Death In The Church: Is New Life Ahead?
The recent disclosure of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the extent of depravity reported in the news is symptomatic of a Church in crisis. It is no longer acceptable for the Pope simply to issue a public apology nor is it sufficient for any group merely to reflect on what has happened by issuing position statements. The Church has a deep structural problem which is entirely bound to ancient metaphysical and philosophical principles, not to mention imperial politics, that at this point require either a radical decision towards a new ecclesial structure or accept the possibility of a major schism. The rock-solid Church has crushed human souls and twisted authority into deceit. The male-dominated Christ center no longer holds and there is simply no solution or comforting words that can placate the extensive damage to fragile human lives that has taken place over the past decades. The evidence of abuse brought to light in the Catholic Church is simply unfathomable.
There is something profoundly intransigent about the structure of the Church. It is not that Church structures have caused the abuse but they have masked predators hiding as priests in a closed caste system of clerical elitism. The resurgence of abuse points to something deeply amiss if not embedded in Church culture. “Culture” is a complex term that encompasses the set of operative meanings and values. Church culture is based on operative principles of hierarchy, patriarchy, careerism, and the notorious notion of priestly consecration as becoming “ontologically changed.” The hierarchical pecking order from priest to Pope has entailed obeisance in the quest for a higher position on the ladder of ecclesiastical success. Clericalism is a type of corporate ladder-climbing and no different from the quest for power in the world of major corporations. Corporate power, like ecclesial power, is marked by the dominant male, akin to the evolutionary hunter who is “red in tooth and claw”; the priest-hunter can be cunningly deceptive at achieving his desired goal.
How did we get here? If the Church is founded on the Good News of Jesus Christ, how did it become so radically disconnected from the itinerant preacher from Nazareth?
Structure concerns relationships and the types of relationships that comprise Church structure are based on outdated philosophical notions of nature, gender, and personhood. Structures do not themselves cause abuse but they can abet and, or, cloak mental illness, predators, and criminals disguised as priests. The disguise is actually embedded in the dysfunction of the structure itself. Walled in a fortress of ontological superiority bestowed upon by priestly consecration, one could effectively live a dual life insofar as one’s brain can cognitively dissociate between abusive behavior and priestly function. The dissociative brain is not quite schizophrenic or a split brain but is actually more deceptive because it can capture certain ideas and repeat them (such as abusive behavior is normal) while operating on another level of priestly ministry.
Dissociative behavior can be reinforced by certain philosophical principles and the Church has clung to a number of outdated philosophical principles. Two principles in particular that can create a porous structure of abuse are:
1) The Ontology of Being, that is, the notion that the priest is on a higher level of being and thus closer to God. This misguided notion stems from the way hierarchy developed in the Church. The hierarchical structure that presently defines the Church can be dated back to the fifth century when the mystical writer, Pseudo-Dionysius composed his treatise on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Dionysius introduced the term “hierarchy” to connote sacred order among the many different classes of people that comprise the church. The Dionysian notion of hierarchy was meant to reflect the many ways God shines through creation but the term was corrupted in the Middle Ages by William of Saint Amour who used the Dionysian hierarchy to reject Franciscan Friars as teachers at the University of Paris, a role William claimed that duly belonged to clerical priests and not those of religious orders. Hence the notion of hierarchy as a ladder of ontological distinctions (for example, priests are of higher being than laity) was a medieval construct that became entrenched in the mind of the laity.
2) A second philosophical flaw is the platonic notion of the body as inferior to the life of the spirit giving rise to several different outrageously flawed ideas, including the notion that women are intellectually inferior to men and the source of sin; that sex and sexuality are inferior qualities of human personhood and need to be closely monitored, as these can easily lead to sin; that the corruptible body needs to be disciplined and subjugated to the spirit. David Noble The Religion of Technology and A World Without Women) provides convincing historical evidence to support his thesis that the principal aim of Christianity, like science, is to restore the fallen male Adam to divine likeness. His thesis is based on the myth that Adam was created before Eve and thus received the breadth of life directly from God; hence Adam is the true image of God and Eve is a weak imitation. Eve is the reason Adam lost his divine likeness along with his immortality, his share in divine knowledge, and his divinely ordained dominion over nature (the “fall”). Because Eve was the problem, she cannot be part of the solution. John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century claimed that at the resurrection sex will be abolished and nature will be made one–only man–as if he had never sinned.
It is no secret that even the best theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, held that women do not have fully formed intellects, an idea that can be traced back to the philosophy of Aristotle. It is unfortunate that Pope Leo XIII in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris wedded the Church to the theology of Thomas Aquinas thus making Thomas’s theology the official theology of the Catholic Church. By doing so, the Church adopted the Thomistic-Aristotelian metaphysical framework based on matter and form, substance and essence. Thomas Aquinas was a brilliant 13th century theologian who contributed to the Church a vast corpus of theological insights; however, by making his doctrine official teaching, the Church turned a deaf ear to modern science and to other theological ideas, such as the Scotistic notion of primacy of Christ.
Although the Catholic Church has supported modern science reflected by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, it has not adopted the principle scientific shifts of modern biology, evolution, or quantum physics, despite the fact that these areas are pillars of modern science. As a result, the official theology of the Church is based on the ancient cosmology of Ptolemy and the medieval Thomistic-Aristotelian metaphysical synthesis. Even the most recent report of the International Theological Commission omits science entirely from the task of theology today. As a result, the foundations of theology remain out of sync with nature; the understanding of the human person is outmoded in many respects; and the core doctrines of creation, salvation, and redemption are based on outdated cosmological principles.
Despite the turn to the historical subject in Vatican II, the cosmological framework for official Catholic theology is the pre-Copernican, geocentric Ptolemaic universe. It is not surprising that the Ptolemaic cosmos blended nicely with Newton’s universe, allowing the Church to maintain a static inert framework of substance and form. Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest, compares the institutional Church to Newton’s world, a vast machine made of parts and obeying fundamental laws, a world, she indicates, that can be easily controlled and manipulated. In her book The Luminous Web, she writes:
“Human beings were so charmed by the illusion of control Newton’s metaphor offered that we began to see ourselves as machines too. Believing that Newton told us the truth about how the world works, we modeled our institutions on atomistic principles. You are you and I am I. If each of us will do our parts, then the big machine should keep on humming. If a part breaks down, it can always be removed, cleaned, fixed, and replaced. There is no mystery to a machine, after all. According to Newton’s instruction manual, it is perfectly predictable. If something stops working, any reasonably competent mechanic should be able to locate the defective part and set things right again. . . . Our “God view” came to resemble our worldview. In this century, even much of our practical theology has also become mechanical and atomistic. Walk into many churches and you will hear God described as a being who behaves almost as predictably as Newton’s universe. Say you believe in God and you will be saved. Sin against God and you will be condemned. Say you are sorry and you will be forgiven. Obey the law and you will be blessed.”
Newton’s world was a closed system. A closed system views organizations as relatively independent of environmental influences; problems are resolved internally with little consideration of the external environment. Without any new input of energy, a closed system will eventually wear down and dissipate. Open systems on the other hand can migrate into new patterns of behavior because the system interacts with the environment; closed systems are rigid and largely impenetrable while open systems are chaotic and far from equilibrium. The Church is a closed system. Rules, fixed order, dogmatic formulas, unyielding laws, patriarchy, authority, and obedience under pain of judgment and death, all have rendered the Church impervious to evolution and to the radical interconnectivity that marks all levels of nature. A closed institutional system in an evolutionary world is bound to die out unless new energy can be put into the system, or the system itself undergoes radical transformation to an open system.
The turning point for the Church’s retrenchment from science can be marked by the Galileo affair in 1633 when Cardinal Bellarmine rejected Galileo’s confirmation of the Copernican heliocentric system, stating that acceptance of heliocentrism was contrary to Scripture. Although Pope John Paul II apologized on behalf of Galileo in 1984, by mid 20th century the Church had not accepted Big Bang cosmology or evolution as fundamental to doing theology.
While Vatican II is lauded for its progress, this Council is no exception to the Church’s outdated stance with regard to modern science. Although John XXIII opened the Church doors to the modern world and human history, he did not acknowledge Big History insofar as all history begins with the Big Bang. Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1925: “When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them” (Whitehead 1925). Ralph Burhoe, the visionary behind the journal Zygon: Journal of Science and Religion, said that the discoveries of twentieth-century science, born from the creative human spirit in search of understanding, have far out-paced the ancient myths of world religions causing “people everywhere to lose credence or faith in the models or myths as formulated in their traditional religions” (Burhoe and Tapp, Zygon 1966: 4-5). He wrote that if religions are to be regenerated, they would have to be credible in terms of this age of science, a point highly consonant with the vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Can We Rebuild?
While the reconciliation of science and religion may seem pedantic and marginal to the abuse crisis, it is perhaps the most fundamental work that lies before the Church and world today. Without bringing science and religion into a new integrative relationship, there is no real basis on which to construct a new philosophical understanding of theological truths or of human personhood. All the apologies in the world and all the position papers carefully written will not make an iota of a difference to the “substance abuse” that marks the Church. Unless fundamental levels of consciousness change, we cannot attract a new reality.
In this respect, academic theology is as much to blame for the abuse crisis as the hierarchy itself, insofar as the academy of Catholic theology perpetuates a substance ontology and remains essentially entrenched in ancient philosophies and cosmologies. In theology departments, one can teach a course on Science and Religion as a particular area of interest but “yoking” Science and Religion is not necessary to doing theology in the 21st century, nor has the academic field of Science and Religion impacted the pedagogies of either science or religion. Teilhard de Chardin was adamant that the philosophical shifts brought about by modern physics and biology demand conceptual and pedagogical shifts in science and religion. “Evolution is a general condition,” he wrote, “to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must submit and satisfy from now on in order to be conceivable and true” The Human Phenomenon, Teilhard de Chardin 1999, 152, emphasis added).
Science has greatly shifted our understanding of nature including human nature, biological nature, and physical nature so that every aspect of theological doctrine must be reevaluated in light of evolution and modern physics. Every seminary curriculum should include Big Bang cosmology, evolution, quantum physics, neuroscience, depth psychology, and systems thinking. Incorporating science into seminary education will not preclude abusers but over time the formation of new structural systems that are more consonant with nature as cooperative interdependent systems might allow for greater transparency, interdependency, and accountability.
To accept modern science as part of theological education and development of church doctrine is to recognize the full inclusion of women in the community of biological life. The inability to accept women as fully capable intellectual beings has been a real stumbling block for the Church and, in our postmodern age, the exclusion of women from all forms of leadership and service is no longer acceptable. Systemic reorganization as well as scientifically-literate theological education must include women at all levels of formation. There is no adequate theological argument for excluding women from Holy Orders except the well-worn “image of God” argument which, in light of modern science, is incredible. Ordaining women priests might help save the Church from implosion.
Towards a New Future?
The Church needs a new direction, one pointing not upwards but forward, not towards “heaven above” but a new future of healthy relationships. Beatrice Bruteau describes a shift in consciousness from a domination paradigm to what she calls a “Holy Thursday” paradigm, marked by mutuality, service, and Christian love. To be “in Christ,” she writes, “is to enter into Holy Thursday by experiencing some death and resurrection, letting an old modality of consciousness die, and seeing a new one rise to life. It is to abandon thinking of oneself only terms of categories and abstractions and seeing oneself as a transcendent center of energy that lives in God and in one’s neighbors–because this is where Christ lives, in God and in us.” We need to come to terms with the fact that Christianity is less an historical religion than a religion of the future. In Jesus God’s self-communication to creation explodes into history. God evolves the universe and brings it to its completion through the instrumentality of human beings. Jesus is the climax of that long development whereby the world becomes aware of itself and comes into the direct presence of God. What we see in Jesus is that the future of the material universe is linked to the future of the human community insofar as human agency affects biocentric life in its relation to ultimate fulfillment in God.
We fragile, vulnerable humans are “cooperative co-creators” and it does make a difference how we live our lives. Our participation in the mystery of Divine Love, incarnate and hidden in the brokenness of our world, lies at the basis of a healing world. The shocking news of the abuse crisis crushes our hearts, but know too that God’s heart is broken; that the body of Christ is crucified over and over again, for when one member is abused the whole Body is abused. But our faith must remain unshaken. Christ is risen from the dead; the final word is not death but Life. We will rise from these ashes but we cannot stand still nor can we turn back. Our hands are now put to the plow and we must forge a new path ahead. The Church will be born anew, for God is doing new things.
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Trinity and Personhood
I have been teaching a graduate course on the Trinity this semester and it has impelled me to think anew about the Trinity and what the implications of the Trinity…
Dear Sr. Ilia,
Thank you very much for your whole thought. I shared it with several English, Indonesian amd Chinese speaking priests and sisters. I think we need third Vatican Council to make it happens.
I write a column in our local parish newsletter, and am seriously considering submitting the following text for publication, but because it is controversial, I would appreciate some feedback before I pull the trigger (oliver.j.oviedo@gmail.com):
In Plato’s Republic, Plato considers whether a rational person would be moral if they did not fear being caught and punished for doing injustices. To explore this question, he wrote about a debate between Socrates and Glaucon regarding the legend of the mythical ring of Gyges, which had the power to turn its wearer invisible.
Glaucon posits that “if there were two such rings, and the moral person put on one and the immoral person the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.”
According to Glaucon, the actions of the moral would be the same as the immoral in the end, and that people are moral not out of their own free will, but out of necessity. He believed that if someone had the power to become invisible and never did any wrong, onlookers would praise him to his face while believing in their hearts that he was a “most wretched idiot”. Socrates argues that the man who abuses the invisibility has enslaved himself to his appetites, while the man who does not remains rationally in control of himself and is therefore happy.
Recently, even more news of child abuse at the hands of many Catholic priests suggests that the invisibility granted them by their clerical hierarchy proves Glaucon’s point. Clearly, the abusers have enslaved themselves to their appetites. But haven’t their power-hungry superiors who covered it up done the same? Does this make the faithful Catholic laity and faithful Catholic clergy the most wretched of idiots?
Faithful Catholics, both laity and clergy who are of such an “iron nature” as to remain moral despite the privilege of their position, should seriously explore these questions: “If the clerical hierarchy hangs onto their rings of Gyges, what becomes of Christ’s Church? What would truly giving them up entail?”
As I have heard you say before, dear Ilia, “We need new wine skins for the NEW WINE.” Christ Consciousness is the only thing that makes any sense at all to me.
You hit the nail on the head in your article, when you said, “While the reconciliation of science and religion may seem pedantic and marginal to the abuse crisis, it is perhaps the most fundamental work that lies before the Church and world today. Without bringing science and religion into a new integrative relationship, there is no real basis on which to construct a new philosophical understanding of theological truths or of human personhood. All the apologies in the world and all the position papers carefully written will not make an iota of a difference to the “substance abuse” that marks the Church. Unless fundamental levels of consciousness change, we cannot attract a new reality.”
My faith is hanging by a thread. Thanks for the boost. The only way to calm the intense anger that I have felt for weeks now, it to see this crisis as “Christ purifying the Church.” So often radical change can only come about from “hitting rock bottom.” Bless you and your work, Ilia.
“Structure concerns relationships.” “The rock-solid Church”. Haven’t we again, forgotten who the real “rock” is? I sometimes imagine what the world would look like without the Vatican as we know it today. The relationship between God and his Church surely wouldn’t disappear from the world. It would just be different.
I like the notion of open-source. The Trinity God being the source, accessible to all. Opening ourselves to new relationships to give space to the Spirit to transform us through them. Too often it seems, we are stuck in front of the empty tomb of our old relationships. A friend was telling me, the old wine taste so much better than the new wine. The problem is that we can run out of old wine, and if we don’t make new wine as we drink the old one, we simply run out of wine at one point. And to make new wine, we need new relationships!
You mention chaos. It made me wonder. What kind of chaos? Who really likes chaos? But doesn’t life have this strange sense of humor of bringing chaos to us anyways? Isn’t the chaos just the process of creating empty space by dying to our old relationships and creating/renewing new ones, accepting that the timing of these death/new birth can be different for each one of us, not always triggered/controlled by us, hence creating chaos?
Becoming and seeing each-other as an open-source of relationships (women as men equally, clergy as lay equally, believers and non believers equaly) … To become open-sourced also means to be more exposed, to take more risks. Exposing ourselves to sometimes being pigeonholed sometimes pigeonholing others, to sometimes being first, sometimes last. But if we are convinced that we are in a process of evolution, discovery, and that we are all never just one relationship, why don’t we do it more?
A question I had for a long time was: an evolution towards what? It took me a while to understand that it was towards the Devine Love of God and the consciousness of my brokenness (or vice versa)? Does our poverty reside in us denying our own brokenness or denying the Devine Love of God? To break, isn’t it just to open up to our own poverty and therefore putting us back in the hands of God’s love? When the Pope is telling us that he wants a poor church for the poor, isn’t it what he is talking about? And how can we dare open up to our own poverty if we don’t meet and love the poor who have already opened up to it and showing us the way of how to accept, love, and move beyond it? And it seems that if we don’t go meet “the poor”, “the poor” comes to meet us, as we can witness today everywhere in the news headlines!
Integrating Science and Religion, or opening them up to each other? Again, the question might be, why the need? When Pope Francis talks about Integral Ecology in his encyclical Laudato Si, it seems that he is calling us to this effort of integration. But he is calling us to create a culture of encounter, of transforming actions, and contemplation, a culture of new relationships. Not to become omniscient, which would be a disaster, nor save the world, which only God can do. But simply generating new questions, acting on them, gaining a new perspective in order to move forward beyond the tomb, to the next question that will bring us closer to God.
I was thinking of the different reactions between the demons and Jesus when confronted with an unexpected encounter. It seems the demons are saying to Jesus “what do you want from me”, where Jesus, maybe after humanly first ignoring/denying the request or taking his time to answer, usually ends up by saying “what can I do for you”, opening himself up to this new relationship, taking the risk of knowing and being known (or miss-known), loving and being loved (or unloved), of giving and receiving, as well as taking the risk of not being able to answer the coming request, therefore humbly putting himself and the relationship in the hands of God. And then, he moves on, towards his next encounter that will reveal to himself and to others, our relationship to a Trinity God.
Thank you for your article. It is wonderful to read and understand what you shared. As a woman I am aware of the churches exclusion of women. Your article gives me hope for the future. Women are here, being educated, taking up positions within the church having nurturing discussions and growing in awareness. We are working within the church and ready to go forward. Let us continue this journey together.
Sr. Ilia. Brilliant and beautiful in its simplicity. Jesus was challenging the “priests” of His time on earth constantly. The hierarchy is absurdly outdated to our evolutionary experience as human beings. If jesus said it once, He said it a thousand times, “man’s ways are NOT God’s way.” The early followers didn’t get it then in many respects and still don’t get it now. I was particularly moved by your sound thought process and appreciated your not pointing fingers at anyone but rather addressing the need to restructure what it means to be a follower of Christ. His message was clear and consistent: God is love. Mercy, understanding and compassionate. Jesus spent His time with the so- called outcasts of society. The Roman church has turned that notion on its head. We need to listen to the Holy Spirit and move forward at the Spirit’s promptings
I find much to agree with in your post but would like to point out your point of view is almost entirely from the philosophical / scientific perspective and has little if any of the Biblical perspective in it. God has been shaping a broken church back to the days of Abraham; we need to keep this in mind when we consider the horrific scandal of abuse and worse, hiding it. As a theologian you need to present the entire picture.
Thank you so much, Sr. Ilia, for your customary, insightful summary of the necessary shifts we must make in our faith community. You help to clarify so much.
Love and prayers,
Kevin Lynch, O.F.M.
I think this piece is spot on, brilliant, evocative, and actually exciting. Ilia, you name so much I feel and have not had the wonderful articulation for!!! Thank you, profoundly and deeply!!
“But our faith must remain unshaken. Christ is risen from the dead; the final word is not death but Life. We will rise from these ashes but we cannot stand still nor can we turn back. Our hands are now put to the plow and we must forge a new path ahead.”
True, but Faith is not intrinsically tied to the church as so many of us have been indoctrinated to believe. This introjected belief that the Catholic Church is the be all end all is, in this moment, being soundly rejected the world over. From inside by moral implosion and from outside by an awakened understanding of who we are and who God is and what we both desire from our relationship.
It is too early to tell, imho, whether or not God desires the church to continue in a reconstituted form that is inclusive of women and open to scientific Truth, which cannot be in conflict with religious Truth because Truth is Truth. The Holy Spirit may have something entirely different in mind; something the world has yet to anticipate or even imagine.
What if the future we are being invited into requires those still clinging to the life raft that is their religion, their tribal home, to let go into a new way of being “church?” One rooted in orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Orthopraxy requires no complex structure, dogmas or creeds. It requires “only” our willingness to clarify our perceptual lens that we might increase our ability to see clearly so that we may respond accurately to what is before us. This is the Love that will transform the world.