'MATTERS LEFT UNSAID'

...Many have retained a vocation to theological teaching, but they are no longer priests...

...The Christian vision is in tension with the world...

...Catholic Peace organizations...

...Let me just recall some data from my own experience...

...The vocation to the gospel, therefore, cannot be the smooth flowing triumphal procession from the sacristry to the workplace of the liberal version of Christendom...

...My own temptation is to "let the dead bury the dead...

...It exists to redeem the world, both in the personal and in a collective sense...

...The fundamental ministry of the Church is not the ordained ministry...

...Catholic feminist groups, such as the dynamic Chicago Catholic Women, etc...

...Is there something about the ideology, money and power that supports our institutional Church that makes it hostile to the Christian vision of promoting peace and injustice which it claims to foster...

...In one way or another they were forced to a choice between their priesthood and their personal and intellectual development and integrity...

...It is the ministry of the people, the mission of the Church to the world...

...The clerical structures and even sacramental life only find their proper meaning when put in this context...

...However, having voiced thus far my basic agreement with the statement, there seem to me certain presuppositions in the statement that need to be explored...

...ministering communities like the Community for Creative Nonviolence, sprung from the Catholic Worker Movement...

...The mission of the Church to the world, to struggle against the structures of war and injustice and to hold out the vision of "God's will done on earth," is fundamental to the purpose of the Church's being...

...That is their field of ministry and mission...

...When such groups assumed real lay initiative and, especially when they recognized that their Christian ministry in their work was leading them to real struggles for social change, they soon lost their ecclesiastical approbation...

...Not because they want to focus on the internal workings of the institution, but because it has become evident that, until the power relations within the institution itself are reordered, the Church indeed will not be the base for activating any new vision and mission to the world...

...There have not been lacking some dynamic lay movements in my recent Catholic experience: laysponsored publications, such as the N.C.R...

...The statement seems to presuppose a liberal establishment ecclesiology, or what Gustavo Gutierrez, in his Theology of Liberation, calls the "distinctions of planes" model of the Church...

...Was it not because the Church helped sponsor them,' not to promote real social change in the secular sphere, but to try to tie this lay sphere to the Mother's apron strings...

...The "separation of planes" model of Church and world of liberal Christendom ultimately doesn't work because it doesn't have anything to do with the real divisions of good and evil that divide our hearts and our institutions, including that of the Church...

...Isn't it an amazing statement of faith that women would want to be priests or that laity would believe that the bishops really wanted to have their help to set the agenda for the Church and share in the decision making...

...But the secular belongs to the laity...

...The story can be repeated throughout the country...

...Not one has had anything but a negative relation with the hierarchical Church...

...It must rather be the difficult task of shaping supportive communities for humanization within and across those institutional divides of Church and secular society in order to find a place to stand from which to struggle against the negative trends that define much of both our Church and our world...

...Most of the young priests we knew at that time are now doing something else...

...This model assumes a hierarchical separation between the sacred and the secular which has the effect of "kicking the sacred upstairs" in order to liberate the secular for its own sphere of autonomy...

...Since the statement is really too short to give a clear account of where it stands on some of these matters, this will be less a critique of the statement than some comments on matters left unsaid in it...

...The statement itself seems to suggest this view...

...In short, our experience tells us that there is a sharp dichotomy between the theory of the Church fostered by Vatican II and the kind of Church those in hierarchical power really want...

...It deplores the passing of a period in which many Catholic organizations were founded for direct work within lay professions and vocations: Catholic labor unions, etc...

...Catholic ProChoice groups...

...Systematically the chancery stifles, harasses and destroys the ministry of most of this generation...

...Sacraments and "that sort of thing" are all well and good for priests...

...If the clergy really don't want to "inspire" and "activate" us, why not inspire and activate ourselves...

...A new generation of American-born priests and nuns are no longer afraid of the "modern world" and are ready to take the lead in developing social ministries...

...We have, then, to ask ourselves more seriously the sort of questions which the statement wishes to bypass...

...This complaint seems to ignore a more basic analysis of why this model of the Church didn't seem to work, based on our actual experience of the last two decades...

...Would we not, indeed, find secular versions of that same hostility in many of our workplace situations...

...One thinks of "activated" and "inspired" laity, such as the community of Good Shepherd, Alexandria, which has spent several years in futile institutional battles simply to be the church that Vatican II and their former pastor taught them how to be...

...Certainly the most common aberration of our Church life is the tendency to lose the proper perspective on its purpose for existence...

...If they forget this and imagine that they exist for themselves, that the people exist to "pay for" the self-perpetuation of a self-enclosed clerical church, the whole reason for the Church has become perverted from its true end...

...How does one carry out one's Christian vocation to peace and justice in a munitions factory built on exploited labor...

...It is Los Angeles, 1962...

...Priests should concern themselves with these internal affairs of the Church...

...To be sure there is a relation between the two...

...Those who tried to foster that new church from within the clergy were sabotaged by their own superiors and have either left or have wasted their time fighting futile battles to survive...

...The Church and its ministry does not exist for itself...

...In short, whether we like it or not, doesn't the very taking seriously of the Christian Gospel of peace and justice make us "outsiders," outsiders to the sort of Church the hierarchy wants, outsiders also to jthe sort of world our employers and political leaders want...

...One would have to ask why many of these ventures broke down...

...The statement basically deplores the fact that the institutional Church is not doing its job of inspiring and activating the laity in their proper lay mission, and so the sheep are wandering around uninspired and unactivated in their proper lay mission...

...in tension with the structures of institutionalized evil that define much of the status quo...

...Why not really come of age as laity...

...The priests should keep their noses out of this lay sphere and leave it to the laity...

...The statement seems to be asking for some kind of motor in the institution to be turned on, and then this line of movement will again start clicking along...

...The clergy who function in it, do so less as leaders and inspirers than as refugees...

...Priests, in their own proper institutional sphere, should somehow inspire and activate the laity...

...Mac lives on, in spirit, if not in person...

...Is it surprising then that movements such as the "Call to Action" focus on change within the Church itself...

...The institutional Church is a part of that same world and, in many ways, a parasite upon it...

...But once the laity march out of the church, thus inspired and activated, the secular sphere belongs to them...

...The fuller their Christian vision and the more spirited their activity, the more likely they are to be banned by the chancery...

...Groups of young priests go to Mexico for a while, hoping to survive in the priesthood "until Mac is dead...

...One thinks too of a new generation of theologians, for whom Vatican II was the beginnings of a new era, whose creativity and energy for new perspectives were bright with promise: Bernard Cooke, Daniel McGuire, Gregory Baum, Eugene Bianchi, Charles Davis, Harry McSorley and others...

...The particular ministries of pastoring, teaching and celebrating exist only to nurture and promote this ministry of the people...