THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE:
Hebblethwaite, Peter
THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE
PETER HEBBLETHWAITE
The rise of the Fourth Man
The struggle between the sacred old and the prophetic new is a central theme of the history of religions.
-Paul Tillich,...
...but the work will go on because the questions continue to be asked...
...To say that he had "lapsed" would be to put it too melodramatically...
...Both explanations by villainy must be rejected as the product of naive utopianism combined with Manicheism...
...Crisis," he says "is . . . not a threat of catastrophe, but a turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential...
...The reason why the young apparently "lose their faith" is not because they are hostile or promiscuous or indifferent: it is simply that they do not find in the Church the values that they cherish...
...Mutual Need It is at this point that one begins to sense that if the Fourth Man needs the Church, the Church also needs the Fourth Man...
...The bland led the bland...
...This attitude was well expressed by Heinrich Boll, the German Catholic novelist: "You know that there are two definitions of the Church: on the one hand the institutional Church . . . and on the other the Mystical Body...
...In practice it comes through the Church: but the word "Church" in itself is an abstraction, and existential faith comes to us through the innumerable believers who, hesitantly and always inadequately, make it come alive for us...
...And there is an alternative explanation...
...Different generations operate with different mental maps and judge in the light of different value-systems...
...But though politically committed Christians may borrow their categories from elsewhere, their deepest motivation remains Christian...
...Kenneth Keniston, an American sociologist, has usefully summed up the features of youth culture: "Human qualities such as control, planning, waiting, saving and postponing on the one hand, revering, remembering and respecting on the other, are equally de-emphasized...
...The Church is the flawed embodiment of faith, hope and charity...
...But penultimately this cannot be realized in practice without pain, without the prophetically new colliding with the sacred old...
...To do so would be a form of spiritual suicide...
...It is not identical with the Humanist's faith in man or the Marxist's faith in history...
...His potential role is as the agent or at least the catalyst of change...
...It is the feeling of being knocked off balance that produces the sense of crisis...
...They carry out their own part in the mission of the whole Christian people with respect to the Church and the world...
...Three comments may be made on the denial theory...
...At last, with the youthful demand for authenticity, we begin to come close to the heart of the matter...
...As the psychiatrist Dr...
...Only the truth can console...
...The Church exists to keep alive that all-encompassing truth.xists to keep alive that all-encompassing truth...
...The Pauline use of the image stressed not only the complementary function of the members but also the need for vital, dynamic and life-giving union with Christ, the head...
...The charge of "protestantization" is usually based on liturgical change and the remark that "one can no longer tell the difference...
...Far from bringing any real consolation to the worried, it plunges them still further into their distress, since they are only too aware of the contrast between the soothing rhetoric and what their experience tells them...
...This reassuring theory suggests that "everything will all blow over" or that "in ten years' time everyone will have forgotten about these controversies...
...This intemperate, almost incoherent outburst leaves the invisible opponents lost in a fog of unclarity...
...To devote oneself exclusively to nit-picking and criticism is both frustrating and futile...
...Yet the Fourth Man finds himself at odds with the Church...
...This teaches that there has been polarization and trouble after every council...
...The polemical situation at the time of the Reformation meant not only that Catholics were unfair to Protestants but that they were unfair also to their own positions...
...but it cannot prevent the experience of the Church from being one of community...
...Thirdly, the notion of the Church "settling down" at some future date is contrary to its pilgrim calling...
...Authority" in all its forms is under attack...
...Cardinal Ruffini, who was Archbishop of Palermo, Sicily, talked about the Church going down on it knees to worship the Golden Calf of Modernity...
...To take two simple examples...
...Thus Malachi Martin begins his book, Three Popes and a Cardinal, with this resounding chord: "Well before the year 2000, there will no longer be an institution recognizable as the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church of today...
...If they dismissed the cult of the saints as idolatrous, then celebrate their feasts with even more pomp and construct still more sumptuous reliquaries...
...After one has looked at what has been happening in the Church, the task is to interpret its meaning...
...There will be no point in the future when everything will fall into place, when all the changes have finally been made and the lost Golden Age restored The law of the Church's life is what Pastor Roger Schutz, Prior of Taize", calls "the dynamism of the provisional...
...I shall use it initially in the sense of Henri de Lubac who, following Teilhard de Chardin, defines crisis as "the disturbance of a state of equilibrium and the search for a new equilibrium...
...If it stands still to contemplate its own splendor, it becomes false to its calling...
...Liberalism" is sometimes presented as the scapegoat...
...In the past every hint and rumor of conflict tended to be suppressed...
...To disturb that balance, to break with fortress ways and set off in search of a new balance was a courageous undertaking and bound to be painful...
...The Counter-Reformation worked on the principle that if the reformers asserted a doctrine, then Catholics must say the opposite...
...It may hedge theological work around with prohibitions and guidelines...
...This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Runaway Church, to be published in this country as a Crossroad Book by The Seabury Press, Copyright © 1975 by Peter Hebblethwaite...
...It sets the crisis in the context of a changing world...
...The Christian community is a permanent learning community in which all teach and all learn...
...The next twenty-five years will see the emergence of a new principle of relative equilibrium in the Church as the seeds planted by the Council bear fruit...
...It is not something we invent from scratch, and if we think we do, it is in the manner of an explorer bravely planting a flag on an unknown island only to discover that it is inhabited after all...
...There is one simple reason why the Fourth Man can have some confidence in the future: it is that the ancient legal maxim, consuetudo contra legem, operates in the Church-what is actually done overrides the law, and the law eventually catches up...
...But Bishop Butler justifies his position (put forward, be hastens to explain, as a question for debate and not a proposal for action) in terms of Bernard Lonergan's distinction between faith and beliefs...
...In this way he becomes "the first of a long line of brothers" (Romans 8,29...
...The Fourth Man knows about the folly of the cross, but he does not see why it should be compounded by countless other follies which obscure the Christian message and for which no justification can be provided...
...Faith can be lost, not in the way one loses a bunch of keys, but in the sense that it ceases to shape a life...
...And faith is verified when it casts light on our everyday experience and life acquires a pattern: suffering is no longer mere degradation, fidelity is possible and death, the last enemy, loses its terror...
...The Council's statements were clear enough: "The laity in their own way are made sharers in the priestly, prophetic and kingly functions of Christ...
...The Curia does indeed bear much of the responsibility because of the control which it attempts to impose on the whole Church...
...Have we," asks Bishop Butler, "been too ready to neglect the evidence of shared faith, and to concentrate on the evidence of divisive doctrines...
...Every decision is a step towards the future, and too often the Church's leaders have haphazardly reststed change or made only grudging concessions...
...The balance is momentarily disturbed...
...Paternalism does not work...
...The Pilgrim Church has an unfinished quality, it knows that it is still in the making, and that the possibilities are more open-ended than most people thought ten years ago...
...It was simply that he no longer cared about the Church peter hebblethwaite, a previous contributor, is the former editor of the British The Month...
...This reverses the usual procedure, which has always assumed that "communion was the distant goal, possible once doctrinal agreement had been secured...
...They are exposed to the same influences, have the same struggles, and cannot be accused any longer of unfamiliarity with each other's thinking...
...Christians have been roused from their lethargy and made sensitive to the political and social dimensions of their faith, but that does not mean that the Church has become merely a social welfare agency or a spiritual Red Cross...
...Confidence in the Holy Spirit at work in the whole Church means that ultimately he will bring a greater correspondence between teaching and life, norms and values, institution and existence...
...As Bishop Christopher Butler has said, what keeps them apart are the differences inherited from the past, and he went on to suggest that "doctrinal agreement will only come about when communion has been established...
...but it cannot punish them when they do not...
...What is at stake here is the implicit model of the Church...
...We have no means of knowing what he would have thought of subsequent developments, except that, having seen the hand done by repression, he would have avoided it...
...Their contribution will eventually be recognized, because it will be needed...
...To speak of the Church is to speak of hope, for the man who does not know hope, does not know God and his promises...
...But once liberated from the neurotic fear born of the polemical situation, the way was open to emphasize convergence rather than divergence...
...The Council did not make the Body its central and controlling image of the Church...
...The People of God is in movement...
...Since whether a crisis exists or not is partly a matter of definition, this argument can be made to sound plausible...
...This explanation is widespread and profoundly defeatist: an army in retreat always looks around for scapegoats...
...The earlier model was easier to grasp, more immediately consoling and psychologically powerful...
...Erik Erikson's positive interpretation of crisis applies with precision to the last decade of the Church...
...Malcolm Muggeridge in a series of diverting essays has portrayed the Catholic Church, once the strongest bastion of world-denying Christendom, as "succumbing to the siren voices of material and fleshly well-being wafted across the Atlantic...
...But what this brief account of faith does not say is how it comes to us...
...The Church of Rome has become indistinguishable from Protestantism and is proceeding to repeat its mistakes...
...Secondly, although there is something in the idea that clash and confrontation receive more clamorous attention than they did before the Council, this is merely the obverse of a new and desirable openness...
...The voice of youth," said Pedro Arrupe, General of the Jesuits, "is the voice of the modern world in the Church...
...Inside the fortress strict discipline was maintained, as befitted the embattled situation...
...The entire institution, with all its historically-conditioned features, is sacralized and treated as though it were wholly of divine origin...
...The grain of truth in the Ruffini-Muggeridge interpretation is that if the Church and its members were to spend all their time echoing secular cliches, widely available from other sources, then we could diagnose a loss of nerve and vitality...
...Yet that was what the Pilgrim Church was called to do...
...He denounces "those who have said 'no': they burn but they consume themselves...
...Indeed the question should rather be why there has not been a still greater coming together of Christians...
...Hope does not exclude planning...
...It balanced it with images of growth, and above all by the model of the People of God in history...
...There has been intense polarization between factions...
...One does not wish to underestimate the power of the Roman Curia, but it is not solely responsible for the Church's troubles...
...But there are situations where the Church alone has the strength to denounce injustice, and the Church does not have to be afraid of ever reinforcing a contemporary trend...
...One of the Church's problems was that the institutionalized use of the image of the Body made for complete immobility: it led to a model of the Church in which unchangeable roles were permanently assigned: hands remained hands and eyes, eyes, forgetting that the hand needs to see, and the eye needs to work...
...If we take the model of the Pilgrim Church seriously, then we must expect the Church to have hazards and upsets on its journey...
...But this is very much a theologian's observation: most Catholics do not know enough about the first century to make it a norm...
...It is only the anticipation of the Kingdom, not the Kingdom itself...
...It is unreasonable to ask for perfect faith, hope undimmed, inexhaustible charity in the Church, as Charles Davis does in A Question of Conscience...
...Christians already share in faith: they differ in the set of propositions in which they have formulated that faith-or rather in which their respective communions have formulated their faith...
...Since the Council there has been an attempt to adapt to the contemporary world with disastrous results...
...It is true that Karl Barth, one of the greatest Protestant theologians of the century, warned the Catholic Church against this danger and notably against the sort of "biblicism" which ignored history and imagined that one could return to the faith-experience of the primitive Church by overleaping the intermediate stages...
...He summoned the Council because he believed that the Church's problems could only be solved with the collaboration of the whole Church, recognizing that "it takes many to be intelligent...
...And despite the heavy-handed irony of Urs von Balthasar, they not only remain in the Church out of conviction but they cannot conceive of leaving it, and for a very simple reason: they think of the Church simply as humanity in so far as it has recognized, however falteringly, its vocation in Christ...
...It may exhort Christians to shun married priests...
...What is happening in the Church simply mirrors the crisis of contemporary society which is also off-balance, and moreover this is as it should be: the Pilgrim Church would know that it was failing in its mission if it failed to reflect the turmoil and pressures of the age, for then it would be unfaithful to the principle of the Incarnation which implies that it must really live in the now of history, and not strive for some trans-temporal escape-route...
...There is a feeling of crisis...
...Both shared the view that the success of the Church was built on pessimism rather than the absurd pretension of improving the world, and that the task of the Church is to criticize the world, not to ape it...
...It is said to have invaded the Church...
...Faith is mediated through other people...
...The Reformation, resisted for so long, has belatedly and blood-lessly triumphed...
...The hypothesis that the Fourth Man has quite simply lost his faith must be taken seriously, for if it were true, he would have nothing to contribute to the Church...
...The crisis is cut down to size by being referred to as "the so-called crisis" (just as Catholics used to refer to the "so-called Reformation") and consolation is drawn from the long perspective of history...
...The strategy to which Boll alludes is very familiar among Roman officials and all who have felt their influence...
...but it cannot intrude on the privacy of the married...
...The critics go to work not to enjoy some perverted satisfaction, but because their hopes are unfulfilled and their love disappointed...
...No longer do they grow up in ivory towers, in isolation from each other...
...Perfection, the Golden Age, is a sustaining vision along the way and the gift of God at the end of time, not something that will come about next week or in the next decade or even in the fateful year 2000...
...Anyone who has some facility for distinguishing spirits can recognize them...
...If we do not understand bur recent past, we will be unable to foresee the future...
...The familiar Counter-Reformation model of the Church as fortress or "perfect society," complete in itself, able to defy the world and surrounded by formidable enemies was replaced by another model in which Christians mingle freely with the diverse peoples of the world and the Pilgrim Church acts as the sign or sacrament of salvation, though God's grace is not confined to its institutional channels...
...Without presuming to tie down in advance the unpredictable Holy Spirit, some fairly clear picture of the Church of the future is needed, because without it there are no particular reasons for taking decisions now...
...The other version of the explanation by villainy pins the blame on the Roman Curia...
...The openness of conflicts in the post-conciliar Church represents a victory for honesty, and it transforms our idea of the Church: no longer a vast monolith marching inexorably forwards and brushing aside the accidents of history, it becomes a people, with all the diversity, turbulence, pressure groups, public opinion and tough argument that characterize a real people...
...It is here that we can speak of a new way of belonging to the Church, characteristic of what may be called, after Roustang, the Fourth Man...
...If the leaders of the Church could grasp that criticism has a positive role and saw it as an urgent appeal to their pastoral responsibility, then progress could be made...
...but it cannot ensure that it ceases...
...If only they could be expelled or curbed, all would be well...
...but if it is to be in continuity with the great Catholic tradition, it will refuse to be pushed into the margin of irrelevance, will remain co-extensive with the whole of human life and take the risk of political commitment...
...It is not a matter of accepting indiscriminately the alternative mental map which certainly needs supplementing...
...It is unhappy with any contradiction between theory and practice...
...They can no more leave the Church than they can take leave of humanity...
...one can ask that it should be moving towards it...
...Values today are communicated horizontally through the peer-group rather than from above...
...We must expect it to be travel-stained, flawed, weary, encumbered with much bric-a-brac and yet trying to travel lightly, forever picking itself up and starting again...
...Identity was never in doubt: it was worn like a badge and could not be forfeited whatever happened ("A bad Catholic remains a Catholic...
...he preferred to cultivate his garden...
...The incurable post-conciliar optimists exhort hint to be patient and to bide his time, and remind him of the folly of the cross...
...In Pope John the big abstract words like dialogue, openness and brotherhood came alive, and the world hoped again...
...But the notion of someone not actually sick "criticizing for the sake of criticizing" is as far fetched as von Balthasar's fantasy of rabid fanatics emerging from the Trojan Horse of the Church...
...Christianity uses arguments but depends on community...
...The front remained solid...
...The official Church may proclaim that inter-communion should cease...
...The mother who teaches her child to pray, the student grappling with the doubt of a friend-they too form part of the magisterium...
...Life in the fortress certainly represented one sort of equilibrium, and many remain nostalgic for its apparent peace and tranquillity...
...Few who use this overworked word take the trouble to define it...
...The effects can be seen in the charismatic movement and in the phenomenon of Taize...
...A second interpretation admits the existence of a crisis but attributes it to the work of arrogant and misguided individuals within the Church...
...And the simple reason for this feeling is that the Council formulated a new understanding of the Church which affected every aspect of its life...
...One of his favorite texts was Joseph's disclosure of his identity to his brothers: "I am Joseph, your brother" (Genesis 45, 4...
...They exercise a ministry towards each other and a mission towards the world...
...They become cynical and destructive, they smell each other out and hold together...
...Many conflicts in the Church arise from a clash of "models": the disputants are literally talking at cross-purposes, since they appeal to different values and criteria of judgment...
...It is this effort, with its successes, failures, confusions and ambiguities which has given the last decade a certain unity...
...This should be a matter for rejoicing rather than lamentation...
...And since at present the Church has no way of enforcing its demands, precedents are being created...
...The full reality of the Church has not yet come into existence...
...His adhesion to the Church is a form of critical belonging, and he sees criticism not as self-indulgence but as a duty if identification is to be combined with integrity...
...This is a valuable element in understanding the present situation of the Church...
...Planning the future involves understanding the present...
...To say that the Church will be different is the most evident of truths, for it is is in the nature of all living institutions to adapt in order to survive...
...Denial and deception, even with best intentions, are counter-productive...
...The "Third Man" neither hoped for reform with the progressives nor sought to resist it with the conservatives...
...The perennial Christian task is to close those gaps as far as possible: they can never be entirely eliminated, for that would mean that the Christian had arrived at his goal, his pilgrimage over...
...And Erikson's definition of crisis can be seen as secular transposition of the death and resurrection of Christ...
...One point of general agreement, perhaps the only one, is that a crisis exists, though as we shall see it is capable of many varied interpretations...
...but the Christian tradition is sufficiently rich and deep to make room for these experimental values...
...There is even a special Italian word for it, the dopoconcilio, but after a while, "things settle down again" and order is restored...
...To say all this is not to produce a recipe for ecclesiastical anarchy since all the developments mentioned are within the logic of Vatican II...
...In contrast, activity, adventure, responsiveness, genuineness, spontaneity and sentience are the new experimental values...
...But we cannot seriously maintain that if the Curia were miraculously to be staffed by supermen who happened to be saints, there would be no crisis...
...If the Church is to teach the world, it must also be ready to learn from the world...
...but the injustice which prompts them to speak does not go away...
...But that supposes a continual conversation with the world...
...It may revise the code of canon law and present the Church as an authority...
...Yet the last decade of the Church is not just an arbitrary slice of history: it marks the period in which a prodigious effort was made to assimilate the achievements of Vatican II...
...But before accusing anyone of losing his faith, we need to define a little more closely the content of faith...
...The judgment is not made in an instant or a decade...
...The search for scapegoats can lead to blaming the crisis on dialogue with other Christians...
...He learns the truth of Bernanos' maxim: "It is easy to suffer for the Church-the difficult thing is to suffer at the hands of the Church...
...They expected to meet a pontiff and they met a brother...
...It makes no matter whether they officially leave the Church or remain within it...
...But he is keenly sensitive to any attempt to disarm criticism by appealing to faith...
...Interpretation is not an abstract intellectual exercise nor a luxury for those with time on their hands...
...It would be worrying if the Church came through unscathed, and if Christians did not feel the need to find in the Church a real experience of commmunity...
...It is not a matter of re-inventing the Church as though it had no history, but of recognizing that the tradition is much wider and richer than we had supposed...
...It is true that the demand for a vernacular and more accessible form of worship was one of the battlegrounds trampled over at the Reformation, and that Rome has at last conceded the day...
...The Roman Catholic Church has been "protestantized...
...It consists in switching continually between the severely practical and loftily spiritual...
...There were two contradictory versions of this theory: some blamed the "critics," an ill-defined band of contestateurs, while others blamed the mafia of the Roman Curia...
...This means, for example, that the priest, if he is to have any effective authority, will have to discover a more involved and fraternal way of exercising it...
...It is possible for the Church to decline into a sect, and to be content to snatch a few burning brands from the fire of contemporary life...
...Through the present crisis the Church is being tested and purified...
...It all depends on what is meant by recognizable...
...Using more restrained language, Pope Paul in his Wednesday audiences has rebuked those who "criticize for the sake of criticizing...
...One has Christian faith if one can say that "Jesus is the Lord" -provided one knows who Jesus is and what "Lord" means...
...if it absolutizes a moment of its journey, it betrays its origin and its pilgrim destination...
...The huge theological superstructure erected around faith to elaborate, defend and illustrate it, can hide the fact that the content of faith is exceedingly simple...
...If they denied the real presence, then it must be honored in ever more splendid processions...
...The "politicization" of the Church is a fact...
...Most of the bans and prohibitions of the decade have been ineffectual...
...One can be satisfied if there is enough faith, enough hope and enough charity for it to be a credible sign to the world...
...First, it does not work...
...If criticism is dismissed in advance as gratuitous disobedience or mere ranting, then there will be no learning and polarization will grow...
...What one asks, then, of an organized Christian body, a Church, is that it should continue to convey the essential Christian message and provide a credible context in which faith is possible...
...The critic is discredited and said to be losing his faith or his mind or both...
...Its secrecy, mafia-like tendencies and preconciliar theology have been sufficiently denounced...
...One cannot ask that it already be at its goal...
...Jack Dominian has written: "If I were asked to point to one psychological reason why the hopes of Vatican II are so slow to develop, I would suggest that the retardation occurs at all levels when authority has been challenged legitimately and validly but has not had the psychological resources or insight to cope, and has retreated either in evasion, postponement or repression...
...A favorite episcopal tactic is to underplay the crisis or even to declare that it does not exist...
...It is an urgent practical task...
...One can grant the general truth of these assertions, while denying their allegedly ruinous consequences...
...One fairly obvious conclusion has already emerged: the process of assimilation has been neither smooth nor harmonious, and gaps have opened up between the center and the periphery, doctrine and life, conscience and authority...
...For while the Third Man went off to swell the ranks of the post-Christians, the Fourth Men remain within the Church while recognizing that they are in conflict with it on major points...
...One inevitably thinks, in contrast, of Pope John XXIII who used to find sleep at night with the thought, "Relax, Angelo, it's not you who runs the Church, but the Holy Spirit...
...The common factor to both versions was that they absolved themselves from responsibility while pinning all the blame on "the others...
...It is not only bishops but parents, teachers and politicians who have to devise a new style of authority...
...He forms part of the "loyal parliamentary opposition" which exercises a watchdog function in the Church...
...One has faith if one believes that Jesus died so that we might be reconciled with God and each other, and that he rose from the dead as the pledge of our resurrection...
...Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Ten years is not a long time in the history of an institution so venerable as the Roman Catholic Church, and we are all tempted arrogantly to overestimate the importance of the recent past...
...The Fourth Men are a part of the Church...
...In his Passion he becomes vulnerable, yet through this experience the power of the resurrection is released upon the world...
...It may pronounce a ban on birth-control...
...But that does not mean that he can tolerate their continued existence...
...However, there are various accounts of the crisis, and a critical examination of them will bring us to our conclusion...
...We cannot predict the future because we are, as it were, in the middle of an unfinished German sentence-and the verb which will give it its final meaning comes only at the end...
...It may discourage political priests and committed laymen...
...We have seen so many examples of the gap between rhetoric and reality, between the language of faith and its lived content, between what is officially asserted and what is privately believed, between what authority proposes and what believers accept, between, in short, institution and life...
...We know," says the First Epistle of John, "that we have passed from death into life, because we love the brethren" (I John 3,14...
...His listeners were delighted and surprised that a Pope should step down, like Joseph, from his throne and overflow his official role...
...The evidence of the Church's vulnerability should not blind us to its potentiality...
...The Church is a voluntary association...
...It throws a flood of light on the misunderstandings which have bedeviled the last decade...
...Hans Urs von Balthasar, otherwise a distinguished theologian, resorted with increasing bitterness to the explanation by villainy...
...It is fitting to end with the memory of Pope John who launched the Church on the path of the Council without living to see where it might lead...
...Some of the most dramatic prophecies prove to be less startling on closer inspection...
...THE CHURCH OF THE FUTURE PETER HEBBLETHWAITE The rise of the Fourth Man The struggle between the sacred old and the prophetic new is a central theme of the history of religions...
...It had to begin walking-and walking is a matter of nearly but never quite falling over...
...The talk of crisis is said to be the invention of journalists, a disreputable crew, who are only interested in clash, confrontation and conflict and who ignore the solid progress being made in obscurity...
...And he includes himself in the project of continual reform...
...That is a nonne question, expecting the answer 'yes.' There is another type of explanation for the crisis which avoids the temptation of scapegoat-seeking...
...A decade ago a French writer described the emergence of a "Third Man" who observed the quarrels between "progressives" (First Men) and "conservatives" (Second Men), and turned away bored ('Le Troisieme Homme,' Francois Roustang, in Christus, October 1966...
...The new model of the Church as a pilgrim and fraternal community serving the world will become dominant...
...It is also true that it has acknowledged that the ministry of the Word is as important as the ministry of the Sacrament, and has underplayed specifically "Catholic" features such as devotion to Our Lady...
...His death and resurrection convince us that hatred does not have the last word, that love is worthwhile and hope possible...
...It cannot be conducted from the battlements of a beleaguered fortress...
...But what was suppressed did not disappear: It simply went underground and poisoned the Church's life, causing bitterness and frustration...
...It is the work of a lifetime...
...and ceased to identify with it...
...Christians mediate faith for each other and the world...
...But if they are to be realized, crippling timidity must be abandoned...
...Occasionally a "convert" was welcomed across the drawbridge, and he was greeted as someone who had "seen the light...
...When that voice is listened to, it makes awkward and stringent demands for "authenticity...
...If they rejected auricular confession, then it must be made the center of the spiritual life...
...This is Christian faith...
...The cause of the "Third World" does not become less important because it is fashionable...
...This is liberating knowledge bringing freedom from the absurd, from the rat-race, from the bitter taste of ashes which is so much part of the twentieth century experience...
...Pope John made this text his own when speaking to socialists, to Jewish leaders, to prisoners in the Ara Coeli prison and to mankind generally...
...Likewise, "institutions" are under attack for their daunting size and impersonality...
...The consequence of saying that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are showered on the whole Christian people will eventually be acknowledged and taken seriously...
...I refuse to play the game of eternally justifying the first by appealing to the second" (Interview in Commonweal, May 19, 1974...
...Ten years on, the Third Men have not grown fewer, but the situation has changed again...
...and whether the Church will be recognizable or not depends on the selection of features believed to characterize its essential nature...
...It insists that orthopraxis is as important as orthodoxy...
...He appreciates the truth of John Stuart Mill's remark: "My love for an institution is in proportion to my desire to reform it...
...Most predictions about the Church's future are little more than hasty extrapolations based on prolonging the apparently successful trends of the present...
...The Inquisition happily no longer exists, the kind of theological witch-hunt that first invented and then destroyed Modernism is no longer possible, and even the fact that the Church officially forbids something no longer induces automatic guilt-feelings...
Vol. 102 • December 1975 • No. 20
