Paul & Apollo:

...The problem is that theologians and ecclesiastical administrators lack imagination...

...In an imaginatively structured church there probably should be many kinds of priests as well as many kinds of deacons, a variety of ministries for a variety of needs...

...For some missioners, the system as it works has proven to be an almost insurmountable obstacle...

...Thus the establishment of priests in the communities would free the circuit-riders for another dimension of pastoral or missionary activity: for preaching, for catechesis, for the whole range of contemporary pastoral activity that is not possible under present circumstances...

...It is true that unimaginative and bureaucratic structures often prevent the emergence of such voices, through intimidation, economic pressures, even at times the old device of kicking upstairs, which may not succeed in silencing a prophetic voice, but may well succeed in removing that voice from the scene of action...

...Outsiders, like Paul, can plant, but Apollo must water...

...The people here have a different religion than mine, and I cannot believe in it...

...Even from the most traditional notion of pastoral activity, it would provide for the celebration of the Eucharist and the sacraments during the ordinary course of the year, rather than simply at fiesta time...

...They should be the circuit-riders who keep isolated parishes and communities in touch with the bishop and with the church at large...

...There is a long tradition of priests being, by definition as it were, outsiders, wrenched from their communities at an early age and systematically alienated from the culture of those communities in a Tridentine seminary...

...They think that their religion is my religion...

...he had been faithful to one woman for twenty years, but because he had raised the fees for religious functions...

...In some parts, they have accepted them for centuries...

...I know of one traditional priest, educated in a traditional seminary but fluent in Aymara, who for a number of years carried out a remarkable pastoral mission, appointing men in local communities to positions of responsibility through what amounted to the inventing of new "minor orders" to meet community needs, preaching in season and out in the Aymara language, celebrating the liturgy in that language, taking as his starting point the folk religion and the culture of the people rather than attempting to impose the alien religious culture of Europe or North America on the people...

...Whatever might be said of the place of alcohol in the fiesta, the fiesta is not a scene conducive to any serious dedication to the ministry of the word...

...For the most part, their religious world was defined by the popular religion of the people whose life they shared, and if in some cases the sharing included a woman to live with the people were contented with that, since it tended to ensure the permanent presence of a priest in the community...

...In the highlands, the liturgy would have to be celebrated in Aymara or Qeshua...

...In fact, the traditional church in these areas also had two classes of clergy, even aside from the question of the observance of celibacy...

...The married men with roots in the community who work for a living like everyone else should be ordained to the priesthood, to celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday and baptize and marry and other functions of the traditional ministry in the church...

...At the same time, it might be asked why we, European or North American theologians, should sit in harsh judgment on that folk religion, as if our folk religion were the only pure or normative form of Christianity...

...It was perhaps better than nothing, but for a missionary presence it is not enough...

...All too often such initiatives are not undertaken, either because of a failure of imagination, or because of a fear of the reaction of ecclesiastical administrators...

...The priest in question, originally from a diocese in the Eastern United States, worked in a rural parish in Bolivia, covering an area about the size of Long Island, with a population of less than two thousand...

...At this stage, it is difficult to predict the long-term results of this kind of pastoral imagination, and this imaginative priest was very nearly alone in his pastoral approach...

...Given the situation, circuit-riding priests often, find that the only time they can spend in a community is when they are in real, urgent demand by the people: during the celebration of the annual patronal feast...

...There would, I think, be no difficulty on the part of the people in accepting a married clergy...

...It is true that this might tend to establish two classes of clergy...

...It is not, and I deceive them by pretending that it is...

...And while contemporary missioners may often be able to use wheeled vehicles instead of horses, mules, or shank's mare, it is still nearly impossible to maintain any sustained effort in these communities...

...More learn it as a language of trade, but keep their own language for curses and endearments and the everyday world of the community...

...The deacons should be celibate, well-trained, full-time servants of the church...

...Even the fact that they would have to be taught to read and write would tend to set them apart from their communities...

...Yet the problems remain...

...A few years back the people of one such parish did complain to the bishop about a priest - not because JORDAN BISHOP spent several years teaching in Bolivia and is the author of Latin America and Revolution...

...And for Dussel, evangelization must eventually be realized from within a culture...

...Circuit-riding deacons - or for that matter other circuit-riding priests - could attend to the ministry of the word, organize and supervise cathechesis and provide some continuity in discipline, while the local priests would ensure the survival of the traditional church...

...In Bolivia, with a fifth of the population living in six major cities, illiteracy is still reckoned at seventy percent, and many of them have only a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish...

...Yet one should not attempt to outguess the Holy Spirit...

...They've got it all wrong," he said...

...A critique of this religion is * probably doomed to failure unless it emerges from prophetic voices within those local churches, and these voices are not lacking...

...The kind of abstraction that equated all priests, all religious orders, all ministries should have disappeared with the Council...

...One priest from Quebec, who has since returned to Canada, put it this way: "My whole work here is fraudulent...

...The feast days themselves were distributed to allow traveling priests to reach outlying communities at least once a year...

...Enrique Dussel, an Argentine historian and theologian, has written extensively about the problem of evangelization in Latin America...

...In the mid-sixties, as the Vatican Council ended and many Catholics in Latin America were filled with hopes that some real changes might be achieved, I listened with some fascination to an American priest discussing the advantages of a permanent diaconate...

...It is not simply a question of a' 'shortage'' of priests, or the fact that foreign clergy now outnumber local clergy in some Andean regions...

...It was not that he thought he should impose his French-Canadian Catholicism on the Aymara people...

...It is almost impossible to discuss the problems of the church in all of Latin America, although theologians and pastors from every end of the theological spectrum have spent a lot of time and a lot of ink doing it over the past thirty years...

...He is presently on the faculty of the College of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia...

...Some do learn it in school, but unless they maintain contact with the towns it is soon forgotten...

...But the gap between his religion and the folk Catholicism of the Aymara was too great...

...A married priest with roots in the community would be even less given to change than the present rural clergy...

...On the other hand, seminary-educated priests who came to ground in such rural parishes tended to adapt very well to the culture of the people and to a sort of supply-and-demand pastoral activity...

...Whether they would accept - married or celibate - a member of their, own community as a priest is another question...

...On these occasions, religious celebrations are often followed by a ritual three-day or week-long drinking bout that has deep roots in the culture since the Inca Empire...

...For many of these communities, this has never been done...

...Officially-approved Spanish texts are as far from the understanding of people in these communities as Latin was to most Catholics before Vatican II...

...The patron saints assigned to the communities centuries ago by Spanish missionaries were selected in a pattern that made this possible...

...There were thirty or forty small communities in the parish, some of which could be reached in the dry season with a four-wheel-drive vehicle...

...In that part of the world, such situations are common...

...But the priest, if he is to maintain the good will and acceptance of the people in rural communities, must be there for the fiesta...

...This itself may be misinterpreted by moralizing European or North American clergy - for the Incas it apparently had a religious significance, and outside of fiesta time very little drinking is done...

...As in the Greek church, bishops were elected from the ranks of the celibate...

...The problem of imagination exists when' only one such class or kind of clergy is deemed to exist...

...Without serious and imaginative structural change, the impossible situation that faces missionaries will remain, until the next General Council, and beyond it.Council, and beyond it...

...One could argue that if religious were included there were many classes of clergy, with a variety of specialized functions in the church...

...THE BIGGEST difficulty with the priest's proposal is probably that it would ensure the survival of the folk religion that characterizes the traditional rural church in the Andes...

...If they remembered the Tridentine theology served up in the seminary, it was reserved for formal discussion with the bishop and other priests on rare visits to a city or town...

...Those with larger ambitions - a city parish or perhaps a miter - did not remain in rural communities...

...The missionary priest in such a situation is overwhelmed by the popular demand for ritual activity, which includes not only the sacraments of the church but a myriad of "responsos," or ritual prayers for particular needs, blessings, processions on feast-days, and the like...

...If there are difficulties with this vision of the church they are not, I think, those that would be envisioned by conservative theologians and administrators...