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The Pope Just Doesn’t Get It!

Jul 17th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
5 comments

He may be infallible. But he sure can screw up when it comes to public relations.

That was painfully clear in the latest Vatican publication of “Substantive Norms” on how it is going to get tough on priest pedophiles.

As reported in the New York Times and in the National Catholic Reporter,  the document, in one sense, doesn’t say that much. Basically, it is a collection of past directives on how to more expeditiously remove offending priests from office and eventually kick them out of the priesthood. (It’s called laicization, which among other things, dispenses the priestly sexual offenders from the obligation of celibacy. Hmmm….).

But what would have been new, and what would have helped the standing of the Vatican and the Catholic Church throughout the world, was glaringly missing: directives on how to call to task bishops who deliberately covered up the offenses or didn’t follow the law and report the offending Fathers to the local authorities.

Nor do these official “norms” say a word about obliging bishops to alert authorities when they have a sexual offender in their midst. Not a word about any of the responsibilities and culpabilities that so many bishops bear in this whole mess. Again, hmmm…. (One can only wonder about possible responsibility and culpability that the present Bishop of Rome might bear in the cover-ups and neglect when he was Bishop of Munich back in the 80s.)

But if this latest statement from the Pope and his staff can be faulted for what it doesn’t say, it can be absolutely deplored for what it does say. Alongside priestly sexual abuse of children and of people with mental disabilities, alongside child pornography, the Vatican statement lists as grievous “delicts” and offenses to the well-being of the church: the ordination of women!

The suggestion here is that God, like the Pope, is equally offended by a woman presenting herself to be a priest as by a priest raping a child!

This is simply beyond the comprehension of most people. And it arouses the consternation of most people: how in the world can the Vatican equate such claimed “dangers” to the church? Why, in a document aimed at dealing with the bewildering and scandalous problem of priests taking sexual advantage of children must the Holy Father and his advisers mention the “problem” of women wanting equal status in the Catholic church?

The New York Times opined that the Vatican inserted mention of women’s ordination in order to send a clear message that it wasn’t buying the suggestion that if there were “Mothers” besides the “Fathers” in the Catholic clergy, there would have been greater concern to protect and then stand up for the rights of children. The Vatican wanted to make perfectly clear that in addressing the problem of abusive priests in the church, it was not addressing the problem of abused women in the church.

If that was the internal motive, it is no justification for the public relations disaster. The fact that the Pope and his fellow-clerics had no inkling of how this juxtaposing of priestly pedophilia and women’s ordination would be perceived, how it would register on the minds and especially in the feelings of people “out in the world,” both inside and outside the Catholic Church, is itself an indication of how much these old, celibate, woman-less and childless men are out of touch with the people they say they are serving.

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Posted in: Benedict XVI, Catholic Church, Pedophilia, Uncategorized.
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A “Spiritual Reaganomics” in the Catholic Church?

Jun 14th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
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Does trickle down work in the Catholic Church?

Does "trickle down" work in the Catholic Church?

That’s one of the statements that echoed in my mind and feelings as I flew home from the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, in Cleveland, June 10-13.

This image of a “spiritual Reaganomics” operating within the Catholic Church was offered in the Plenary Address by Catherine Clifford and Richard Gaillardetz to the over 400 Catholic theologians assembled from around the USA and Canada.

A  Reaganomics of spiritual truth and beliefs, the two speakers pointed out,  claims that truth is delivered from above – from God’s revelation and then through the bishops, especially the Bishop of Rome.   It then is to “trickle down” to the ordinary faith.  In this understanding, the primary role of theologians is to help it trickle.

Such an understanding of how things work, Clifford and Gaillardetz made clear, does not conform to the nature of the Catholic Church, especially as the church as been understood in the Second Vatican Council. In their lecture, which they presented as a verbally danced duet, they gathered, refocused, and recharged what has been the pretty standard “ecclesiology’ (understanding of the church) that Catholic theologians have advanced since the explosive breakthroughs of the Second Vatican Council:

  • That the beliefs of the Catholic Church are to be worked out through the collaborative and dialogical mining of three sources: the people of God (or the sensus fidelium – the sense of the faithful), the bishops (with the Bishop of Rome providing the unifying center), and theologians.
  • While each of these sources of Catholic belief have different roles within the Church, none of them can be placed “above” the other.
  • Each of these sources – bishops, theologians, people — has to “receive” (that means, listen to) what the others are saying.
  • If any of the three sources has a certain “primacy” it is the “the people of God.” Therefore, as Clifford and Gaillardetz stressed, the exercise of the bishops’ and Pope’s teaching office must begin with listening carefully and respectfully to the “sense of the faithful.”   The role of the theologians is “to help the bishops listen carefully.”

But the problem that is rankling the Catholic Church today – and one of the primary reasons why a lot of people  are opting to move out of the Church – is that this leadership of the Catholic Church – yes, the bishops and yes, especially the Bishop of Rome – are NOT LISTENING. Clifford and Gaillardetz pointed out what most of their audience of theologians knew only too well:  many bishops in the US look on theologians with “a presumption of suspicion” that theologians are up to no good and are the primary causes of unrest in the church.

So the conclusion to Clifford and Gaillardetz’s presentation was that theologians, as well as ordinary Catholics in the pews, have to carry out the responsibility given to everyone in their baptism: the responsibility of being prophets.   If theologians and ordinary Catholics always have to listen carefully and respectfully to the bishops and Pope, they sometimes have to speak up and resist honestly and humbly.

In the present state of turmoil and confusion in the Catholic church, that responsibility of speaking up weighs more heavily than ever on the shoulders of Catholics and especially of theologians.  The job description of the theologian is to be a researcher and a teacher – but also to be a prophet.

The problem is that so often when theologians exercise their jobs as prophets and speak up to the bishops and Pope, they get into trouble, even lose their jobs – especially if they are priests or religious.

The power structures today in the Catholic Church do not correspond to the nature of the Church as a community of co-responsibility between people, theologians, bishops.

If the church, as is often said, “is not a democracy” (I’m not so sure about that), neither should it be the monarchy or oligarchy that it seems to be today.

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Posted in: Catholic Church, Democracy, Papacy.
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“We’ve Got a Friend” – Obama and Interfaith

Jun 8th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
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That’s what I felt as I rode the train back from Washington, D.C. the night of June 7, after attending a meeting at the White House on “Advancing Interfaith and Community Service on College and University Campuses.”  It was organized by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

It made clear to me, and I dare say to all of the 110 invitees, that those of us who are committed to promoting better relations and more effective cooperation between the religious communities of this country (and the world) have a friend in the President who now lives in the White House.

That’s a statement I don’t make easily.  I travelled to this meeting with my left-leaning guard up:  politicians are keen, and experienced, at using religion and religious leaders for their own political purposes.  If religion is supposed to be one of those sources of truth spoken to power, it suits “power” to befriend, and soften, “religion.”

I soon lowered my guard and opened my mind and heart.  Joshua DuBois, former Pentecostal minister, and presently Executive Director of the Office on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, together with his energetic and articulate Deputy Director, Mara Vanderslice, made it clear to us, in both the content of what they said and the way they said it, that they were genuinely interested, as Vanderslice put it, “to increase collaboration between universities, colleges, and seminaries in their interfaith activities and White House efforts to call religious communities to cooperate for the greater good of our society and the world.”

Mara Vanderslice, Deputy Director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships; Joshua DuBois, Executive Director of same, Rev. E. Terri LaVelle, Director of Veteran Affairs.

DuBois made it clear, especially for secular critics who fear transgressions of church-state borders, that this effort of the Obama Administration places its focus on bringing religions together not on the basis of shared beliefs but on the basis of shared action. This reflects what President Obama said in his first talk at a National Prayer Breakfast: he clearly recognizes the enduring differences between religions; he’s not out to boil those differences down to one common religious soup.  But Obama, and his administration, believe that the religions do have one thing in common: the desire to serve – the desire to respond to human needs and problems and do something.

This is where, the White House believes, religious believers, despite their real differences, can come together – and even be joined by secular humanists who also want to serve: they all can stand and act shoulder to shoulder in imaging and achieving “what good might look like.”

That last phrase came from Eboo Patel, the young, dynamic Muslim founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and one of the 25 members of Obama’s “Council of Advisors” for the White House Office on Interfaith. Patel delivered a short keynote address to launch the meeting and further conversations.

His main point was that “Interfaith, ” – the one-word designation for the dialogue and collaboration of religions that must replace the competition and clash of religions – is at what Malcolm Gladwell would call “a tipping point.”  Our society is coming to the realization (but is not quite there) that if our nation, as well as the community of nations, is going to effectively deal with the problems confronting us, religions are going to have to get along with each other and make their contribution.  That means that whether you’re a religious believer yourself or not, you’re going to have to deal with religion – with religions in the plural.

This is where Steven Prothero, Professor of Religion at Boston University and well known author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t, offered his input. He highlighted both the growing awareness that “religious literacy” is today becoming an essential part of being educated.  When one goes to college one should expect just as much to learn about religious diversity as one expects to learn how to dissect a frog.  The term “interfaith” must become as much a part of our general knowledge and concerns as “ecology” and “human rights.”

And for religious believers themselves, Patel pointed out to the affirming nods of all participants, this presents a challenge.  Religions today stand before four possible paths: 1) religious communities can become bubbles, and try to shut off the rest of the world; 2) they can become barriers and by insisting that “my God is better than your God” increase the tensions among nations; 3) they can become bombs, and actively call their followers to resort to violence to defend their identities or supremacy; 4) or, they can become bridges of mutual respect and collaboration.

Clearly, the reason why the White House called us religious types together, and the reason why we all responded eagerly and hopefully, is that we share the conviction that now more than ever we can, and we must, make sure that at this “tipping point,” religious believers and religious leaders become bridges – or in the terms of the White House, partners in service.

The religious experts, leaders, scholars and organizers who attended this meeting felt that what they were trying to do was confirmed and affirmed.  It was a relief and a reassurance to know that this President understands “faith-based initiatives” to mean “multi-faith based initiatives”  — with the emphasis on service.

Personally, I found this meeting to be a confirmation both of what I have been trying to do as a scholar over the past 40 years and of what we are trying to do here at Union with the redefined Paul Tillich Chair.   As I tried to lay out in my 1995 book, One Earth Many Religions, the most promising and the most urgent kind of interreligious dialogue doesn’t begin with interreligious conversations about what we believe; it begins with interreligious collaboration about issues that concern us all.  If we start there, if we can become friends in such solidarity of action, we will create the spaces of trust and respect in which we can, and will want to, talk about the beliefs that ground us and animate us in our efforts to serve.

When I summarized this at the end of the meeting, Mr. DuBois pronounced a Pentecostal “Amen.”

I rode the train back to New York with a palpitating sense of gratitude – and hope.

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Posted in: Dialogue, Government, Interfaith Dialogue.
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Where Buddhism Helps: Action with Equanimity

Jun 6th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
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When I ask myself the question: “How has Buddhism helped me in the practice of my Christian ideals?” I realize immediately that there is no one answer. But amid all the ways in which the teachings and the practice of the Dharma have enabled me to clarify, confirm, correct and enliven my efforts to live the message of the Gospel, one of the most pivotal for me arises from the two keys virtues or ideals of Buddhism — wisdom and compassion (prajna and karuna).

The experience of Enlightenment or Awakening for Buddhists includes the realization – not just theoretical in one’s mind, but practical in the way one finds oneself living one’s daily life – that we are part of a larger, inter-connected Reality (wisdom); and to feel this is to feel compassion both for all the other sentient beings who are part of this bigger picture as well as for ourselves.

So the Buddhist experience is one in which one feels oneself energized with a natural, spontaneous necessity to embrace the world in active, love but at the same time one knows that this inter-connecting love is already there, already going on, already complete.

When I ponder this Buddhist realization that wisdom (interconnectedness as given) and compassion (interconnectedness as embraced) are two sides of the same coin, it confirms the central Christian message of having to love and act for what Jesus called the Reign of God. This is at the heart of the Gospel: the call to love one’s neighbor, to act for justice, to “fix the world” (as Jesus’ Jewish teachers might have taught him), to keep acting so as to bring this messed up, suffering world a little closer to the ideal of God’s Reign.

Such loving action for justice is what Buddhists might recognize as compassion. But they then immediately remind Christians that such action for justice and a better world needs to be combined with the wisdom that this world, as it is, is already filled with what Christians might call the interconnected Spirit. As Jesus himself taught, the Reign of God is not only ‘still to come,’ it’s already present. In all the limitations and imperfections, in all the suffering and injustice, the Reign of God is present and taking shape. We have to fix this world, but we can do that only if we work with and in the world as it is. Only when we can accept the way it is (that’s wisdom), can we change the way it is (through compassion).

So when we Christians insist that we have to act to change the world, the Buddhists would definitely agree, but they would add that we should not make too much of a “big deal” of our action. Our actions are important in one way, but in another way, they are not. We have to act, we have to get things done, but the bigger picture is bigger than our individual actions.

Buddhism is here helping me reconnect with what I learned way back in my seminary days from St. Ignatius. He told his Jesuit brothers that they must act, but always with a “holy indifference” (sacra indifferentia). Such holy indifference can be translated nicely as equanimity – a balanced soul, or an easy-going heart.

If we are truly in touch with our Buddha-nature, if we are really “in Christ” as St. Paul puts it, we will be called to give all that we have to loving others and working for a better world, but at the end of the day, or even in the very actions themselves, we will be able to relax and know that even if our actions don’t succeed, even if people don’t respond, it’s no big deal. The bigger picture or the inter-connecting Spirit is still there, still active, still carrying on.

We are to act with all our might, but at the same time, relax. We have to be fully committed, but at the same time, we’d better not take ourselves too seriously.

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Posted in: Buddhism, Interfaith Dialogue, Uncategorized.
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Is Obama “Whacking the Old Folks”??

Jun 2nd, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
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William Greider

I’ve just returned from a wonderful, nostalgic visit to my favorite city in the whole world: Rome. And I’ve been trying to catch up with national news.

The latest issue of THE NATION has left me stunned, bewildered, unable to be incredulous. A column by William Greider, whose books, columns, and appearances on the Bill Moyers show have elicited my trust and respect, lays out the case that President Obama is, indeed, “whacking the old folks.” (I guess I should make that “us old folks.”)

This is his main contention: “The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan compromise in which Democrats agree to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees while Republicans accede to significant tax increases to reduce government red ink.”

Greider offer particulars: “Obama is arm in arm with GOP conservatives like Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, who for decades has demonized Social Security as a grave threat to the Republic and has spread some $12 million among economists, think tanks, foundations, and assorted front groups to sell his case.”

But the facts contradict such claims. “Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus — $2.5 trillion now, rising to $4.3 trillion by 2023.”

Therefore: “Despite conservative propaganda, cutting Social Security will have no impact on the deficit problem that so stirs public anxiety. The While House knows this. So why is the president targeting Social Security?”

Greider’s answer to this question sends shivers up the spine of many an Obama supporter, especially those who are moving close to retirement: “Targeting Social Security is a smokescreen designed to reassure foreign creditors and avoid confronting the true sources of US indebtedness.” Those true sources of our gigantic deficit are the two wars we are now fighting on borrowed money, tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, and the deregulation that was a major cause of the recent financial crisis.

So why doesn’t Obama address the real causes of our deficit? Greider’s answer to that question is both sobering and shivering: “Those and other sources of deficits involve very powerful interests. Instead of taking them on, the thinking in Washington goes, let’s whack the old folks while they’re not watching.”

If this is the thinking in Washington, as it seems to be, both young and old folk better speak up before they get whacked.

Check out Greider’s full case.

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Posted in: Economy, Government, Politics.
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Pope Benedict, May I quote Josef Ratzinger?

May 6th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
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Joseph Ratzinger vs. Pope Benedict

Peritus Ratzinger

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books on the morass of pedophilia crimes and cover-ups facing Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church, Anthony Grafton offers these words of encouragement and hope for bewildered Catholics: “Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical Church was not providing.”

That rather uplifting statement brought back to my mind similar words that I heard from the lips of none other than the young Father Josef Ratzinger, way back in 1963, in Rome, when he was attending the Second Vatican Council as a theological “peritus” (expert).

I was an even younger seminarian in Rome at the time, just beginning my theological studies at the Gregorian University.  Every evening when the Council was in session, there would be talks given all over Rome by the periti which we seminarians and the general public could attend.  It was a theological candy shop — with offerings from the likes of Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Ives Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx, John Courtney Murray, Gregory Baum (sorry, at the time, there were no peritae).

Josef Ratzinger was a rather new name.  But one evening, we thought we’d give him a hearing. He was giving a talk on the church, and if I remember correctly it was in a press office on the Via della Conciliazione, right in St. Peter’s front yard.  He was brilliant.  And I remember one particular statement that both stunned and encouraged us. It was something like: “There have been times in the history of the Catholic Church when the bishops have so fallen away from the spirit of the Gospel, that it becomes necessary for the laity to exercise the  rights given them in baptism and to stand up, speak up, resist — even to the point of disobedience!”

I don’t think that the present clerical pedophilia morass is calling us Catholics to disobey. But it is calling us to stand up and speak up and demand that the Pope and the bishops make a public confession of the way they have mishandled so many cases of offending priests and bishops.

All they have to do is follow the rules for a “good confession” that are still given in any orthodox Catholic catechism:  a careful examination of conscience, an honest confession of sins (in detail if they are mortal sins), a sincere act of contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment.  If the Pope and bishops would do that, publicly, they would surely be forgiven by God — and the Catholic laity.

So, Pope Benedict, may I remind you that Josef Ratzinger is encouraging us to speak up….

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Posted in: Benedict XVI, Catholic Church, Pedophilia, Uncategorized.
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Muhammad on South Park – Ouch!

Apr 26th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
4 comments

What would a Buddhist Christian American make of South Park’s portrayal of Muhammad  in its April 14, 200th episode?  Was it imprudent?  Impudent? Or was it something you would just expect from the always irreverent, usually tasteless (at least for an old fuddy-dud like me), and sometimes embarrassingly funny fare that producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been dishing out since 1997?

Clearly, for many Muslims it was offensive – very much so for the group called Revolution Muslim who immediately after the show announced on their website that they were “outright insulted.”  Okay.  That’s understandable, and their insult should be addressed. But they then added: “We have to warn Matt and Trey that they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh for airing this show.”  van Gogh was the Dutch filmmaker stabbed on the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamic militant for making a film that was critical of Islam’s attitude towards women.

So I, and many others, ask ourselves:  Should South Park have aired this program?  Should all comedians in the United States avoid depicting or joking about Muhammad?

These are not easy questions.  On the one hand, I firmly believe that we should respect the religious sensitivities of others.  On the other hand, it is part of our Western-American culture that comedians make fun of all kind of “sacred” topics and people.  Following the South Park blow up, Jon Stewart on the Daily Show reviewed all the religions and religious figures his show had teased and ridiculed and made fun of over the years – no religion was spared (though references to Muhammad were sparse).

Here’s the rub.  Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in our country.  That calls for adaptation on both sides.  American non-Muslims need to know more about and respect Islam.  American Muslims need to, and the vast majority of them want to, adapt to their new home. (I’m speaking, as is evident, about immigrant Muslims, not African American Muslims.)  But this means that Muslims have to adapt to a culture in which religions are taken seriously enough to be laughed at.  Americans are as ready to seriously practice religions as they are ready to seriously criticize them – and much of that criticism will come through humor.  As a child of this culture, I think this is good.  God only knows how much we need to be critical of the excesses that religion is capable of.

So, recognizing that I cannot really understand the depth of offence that a Muslim may feel when they see their Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) “disguised” as a bear (since his face cannot be seen) on South Park,  I still would cautiously and respectfully suggest to them that if they live here in the United States, they will have to put up with such audacities.  “Put up” doesn’t mean that they should keep silent. Not at all. They should speak up, try to explain to their fellow Americans why they feel insulted, make their Muslim presence felt in American culture.

But I don’t think I have to be as cautious and respectful when I address my Muslim friends and add: but don’t respond with threats to kill people!  Not only does that diminish the respect Americans have for your religion; it also, if I may say so, is contrary to what I have understood about your noble religion.

When such incidents as this South Park portrayal of Muhammad occur, I hope they could be learning occasions for all of us: for us non-Muslims, to try to understand the feelings of our Muslim fellow-citizens — and for Muslim Americans, especially their leaders and scholars, to stand up and declare loudly and clearly that responding to such insults with threats of violence and murder is not only un-American, it is un-Muslim.

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The Limits of Moral Outrage

Apr 22nd, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
3 comments

In these days of widespread – including my own – moral outrage at sacerdotal pedophilia and episcopal cover-up, this sentence from Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now stopped me in my moralistic tracks: “Moral outrage at the ideas of others hardly ever serves God’s purposes, only our own.” (p. 132)

Rohr is right, uncomfortably but also enigmatically right.   Outrage, in itself, is not improper. Indeed, in our world of so few big fish eating so many little fish – whether in the market-place or in church-space – it is an ethical imperative.

But the problem seems to be that one’s moral outrage or righteous indignation so easily establishes a neat black-and-white relationship of us/them, which is really a relationship of good/bad.  And if the difference between us is that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, we have a relationship that isn’t going to go anywhere.  All we can do is shout at each other. We can’t really talk to each other because we can’t really hear each other.   Philosophers will call this a situation of dualism – either/or.  And an “either” can never connect with an “or.”

So, how can we be “outraged” without become “dualistic,” without making it an either/or between good/bad?    How can we declare our opposition to something without cutting off our connection with that something?

I suggest to myself and to others that perhaps we can prevent our outrage and opposition from becoming dualistic if we voice that outrage and carry out that opposition with two virtues:

  • HUMILITY:  In declaring what we think is wrong or what we believe needs fixing, we have to feel, and we have to enable others to feel, that we recognize our own limitations. We are conscious that in speaking strongly we can never speak definitively.  There’s always more to learn. There are always other perspectives.  And yes, we may be wrong.  We know that. And we must be aware of that as we voice our outrage.
  • COMPASSION:  In opposing others, we can and must also care about them.  Once our outrage about others leads to the hatred of others, we’ve lost all chance to change them or the situation – as well as any chance to change ourselves.  I can oppose you in a way that you know I care about you.  That’s the only way opposition has any chance of leading to cooperation.

If we can be outraged but at the very same time humble and compassionate – then, and maybe only then, can our outrage serve God’s purposes.

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Can This Be the Will of God?

Apr 19th, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
3 comments

For the past week, I’ve not been able to shake from my imagination the image that Maureen Dowd described in her op-ed column in the New York Times on April 11. She contrasted “educated and sophisticated young professional women” in Saudi Arabia who put up with “an inbred and autocratic state more like an archaic men’s club than a modern state” with faithful, dedicated Catholic women and men who continue to celebrate and practice their faith in a church which, for all practical purposes, looks very much like “an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity … an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world.”

Ouch!  My discomfort became all the more painful when Dowd went on with a bit of theological-historical analysis: “To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthdoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.”

Dowd’s right.  There are no theological or historical supports in what we know of the mission of Jesus and the early years of the church to support obligatory celibacy for the priesthood or to exclude women from the priestly ministry.  None.  The present practice can be called an aberration.

Dowd’s  mirror-images of Saudi Arabia and the Catholic Church pushed me to stand back and take a sobering look at this church that I love:  It is one of the few surviving  (if not the only surviving) absolute monarchies to exist on this planet. It is run by a man and his entourage called the Curia who are all  male and who, in the name of celibacy, have denied themselves the experience of intimate love of another human being, which means they have denied themselves  “the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” (Lisa Miller quoted by Dowd)

And they exercise their power over the church in almost complete secrecy, without any recognized checks and balances. The Pope’s authority, as defined by the First and Second Vatican Councils is “full, supreme, and universal” and the pope can “always exercise this authority as he chooses.” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, par. 22)

I invite my fellow Catholics to step back with me, take an honest look at the monarchical, exclusively-male, family-estranged authority structures of our church and ask ourselves the simple but sobering question:  Can this be the will of God? Can such a church really be what the God of Jesus — what Jesus — would approve of?

Or, must we say, as some Latin American theologian friends of mine put it:  This Catholic Church is the church of Jesus (along with other churches).  But this Catholic Church is not the church that Jesus wanted.

If we Catholics really feel that the present state of our church — with its absolute, monarchical, all-male structures –is not God’s will, what should be do?

Right now, I don’t want to take up that question.  I just want all of us Catholics to ask ourselves this question: can the present state of our church be the will of God?  And let the answer sink in.  Really sink in.  Take firm hold of our minds and hearts.

If the answer to this question does sink deeply into our Catholic identities, if it shakes us up, if it stirs our feelings, it will slowly but surely be translated into actions — actions that will bring us together to reform our church.

Hans Küng has recently called for such actions on the part of the bishops.   We have to talk more about what his call implies for the laity.

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Posted in: Catholic Church, Papacy.
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The Cross and the God of the Gaps

Apr 2nd, 2010
by Paul Knitter.
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Today, Good Friday, I experienced the confluence of two theological streams – one philosophical and the other devotional. I started with the philosophical on the bus to the United Nations this morning, on my way to participate in “The Way of the Cross, the Way of Peace” which would trace its way down 42nd Street and end up in Times Square.  I was reading a piece by John Caputo in the recent issue of Tikkun whose featured topic was “God and the 21st Century.”

Caputo, ever the devoted theologian of postmodernity, described eloquently and engagingly, as he always does, the only God he (and I) can believe in – a God who is thoroughly, intimately, and dangerously part of the ongoing and always messy process of life:  “God is not a warranty for a well-run world, but the name of a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet.”  This promise can be kept only if we work with it. The divine “promiser” and the finite “promise-ees” are in this together.

And on this basis, we have an entirely different take on the much ridiculed “God of the gaps” – the God we resort to in order to fill in the holes or gaps of our knowledge or inadequacies, only to find that science keeps filling in the blanks and pushing out God.  The way Caputo puts it can well serve as a zinger for all our “new atheists”: “God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gap God fills, but the gap God opens.”

God is that power, that presence, or that something that keeps opening, surprisingly, new gaps, new questions, new possibilities.

Caputo’s philosophical proddings were stirring in my mind as we started the “First Station” of the Way of the Cross in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN.  I was waiting for the usual prayer, traditional to Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgies and used in the “Way of the Cross, Way of Justice” that I used to attend in Cincinnati: “We adore thee, O Christ, and we praise thee, because by thy holy cross, thou hast redeemed the world.”  Instead, this is what we read and prayed from the printed program: “We adore you, O  Christ, and we praise you. BY THE POWER OF YOUR HOLY CROSS, HELP US TO CHANGE THE WORLD.”

The difference between those two formulations is the difference between two very different soteriologies – or ways of understanding how Jesus’ death on the cross saves us.  In the first, the cross redeems us by changing God – that is by satisfying God’s demand for reparation or atonement for humanity’s sin.  In the second, the cross redeems us by enabling US to change the world.

The cross doesn’t pay off God.  Rather, what we see and learn from the cross changes our hearts so that we can change the world.

And here is where I reconnected with Caputo’s understanding of the God who opens gaps. The cross and the death of Jesus represent the primary gap or new possibility that Christianity offers the world: on the cross, we see a man who was filled with the Spirit of God and who challenged the powers that be (mainly the Roman Empire) to the point that they decided he had to be “disappeared” and executed.

But rather than respond to the violent hatred of his executioners with hatred, he responded with non-violent love.  He forgave them.

That’s the new gap – the new possibility opened up for humanity:  in order to save or really change this messed up world of hatred, injustice, and greed, we have to confront the powers that have caused this mess.  But when they respond and come after us, we can’t hate them; we have to confront them with the power of love and non-violence.

It may cost us our lives.  But if we die like this – if we confront evil but do not hate the evil-doers even though they kill us – we can change the world.

This gap, this possibility, this way of living cannot be proven to bring the birth or resurrection of a new world.  But given the example of Jesus – as well as so many others like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Archbishop Romer, the Dalai Lama – we can bet our lives on it.

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