The future of our fellowship

...The obligation of poverty in our communities is not significantly different from the even sharing and the generous giving which any family that marries in Christ is also bound to...

...There is, I should think, fair unanimity regarding the qualities we desire in those who hold the offices of bishop and presbyter and, with some adaptation, that of deacon...

...We have allowed ourselves great liberties in the possession and ostentation of property and even luxury...

...We would say, if left to our simpler but graced wisdom, that spiritual powers are not conferred by ordination...

...NY expectation is that the church will no longer think it well to abide by that discipline or by the doctrine' it requires...

...Not only are most clergy recruited with little realistic attention to the essential criteria for office, but the church is so dependent on the readiness of enough males to be celibate and to serve as clergy that many Catholics in the world are left to hunger for the Lord's Supper...

...But this is not what we see happening in ordination...

...A deacon is said to be given powers that a layperson lacks...

...The presbyter would not claim to be celebrating a Mass to which others were invited...

...They came to do the work of priests...

...They are willing to make service in Christ their life's work...

...Any attempt to secure a prophetic reconnaissance into the future resists a, conclusion...

...This has not been a temptation, I would observe, that we have shown ourselves ready to vanquish...

...Decisions that affect the fellowship, and its service to church and world, must belong to all, by whatever political process the commonality is achieved...

...Some came from countries that were economically, technologically, and culturally more developed...

...We need to look for them before they are ordained, or we shall not be likely to find them after...

...But to sum up, if not to conclude, I would see a great freedom lying before us...

...the presbyter is given a wider range of powers...

...And they are vigorously taking on the ministries to which they now have access...

...To be a missionary is to have one's departure date already set...

...Partly we have been drawn into this by throwing our hearts perhaps too hungrily into our work, and by the gratifications of ego that the work brings...

...they marry and bury and baptize...

...But I am not so sure that our numbers will dwindle drastically...

...He or she would convene the Christian community and preside rightfully at the Eucharist that was the celebration of them all...

...Whatever its merits, this rule has not provided the church with clergy in adequate numbers or of adequate virtue...

...There is hardly a ministry among these which is not presently open to laypeople without their needing to enter vowed communities...

...Let me elaborate on these two changes, or upheavals, in order...

...and they found it difficult to accept that their congregations might ever be sophisticated enough to do without them except at great loss...

...We shall cherish our companionship more, and turn to our work more sanely, and walk the road more simply as benevolent bands of brothers and sisters...

...but hospitable, and instinctively warm to all that is good, sensible, moral, devout, and self-controlled...

...This is likely to result in some significant rearrangements of ministry and training for many congregations...

...There are today many times more such people ready to give themselves to Christ's ministries...

...impressive in their personal lives...

...OUR vows will be seen, in the clarity of reform, as pledges to make a familial life in common...

...Our first pledge is to one another, to cleave close in a fellowship so bound up with our vocation and destiny that we cannot expect to draw any closer to Christ than we succeed in supporting one another...

...But if the church chooses to recruit only among them, it will have to content itself with quite a few clergy who in open competition would not display many of those other qualities we had first hoped for...

...To squint at this problem with some perspective, let us imagine that membership in American symphonic orchestras were restricted to Americans of full Japanese ancestry...

...nor out to make money...

...Each rank is invited to define itself by certain actions which its incumbents can perform: powers denied to those of lower rank...

...I foresee that this will work to our advantage...

...We have been seen as a cadre, both ascetical and privileged, that had first option on leadership and ministry in the church...

...Paul wanted his officers to be men of irreproachable character, married but once, and with children who were disciplined and believing...

...First, the Latin church will reform its recruitment process for ordaining those who hold leading, office in the churches...

...I HAVE DESCRIBED, at some length, eventualities that may not appear on their face to touch the lives of members of vowed brotherhoods and sisterhoods in Christ...

...Not the freedoms of a lesser sort that Vatican II has already given: freedom from the confinements of uniformity and arbitrary authority and inept professionalism and the suppression of dissent...

...Some monastic orders of men have already discontinued the routine ordination of choir monks, recognizing that there was no presbyteral work for them to perform and that ordination had long served only to establish the choir monks in a more genteel caste than their brethren...

...When one asks them to accept a larger responsibility one is not taking the sort of risk that comes from accepting young people directly out of school...

...Each way of life involves sacrifice and asceticism...

...We leave our father and mother to bind ourselves fast to specific partners for life, to make them our closest kinsmen and kinswomen in the Lord...

...Many of them have been at this long enough that their powers have endured the tests of adulthood...

...And so this beguiling theology of empowerment has ironically rendered still more impotent the already mediocre incumbents whom our restrictive recruitment has accepted into offices that were meant to provide the church with Christlike leadership...

...It may, of course, be as true to say that the church burdened them with these tasks for want of any other volunteers...

...But I think we shall be happier...

...The result is that the cleric imagines himself to be personally possessed of powers that are essential for the welfare of the church, powers which do not depend upon his own surrender to the grace of Christ...

...We are first of all attached: attached to one another in a common life as demanding as Christian marriage is demanding...

...We are all familiar with the fresh inrush of fellow believers into ministries which they perform with grace and excellence...

...Our vow of obedience, too, is not so much a forfeiting of our own will to do that of our superiors, as it is the yielding to our brotherhood or sisterhood of our right to pursue our own private course in life...

...and gently forgiving when they walk through our consciences...

...The primary goal of our pledges is not to create a cadre of church workers, detached and freed for action...

...Second, the missionary enterprise (also of the Latin church) will collapse so as to permit a firmer establishment of the faith in areas where missions are presently the faith's major impediment...

...And our common good requires that this responsibility be given to those whom God appears to have endowed with the requisite powers...

...A second theological difficulty follows upon the way people define holy orders...

...We who were vowed religious claimed to be, and were supposed to be, those who took their faith most seriously, while secular folk (and in that grouping we included, both technically and really, secular clergy along with secular laity) sat to their religion more lightly...

...But now let me suggest how, in fact, they will overturn our lives, and bless them...

...One of the duties of those in high office is to recruit as their collegial comrades those who display the powers, or virtues, that their duties require...

...Our vow of poverty is less a renunciation of property itself than it is a promise, to our kinsmen or kinswomen, to share evenly all that we hold in common, and to give away evenly what we do not need for a frugal life together...

...In the future many of them will most likely choose marriage and family, and priesthood besides...

...We have fretted about our own individual fulfillment and ensured that we could not be cornered by anyone else's imperatives or priorities...

...The church has put itself into some embarrassment...

...A presbyter, for instance, is said to be given the power unfailingly to take bread and wine and to set before the church Christ's body and blood: unfailingly...

...It will be as if Samuel had finally and reluctantly passed by the beguiling elder brothers and come at last to David, and realized that the Spirit would not agree to inspire just anyone the leader chose to anoint...

...Almost anyone could compose his or her own roster of requirements, and I take it that it would be configured somehow not unlike the one I have offered...

...they preach...

...ment...

...Many members entered vowed brotherhoods in order to become priests...

...so can the churches in Indonesia and Canada and Peru and Italy...

...The range of sight stretches out ahead of our vision...

...But whatever the many causes, the observation needs to be expanded...

...Those who think that an ordaining bishop bestows power on the powerless create a cluster of theological difficulties...

...One is left without much hope, however, for powers from the Spirit that lead to valid but impotent results...

...The sacraments are in a tongue unloosed now, and can be celebrated with an imagination and an integrity that release more of their grace and power than in times before...

...What is essential is that each of us as individuals acquiesce in the common will...

...But before long all communities, of men and of women, will contain an amalgam of members...

...On the other hand, we fail to provide Christian communities all over the world with worthy presbyters enough to preside at the Eucharist...

...No matter what configuration of virtues we may say we require of clergy, if we first require they be male and celibate then we are in effect making those two qualifications so determinative that we forfeit most others...

...The result is a powerful temptation to feel relieved of any very compelling call to holiness, for even if one hearkens but halfheartedly to that call, still one enjoys a monopoly on that full range of wonderful acts that provide the Spirit to the church...

...There are today men and women, young and old, well tried already or asking to be tried, who are possessed, as far as one can judge, of exactly those qualities we yearn for in our ordained ministers...

...Male celibates are as able as any others for ordained ministry...

...Our task must not be simply to ensure that all of our employable members are placed and are comparatively happy...

...Missionaries have commonly been of two sorts...

...Among all matters touching our common welfare this has not been one upon which we have often fallen out in disagreeFATHER JAMES TUNSTEAD BURTCHAELL, C.S.C., is a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Rachel Weeping and Other Essays on Abortion (Andrews & McMeel...

...We shall have the energy and the wits to gather forces and redeploy ourselves where we can characteristically be of most help, working side by side...

...We shall then be free to turn more com-panionably towards our vowed brothers and sisters and to reconstruct a more sustaining common life together, better in prayer and in edification and even in recreation...

...Rank and status in the church and its ministries will no longer be the force sustaining our vowed membership as once they were...

...If a missionary is one sent from a mature community to an unchurched area, to plant the faith there and raise up a church that can provide for its own continuance, then I have never met a missionary...

...For one thing, they are quite selective about how this empowerment is to be verified...

...To put it in familiar though not entirely appropriate terms, our religious communities will emerge more clearly as our family, not our career...

...We have been so exhilarated by our ministry, so addicted to our work, that our community prayer and companionship have withered...

...men who were not arrogant nor hot-tempered...

...This is not to say that we anticipate some golden age when God will be more generous than before in breathing his Spirit into the church...

...Not only do they stand in as surrogates or lieutenants for the deacons and priests who are absent: they stand beside them and sometimes outdo them at tasks essential to the growth of Jesus in the church...

...It is responsibility, not power, that is conferred...

...courageous yet compassionate...

...Our forthcoming freedom is at once a freedom for us and one for the church: the ministries which we have had to ourselves are to be released to the full range of the church's membership in the hope that the most qualified and generous and graced will find their way toward them...

...We have become more secularized, unmoored from the single-minded vision of love that we keep alive only by gazing into the eyes of Jesus crucified...

...and the bishop receives power in its plenitude...

...From the church's perspective, we shall not need to be so numerous because we shall no longer be so crucial as her service source...

...A recovery of the asceticism proper to our lives will be precisely a return to our home life, a surrender of frenetic, individual preferences to the closer claims of our life in common...

...Ordination gives people an officium: an office, a position of duty within the church...

...For those who do come, the traditional categories among and between vowed men and women will continue to dissolve...

...By choosing to ordain only males, and only celibate males, to office within the church, we have so reduced the pool of possible or plausible candidates that, instead of searching for those who best live up to the total profile, we must be content with those who apply and who do not exhibit the grosser signs of unfitness...

...This article is adapted from an address given to the National Assembly Conference of Major Superiors...

...What I anticipate too is that churches everywhere, not only out of a surge of nationalism, but from their reading of the New Testament, will thank those who first wakened the faith among them (or more likely the third-generation successors of those who first wakened that faith) and those who generously staffed their institutions, and will then ask to manage their own affairs: not, perhaps, with the financial outlay that their supplying churches have thought needful, but with what seems best and available to them...

...They wished to be ordained, and preferred the companionship of our communities to what they foresaw as a more isolate life in the secular priesthood...

...The older Benedictine tradition, with its twofold commitment of vowed fidelity (stabilitas) and ongoing rededication (conversio morum) is just as obviously centered on the creation of a common life...

...There is little sense in joining a brotherhood or sisterhood and wasting one's work on marginal service, or in parting ways so that each of us can find an individual career and private satisfaction...

...rather, it was his duty to anoint the one God had already chosen and filled with his breath...

...Indeed, if a probationary service in various ministries should become normal before one is asked into presiding office, then priesthood will be conferred well beyond the ordinary age for marriage decisions...

...nor heavy drinkers nor insolent...

...We have promised to live in a fellowship that knows no exclusive in-groups, and that fashions family out of people whatever their previous disposition to friendship might have been...

...they teach...

...We want them to be devout and to be articulate about their faith...

...We shall be seeing the dissolution of the distinction between clerical and lay congregations...

...In a word, the church has virtually left its leadership at the mercy of such as care to apply with the minimal requirements...

...They are as widely spread as is the church...

...Religious orders, first those of men in the high middle ages, and then those of women in the seventeenth century, also came into possession of certain works in the church, including notably hospitals, schools, foreign missions, the nurture of orphans and the rehabilitation of delinquent children, care of the elderly, custody of church properties, and others...

...And one reason for their doing it was the earlier wastage of our energies in institutional services that were no longer really washing the feet of the world...

...We have sought closest friendships and intimacies beyond the circle of our brothers and sisters, and in ways that are sometimes separative...

...Throughout the church and its generations, we have, and have had, a generally shared profile of essential requirements for those who are ordained to serve by convening and leading us...

...These men and women have flown their flags, they have run many laps on the course...

...attentive listeners when counseling...

...This second change will bring forward the grand movement supported boldly by Paul VI: the conversion of churches which, in some cases for centuries, have been held in subordinate and immature status...

...We know what happens to men and women when they undergo a moral conversion, or when they recover from alcohol addiction, or when they prepare themselves peacefully for an unexpected death...

...What will be different is that we shall be accepting into office those he has inspired for it, rather than those few we had insisted on preferring...

...We face a time when the church will see itself possessed of a bounty of believers graced by Christ with just those qualities we have always clamored for, and possessed of the freedom for us to recruit them, according to their respective capacities, for appropriate service, even in the offices that have long gone begging...

...To do that is not to dwindle...

...We have renounced individual possessions in a fellowship that professes to live sparingly and generously...

...Further still, they would define themselves, not as newly empowered to do things which Catholics of lower rank and order could not do, but as newly responsible to lead those in every rank in the things that all Christians must do together...

...We have promised to work in concert with our community in ways that would forfeit our individual preferences...

...But if one were to put his orders to the test by noting how effectively he preaches the word of God, which is another charismatic task with which ordination has charged him, the effect of the bishop's hands and the impress of the Spirit are not so unfailing...

...I HAVE SUGGESTED reasons why many who might otherwise have been recruited into religious orders for ministry's sake will no longer be joining us, and how this is doubly so for clerical communities...

...When holy orders in the church begin to incorporate those who most qualify for them, without requiring the further restrictions of maleness and celibacy, it is reasonable to expect that many men who would have joined us will no longer have the same incentive for doing so...

...We promise to protect that sworn fellowship from rival affections or separative privacies...

...Two very special qualifications, one included from the very beginning and the other added well afterwards, have had the practical effect of crowding all the others aside, or of reclas-sifying them all from "essential" to "desirable" (which means "optional...

...They did not come into our communities because the celibate brotherhood drew them, as an alternative to marriage and family...

...Then they may invite some brothers and sisters from abroad to come and help serve (not rule), with special gifts and experience that they have to bring, but not, one hopes, with the cash that would permit them to purchase forbearance and courtesy and intimidation...

...Were we to ask some of them to accept ordination to the offices of leadership, to preside at the church's work and worship, they would be chosen precisely because they showed the grace of state which the ordained should have, and which they should have before they are ordained...

...Yet each way of life is taken, not primarily as one of renunciation, but as one of kinship and belonging and joy...

...The past decades have witnessed a wonderful development in our potentialities in the ministry...

...humble and gracious at the same time that they call us smartly to our duties...

...responsible with community resources...

...This is, I fear, one of those instances wherein theology has defied experience, and not credibly...

...We have become more proficient in counseling, more professional in ministry to the sick, more savvy in ministry to the poor, more knowledgeable in the political and economic realities that impinge upon faith, more free to inquire and to publish in the field of learning, more capable of mingling effectively in open society where once we were more shy and awkward...

...We, the very ones who chide doctors and lawyers for being consumed by their work to the neglect and eventual collapse of their families, have done the very same thing...

...The older orders of religious women have merged their extern sisters into the ranks of the fully professed...

...Our life and role in the church has been denatured, and needs to be restored...

...The problem is that we have not in fact been recruiting people with these graced qualities...

...I must confess that I never met a missionary...

...They stood to lose their support by going home...

...There are other results of this discrimination...

...Both classes of missionary, the Americans in Kenya and the Irish in Los Angeles, have had some vested interest in an inability of the churches they served to supply their own ordained leadership...

...On the one hand, we insist that weekly participation in the Eucharist is needful for Christian survival (indeed, ordering it as a mortal obligation) and urge that no obstacle be put in the way of those who wish to share in it every day...

...TRANSFORMING THE LIFE OF VOWED COMMUNITIES The future of our fellowship JAMES TUNSTEAD BURTCHAELL THERE ARE TWO tumultuous changes shortly to be accomplished within our church that will transform the life of vowed communities as much as any of the restoration changes we have undergone since Vatican II, and perhaps more so...

...John Coleman and others have noted that the ordained male celibate clergy has taken to itself almost the entire complex of ministries in the church...

...Those communities in active service will deploy their members in a wide assortment of ministries, with some being called, as needs and talents provide, into the presbyteral college, and then occasionally into the episcopal college (without, I hope, the effective estrangement from their communities which now, in law and in fact, draws our confrere bishops away...

...We have not got this without price, though...

...They require only a hint of welcome, to offer themselves...

...We shall share out the monopolies, clerical and regular, which we have for so long enjoyed (and endured) over the church's more venturesome and attractive works...

...vivid and rousing from the pulpit...

...Much of what has been disedifying lately in our observance of the vows may then find reform...

...Our hope, in yielding up our individual lives in favor of a life shared, is so very similar to that of men and women who do the same in Christian marriage...

...Our strength is in our numbers, and in our freedom to be deployed easily, and in our ability to confront larger needs with institutional services, and in our capacity as community to support some of our members in work that brings little or no income, and in our capacity, as a continuing family, to accumulate experience and perspective and expert acquaintance with ministries that require special proficiency...

...Others came from countries that overproduced clergy, and went as Gastarbeiter to countries that could afford them...

...Monastic communities have already been reforming the distinction between choir monks and laybrothers: in most abbeys nowadays all monks are of a single class...

...It is not that the people are unable to recognize the onset of spiritual power...

...We shall have to explore the needs of the world, and find those to which our energies and personnel and corporate strength make us more apt to be helpful...

...What we face - imminently - is not a strange and unsettling time when familiar customs and usages will be swept aside...

...Every missionary has acknowledged that his operation should fold its tent and leave the local church on its own, but somehow this has always been scheduled to occur sometime after that particular missionary's death or retirement...

...Our vow of celibacy, or chastity, is to be understood not simply as a renunciation of marriage and childbearing but as a promise, for the sake of the kingdom, to make family among a brotherhood or sisterhood...

...I know of no one who really wanted to leave a mission church to its own devices...

...they distribute the Eucharist and care for the sick...

...They are catechists and directors of religious education...

...The churches in Ghana can number them...

...Our brothers and sisters have been scattering into solo ventures that deplete whatever wisdom and corporate force we might bring to the apostolate...

...After this has come to pass I would foresee a redefinition by vowed communities of those ministries to which they want to give themselves in a special way...

...THE DISMAY THAT THIS might otherwise cause has been assuaged somewhat by the popular belief and teaching (I call it popular, not because it is held widely by the people, but because many theologians believe it is) that holy orders confer the powers and graces to lead Christ's church...

...they prepare fiances for marriage, counsel couples through their family strains, and even staff the tribunals that inquire into marital nullity...

...Those powers are the graced qualities we all look for in the ordained...

...And we have become fatigued, dissipated, worn down by the helter-skelter pace of our ministries that have taken us away from our brothers and sisters...

...In many clerical communities, lay brothers have been moving from the blue-collar, intramural work they customarily did into active ministry, not only to their confreres but to the church and world...

...One way of explaining this is to say that the power of orders is to accomplish these duties validly, if not effectively...

...Since a good number of our brothers and sisters were surely drawn into community by these particular forms of service, and since Catholics today are free to take them up without having to forego marriage and children, it also stands to reason that significant number of men and women will no longer be seeking entry into our fellowships...

...What will emerge, when our monopoly is relieved, is that life in vowed communities properly has, as its raison d'etre, not certain ministries, or even a privileged status in the church's mission, but fidelity in the brotherhood or sisterhood as an alternative to marriage...

...Once their word has taken root and the Gospel has flowered into Eucharist, mission is over and the missioner must move on or change status to that of foreign auxiliary...

...Auditions would continue to be held, but the standard of performance would inevitably deteriorate: not because Japanese are less capable musicians, or that they are uncooperative colleagues, but since, there being relatively so few to choose from, one must pay the price of mediocrity for imposing that first discriminating requirement...

...Enough of us are wearied of that weariness, which ironically has come to us through the marvelous opportunities in our ministry, for us to sense the need for one another's close companionship in leisure and in worship, the highest leisure...

...and he wanted them to have a firm grasp of the unchanging message of the tradition...

...I WOULD LOOK ALSO to a restoration of a healthier balance between common life and work...

...They would find the joy of it more precious than the larger income their talents could earn elsewhere...

...A SECOND TUMULTUOUS change we might foresee is a reform in our missionary endeavors...

...We renounce separative privacy or furtive possessiveness, by surrendering all we have to a common purse...

...they tend the tradition as theologians...

...These are some of the moments when persons rise visibly towards the full stature of Christ...

...Any who do go abroad in the name of Christ will have to do so with clearly transient status, and will have to serve at the pleasure of those whom they call to community...

...Most Christian people have observed that bishops, presbyters, and deacons come away from ordination not notably more powerful in the Spirit than when they approached the altar...