A review of Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity can save the Church, Paul Lakeland, Continuum, New York, 2007.
(The Furrow, September 2007, pp. 497-502)
‘The principal theme of this book is the need for “an open church in an open society”. (p.1) Catholics, clerical and lay, whose minds are closed and who wish them to stay that way, or who are happy to write off the church in the First World as lost, should hurl this book in the fire; reading it will only upset them.
Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity can save the Church is easy to read and to follow, nearly always fulfilling its pledge to be theology that laypeople can understand; the end is pre-figured in the means. Although it focuses substantially on the US, it may usefully be read by just about anyone, anywhere, in the church.
In several respects, the US church is healthier than the Irish. Although ‘there are more priests in the United States today over ninety years of age than there are under thirty’ (p.38), among Irish Capuchins, to take one example, there are more friars over eighty than under sixty, and that is not very far from the pattern among Irish clergy. In the US, there are 40,000 lay ecclesial ministers (p.41), while such ministry exists only minimally in Ireland.
Lakeland examines a question central to the book’s title: what is a layperson? He challenges readers to define the term without using the word not, e.g. a layperson is a Christian who is not ordained. He examines the issue in depth over several chapters and covers the ground well. He is surely right in saying that ‘a theology of orders has overshadowed the theology of baptism for much of the history of the church’ (p.43), and responds that it is in baptism, not in ordination, that we become a new creation. He has history on his side in pointing to the role of laypeople, especially women, in the fourth century in sustaining the church for a century when the bishops became Arian. (p.68), ‘A layperson’ he says,… [is] a baptized Christian, gifted by the Spirit with a responsibility for the mission of the church…. He or she is called to an active and responsible faith…’ (p.35) ‘Baptism is a call to ministry’. (p.114)
A re-assessment of the role of laypeople necessarily involves a re-assessment of the role of clergy. His way of doing this is challenging, but not confrontational. Rather than define laity in terms of priesthood, one might be tempted to define priesthood in terms of laity, ‘the ordained priesthood is evidently explicable only in relation to that of the baptized.’ (p.71) While true, Lakeland acknowledges that to leave it at that would merely turn the tables, so instead he suggests seeing both states as ministries to a community rooted in baptism: ‘ordination is ordination to the service of a particular community…. This relational approach offers the possibility of thinking of all ministry, including that of the ordained, as lasting only as long as the relationship to the community perdures’. (p.73) He is clear that priesthood is about relationships, not about an ontological “character” imprinted, or sealed. (Indeed, recourse to the ethereal ground of ontology is a frequent refuge of those unwilling to admit that their argument is unsustainable in interpersonal terms.) And this approach opens up ways to short-term priesthood. He adds, ‘if there is a common priesthood, there is also a common episcopacy and a common diaconate’. (p.74) That, too, has interesting possibilities, which should merit something better than dismissal, since, ‘the very different ministerial structure of the early church was presumably at least as much a reflection of the will of Christ as has been the later development between clergy and lay’. (p.72) ‘Apostles were not bishops. Peter was never bishop of Rome’. (p.110)
Lakeland does some plain speaking about what he calls the infantilization of the laity. ‘One of the endemic problems of the Catholic Church is its tendency toward the infantilization of its members’ (p.7), adding that ‘because of the oligarchic structure of the Catholic Church, claiming adulthood must always seem strident, if not actually subversive’. (p.9) He helpfully invokes history, ‘The very early church never talked about “laity” and “clergy”. Everyone was a part of the laos or “people” of God’. (p.28) ‘In the letters of Paul and the Gospels that followed, there is no hint of “clergy” and “laity” as we know them today’. (p.28) Those who continually beat the drum about a difference of kind, and not merely of degree, between the general priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood of the ordained are really only defending the institution while claiming to defend the faith. ‘Scholars disagree about just how early a clear distinction comes to be made between clergy and laity, though no one, as far as I know, is willing to date it before the second century’. (p.29) He quotes the late Yves Congar as suggesting that ‘we should stop talking about laypeople and clergy and talk instead of “different ministries”. (p.32)
Why is this an issue? Because ‘Where adults do not make their own decisions, they are either phantom adults or they live in a paternalistic culture in which adulthood is not really recognized’. (p.34) His statement that ‘The American Catholic Church today looks a lot like a family in which the parents are clinging desperately to the illusion that their children are still infants’ (p.46) applies no less elsewhere. The author is surely right in saying that, ‘It remains entirely possible… that the struggle for a more adult church will fail, at least for a time, and that the worst features of the present situation will become even more entrenched, while the congregation dwindles until it is only the passive and obedient few kneeling humbly in the pews of their masters’. (p.97) That is probably not far off in Ireland.
Related to the above are three other issues which he sees as mutually interlinked, namely, accountability, authority and credibility. Put simply, if a teaching lacks credibility, the invocation of authority over it is, at best, bound to fail. Teaching is likely to lack credibility if there isn’t accountability in its formulation. To be credible, accountability needs to be mutual, whereas in the church, ‘accountability is primarily understood in the… impoverished sense of obedience to a higher authority. [This] accountability operates only in one direction, upward…’ (p.50) Authority, he argues, is ‘a characteristic of the whole church’. (p.58) ‘The church has lost authority in a world that needs its leadership so much, because it has lost credibility’. (p.58) For instance, its ‘ethics of domesticity and sexuality have not persuaded good Catholics that it offers a liveable shape of life.’ (p.150) He describes the church as a benevolent despotism (p.104), but, truly, the despotism is more evident than the benevolence in denying condoms in Catholic clinics in AIDS-infested countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
It was a failure in accountability that allowed clerical sex abuse to go unchallenged for so long. ‘Credibility is something we acquire… through the transparency of our practice of accountability’ (p.50), and ‘Respect follows from the credibility that is based on the public practice of accountability. Anything else simply enables dysfunctional behaviour’. (p.51) He suggests looking at accountability in terms of family relationships, or, better, of relationships between husband and wife, a working paradigm of communio.
One obstacle to this is clericalism: for instance, it is laypeople who have the experience of marriage and family life but it is clergy who formulate the doctrine. ‘… clericalism is sinful…. It divides the church into two classes of people, where one has voice in the church and one has not’. (p.66) Lakeland, however, does not recognize that some of the most clericalist people you could meet are laypeople, and that clergy, too, may be victims of ecclesial power structures and power games, and as helpless as laypeople to change them. What influence on decision-making in the church does an ordinary priest have? Lakeland is surely right to say that ‘whatever impedes our full humanity is sinful because it impedes the will of God.’ (p.66) He is realistic in saying that ‘it is exceedingly rare that an elite in any society will freely give up its hold on power’ (p.82), and, ‘this institutional element, at least in the Catholic tradition, has a history of overstepping its bounds, identifying the church with its own imperatives’ (p.85), and is right in saying that ‘leaders [are]… unable to trust the knowledge and judgment of the great mass of the faithful’. (p.91) This lack of trust is key to most of our problems.
The author writes in a catholic spirit: ‘Orthodoxy is roomy enough for most liberals and most conservatives’ (p.4), and ‘Conser-vatives forget that traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Liberals overlook the truth that tradition is the living faith of the dead’. (pp.37-38) To love people while disagreeing them is indeed the challenge. ‘No one can be assured that they are right… not those who want change nor those who want things kept exactly as they are. But there is undoubtedly a tendency in church circles to think that the latter group, let’s call them the “default Catholics”, need no defence of their position’. (p.13) He sees a re-awakened sense of Catholic exclusivism parading itself as orthodoxy, commenting: ‘Catholic exclusivism does not derive from a strong sense of identity but from a weak structure of communication. The tendency towards exclusion is more commonly a sign of insecurity than confidence’. (p.92)
So where does Lakeland go from there? He acknowledges two real and pertinent problems: the first is that ‘our… leaders are either too blind or too fearful to see that it is within their power to act in the pastoral interest of the… church…’ (p.95) But the second, what he calls the ecclesial Catch-22, trips us up even before we start: ‘How can we remake the church as a more open community when it is not sufficiently open to be able to hear the voices calling for a more open community?’ (p.93) He responds to this difficulty by listing, in chapter seven, ten steps towards a more adult church. They are all good and welcome, but how likely is it that they will be accepted? He is surely right in saying that ‘there are currently no signs that one iota of true responsibility is likely to be passed to the laity. Those who hold the reins of leadership grasp them ever more firmly.’ (p.108) Instead of structure serving mission, mission is made to serve structure. (p.107)
Still, without being Pollyannish, Lakeland struggles to find hope. Present pains, he says, are growing pains. (p.39) ‘In the next twenty years… lay ministers will come to outnumber the ranks of the clergy. With this demographic shift will inevitably come the pressure to scrutinize the nature of ministry and the differences, real and imagined, between priestly and lay ministry’. (p.41) This will bring structural change because, ‘You cannot build a culture of ministry simply on an appeal to voluntarism’. (p.115) ‘The laity [will]… carry out the mission entrusted to the church by God. The ordained as ordained assist in that mission’. (p.125) He sees married clergy operating in a parochial team while working in ordinary civil employment. (p.98) And the mission of laypeople will be to the world more than to the church, ‘the church was thought of as bringing salvation to its members through their faithful membership, rather than reaching out to the world in faithfulness to its God-given mission’ (p.128), but ‘a layperson is a Christian baptized into mission to the world beyond the church’. (p.125) ‘The church is there not just for its members; in fact, it is more properly there for what its members can do for those who are not its members’. (p.115) How good it is that Lakeland says, ‘The church exists for the sake of the world, not for itself’. (p.105) How much more catholic that is than the statement, ‘The world was created for the sake of the church,’ and ‘The church is the goal of all things.’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n.760.)
How will such a mission express itself? ‘The battle between religious and secular worldviews is not in the end about whether God exists or not, but about what it means to be a human being’. (p.140) Drawing on Viktor Frankl, Lakeland says that ‘with the decline of the old common culture we have moved into a kind of vacuum in which people typically choose to do what everyone else does or to do what someone tells them to do’. (p.157) ‘That our culture is no longer Christian is a fact of our pluralistic world and not ultimately critical. But that our culture is in many ways anti-human, this is a call to arms for Christians’. (p.157) There is here an agenda for Christians to work for with non-Christians marshalling our forces in defence of the human. (see p.163) And it is good that he says, ‘more action and less talk might accomplish quite a lot’. (p.158) ‘What is a human being? A child of God whom God loves unconditionally, whose home is here in the world that God created and knows to be good, and with whom God restored a broken relationship through God’s son, Jesus Christ’. (p.159) And, ‘Sin is the failure to be what God wants us to be’. (p.160)
Is any of Lakeland’s project likely to happen? Like many others written in the post-Vatican II period, Lakeland’s book sparkles with perceptive comment, with good ideas, with hope, with practical and positive suggestions, with understanding towards those he disagrees with, and yet perhaps it is destined to be ignored by a hierarchy which seems neither to want such views nor to recognize the need for them. Yet if we truly believe that communion is ‘the essential characteristic of the church’ (p.33), ‘if God is fundamentally interpersonal, how can the church be anything else?’ (p.54) should we not give such ideas a fair hearing? Historically, ‘first the church was democratic, then it became oligarchic, only to find its way to monarchy’. (p.70) If the mantra “the church is not a democracy” ‘means that the church is not structured in such a way that all its members participate in celebrating its present and making its future, then more’s the pity’. (p.101)
Will Catholicism at the Crossroads make any difference? Time was when what used to be called ‘ the apostolate of the laity’ was described with mordant wit as ‘the interference of the laity in the lethargy of the hierarchy’. Rome currently seems occupied with issues such as the restoration of “sacral” language, and with placating the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre by extending the use of the 1962 Latin missal. This would seem to illustrate Lakeland’s view that ‘episcopal leadership does not live in the same world as the rest of us’. (p.120) Is anyone at “the top” listening? ‘Roman restorationism of the past quarter of a century has returned us institutionally to where we were before Vatican II’. (p.56) Cardinal Wiseman of Westminster once asked, ‘Does the church really need the laity?’ and Cardinal Newman answered, ‘It wouldn’t be much of a church without them, would it?’ Wiseman appears to have been in the ascendant in recent decades.
Perhaps a better way forward would be to think and to step outside the ‘church’ box, and look rather to the New Testament model of the kingdom of God, one which – strangely – Lakeland hardly mentions.