I am very pleased to publish, with the author’s permission, this brilliant speech on Catholic Church Reform delivered by Robert Blair Kaiser in Ireland on August 19, 2010.
It is jam-packed with relevant history and offers hope for the future. It presents substantial raw materials for the tough task of real church reform.
I invite you to let me know what you think of Kaiser’s ideas through use of this blog’s comment capability.
* * *
CATHOLIC CHURCH REFORM: NO MORE THRONES
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
THE HUMBERT SUMMER SCHOOL
The Harlequin Hotel, Castlebar, County Mayo
August 19, 2010
Robert Blair Kaiser
I love the Irish. I love you for your smiling Irish eyes, for your impish sense of humor, for your great gift of gab, for the poetry in your souls, for the intelligence and the beauty of your women.
I must confess that I always fall in love with Irish girls. My three children are half Irish — and they have smiling Irish eyes, an impish sense of humor, the gift of gab, and poetry in their souls. They have also generated some beautiful young children, much like them.
I also love you for your revolutionary spirit.
When John Cooney invited me to speak at this, your 24th annual jamboree of ideas, I knew I would be among my own kind, speaking in the memory and honour of the French General, Jean Humbert, who landed here in County Mayo in 1798 to assist Irish rebels against the English.
Our kinship comes from our histories. My country was born in revolt against English tyranny when we won our freedom and founded our nation in 1776. At least a century and a half before our revolution, you revolted against England. You lost many a battle before you finally won the freedom you have today.
This is another thing I love about the Irish: you don’t quit.
This is important, because your struggle for freedom today needs men and women with staying power, and, of course, faith, hope, charity–and a sense of humour.
When I speak about your struggle for freedom, I am not talking about your freedom from British tyranny. I am talking about your struggle against another colonializing power that perhaps you never quite thought of as a colonializing power.
I am talking about the modern papacy, Rome and the pope, who has so much in common with your historic British overlords.
Until the Copernican revolution, monarchs exercised absolute control over their subjects by divine right. But when the peoples of the world, informed by a new cosmology, put the divine right of kings into history’s dustbin, they forgot to toss the divine right of popes into the garbage, too. As a consequence, the popes have been getting away with this “divine right” nonsense for too long, since long after thinking Catholics knew it was nonsense.
I am not attacking our Catholic faith. I am talking about the special and corrosive tyranny that popes have been exercising over Catholics everywhere, and, dating back to the middle of the 19th century, over Ireland’s Catholics (who were then too unformed and too uninformed to offer much resistance).
From 1849 to 1878, Paul Cullen, Ireland’s first cardinal, built a clerical Irish Church that marched in total loyalty to Rome and his own overreaching authority. But, as you know, an overreaching authority is not real, natural authority, like the authority a good father has with his children. Natural authority helps people grow. Artificial authority knocks people down; it scares them.
Dublin’s Archbishop John Charles McQuaid fine-tuned Cardinal Cullen’s lordly model. From 1940 to his retirement in 1972, McQuaid imposed his iron will on Irish politics and on Irish society, instilling fear of his disfavor in the clergy and, in the people, fear for their eternal salvation.
Cullen constructed and McQuaid consolidated a two-tiered clericalist system in the Church, with free men (the holy priests) on the upper deck, and below in steerage class, the slaves (the sinful laity) who were never allowed to ask an impertinent question, like, “Father, are you fooking my little Tom?”
They established the clerical culture in Ireland that Judge Yvonne Murphy identified as the root cause of the Irish scandal that has sent your nation reeling.
According to Judge Murphy’s report, four successive archbishops of Dublin, McQuaid, Dermot Ryan, Kevin McNamara, and Cardinal Desmond Connell, failed to tell the police that priests were abusing children, often the poorest of your nation’s children. Clerics were able to do their dirty deeds in secret, compelled in no way to give an accounting to the people they were purportedly serving. If the families of the abused children complained, they were punished, or bought off in return for their silence.
The irony is that when the cover came off, we found that the bishops had been hiding the truth to preserve the reputation of the clerical caste. John Cooney summed things up in an analysis for the Irish Independent. “In the public revulsion and shame accompanying the state investigations into Ferns, the religious orders, and now the Archdiocese of Dublin, Irish society has been stunned by the collapse of the credibility and moral authority of bishops.” He might have added, but it had not yet been proven, that the bishops covered up as a matter of policy set by the Vatican under the direction of one Joseph Ratzinger.*
That news made previous calls for Papa Ratzinger to deal with the causes of the situation look fatuous. He hasn’t addressed himself to the causes (which have everything to do with the two-tiered, upper-deck, lower-deck clericalism that once struck fear in your hearts). He hasn’t even come close. Yes, in his Apostolic Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he did apologize — with hollow words.
The most significant actions of Benedict’s papacy so far have had nothing to do with his priests and bishops: he has set in motion two investigations of American nuns, one of them a doctrinal inquiry by the pope’s heresy-hunting department. Will this be the pope’s Final Solution to the problem of his uppity American nuns? Condemnation by the Holy Office of the Inquisition? (In my humble opinion, our nuns, the bravest, most generous Jesus-people in the universe, should be investigating the Vatican.)
Oh yes. The pope has taken some action in Ireland. He is sending nine legates here this autumn to fix what his minions are now delicately referring to as la situazione.
One of the legates, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, has bragged that His Holiness wants to fix Ireland — by taking its Catholics back to the upper-deck, lower-deck system of Cullen and McQuaid.
That system isn’t working. It wasn’t working a hundred years ago. It wasn’t working in 1959, when Pope John XXIII called a Council to update the Church. (I am tempted to say, “to democratize” the Church, because that is what the bishops tried to do, give the Church back to the people.)
At Vatican II, a 2000 to 200 majority of bishops, – ten to one – redefined the Church as “the people of God.” That hit at the heart of papal absolutism. In effect, the Council Fathers said to us: “The Pope is not the Church. Your bishop is not the Church. You are the Church. Believe in your Church. Believe in yourselves.”
They were saying the exact opposite of what Pius Ninth announced during the 1870 debate on papal infallibility at Vatican I. During that debate one of his aides came to him and pointed out that infallibility was “not in the Church’s tradition.”
Pio Nono said, Traditio sono Io. Io sono la chiesa. No one had ever expressed papal absolutism quite so clearly: “I am tradition. I am the Church.”
I was privileged to chronicle the historic reversal of that attitude when I covered Vatican II for Time magazine in the 1960s. I watched Popes John XXIII and then Paul VI, more than 2,000 bishops and almost as many theologians, begin to rethink everything that generations of Catholics had taken for granted.
They worked out a new charter to return ‘the People of God’ to a more simple Christianity. Almost overnight, the Church discovered a new view of what it could be –- and should be: more democratic, more pluralistic, more free, more human, more humble in the face of history. The Council’s charter made the Church less Roman, and more catholic; less a Church of laws, more a Church of love.
The idea was to help people, not hurt them; stop frightening them with a list of “thou shalt nots”, and start emphasizing the Good News of Christ. The Council saw the world as essentially good, because it was redeemed by Christ – and would continue to be redeemed by our ongoing Jesus-witness for justice and peace.
When the Council’s editors sifted the final draft of its landmark document on “The Church in the Modern World,” they paused over its opening words — Luctus et angor, “grief and anxiety.” Was this the proper way to start their manifesto, with the words “grief and anxiety?” No. They did one of those quick editorial fixes that anyone who has worked in the word business can only consider inspired. They moved the words Luctus et angor aside and inserted the words Gaudium et Spes — “joy and hope.” They were exactly the right words to set the tone not only for this document, but for the entire Council.
But what had really changed? Nothing, except the way these editors chose to look at the document and then strike a new chord for a new kind of Church.
Unfortunately, many bishops returned home so deaf to the new joyous chord that they failed to convey its message of hope. Archbishop McQuaid promised his people in Dublin that, after the Council, “nothing will change.”
Pope Paul VI seemed to go deaf, too. He had championed the Council’s new charter for a people’s Church. He had put his blessing on the work of John XXIII’s birth control commission but he pulled back when advisors in his Curia warned him that, if he accepted its conclusions for a change in the birth control rule, he would lose his moral authority.
Paul VI took the Curia’s advice — and lost his moral authority.
Paul VI’s two successors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI took the Vatican II libretto in hand but wrote their own revised musical score for it, losing the new tone struck in Gaudium et Spes.
To keep absolute control, they did everything they could to make the Church less human and more severe; more a Church of laws than a Church of love, more Roman and less Catholic.
Vatican II proclaimed that Christ had to have an African face in Africa and an Asian face in Asia. John Paul II didn’t get it. He frowned at efforts in Africa to create an enculturated African Church in Africa. In a dozen trips during his papacy, he wasn’t promoting the face of an African Jesus so much as he was selling Africans a commodity, papal celebrity: the Pope as hero, the Pope as God.
John Paul II also vetoed attempts by Americans to incorporate important elements of American culture–democracy and freedom and equality–into their American Church. Those Catholic thinkers who might have guided that adaptation most tellingly–for example, some American Jesuits mentored by the Jesuit John Courtney Murray–pulled back in fear–once they discovered that the Pope and Cardinal Ratzinger had set key American bishops to the task of watching them.
Those bishops were John Paul II-bishops, more Roman than Catholic. They did what John Paul told them to do: they silenced independent voices in the Church, tried to make women who felt they had priestly vocations into heretics, and used the threat of excommunication to intimidate Americans in political life.
And they drove people out of the Church. Some 80 percent of American Catholics do not go to Mass much any more. I understand the numbers are pretty close to that in Ireland, where almost all of your young people and many of your women of all ages say they have “left the Church.”
What have I said so far? That, for a thousand years, popes have promoted a clerical Church instead of a Jesus-Church, that the Fathers of Vatican II worked for four serious years to give the Church back to the people, and that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI spent the next thirty years repealing their labor, a move that has left our Church, which is Christ’s body on earth, broken.
Who will fix this broken Church?
Who can? We can. It is our Church.
We can fix it in four ways.
The first way, we don’t have to do a thing. In fact, we have already taken a radical, giant step to fix the dysfunctional hierarchical system — by ignoring it. In effect, we are making much of the pyramid’s base disappear. As a result, the hierarchy is now running in some kind of imaginary space, like Wile E. Coyote chasing the roadrunner off the edge of the mesa. I wonder how long before our bishops, in the U.S. and in Ireland, realize they are out there, somewhere in space, atop an ecclesiastical pyramid that exists no longer?
Maybe they will never know. Many bishops are dumber than seven horses. For the past 40 years, no amount of lobbying, no number of petitions by the world’s largest lay organizations, no brilliant theological persuasion has moved a single lord bishop to become a servant bishop.
It seems to me we have three other choices.
1. We can join any one of a number of Protestant Churches. Millions of Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, have done this over the years because they prefer to be part of a worshipping Jesus-community that is local, charismatic, and intuitive, one that relies heavily on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Psychologically speaking, however, it may be hard for lifelong Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, to do that. I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s very un-ecumenical one-liner after he announced his apostasy and was asked if he would now become a Protestant: “Madam, I have lost my faith. I haven’t lost my mind.”
2. We can create our own wing of the Church, one that is Catholic in doctrine but strong on freedom and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, much as the Apostles and their followers did after Pentecost. We can re-create the kind of community that existed in the first century–a brotherhood and sisterhood of Jesus-people who meet periodically in small groups to break bread together in prayer, hooking up with a growing “house-Church” movement that is drawing in more and more Catholics worldwide.
These home-Church people are saying that early followers of Jesus didn’t need the chief priests and the elders of the temple, and that modern Catholics do not need the hierarchy today. In one sense, they are right. In another very practical sense, they would be leaving the entire Catholic infrastructure (all of our churches and hospitals and schools) into the hands of the bishops and the pray-pay-and-obey passive Catholics who do not seem to care about the tremendous witness for justice and peace that 1.2 billion Catholics can make in the world.
3. A third alternative would put Catholicism more at the service of the world (and make it a happier place for thinking Catholics). We can work for a home-grown, enculturated, autochthonous Church of the people.
Aw-what? Well, autochthony (aw-TOCK-thu-knee) is a fifteen dollar Greek word that literally means “from the ground up” or “home grown” or “local” and it is the opposite of another, rather more ugly, Greek word, “schism.”
I use the word a lot in my novel Cardinal Mahony, which is really an action plan for the future of the Church disguised as a novel. My characters have a lot of fun with the word autochthony. They see the concept as a decentralizing solution to the major problem of the Church today, its two-tier system run by clerics for clerics, and by a pope who think of himself as an absolute ruler ruling absolutely. Papa Ratzinger is a perfect personification of Lord Acton’s immortal words, “All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The Roman Church is only one of 21 autochthonous Churches under the Catholic umbrella. The Melkites and the Maronites, originally of Lebanon, and the Chaldeans are autochthonous Churches that operate in union with Rome. They have their own elected patriarchs, their own elected bishops, their own priests (some ordained, some not), their own liturgies in their own languages, and their own customs. But they are all Catholics. Chaldean Rite Catholics have a history that predates the Roman Rite. And the very presence of these autochthonous Churches under the Catholic umbrella celebrates a very human aspect of the Church: it can be, and is, different in different lands, part of the local culture, and emblematic of the freedom our faith should give us. We do not have to all march in lockstep.
An Irish declaration of autochthony will challenge your priest-people and your people-people to work out a constitution for the Irish Church that carefully puts aside the Rome-based secretive, half-vast, culturally-conditioned, legalisms codified in canon law in return for the kind of servant Church envisioned at Vatican II.
How might autochthony work in Ireland? You could demand the Irish bishops get the hell out of your cathedrals (your cathedrals, not their cathedrals) while you elect your own bishops to limited terms of office. They would serve the people as listeners not lords, and meet periodically in a Senate of Bishops alongside the elected members of a separate House of the People. Both bodies, the Senate of Bishops and the House of the People, will check and balance each other. They will conduct the business of your Irish Church not in private but in open sessions with press and broadcast coverage, making them accountable to the people who elected them, not to the pope.
You could elect your own representatives to every diocesan board and commission and committee, particularly the finance committees, which will all have active, not merely consultative voice. You could have similar elections to every committee in every parish, whose parishioners will select their own pastors from a list of priest candidates. You can take care of the so called priest shortage by finally admitting that women are not “defective males” according to the scientific analysis of St Thomas Aquinas, and recognize that in your Irish autochthonous Church, you can ordain anyone whom God calls to ministry in the Church.
You could write a constitution that makes these moves mandatory, by consent of the governed. And, while you are at it, you would have to make some provision for two other branches of Church governance: 1) for courts, including a supreme court (because, wherever men and woman gather, disputes arise that must be settled by a refereed dialogue), and 2) for the election of a president or chief operating officer who will head the executive branch of your Irish Church–because the buck always has to stop somewhere.
You will still have bishops, but they will be your own elected bishops, accountable in a Church of, by and for the people–even young people who may come flocking back to the Church once they realize they have a voice and a vote and citizenship in their own Church.
Can you help create a people’s Church? You can if you want to. In this context, I like to quote Pope John Paul II. In 1978, he traveled to Warsaw and told millions of Poles, “You can take back your country if you demand it.” You could be saying the same thing. “We can take back our Church if we demand it.” The Poles were fighting against long odds –-the military might of the Soviet Union itself. But they won their battle.
We face long odds in the battle for our own home-grown Churches – against the thousand-year-old entrenched power of the Vatican. But only bullies go into fights where they know they will win. It is fun going against the odds, and even more fun if we finally win a battle that no one expected us to win.
In the United States, almost one hundred years after our Declaration of Independence from England, women still did not have the right to vote. So a small group of American women launched a campaign with the U.S. Congress to amend the U.S. Constitution. Conservative Southern senators opposed them. But that didn’t stop these intrepid women. If they couldn’t get to the U.S. Senate, they decided to go to the leaders of our 48 states, an infinitely more painful route that ultimately worked. But not until they had given many a speech and made many a demonstration and been thrown into many a jail. They launched 480 campaigns to get state legislatures to submit voting rights amendments to their people, 47 campaigns to get constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include planks in their platforms that included the right for
a woman to vote; 30 campaigns to get the parties to include similar planks in their party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses. Until finally – in 1920 – they got their right to vote into the U.S. Constitution. That fight took seventy years.
Will the battle for an Irish Catholic Church in Ireland take seventy years? I doubt it. This mass-mediated, Internet world we live in spins very fast. If this is an idea whose time has come, then the Holy Spirit will make it happen. News over the past decade about our crumbling, abuse-of-authority Church may tell us that change is already happening, happening faster than anyone thinks.
I can see some of you smiling. This is a very Utopian idea, isn’t it? Well, maybe not. I’d like to remind you that the revolution may have already started – in Ireland—by an 80-year-old grandmother in Cork named Jennifer Sleeman. According to a news story by Patsy McGarry in the Irish Times just a few days ago, on August 11, Ms. Sleeman, the mother of a monk, organized an one-day boycott of Sunday Mass on September 26 by the faithful women of Ireland “to let the Vatican and the Irish Church know that women are tired of being treated as second-class citizens.”
Ms. Sleeman told McGarry, “Somehow I have grown up and the Church has not. It seems caught in a time-warp, run by celibate old men divorced from the reality of life, with a lonely priesthood struggling with the burden of celibacy where rules and regulations have more weight than the original message of community and love.”
Maybe this grandmother from Cork has already started the revolution. She obviously believes what I believe that you can have a voice and a vote in your own Church, and still be Catholic and, at the same time, Irish. Like all revolutions, the struggle won’t be easy. You will have to take a thousand creative steps, have many a meeting, organize many a boycott, withhold many a Euro, and give many a speech.
I have every reason to believe you can take back your Church, your Church, not the pope’s Church, or your bishop’s Church. You have what it takes. You understand politics. You think politics is an honorable profession. And you have your smiling Irish eyes, your impish sense of humor, your great gift of gab, and poetry in your souls.
You also have your smart, beautiful women. Don’t forget them. The Vatican doesn’t have many of them.
–
Robert Blair Kaiser
14249 North Third Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85023
(602) 358-7274
(602) 300-5773 – cell
(602) 801-3320 – fax
rbkaiser@justgoodcompany.com
Sample or purchase an eBook version of
Cardinal Mahony: A Novel here
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7027
(Read the first 40% of it for free.)
Buy an autographed copy of the print version here:
http://www.robertblairkaiser.com
