The pope's two voices:
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey THE POPE'S TWO VOICES NOTES ON AN ASIAN JOURNEY THE RECENT visit of Pope John Paul II to Asia was significant in many ways. The style was typical of the post-Vatican...
...this makes a discipline of the church more important than the command of Jesus to celebrate the Eucharist in his memory...
...Celibacy was not attached to ordination in scripture or early church tradition...
...Perhaps this is what has led recent popes to emphasize persuasive symbols...
...As important as celibacy is, it is not a sacrament...
...The labor of time, from this optimistic point of view, always moves in the direction of one's own notion of what is best...
...The style was typical of the post-Vatican II papacy: here the pope was a pastor, not a prisoner of the Vatican...
...Protestants look at the ways Rome responds to ideas it considers unorthodox, from the strictest curial point of view...
...But it is not possible for the pope to rein in the team the way he seems to want to...
...The power of the church in recent years is in part a function of its internationalism, combined with its lack of the sort of power which can be backed up by police and armies...
...Indonesian bishops, for example, have requested permission to ordain married men...
...The consensus of millions of laypeople and clergy is simply that the members of the hierarchy who back Humanae Vitae are wrong...
...In some countries and in some places social pressure still keeps people Catholic, but such places grow fewer every day...
...The fact that this belief was declared essential to Catholic faith only during the middle of the nineteenth century, and that it was hardly the universal belief of the church during many periods of Christian history, does not make any impression on conservatives...
...but that is precisely the problem...
...But these moments did not exist without contradiction...
...John Paul has spoken of the importance of marriage, and at the same time he has spoken of married priests in terms that denigrate marriage...
...It is a nice paradox of power that the efficacy of Catholic involvement in Poland's recent movement towards a more humane, less dictatorial socialism would not have been possible if the Vatican were seen as one state among many, or if the Catholic church were a national church under the control of the state...
...We have hints of what the papacy could be and in some ways what it is when we see John Paul addressing the people of the world in their own languages, moving with obvious affection among crowds of children, speaking words which give hope to the poor...
...John Paul has made moving and important gestures towards Eastern Orthodoxy, but to speak this insensitively of an ancient church tradition which the Orthodox take very seriously contradicts those gestures...
...Symbol and reality are one thing in her...
...Even in the disputes involving Hans Kiing, to take the most recent public controversy, Rome's action was mild compared to what it certainly would have been before Vatican II...
...Here is where several symbols clash...
...The upshot of this is very little moral authority at all: militarists feel free to ignore his words about the arms race, and capitalists can dismiss what he says about profit...
...The result of their decision is that they reserve the right to remain Catholic and disagree...
...In this the pope is no different from most of us...
...For conservative Catholics there is no problem with papal authority: they believe that God from all eternity wished the pope of Rome to be the infallible leader of his church...
...At important moments'the role of the pope as a prince might never have existed-for example, when John Paul embraced a handicapped child in Japan, or when he told a crowd of peasants in the Philippines that the land belongs to the people, and is not to be used against their welfare for the profit of the rich...
...The Orthodox churches pay attention to the way Rome deals with its bishops...
...Secularism's gift to modern religion is the fact that religious traditions must now make sense in some way, or be abandoned...
...The effect of the trip was to reveal the papacy, and by extension the position of established authority in modern Catholicism, in all of its current ambivalence, with all of its strengths and weaknesses...
...but we cannot help associating these gestures and words with other things he has said, about sex and marriage, contraception, and the ordination of married men...
...It is all the choice Rome offers at present...
...A few years ago Canon Drinkwater, writing in the London Tablet, compared Rome to a crazed government in exile, issuing orders to imaginary troops while the countryside lies in ruins...
...that wouldn't serve the cause of truth at all...
...liberation theologians know that he is wrong to separate the political and religious realms as easily as he does...
...all by itself, presumably, working in that abstract way time and history and evolution were believed to work by nineteenth century thinkers...
...One of the strengths of Catholicism is that it is an international religion...
...There is no way to make people accept a modern version of the Syllabus of Errors...
...This is what I mean: Mother Teresa, talking about abortion, speaks with an authority which a comfortable middle-class pro-lifer simply does not have...
...For liberal Catholics the problem is different: they assume that the conservatives are wrong, and that no one really worries about the issue anymore...
...One is that a discipline which even conservative theologians admit is not strictly speaking essential to the priesthood is made more important than the right of Catholics to receive the body and blood of Christ...
...Married people know that he is wrong when he talks about contraception...
...The other is the belief that an evangelical charism given to a few is more important than a sacrament...
...This is something of an exaggeration, but it has its truth...
...Its international character has been enhanced by the fact that it is no longer attached to any particular state...
...but there is a danger that he will also seem no more authoritative than most of us...
...And a number of observers, inside the church as well as outside of it, cannot help noticing that the papacy, which should be a symbol of the church's unity, is at times a reminder of Catholic division...
...JOHN GARVEYY...
...But the symbols must be more compelling than they have been...
...So when John Paul II speaks out strongly about nuclear war at Hiroshima, when he embraces a handicapped child, when he tells an audience of Filipino peasants that land belongs to the people and is not to be used to enrich a few at the expense of the many, we are moved...
...There are a couple of other assumptions here which have not been well defended by Rome...
...This request, which was denied, would probably never have happened before Vatican II, and the compliance of the bishops may not happen twenty years from now...
...The reason is obvious: unless missionary territories are provided with married priests, millions of Catholics will be unable to receive the Eucharist...
...The fact that everyone concerned with this question has made up his mind about it is frequently seen as a reason to ignore it...
...Since the papacy must persuade through symbols now, the symbols must be both powerful and consistent, and they do not appear to be either...
...And no one really mourns that fact: social pressure was always a terrible reason for going to Mass...
...Where he moves us it must be in a vague way, because dissent from his least authoritative ideas is not possible within the church, except the dissent which expresses itself by ignoring church authority...
...The authority of the papacy must shine with a light reflected from the greater light of the whole church, to which the papacy frequently does not seem to be listening...
...To speak of the obligation of the rich to the poor is certainly right, but it doesn't square with building a swimming pool in the Vatican...
...It is hard to see how defenders of an exclusively celibate priesthood can defend themselves from the charge of having defamed a sacrament when they speak of marriage diminishing the priesthood...
...Africans know he is wrong when in his remarks on monogamy he fails to take into account the frequently generous role polygamy plays in a culture built on extended families...
...If a modern pope tried to excommunicate someone he would be fought or ignored...
...This point of view is insensitive to the importance which still attaches to the papacy, in the eyes of the world beyond Catholicism...
...JOHN GARVEY listening...
...Church authority is in crisis, but the crisis will not be solved by an attempt to crack down, or to return to pre-Vatican II models of authority...
...This is what is done when marriage is spoken of as something that must diminish the priesthood...
...Pius IX could, and did, excommunicate people who disagreed with him...
...Dorothy Day once called the seizure of the papal states by Italian revolutionaries an act of Divine Providence, and there is more than ironic humor in that idea...
...Since we have come a sadly long way from the council of Jerusalem and since there is no way for Paul and Peter to argue, our dissidents must ignore the pope...
...It would not be pleasant to see the papacy reduced to an institution which can only generalize in a way calculated to please everyone...
...it must persuade or it will not be listened to...
...It is more like lightning striking, a gift like prophecy...
...Or they see the issue of papal power as a sort of embarrassing leftover from the past, something time will take care of...
...Catholicism must be persuasive to its adherents because it seems to be true and to have vital personal and social importance...
...A rule by ffat will not work anymore...
...During his visit to the Philippines the pope once again brought up our boring old friend contraception...
...Was Peter's leadership of the earliest Christian community diminished by his marriage...
...Now that the power of social pressure to be religious is waning, and now that the power of the state has been removed as a prop for religion, Catholicism is more free than it has been since the pre-Constantinian era to be itself...
...Because rule by fiat no longer works in the church this sort of symbolic authority is more important than ever...
...This means that whatever papal authority might be is inextricably entwined with what it insists on being right, all the time, with no questions asked...
Vol. 108 • March 1981 • No. 6
