'THE WORLDLY CALLING'
Coleman, John A.
The Worldly Calling' JOHN A. COLEMAN The malaise of the Church in Chicago since the incumbency of Cardinal Cody has been painful to many of us whose roots lie elsewhere. Out of their sense of...
...Yet a tension exists between this position and the complaint of an overemphasis on "outsiders" to the system as the carriers of a new social ethic...
...2) Outsiders to the system are the principal actors in changing the social order...
...The second proposition only holds for those systems which the Christian conscience deems so irreformable that revolution is both the last resort and the adjudged lesser of two evils...
...2) There is danger of a new clericalism of the left...
...For, in both my sociological and theological understanding, the laity always remain the key agents of any genuine Church renewal...
...Catholics have never really had a lay church in America...
...All this supports the Declaration's third allegation, that the Church is focused excessively on internal affairs...
...The Declaration is correct in rejecting the second proposition about outsiders to the system...
...Nor is the major threat to the Church in America that of a new clericalism of the left...
...There are societies in lie world which merit that judgment...
...Its very ingathering as community is constituted by its being sent in mission...
...When the Declaration points to past lay movements and their priest animators, it misses the irony that these earlier movements, for all their important achievements, were never "worldly" enough...
...Only religious resources could retrieve a new sense of worldly vocation for a genuine renewal of church in service of society...
...The Declaration rightly scores the tendency "to see lay ministry as involvement in some church related activity, e.g., religious education, pastoral care for the sick and elderly, or readers in church on Sunday...
...The first is a strong sense of the secular as a vocation in its own right, what Weber calls a "worldly calling...
...Including laity in the class of religious professionals does nothing to promote new ways of relating the Church to the social order...
...In criticizing this new emphasis on the "outsider," the Declaration confuses two distinct propositions: (1) Outsiders to the system constitute a privileged reference group for determining the justice of a social order...
...Of the latter Weber remarks incisively that he would speak of lay incorporation into the community "only in cases where the laity (1) are socialized into a lasting community activity whose progress they (2) also influence actively in one way or another...
...The opposite of a lay church is not so much clericalism, measured by ordination, as bureaucracy...
...If, as the Declaration correctly declares, there is no short-circuiting of the move from gospel values through ethical principles to concrete expertise, the laity, precisely through their occupational roles, have an experience which makes them an indispensable element in the Church...
...Professionals have a penchant for turning co-participant peers into clients...
...Without them, hierarchy, clergy, or lay religious professionals spin social action models at their own peril...
...Nevertheless, an initially healthy reaction to the Church conceived almost purely as an institution has lured us toward an overemphasis on the Church as koinia and communion...
...Perhaps a too facile importation of social action models from other countries, e.g., Korea, the Philippines, Brazil, explains their current prevalence in the American Church...
...But to take seriously the idea of a world calling would jeopardize the religious professionals' monopoly in the Church, Weber's second decisive factor...
...It raises the right issues and signals the wrong turns in the post-Vatican American Church...
...Some internal reforms, in collegial communication and governance, are therefore necessary to break the professionals' monopoly in the Church...
...Because the professional bureaucracy predominated in the final convocation of Detroit's "Call to Action," its preoccupation, like all bureaucracies, was with internal affairs...
...I do not share its implicit nostalgia for some non-existent past American lay Church...
...Even when it includes lay religious professionals, a professional bureaucracy is still a species of clericalism, by certification if not ordination...
...Despite a rhetoric of "service orientation," they tend to substitute self-interest, experts' control and mystification by certification for genuine service...
...Service to the world is not something the Church does after being fully constituted...
...The Declaration is absolutely right in asserting that only a renewed sense of a specifically lay worldly calling could do that...
...I was helped in reflecting on the Declaration by recalling Max Weber's three decisive sociological hallmarks for a lay church as opposed to a religious professionals' church...
...No one ever quite knew just who had the Catholic Action mandate...
...Moreover, as Gregory Baum has put it, in commenting on Weber, internal preoccupation is always disastrous for church renewal...
...But such an opening up of a diminished concept of ministry does little to alter the idea of the clergy as religious professionals...
...We have forgotten that the community exists precisely for mission...
...It seems that church reform can only be successful if it is carried forward by important sociopolitical trends in society...
...They make four claims about current American Catholicism: (1) the laity who spend most of their energy in the occupational world have been deserted by the Church...
...4) New social action models for the Church accord a privileged role to "outsiders" to the system to the detriment of ordinary social roles in public life...
...The greying of the clerical caste is no statistical secret...
...From Gaudium et Spes through Justice in the World, from papal encyclicals and episcopal pronouncements to political and liberation theology, there is a new call for a worldly vocation to build a social order of justice and peace...
...The Chicago Declaration deserves a widely ranging debate...
...Without something like it we run the risk once again that the worldly calling might be a surrender to purely secular trends...
...It would also rule out any shortcuts to Christian social action...
...It does little to nurture a vivid sense of worldly calling...
...Bureaucracies—even religious ones—are prone to the temptation of what Ivan Illich calls "professional monopoly...
...Nevertheless, the first allegation about scouting the ordinary lay occupational worlds speaks to Weber's criterion of a strong sense of a worldly calling...
...It lacks historical validity and deviates widely from the traditional Catholic sensibility for concrete political wisdom...
...I miss in the Declaration any sense that the first proposition provides us with a renewed, biblicallybased motive and vision for worldly action to transform the injustices of our social system...
...When they do so they lose touch—as the Declaration alleges—with their constituency...
...Out of their sense of present drift and reactionary setback in Chicago, the drafters of "A Chicago Declaration of Christian Concern" have raised questions which axe compelling for the entire American Church...
...There are also reasons why most of the new religious professionals may be insensitive to the idea of a worldly calling...
...Moreover, the currently privileged Clinical Pastoral Education model for training in ministerial apprenticeships, while rightly stressing professional competence in functional tasks, neglects to raise substantive questions about the social location and purposes of ministry...
...3) The Church has been too preoccupied with internal affairs...
...That such countries are legitimately reference groups even for judging our own social order does not compel us to accept social action models which originate there...
...They sought lay insertion into the secular order through specifically confessional Catholic separatist organizations...
...I concur, however, in its concern for pointing toward an American Church in which, in Weber's phrase, the laity "are socialized into a lasting community activity whose progress they also influence actively...
...The Declaration is wrong in its second allegation which draws a line mainly between clergy and laity instead of one between the new religious professional class (ordained and lay) and the laity in a worldly calling...
...The main danger is Weber's prime bogeyman, the professional bureaucracy...
...In my opinion, America at present is not one of them...
...The lay ideal of the 1940s and 1950s was too tied to the Catholic Action model, now outdated, which in fact never fitted the needs of the American Church...
...17 February 1978: 116...
...A mere administrative district which defines the priests' competencies is a religiously defined administrative unit but not a community...
...Finally, a lay church is a true community...
...But it is the "outsiders" in the present unjust social order—the poor, the marginal nonparticipants, the developing nations, oppressed cultural minorities—who become the touchstone, as they are in the Bible, to judge the justice of any social order...
...Finally, too often these lay movements lacked social leverage because they uncritically baptized the New Deal and secular liberal pragmatism without offering a compelling alternative vision of the social order...
...The second is the absence of a professional monopoly on information or decision-making in the community...
...This depreciation of a sense of an autonomous world vocation is doubly sad since it comes at a time when for most in America the world-calling, by degenerating into a treadmill on careers which lack inner meaning, involves being trapped in what Weber called "an iron cage...
...To begin with, it is not their calling...
...There are reasons for the clergy to open up ministries traditionally assigned to priests and sisters...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 4
