Reforming the church Is the era of 'faithful dissent' over?
Baumann, Paul
OF SEVERAL MINDS PAUL BAUMANN REFORMING THE CHURCH Will we all become saints? In too many instances the reaction of Catholics to the church's sexual-abuse scandal has been as demoralizing as the...
...Quite the contrary: the tradition assures us that the sacraments are efficacious regardless of a priest's moral failings...
...I don't want to be misunderstood...
...Allegiance to the church and the assimilation of the gospel are much more varied and ambiguous than that...
...Nor is there much evidence to support the idea that the vast majority of churchgoing Catholics are eager to become Benedictine oblates...
...Cause and effect is complicated, and it is reductionist to pin the scandal on dissent or homosexuality or the failure of "fidelity"- or the failure to implement Vatican II, for that matter...
...I have a democratic suspicion of demands for sanctity as a solution to corruption and other inveterate human failings...
...There would be no crisis, they brightly propose, if the abusers had merely followed the church's teachings about sexual morality...
...Even more astonishing is how conservatives divine a connection between dissent and the sexual molestation of children and the cover-up of such crimes...
...George Orwell, in a famous essay on Gandhi, noted that there is something "inhuman" about saints...
...The reform will be accomplished most of all by saints," he writes...
...Virtue should be our goal, and we need the example of extraordinary lives to help us toward that goal...
...But so did quite venerable practices, such as clerical privilege and arrogance...
...We are all doubtless equal by virtue of baptism, but priests, like doctors, perform distinct and indispensable functions...
...This crisis must not be exploited to purge "dissenting" Catholics or be obscured by pious rhetoric demanding a church of spiritual virtuosos...
...Yet the abuse scandal is being wielded as a club to attack what papal biographer George Weigel delights in calling "The Catholic Lite Brigade" (see The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, Basic Books, $22, 235 pp...
...Weigel, for example, is eager to condemn clericalism and ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and he issues resounding calls for spiritual renewal...
...Inevitably, they will be "set apart" from the laity in some way...
...Such exhortations are rhetorical, Utopian, and implicitly elitist...
...Once conservatives were expected to defend the institution...
...Truth be told, Catholicism has always made ample room for underachievers...
...Frequently, they are also a smoke screen to forestall real institutional or political change...
...The game is over," he boasts about the future of "faithful dissent...
...The molesters and their protectors in the episcopacy come from across the ideological landscape, from liberal to conservative churchmen, from priests trained before Vatican II to those ordained afterward...
...True sanctity serves as a goad and a promise, but is not a requirement for church membership...
...I find especially interesting, however, the ways in which the critiques of both liberals and conservatives converge...
...He rejected the idea that the average human being is just a "failed saint," arguing that the "essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection...
...Jesus chose to build his church upon the most fallible of his disciples...
...Not anymore...
...Happily, the church has never relied on the sanctity of its priests...
...Weigel is looking for a "harder, more brilliant form of Catholicism"-absent certain dissenters, of course...
...Saints have their place...
...That must be why so few married persons have been canonized...
...it came about because of an absence of justice and ordinary decency...
...In a sacramental system there is a kind of spiritual division of labor...
...It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.'" There is something uncharitable, even un-Catholic in such rhetoric, whether it comes from the left or the right...
...There is no evidence to support such a claim...
...But in both cases, it seems a little late in the day to be sanctimonious about the fact of human fallibility and disobedience...
...Neither would we be in this fix if Adam and Eve had followed instructions in the Garden of Eden...
...Calls for the laity to awaken and belatedly put on the mantle of "holiness" need to be approached with caution...
...In too many instances the reaction of Catholics to the church's sexual-abuse scandal has been as demoralizing as the scandal itself...
...Yes, confusion about sexual morality had something to do with it...
...The demands of perfection, Orwell thought, made forming any intimate attachment to another human being impossible...
...First, the scandal has discredited the church's "countercultural" message about sexual morality...
...Nor can there be an institutional church without some degree of clericalism...
...That doesn't mean that priests, any more than doctors, should be regarded as unquestioned authorities...
...Well, yeah...
...Conservatives, of course, complain bitterly about liberals using the crisis to trot out pet theories about celibacy or hierarchy...
...Through the church, we sinners in fact share in the graces made available by the perfection of saints...
...The sexual-abuse crisis did not come about because of a lack of heroic virtue...
...Every Catholic committed to truly Catholic reform can say, with Pope Pius XI and Dorothy Day, 'Let us thank God that he makes us live among the present problems...
...Real sanctity is rare, and spiritual ambition, as this crisis reminds us, often disguises a host of other failings...
...Whatever the differences articulate Catholics have over Humanae vitae or the legitimacy of dissent, most condemn clericalism, call for reform and for the laity to take their rightful, "equal" place in the church, embrace the "universal call to holiness," and speak of the need for saints...
...The call to holiness must be lived more intensely by every member of the church...
...It is equally true, however, that the Lord in his wisdom has seen fit to make relatively few such exemplars...
...Second, conservatives, who have been crowing about the recruitment of "orthodox" seminarians drawn by John Paul II's image and "heroic ideal of the priesthood," as Weigel likes to put it, see this achievement endangered by the exposure of the aberrations of an earlier, more liberal era...
...The prospect of a church that doesn't permit mediocrity is not just idle, it's frightening...
...Conservative Catholics, for example, are making a concerted and frankly demagogic effort to blame the crisis on the so-called "culture of dissent" within the church...
...On the contrary, they need added scrutiny precisely because of their power...
...That should be good news for liberals and conservatives alike...
...They have a point...
...I think the evident anger of conservatives has at least two sources...
...Most of the talk about the "universal call to holiness" strikes me like speculation about how much better democracy would be if "disaffected voters" participated...
...As a consequence, much good work exposing the evils of abortion and questioning the assumptions of the sexual revolution will be vitiated...
Vol. 129 • September 2002 • No. 15
