A MODEL OF HUMANITY

...The persons entrusted with the election of the pope shoed be a group representative of all the baptized--laity, religious, priests, bishop~-~osen by them, and (this is extremely important) responsible to them...

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

...The new pope cannot perform this staggering work alone, nor can the rest of responsible Christians wait upon his initiative...

...The characters were weird...

...From-the-topdownward must now become from-the-bottom-upward...

...A decade after Grease first appeared, nostalgia for the fifties---for "hoody" guys and girls in circle skirts with poodles appliqudd on them--is an idea whose .time has come...

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

...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...

...It must be dismanded...

...Bishops, pastors and people must work creatively to put shared responsibility into action, custom, and law at every level--now...

...This is the awesome task the new pope has before him: to reverse the flow of responsibility...

...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...

...Grease has moved from off-off Broadway to Broadway, where it is now the longest-running show, and then on to Hollywood, where it has been made into a blockbuster as well...

...The male lead was so rubberboned and long-necked that he was a caricature of a fifties "greaser...

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

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

...they must become part of canon law, not to be overturned by some new pastor or bishop...

...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...

...all responsible leadership shoul:l be so rightly understood...

...Compared to the original, the Hollywood version of Grease is in fact a Roman Circus, complete with a BenHut chariot race between two dragsters near the end...

...The same sort of structural exercise of decisionmaking responsibility from below must also be put into action---and into canon law--on the diocesan, national and international levels...

...The people who did that original stage version seemed'to realize this, too...

...The heady excitement of the sixties, which had been based on a reaction against the fifties, still lingered on then...

...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 songs were weird...

...The new pope will have to encourage and insist vigorously upon a full systemic humanization of all the Church'sstructures---andthus also its spirit--from the international to the grass-roots level...

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

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

...One number that he sings and dances with his pals on bleachers near 1 September1978:564...

...The theater was defini.tely in a weird place for a theater...

...Having preached his Good News about a truly human existence by his own lived example, Jesus cottld then speak it in words that carried authority and credibility...

...As in Vatican H, he will have to reach outside of the prese~ curiatand hierarchical Establishment to marshal the talents needed for this massive task...

...These responsibilities of the baptized must be built into the very structure...

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

...John Travolta occasionally gets to show some charm that is in scale with the original musical...

...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...

...And the whole idea of being nostalgic about the 1950s was the most weird of all...

...The first thing the new pope needs to undertake is the elimination of the College of Cardinals as a body of Church leaders appointed solely from above...

...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...

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

...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...

...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 whose greatest need is to be able to exercise their own decision-making in responsible freedom...

...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...

...The Church--and that's all of us--"should go and do in like manner...

...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...

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

...On the grass-roots level the parish people must inform themselves, deliberate, make decisions---and take the consequences...

...The missionary age is dead...

...Despite Vatican II for the most part the Churoh's sLructure still systematically treats its members like children who simply need to be instructed and directed, whose human capacities are hence minimized r~ther than maximized...

...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...

...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...

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

...But John Travolta, who plays the male lead in the new film version of the musical, is more an idealization of a greaser than a caricature of one...

...The performers playing them were even more weird...

...GREASYKIDSTUFF 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 When I first saw Grease, eight or ten years ago, it was an off-heat little musical playing in a run-down theater on the Lower East Side...

...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 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...

...As the seventies have made it increasingly clear that the sixties didn't work out either, :the fifties .have begun to look rosier in retrospect...

...Everything about it was--well, you might say--weird...

...To the shocked retort that Church leaders are appointed by and responsible ~o God, the calm response is, "Of course they are...

...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...

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

...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...

...The greatest scandal of 1978 is the super-secret election of the pope, which really ought to be super-public and super-partioipatory...

...As Pope Leo the Great stated in 451 A.D., "The leader of all he elected by all...

...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...

...In far too many ways the Catholic Church resembles such a domineering parent...

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

...As St Paul says, "all authority is from God...

...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...

...But just as the divinely sustained responsible leadership exercised by a senator or president is one that is responsible to the people it serves, so too should that of Church leadership be...

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

...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...

...we do not need a "higher-archy...

...I.t is not adequate that this be done by the leave or the magnanimity of a progressive pastor...

...The structural pattern must be reversed, and soon, lest the Church find itself another tragically shattered family...

...Americans have begun to wish that they had left well enough alone, and nostalgia for the fifties has become a centrist notion rather than an eccentric one...

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

...A~ the same time safeguards against a dehumanizing tyranny of the mob must also be built into the structure--that too is part of systemic humanization...

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

...We all know ~he tragedies of families where parents treat thei: grown offspring like children...

...We need in Catholicism a "hier-archy," a "rule of the holy," in the sense that all the baptized are called "holy" by St...

...Paul...