Responses
Lec-key, Dolores & Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler & Murnion, Philip & Marty, Martin E. & McKenzie, John L. & Neuhaus, Richard John
John L. McKenzie 'A RELIGIOUS COP-OUT?' THE LAST TIME I engaged in a discussion with Charles Davis 2600 people paid admission to the ballroom of the Palmer House in Chicago where seats had...
...or that the poor and powerless are given short-shrift by historiography (which includes ecclesiastical history that focuses on the clergy and church organizational structures...
...All communities have their problems with authority, but Mr...
...Elisabeth SCHUSSLER FIORENZA is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...In such a reconstruction of Christian tradition the history of prophetic witness and protest would have a privileged place, since it is continuous with the prophetic movement in Israel and the counter-cultural, religion-critical early Christian movement initiated by Jesus...
...In her commentary to thsDinner Party Judy Chicago gives the following raison d'etre for her work: All the institutions of our culture tell us...
...Davis rightly states that the penalty for idolatry—in this case, idolatrous commitment to the church as institution—is unreality...
...To turn a phrase, the family that prays together, prays...
...Here the symbols of the Christian faith are presented, not to an individual, but to a group, to a people...
...RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS is a Lutheran pastor and Senior Editor of Worldview Magazine...
...The truth claims of Christianity as summarized in, for instance, the Apostles' Creed will finally be vindicated only in the consummation of the promised Kingdom...
...I am invited to declare why I have retained mine...
...The definition of faith as "a permanent attitude of nonparticipation" does not suffice...
...Charles Davis had then renounced his allegiance to the institutional church, and I have retained my own allegiance...
...Perhaps he owes his public an explanation how he can with a good conscience work for a system which deserves the appellation of the Scarlet Woman at least as much as the one I work for...
...Davis does not suggest that those events would be better understood from the perspective of the losers, namely, the leaders of the Third Reich and the slaveholders...
...One challenge we face, then, is that of broadening our view of where the church is acting while clarifying the religious foundations of social critique and action without asserting control over all action done in the name of the Gospel and of the church...
...The potential, at least, is in the gathered church at worship...
...To have a tolerance for ambiguity is not necessarily to be seduced into unconditional loyalty...
...One may ask whether it has even the sorry virtue of staying bought...
...John L. McKenzie 'A RELIGIOUS COP-OUT?' THE LAST TIME I engaged in a discussion with Charles Davis 2600 people paid admission to the ballroom of the Palmer House in Chicago where seats had been prepared for 1800...
...Commonweal: 56...
...Davis has clarified the implications of an alternative commitment, I find myself reaffirmed in my "critical affirmation of the church and its mission...
...Since Davis's concept of the church as institution is somewhat ambiguous, it is hard to know exactly when he speaks of the church as an institution in the sense defined by Neuhaus or when he identifies the institutional church with the clerical office and with mainline tradition...
...The challenge, then, is not whether there will be institutionalization—for this is unavoidable—but whether the church can reflect the fact that the mission and ministry of the church extends beyond the reach of ecclesiastical structures...
...possibly he has spoken and I missed it...
...This is the reality of the Old Testament, Noah's willingness to fill the Ark with clean and unclean creatures, and of the New Testament with the wheat and chaff 1 February 1980: 49 growing side by side...
...Davis has lived in this zoo long enough to share these criticisms...
...Shall only the church fight with its hands behind its back—fight, that is, for justice or freedom or love...
...and I think we have been through that...
...Remaining outside can be heroic...
...Clearly, it is at least as appropriate to press social ministry to be accountable to Gospel norms as it is to promote the responsibility of corporations to social justice...
...But life, religion, social needs, and church are for me as for millions much broader than they appear to be in Davis's definitions...
...There is a certain Rousseau-like suggestion in this position...
...Creative subjects have different requirements, in the primary family and in the wider church family...
...and he recalls for me the sinking feeling I had in our debate that I was compelled to defend the indefensible...
...While this is not the place to argue truth claims, we have to observe that just as people do not live by bread alone, they also do not live by revolutionary struggle alone...
...in the Office of Hours...
...This concluding statement of Charles Davis accurately sums up the most recent developments within Roman Catholicism...
...It is a matter of a life and faith not merely shared but transmitted through human relationships and supported by these relationships...
...There has always been a flight from the world in some sense or other, and there have always been a few who found the human community intolerable...
...No doubt in his encounter with the church institution he has been hurt and scandalized...
...It is a perfectly honorable, although I think mistaken, choice...
...The challenges facing the church are: (a) how to achieve unity in faith necessary for an> corporate or communal faith without allowing transcendence to mean no relationship to the social world—something that happens when we claim that faith is non-participation in the social struggle 01 when we adopt a kind of scripturism thai ignores theological development...
...Of course the truth is compromised, even falsified, by any institution...
...Accepting means accepting responsibility...
...Of course, because Roman Catholicism is a large part of the community to which we all belong, it is also our problem...
...I have yet to see a winning revolutionary cadre, be it in America, France, Mexico, Russia, China, or Third World, that did not issue in a new structure of domination over against which people need other forces than a new revolutionary party in order to preserve their .humanity...
...By denying that the victims are also historical subjects with a continuous history, Davis implicitly acknowledges the claims and ideologies of the oppressive majority...
...to the effect that Christian people, the redeemed community, is embodied in a stable institution, with an official ministry, a hierarchy of authority and a continuous meaningful tradition from its origins to the present, is just a religious transposition of the structure of domination that has determined and still determines the very conception of history as well as its ongoing course...
...To concede that the Christian church as a social entity is commensurate with the patriarchal hierarchy found in various denominations is to deny my own personal history and identity as a Catholic woman and to relinquish "my people," Christian women, and women's Christian heritage...
...and (b) how to achieve unity in faith and worship while leaving room for the varieties of theological interpretation and liturgical expression...
...To judge from his present statement, it is in Charles Davis's case more an instance of confusion...
...Davis beats Neuhaus all hollow in Commonweal: 50 their controversy over the possibly redemptive and positive aspects of religion, Christian faith, and the church...
...The notion of Christian presence as a potential for transforming societal structures has been a cornerstone of many movements in Catholic history...
...The history of sexist oppression perpetuated by the clerical ruling classes must be seen for what it is...
...Therefore one cannot leave the "church" without alsa abandoning the struggle against the sexist oppression of a patriarchal hierarchy...
...Such an understanding of church does not cover up the injustices done to women nor does it appeal to an ideal liberated community of the Spirit...
...Theologians have to decide to whom their loyalties belong...
...We did not draw as well as the Lyric Opera or the Chicago Blackhawks, but the talent was not as well paid...
...It would be helpful if he explained what he means by history...
...in its place, by the grace of God, we have forgiveness, faithfulness, and hope...
...As several of my children have crossed the threshhold to young adulthood, I've seen the theory in practice...
...I try to rer spect fluid boundaries for my own family...
...The memory of the civil rights movement in this country is a memory of churches, gathered people bound by a group consciousness and religious unity, empowered to act as a body...
...And thus he answers my question above about church and community...
...The kind of private, existential religion of surprise and non-participation that Davis affirms poses no threats to the unjust orders of the world and has no resources to bring those orders under judgment...
...Others, like the monks of the desert, appear at least superficially more genuine...
...Davis triumphantly quotes one passage which he believes "gives the game away...
...The subtle and constant demands of the ego do not make life-sharing an easy enterprise...
...In short, it appears to me that we face with unprecedented poignance the challenge of achieving a community in Christ that truly embraces the myriad forms of understanding and worship and the varieties of gifts of the Spirit, without letting the church be narrowed by organizational limitations and while acknowledging that the church as human is hot exempt from the need for organizational supports...
...But our heritage is our power...
...It is a Catholic conviction that Christianity is inherently communal or corporate...
...Davis is reacting...
...Many ordinary men and women— workers rather than professionals—find the thread of their own history in this communal experience of church, and it is this identity which can sometimes impel the group to act...
...Allegiance to women as an ecclesial-social entity becomes politically active in an ecumenical, truly catholic movement of women, distinctive but not separated from the so-called secular women's movement...
...Some famous Irish wit whose name escapes me abandoned his Roman Catholicism...
...An illustration from social ministry may be helpful...
...I do not mean to hint this, especially since I am not yet too old to detach myself from the institution...
...in the richness of Christian contemplation...
...Corporate, social, palpable, tangibilificated religious faith in the form of the church meant much to them in cancer wards, nursing homes, snowstorms, as they nurtured their young and sang praises...
...Perhaps to live in reality, then, is to expand one's tolerance for ambiguity while keeping alert enough to know when ambiguity has become moral dilemma...
...At the same time, there is an effort in all of social ministry to integrate more clearly social action, theological reflection, and worship, so that more conscious faith may act as critique of both social structure and reform efforts, and that social action may more clearly be part of the forming of a value-committed people and not simply be the action of a temporary coalition based on shared self-interest...
...They may be wrong in that grasp, but it is more on their mind than winning a battle against structures of domination...
...Can we fashion the church so as both to support and to hold accountable to the Gospel all of social ministry without asserting control over all that claims to be social ministry...
...Most of us cannot play by Davis's rules...
...Davis says, makes the discussion "more fundamental...
...We are not thereby removed from the storm and the tossing, but we stand some chance of survival and service aboard, or at least clinging to some floating logs in sight of it...
...Davis as an emetic for disgorging the discontents that have been fermenting since "some thirty or so years ago...
...Davis, like me, has spent his life within the professional academic community...
...Dolores Leckey MEED & AMBIGUOUS' CHARLES DAVIS raises a number of issues—some challenging, some questionable—any one of which could engender lively debate...
...Surprising too is his bundle of excited reactions to a volume that "in its substantial content . . . does not say anything particularly new...
...The first is that of reality vs...
...Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that, in a society that makes religious faith at least marginal, faith and commitment to a communal religious life (read "church") depends heavily on support from one's family and one's significant community...
...The second theme that concerns me is Davis's contention that the people of God are scattered only, with the implication that there is little or no value in gathering the community...
...Maybe that is the only game in town...
...I cannot rationally defend civilized humanity as a viable species, but I cannot opt out of humanity either...
...If the university is not the island away from structures of domination, then is business, the government, or the revolutionary party...
...illusion...
...It is this history that feminist and liberation theologians seek to reconstruct...
...And he goes on to escape religious solipsism by denying any human community except the social and political community...
...For, in a piece that appears more polemical than logical, he defines his terms to suit his case...
...I hope he will reconsider, but that is of course his decision to make...
...I, not surprisingly, am among those who recognize more compelling reasons for being inside and urging others to join in the risks, joys, and tedium of commitment to the community...
...If the Irish wit thought that Roman Catholic Christianity was more rational than Protestant Christianity, it is no wonder that he renounced it...
...in spiritual direction...
...While acknowledging the book's "balance, insight and good sense" and thinking it deserving of "laudatory notice," Davis believes the author is perpetrating a "sham," practicing "evasive dexterity," urging an "idolatrous commitment" to the religious institution, and doing distinctly unlaudatory things...
...So, for several paragraphs, I have had to act as if struggles for freedom and justice are not important, simply because I was addressing other aspects of Catholic faith...
...in other words, environment differs for everyone...
...when he was asked whether he intended to join a Protestant church, he answered, "I renounced my faith, not my reason.'' Belief in the church is not a rational assent...
...in the new and old theologians...
...But it is regrettable that Mr...
...I had hoped for something better than secular humanism...
...Thus religious faith is "the moment of non-participation that reaches transcendence'' which makes his claim against any institutionalizing of religion self-evident...
...One can sustain the thesis that die university is the most powerful single antiintellectual force in our society...
...in my parish where I worship...
...Davis's argument invites one to join him as a victim of the naivete that embraces an illusory ideal of pure religion and then be victimized again by the naivete that cannot endure the illusion's destruction...
...Is that true of the history of the Holocaust or of slavery in America...
...All these events publicly testify to the repressive character of a patriarchal hierarchy that idolizes itself as ' 'church.'' In short, I agree with Professor Davis's diagnosis of the malaise but not with the prescribed remedy...
...Therein is the truth of the ancient and contemporary Eastern Orthodox emphasis upon the "apophatic" and the Western church's appreciation of the via negativa...
...I have never thought that church membership required suspension of critical thought or the surrender of sovereign conscience...
...Some of the fugitives, like Diogenes and Thoreau, were as phony as a three-dollar bill...
...But Davis has made it clear not only that the church can do nothing for him, but that he can do nothing for the church—and more important, that the church is not worth doing anything for...
...I hope we are as outraged over injustice in church and world as he is...
...Perhaps the confusion is a consequence of the collapse of a prior credulity with respect to the church and its institutions...
...I am sure that he too prefers that community to any other subcommunity...
...Most of us ordinary lay people live in families, and families are no strangers to ambiguity...
...Feminist theology has as its primary task to reclaim the cultural-religious heritage of Christian women, since the history of Christian women cannot only be understood as a history of oppression but also must be reconstituted as a history of liberation...
...This is true even of the most elementary institution of language itself...
...The nonparticipating, isolated, momentary, and transcendent religious response ("the Protestant principle of prophetic protest...
...Women as church have a continuous history and can claim Jesus and the praxis of the early Christian movement as its roots and beginnings...
...Davis's assumption that he is liberated from the tradition he wants to abandon...
...MARTIN E. MARTY, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the history of modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, is associate editor o/The Christian Century...
...I agree with Davis that religious faith is not a separate sphere of human activity but finds its institutional expression within the secular arenas of society...
...Italics mine...
...and when I look at the church I see there a latitude and elasticity that others do not, a case of different environmental experiences, perhaps...
...In addition, there is an element of false consciousness, if you will, in Mr...
...On the one hand, growing numbers of lay people are participating in co-equal and interdependent ways with the ordained, at the heart of the church's ministry...
...that we are insignificant...
...Richard John Neuhaus 'HONORABLE BUT MISTAKEN' I confess to finding the choice of Charles Davis to review a book on the theory and practice of pastoral ministry somewhat curious...
...His and my academy...
...I question that assumption...
...I am restrained from yielding totally to the temptation of rhetoric, which comes so easily on this topic, only by the inexorable limits of space...
...His most recent book is A Nation of Behavers...
...In a short-hand way, we may say that the issue is an extension of the question posed by the relation of the Catholic Worker movement to the church...
...Is it realistic to hope that isolated concerned individuals can achieve what these individuals united in a religious community are frustrated by the dominant structure from achieving...
...emphasis his...
...The assumption behind this particular idolatry seems to be that church membership blinds one to all that is mean or petty or grossly unjust in the institution...
...There are two other themes in the Davis article, however, to which I want to respond...
...This has been asked so many times and not answered that I feel embarrassed at raising the question again...
...How, for example, does one shed the societal images of God and move closer toward the , truth of God in Christ...
...The very metaphors of liberation, community, diaspora, and such, which he employs, emerge from the biblical tradition and the institutions that have, however inadequately, sustained it...
...Religious faith must also be lived in the involvement in a historical movement for liberation, in prophetic commitment, compassionate solidarity, consistent resistance, and grass-roots organization...
...Finally, Davis's argument is touchingly naive in its yearning for a "pure religion" untainted by the ambiguities and compromises of history...
...One who flees the world and stays within reach of the corner grocery and the neighborhood drug store makes one wonder...
...If the answer is affirmative, it has to be an affirmation of faith...
...It is simply not very helpful to deny the institutional imperative that exists if the Christian community will resist the temptations to privatize religious faith or to make faith unrelated to the formation of a just human community...
...Clergy and laity together will : need to learn how to engage in mutual ministry, and in so doing I suspect we will have to settle for something less than absolutes...
...For better and for worse, we accept that teaching and history as ours...
...He has declared above why he has retained his position...
...But perhaps the book did have some therapeutic value for Mr...
...At the same time, we are aware that the articulation of faith in theology and its expression in worship take many forms and of the difference between theological inquiry and credal commitment...
...CCUM has assembled this wide-ranging church and fostered such linkages...
...It has been the experience of the Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry (CCUM) that many of these people wish to associate themselves with church-based social ministry, with theological reflection, and with liturgy...
...The worshipping gathered church can strengthen one for action, passing on the wisdom of the saints, aligning the lone individual with his or her lineage...
...There and elsewhere the book argues that the truth of the church and its ministry cannot be legitimated or vindicated by appeals to the ethical quality of relations within the believing community...
...As I accept my personal history, my family, my being an American, so I accept responsibility for the Christian tradition—from Jerusalem to Rome, from Chalcedon to Wittenberg, from Augustine to Thomas Munzer, from Karl Rahner to Billy Graham...
...It is primarily in the proclamation and sacramental celebration of that gospel hope, and not in the ethical superiority of Christians, that the necessity and integrity of the church is to be located...
...To reclaim our past and insist that it becomes a part of human history is the task that lies before us, for the future requires that women as well as men shape the world's destiny...
...I suppose I am hinting that Charles Davis is a religious cop-out...
...One must try to be sympathetic...
...Would Judaism be stronger, or even have survived, without synagogue and rabbinate...
...Surely Mr...
...Accepting responsibility means critically appropriating, assenting to the truth within it, publicly identifying with that history called Christianity...
...The criticism Davis levels against the church can easily, mutatis mutandis, be leveled against the university...
...Neuhaus might as well take his bat and ball and the bases and backstops and go home...
...As has been frequently noted, the Stalins and Hitlers of history do not attack religious belief so much as they attack and restrict the institutions of religion...
...Responding to a Lutheran, Mr...
...Increasing numbers of young Catholics are enrolled in seminaries and divinity schools, shaping a post-Vatican II vocation: to be lay and to be in ministry...
...They often, as Christians, really and truly believe that God is revealed in Christ and that the church is Christ's body, and that this body calls them to social participation in the world...
...or that institutional forms of religion are inevitably inadequate to the reality they embody...
...In this way, the image of God as policeman or landowner was discarded for that of the God of Exodus, the God of freedom...
...Beyond that point Pogo, Neuhaus, and Marty by a three to one vote form a structure of dominance and oppression against thus out-numbered Davis, leaving him alone to represent true humanity against our ruling-class conceptions...
...My frustration is that I think I agree with some of Davis's positions, viz., that sociologists are erroneous when they define religion so broadly as to include all ultimate meaning systems, whether or not these involve any element of transcendence...
...I think of another analogy...
...Charles Davis has decided to remain outside...
...in the litany of the saints...
...Rather than analyze this ambiguity I would like to state that whenever I speak of the church as a social entity and institution I have in mind Christian women of the past and of the present...
...A similar challenge faces religion or "religious faith" as Davis calls it...
...It is in and through these institutions, created and maintained by believing people, that an alternative to oppression can be posited, that another truth can be proclaimed, that a transcendent referent for moral judgment can be invoked...
...Would black liberation be advanced by the disappearance of the black church...
...in the Scriptures...
...It is for the sake of that hope, for the Gospel, that one participates in, protests, proclaims, criticizes, and celebrates the Christian community...
...This, of course, leads right to the question which within this space I can only ask: is there a valid distinction between 1 the institutional church and the church as community...
...For one thing, we are less sure the world divides so neatly into oppressor/ oppressed, dominator/dominated, ruling-class/revolutionary class, or that people on both sides of those slant bars have nothing on their mind except struggles for liberation...
...we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women have been strong...
...I February 1980: 55 the authority of the religious institution as such is singularly Roman Catholic...
...Again, such a reconstruction of the history of Christian women does not lessen but enhances the history of womankind...
...Just once he whistles past the word 'love.' Neuhaus in his inner city parish and I in pastoral activity, brief or long, in black, blue-collar, white-collar, and ruling-class high-collar parishes, saw that love mattered to people on both sides of the slant bar...
...namely, that the church is a human/divine intermingling, a gathering of sinners as well as prophets, in need of unceasing reform...
...in vowed religious women and men . . . All of these institutional places have their dark side, but my life would be poorer without them...
...I would be, I hope, among the last to deny that Jesus called all to personal responsible decision...
...In doing so we lose our purity...
...It tapped them to be generous to the boat people and to pray for the hostages and to criticize shahs all at once...
...In fact I have not heard him speak to this point at all...
...Davis's failure to distinguish between history and the writing of history has far-reaching consequences for his understanding of the traditions of those Christian churches that have become the historical losers and whose history has not found its way into the historical textbooks of the winners...
...Neither of us seems entirely happy with our unchanged positions...
...Neuhaus and I have been victims of the demonic in the structures of the church in which we were brought up as much as Davis was in his...
...Only recently I said to a friend and colleague much younger that I was in late middle age before I realized that the academic community is a jungle, and that I still like it because it is the only jungle I know...
...Placing this phenomenon beside the major renewal movements of the past ten years— Cursillo, Marriage Encounter, the Charismatic Renewal—which have involved millions of ordinary men and women, not only as recipients of ministry but as agents, we see the possibility of a new egalitarianism developing in the church, echoes of the New Testament church...
...I fear Davis presents a faith which is indeed within the grasp of the civilized intellectual, and no one else...
...My position was not unlike the position of General Cambronne at Waterloo, and it would not be helped by recourse to his celebrated mot...
...Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza 'A HISTORY OF THE VICTIMS' "THOSE who claim spiritual rule always say that it is for the good of ordinary people, who, it is understood, cannot be trusted if left to themselves...
...Those who maintain commitment to the church while acknowledging the defects of the church appear branded as having been' 'seduced into unconditional loyalty...
...He uses ' 'history'' in quite different ways—as actual lived experience, as event in the consciousness of the reflective subject, as written record...
...in my work, which deals with laity and bishops...
...Many of us who continue to work for institutional renewal do so because we have come to really believe the fundamental teaching of Vatican II...
...Davis to have an informed opinion on that...
...I think Davis overlooks some of these forces and the needs to which they appeal...
...I have often learned from Davis, and expect still to do so...
...There is no other part of the Christian community— not Methodists with their four-fold authority in scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, nor Lutherans who subscribe to scripture, councils, confessions, conscience, and reason, nor Eastern Orthodox with their understanding of decentralized teaching authority in the of: fice of the bishop—that poses the problems to which Mr...
...I do not see how anyone can meet this demand apart from community...
...Laity, religious, and clergy are in fact studying together and working together, sharing responsibility for the church's mission in prayer and worship, social services, and administration...
...If I grant the social character of existence and do, contra Davis and Kierkegaard, allow for more than a moment and for participation in the world, and then if I reject the church, I have to reject 1 February 1980: 51 it "compared to what...
...Although one might desire greater clarity in their arguments, it is important to listen to those outside the believing community explain why they left and why we should leave too...
...His view sounds reductionist and looks a bit Manichean in its good guy-girl/bad guy-girl division of history...
...In truth, his protests against religious authority are peculiarly and parochially Roman Catholic...
...I'm acutely aware that some need to stay close to the place of origin while others need space between their growing lives and all that home symbolizes...
...With respect to history as the record, is it really true that the poor have no history, that history is always the account of the conquerors...
...On the other hand, shared responsibility at the parish level in general practice at least continues to be frustrated either by clerical abuse of power or by underdeveloped lay leadership and apathy...
...Because of them, we put up with the muck, the crowding, the infighting, and the domineering of some captains on the ark...
...I suppose the reason why I still cling to the affirmation of faith—from which not even John Paul II has yet dislodged me—is that there is no choice between that and the religious solipsism into which Davis is compelled...
...In any case, to the extent that Mr...
...I doubt it...
...In light of the importance that feminist and black artists and theologians ascribe to the reconstruction of their own history Davis's repeated Commonweal: 52 assertion that blacks, the poor, or women have no meaningful history is jarring...
...But it seems for Davis that the scattered churchindividuals in their various spheres of work, family, and community—can sufficiently affect society so that justice will reign...
...it is an act of faith, and I cannot justify my faith as rational...
...It appears to me that we are at a critical juncture in the history of religion and of the church and that these two realities are related but distinct, precisely because no institutional form of church fully cap/ February 1980: 53 tures the reality of religion...
...Davis says: ". . .the whole Catholic concept of the church...
...Davis is suggesting...
...in the preservation of the Feminine through Marian devotion...
...When I say the monks look more genuine, I mean they seem to be real cop-outs...
...Fortunately, the passage does not say what he says it says...
...Philip Murnion 'A CRITICAL JUNCTURE' I FIND it difficult to discuss Charles Davis's positions in his own terms...
...Davis's refusal to accept responsibility for sustaining within history the truth claims of Christianity seems to be only marginally related to his rather confused statements about history as such...
...I can only suggest that the opening of minds and hearts to a new vision for which Davis hopes might begin modestly with serious efforts to get Alma Mater, the mother goddess of secular humanism, out of the gutter...
...To begin with the church as an institution, which I could not do if I were to follow Davis (and my major reference is to the Catholic church), there is a struggle underway to clarify the identity of the church community, its teaching and structures, while allowing for varieties of viewpoint and ministry...
...There is a widely held theory that every family member experiences a different social reality within the same setting...
...Finally, I have been asking myself when do I personally and existentially encounter the institutional church...
...Martin E. Marty 'REDUCTIONIST & MANICHEAN' Pogo ("We have faults we have hardly used yet") and I join Richard Neuhaus and Charles Davis in admitting that the church has grievous faults...
...I am identifying religious faith with the moment of non-participation that reaches a transcendence present as limiting all human institutions," he writes, "which as transcendence cannot be separately institutionalized without contradiction...
...I suppose as an argument from parity this is less than overwhelming...
...Possibility and promise, Davis writes, when real and not imaginary, are rooted in present reality...
...A reconstruction of church history as the history of women would have to replace the orthodoxy-heresy model with a different pattern of meaning that would point out the patriarchal repression of women and at the same time get hold of the historical contribution, leadership, and struggle of Christian women...
...I have to invoke Rousseau at this point: you can expect my ideas to be consistent with each other, but you cannot expect me to assert them all at once...
...Alma Mater is a part-time mother and a full-time whore...
...I have not heard him say that the university does more good than harm, or that the harm must be tolerated for the greater good...
...And it is Utopian to imagine that only non-religious social groups and non-participating religious isolated beings can produce a world that moves beyond structures of domination...
...Do they make their claims non-religiously...
...At one level, this bifurcation of religion from historical (read institutional) reality is but a sophisticated version of the notion that "religion and politics (or economics, or whatever) don't mix...
...Human history is a matter of continuity among victors, which places the crucifixion outside the meaning of history...
...Charles Davis argues well, as always...
...Finally, commitment to the church of women and to their heritage is sustained by consistent resistance to all forms of structural-ecclesial oppression and political involvement in the struggle for liberation...
...The present reality for the ordinary lay person in the church is mixed and ambiguous, like the rest of life...
...Whatever else it is—and many of us believe Christian religion is the bearer of the ultimate truth—religion is an emphatically human enterprise...
...If that community is not the church, it is a sect...
...Commonweal: 48 I am not just protecting myself in advance against assured failure by giving up rational apologetics, although I do admit there are some things I cannot do...
...the silencing of Callahan, the condemnation of Pohier, the suppression of Ku'ng, not to mention the demeaning interrogation of Schillebeeckx and the attempted laicization of Hasler, have shocked not just the Catholic community...
...In a similar fashion Alex Haley tells the story of his people in Roots in order "to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners...
...It is not widespread, but it is there...
...This history does not cancel out a "history from below," namely the history of the life, struggle, and leadership of Christian women...
...DOLORES LECKEY is Executive Director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for the Laity...
...But one would have to know more about Mr...
...will and should judge and nudge people like me...
...I love the university, but it is less reformable in its five-person departments than Catholicism has been in its five-hundred-million membership...
...It is a lovefy, if somewhat hackneyed, sentiment and to the extent there is merit in it I believe its hope will be fulfilled in the present anticipation and final victory of the one whom the church calls Lord...
...Intrachurch debates, however, were much more exciting in 1967 than they are in 1980...
...I say "surely," giving him the benefit of the doubt, for it is not at all clear just what Mr...
...There is his historiography, for example, which I find baffling, but which I leave to historians to illuminate...
...He seems to identify history and historiography insofar as the victors write the history...
...He does this by defining religion more narrowly than anyone—Kierkegaard possibly excepted—in Western history...
...Davis's creed would seem to consist in "releasing all human beings, men and women, to become free subjects, acting together in responsible cooperation and mutual respect to create a worthy human existence," and so forth...
...Any struggle against the oppression of sexism waged for Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, or Mormon women benefits all women of our society and vice versa...
...I am not sure that Jesus spoke to us and our kind at all...
...It may be more fruitful, therefore, to remark on some of the subjects of Davis's piece, rather than on his arguments, because I do feel that he falls into "naive institutionalism," however much he acknowledges this danger...
...You do not have to broaden the definition of religion as drastically as Davis has narrowed it to see that all of these cheat and make social, transcendent, participatory, and lasting claims...
...I have not heard him say that the honest intellectual can live only outside the university...
...FATHER PHIUP MURNION is Director of the Parish Project of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops...
...And on those terms, all social religion, anything that lasts two moments and is held by two people who want to participate in anything, is out...
...However, only when the women's movement is joined by all those in and outside Roman Catholicism who share the religious vision of the church as the People of God will we be able to build a strong grass-roots movement of prophetic witness against the repressive forces of a reactionary patriarchal hierarchy...
...It is as morally mixed a bag as that of any significant communal tradition, although, in both good and evil, a great deal more impressive than others...
...The crux of Davis's excited reaction is in his concluding rejection of "a teaching Commonweal: 54 and a history which are not and have never been ours...
...As for the church, it is "just a religious transposition of the structure of domination that has determined and still determines the very conception of human history as well as its ongoing course...
...But there is a history of the victims that is distinct from the historiography of the victors...
...Davis extrapolates from his unhappy denominational experience in order to propose a general theory of religious authority...
...in my Christian women's group...
...Only in silence can the purity of The Truth be maintained...
...Davis's problem with CONTRIBUTORS FATHER JOHN L. McKENZIE is the author of The New Testament Without Illusions, (Thomas More Press...
...He should have done so sooner...
...Davis would seem to be saying that, with respect to those truth claims and the myriad ways in which they are communally borne in history, he is, quite simply, not a Christian...
...But we must speak, as we must act, as we must associate with others...
...Among Catholics engaged in social action, such as public interest lobbying, community organizing, and international justice education, many work outside of ecclesiastical structures, but with a clear consciousness of their work as ministry...
...The fifty women who faced the pope at his visit in Washington, standing silent and upright in their protest against ecclesial sexism, have become for me the symbol of the women's movement in the church...
...I tend to believe that these symbols have the power to stir the individual and collective unconscious, to release truer images of God buried in the human heart and in the memory of the people...
...Free associating, I've come up with the following: in my marriage, as the living out of a public sacrament...
...At another, it is but a modern socio-politicized rerun of the ancient gnostic heresy that would seek salvation through "non-participation" in the dreadfully compromised history of an itching, sweating, smelling, and endlessly quarrelsome sacramental community of faith...
...So far, I have been talking about the activity of the church, though this has included reference to the explicitly religipus foundations of church action...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 2
