Nettles to be grasped

In a recent article Gerald O’Hanlon SJ, former Superior of the Jesuits in Ireland, outlined some reasons why many feel that there is a crisis at the heart of the Catholic Church today.* But crisis means danger plus opportunity; and the opportunity here is for radical change.

Sadly, the dream of the Second Vatican Council of a more collegial Church, with active lay participation, and a balancing of the power of the papacy with the influence of local Churches has for the most part not been realised.  Perhaps this is due in no small part to conflicting interpretations of Vatican II, the success of the Roman Curia in resisting reform and effectively ensuring that collegiality has yielded to a more entrenched centralisation.

But if there was one event, he says, that crystallised this crisis of power and linked it with the crisis of sexuality, it was the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968.

The papal commission leading up to this included lay men and women, married couples, medical experts and other specialists. It found that it could not establish the intrinsic evil of contraception on the basis of natural law or reasoning.  Four theologians dissented from this finding.  Paul VI in his encyclical took the side of the four dissenting voices (out of nearly seventy) and effectively decided the issue by papal authority.

However, a large majority of practicing Catholics do not find this teaching persuasive.  Theologians have pointed to an overly physical notion of natural law underlying the teaching, as well as an overly static notion of what tradition entails, tendencies which continue to be the case with regard to many other areas of sexual teaching such as premarital sex, remarriage, homosexuality, the role of women in ministry and mandatory clerical celibacy.

It is also worth noting how absolute this teaching is in contrast to the more tentative stance on disputed economic and political matters.  Is it not curious that the Church can claim such certainty on a matter as complex as human sexuality, while being more modest about truth claims in other spheres and even admitting that the natural law is not something that we know fully but rather something about which we grow in knowledge?

Conflict need not be a bad thing, and in fact in human affairs it is often vital for growth in truth: have we forgotten that the opening of the Good News to us, the Gentiles, depended in no small measure on the conflict between Paul and Peter, in the early Church? And one recalls the wise counsel of Gamaliel, addressing his fellow Jews in relation to the disturbances caused by this new way of looking at truth by the followers of Jesus: ‘In the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan, or this undertaking, is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them - in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’ (Acts 5:38-39).

This ‘Gamaliel principle’, an application of the gospel ‘by their fruits you will know them’, is too often bypassed by the Church in heavy-handed attempts to impose truth, not by means of the authority of persuasion and reason, but rather by the authority of power.  It often seems in our Church that we attempt not just to inform conscience but to coerce it.

Yet Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly stresses the compatibility of faith and reason, and there is an appealing phrase in the documents of Vatican II which says that ‘truth cannot be imposed except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entry into the mind at once quietly and with power’ (Dignitatis Humanae 1).

What has happened instead with regard to many controversial issues of sexual morality in our Church is the development of a culture of taboo and fear, with matters being settled by appeal to authority rather than by means of open discussion.  This pays scant respect to the notion of that ‘sense of the faithful’ which is intrinsic to the Church’s own teaching.

All this alerts us to how far we have come from the notion of power and authority personified by Jesus in the washing of feet.  It seems at times that we are closer to the notion of power as exercised by the Scribes and Pharisees in the devastating critique of Jesus.   (Matthew 23:4-7)

One gets the sense that we are at a watershed in Catholicism worldwide.  There are many good reasons, not least the emergence of a more globalised world, for a centralised papacy. It would be ironic, at a time when secular commentators are pointing to the need for global governance to tackle economic, environmental and political problems, if we as a Church turned our backs on the service to universality that the papacy can provide.

However, some years ago John Paul II was aware that, particularly to other Christians, the papacy was seen as an obstacle rather than as a sign of unity, and he asked for help to change the papacy in ways which would better fulfil its great potential.  (Ut Unum Sint, 1995)




*Adapted from The Tablet 13/2/10