The title of Küng’s book  in English, Can the Church Still Be Saved?, is essentially a call to the Roman Catholic laity to stand up,  to resist the refusal of Pope and bishops to allow any real change in the RC Church, and so save the Church.

The only hope for the Church, Küng maintains, lies in the courage and resistance of the laity.

Sounds radical?  Sure is.  But I heard basically the same message from Joseph Ratzinger when he was a promising young theologian serving as a “peritus” (an expert advisor to the bishops) during the Second Vatican Council.  At a press conference during the 1963 session (the exact year is fuzzy in my aging memory), he told us that throughout the history of the RC Church it has happened that the Bishops so lost touch with the message of Jesus that it became incumbent upon the laity to exercise their prophetic role given in Baptism and to stand up and refuse to obey!

That was Joseph Ratzinger in 1963….Quite different from Benedict XVI in 2011.

But the Ratzinger of 63 echoes what Küng said in the press conference for his new book. I quote from a report on the conference:

Speaking at the book launch in Tübingen, Germany, Wednesday, the 82-year-old said Jesus Christ would not like today’s Catholic Church.

‘If Jesus of Nazareth returned, he would not prohibit contraceptives, he would not shut out divorced people, and so on’, Kueng said.

He charged that the curia, or Vatican bureaucracy, had come up with a long series of rulings over the centuries that opposed the teachings laid down in the Christian New Testament.  He said Benedict XVI and his predecessor John Paul II had reinforced this.

In the book, he argues that resistance to church doctrines that are ‘obviously against the Gospels’ is a duty.

Küng said this included Catholic parishes insisting on keeping their priests after they marry, even if church law declares the man is no longer a priest.

He said the church could only saved by the faithful taking over responsibility for their church.

Küng’s words, and his example, urge me to take up this responsibility.

I sure hope a growing number of Catholic laywomen and men will feel the same. The well-being of our Church is at stake.

The first was an excellent article by my fellow parishioner at Ascension Parish on 107^th Street, Peter Steinfels.   It’s titled “Further Adrift,” playing on the title of his 2004 book, A People Adrift, and showing that in the light of the Pew Forum’s recent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the Catholic Church is suffering even greater losses, in numbers and in spirit.

Two paragraphs in Peter’s reflections captured the sad reality of my church:

One out of every three Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. That dwarfs the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. Thomas Reese, SJ, recently described that loss as “a disaster.” He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”

I wonder too. As far as I know, there has never been any systematic discussion of these findings at the meetings of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. They will meet again in mid-November, with an agenda that will deal with many things—but not with these devastating losses.

Item #2: My son John sent me a pamphlet that had been distributed in his Chicago parish on Understanding the Revised Mass Texts. In it, the bishops, following orders from the Vatican, labor to explain the importance of such liturgical changes as:

• “greatly sinned” instead of “sinned through my own fault.”
• “and with thy spirit” instead of “and also with you”
• “Lord God of hosts” instead of “God of power and might.”
• (here’s the kicker!) “not worthy that you should come under my roof” instead of “worthy to receive you.”

Where are these men, these pastors!  They fiddle with language while their – OUR! – church burns.

In his article, Steinfels expresses not just the anger, but the deep, deep grief that so many Catholics are feeling.

Whether it’s “greatly sinned” or “sinned through my own fault” something is profoundly amiss in the Catholic Church.

Pope Bendict XVI’s recent efforts to deal with the clergy sexual abuse problem are not only too feeble; they’re downright dangerous.

The National Catholic Reporter reported on Benedict’s sermon for his general audience on Sept 8 with this lead: “The problem of abuse by clergy is solved more by a spirit of penitence and conversion by its members than by a radical change of church structures, Pope Benedict XVI said.”

The Pope’s own words were: “a true renewal of the ecclesial community is not achieved so much with a change in the structures as much as with a sincere spirit of penitence.”

Your Holiness,  that approach not only lets you and the bishops off the hook.  It allows the conditions in which this problem bred to endure.

Maybe it’s because the Pope doesn’t like liberation theology that he won’t accept one of its central claims:  sin may have its roots in the human heart, but it can take on an independent reality of its own in the structures of institutions and laws.  To confront sin and evil, a change of heart is always necessary.  But often it is not enough.

And that certainly pertains to the problem of priestly and episcopal pedophilia, and its cover up.   The actual acts of sexual abuse of children may not be directly linked to obligatory celibacy. But it does have to do with the clerical ethos or culture that results from the all-male, all-celibate (supposedly), and all-powerful structures of authority in the Catholic Church.

Even more clearly, the sad cover-ups and the persistent refusal to admit complicity by most bishops (especially in the USA) have to do with the patriarchal structures that place absolute power of authority in the hands of one bishop in each diocese and in the hands of one bishop over all the Catholic Church.

Unless these structures are changed according to the spirit and I dare say mandates of the Second Vatican Council – which called for greater power sharing between bishops and pope, and between laity and clergy – there will be no “true renewal of the ecclesial community.”

Your Holiness,  Please change your heart so that we can change our structures.

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.

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.

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….

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.

I have a definitely biased reaction to that statement.  I’m a former priest, who had to leave the clerical club because I wanted to also find God in human love (which means I didn’t want to sleep alone).  If I could have stayed, there would have been one less reason to rent a priest from abroad.

That’s what the Catholic Church in the US is presently doing — it’s renting — really, stealing — priests from other countries who need priests even more than the US RC Church does, especially Africa and Asia.  In the US (and Europe), the ratio of priest to Catholic laity is 1 to 1,300. In  Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s  1-4,786; in Southeast Asia: 1-5,322.

Many of this foreign sacerdotal acquisitions are doing a fine job of shepherding a flock whose customs they often don’t understand and whose language they often speak with heavy, hard-to-follow accents.  Many of them aren’t.  Whether they are or aren’t, it’s a shame that they cannot stay at home and tend their own flocks.  It’s a shame that so many parish-flocks throughout America are without shepherds.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  There’s a simple solution, and it’s staring the Vatican and American bishops right in the face:  Ordain married men and women.  As any Catholic theologian who doesn’t work for the Vatican or the Bishops’ Conference will tell you, there’s no theological reason why that can’t happen.  The only obstacle right now is, literally, “a man-made law” — that is, men huddled around one of the the last surviving real monarchies in the world — a monarchy that wants to hang on to its patriarchal power.

I say all this not from outside the Catholic Church, but from inside.  I love this church.  And it’s killing me to see how man-made rules are killing it.