The church beyond the church

...The same applies to celibates, no matter how highly placed, when they speak of such matters as contraception and the place of sexuality in married life...

...Once, when she attended Mass in a church where she was not known, the priest refused her Communion...

...the refusal to consider seriously the question of women's ordination...

...These are the strange poles of the church—near-total irrelevance on the one hand, and the willingness to risk death on the other...

...God's life is shared with people through the sacraments despite the people who administer and receive them...

...Bishops at times may seem like a mad aunt who usually keeps to an upstairs bedroom: we hope she'll stay there, but sometimes she insists on coming downstairs, dressed in strange clothes, talking to the guests about Goths and Martians...

...She may be crazy, but the family has her in common, and she reminds us in lucid moments of things we need to remember...

...JOHN GARVEY 21 November 1980: 647...

...What Bishop Coba (the only name which filtered through whatever network it takes to get news out of Albania's hell) died for was not the stuff most of us, bishops, priests, and laypeople, worry about...

...There were hopeful moments during the synod...

...But just as there are people who leave the church out of frustration, there are also people who stay despite every encouragement to leave...

...Most of us are as unwilling to engage in serious controversy, no matter how important the subject, as the bishops are...

...she pointed out to him that he would never have done such a thing to a white person...

...For"the most part they are decent, ordinarily thoughtful people who, for a variety of reasons, have concluded that they do not need the church...

...and Cardinal Hume pointed out something that should be obvious to more bishops, but is not...

...Her charity certainly exceeds theirs, and mine...

...The same woman was told by a bishop that a young priest who had done good work with poor aborigines was reassigned because "there are more important things for him to do...

...But people remain because they know there is something more important than any of these things...

...The belief that it is real, no matter what bishops do stupidly, no matter how unfaithful we are, gives hope to millions of people...

...and, most common of all, liturgies and sermons which reflect what seems to be near-boredom with the fact that a man died for us...

...The disgust of many Catholics with the institution is understandable...

...In the past the Catholic procedure was to allow Rome's mistakes to fade away quietly, like the morning-after memories of the quarrels at a drunken party...

...It would be easy to agree with them if the Vatican or the American hierarchy or Catholic teaching on sexual morality were the whole of Catholicism, or even the most important part of it...

...Irish television did a program on the church in Australia, and included an interview with an aborigine woman who had spent most of her life working with poor and drifting young aborigines, the victims of Australian culture...

...There was talk (no action, however) about allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion...

...I know a, woman who had a bad first marriage and had the misfortune to have it witnessed by a priest...

...The announcement of Galileo's second chance was made during the synod of bishops...

...It can be argued that she exhibits more of the Gospel than do the safe men who deny her the right to follow the command of Jesus to eat bread and drink wine in his memory...

...He said that married people should be listened to, where marriage-related issues are concerned, because they are the true ministers of the sacrament, and they alone have received its graces...

...We believe that the God who created the universe is humble enough to be present to us in pieces of bread we can hold in our hands...

...And the sins of the institution are, frequently enough, reflections of our own...

...The best ending of the procedure would be a Vatican declaration that, since its judgment in these matters must always be taken as absolutely binding, final, and true, the accused Galileo Galilei is still guilty as charged...

...A comfortable layman is not on firm ground when he criticizes bishops for not living more simply...

...and if it does not Commonweal: 646 repudiate this one, or if it tries to talk its way around the central point of its fallibility in matters where it has no special competence, the Vatican will look even sillier than it does having announced the procedure in the first place...

...She remains Catholic...

...Her second, enduring marriage makes it impossible for her to receive Communion...

...This thought might be extended to its logical conclusion: where it comes to marriage, bishops are no more competent to give instruction than married laypeople would be to tell them how to deal with the special problems of celibacy...

...But as Rosemary Haughton says in The Catholic Thing, "Rome is not the church, and, to its chagrin, it never was...

...This is a heartbreaking, terrifying tenderness...

...this is what the church did with its approval of the execution of heretics, the doctrine that all non-Catholics are damned, and the condemnation of interest-taking on money...

...The timing was appropriate: here the bishops were busy reaffirming Humanae Vitae^s ban on artificial contraception, something which (given the Galileo precedent) the Vatican will reexamine in a few hundred years, to show its humility, its openness to ideas, its willingness to be self-critical...

...After Mass, when she asked him why he had not given her the host, he replied that he could not be sure she was baptized...

...People remain Catholic because they believe that Jesus is present in the church, despite everything...

...We may have the right to offer tentative suggestions, we may try to be helpful, we might say how it looks from our point of view—but we have no right to pretend final authority in an area where people work daily with a circumstance which is not our own...

...Rome will set a precedent if it formally repudiates a past error...

...And of course there is more to it than that: bishops have, for better or worse (and it has been better, and it has been worse) usually guarded orthodoxy, and they have made it possible for the sacramental tradition to continue...

...To look too much toward Rome, and ignore the courage and life which are clearly part of the church in many countries—particularly in countries where Christianity requires courage—is to take far too narrow a view of the church...

...Nevertheless, it is easy to see why people find Rome irritating, irrelevant—even funny, as it certainly is in making a decision to reopen Galileo's case...

...There are many other examples of institutional insensitivity: the scorn for marriage implicit in the Vatican's refusal of the request made by many missionary bishops for a married priesthood, as if celibacy were more important than the right of baptized people to receive the Eucharist...

...We might look at their lives for signs of what Catholicism is, beyond its narrower institutional incarnation...

...The same issue of the New York Times which announced the reopening of the Galileo case reported, immediately below that story, the murder of an Albanian Roman Catholic bishop...

...They simply are not the authorities here—as they were not authorities in the field of natural science, when they judged Galileo to be wrong, with all the authority they now bring to bear upon sexuality...

...Despite this fact she attends Mass on Sundays and often during the week...

...Are they protecting God from her...

...He had conducted a religious service in a prison camp, and he was battered to death for doing so...

...Our authority does not extend to the lived experience of the vowed celibate...