Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Sketch 4: Simply Catholicism
"We are back to "simply Catholicism," which locates power in Christ and in his gift of authority to the Twelve. The church preaches Jesus Christ, not herself; but Christ cannot be adequately known except from within his Body, the church. Within the church, the bishops are the reality check for the apostolic faith. They are not free to change established dogma or create new doctrines, unless they want to become heretics.
In being presented as a revolution rather than a development of doctrine, the Second Vatican Council has left some Catholics with the impression that bishops control rather than preserve the apostolic faith.
Maybe "revolution" is the word liberals use in joy and conservatives in fear. I prefer seeing Vatican II as a metanoia. Is the "control" of the apostolic faith a product of Vatican II? While I do see where the cardinal is going on this one, I have my doubts. George seems to be saying that religious upheaval of the 60's was enacted by the bishops. So we are seen to be at their mercy for future upheaval. For George's statement to be accurate, I think Catholics would need a greater sense of the continuum of apostolic faith and its expression through the ages. After the Council we might have had more of it. But I'd like to hear more along these lines before I accepted this argument.
If bishops won’t change, it must be fear or willfulness or perhaps stupidity that prevents their being enlightened. It is then up to Catholics with an agenda to force them to change or to make the changes themselves, in a separate peace. But a church of such factions not only cannot evangelize, it cannot think. That is the greatest practical difficulty, it seems to me, in the use of the terms "liberal" and "conservative." When they are applied now, or even as they were sometimes applied in papal documents in the last century, people stop thinking things through.
Isn't this the truth? Would that we could arrive at a time and place in which liberals and conservatives saw each other as complementary rather than adversarial. Each brings the insight of the other's faults and failings in aligning the Church's mission with that of Christ's will.
In thinking things through in the church, bishops are the verification principle in the development of doctrine. Pastorally, bishops are ordained to headship, which does not exhaust leadership. Leadership is influence; sometimes it is based on office, sometimes on charism or purely personal gifts; always, in the church, it is more obviously from Christ when the leader’s friendship with the Lord is evident. When headship and leadership are not adequately distinguished, then either every leader has to become a priest or every priest has to recognize the injustice of co-opting leadership and become just like those who minister only out of the sacraments of baptism and confirmation.
Many of us do not make this distinction. The cardinal is crystal clear on this point.
In either case, Christ’s original gift of the Twelve disappears or is no longer adequately visible. The current PBS series on Pope John Paul II ["John Paul II: Millennial Pope"] raises the question: Is this a pope for our times or against our times? The only adequate answer is: both. That is "simply Catholicism."
I can agree with this. Does that make me not a liberal for doing so? Cardinal George's "simply Catholicism" deserves a deeper look, but I'm not aware of any work since 1999 in which he has elucidated this point. Maybe it's been left to the rest of us.
Thoughts?
