Boundaries...

Saturday January 6, 2007

This is the clearest presentation of the present challenges that the “People of God – Catholics in the Pew” face in today’s Roman Catholic Church. Our bishops are supposed to be the ‘guardians of the faith’ as well as guardians of boundaries. However, in recent years, they have come across more as ‘armed guards’ in what they apparently perceive as a controlled environment which in effect has become for many an ‘armed camp.’ Totalitarian systems produce that effect. Donald Cozzens has insightfully described the Church as a carry over from the Medieval feudalism. Unfortunately, most Roman Catholics in the pew have become either conformists or passive aggressive in their response. Relatively few are the Catholics who are prepared speak from a platform of wellness as has Anthony Padovano, the author of the article that follows.

Anthony Padovano, colleague and friend, is one of the finest priests I know. He and his wife, Theresa, the parents of four grown children, reside in Morris Plains NJ. Theresa has been a ‘low-key’ activist in the North Jersey Chapter of VOTF – Voice of the Faithful. Anthony is a CORPUS Ambassador. “CORPUS” is an association for an inclusive priesthood which, rooted in a strong Eucharistic commitment, promotes an expanded and renewed priesthood of married and single men and women in the Catholic Church.

In addition to his work with CORPUS, Anthony is a very well-known and respected internatioinal speaker and author of 28 books. He is a distinguished professor of theology, literature and philosophy and has been a visiting professor at 25 American colleges and universities. He has presented at United Nations Conferences in New York, Geneva and he Hague. Since 1968 he has served as pastor of the Inclusive Community. His personal and professional papers are kept in the Archives of the University of Notre Dame.

This presentation was made at the NCMA Conference in Milwaukee and published in CORPUS Reports, Jan-Feb. I am proud to be able to post it on my website with appropriate permission.
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Boundaries are perilous endeavors.

We must inquire about who draws the boundaries and why they do this.

Boundaries, badly delineated, imprison us; properly defined, however, they bring order and peace into the equations of human life and make creativity possible.

For the last half century or so, since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has had to deal with those who challenge and those who defend the boundaries of ministry.

We explore now the record of this period and seek to determine which boundaries must be preserved and which boundaries must be annulled.

THE PRESERVATION OF BOUNDARIES

There are five boundaries from the pre-Vatican II era which are worth preserving.

1. Tradition

No Christian endeavor makes sense without remembering. Christianity is an historical religion. It keeps a careful record of where it was because it believes God’s Spirit is revealed in what the past became. In this sense, there is nothing absolutely new in Catholicism. The past is never totally past but alive in the present.

Tradition gives us guidelines for ministry. It requires that Christ be the pattern, that sacraments be central, that the Gospel be normative and the Word of God our message.

These limitations and definitions are not negotiable or arbitrary, even in dialogue with global religions and the secular world. We must know the DNA of our identity and that can only come from who and what we were.

2.The New Testament

The New Testament is the Christian charter for ministry. It illuminates but it is also ambiguous. It does not give us truth by a literal reading of it; nor do we gain guidance by abstracting from it absolutely so that we effectively disregard it.

Those who read the text literally draw imprisoning boundaries around Christians. But those who essentially disregard the text take away all boundaries and leave us in a wilderness.

The New Testament speaks frequently of ministry. It tells us the minister must not dominate others but it also expects the minister to have authority. It defines the minister as a member of the Community who is expected, on occasion, to be a prophetic voice confronting it.

We wrestle with these norms and seek to discern when authority is legitimate and when excessive, when the Community is right and when prophetic dissent is required.

Our struggle must be with the New Testament and not with our own speculations and preferences. The people we serve are never more deeply moved than when they experience our ministry as validated by the norms and message of the New Testament.

3. Community Endorsement

Without community endorsement, there is no valid ministry. The deepest
Christian Tradition for validating ministry is not the laying on of hands or tactile apostolic succession but the acceptance of the minister by the community.

Yet community approval is not sufficient. Ministry must be reconciled with apostolic teaching before the whole Church can receive it. Continuity is not assured only at the local level nor by tactility.

Apostolic teaching is absolutely normative. Continuity with it prevents the community and the minister from being so autonomous that they present whatever they choose as Christianity.

These norms are sound but they do not make clear how community endorsement occurs and what the substance of apostolic teaching is. Indeed the entire ecumenical movement is premised on communities recognizing divergent alternatives to authentic ministry and apostolicity.

Creeds, the canon of Scripture, the approbation of other Christian communities, help to assure that apostolic teaching is substantially continued. But the case is not closed. Creeds are sometimes underdeveloped and exclusionary. The canon is not easily interpreted. Other Christian communities may subvert apostolic teaching as the dispute between Rome, Orthodoxy, and the Reformation shows.

We have the norms and this is not nothing. Yet these norms are difficult at times to apply specifically. As we shall see, emergency situations and ministerial autonomy may sometimes have to be invoked.

4. Pastoral Needs

The needs of the community shape the character of ministry.

This dialectic between minister and community is essential. The minister must not conduct a ministry, however much it may be endorsed in other Church circles, that harms the community. The minister has some autonomy here but this can drift into authoritarianism and create what I would call the Catholic problem with ministry. On the other hand, the community must not so dominate the minister that no charismatic or prophetic role for the minister remains. Leadership which serves only the community’s requirements may turn into servility. This is the Protestant problem with ministry.

There are no easy ways to determine what a ministerial charism requires and what a community’s legitimate needs are. Church authorities have no right to tell us the solution is simple and that they always know what it is.

The best criterion that the tension between charism and community is healthy is the end result. If there is love and forgiveness, magnanimity and inclusivity, then God’s Spirit is present. Too often the Roman church dismisses the value of this end result. Priests have been dismissed from their calling even though the ministry was fruitful and the community ardently wanted the minister to serve them.

5.Discernment

Discernment addresses competency, call and choice.

Competency

There must be requisite qualities for a competent tenure of service and they must be tested. These include: collegial leadership skills, intelligence, mental health, common sense, moral integrity, and a capacity for conflict resolution, liturgical celebration, preaching, counselling.

Competency is dealt with as early as Acts of the Apostles (6:3) where “good standing”, the Spirit, and “wisdom” are cited. I Timothy (3: 2-6) expands the list: a good reputation, marriage, temperance, discretion, courtesy, hospitality, teaching skills, control of alcohol and anger, gentleness, patience, freedom from greed, managing a family, not a recent convert, respect from those outside the Church.

The long list shows how careful the New Testament Community was about ministerial competence.

Call

Discernment tests the call or vocation:

Does the candidate believe and does the community sense a call from God?

What impels this person to want ministry?

Is a selfish or evil spirit at work?

Does the candidate pray, show resiliency, seek contemplative depths beneath the surface of personal advantage?

The candidate may be competent but ministry is more than an occupation or profession. It is a summons from God and the community must perceive this as well as it can.

Once the authenticity of the calling is discerned, the community is obliged to respect this and not discipline or dismiss the minister for frivolous reasons.

Choice

Ministry is inseparable from freedom in the Spirit. The minister must choose to respond, neither coaxed nor compelled.

Ministry is not predetermined by gender in the New Testament nor by heredity even though these were norms in the Hebrew Bible. The Spirit may choose anyone at all, even a persecutor of the Church on the road to Damascus or a Gentile with no Jewish history or a woman apostle.

The minister, called to freedom, must bring the community to freedom as Moses did in the Exodus or as Mary did, by her choice, in the Magnificat.

The minister must want what the call requires, regardless of the cost. This is what a shepherd does. Then, the ministry becomes the person.

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

The twentieth century compelled the Churches and religions of the world to include in ministry elements hitherto considered unthinkable. Let us look at how Roman Catholicism responded.

There are two ways to change ministry.

One is shallow, namely, to open ministry to married priests or to women or even to new structures of accountability. These reforms are not beside the point entirely but they are not substantial or even ultimately helpful.

A second approach is to recast the coordinates of ministry, the entire context, the very substructure. Once this is done, inclusivity and new forms of ministry follow almost incidentally and automatically.

Vatican II changed the entire context surrounding ministry. Reformers often disregard this and focus on the less important issues of marriage, gender and structural inclusivity..

Let us be concrete. If the basic theology surrounding ministry is not revolutionized, then the married or woman priest is ordained into a priesthood which continues as it was, only, this time, with different players.

Let us use marriage as an example.

A troubled marriage is not made healthy because the behavior of one of the spouses is changed. A marriage is healthy only if the underlying reality is changed.

Otherwise, a partner may agree, for whatever reason, to behave better but this change is superficial. An abusive husband might manage no longer to be physically abusive but continue to believe that women are of little worth or that marriage is a hierarchy rather than a partnership. Such a marriage is not free of abuse even if the abuse is not physical. The marriage remains sick but in a different manner.

The entire reality surrounding ministry has been altered in the last half century. This has been more valuable than any surface change might have been. Reformers need to see this. Let us review these innovations in eight steps.

1.Spirituality

Spirituality before Vatican II centered on self-sacrifice; now, relationality is the preferred focus.

In self-sacrifice, a priest was most impressive in his aloofness, his difference, in all he gave up and demanded from others in the name of God. There were, of course, good and healthy priests before Vatican II. Some priests loved people and were loved by them. But this love was often heavily conditioned by what the institutional Church expected a priest to do. Healthy priests were often healthy in spite of what they were taught by the system.

Self-sacrificial spirituality required that people accept bad or abusive marriages and choose even unwanted pregnancies as God’s Will. It demanded that priests persevere in depressing and destructive ministries, that married couples forego sexuality for higher values and, in all instances, avoid birth control.

Denial of self was the fundamental sacrament in this spiritual system. A dreadful liturgy was more meritorious than one which brought delight. An unsuitable teaching assignment gave more grace. A marriage or ministry in which one’s identity, happiness and humanity were crushed was a salvific crucifixion, pleasing to God, leading to heaven.

In this system, there was something vaguely suspicious about people who enjoyed their lives too much. There was glory in obligation and obedience, in sexual deprivation, in abstinence, in suffering even if sought for its own sake and self-inflicted.

The world was a vale of tears. God might at any moment come upon us as an avenger, in a dies irae, a day of wrath, as frightening as the Christ in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Relational spirituality is profoundly different.

The concreteness of life matters more than ideology.

Fulfillment in marriage is more valuable than its permanency. Meaning in ministry is a higher norm than vows or promises. Homosexuals are homosexuals and not illusory heterosexuals. Married partners are not would-be celibates. Priests are not meant to be angels. The Church is not sinless. The Pope is not isolated or absolute.

Results and actual experience are essential concerns.

One might object that there is a danger in relational spirituality that one might eventually justify anything or rationalize self-indulgent behavior. This is a danger but no system is trouble free. Self-sacrificial spirituality has the potential to discount the happiness of the person and, ironically, to destroy the very purpose of the commitments it enforces. Marriage might not lead to love or ministry to service of the community or celibacy to authentic spirituality. And yet there is an insistence that all these failed endeavors must be continued at all costs.

Relational spirituality emerges from Vatican II, from its collegial and pilgrim categories, from its definition of marriage as a community and of the secular world as a partner and the other Christian Churches as members of the same family. The Church is not a pyramid but people assembled, the people of God.

Self-sacrifice may and must occur at times for relational spirituality to be authentic. We settle for this, however, rather than choosing it. One accepts the sacrifice because there are no honest alternatives.

Reformers offer the Church a new environmental structure for its life, an ecologically sound relationality, the infusion of oxygen to replace the constricted air that stifles the very Spirit of Catholicism.

2.Ecclesiology

At the core of Vatican II was the creation of a collegial Church, circles in
place of pyramids.

In the pyramid model, the minister is wholly defined by superiors. Because the full identity of the priest depended on a higher juridical authority, obedience became the most prized virtue, indeed, the most necessary virtue because without the superior, the priest was nothing or nobody. Without the superior, all a priest did was invalid, illicit or sinful. A pastorally talented priest, beloved and gifted, intelligent and deeply spiritual was not validated by any of these attributes but only by permission. Approval from the bishop and even from other priests depended on obedience, not on pastoral excellence.

In a collegial Church, the priest is independent of the bishop, not absolutely independent because the priest must be part of a circle. But so is the bishop. The priest needs the bishop as much as the bishop needs the priest. And both must relate to all baptized Christians who may not be ordained but who are an essential and equal part of the circle. If the circle is broken, a new pyramid is formed in which a priest might function in splendid isolation, accountable to no one. But this potential liability cannot be solved by using obedience to define priesthood as often as we once did.

None of this had a place in the theology of the priesthood before Vatican II.

The Roman Church refers to itself as a family. The highest value in a family is not obedience. A son or a daughter wholly defined by a parent, is not a hero but a victim; such a parent is not responsible but pathological. Dissent in a family is a sign of growth; in the Roman Church it is a crime. No healthy family dismisses its members. The absent family member is not a source of celebration because truth or goodness have supposedly prevailed but an occasion for endless heartache.

3.Authority

Authority structures accommodate themselves to the philosophy of the institution.
The escalating loss of hierarchical credibility in the Roman Church signifies that the wrong authority structures are in place. Absolute hierarchy is no longer an organic development of an underlying consensus but a fossil left after life moved elsewhere.

The decision to become a collegial Church has been made on the deepest levels of the Church’s life. For this reason, Vatican II is accepted and papal decisions on celibacy and birth control are rejected. Catholics are not attracted to a priesthood enveloped by the institution with imperatives and pyramidal expectations. The crisis in priesthood is not vocational. It is an authority crisis of the highest order.

4.Christology

At the heart of the Church is the image of Christ.

If Christ is king, judge or avenger, the Church will bear the insignia of these
assumptions. If Christ is preeminently male or celibate, the Church will be patriarchal and sexually focused.

Vatican II marginalized the maleness of Christ in a way Thomas Aquinas could not. It defined him with far less reference to celibacy than the Council of Trent did. Not since the New Testament had so little been extracted from the maleness and marital condition of Christ.

Vatican II was a Council of relational rather than ontological Christology. A comprehensive Christology, of course, includes both but the priority of these elements affects the way ministry is done.

It makes a difference if God is passionate about becoming human or becomes human to settle accounts with us. If God is passionate, a ministry of compassion is preferred. If God is intent on retribution and equity, a minister serves with like exactitude.

A ministry of compassion stresses parables over Judgment. It finds goodness everywhere and works with that, as parables do. It is not blind to evil but it marginalizes it.

These four changes we have surveyed (spirituality, ecclesiology, authority and Christology) lead to four practical consequences. We shall consider these in our last four points.

5.Emergency Ministry as Normative

There was a time in the New Testament when Gentiles functioned as members in equal standing and as ministers before there was apostolic acceptance of them. Even in apostolically-sanctioned ministries, so to speak, these were diverse models of ministry, from house church leaders to missionaries to wandering prophets and teachers. This is a situation very much like the one we face today.

The pastoral situation in the Church today is dire. The institutional Church cannot manage the escalating crises in ministries by keeping all as it was in another era. Nor must we permit this.

Reformers, nonetheless, must not declare that an emergency situation allows them to serve without endorsement if the intent is to do only what one prefers or if one acts in contempt for the institutional Church or out of anger.

The danger, however, in doing nothing is a denial of the call of the Spirit and a neglect of pastoral needs. These precede hierarchical review and they serve as their own endorsement.

The deepest Tradition in Church law is that the law is less than the Spirit and that the care of people is the supreme law of the Church.

What does a minister do when believers, deprived of sacramental life and pastoral care, assume God has forsaken them? If this situation is caused by arbitrary and unwarranted Church policies, does not the minister, by not acting, endorse authoritarianism and decide against vulnerable believers?

If one could read back anachronistically to the New Testament, one might maintain that Gentile ministers, with no Jewish identity and charismatic ministers, with no canonical mandate, violated the law of the Church. But these ministries instructed the larger Church by not following convention, teaching the Community of Christ that it was not Jewish only or only juridical.

Canon law is premised on epikeia, namely, reading into the law what the law-maker must have intended even though the law does not cover this case. A minister might conclude that canon law does not intend the severe wounding of Church members.

A second principle in canon law is the emergency situation which allows the minister to do what must be done, in the larger view of the Church, even if this instance is not sanctioned or favored by the institutional Church.

We are in an emergency situation now. Ministers have the duty to do what must be done and not to act as though this is an era of normalcy. Care must always be taken not to be reckless or arbitrary. But the minister, by virtue of ordination, has been commissioned, through discernment, and this must mean something.

Life must go one even if not codified or canonical.

6.Contemporary Culture

The alignment of ministry with culture has been ongoing through the centuries. Christian ministry has been profoundly shaped by Jewish and, later, by Greek and Roman influence. Byzantium and Feudal Europe left their imprint on ministry. There can be no effective ministry abstracted from the culture of the age.

Why does the institutional Church resist contemporary culture when it readily adopted models from pagan empires and political fiefdoms?

This resistance may be driven by the fact that all previous cultural models (Jewish, Greek, Roman, Byzantine,Feudal ) were hierarchal and male-centered. Contemporary culture is democratic and inclusive. It seeks common ground and dialogues with adversaries.

The Roman Catholic Church today assumes that many innovations, regardless of their pastoral worth are relativistic and secular and undermine the Church’s legitimate authority. But many New Testament communities once believed this about Gentiles.

Vatican II profoundly relativized Church authority by insisting on collegiality and inclusivity, defining itself as the People of God. It secularized, as it were, marriage by calling it a community and a relationship rather than a contract. It made its authority structures less absolute by inviting schismatic Orthodox Christians and heretical Protestants to an Ecumenical Council and seeking their advice. It validated sacraments, spiritual systems and pastoral ministries outside the Roman Church and declared them salvific. Baptism in these Churches was equal to Baptism in the Roman Church even though the Roman Church had nothing to do with it and even though the baptizing Church rejected essential elements of the Roman Church’s teaching.

Vatican II democratized the Church by calling for councils, senates, synods and voting procedures in parishes and dioceses throughout the world. It democratized the liturgy, so to speak, by utilizing the language of the people and inviting a lay voice, male and female, in worship and in sacramental celebration.

The ramifications of these reforms threatened the clerical system more profoundly than anticipated and a reaction developed. A way was sought to maintain the principles but restrict their implementation. Since authority and power in the Roman Church are linked with ordination, ministry became the battlefield for this conflict.

Pope and bishops kept the collegial structures but claimed an escalating veto power. Ordination was restricted to males and celibates by preemptive and juridical fiat before a strong community consensus could emerge. In effect, this denied authority to all women and married Christians and it did this without consulting them.

This retreat from Vatican II was costly, a pyrrhic victory. The Roman Church never recovered its hierarchical authority and lost its capacity to attract Catholics to ordained ministerial service.

The end result of rejecting the culture of one’s own era is not a Church but a cult.

7.Conscience

Conscience is the most crucial means by which a priest is defined as a person in the Church and not only as an institutional officer. Thus, the model for both Church and ministry can never be military obedience or corporate conformity. In those models, the larger collectivity defines the person. Such a person may have a distinctive life but only privately, outside the system.

The Church is meant to be different.

A priest is given, in ordination, institutional trust, public identity, authority and mission. In return, the priest is obliged to work within the parameters of Church life and to be accountable to Church administrators and to the people a priest serves.

All this is accepted by responsible thinkers. The challenge is how the priest reconciles this public definition of priesthood with the personal charisms a priest is given. A major means by which this is achieved is conscience.

Even some of the most imperative and controversial Church doctrines, such as Humanae Vitae, prohibiting artificial birth control, allow for conscientious dissent. Canon law, the ecclesial judicial system itself, the tradition of doctrinal disagreement, all presuppose dissent in conscience and, indeed, the rightness of this dissent. There is to be no compulsion in the act of faith and in the living out of the Christian life. Christ has called us to freedom, not to the enslavement of law.

Is it not time now for this rhetoric to create new structures in the Church and to allow a wider latitude for conscience?

Two areas where conscience can be most decisive are sexuality and ministry.

Sexuality of its very nature is deeply rooted in the person and cannot be defined readily by outsiders, so to speak. It is intensely private but it does have public consequences. Conscience mediates the difference between these private and public realms.

Ministry, by its very definition, is focused on the pastoral needs of others rather than on institutional requirements. Pastoral needs are private and personal but they are addressed by the priest as a public person in the Church. Conscience mediates the difference. A traditional rule in the Church is sacramenta propter hominem, “sacraments are for people.” Sacraments, the most public actions of the Church, must serve the pastoral needs of people.

There is hardly a faithful priest in the Catholic Church who has not been resilient with norms and rules when guiding people through the complexities of life. Epikeia and the entire realm of the internal forum expect resiliency.

Epikeia allows a priest to interpret the law as it should have been written; internal forum applies the law privately

Church doctrine assures the priest that one is never allowed to act against a properly-formed conscience and must always make the salvation or care of people the ultimate intent of ministry. Thus, the priest is defined by conscience and the pastoral needs of others far more than by institutional doctrines and policies. The priest is often the final arbiter. Furthermore, the definition of what a properly-formed conscience is cannot be solely determined by superiors. If this were the case, there would be no personal conscience.

The Roman Church never spoke more eloquently of conscience than it did in Vatican II. The subsequent dialogue with world religions and the other Christian Churches is premised on the priority of conscience. How else can one be assured that this religion or this Church is where one belongs? A faithful priest does not apply these alternatives recklessly or with the intent to subvert the system. The priest acts so that the spiritual life of a person may not wither. Indeed, the priest is working within the system by limiting its unintended oppressiveness.

It is time for the priority of conscience, experience and pastoral life to prevail.

A priest is commissioned to be someone on the side of the people served, someone who understands the dilemmas, and, in conscience, resolves them even if against the rules.

Was this not what Jesus once did?

8.Autonomy

This survey evaluating the boundaries of ministry underscores the relative and
astonishing autonomy of ministry.

In a time of crisis, two imperatives emerge: to preserve the past and to create the future. This essay dealt with the past in “The Preservation of Boundaries” and with the future in “Crossing Boundaries.”

Allow me to share a story with you.

I have been moved, since I was a beginning student, by the image of Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid. We meet him as he escapes the flames and ashes of defeated Troy. He rushes from the ruins with his aged father on his shoulders, his young son clutching his hand, and the household gods he worshipped in his arms.

This is a perfect icon for surviving crisis and tragedy: preserving the past (his father), creating the future (his son), embracing the values of life (the household gods). If we take all three with us, past, future, values, we never run out of hope even in the ashes of our worst losses.

New life cannot happen without declaring our autonomy in ways we may not have anticipated or preferred.

To remain in the city as it was is to live in the past. Such a city is not the city of God. And, so, we leave to begin anew. We reach for a spirituality and ecclesiology, a vision of authority and Christology we did not know before, driven by the terrors of a collapsing past. There is no easy geography out of the lost city we once called home. And, so, we face this emergency with our conscience and our unfamiliar autonomy, sensitive to the culture of a new era.

To take nothing from the city, however, is to lose our identity, the DNA of our memories and our heritage. Our Tradition is linked to what we once were and must become. Our values are defined in the biblical charter from the past and we hold on to this tightly.

We seek now not any city at all but a new city of God, on a distant mountain, in an alien land. Aeneas left Troy and founded the city of Rome. It is our task to leave defeated Troy, not without tears, for a new Rome.

A priest today must be autonomous, not with an absolute autonomy or else there will be no Christian or ecclesial character to ministry. It is not possible now to minister to a past consumed by the fires of the Spirit.

In the burning city of Troy, there were no credible authorities remaining. Aeneas had to deal with Aeneas. It was all he had.

The autonomous priest must be an apostle, ever looking back to Christ for validation and identity. Even more, the priest must be a prophet, seeing the future as already present, driven by the Spirit, on a path with little assurance, pressing on against the condemnation and rejection of those who want the past to be an abiding city.

We must not be Christians as we once were because such a Christianity has been razed by the flames of the future. We cannot cling to the flickering shadows of a reality we once preferred. We cannot do this because the God we hold in our arms and heart sends us into the desert with Abraham and Moses, out of Egypt or Troy or Trent, into an Easter encounter with a Christ we do not recognize as easily as we once did but whom we shall follow wherever he leads us.

Anthony T. Padovano

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