There’s a great deal of repetition in this article vis-à-vis “A Candle in the Darkness” and “The Silent Schism”. I don’t know what I was thinking of when I wrote it; it just re-works them.
(The Furrow, October 1996, pp.543-547)
We in the Church have a problem with change, and we are not very good at coping with it. We have a passion for permanence. We change in spasms and convulsions interspersed with long periods of inertia, stone-walling and entrenched resistance to movement. ‘Change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changest not, abide with me.’ (H. F. Lyte) We need an organic model for change so that we get away from the on-off, stop-go model we have been following. Because change is constant, ‘You never step into the same river twice,’ wrote Heraclitus.
What happens if we are not open to change? There is a price to be paid for it because to dig in one’s heels is a decision with consequences as real as any other. And trying to put back the hands of the clock to some imagined golden age is not a realistic option. Yet there are powerful leaders in the Church who openly advocate a policy of “restoration”. They want to go back to the past and they react to proposals for change with a degree of caution which cripples initiative and dispirits those who do not see a return to the past as a viable agenda for the future. When the avenues to creative change are blocked, opportunities are lost or thrown away.
I believe history will see Vatican II as a lost opportunity. The bishops were so naïve as to imagine that good ideas, by themselves, were enough, and that it was unnecessary, or perhaps even unworthy, to consider the politics of the process of change. But where there are human beings there are politics and in the years after the Council a struggle developed for control of the Church and of the process of change within it between the centralized bureaucracy in the Vatican and the bishops. The bureaucrats won, and the bishops seemed unable to grasp what was happening. They know now what has happened, but it is too late. They are reduced to the role of carrying our orders as mere delegates of the Vatican.
In addition, little attention was given to the need for structural change to accompany and reinforce changes of attitude. The post-Vatican II Church poured new wine into old wineskins and both were lost. Where new structures were introduced, as in the Synod of Bishops, they were controlled so tightly that they suffocated. And that situation is paralleled at local level in many Church councils.
The ecumenical movement is in danger of becoming another lost opportunity. It is being driven with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. As a result, it has stalled and has lost a vital element, the interest of the faithful, many of whom now view it with something like indifference. The enthusiasm of thirty years ago is gone.
The charismatic movement, with all its oddities and eccentricities, was a breath of fresh air in the Church. I can remember a senior bishop whose initial attitude was one of intense hostility to it (‘Nothing but evil can come from this,’ he wrote to his priests) being won over when he saw that the charismatics were prepared not only to sing ‘Alleluia, Jesus’ for an hour or two but also to roll up their sleeves and willingly undertake thankless work like feeding dropouts and drifters in a relief centre. However, with the exceptions of Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Suenens and a few others, Church leadership did not welcome the opportunity created by the charismatic movement. Enthusiasm, that freshest and rarest of gifts was allowed to die of indifference.
In the area of human rights, the Church had a lot of catching up to do at both the practical and the doctrinal levels. There was a significant body of opinion in the Church which viewed the very concept of human rights with suspicion, because they saw it as a by-product of the French Revolution. Pope St Pius X is one example. Despite this the Church did catch up through the influence of people like the late Cardinal Pavan. Pope John Paul II has made the promotion of human rights a constant theme of his pastoral visits. But the effectiveness of this witness is undermined by the church’s denial of human rights in suppressing dissenters within its own ranks.
How deep is our commitment to the rights of Church employees to receive a living wage? In this area it sometimes seems that we have excuses for the past, promises for the future, but no remedies for the present.
The women’s movement is yet another opportunity lost as a result of lack of imagination, excessive caution and the fear of taking risks. Can the ground be recovered? Probably, with the right leadership, but not without it.
The Church and the ecological movement have become embroiled over one issue – birth control. But there is a much wider field than that to be examined. There is the relationship between the person and nature, and the person in nature, to take only one example. There is scope for developing a vigorous and positive theology of conservation which goes beyond the concept of stewardship and into areas of human participation in God’s continuing work of creation and conservation. The encyclical letter, Humanae Vitae, is often understood as a single-issue document; but another reading of it opens up a challenge to the ecological movement to re-examine itself as to whether it really believes what it says about the person working in a harmonious partnership with nature, especially in that part of nature which is most intimate to the person, namely, the human body.
The worldwide movement towards democracy is something which the Church should welcome, and there are signs that it has begun to do so, moving from the scepticism, if not outright hostility, expressed by popes at the turn of the century to the more positive approach of Pope John Paul II who stated simply that ‘The Church values the democratic system.’ (Encyclical Letter, Centesimus Annus, n.46) But the welcome stops at the church door. It is clear that the Vatican does not want any democratization of the Church, even though the best paradigm of a Christian democracy is the Trinity, where persons, distinct but equal, live in a community of shared love.
The decline in vocations to the priesthood and religious orders in many parts of the world provides an opportunity for a fresh look at all aspects of ministry, at the balance between mission and maintenance, at priorities and structures in the Church. But that has not happened. Instead we have the massaging of statistics, exhortations to try harder with old methods and a refusal to examine the problem realistically. The 1990 Synod on the formation of priests and the document Pastores Dabo Vobis which followed it, are examples of looking at a wide problem while wearing blinkers.
When the avenues to creative change are blocked, all sorts of results may follow and some of these are evident in the Church at present. We have got stagnation and we call it stability. Initiative is crippled, people grow demoralized, give up and walk quietly away, sometimes hurt, sometimes struggling to keep alive the flame of hope, and, sometimes, regrettably, bitter. The longer this problems remains unaddressed, the more likely it is that there will follow either an explosion or an implosion: an explosion, such as happened at the Reformation when the long-unresolved problem of the failure to reform the Church despite several centuries of effort, as in the Lateran councils of the thirteenth century, led to a division in the Church; or an implosion, a quiet collapse of support, where people weigh up the pros and cons of staying in the Church and decide that staying is not worth it and so they try to live a human life elsewhere. The implosion is already taking place not only in the First World, but also in the Third World where there is a steady loss of youth to sects and to a practical atheism. Responsibility for this situation rests in part with those whose policies have killed hope in the lives of so many of the faithful. There is a problem there and it needs to be faced. It is not being faced with an open mind and there will not be any solution until the Church is ready to change. Sticking-plaster solutions will not work; fidelity requires approaches which are radical, which go to the roots.
I’m reminded in this context of what was written by one Petronius Arbiter, a wise old pagan who lived in the time of Emperor Nero: ‘I was to learn late in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.’ That is a good description of what happened in the Church after Vatican II. The Council did not fail the Church; it was the Church that failed the Council. We tamed and domesticated its impulse, drew the teeth of its radicalism and suffocated it with caution.
A good illustration of this is what happened to religious orders. While some of them have experienced a genuine renewal in the spirit of their founder and have recovered a sense of their collective vocation, others have remained substantially at square one, with a few cosmetic changes to sustain the illusion of having responded to the call of Vatican II. The latter are not seen as places to look for a radical evangelical alternative to contemporary life. They have become conventional, reflecting rather than challenging the value-system of the world around them. If that is the case they will never attract the best of the young people.
The Church at present is like a human body suffering from hardening of the arteries. The flow that gives life is being slowly choked off; we are becoming rigid and sclerotic; we are staggering our way into decline, we need to open up new channels, to let the streams flow, to ride the currents and the waves with all the risk that that entails.
If an organization refuses to adapt to changing situations, it will find itself left behind like a log thrown up on a sandbank. To cling to outmoded positions, attitudes and structures when there is no gospel mandate for doing so is an act of infidelity. One example of unyielding resistance to overdue change is the insistence on maintaining the present law on ecclesiastical celibacy, even though in many rights places the right of the baptized to receive the sacraments is negated by such insistence. If an ecclesiastical law undermines the life and growth of the God’s kingdom then there is a moral imperative to change it.
If arguments for openness to change which are based on principle are not weighty enough, it is worth looking at one based on considerations of practicality or political expediency. It is possible to learn something from the example of the Soviet Union. For decades it seemed as solid as a rock. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the western world was often in the throes of political and social turmoil, the Soviet Union seemed, to outsiders, to be immune to all such difficulties. In fact, all it was doing was postponing the day when they would have to be faced while, at the same time, narrowing the range of available options in facing them because of its rigid inflexibility. What happened? When Gorbachev opened the windows of the Kremlin to let in some fresh air, the Soviet Union evaporated like dew in the morning sun. It could happen in the Church, too, and we should confront any complacency on the matter with the fact that it did happen before – to the Church in North Africa, some twelve centuries ago, which, from being one of the strongest centres of the Christian faith, was swept out of existence by a combination of internal weaknesses, such as its lack of inculturation and localization, and the military action of an aggressive Islam.
Response
What response does this situation call for?
First, we must recognize that a problem exists. There is no point in proposing a solution to a problem that no one acknowledges.
Second, it calls for leadership at all levels of the Church. In particular we need leaders at the grassroots who, working with and for the rank-and-file, can articulate and communicate a vision where God’s people are being led by the Spirit through the Gospel and the signs of the times.
Thirdly, such leadership requires moral courage; it is sorely lacking throughout the Church. What are we afraid of? Is it
- losing control, power, status?
- losing numbers if we challenge people?
- losing money if we lose numbers?
Are we afraid to challenge the obstacles in ourselves? – our complacency, our unwillingness to change, our identification of the status quo with God’s will, our laziness, our lack of imagination, our cynicism, our sheer bloody-minded inertia?