Reformation Today! 1

The Son of Man came not to

be served but to serve

(Matt 20: 28)

I think that when we bring up the subject of Reform in the Church what we most need today is a movement to restore the Church to its role as Servant in imitation of its Master who came not to be served but to serve.  All this commotion about the Affordable Care Act and what it purportedly does to our “rights” as Catholic Americans is centered about the idea that we, as Church, should be able to dictate the norms of behavior to the larger society in which we live.  That premise needs to be seriously questioned, but even more we need to take stock of the reality of the declining influence of the Church on our society.  It is unrealistic to think that the Catholic Church can have the political influence on American life that it had through most of the 20^th century.   While some may either grieve or be angry that we can’t shape public policy as we once did, I believe it presents us with the opportunity to be once again the Church that Christ established and not the Church built by human power. 

Years ago I was struck by a passage in William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas’ Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, (Nashville:Abingdon, 1989) in which they critiqued mainline Protestantism in the United States  for its delusions about a lost ability to determine societal norms.  Hauerwas and Willimon wrote:
Everything needed to be reexamined, and the failure of the old answers, seen now more clearly by the glow of the furnaces at Dachau and the fires of Hiroshima, demanded new questions.  The world had shifted.  Mainline American Protestantism as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed.  Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless,  house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.

Well, we could rewrite this today to say

Everything needs to be reexamined and the failure of the old answers, seen now more clearly in the glare of the clergy sex-abuse trials and the investigative lights of numerous financial crimes and ‘irregularities,” demands radical reform.  The world has shifted.  Catholicism in the Developed World—and in particular in the United States—can no longer plod along as if everything has not changed.  Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house falling into ruins around her, but acting as if her family still controlled the city, the Holy See and our own American bishops, continue to act as if they were still in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.     

If I am critical of Cardinal Burke for his antiquated pomp and Archbishop Lori for his high-handed ways and the Institute of Christ the Sovereign Priest for their living in a world of make believe baroque revivalism, and Carl Anderson for his shabby influence pedaling at the Roman Curia, and Bishop Olmstead for his ill-informed autocracy, and Cardinal Law for his unrepentant lack of shame, it is because they are holding our Church hostage to a world that exists any longer only in their own fantasies of power.  Gentlemen, the ancien regime is over and it ain’t coming back.  The toothpaste ain’t  goin’ back in the tube.   You—we—simply have no power anymore to chart the course of American society.  Get over it.  Wake up and smell the coffee.  Move on!

And if I am behind the good women of the LCWR and I tend to canonize people like Dom Helder Camara and Archbishop Romero and Bishop Tom Gumbleton, and Sister Joan Chittester,  and Dorothy Day and Social Justice and L’Arche and the Jesuit inner-city schools it is because I believe these are the first fruits of a new age for the Church, an age that will be characterized by service to society rather than exercising power over it.  And as one who looks to the Gospels for guidance, I say “gratias tibi, Domine.”