "Q" but it was cool to know what the four great letters stood for.
I didn't tingle either over the discovery that the world is a sphere, no longer flat, and that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around, and instead of being in the center of all things created, is but a speck, almost invisible, in the universe. History was a collection of facts and events and people, functioning way back then, obsolete when being studied in school. Like the RCC is becoming today.
Along with the intuition that the RCC may become obsolete is the almost certain conviction that its hierarchs sense it, too, not only as a suspicion, but almost as a certitude. While they dress up and thump their crosiers, they are mimics of those patriotic citizens who like to dress up like Yankees in a mock re-creation of Concord and Lexington, when Paul Revere yelled from his wild ride on horseback, "The Redcoats are coming, are coming, are coming." There's a bit of nostalgia about them, pope and curial cardinals, ambitious bishops out to please both, issuing press releases on the latest sin to be discovered and punished by them, broadcasting their constantly revised list of public officials who must be denied the Eucharist lest church be separated from state, pleading like a bunch of clowns, "Hey! Look us over."
That word I wrote above -– "re-creation" – takes on an intuitive meaning when you drop the hyphen: "recreation." Going to church on Sundays now is a recreation. We go for entertainment. We used to go for worship, sort of a re-creation of ourselves as Catholics. Funny how attitudes change so simply, so quietly, almost with the whimper the poet said was so different from the bang. Funny how something suddenly shows up as becoming obsolete, even though we suspected that was so for quite a long, long time, and the thought ever lingering becomes a knowledge almost certain. We might even smile a bit, thinking that if we could live long enough, say the requisite 100 years, we could change the designation from "obsolete" to "antique."
Typewriters, for a mundane example, went obsolete within my own lifetime. In 1939, age 10, my aunt taught me typing on her boxy, battered, monstrously heavy LC Smith with black caps covering the keys. It's obsolete. Right now, I live with a Logitech di Novo Edge keyboard and its Revolution mouse. Then, it was a laborious pecking away, slamming carriage return with a sweep of the left hand when the bell rang at the end of the line. Now, with just a click of the mouse, I zoom all over the world, into the universe itself, and awake each morning to read Mirabile Dictu, which tells me what's going on all over and where I am at the moment, beginning a new day.
You know, David, when we begin to see that an institution is nearing obsolescence, anger begins to subside, and hope becomes the predominant mood. A day can then begin with a smile rather than a scowl.
Paul
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Second Letter to David, Monday, November 03, 2008
David, may I add to that letter of mine about the church becoming obsolete? I had written it to you as a letter of transmittal on some stuff sent for your scrutiny, unmindful that it might be put up in Mirabile Dictu. When I read it there this morning, I thought, 'Oh! Oh! That guy can't dismiss a 2,000 year old institution so cavalierly,' and knew I should submit an ending paragraph or two, if you would be so kind.
While the RCC might become obsolete, Christianity will not
- Jesus.
- The Gospels and the New Testament.
- Canonized and uncanonized saints down through the years.
- Good and decent lay and religious and clergy people, making up the people of God.
- The crowning documents of Vatican II.
- The little churches "where two or more are gathered in my name."
- Us.
My conviction is that of Robert N. Bellah, author of "Communion in a Scientific Age" in Commonweal, September 12, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 15, at: http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/print_format.php?id_article=2302. He wrote:
"Charles Taylor's remarkable book A Secular Age achieves something quite different from what other writers on secularization have accomplished. Most have focused on decline as the essence of secularism-either the removal of religion from sphere after sphere of public life, or the decrease of religious belief and practice. But Taylor focuses on what kind of religion makes sense in a secular age.
He speaks of "the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual" that make it possible to speak of ours as a "secular age." Taylor is asking not only how secularism became a significant option in a civilization that not so long ago was explicitly Christian, but what that change means for the spiritual quest, both of those who are still religious and those who consider themselves secular. "
We are no longer in feudal times, look back on the middle ages as part of our traditions, are beginning to see that the nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries is also a part of history, as we move into globalism with its under- and over-tones of our modern secular age. Bellah's article was a review of Charles Taylor, the unbelievably brilliant Canadian philosopher, whose masterpiece is A Secular Age, published in September, 2007. Amazon.com's principal review said,
"Challenging the idea that the secular takes hold in a world where religion is experienced as a loss or where religions are subtracted from the culture, Taylor discovers the secular emerging in the midst of the religious. The Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on breaking down the invidious political structures of the Catholic Church, provides the starting point down the road to the secular age. Taylor sweeps grandly and magisterially through the 18th and 19th centuries as he recreates the history of secularism and its parallel challenges to religion. He concludes that a focus on the religious has never been lost in Western culture, but that it is one among many stories striving for acceptance. Taylor's examination of the rise of unbelief in the 19th century is alone worth the price of the book and offers an essential reminder that the Victorian age, more than the Enlightenment, dominates our present view of the meanings of secularity. Taylor's inspired combination of philosophy and history sparkles in this must-read virtuoso performance."
Amazon.com also put up a quickie review from the same Robert Bellah, dated June 11, 2007,
"This is Charles Taylor's breakthrough book, a book of really major importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about secularism. This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime. I am tempted to say the most important book, but that may just express the spell the book has cast over me at the moment."
That quote shows that the spell cast over Robert Bellah on first reading, grew into his Commonweal article, which he concluded with this deep-down faith statement:
"The way to God is through love, sharing, participation, communion—that is, through a profound sense of our membership in one body. That love is God's ever-present gift, now as much as in the first century or in 1500, if we could but see."
And that is pretty much what and how I feel, helping put my own conviction in place: the RCC might be obsolete but Christianity is not. We live in our age, not that of a century long gone,. Bewildered, we behold our own Church in tatters from abuses: sexual of minors by some clergy; discipline of lay people standing and speaking truth to power of bishops; intransigence of absolute power of the papal primacy claimed by popes.
Tired now but not disgusted, we are aware that our eager efforts to reform an institution locked down tight by celibate hierarchs and their lock-stepped clergy, are puny. It is infallible that the whimpering of hundreds of little groups, using capital letters from the alphabet soup of protesters is doomed to dismal failure. We cannot even get ARCC to sit down with CTA, hold hands with SNAP, and merge with VOTF to set up a USCCP – United States Conference of Catholic People – to link with USCCB – United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. And each single one of us knows that The People of God are the USCCP and the USCCB, in unison as one People, one Church, which could very well become literally true, rather than a doubtful whisper in a credal recitation of faith, as "one, holy, Catholic and apostolic."
So? If the RCC might be obsolete, and if we its People of God are powerless to reform, renew it, then we walk. Right?
No. For another question arises. Where?
Well, where in the world are we? Should we not look around and see? And if we do, what do we see? A Secular Age. Of course, ours, the one slam-banged for over a century by Rome, denounced by pope and cardinal, demeaned and excommunicated by bishop. If we have ever wondered how far Rome would go, try to imagine the Dicasteral Dean of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the CDF -- promulgating in weekly church bulletins his Excommunication over the whole wide world. That's not funny. It's sad. He might try. Check it out: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/index.htm
Was not such an age, pagan rather than secular, in which God chose to be incarnated, similar to ours. God chose Palestine, where Jesus lived for over thirty years and died. On leaving it in an ascension, he said something like, "I leave you now, but not alone. For I will be with you for all time. And I will send you a Paraclete."
[OED says, Paraclete means: "1. A title of the Holy Spirit . . . 'an advocate, one called in to one's assistance, an intercessor', but often taken as = 'comforter'…"]
Even as long as and into our own secular age? Of course. God's promises are never meaningless, never broken. We know that quite simply, for God isn't God, should he deceive. Impossible for God to do that. Men do that, People like women and children and men, priests and sisters, bishops and cardinals. Popes even. Presidents also, but let us not descend into such politics, in which the RCC has been swimming for centuries.
What we are to do is let go, let God. As The People of God, we are called upon to build a new Church, one for our very own secular age. We have to shuck off the tricky baggage of ecclesiology, with all its armaments and restrictions and horrible denials of the dignity of human beings, clean out of our minds all the garbage and confusion of two thousand years of servitude, and act like free and humble people about to build something new. Our own Church. We begin, as Charles Taylor says and Richard Bellah reminds, by focusing "on what kind of religion makes sense in a secular age."
How? Don't ask me. I'm just an old man who prays to see, sees and thinks, writes what he thinks. A lot of people do that, be they alone or in splinter alphabet groups. We need to act, to help each other gather a lot of them together. Out of them will rise a leader. History shows us that always, always happens. A leader will appear. It is always so. Pray for her.
Don't forget the Paraclete. Without a dove there is no flight. Without tongues of fire there is no spark. If we stick to ourselves alone, we will produce just a mirror image of the institution we already have. The one called "Roman," which modeled itself on the philosophical lingo of Athens and the rational legalisms of Rome, dressed both up in the regalia and might of the emperors and kings and other nobilities who popped up as civilization grew out of paganism into a Eurocentric Christianity. And then that Roman institution began to decline and fall, like its trade-name, which lasted almost as long. That word "Roman" has endurance.
Such a monumental fall, named "Roman" has happened before, as Edward Gibbon told us. Amazon.com's product description reads at: http://www.amazon.com/Decline-Fall-Roman-Empire-Vol/dp/0809592371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225755061&sr=8-1
"Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788, is the undisputed masterpiece of English historical writing which can only perish with the language itself. Its length alone is a measure of its monumental quality: seventy-one chapters, of which twenty-eight appear in full in this edition. With style, learning and wit, Gibbon takes the reader through the history of Europe from the second century AD to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 - an enthralling account by 'the greatest of the historians of the Enlightenment'."
After a decline and fall, institutions just fade away like old soldiers, or give way to a successor, or rebuild. For People like us, so accustomed to "pay, pray, obey," rebuilding looms as an impossible, enormous undertaking. Try to imagine the first Christians, the ones to whom the Apostles, Disciples and friends went to tell them about Jesus. Be People as they were People, common ordinary People like us, with Faith and Hope and Love.
Ever try to create those three just by saying so? "Faith, Hope, Love? Ah! I know them all, have experienced each one. Come, follow me." We were taught by ancient theologians, the good guys, that Faith, Hope and Love are Theological Virtues, i.e. no person can bestow them; no person can assert them; no person can create them by will-power alone. Not even a bishop, a cardinal, a pope. Each one is a gift of God, just as life is a gift of God, just as Jesus himself is a gift of God. Nobody can do that. Only God can. And God does. For the asking. We call it Prayer. Sound obsolete? So does "church," as we know it today.
A word of caution, please. We should be careful not to lapse into the impossible dream of trying to rebuild the Roman brand of church. It cannot be done. For one thing, it took two thousand years to get into the condition it is in now. And they won't let you.
Remember "Roman" is an adjective. "Church" is a noun, meaning little, when modified, limited. Try cutting the adjective "Roman" down to the size of a city-state called The Vatican, a section of Rome itself, and in a sneaky way the entity that now bears the name of the large city in which it was but an insignificant, tiny segment behind walls. The Roman Catholic Church is actually a misnomer. More properly and accurately, it should be The Vatican Catholic Church.
That's nitpicking, though, for the Vatican itself is not yet 100 years old, having been created in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Roman Catholic Church, the last vestige of the enormous territory of the Papal States, over which the pope ruled as sovereign. In the RCC, there is no separation of church and city-state: the one is the other.
"Catholic" actually means "world-wide, universal, wide-reaching, all-embracing." Denotation clashes with connotation, when diminished by "Roman," a/k/a "Vatican."
An internet page on the Apostles Creed has an asterisk for the word "catholic" in the part about the church. That asterisk says: "*The word 'catholic' refers not to the Roman Catholic Church, but to the universal church of the Lord Jesus Christ."
[http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/documents/apostles_creed.html]
That is the church we are called upon to build in our secular age.
Pray, then, for faith, hope and love. Go! Build a Church for our secular age, the one we live and move and have our being in as The People of God. It can be done. God promised. And that is our way to God, as Robert Bellah saw and then wrote down:
"The way to God is through love, sharing, participation, communion—that is, through a profound sense of our membership in one body. That love is God's ever-present gift, now as much as in the first century or in 1500, if we could but see."
Paul
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Yes. We can.
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