GENUINE COMMUNICATION

...Thesame problem cripples the Catholic Church.Institutionally it continues to function at the conven.tional level, holding tight to traditions and rules and eupbemizing domineering authorityas divinely commissioned hierarchy...

...And what is a humanizing structure...

...2) abolish obligatory celibacy for priests (while encouraging on a case~by-case basis the readmission of married priests to active ministry...

...Individuals reach an autonomy of conscience, enabling them, if need be, to create new rules...

...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...

...Meanwhile, more and more Catholics have reached a post-conventional religious identity, many thrust into self-reflection by Vatican II and HumanaeVitae.He~:e thetensionbetweenactive, self-reflective Catholics, who wish to draw upon the resources of the Catholic tradition but by critical appropriationratherthanconformity,andanofficial Church that blocks free and open communication by unilateral action and appeals to obedience...

...The Catholic Church is being called to open itself to a nondominating exchange with other religions and cultures...

...But a week of intrigue inincense-filledbackroomshas focused the attention of veteran Vaticanologists on two men: Cardinal Ernesto Jaime (Jimmy) Bono Bravo (39) of Ben Salem Island...

...To continue the parental image, Holy Mother the Church today will have to be a good parent no longer dealing with infants but with offspring "come of age," Commonweal: 563...

...The identity of the autonomous person is not tied to particular social institutions or to the fixed contents Commonweal: 561 of a tradition...

...The exercise of personal autonomy becomes restricted totheprivatesphere,andpeoplefeelthemselves prisoners in a social framework that does not allow them to function as free persons...

...To be creative communication must be free from domination and proceed in a mutual recognition of personal autonomy...

...Let him be a less anguished figure, more benign, more simpatico, less plaintive...

...the interpretation and mediation of the divine wi$l...

...To the extent the Church does not effectively preach the Gobd News of humanizing love to the interpersonal, intergroup, societal dimensions of humanity--the message is to eliminate not just "individual" but also "systemic" hostility, injustice, indifference and other barriers to love---to that extent it fails in its mission...

...With the prompting of the spirit of Jesus, Christians attempt to follow his humanizing, and hence divinizing, example as fully as possible...

...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...

...left alike...

...At liturgies he includes the names of Teihard de Chardin and Henry David Thoreau in the canon of the Mass...

...That, in any event, is a shameful solution...

...To spread that Good News, about how to be human, and to help people live it is the purpose of the Gathering of the .Followers of Jesus, the Church...

...The Church's very structure, its pattern of living, must be an examp/e (after Jesus's, under the prompting of his spirit) of a humanizing structure...

...Progressives are expected to/all in behind him...

...the principles of subsidiarity and coresponsibility as hallmarksof a Church that is first and foremost a community...

...Here he used his skills to evict 100 orphans from a seaside mansion he desired as an episcopal palace...

...In a Church based upon genuinely free communication among its members, there issimply no place for a pope with absolute authority or for a control|ing central bureaucracy...

...No appeal to the conventional identity of any or all of the existing traditions will pass today, but only a shift to the creative level which generated and sustains those traditions and which can give them new form.A MODELOFHUMANITY IIII UmN.UU) swmum, Edltor of the Journal of Ecumenical Stud/es...

...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...

...Bravoenteredthepriesthood following two years in the Peace Corps in Pago Pago and two more in prison after refusing to tell an American court his sources for an article he wrote on Dan Berrigan's escape from the FBI...

...Born on an airplane over New York when his Italian Marxist novelist father and Irish actress mother escaped from the Fascists at the beginning of World War II, Jimmy Bravo (pronounced Brahvo) has two Ph.D's, one in politicaleconomy fromtheLondon School of Economics and anotherin American Studies from Yale where he both played rugby and rowed on the crew...

...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...

...the scope and limitations of ecclesiastical authority...

...Correspondingly, the chief task for the new pope is to remove the institutional barriers to such communication...

...DIRECT Fm Ol I B OI IE VATICAN CITY, August 25.--Not even the imposing power of Michelangelo'sLastJudgment looming over the 113 Cardinals filing into the Sistine Chapel this evening couldhushthe rumors that flit like putti around the Renaissance precincts of the Sacred City...

...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...

...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...

...He lives in a slum in a one-room dirtfloor grass hut with a goat, a dog, and an old white horse he rides for exercise...

...The limiting assumption would be dropped that all that has to be done is to adapt what already exists...

...If the Catholic Church were to find ways of instittrtionalizing (and not stifling) creative communication among free persons, it would make a major contribution to the present social and political needs of humanity...

...At the conventional level, an individual simply follows the fixed rules of his social group...

...Cardlmd Grando Gov~~ (64), head of the Sacred Congregatio~ for Order, Truth and Silence...

...They, too, must be fully humanized, after the Jesus model of love...

...But the Church has many competitors in the field of therapy, and one wonders how long it can survive in a recognizable form against more exotic and fashionable remedies...

...The missionary age is dead...

...I do not agree with this point of view...

...At least there would no longer be any serious doubt about the Church's future course...

...Then perhaps some bishops might promote communcation within their dioceses that acknowledges the autonomous personal identity of the participants and does not introduce the baton of authority at every departure from presently formulated doctrines and norms...

...I see ;the failure of the pontificate just ended as a failure to promote creative communication within the Church...

...t~ Prote.~mr o[ C~tcThought at Temple Unioendty in Ph,~del~,hta...

...The main obstacle to such untrammeled communication is the Vatican power structure...

...male-female complementarity...

...Enrolled in the seminary by his parents at the age of five, and rejecting secular learning--aswellas philosophy and theology--as distracting from his vocation, he made himself an expert of canon and property law...

...The synod of bishops might be freed from dominating control, and events like the coming Conference of South America bishops might take place without manipulative interference from the Vatican...

...He has no hobbies, but likes to relax by sitting to have his portrait painted...

...And in this century of anti-Semitism .I cannot refrain from repeating that Jesus found and passed on this model of love from his Jewish heritage, which he gladly lived to the full...

...Wrapped in their violet cassocks and wool capes, the Cardinals are now wrapped in the deep secrecy of the Conclave as well...

...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...

...The moral stance is one of conformiey...

...What the Catholic Church needs now is a shaking down and a sorting out...

...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...

...Certainly, creative communication is needed in the world sieuation...

...Named Cardinal immediately after his ordination, he turned his episcopal palace into an orphanage and officiated at a ritual demolition and burial of the episcopal limousine in the town square...

...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...

...Science with technology has been promoted FLASH...

...An ecclesiastical leader who proves inde~Jsive about the latter will be inevitably less convincing about the former...

...It is univexsal in character, allowing a continuity of the self ~-ough a sequence of particular identities when institutions and traditions change...

...One which leads all persons within it to an even fuller development and utilization of all of their faculties: one which expands and deepens their minds, sharpens their powers of judgment, strengthens their decision-making abilities, fosters their sensitivity to other persons and things--all, as St...

...But this preaching of systemic humanization, of justice, love, freedom, responsibility, cannot be accomplished simply, or even at first, by words...

...The ideological function left to religion is the secondary one of therapeutic: it provides consolatory release from ehe impersonal routines of a technocratic society...

...The new Pope wi~l not be able to keep his ecclesiological cards hidden for very long...

...the orientation is towards authority and the law and order of a particular social system...

...But it remains a social reality, because it is created and sustainedthroughintersubjective communication, insofar as that is free from domination and pursued on the basis of the autonomy and equality of the participants as persons...

...Though little known outside his immediate circle, he is said by those who observe him to have a warm smile and a deep laugh...

...Our society however, no longer needs a religious worldview as an ideology...

...The temptation for Church leaders is to dismiss the more alert members as troublemakers and rely upon the passive loyalty of the "silent majority...

...The honest way forward--which one can at least dream that the new pope might recognize---would be to establish within the Church a process of communication of a post-conventional kind, that is among free persons who are prepared to agree but not to conform...

...His brief, pre-seminary marriage to a Vietnamese refugee--entered to help her obtain U.S...

...I am, of course, using the distinction made by Lawrence Kohlberg between the conventional and the postconventional or autonomous levels of moral consciousness...

...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...

...The relationships that exist between individuals and groups are real and constitute part of our humanity...

...Paul stated in paraphrasing Pindar's maternal image, within God "in whom we move, live and have our being...

...I have deliberately included no reference here to the painfully evident gap between rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed...

...This hope that institutions might be created to embody and stablize their new, reflective and critical religious identities is the chief reason why many Catholics still bother with the official Church...

...A defender of human rightseverywhere, he has defied any dictator in the world to kill him...

...Today's problem is the clash between the autonomous identity we admire and strive to achieve and the rigid particularism of our social and political institutions, demandingconformismandnon-reflectivebehavior...

...It must be achieved in lived action---systemic action...

...and he is quoted as saying privately that the denial of the priesthood to women, as well as obligatory celibacy and Humanae Vitae, are "scandals and crimes as great as the Crusades and the Inquisition...

...The central doctrine of Christianity is that Jesus was most fully human and that it is precisely in him that humanity is fully divinized...

...At the post-conventional level, self-reflection gives rise .to a distinction between formulated rules and the universal principles that generate the rute...

...But what is the model of being human that Jesus presents to Christians...

...We are locked in particularistic, oppressive institutions that do not correspond to how we now think and function as persons...

...All hierarchy might eventually be seen as an anomaly, but for now the Church could at least allow the bishops themselves to function outside a framework of conformiey and obedience to Rome...

...However gloriously and ingloriously the Gathering of Jesus's Followers, the Church, helped humanize ~he world in the past, in recent frees it has become increasingly clear that essential as personal charity and compassion are, they are not enough...

...citizenship--was annulled in the Diocese of Brooklyn...

...It must be dismanded...

...That would release the creative energies of Catholics...

...ProgressiveCatholicspokespersons like Tiny McMullin, American publisher of "Justice and Joy" holy cards and chief organizer of the Committee of Americans for aResponsible Papacy(CARP), are still chafing under this cloud of secrecy...

...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...

...Of course it is multi-faceted, but at the heart of it is the love of God by way of love of oneself and one's neighbor as oneself...

...The son of a noble Italian munitions manufacturer and a Hapsburg countess, Malo (pronounced Moll-o)has never been outside Italy and leaves his Vatican desk only to tour his villas, vineyards and chemical factories, driven in his armored car with a motorcycle and helicopter escort...

...Could be a compromise candidate.ERASMUSMACCROCODILE 1 September 1978:562 to the dominant ideology in popular consciousness.actions and institutions axe justified as scientific or technically efficient...

...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...

...GENUINECOMMUNICATION I BAVlS is Chairman of the Department of Religion of Conconcordia University, Montreal, Canada...

...My dream for the pope is a Catholic Church, no longer just another oppressive institution, but the social embodiment of free persons in open communication, seeking agreement to questions of Christian truth and value...