Catholic Sensibility

I have it on good authority ... Frequent guest Neil Dhingra contributes today's thoughtful post: There is a good deal of talk at St Blog's (and this blog) about what authority should look like. I'd like to share some insights from a talk by Peter McCarthy, OCSO, entitled "The Spirituality of the Superior: Standing in the Midst" (Cistercian Studies Quarterly 39.3 [2004]). When he first became abbot of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Oregon, Dom McCarthy thought that the best symbol for his role would be the image of the Good Shepherd. But that harsh teacher, experience, has taught him that the abbot's role is instead to"serve the place of the Good Shepherd within the monastery ... [to] point to the place of the Presence by listening for the Word in the middle of his community." So, ten years later, the symbol he would now choose is the man with the withered hand from Luke 6.6-11. Jesus asks the man to do only two things: "Rise up, and stand forth in the midst" and "Stretch forth thy hand." This seems rather odd. But Dom McCarthy says that these two things are just what the monastic superior is called to do. He first must stand forth in the midst of his brethren. As St Bernard tells us, "Learn that you must be mothers to those in your care, not masters [domini]." Like Mary, the abbot must treasure what he hears and sees and ponder these things in his heart. In Dom McCarthy's words, "It is this willingness to ponder - to hold respectfully the tensions - that points to that place of Presence at the center of the community. It is good to reflect on the courage of the man with the withered hand, the courage to stand in the tensions within and around him." When he becomes aware of the fragility of his community, the abbot might be tempted to depend too much on himself and his own charisma. Thus, the Rule of St Benedict warns the abbot "to act with prudence and not go to extremes, lest, while he aimeth to remove the rust too thoroughly, the vessel be broken" and to also "always keep his own frailty in mind." The abbot might then be tempted to go too far in the other direction - to abandon any pretense to ministry altogether and depend on consensus. But St Benedict warns him to "always to remember what he is and what he is called." The abbot ultimately must do the second thing that Jesus asks of the man with the withered hand in Luke 6 -"Stretch forth thy hand." "This," counsels Dom McCarthy, "is neither the community vanishing under the abbot nor the abbot vanishing under the community but rather the abbot standing in the midst and stretching out his withered hand toward the place of Presence at the center of the community." A diocesan bishop is not exactly a Trappist abbot. But, that said: - Do the problems with authority in the contemporary Church really have to do with the size of dioceses, bitter polarizations, and other things that prevent bishops from "standing forth in the midst" and holding "in awareness the mystery and tensions within himself and the community"? - Can bishops, keeping their frailty in mind, stretch withered hands "towards the place of Presence at the center of the community," or do we unfortunately expect them to (if we are "conservative") always control the situation and already have all the answers, or (if we are "liberal") just vanish into the consensus of the community?