TOWARD A MORE FALLIBLE CHURCH

By Mayo Mahs

ROME--Now that the third session of the international Synod of Roman Catholic Bishops is over, what has really taken place? The synod, like the two others held since the Second Vatican Council, was less than the council had intended when it recommended such meetings as a way for the bishops to have a continuing voice in church developments. Today's synods, unable to exercise any real power of their own, merely advise the Pope of the bishops' thinking on subjects of import. This time the subjects were of import indeed: the crisis in the priestly ministry and the church's role in bringing peace and justice to the world. But the results reveal all too clearly the high cost of the bishops' lack of power. Despite flashes of fine intention and bold suggestion during the past five weeks, nothing really has been accomplished, little really changed. Time may see some of the well-meaning talk translated into action, but time has long since become a luxury. The world has begun to yawn.

It seems almost sacrilegious to yawn at Rome, even in the secular sense. The city is still overwhelmingly attractive, indeed seductive: an Eternal City, according to the cliche, insinuating its spirit of timelessness into those who visit it. That attribute may be unfortunate for Roman Catholic churchmen. For while one can stand in Rome, innocently confident that the Catholic world still spins around the Vatican in reverent orbit, the facts are different. There are times when the center cannot hold, as Yeats said. Most especially it cannot hold when it is the center of an institution that fails to comprehend --or merely ignores--the centrifugal forces that are tearing at its edges. It is just that lack of comprehension that characterized the synod.

The attitude may be understandable in men who know in advance, as the synod delegates did, that the final say on any subject belongs to an increasingly besieged Pope. But, to a waiting world, the seeming immobility of the hierarchy is inexplicable. Perhaps the real question this autumn is not so much what the bishops have or have not done as whether the Catholics of the world seriously care about what they do at all. Most bishops may still listen to the Pope, but fewer and fewer priests listen to either the Pope or their bishops--and many of the laity are beginning to listen to no one. It is not so much the beliefs of the church that have come into question --though some of those, too, have been challenged--as the structure itself. The synapses no longer connect: the mystical body of Christ seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown.

It was only six years ago, at the end of Vatican II, that the Catholic Church seemed to be glowing with new health. What happened? And why? One factor in the upset was Vatican II itself. For four centuries, ever since the Council of Trent countered Protestant reform by consolidating Catholic belief and practice, it had been clear enough what was Catholic and what was not. Though the church frequently required personal sacrifice or demanded personal hardship, it seemed to have all the answers. Vatican II forever changed that, and some people never forgave it.

If Vatican Council II was the bitter pill that caused conservative alienation, it was Pope Paul's no-Pill Humanae Vitae that most embittered liberals. The tragedy of that encyclical was that it could have been a proud plea for the dignity of human life--as many of the overlooked paragraphs remain--at a time when human engineering was raising serious moral questions. Instead, in forbidding artificial birth control, it discouraged not only fervent Catholics who believed in change but those borderline Catholics for whom change might have been a hopeful sign.

Celibacy, birth control, marriage laws and other matters of dogma and discipline may be in the forefront, but the real crisis in the church is one of authority--and whether the government of the church can still command it in the minds of many Catholics. "Authority belongs to those who have authentic voices," writes Maryknoll Psychologist Eugene C. Kennedy in a new book, In the Spirit, in the Flesh, "those who speak to the experience and hopes of mankind."

Too often these past few years, the voices have not been heard from the middle-of-the-road majority of the hierarchy, either in the U.S. or abroad. They have come from loyal independents like Brazil's Dom Helder Camara, battling for his nation's poor, or Belgium's Leo-Jozef Cardinal Suenens, pleading for a greater role in the church for bishops, priests and laymen as well. Often they have come from outside the hierarchy altogether: from Daniel and Philip Berrigan, languishing in jail for the cause of peace; from the irrepressible Hans Kueng, refusing to be read out of the church and telling the Pope that infallibility is a wrong idea.

One thing that might restore such authority to the Pope and his bishops is a new, more flexible vision of the church, less dependent on the sort of legal complexities that bogged down the synod. What the church needs to be, argues Kennedy, is not an organization but a family, "where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in." Such a family, he says, fosters "an atmosphere of growth rather than a domain of control." In short, he says, it "makes room for everybody" because in the end it is the home of sinners.

The long tradition of a "sinners' church" is perhaps the most commanding reason for the survival of Catholicism. Catholic theology is neither a theology of the elect, in which man is saved or lost from the beginning, nor a theology entirely of faith, in which man is saved by faith alone. In essence, it sees man's life on earth as a daily gamble to be won or lost as each man may choose. However much the reality of hell may be dimmed among today's Catholics, they retain the conviction that it is still quite possible to lose one's soul --or save it.

Belgian Theologian-Psychologist Antoine Vergote believes that the young, searching again for religion, will increasingly find their answers in Catholicism because it perceives and preserves the tension between the immanent and the transcendent, the human and the divine. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the continuing Catholic devotion to the Eucharist, the centerpiece of the Mass and what theologian Marc Oraison calls "the only essential, the only ultimately important reality." Catholic left and Catholic right may disagree over the words by which they define it, but not on its ultimate importance. Some of the angry differences today might fade if the church could adopt within itself the sort of ecumenical spirit that it now shows to churches without--if conservatives and liberals could sit down more often around the eucharistic table to discuss one another's problems.

Practical proposals abound, of course, regarding the church's problems. Church Historian John Tracy Ellis insists, along with many others, that U.S. clergy and laity must be given real power in electing their bishops. Activist Priest Joost Reuten of Holland would like to see a Pope along the lines of Dag Hammarskjoeld, presiding over churches of distinct national character but acting as an arbitrator and innovator among them. Reuten, like a growing number of liberals, would not want to see the papacy disappear; too often in the past, an appeal to Rome has been the liberal's only recourse against a reactionary local episcopacy. But Reuten would prefer to see such cases go to an international tribunal, not to "one old man" in the church.

Church government, like secular government, is a resolution of contradictions. The priests and people of a diocese ought to be able to oust a totalitarian or senile bishop, but the church simply cannot become a popularity contest. There will continue to be times when church teachers must be prophetic, pastors authoritarian, bishops angry. Silly theologians should be told when they are silly; silly Popes should be told the same. There should be only one limiting criterion: the church and churchmen ought to stress the humanity and fallibility of the church rather than its immutability and triumphalism.

Humanity, after all, is the saving grace of the church. Jesus Christ, it believes, is God, but he is human too. For all its excesses, past and present, the Catholic Church is an institution of incredibly diverse humanity, a church of people. Underneath the surface of this reluctant third synod ran a discernible strain of awakening humanity that may, in the long run, make the synod more important than it seemed. It is nothing new for a gathering of prelates to be confused, but it is new for many of them to admit that they are confused--to question the very methods that they use for advising the Pope.

The church's salvation, like mankind's, is a long way off, and the impatient would do well to get used to that idea. Meantime, to be a Roman Catholic is to live in a church with growing pains, complete with the special anguish that that implies. The hope is that the church is growing, as the evangelist Luke said of the young Jesus, in wisdom and grace. It is a perilous hope. That sort of growth does not come easily, nor without scars. Even when it seems that it should, it does not happen quickly, or exactly how all the diverse members of the church feel that it should. sb Mayo Mahs

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.