AGENDA FOR THE PAPACY: What the Church Needs from the Next Pope:SHAKING DOWN A SORTING OUT
McBrien, Richard P.
lectual of modern popes may have sincerely felt he was protecting the integrity and moral authority of the church by "unpopular" decisions, the weight of...
...and, in the long run, he has inadvertently undermined the very authority he sought to uphold...
...From the summer of the encyclical to the fall of 1971, with the .issuance of the Third International Synod of Bishops' declaration on .the ordained priesthood, the Church showed the strains of conflict, tension, unrest, and anger...
...If Providence has her on a conservative course, then let that become unmistakably clear under the new Pope so that those who cannot abide such a course will be able to pursue other options for the sake of God's Kingdom without fugher delay...
...GENUINECOMMUNICATION I BAVlS is Chairman of the Department of Religion of Conconcordia University, Montreal, Canada...
...Yet, Jesus, one might answer, did not ask Peter to be a diplomat...
...the orientation is towards authority and the law and order of a particular social system...
...I see ;the failure of the pontificate just ended as a failure to promote creative communication within the Church...
...Many things are indeed important, and some things are even very important...
...but, except in general terms, they have never been communicated with the same force as the church's sexual discipline to the Church at large...
...He asked him to feed his sheep and expect a violent death...
...To be a member of the Church in those years meant being part of something on the move, something perceived by insider and outsider alike as having value, as having ~he capacity to make a difference to the quality of life and the direction of world events...
...The new Pope wi~l not be able to keep his ecclesiological cards hidden for very long...
...History may someday look very kindly upon these fifteen Pauline years, but I should doubt very much that history will have any praise for a successor who tries simply to reproduce those years over the next decade and a half...
...Because of the way he chose to live and because of the way he understood his office, Giovanni Battista Montini will never be understood the way any human being as sensitive as himself would like to be understood...
...Individuals reach an autonomy of conscience, enabling them, if need be, to create new rules...
...It may be argued that if Paul VI had been any stronger and more specific in his attacks on economicinjustice and, for example, the level of American violence in Vietnam--particularlyin requiringfollowthrough from American bishops---he would have undiplomatically "alienated his constituency...
...A Pope with the theological vision and pastoral courage to pursue such initiatives as these can provide the Church with a kind of leadership that is at once unambiguous and progressive...
...And if Providence has a more progressive course for the Church, then tet that be unmistakably clear so that those who could not really accept Vatican II and have been waiting in ,hope for the day of its effective repeal will be free to pursue the holy grail of orthodoxy in some other Christian household...
...To his credit, on social, political, economic and international issues the Pope's thinking and teaching have been consistently more progressive than those of most American Catholics...
...How else will he be able to hold the Church together...
...But he has earned his own sentence--"l love him as a member of the great human family . . ."--as his epitaph...
...2) abolish obligatory celibacy for priests (while encouraging on a case~by-case basis the readmission of married priests to active ministry...
...and (3) set in motion forces which wilt lead eventually to the full incorporation of qualified women to priestly and episcopal ministry (beginning perhaps with the diaconate, since ordination of women to the priesthood remains the one reform-issue which continues to evoke a large negative response from the Church's general membership, including women...
...ii AGENDAFORTHEPAPACY What the Church needs from the next Pope SHAKINGDOWN &SORTINGOUT FATHER RICHARD P. MCBRIEN is pro]essor o] theology at Boston College and director of its Institute ]or the Study of Religious Education and Service...
...history...
...Meanwhile, he has expended his physical energies so generously, but most diplomatically, as a traveling symbol for peace--in a worldly arena where, as Jose] Stalin cynically but correctly observed, the Pope has no armed divisions...
...To be sure, .there are far more important issues facing the Church over the long expanse of human history than are the issues of birth control, clerical celibacy, and the ordination of women...
...Paul VI, ever sensitive and intelligent, knew that too...
...Correspondingly, the chief task for the new pope is to remove the institutional barriers to such communication...
...At the conventional level, an individual simply follows the fixed rules of his social group...
...Although the 1971 synod spoke with exceeding wisdom and courage on the matter of social justice, its pronouncement on the priesthood made it clear that there would be, indeed there could be, no additional institutional reforms of any significance during the reign of Paul VI...
...What the Catholic Church needs now is a shaking down and a sorting out...
...I have deliberately included no reference here to the painfully evident gap between rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed...
...departures from the priesthood and religious life increased...
...These reservations notwithstanding,I propose the following thesis: Barring abbreviation by sudden death, the term of the new Pope will prove to be the most .crucial in modern Churchhistory, rivaled only by Pope John XXIII's...
...the interpretation and mediation of the divine wi$l...
...In his last months he once offered himself to take the place of a hijacking hostage and later, in another burst of feeling, escaped the papal "We" to plead with terrorists for the life of Aldo Moro: "I love him as a member of the great human family, as a brother in faith and a son of the Church of Christ...
...Let him be a less anguished figure, more benign, more simpatico, less plaintive...
...left alike...
...That would release the creative energies of Catholics...
...If there is to be a concession to modernity or to public opinion, let it be only in the personality of the new Pope...
...They will have to be placed on the table, one by one, as .he makes his first important appointments, as he issues his first encyclical, as he responds to the first major challenge to his authority from left or right...
...And so, with the shouting having subsided and the rhetoric softened, the Church entered a period of quiet a~trition at a slower but inexorable pace...
...From 1963, with only one of four couneit sessions completed, ur~til 1968, with the publication of Humanae Vitae, the Church seemed marked by excitement, even enthusiasm...
...That demands advancing beyond the "conventional" stage of consciousness, at which Catholic leaders themselves seem to be stuck and at which, at any rate, they want to keep the rest of the church...
...But events which alter the course of history ---even of a single nation or church--are truly rare, and they are unpredictable in any case...
...As a group politicians are not remarkable for their sense of history...
...male-female complementarity...
...Accordingly, we should look forward to a new Petrine minigter who will, withoct prejudice to due process and his responsibility to mount reasonable andpersuasive arguments, (1) revoke the anti-contraception teaching of HumanaeVitae (while reaffirmingthe Church's concern for human life at every stage of development...
...Given the state of mind of many in the Catholic Cburoh today and given the range of their expeotations for the future, a moderately conservative Pope wilt only intensify the frustrations of both right and...
...But a Pope's approach to such issues as these is symptomatic of his approach to the deeper issues .they imply: the meaning of human sexuality and its relationship to psychic and spiritual growth...
...the principles of subsidiarity and coresponsibility as hallmarksof a Church that is first and foremost a community...
...The moral stance is one of conformiey...
...Our governmental institutions, our free enterprise system, our personal liberties, our commitment to social justice, our standing in the forum of nations will somehow hang in the balance...
...At least there would no longer be any serious doubt about the Church's future course...
...The limiting assumption would be dropped that all that has to be done is to adapt what already exists...
...They tend to exaggerate the significance of the immediate and the ephemeral...
...The thesis ,has to be explained against the 'background of :the pontificate just concluded.During the course of Pope Paul Vl's incumbency, the Catholic Church showed at least three different faces...
...The identity of the autonomous person is not tied to particular social institutions or to the fixed contents Commonweal: 561...
...To be creative communication must be free from domination and proceed in a mutual recognition of personal autonomy...
...At the post-conventional level, self-reflection gives rise .to a distinction between formulated rules and the universal principles that generate the rute...
...For .that reason .there was always something peculiarly attractive and refreshing about the understated, almost diffident rhetoric of Eugene ,McCarthy...
...lectual of modern popes may have sincerely felt he was protecting the integrity and moral authority of the church by "unpopular" decisions, the weight of scholarly theological-z--notjustpopular--opinionwithinthe Church has not supported him...
...Church attendance and vocations fell...
...An ecclesiastical leader who proves inde~Jsive about the latter will be inevitably less convincing about the former...
...He must steer the same middle course, suffering 1 September 1978:560 Kiing and Lefebvre alike...
...The conventionzd wisdom asserts that the new Pope should be like his predecessor, a moderate conservative...
...It is not because I think that the new Pope can afford to be inattentive to the demands of justice and peace, but that issues of justice and peace in the world at large cannot be divorced from issues of justice and peace in the Church herself...
...the scope and limitations of ecclesiastical authority...
...I am, of course, using the distinction made by Lawrence Kohlberg between the conventional and the postconventional or autonomous levels of moral consciousness...
...Thus, a forthcoming preside~ialelection is conCxlenI.ly deseri'bed as the most critical election in U.S...
...I do not agree with this point of view...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 17
