The article below was a follow-up to “A Candle in the Darkness”. It was better received than anything I’ve written before or since. In Mangango, I received letters from men and women, religious and lay, from Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia, all strongly supportive. The one that moved me most was from an 85-year-old Irish Augustinian living in Rome, who said he had been reading The Furrow since it began publication and that this article was the best he had read in that time. The Irish Religious Press Association awarded the article its prize for the best article in 1994.
In addition, the article was reproduced in an Australian clerical journal called The Swag, and in CrossCurrents, the journal of the (US) Association for Religion and Intellectual Life (Winter 1994/95). Then Michael Gill, of the publishing house of Gill & Macmillan, wrote asking me if I would expand it in to a book. I agreed, and that became The Silent Schism: Renewal of Catholic Spirit and Structures, Dublin, 1997, (ISBN 0 7171 2560 2).
Perhaps I should have named it The Silent Schisms, as there is more than one.
(The Furrow, January 1994, pp.3-10)
There is a silent schism in the Church. Although no Martin Luther is dramatically nailing 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg church while declaiming, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other!’, believers are slipping away quietly in many varied ways and for different reasons, without making a fuss or hitting the headlines. They are not doing so because they have lost faith in God but because they have lost hope in the Church.
This schism takes various forms. The young, for their part, do not have a sense of Catholic identity, and the attempt to forge one around a restoration of the ecclesiastical ancien régime means nothing to them. They are not switched off; they were never switched on in the first place. Nostalgia for the pre-conciliar past provides them with no agenda for the future. And so they go, directionless, carried off by a popular culture without content or substance.
Married Catholics
Married Catholics, for the most part, have quietly made their own decisions about the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae of Paul VI. They ignore it, and it’s a pity that they do, because there is a great deal of good in it. By placing the responsibility for family planning on the shoulders of husband and wife together, it affirms the principle of sexual equality. By urging people to know, respect, and cooperate with that part of nature that is most intimate to them, namely, their own bodies, it is proposing a green approach to a challenge sometimes tackled with an intrusive and less than human technology. And by affirming the link between the unitive and procreative aspects of sex, it offers a holistic view of human sexuality.
But the encyclical makes an absolute of its position, and this has obscured its value for many Catholics. (Absolutizing the relative is a long-standing Catholic failing, with future generations less to sort out the mess: witness ‘outside the Church no salvation.’ Church leaders insist that Humanae Vitae is not merely the best way, but the only moral way, of facing the challenge of family planning. To do otherwise is to commit sin: ‘each and every marital act must remain open to the transmission of life.’
In recent years, the present pope [John Paul II] has carried this process a step further by hinting repeatedly that Humanae Vitae is an infallible statement. Those hints point to the heart of the matter: the issue is one of papal authority. When Paul VI presented Humanae Vitae as official teaching, it seems he was persuaded that, to do otherwise might be seen as turning away from the position of Pius XI in his 1930 encyclical letter on Christian marriage, Casti Connubii, which emphatically rejected the idea of family planning (perhaps because the Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops had just approved it.) For one pope to appear to go against another was seen as unacceptable because it would undermine papal authority. So, for the sake, it seems, of upholding a particular view of papal authority, Humanae Vitae was promulgated with all the sacrifices it involved for those who tried to uphold it, and with pain and anxiety for those who could not.
If it is true that this was the reasoning, it means that the basis of decision-making shifted from morals to church politics, or, even worse, to saving face. But this rebounded badly when people did not, in general, follow the encyclical. The end result was a loss of papal authority more severe than anything that would have followed a revision of Casti Connubii. (Was Vatican II’s decree on ecumenism not a very substantial revision of Pius XI’s encyclical on ecumenism, Mortalium Animos?) When truth is subordinated to political calculation, credibility disappears, and, it must be said, deserves to disappear.
Women
Another distinctly alienated group in the Church is made up of women, whether married, single, or religious. A great many women – not only young, educated, middle-class Western “libbers” – but also the elderly and Third World women feel themselves excluded from all but the traditional roles of Kinder, Küche und Kirche, as the Germans put it (loosely translatable as children, chores and church). It is not only the rejection of the ordination of women to the priesthood – an issue that probably does not greatly concern more than a few – but rather that the Church is patriarchal. Women are given to understand that they have no rights but that, if they ask nicely, some concessions may be made and privileges granted. Women today do not accept such an attitude, nor is there any good reason why they should.
Likewise religious sisters are alienated, a fact which becomes clear to anyone who takes the trouble to enquire. Many religious women have stopped listening to Church leadership because it doesn’t listen to them. Communication is a two-way street, not a cul de sac. The great awakening of hope in religious women after Vatican II that, at last, however belatedly, they might find a voice in the Church, has given way to disillusionment and cynicism. And cynicism is the product of despair. There is no one as pessimistic as a disappointed optimist and the convents of the Church have many of the latter. It is not surprising, therefore, that, in such an environment, vocations to the sisterhood have taken a steep and prolonged drop. They will not be revived by attempts to revise the status quo ante Vatican II. The way ahead lies forward, not backward.
Priests
Among the priests of the Church there is also an undercurrent of unrest which focuses on, but is not confined to, the issues of the law on clerical celibacy and the appointment of bishops. On the first of these, there is a widespread realization that the problems associated with celibacy are not acknowledged, much less faced. There isn’t an honest recognition that a problem exists. Attempts to open up discussion on the subject are stifled to the accompaniment of expressions of doubt about the loyalty to the Church of those who raise the issue, or, at times, about their personal commitment to celibacy. In a similar fashion, the official response, when scandals occur, is to cover them up rather than clean them up.
The reason behind the official stonewalling on the law about celibacy probably has little to do with doctrine since there is, in fact, no doctrinal obstacle to a married clergy, but rather to the fact that a married clergy would cost more than a celibate one, and also be less amenable to episcopal control in matters such as transfers. Money and power have more to do with the law on celibacy than doctrine or tradition.
It should be clear to anyone who is willing to look reality in the face that, in many parts of the Church, both in the New World and in the Old, the number of priests is critically insufficient for present, much less future, needs of the Church. The pastoral care of the present Church in terms of the Mass and the sacraments, and the growth of the future Church are being sacrificed on the altar of an ecclesiastical law. This not evangelical celibacy for the sake of the Kingdom (Mt.19:12); rather is it the Kingdom for the sake of a law on celibacy.
In regard to the appointment of bishops there has been a steady tightening of the screws of bureaucratic centralism. Processes of consultation of any and every kind have been severely eroded so that, by now, the standard procedure is to present the people and the priests of a diocese with a fait accompli, the acceptance of which is then made a test of loyalty. Such a manner of proceeding severely strains the very loyalty on which it rests.
Together with the manner of appointment is the theological make-up of the appointees. There appears to be, by now, an established practice of choosing only conservative candidates, of whom some are simply reactionary, and whose programme is to put back the hands of the clock. The result is that the episcopate increasingly represents not the Church but a faction within it, and faction is schism.
Bishops themselves are experiencing a sense of being excluded from decision-making in the Church. In some cases, far from being consulted, they are not so much as informed, even after the event, of decisions taken by the Vatican about their dioceses. One example of this is when the Vatican authorized the use, in some dioceses, of the pre-1969 Latin Mass, and the bishops concerned were left to find out about it from the grapevine. Another is the fact that some bishops, on retirement at age 75, or on transfer to another diocese, were not consulted about possible successors. It is as if their opinions were not worth asking for. Or the case of the bishop who, while listening to the radio when on holidays, discovered that he had been transferred to another diocese. Yet another example is the manner in which the Synod of Bishops is conducted. Representatives chosen by episcopal conferences can be, and sometimes are, vetoed either by the Synod secretariat or by nuncios. In the Synod itself, opinions expressed carry little weight unless they conform to the line set out before the Synod began. For example, the 1980 Synod of Christian marriage and family life voted by a large majority that groups of episcopal conferences be authorized to determine some of the criteria for validity of marriage in their regions. The post-synodal apostolic exhortation – supposedly based on the Synod’s discussion – ignored the vote entirely.
What adds to these problems is that attempts to discuss them openly in the Church are treated as acts of disloyalty. There are virtually no channels within the Church for such discussion. Obedience is equated with passivity as if problems will disappear by suppressing or ignoring them. And all this takes place while the Vatican continues to speak of communio as a key element of relationships within the Church! There is a failure, or an unwillingness, to grasp that communio required communication, and that communication, of its very nature, requires a two-way flow of information and ideas.
The silent schism in the Church is not about doctrine; it is about power. Essentially it is a conflict between two views of how power should be exercised in the Church. The first view, which is the dominant one in the Vatican at present, is best expressed in the old slogan: Roma locuta est, causa finita est. (Rome has spoken, the matter is closed). The second is found in Paul VI’s first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, in which he presented power as an exercise in dialogue. In summary, it is a conflict between power as dictation and power as dialogue.
Power as Dictation
From a Christian perspective, the exercise of power as dictation is wrong in principle and self-defeating in practice. It is a sad commentary on the way the Church has developed in recent years that to argue that something is wrong in principle is unlikely to make an impact. What will be listened to is the pragmatic argument that it doesn’t work. That such a situation can exist in the Church itself illustrates the destructive consequences of the hunger for power.
The self-defeating nature of the exercise of power as dictation can be seen from the way in many large and significant bodies of people within the Church and without have been alienated from it by its refusal to enter into open dialogue on some of the pressing questions of the time. To name only a few, the conservation movement has been alienated by Rome’s de facto commitment to rapid population growth; democratic liberals, while rejoicing in the collapse of one-party states in eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, experience no joy in the re-emergence of a one-theology Church bound together by rigid centralized control; those who welcomed the easing of political censorship in many parts of the world see the re-imposition of ecclesiastical censorship through bans on teaching, travel, and publishing; and Church leaders in Third World countries experience the imposition on them of a Western model of Church in everything from seminary systems to alternative ministries to inculturation, the Roman view of the latter seeming to be that it’s a great idea as long as no one applies it.
One consequence of this is that many groups outside the Church who were listening sympathetically to what the Church had to say in the years after Vatican II now no longer expect anything of it and have stopped listening. The last fifteen years of the Church’s life will be seen by history as a time of lost opportunities, or rather of opportunities thrown away.
Why is this happening? What has brought it about? Part of the answer would seem to be that there is in the Vatican a restoration of the pre-conciliar view of the Church and the world. This view emphasizes the static rather than the dynamic or evolutionary, the hierarchic rather than the democratic, uniformity rather than diversity, and centralization rather than local autonomy. Mistrustful of people lest they abuse freedom, the Vatican reacts by trying to make people do what is right rather than take the risk of trusting them to choose what is right. Fearful lest it lose control, it tightens its bureaucratic grip and regards this strategy as successful when there is no overt revolt. The heart of the matter is the fear of losing power; this fear is rationalized and justified in terms of a theology of authority.
But the world has seen all of this before; it has seen it in every decaying empire. There is a price to be paid for the apparent success in re-asserting centralized control. It was hinted at by Arthur Schlesinger when he wrote that those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. But that is only one possibility. Another is to have stagnation, and call it stability, while yet another is that people quietly go their own way, making their decisions conscientiously and without fuss, leaving those at the centre in a vacuum, talking only to themselves. And that is what is happening in the Church at present.
This development is not all bad. In fact, by way of reaction, it may open the way to a better direction for the Church in the future.
There is an historical analogy which may be helpful in understanding the present situation. Just over 120 years ago, the Vatican saw it as indispensable for the freedom of the papacy to maintain the papal states, and it clung to them in the face of the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian re-unification. When the French garrison protecting Rome withdrew at the start of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the Italian army moved in. Italy was re-united and the papacy found itself isolated. It responded by shutting itself off from Italy in a 60-year-long sulk. Rather than trust people (in this case the Italians) the papacy had put its faith in an institution which was an anachronism. The result was that it lost both ways, both the papal states and the loyalty of a large segment of the Italian people. The seduction of power (illusory though it was) proved too strong and overcame those who argued for an act of trust in ordinary people.
The “loss” of the papal states turned out to be no loss, but a blessing. Freed from the demands, and the politicking, of civil administration, the papacy was able to fulfil its Christ-given pastoral role as a focus of unity in the Church. There must be very few people, if any, who would today look for a return of the papal states to the church.
Centralization
The situation in the Church today is not dissimilar. The Vatican seeks to concentrate power in its own hands, and to regulate anything and everything in the Church by centralized control. It has, quite frankly, over-reached itself, and the law of diminishing returns has begun to apply: the more sweeping its claims, the less the rest of the Church listens. As people of all sorts in the Church are alienated by the renewed authoritarianism of the Vatican, and its refusal to listen to them, they are finding their own solutions. Without revolt, without leaving the Church, and generally without rancour or bitterness they are looking elsewhere to find their way. With others, Catholic, Protestant, and unbelievers, too, they are engaged in a dialogue to give their life direction, meaning, and purpose. They have learned that the Vatican is not the Church, and the Church is not the Kingdom, but God and conscience have priority.
The result may be that the Vatican will lose the kind of power that it has accumulated since Vatican I. That “loss” would be like the “loss” of the papal states, in other words, not a loss but a gain. The Vatican bureaucracy would indeed lose its power and control, but that would not be a loss to the Church. The Jews, after all, have managed for 5,000 years without a Jerusalem curia. The papacy would be freed from its present role (which has no evangelical mandate) as super-administrator of a multi-national conglomerate all too beholden to the subtle seduction of power and money. The pope could again become Peter, not a chairman of the board, but someone who strengthens his brothers, a motivator, a unifier, a bridge-builder, a servant of the servants of God.
Is that too much to hope for? A Christian should dare to hope. Those many people (probably indeed the great majority) who had despairingly accepted, until a few years ago, that the Soviet Union would just keep grinding on relentlessly now have reason to feel somewhat ashamed of their lack of hope, of their failure to have courage. Miracles do happen. If they can happen in as fossilized an institution as the Soviet Union surely they can happen in the Catholic Church which, after all, has not completely lost the capacity for self-criticism, however uncertain and hesitant it might be.
Power as Dialogue
The way forward would seem to lie in the exercise of power as dialogue and the firm renunciation of power as dictation. ‘Dialogue should be as universal as we can make it,’ wrote Paul VI, adding that people, whether religious or not, are enabled by their secular education to think and to speak and to conduct a dialogue with dignity. He asked for a dialogue characterized by charity, meekness, trust and prudence. The re-emergence of such a spirit of dialogue is an indispensable condition for the restoration of communio in the Church. Without dialogue, the schism will widen and deepen; with it, all things are possible.
But this dialogue requires courage, especially moral courage, and there is little of that in the Church at present. If it true that power corrupts, it is also true that fear corrupts even more. And there is much fear in the Church. People are afraid to speak their minds; many, especially Church leaders, have “prudently” assessed which way the wind is blowing and have trimmed their sails accordingly, knowing well that everyone loves a winner while the heroic loser invites only mockery until the tables are turned, when all profess admiration for his farsightedness and courage, and assert that they were really on his side all along. Such “prudence” is not a cardinal virtue but a clerical vice.
The atmosphere in the Church has soured: where there was trust, there is now cynicism and defensiveness; where there was hope there is now timidity, lack of imagination, and narrowness of vision; where there was a willingness to listen and learn there is now the triumphalistic insistence that the Church is right, always has been right and always will be right; where there was loyalty there is now mere subservience to the party line.
But while there is Christ, there is hope. The situation can change for the better, especially where people have the courage to speak the truth and damn the consequences.
Why rock the boat? Because it’s stuck in the mud. When the barque of Peter is rocked hard enough and often enough, it can be loosened from the mud to float on the high seas of freedom.