The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform And The Future Of The Church

Introduction

IN THE FIRST MONTHS OF 2002 , the Catholic Church in the United States entered the greatest crisis in its history. When Lent began on February 13, the penitential ashes imposed that day on millions of Catholics felt leaden. Something had gone desperately wrong. Something was broken. Some-thing had to be fixed. Like every Christian community, the Catholic Church is a Church of sinners. Its spiritual rhythms regularly repeat the ancient biblical cycle of failure, repentance, penance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Yet even in a Church that knows a lot about sin, some acts of wickedness still retain their capacity to shock. The sexual abuse of minors by priests-men traditionally called "Father"-is one such kind of wickedness. So is the failure of bishops-shepherds, in the ancient image- to guard the flock against predators, especially predators from within the household of faith. The shock of seemingly wide-spread clerical sexual misconduct, reported on an almost daily basis in the first months of 2002, was immeasurably intensified by what even sympathetic Catholics had to regard as some bishops' inept and irresponsible response to grave sins and crimes. In this instance, one plus one yielded something more than two: one plus one equaled an unprecedented crisis. In the language and thought-world of the Bible, "crisis" has two meanings. The first is the familiar sense of the word: the venerable Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary defines a "crisis" as "the turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever ...a paroxysmal attack of pain, distress, or disordered functions . . . an emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person's life." Throughout the first half of 2002, the Catholic Church in the United States certainly seemed to be in "crisis," according to those definitions. The second meaning of "crisis" in the Biblical world is instructive, however: a "crisis" is also a great time of opportunity, an invitation to deeper faith, a summons to a more thorough conversion. The premise of this small book is that we best understand the current crisis in Catholic life in this second sense-as a tremendous opportunity. An opportunity for what? An opportunity to deepen the reforms of the Catholic Church begun by the Second Vatican Council in 1962-1965, which are precisely the reforms urged by Pope John Paul II through-out his entire pontificate. Like virtually everything else in Catholic life, the very word "reform" has been bitterly contested since Vatican II. Those usually identified as Catholic "reformers" would, in at least some instances, be more accurately described as a wrecking crew for whom nothing short of Catholicism's transformation into a kind of high-church, politically correct American "denomination"-Catholic Lite-will suffice. At the other end of the spectrum, Catholics of a more traditional bent have shied away from the word "reform" and its powerful connotations of the Protestant Reformation, preferring a word like "renewal" to describe what they think Vatican II in-tended and John Paul II intends. In light of the two-edged scandal of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance, perhaps everyone in the Catholic Church-including that broad group of faithful Catholics for whom the ecclesiastical tong-wars are of far less interest than the sacraments and the local parish-can now agree that what the Church needs is reform. What, then, is genuinely Catholic reform? A Church with almost two thousand years of history be-hind it has inevitably passed through many moments of crisis and many moments of reform. In each instance when crisis-as-cataclysm has been transformed into crisis-as-opportunity, "reform" has meant a return to the Church's roots in order to better engage the spirit and the needs of a given time and place. "Reform," in the history of the Catholic Church, has meant retrieving, renewing, and developing often-forgotten elements of the Church's tradition. It has not meant rejecting the past, or severing the present and the future from the past. Genuine "reform" in the Catholic Church has always meant returning to the past-to roots-in such a way as to create the possibility of a genuinely new future. That is what happened in what we now know as the Dark Ages, when the collapse of the Roman Empire threatened the very survival of the Christian West: The reform led by great monks and nuns such as Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica created new forms of Christian discipleship and, in doing so, saved the Church's memory-and Western civilization. That is what happened in the early Middle Ages, when a decadent clergy threatened the Church's mission: The reforms launched by Pope Gregory VII revived early penitential practices and reached back to such ancient traditions as priestly celibacy in order to prepare the Church for a nobler future. That is what happened in the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Re-formation fractured western Christianity: The Council of Trent (1545-1563) unblushingly examined the Church's corruptions and failures, restated the fullness of Catholic truth, and made that tradition the basis of a thoroughgoing reform of seminaries, the priesthood, the episcopate, the Church's worship, and indeed almost every facet of Catholic life. And that is precisely what Vatican II proposed: to "update" Catholicism for the twenty-first century by retrieving the deepest taproots of Catholic faith in the Bible, the great Church Fathers of the first millennium, and the medieval theological masters. By returning to these sources of Catholic faith, the bishops of Vatican II hoped, the Catholic Church would be able to preach more effectively the passionate love of God for all humanity, made visible in the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. By rediscovering its roots, the Catholic Church would better offer Jesus Christ to the world-Jesus Christ, the answer to the question that is every human life, as John Paul II has described the Church's Master. Every great period of reform in Catholic history has involved a thorough reform of the priesthood and the episcopate. That is one of the things that is self-evidently required today if the promise of Vatican II is to be fulfilled. To grasp what is at stake, as well as the meaning of genuine reform, Catholics need only look back about five hundred years. In 1512-1517, the Fifth Lateran Council met in Rome. It was in-tended to be a great reforming Council. It failed. Why? Be-cause its analysis of the Catholic crisis at that moment was shallow; because the reforms it proposed were either inadequate in themselves or inadequately implemented; and be-cause the Church's bishops, including the reigning pope, lacked the will and the courage necessary to do the needed job. The failure of Lateran V was the prelude to the Reformation, which shattered the unity of the Christian West and set in motion the dynamics that eventually led to the European wars of religion. Failures of reform carry a high cost. No one knows whether, in the twenty-fifth century, Vatican II will be remembered as another Lateran V-a reforming Council that failed-or another Trent-a reforming Council that was so successful that it set the course of Catholic life for more than four hundred years. The pontificate of John Paul II has been a heroic effort to ensure that Vatican II-which made a profoundly Christian analysis of the crisis of human civilization at the turn of a new century and a new millennium-be­comes a second Trent, not a second Lateran V. The question is not whether Vatican II adequately analyzed the Church's situation. The question is whether that analysis has been correctly understood and vigorously implemented. The current crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States has made unmistakably clear just how much work even so dynamic and effective a pope as John Paul II has left the rest of the Church to do. Individual Christians fail when we avert our gaze from Christ and start looking elsewhere for security. Like Peter in the gospels, we, too, can "walk on water"-but only so long as we keep our eyes fixed on the Christ who beckons us to do what we imagine to be beyond our capacities. The same applies to the Church. At the bottom of the bottom line, every crisis in the Church is a crisis of fidelity. And the answer to a crisis of fidelity is fidelity: a deeper conversion to Christ, a more thoroughly Catholic reform of Catholicism. Amid the many complexities of the Catholic crisis of 2002, which will be explored in what follows, a great simplicity stands out: This is a crisis of fidelity. Crisis means trauma; crisis also means opportunity. The trauma of the Catholic Church in the United States in 2002 will become an opportunity to deepen and extend the reforms of Vatican II if the Church becomes more Catholic, not less-if the Church rediscovers the courage to be Catholic. The answer to the present crisis will not be found in deconstructing Catholic faith or further loosening Catholic discipline. The answer to the present crisis will most certainly not involve the Catholic Church surrendering to the decadence of the sexual revolution, as so many other Christian communities have. Such surrenders, and the tremendous human suffering they cause, are one of the sources of the crisis, not a solution to it. The answer to the current crisis will not be found in Catholic Lite. It will only be found in a classic Catholicism- a Catholicism with the courage to be countercultural, a Catholicism that has reclaimed the wisdom of the past in order to face the corruptions of the present and create a renewed future, a Catholicism that risks the high adventure of fidelity. The Catholic Church learned the truth about reform from its parent, Judaism, for the pattern of authentic Catholic re-form first took shape in the Hebrew Bible. There, the prophets insisted that the answer to Israel's whoring after other gods was neither greater subtlety in the worship of false gods (Idolatry Lite), nor more clever ways to cover one's theological bets (Syncretism Lite), but rather radical fidelity to the one true God and His commandments. Similarly, crises of fidelity in the Catholic Church are never remedied by Catholic Lite, but only by more radical fidelity to the fullness of Catholic faith. That is the truth the current crisis is compelling the Catholic Church to remember-and to act upon. What today's Catholic crisis is, how it came about, and how the crisis might become a great moment of reform is the business of this book.