Sometimes Religious Syncretism Works

Seventeenth-century altar rail in
an English (Anglican) Church

For many Catholics who are disturbed by the liturgical changes of the last fifty or so years one of the most upsetting has been the removal of the altar rails from their parish churches.  What many do not know, of course, is that the altar rail has its origins in the Protestant reformation. 

We can tell from reading the Fathers of the Church that the practice of receiving Holy Communion for at least the first seven centuries was—as it remained and still is in the Eastern Churches—for the communicant to present himself or herself standing to the priest at the foot of the altar.  In the very early centuries, let us say from apostolic times up until perhaps the seventh century, it was expected that all present would receive Holy Communion.  (Those who were not eligible—catechumens and penitents—had been dismissed after the sermon.)  However, as through missionary efforts Christianity spread northward into what is today Germany, England, the Low Countries, Austria, and eventually Scandinavia and Poland, and as the various “Barbarian” tribes swept down into Italy, the large number of poorly catechized converts saw a dramatic decline in the numbers of those who received Holy Communion.  Many never received at all.  An exaggerated emphasis on the need for Sacramental Confession before receiving Holy Communion and the imposition of very strict Communion Fasts also contributed to the decline in people receiving.  The situation became so desperate that in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council had to mandate that Christians must receive at least once a year and that during the period from Septugesima until the Octave of Pentecost—the Lent-Easter season.  Even then many never received the Sacrament from their first Communion until their deathbeds.  Communions became so rare that they were often separated from Mass with people receiving from the Reserved Sacrament in the Tabernacle before Mass or after Mass.  Indeed it was not rare for there to be no “Communion of the faithful” at Mass, with only the priest receiving.

In such cases those few receiving Holy Communion would present themselves kneeling in one of the smaller chapels of a large church or at a side altar of the main church before or after Mass.  Kneeling became a common practice after the seventh century as the Church more and more stressed the need for penance and demanded of communicants a penitential posture. 

Tourists and pilgrims visiting Rome are often surprised how few churches in the ancient city, and none of the old churches, have communion rails.  That is because of this practice of receiving outside of Mass.  With only four or five people receiving on any occasion—and often as few as one—the communicants would approach the priest one by one, kneel and receive Holy Communion.  The Rite for Communion outside of Mass involved the priest coming to the altar in surplice and stole, the candles being lit at the tabernacle.  The people, or more often the server(s) recited the Confiteor and priest granted the absolution that follows.  The priest then showed the Host to the communicants saying the Ecce Agnus Dei…and the response thrice given “Domine non sum dignus…” The communicants then approached the priest, knelt and received the Host on their tongue as the priest said the “Corpus Domini Jesu Christi…” There was then a final prayer over the communicants.  (There were local variations of this rite but the practice of Communion outside of Mass persisted as the normal form until the Liturgical Reforms of Pius X at the beginning of the 20^th century and was in common use even up to Vatican II.) 

The Protestant reformers tried to restore frequent and universal communion—with mixed results.  Luther had more luck with this than Calvin or with the Anglican Church.  Luther’s liturgical revisions were far less drastic than either Calvin or the English Church’s and much of the Mass appeared very little altered except for the substation of the vernacular for the Latin (though even the Latin persisted in some places, especially for the sung parts of the service).  From sixteenth century woodcuts of Lutheran liturgies we can see the introduction of the rail with communicants kneeling to receive.

Let me back up here for a moment.  Railing the altar in one form or another was nothing new.  At some older churches in Rome, notably Santa Maria in Cosmedin, San Clemente, Santa Sabina, we can see the rails that were erected as early as the sixth century to mark off the space for the choristers and the Sacred Ministers during the liturgy.  These were not Communion rails—they are approximately four-and-a-half feet to six feet high.  They were simply an effort to prevent the crowds from taking over the space around the altar needed for the Ministers to perform the Liturgy.  Similar barriers developed in the East into the Iconostasis.  In the West, particularly in England but also elsewhere, they became choir screens.  The magnificent choir screens of many of the Spanish cathedrals have survived but these are high walls—thirty and forty feet in height. 

During the Catholic Reforms of the fifteenth (Spanish) and sixteenth (Trent) legislation demanding that the altar area be railed off became normative and rails were built around the sanctuary to divide it form the nave. Originally they had nothing to do with the reception of Holy Communion but were to keep out stray animals, wandering children and over-enthusiastic worshippers.  Where these railings survive they are usually about four feet high (too high for communion rails) and without a kneeling step on which the communicants can kneel.  Communion rails were not needed in Catholic Churches since communions were relatively rare and usually conducted away from the main altar before or after Mass.

The Lutheran custom of the rail caught on in both Germany and Scandinavia.  In England there was a conflict.  The Puritan wing of the Church of England, Calvinst in theology, clung to Cranmer’s practice where Holy Communion was celebrated at an ordinary table placed in the chancel.  The communicants were expected to kneel around the table as the priest placed the bread into their hands and then gave them the cup from which to drink.  Frequent communion did not catch on in England at the time.  People would come for Morning Prayer and the Sermon and then leave with only a dozen or so remaining for Holy Communion.  But the efforts of the High Church Party under Archbishop Laud in the early seventeenth century won a significant number of people over to a more Sacramental worship.  The High Church party moved the table from the middle of the chancel or from the nave where Cranmer had put it back to the traditional position against the eastern wall of the Church.  And it introduced communion rails with the communicants kneeling at the rail rather than around the table.  All this was done away with during the Puritan Commonwealth but was restored with the Restoration of the Episcopacy and the Crown in 1660. 

There was a dramatic Reformation of the Catholic Church in France in the seventeenth century.  The French Crown had blocked the promulgation of the Decrees of the Council of Trent for decades but a determined group of French ecclesiastics under the leadership of (later Cardinal) Pierre deBérulle undertook an internal reform of the Church.  Old religious orders were reformed and new religious orders were founded along with the Society of Saint Sulpice to train diocesan clergy.  Francis de Sales preached an everyday spirituality for lay people that brought incredible new energy to the Church.  Great attention was paid to the liturgy and magnificent churches were built.  And in these new churches communion rails appeared.  There were many connections between England and France at this time.  Sizable communities of English Catholics—both lay and religious—had taken refuge in France.  People went back and forth across the channel with regularity.  Many French churchmen had contacts with Church of England clergy and academics.  Many English converts to Catholicism came to France for education in the faith.  England had a French Catholic Queen  from 1625 until 1649.  Catholic chapels were maintained in London by Continental European embassies throughout the sixteenth century except for the years of the Commonwealth.  We can’t say for certain that the communion rail was an import from the Church of England but its appearance in France from where it spread through much of the Catholic world strongly suggests a link.  

Semper Reformanda

Sorry for the hiatus –I have been travelling a bit and on retreat a bit and have had deadlines to meet and—well, excuses are just that, excuses—but I am sorry.  I realize every time I don’t do an entry for more than two days, the readership begins to drop off and I have to get back to work.  And while my readership is relatively small (a couple thousand hits a month) I know from your responses that it is helping a number of you think more clearly not so much about the past as what we can learn from the past for the crisis the Church is in today.  And it is in a crisis.          One of the themes I explore when I teach—and I have been exploring in this blog as well—is the  periodic  need of the Church for Reform.  There is a precept Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda (the Church, always reforming and always in need of reform).  The current mess in Rome with butlers and bankers out of jobs and into court is only one sign of needed reform.  The clear signs that there is a power struggle going on behind the scenes—indeed that Pope Benedict is more a pawn of warring factions than able to give direction himself—is very troublesome.  Even more troubling is the lack of authority the faithful are willing to invest in the hierarchy.  This is clear from the immense support being given the LCWR by the average Catholic-in-the-streets whether it is comic commentator Stephen Colbert or my 92 year old grand-aunt.  The staged and trumped-up charges against the American nuns by prelates whose own integrity has been shown to be not even questionable but voided (Cardinal Law),  prelates who are known for being supercilious rather than  judicious (Cardinal Burke), prelates whose reputation has shown them to be ruthlessly ambitious climbers (Archbishop Lori) and prominent laity who are base influence peddlers with  ties to the extreme right wing of American politics (Carl Anderson) is a clear indication that there is an every-opening chasm between the hierarchy and the faithful and this is a dangerous situation.
       When we look at the history of Church Reform we see several models.  At times, such as in the Reforms of the Emperor Charlemagne and again in the Reforms of his heirs—the Ottonian Emperors of the 10^th century, the reforms were imposed on the Church by political force.  In the Gregorian Reform of the 11^th century and Innocentian Reform of the 13^th, reform was initiated by the papacy itself under the leadership of convinced and evangelical  popes who threw the traditions of patronage and favoritism to the winds and did not hesitate to clean up the rats’ nests into which much of the hierarchical Church had devolved.  Tragically, in the 16^th century when the political power was impotent to reform the Church and the vested interests in the hierarchy were too strong for effective renewal, reform came from within but ended up splitting the Church and, to be honest, throwing out too many babies and not enough bathwater.  I have to say that in my judgment the Protestant Reformations of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were not only tragedies, they were ineffectual.
       Well, not entirely ineffectual.  Human nature is human nature.  Time has shown that while liturgy and catechesis changed in the reformed Churches, human nature most often did not.  Issues of ambition, abuse of power, intellectual rigidity, greed, jealousy all carried over into the new religious groups.  Granted some of the changes were good and should have happened sooner and with sponsorship of the Catholic hierarchy—scriptures and worship in the common tongue, restoration of the Chalice in communion, etc.  (I use etc. when I can’t think of anything else but know there must be something.)
        The Reformers also triggered the papacy finally into action and led to the Council of Trent which is the most successful reform Council in the history of the Church.  Much good came from Trent, but that is not where I want to go in this entry.
       As a historian I have come to see that as much a failure as the papacy so often has been—and I believe currently is—it is it gives a continuity to the Church with which we cannot dispense.  I am terrified of a new reformation that will cause people to walk away in disgust from the papacy.  On the one hand I see the Roman Curia and many of our bishops being the very force that is undermining the papacy by creating this injurious gulf between the institutional church and the faithful.  We need leadership with credibility not with arrogant self-importance.
       It is said that once a priest becomes a bishop “he has had his last bad meal and will never hear the truth again.”  Much of the leadership of the Church is out of touch with the Catholic in the pews.  When you are out of touch you cannot effectively preach the gospel—you become a buffoon like Chaucer’s pardoner.  This is not a time for blind obedience—only God merits blind obedience and I am not sure that he desires it—it is a time for wise and strong leadership that calls us by credible example to put our faith in Christ and in his Gospel.     

What do the Blessed Mother and Billy Graham Have in Common?

Saint Augustine, Doctor Gratiae, the great

theologian of grace. 

Well, the word that is getting attention today is “prevenient” as in “prevenient grace.”  It is used in the “prayer over the gifts” in the revised translation of the Roman Missal.  I must have had three phone calls and a dozen emails asking me about it—including at least four messages from priests who don’t know the doctrine of prevenient grace.  What are they teaching in seminaries nowadays?   If there is anything good that might come out of this revised translation it might be that people have to learn their theology.  If you know “Consubstantial” you have your Christology half learned; if you know “prevenient” you have your Christian anthropology (the theology of grace) pretty much done.  And if you have Christology and Grace under control, you have pretty much what you need to know.  Other than ecclesiology everything else is commentary.  And actually, ecclesiology is simply an expansion of Christology.  Prevenient Grace is that gift of God that precedes any good work on our part, even an act of faith, but come totally gratuitously from God and empowers us to believe, to yearn for holiness, and to seek a righteousness in the sight of God.  You see, given our fallen nature—or what we Christians believe to be our fallen nature—we are incapable on our own of any choice for the good.  God loves us as we are—in our sin, our brokenness, our weakness, whatever one may call it—and God begins the process of salvation by giving us that which we need to be saved.  Anyway, that is pretty much what the Council of Trent says about it, though in somewhat different words.  Trent does call it prevenient grace however.  The interesting thing  both about Trent and the new translation is that the concept of prevenient grace is really more a preoccupation of Protestant theology than Catholic.  This is because Catholics almost invariably fall into a Pelagianism that affirms that we can do good on our own.  I am amazed how many priests have an exaggerated concept of free will.  According to Saint Augustine, a favorite of Pope Benedict, Martin Luther, and my own, the human will is not free except as it is aided by grace.  Without grace we would always choose sin, with grace—and only with grace—the will is free to choose between sin and the Will of God.  The Will will not choose evil—it will always choose what it perceives to be “a good;” but it is only with grace that it is free to choose God’s good rather than the perceived good our own self-interest would otherwise select.  Anyway, I love the idea of prevenient grace.  First of all I love the word.  When else do you hear it?  And it is such a neat word. Very, very, Latin—from pre and venire.  It is the affirmation that God loves us just as we are even before we can come to him in repentence.  He doesn't love us because we have repented but rather gives us the grace of turning to him because he loves us.  As the old Methodist piano thumper sings: 

Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.


Just as I am, and waiting not
To rid my soul of one dark blot,
To Thee whose blood can cleanse each spot,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.


Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.


Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind;
Sight, riches, healing of the mind,
Yea, all I need in Thee to find,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.


Just as I am, Thou wilt receive,
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
Because Thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.


Just as I am, Thy love unknown
Hath broken every barrier down;
Now, to be Thine, yea, Thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.


Just as I am, of that free love
The breadth, length, depth, and height to prove,
Here for a season, then above,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come!


Thank you Ms. Charlotte Elliott for writing this hymn back in 1835.  Billy Graham heard this song as sixteen year old boy and “gave his life to Jesus.”  When he began his ministry of revival preaching, he used this hymn as his altar call song that would move people to come up and surrender themselves to the Lord.  Dr. Graham used the hymn title” Just as I Am” as the title of his 1997 autobiography.  So what do the young Virgin of Nazareth and the young Baptist of Charlotte, North Carolina have in common: prevenient grace.  And we would never have known that except for this revised translation.     

Valid Orders?

The Posthumous trial of Pope Formosus known as

the Cadaver Synod

Not too long ago I did an entry on the Third Lateran Council, an Ecumenical Council recognized by the Western Church (not by the Eastern Churches) held in 1179 that among other things, condemned Peter Waldo as well as the Cathars, reaffirmed the mandate for clerical celibacy, forbad charging fees for administration of the sacraments, condemned usury, and decreed that clergy guilty of sodomy should be deposed from their offices.  All well and good.  But there was another decree that I want to explore and that is that the Third Lateran Council decreed the ordinations performed by anti-popes Victor IV, Pascal III, and Callixtus III were “null and void.”  I want to look at the subject of “valid” and “invalid” orders as it has repercussions on the Church today.  
     Basically what the Council was saying was that priests, bishops, and deacons (as well as subdeacons and the minor orders in use at the time) ordained by these three false claimants to the papacy were invalidly ordained to their respective Orders.  Why?  Were they ordained according to a defective rite?  No, the rite was the same rite used by the Bishops of Rome in ordinations.  Did the candidates or the ordaining prelates have faulty intention?  No, the ordaining bishops intended to ordain the men according to the mind of the Church regarding the sacraments and the men being ordained presumably had sound intentions as well.   The only reason for declaring the rival ordination as null and void was to challenge the authority of the papal rivals.  You can be sure that these various antipopes had challenged the validity of the ordinations of Alexander III who is today recognized as having been the legitimate claimant to the papal throne but who, in his own time, was initially recognized by only a minority of bishops while Victor and his successors, Pascal and Callixtus,  were thought by many of their contemporaries to have the most authentic claim to the Chair of Peter.  You may remember the papal imbroglio at the time of Pope Formosus (reigned 891-896) when the dead Pope was exhumed by his successor but one, Stephen VI, who convoked a synod, had Formosus posthumously deposed, and declared that the ordinations he had performed were null and void.  Stephen’s successor but one, Theodore II, (reigned for twenty days in December 897), declared the ordinations of Formosus to have been valid and those of Stephen to have been null and void.  The next two popes, John IX and Benedict IV, upheld the ordinations of Formosus—in fact John had been ordained priest by Formosus—but then Sergius III came along (904-911) and declared the ordinations of Formosus to have been null and void.  What is going on???  It has nothing to do with sacramental theology but with claims of legitimacy and political power.  
       The undermining of opposition within the Church by declaring the ordinations of the opposition leaders was not new to the tenth century any more than it was to the Church at the time of Lateran III.  In the debates of the second through the sixth centuries with the various factions such as the Montanists and the Donatists claimed exclusive validity of the sacraments and denied the validity of the ordinations in the “Great Church” (the mainline Church in which both Orthodoxy and Catholicism have their roots) and these splinter groups in turn had their ordinations condemned as invalid by the bishops who clung to the Apostolic faith.  
      All this is by way of saying that at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the papacy pulled out this canard once again in declaring “invalid” the ordinations of the various "Protestant” Churches.  By this point they had to do more than declare; they needed to give a rationale and the development of scholastic theology with its breakdown of matter, form, and intention gave them a theological apparatus by which they could rationalize this but it was still basically a political and not a theological decision.  It was only by devising a theological justification robbing the Churches of the Reformers of sacramental character that they could undermine the confidence of the believers in the Reformed Churches.  Now, I am not going to say that all “Protestant” Churches have maintained a continuity of apostolic succession in their clergy.  For many—especially in the second and later waves of the Reformation—this was not even a concern, but the case of the Scandinavian (Lutheran)  and Anglican Churches merits very close study.  Furthermore, while the Council of Trent taught that only a bishop possesses the “fullness of the priesthood” and thus only a bishop can ordain priests, there are historical instances of presbyteral ordination (ordination of priests by priests), recognized by Rome, at least up to the thirteenth century.  I seem to recall an instance as late as the sixteenth century of a Bull authorizing presbyteral ordinations in the Spanish missions of Mexico, but it may have been authorizing a priest to ordain deacons which would be a somewhat different question.  If presbyteral ordination can be shown to have a legitimate place in the history of the Church, that also opens the door to German Lutheran as well as Reformed Church orders.  Again, I only write from a historical perspective and make no claims to theology but perhaps in future entries we will look more closely at Catholic objections to Anglican and Lutheran Orders and even the very concept of Sacramental Validity—from a historical perspective.

The Gregorian Reform--Mixed Successes

A Medieval Bishop sits enthroned
holding his crozier or episcopal staff

There were three main projects to the Gregorian Reform: the imposition of celibacy, the elimination of simony, and breaking the imperial or royal authority over bishops.  This final point is referred to as “The Investiture Controversy” and we discussed it briefly in our last posting with the example of William of Saint-Calais, Bishop of Durham, in the reign of William Rufus of England.  We will look at the Investiture issue more in this posting.  But before we do, let’s review the first to goals.
      The Gregorian Reform managed to impose clerical celibacy as the universal law for the Western Church. That is to say, by the end of the eleventh century it was known and accepted as law that clergy above and including the Order of Subdeacon in the Western Church were to be celibate.  Accepted does not mean, however, that the law was enforced, much less complied with.  As mentioned in some earlier posts (July 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, August 9), clerical marriage—of a sort of common-law variety—remained somewhat the norm until the reforms of the Council of Trent.  We often refer to the practice of the clergy having a less than formal (that is to say church-blessed) union as “clerical concubinage” but it should be considered more as common law marriage as the relationships tended to be permanent, exclusive (faithful), fecund (child-bearing), and if not public nor were they secret.   It is only after the sixteenth century that celibacy, though not necessarily chastity, became the practice as well as the law.
      Simony, the purchasing and selling of Church offices, did not have a better fate.  One does not come across it as much after the Gregorian Reform, at least by that name, but in fact it persisted under various guises and indeed still persists in the Church today under the camouflage of well accepted practices.  We will see that in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance huge amounts of money as well as promises of lucrative positions were shelled out to the Cardinal-Electors by papal wanna-bes every time there was a conclave.  When we look at the situation at the time of the Protestant Reformations we will examine the issue of “annates”—the practice of giving the Holy See the first year’s income from one’s new position in return for papal confirmation of the election or appointment.  Can you imagine giving to the Holy See the entire income of the Diocese of Winchester in England for, let us say, 1532?  Or the Archdiocese of Cologne?  One can see why so many supported the breaks with Rome just to keep that  money local.   Today too—and many Catholics are surprised (and even shocked) that it is customary for a newly elevated prelate ranging from Cardinals down through Monsignors in developed societies such as our own to give the Holy See (I refrain from saying “The Pope”) a handsome gift in acknowledgement for their appointment.  Such honorariums can range anywhere from a million dollars for a more important appointment to perhaps ten or fifteen thousand for the monsignoral purple belly-band.  In the case of Cardinals or bishops, these gratuities are usually offered by their dioceses to thank the Holy See for providing new leadership and, to be fair, the gifts offered newly named monsignors by their friends help defray the offering the new domestic prelate or chaplain to His Holiness or whatever makes to our friends across the seas.  Moreover the gifts and fees accruing to a major prelate (not a monsignor) make their gifts to the Holy See affordable.  For example, when a bishop visits a parish for confirmation or comes to a religious community to perform an ordination—priestly or diaconal—the normal gratuity would be between five hundred and a thousand dollars.  Even a casual visit to the parish merits an “Irish hand-shake.” One East Coast Archbishop, when complimented on some expensive cufflinks  that matched his arch-episcopal ring (all three holding a Roman coin from the time of Jesus—also the time of Herod the Great), said “Oh, when you’re an archbishop you don’t pay for these things.”    No, I guess you don’t.  And so it is indeed right and just that the Holy See should be thanked for facilitating a step up into a more gracious life-style.     As Thernadier was inclined to sing in Les Miserables: “But nothing gets you nothing Everything has got a little price!”  It can be argued that this provides necessary income for the Holy See which always has a terrible time balancing its budget—an even tougher time than the United States Government, though more successful than the Feds in the end.  I buy that.  The problem isn’t the financial transaction; the problem is the lack of transparency.  But Catholic Church finances are notoriously non-transparent, excepting for some religious orders of women who are way ahead of the pack in knowing what the Church needs today for genuine Reformation. 
     Well—on to the Investiture Conflict.  You know, I don’t think we have time for that today after all.  Let me set it up and we will continue it in the next posting.   The problem is that, as I described yesterday, the custom had arisen of the Emperor, or a King, or even a major nobleman “investing” bishops and abbots in their respective empires, kingdoms, or duchies with the insignia of office.  This implied that the prelate received his jurisdiction and authority not from God (or from God’s Church) but from the secular lord.  Indeed, the problem was even more serious.  In fact it was usually the Emperor, King, or major noble who instructed the cathedral chapter (or in the case of abbots, the monastic chapter) for whom to vote in the election.  Church offices were in the gift of the political authority and this threatened the independence of the Church.  It also, and this was even more to the point, threatened the loyalty of the bishop or abbot to the Holy See should a dispute arise between the secular power and the Church, as it indeed often did.  Thus Gregory VII—who is my second favorite pope in history—undertook to break this practice of imperial/royal investiture and so he took on the Emperor, Henry IV.  But that is for our next posting.        

History in the Making: Today's Need for Reformation II

The Council of Trent
painting in Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome
note the lady pope in the foreground

After yesterday’s blog on the question of what happens today when (and if) the Church needs Reformation and who has the authority to reform it when (and if) the papacy doesn’t see the need for reform? I was emailed with the question whether I think that the Church today does indeed need a Reformation.  My answer is yes.  That is why I am tracing the history of Reformations.  We are facing many of the exact same questions and issues that we have had to face in the past—internal power-struggles, fiscal irregularities, personal sinfulness and sexual immorality at all levels of hierarchy and laity, doctrinal confusion, authority issues—the list goes on.  It is a key axiom of the history of the Church—ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda—the Church, always reforming and always in need of reform. 

I think that the Second Vatican Council was a superb opportunity for Reform in the Church and it held great promise.  I believe that it began to make some significant headway in Reform, but I also believe that its agenda has been abandoned or subject to a sort of ecclesiastical “bait and switch” scam where many of its chief advances have been “reinterpreted” to very different ends than the Council Fathers envisioned.  By the way, this is not a new problem.  Several times in the history of the Church, Councils have had be followed up by subsequent councils to put them back on track.  The best example of this was the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) which met and passed key legislation that probably could have avoided Luther’s Reformation had the Council been taken seriously.  But its reform legislation was never implemented and it took a subsequent Council, the Council of Trent (1545-1562) to clean up the mess that Lateran V had tried to address and failed. 

It would be easy to say that the problem is the Sex Abuse Crisis, or homosexuals in the clergy, or celibacy, or an all-male priesthood, or lack of doctrinal orthodoxy, or the new liturgy, or the revival of the old liturgy, or whatever one’s favorite bugaboo is and say all that we need for reform is some tough legislation that will whip everyone back to shape or to force everyone out of the Church who doesn’t see things the way that we see them.  But the problem is sex-abuse or orthodoxy or secularism or liturgy or whatever.  Certainly the sex abuse crisis is a problem, but it is symptomatic of a far more fundamental problem.  Liturgical aberrations on either the “left”  or the “right” can be problematic, but they are telling us something of a deeper problem to which we must pay attention.  The lack of fiscal transparency in the Church and the lack of accountability of many clergy and hierarchy in financial as well as other matters is a problem, but more important it is another symptom of more basic things going wrong.  No matter what issue is surfaced, we must face the fact that simple legislation—however strict—will not solve the problem of human nature and original sin. 

We can back up a step from the concrete problems and identify the fact that we have some very different theologies operating today in our Catholic Church.  There is a conflict between those who, to use Avery Dulles’ models of Church, are invested in an Institutional view of the Church as opposed to those who embrace a Servant model of Church.  They see issues of authority and mission from vastly different perspectives, so vastly different that it is difficult (if not pointless) for them to even discuss their differences.  There are different moral theologies operating today and this does not just represent a magisterium and a counter-magisterium view as the fuss over condoms as a method to combat aids suggests.  There are different understandings of the Mass and the sacraments which is witnessed by the official sanction of two vastly different rites expressing two vastly different (though not necessarily contradictory) understandings of the Eucharist, of the Church, and of the relationship of humankind to God.  There are times when being Catholic is somewhat like the “crazy-cars” ride that one finds in amusement parks with the little cars all going around in every direction, bumping into one another and bouncing off with no common order or rules.  But this lack of uniformity in practice and even in doctrine is not the fundamental or foundational problem in need of Reform.

What is needed, I believe, to Reform the Church today, is a head-and-members (or the classic term is “root and branch”) renewal in which we examine our personal and communal life as Church with all its structures and rites in the light of the Gospel and the mission of the Church as it is outlined in the Gospel.  We must come to see the Catholic Church as an Evangelical Church—that is a Church, indeed THE CHURCH, of the Gospel.  We need leadership and we need membership who find themselves personally and institutionally renewed and energized by the Gospel. 

It would be relatively easy to legislate “reform.”  People are not to have sex outside of marriage.  Priests and deacons are not to have sex, period!  No abortions.  No birth-control.  Mass is “by the book.”  Everyone has to ante up their share and the clergy have to be honest in dealing with Church funds.  But good luck.  Laws don’t take into account human nature and the effects of Original Sin.  That is why Saint Paul didn’t have a lot of use for “The Law”  (read the commandments of the Old Testament).  The only thing that works is conversion—that arduous process of admitting (and ultimately we have to do this one by one, each for ourselves but with each other’s support and encouragement) of admitting that our way of doing things isn’t working and surrendering to God’s way for us.  I know it sounds naïve.  I know it sounds idealistic.  I know it is terribly abstract.  But conversion is the only model the Gospel gives us and I believe, (to bend Chesterton’s words but not his intent) that it is not that the Gospel has been tried and found wanting; but that it has been found difficult and left untried.

I think as we look at the history of Reformations, we will see that the most successful ones—the Reform of Gregory VII and the Reform of Innocent III, along with the Reform of Trent (or the so called “counter-Reformation)—have all been successful because and to the degree that they fostered conversion in the great and the small alike.  They fostered spiritual renewals in which clergy and laity (and even some bishops) began taking the Gospel to heart.   When Bishop Emil deSmedt stood up at the opening session of Vatican II and called for an end to “triumphalism, juridicism, and clericalism” I think this is what he had in mind.  You cannot legislate Grace. But you can open yourself to it.  We need voices in the Church today that will open our hearts to this sort of conversion—as Saint Francis did in his day or Francis de Sales did in his.  We don’t need bishops or clergy who see the world through the prism of Canon Law (which is not to say that we don’t need Canon Law, only that it is not the foundation of our Christian life).  We don’t need bishops or clergy who are fascinated by their own prerogatives or pomps (which is not to say that a little pomp now and then can’t be a fun thing as long as we don’t take it seriously).  We don’t need dogmatic strict constructionists who strangle Grace before it can emerge from the womb of spiritual experience (which is not to say that we don’t need genuine orthodoxy, operative word being “genuine”).    We don’t need ecclesiastical Nazis who would have a place for everyone and keep everyone in their place (which is not to say that we don’t need some good order in the Church.)  We need in the Church men and women; hierarchy, lay and clergy; that take Jesus—and Jesus alone—at his word and encourage each other to do so too.  We need Christians who get enthused when the read the scriptures and see the possibilities for that Word to incarnate again today in the world as we, the Church, focus on the mission that Jesus has left us.  I am sure that such Reform and Renewal will need guidelines, will even need some parameters, perhaps even a law or two—but it is primarily a question of conversion, personal and communal. 

This will not eliminate sexual misconduct, abortion, dishonesty, pomposity, twenty-foot long trains of scarlet silk trailing behind overweight prelates, priests who don’t know a quid from a quod saying mass in an unintelligible language, aging nuns in capri pants, greed, bad doctrine, nobody going to confession anymore or any other problem.  Human nature is human nature.  No reformation yet has eliminated original sin and its effects—or, for that matter, what the old catechism called “actual sin.”  What it can do is eradicate the “establishment culture” that makes the Church a comfortable home for so much covering up of sin and scandal and help us call one another to ongoing conversion and greater  discipleship.  And we don’t have to wait for Pope Benedict or someone in Rome to lead the way.  Conversion, again, is a one by one process.   None of us can do it alone—we need the support of one another to be faithful—but if we keep the eye of our heart on Christ the Good Shepherd we don’t have to wait for those huffing and puffing guys with shepherds’ crooks to lead us.  They can catch up when they are ready.