Let That Fire Fall From Heaven

Irish Crowds celebrating victory
in Same-Sex Marriage Referendum

Well, I was going to run quickly through Methodism and then into the Second Great Awakening, but that will have to wait a day or two as I want to make some comments about Ireland and the national referendum that overwhelming endorsed changing the national Constitution to include the right of same-sex couples to marriage.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said the Church (in Ireland) needs a “reality check” to see if it has drifted away from its younger members.  All due respect to His Grace, but sort of reminds me of the “Captain Obvious” commercials for Hotels.com.   On the other hand, at least the good Archbishop is one step ahead of his American confreres (including those who work—or used to work—at the Vatican) in their ostrich-like head-in-the-sand approach. 

I remember reading a book several years ago, A Whisper of God: Essays on Post-Catholic Ireland by Richard Clarke, now Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland.  Bishop Clarke was way out ahead of his Catholic colleagues in identifying the reality that Ireland has over the past four decades moved very rapidly from a devoutly Catholic country where the faithful followed the directions of their parish priests to a society in which people think for themselves and have no difficulty in adjusting to the changed social realities.  Bishop Clarke (he was then Bishop of Meath and Kildare) and I shared a platform some years back when invited by a Roman Catholic Religious Order of men to help chart their future in Ireland.  He astutely named the very dramatic changes in Irish society and the impact those changes were to have on the Catholic Church in Ireland and what the Church must do if it wants to remain a part of Irish life.  We could use a similar analysis today.  Of course, Andrew Greeley warned us thirty years ago but remained only a voice crying in the desert.  Thanks to pressure from the infamous Cardinal John Cody, then Archbishop of Chicago, we chose to ignore Greely’s spot-on sociological research.  We need to be careful and ignore no longer or we will see—as the Pew Survey released last week—the Catholic Church shrink into total irrelevancy in American life. 

To a certain extent I think this does tie into the theme I am currently working on of the Great Awakenings.  I think an evangelical revival, a truly evangelical revival, not a fundamentalist reign of terror, is needed in America today to give a boost not only to the Catholic Church, but to all the Churches of Christian orthodoxy, that is to say all the Churches that profess the faith of the traditional Christian creeds.  As you probably note from earlier postings I am intrigued by George Weigel’s definition of Evangelical Catholicism.

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

I think that if the Catholic Church wants to capture the spiritual imagination of the next generation it must address the following issues.

1.   Integrity.  The Church—and Church leaders in particular—need walk the walk they preach.  In particular they need to embrace a less materialistic and consumerist lifestyle and adopt the servant-model of Church in both their personal lives and episcopal ministries.  A key part of this re-visioning is to drop the C.E.O. model of the majority of bishops and the Renaissance Prince model of that wing-nut minority that parades around in Church-drag.  Pastors are neither executives nor princesses but loving fathers of adult sons and daughters. 

2.   We need to re-vision ourselves as Church not as an institution but as a people commissioned by baptism to spread the Gospel of the Kingdom of God in concrete terms of establishing among ourselves and inviting others into a culture of community, peace-building, and a passion for a more just world, 

3.   We need to refashion ourselves as Church not only to be more inclusive and welcoming, but to put the emphasis on community—a family of people who know one another and are invested in one another’s lives as we encourage each other to grow in discipleship.  Part of this community emphasis has to be the development of small groups in the parishes to network in mission and fellowship. 

4.   We as Church need to redo our moral theology to bring its historic values—rooted in the scriptures and tradition—into dialogue with the social, biological, and psychological sciences to come up with a credible anthropology and, in particular, a sound theology of human sexuality.

5.   We as Church needs to permit greater inculturation in its worship, maintaining a unity of faith but recognizing the vast cultural differences that cut across not only nations and language groups, but age and economic groups within societies. 

6.   We as Church need to rethink and re-theologize our understanding of sin in a way that reminds us that we are a community of redeemed sinners and not an “us” (the saved) faction in an otherwise damned world of a supposedly unredeemed “them.” 

7.   We need a reemphasis on spirituality and an empowering of the average Joe or Mary Christian to develop a rich personal spiritual life, rooted in a personal friendship with Jesus as encountered in the scriptures, the sacraments, the community of the faithful, and the poor. 

8.   We need to move beyond the clerical/lay distinction in the Body of Christ so that each Christian is empowered to make full use of the gifts of the Holy Spirit entrusted to him or to her by God for the good of all the Church and indeed, the entire world.

9.   Without abandoning our historic faith and the creeds that express it, we need to move from a Church marked by doctrines and rules to a community of faith where people personally encounter Christ through the fellowship of believers, worship, preaching, and mission. 

There is some redundancy in what I propose and there probably are other features that I am overlooking but the current model of Church is not working.  Religion in general and Christianity in particular are fast losing their credibility in this post-modern world and it is time for a radical renewal of our identity as Church.  The work of theologians such as Avery Dulles, Karl Raher, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Hans Kung, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Richard McBrien, Jean Vanier, Elizabeth Johnson, Marie Dominique Chenu, and—surprising to some—Josef Ratzinger, make just such a renewal possible, even imperative.   Indeed, while I am not happy about the way Weigel unfolds his thesis in Evangelical Catholicism, I concur with him that the fundamental shift in Catholicism began not with Vatican II, or even with Pius XII’s revolutionary encyclicals Mystici Corporis,  Divino Afflante Spiritu, and  Mediator Dei, but can be traced back to the fundamental shift in Catholicity by Leo XIII at the end of the 19^th century.  Leo’s embracing of the cause of the non-establishment working class with Rerum Novarum, his naming the very non-traditional John Henry Newman to the cardinaliate, and his reconciliation with democracy in his recognition of the Third French Republic may seem to us today small potatoes, but they signify a very dramatic shift in the direction of the Institutional Church that would bear fruit in the Second Vatican Council.  Up to that point the Church had been little more than a well-embalmed vestige of Renaissance Catholicism, but Leo breathed the Spirit upon those bones and we have seen them slowly come back to life.  Now is the time to unbind the resurrected Church and let it go free into the future where we, as Church, can fulfill the great commission to bring the Good News of God’s Kingdom to all nations.  Happy Pentecost.  

A Once Christian People

Most Reverend Richard Clarke, DD, Anglican

Archbishop-Elect of Armagh and Primate of all

Ireland

Some years ago I was doing a series of workshops in Ireland and I found the book A Whisper of God: Esssays on Post-Catholic Ireland, by Richard Clarke, Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath and Kildare and now Archbishop-elect of Armagh and Primate, most helpful in comprehending the state of the Church in Ireland.  My first visit to Ireland was 1971 and I remember when Ireland was a seriously devout country.  Recent visits show a very different country and a very different Church.  Vocations have dried up.  Congregations have grayed and the next generations have other plans for their Sunday Mornings—golf, brunch, or just a lazy day in bed.  The clergy are openly despised.  And the faithful, or formerly faithful, have moved on from the Church.  There are those who blame the materialism of the Celtic Tiger era for the alienation but the honest truth is that the Church brought the Temple down on its own head much like Samson.  The Irish finally had enough of the abuse of clerical power and the arrogance of generations of parish priests; the sex-abuse crisis and the disastrous handling of the same has pushed the Irish over the ledge and caused a huge sociological revolt. 

     We do have had a sex-abuse crisis in our country and our bishops have handled it no better than did the Irish, and we too are seeing a defection on the part of regular Churchgoers, but it does not seem to be for the same reasons.  Oh yes, there are some who attribute their new-found Sunday leisure to pederasts and their protectors, but as the defection is not limited to Catholics—or even any more strong among them than among the general population—we need to look for other reasons.   

       According to a recent Pew survey, one in five Americans now identify themselves as “unaffiliated” when it comes to their religious membership.  Part of this shift has been the loose boundaries among American mainline Protestants where people shifted from Presbyterian to Methodist to United Church of Christ more according to neighborhood convenience than doctrinal commitment.  Women no longer being confined to the home and its duties, and children having a multitude of activities ranging from Tai Kwan Do to ballet to sports, has reduced time available for Church activities just as the expansion of American social life in the years since World War II with gyms and clubs and civic organizations has reduced the need for the Church to be a social center.  In this Catholics are no different than their Protestant neighbors and few look to the Church to be more than a place for worship.  An exception to the general trend is the number of Catholics who see their Church not only as a place for worship but an opportunity for volunteerism.  Catholic parishes seem to be more active than ever—and in terms of numbers more involved than Protestant Churches, mainline or evangelical—in outreach to the homeless, in food pantries and soup kitchens, in adult education and awareness programs, in community service projects, work camps, and other outreach programming.  Yet, at the end of the day, there is an increasing number of former Catholics among the “unaffiliated.” 

      Some simply leave the Church and formal religion altogether for the same reason that others find new Church homes among Protestant Churches—mainline or evangelical.  Not being able to come to Holy Communion because of their being in a marriage not recognized by the Catholic Church leaves them feeling cut off and second-class.  Others feel rejected due to their LGBT status—or their disagreement with the Church’s stance towards the LGBT community has led them to think that they have moved on and left the Catholic Church behind.  While the majority of American Catholics disagree with the Church’s teaching on contraception that issue has not driven many from the Church—they have just learned to find themselves comfortable with the fact that they disagree with doctrine.  Knowing that the majority of clergy are not committed to that particular doctrine probably helps them over any discomfort they might otherwise feel.  Similarly women who have had an abortion find they often can reconcile with the Church and still feel at home in her, while those men and women who are more vigorous advocates of “abortion rights” find themselves very uncomfortable even in progressive parishes. 

       The state of Sunday morning in many Catholic parishes has not helped.  One Sunday recently I was walking with a friend when he got a text message from an acquaintance whom he had recommended that she should try a particular parish.  His friend was ecstatic: “I finally went to a Mass where the priest was not telling me that I was on the road to hell.”  Priest after priest today tends to tell his congregation what the Church is against without any idea how wearying to the soul this message can be.  We all know what the Church is against.  That doesn’t inspire us.  Can you tell us what it is for? 

      Sermons are not only invariably negative they are too often ill prepared with the preacher just following his stream of consciousness as it trickles down to a rivulet or runs dry all together.  Some of the younger priests in particular have more confidence in their seminary training than their education merits and it is embarrassing to hear them pontificate on subjects they know nothing about to congregations who are often better educated and certainly more experienced than the preacher.  These same priests have often reintroduced liturgical styles that are stuffy at best and often just turgid in their mind-numbing tedium.

       What is to be done?  Well one thing is we need leadership that wakes up to this problem, doesn't blame it on someone else, and is concerned about it.  To many bishops and priests today say “a smaller, leaner Church is good” with no concern for the spiritual welfare of those very people who are being made to feel unwelcome.  The smaller leaner Church answer is only a cop out for “shepherds” who are too lazy to look after the flocks entrusted to them.  We need good shepherds—that is the first step.