Schism or Evolution?
Something momentous is happening in our midst. The concerted efforts to oust Pope Francis are deeply tied to the perverted crisis of abuse embedded in ecclesiastical power structures. While some may spiritually rely on Julian of Norwich’s “all shall be well”, the fact is, all is not well and will not be well unless the Church undergoes a deconstruction of power and authority and a reconstruction along new lines of inclusivity and integrated systems.
Evolution is the term used to describe the way biological life unfolds into new forms and structures over time. It is not a linear process but one of complexification whereby environmental factors, including stress and crisis, play a role in selecting out traits or behaviors that will optimize life. Intrinsic to this process are the forces of resistance, breakdown, devolution, and death. Considering the extent of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the more recent ideological battle between Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and Pope Francis, I am led to ask, is schism now necessary for the evolution of the Church?
Bill Dinges who is professor of Religion and Culture at Catholic University, recently wrote an insightful essay on why teens are leaving the church and the results are sobering. The millennial generation, he claims, has moved on from institutional religion. “Religious disaffiliation cuts across almost all traditions, although not equally,” Dinges writes. “It occurs among all age cohorts, but more dramatically among younger millennial and Generation Z respondent. Catholic disaffiliation—which currently represents the greatest net loss of any American religious group—mirrors the intergenerational and intragenerational realignment of religious preference and disaffiliation characteristic of the current American religious landscape in general.” Professor Dinges states unequivocally, “studies of religious disaffiliation point unmistakably in the direction of a post-Christian American future.” Given the present chaotic state of the Roman Catholic Church and the data on the rise of “nones” (those with no institutional affiliation), it is reasonable to suggest that the Catholic Church, at least in North America, will not survive long into the future.
The data on religious disaffiliation and the recent crises in the Catholic Church are intertwined. The battle between Archbishop Viganò and Pope Francis reflects the deep underlying tensions in the Church between what Michael Sean Winters calls the “EWTN Catholics,” those who want to restore the Church to a pristine past and post-Vatican II Catholics who support Pope Francis’s agenda of incarnating the Gospel as a fundamental transformative way of life. This difference is one of acosmic (world-denying) idealism and historical realism. The present crisis is not unlike the political battles in the early Church (2nd – 3rd centuries) over Arianism (Jesus was not truly God) and the corresponding disputes over the two natures of Christ, which led to the five-time exile of Saint Athanasius who was repeatedly threatened with death. It was Athanasius (d. 373 AD) who argued that if Jesus was not truly God, then we are not truly saved; God became human so that we may become like God.
The doctrine of the Incarnation plays out in our current ecclesial battles because at the heart of the abuse crisis and the polarization between conservatives and liberals is the platonizing tendency toward spiritualism, if not outright Arianism. Conservatives want a Christology based on original sin, suffering, and sacrifice not evolution, novelty, and future. There’s is a theology of human sinfulness, divine transcendent power and acosmic spirituality. Pope Francis, who is a Jesuit, emphasizes the Incarnation as God becoming human. Rather than positing a sterile patriarchal Father God, Francis emphasizes that God bends low in love to embrace us where we are. We do not have to attain spiritual perfection to be pleasing to God; rather, God has come to us in all the messiness and chaos of our world. This is the good news: God so loved the world that he has become enmeshed with the world in the person of Jesus Christ. While the conservatives want a changeless Church, a Church that transcends the shifting boundaries of history, Pope Francis wants a Church deeply engaged in evolution.
The Viganò circle of Bishops and believers are included in what is informally referred to as the Church of Pope Benedict, a Church based on medieval theology, static cosmology, and entrenched dogma, even if dogma contradicts modern science. The Benedict Church holds that orthodoxy or the true teaching of the Church resides in the unbroken apostolic tradition of the Petrine tradition, the men ordained and ontologically changed by the sacrament of Holy Orders. Their restorationist theology is based on an outdated Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophical synthesis and stands in contrast to the theology of Vatican II in which the Church recognizes that change is integral to history and to the working out of salvation in history. Pope Francis represents Vatican II theology which is less focused on orthodoxy and more concerned with orthopraxis, that is, embodying a living faith attentive to the cries of the poor and the earth, and a faith which expresses itself in mercy, compassion, and solidarity.
Where do we stand in this divided Church?
Do we want a purified Church walled in by unbroken apostolic succession, acosmic-spirituality and patriarchal power, or do we want a Church open to the world and engaged in evolution, where the incarnating presence of God is empowering creative new life?
We cannot confess “One, Holy, Catholic and apostolic faith” and live in the tension of a divided Church. Rather, we need a reality check. Since the pontificate of John Paul II and the strained interpretations of Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has been on a downward spiral of ideological and theological division. With the Viganò attack on Pope Francis, we begin to see the light of an inchoate schism; the seams of the church are busting open. This schism has not reached its full-blown proportions but at the current tempo of dissolution, it will erupt sooner than later.
Welling up between the Viganò (acosmic) and Pope Francis (historical) churches is the sexual abuse crisis. Perhaps we should like to smooth over this crisis by acknowledging a few bad apples who managed to manipulate the patriarchal power system. But the crisis is much deeper and symptomatic of deep structural dysfunction that, if left unchallenged, will catapult the Roman Catholic Church either into outright schism or historical irrelevancy. The Church is no longer One or Whole. It is divided, fragmented, and permeated with secrecy, abuse, and unbridled power. If the Church can be likened to the Titanic, there is a giant hole in the ship and it is starting to sink. Be assured that all who are standing still will sink as well, if they insist on doing nothing but wait.
Only God can save this wreck from crumbling—but salvation comes by no other way than the cross. Bonaventure’s profound insight is worth noting: “There is no other path” he wrote, “than through the burning love of the Crucified” (Soul’s Journey into God, ch. 7). Death is integral to life. This is not meant to be spiritualized or platonized; death is the source of all new life in the cosmos which is why the Christ event recapitulates cosmic life: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” Jesus said, “it remains just a grain of wheat but if it dies, it will produce an abundant harvest” (Jn 12:24). Similarly, “if you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it” (Matt 10:39).
The Church is grounded in a self-emptying God. Divine love pours itself out unto death for the sake of new life. We have spiritualized this core belief and now we are challenged to act on it. The God of Jesus Christ is a God of absolute love and radical freedom who is revealed not in the power of separation and exclusion but in the power of darkness, emptiness, and death. The power of God is shown in the powerlessness of the cross. It is this incarnational commitment of divine love that renders Christianity a religion of evolution, as Teilhard reminded us, which makes death and letting go integral to life.
We are at a crossroads in the Church, a decisive moment for the future of an institution that is sinking in corruption. “Trust in God and trust in me,” Jesus said (Jn 14:1).
Do we trust God enough to let go of an imperialized, political church and enter into new structures of relationships?
Can we trust the Spirit of Love to energize us to create anew?
Can we lose what we have clung to in the Church for centuries and enter into the darkness of new structures and systems of organization that are inclusive?
The time is coming when every person who loves the Church will have to face death in many forms, in what we have known, in what we have loved and in what we have cherished. The dawning of a new Church is upon us and what form this Church will take in the future depends on the depth of our inner freedom to act in new ways.
Beatrice Bruteau wisely noted that revolution does not mean a coup d’etat where one set of rulers is replaced by another set while the structure of ruling itself remains basically the same—that is only rebellion. A genuine revolution, she claims, must be a gestalt shift in the whole way of seeing our relations to one another so that our behavior patterns are reformed from the inside out. Any revolution worthy of the name must be primarily a revolution in consciousness. A significant future, according to Bruteau, will not be born until the orientation of the axis itself has been shifted.
Because the coming revolution in consciousness is truly new, a genuinely radical shift in our basic perceptions, we cannot possibly know just what form it will take. We need a new perspective in which to view our elementary personal, social, and economic relations, and new images in which to represent them mythically to our imaginations, which in turn direct much of our life. We are far from this Church at present but a new consciousness is being born. In her book, The Grand Option, Beatrice Bruteau brilliantly describes a new understanding of Christ for a new way of being Christian:
To enter by our transcendent freedom into Christ and to become a New Creation means to enter by faith into the future of every person and into the very heart of creativity itself, into the future of God.
To be “in Christ” is to abandon thinking of oneself only in terms of categories and abstractions by which one may be externally related to others and to coincide with oneself as a transcendent center of energy that lives in God and in one’s fellows—because that is where the Christ lives, in God and in one another.
To be “in Christ” is to experience oneself as an initiative of free energy radiating out to give life abundantly to all, for that is the function of the Christ. To be “in Christ” is to be an indispensable member of a living body, which is the Body of Christ.
To be “in Christ” is to be identified with the Living One who is not to be sought among the dead, for the Living One is the One who is Coming to Be.
If I am asked then, “Who do you say I am?” my answer is: “You are the new and ever renewing act of creation. You are all of us, as we are united in You.
You are all of us as we live in one another. You are all of us in the whole cosmos as we join in You exuberant act of creation. You are the Living One who improvises at the frontier of the future; and it has not yet appeared what You shall be (Bruteau, The Grand Option, 172-73).
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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…
Is this a time we need the Third Vatican Council?
I was thinking again about separation.
In Matthew 19,6 we can find “… what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
Of course they are talking about weddings, and today we have this big debate in the Catholic Church on divorcee.
One of the thing out of the many things the Catholic Church bring to the table of Christianity are the sacraments. The belief that there are some engagement in life that requires the grace of God to be made possible. And of course one can make a mistake and shouldn’t be living in horrible condition “for the sake” of the sacraments. A bit like when Jesus was saying in Mk 2, 27 “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
This summer I witness two situations in the Catholic Church
• the immense joy and gratefulness of two divorcee who were desperately asking for and who received the sacrament of marriage in the Catholic Church.
• the immense joy of a couple finally getting out of their marriage crisis, a very dark and deep crisis, where one of the two held on to their couple putting all her faith in the vows they had pronounced on the day of their marriage, therefore putting her marriage and herself in the hands of God.
In made me wonder. Why?
Why does that first couple, who know by experience that a marriage can fail, absolutely want to be married in the Church, even more so the Catholic Church where weddings are a sacrament that shouldn’t be dissolved? What make them thirst so much for the sacredness of this sacrament and for the blessing and grace of God?
Why did the wife in the second couple trust that putting all here faith in God would enable her and her husband go through their transformational crisis, digging deeper in the roots of their vows? What enabled her husband to realize that now “their couple is stronger than ever”?
Another sacrament in the Catholic Church is the sacrament of the order. Is being a priest a simple “job” or a more? In the Catholic Church, a priest can be many things in addition to being “married to God and to the Church” through the sacrament of the order. I would say the many things is the job part (actor, teacher, therapist, manager, and maybe even giving out the sacrament?) But the sacrament of the order “marry” them to the Church; and actually to a specific rite chosen by them, within the Church.
The sacrament of marriage as well as the sacrament of the order are both vocations. As Pope Francis puts it in his encyclical Amoris Laetitia, these vocations are there to teach us how to love. And love, and faithfulness to one’s vow to it, sometimes becomes a choice more than a calling.
Both vocations are blessed in a public sacramental ceremony. Not only are they live testimony of the hope in the love and trust of and in God, but they are also a call for all the witness to help them and support them fulfill their vows, especially in times of crisis. Aren’t we all the hands and feet of God on earth?
And maybe the question that we are asked today is the one God asked in Gen 4,9 “Where is your brother?” Will we answer “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Isn’t that the exact same question the Pope is asking us in his encyclical Laudato Si?
On a side note. I was talking to an Israeli the other day. He was asking, what is new in the Catholic Church. I pointed out that top researchers were working on the dialogue between Science and Religion. His reaction was “The Galileo complex”. To put it in other words I told him, how about “Technology and Poverty”. His reaction was “Ah, now that is new”.
Almost as long as the article ???? but very well said! I agree evolution comes from life and we need to pray for unity of heart of not viewpoint
You have asked the most courageous and important question we face at this moment in time:
“We are at a crossroads in the Church, a decisive moment for the future of an institution that is sinking in corruption. “Trust in God and trust in me,” Jesus said (Jn 14:1).
“Do we trust God enough to let go of an imperialized, political church and enter into new structures of relationships? have asked the necessary and courageous question we are faced with at this moment in time: ”
It is time to LET GO and Trust in the Darkness of God
Dear Ilia, You are a prophet crying out in the wilderness of civilisation, and many are hearing your transforming words and their lives are changing. There is a quiet but painful, spiritual rebirth occurring across Christianity and all the major religions. Somehow somewhere you will be a part of this on going rebirth.
My thoughts and prayers are with you. Stay strong.
Love
Wayne
What I’m offering here has a kind of specificity that I think deserves consideration. I wrote the following, under the heading “Catholic Church Needs Radical Reform,” on August 28 and sent it as a letter to the editor of my state’s major newspaper. The paper declined to print it. Here is what the paper would not print.
I am 85 years old and what is known as a “cradle Catholic.” The most recent revelation of the horrendous sex abuse perpetrated by priests in my church not only saddens me, but makes me angry. Angry because I am convinced that unless those deemed to have both power and authority in our church recognize the structure enabling sexual abuse by clergy and act to reject that structure, nothing essentially will change. The Vatican may make stern announcements, bishops may (again) authorize investigative commissions and reports, but after a flurry of activity, and scandalous headlines have disappeared, the institutional church can finally breathe a collective sigh of relief as it envisions its life getting back to normal.
And what will that “normal” be? It will be “an essentially flawed celibate/sexual system of ecclesiastical power,” a system that, thriving in a culture of secrecy and impunity, “develops, fosters, and protects sexual abuse….” These are words from a book published 23 years ago, Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy Of A Crisis, by the Catholic psychotherapist and former Benedictine priest, Richard Sipe, who as early as the 1960s began investigating and warning about sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Moreover, the abuse of minors, as he noted, “is only part of the problem. Four times as many priests involve themselves sexually with adult women, and twice the number of priests involve themselves with adult men.”
While Sipe’s pioneer research and his work as an “expert witness” in the courtroom brought him into conflict with some bishops and other Catholics, upon his death just a few weeks ago, it was said of him: “No one did more for the cause of people abused by clerics and to aid the moral repair of the Catholic Church than Richard Sipe.”
Sipe’s prophetic writings make clear, however, that no genuine “moral repair” will be possible so long as a system is maintained that is rooted in ideas that run deep in the history and culture of the church, ideas, to name just a few, such as: 1) “the place of women is subordinate to men,” 2) “the equation of women, pleasure, and sin with sex,” 3) “the male virgin–the celibate–is one not defiled by woman,” 4) nonmarriage is a “higher state” than marriage, and 5) by both nature and God’s will only males are especially suited to exercise religious authority.
Because ideas like these and others–particularly ones that range from the loony to the downright demeaning about women–are what undergird the Catholic Church’s celibate/sexual system, it is hardly surprising that Sipe notes: “Equality of women is the single most threatening factor to…the system as it now exists and operates.”
Is it not time then for the institutional church’s Old Boys’ Club with a Vengeance to acknowledge its systemic sickness of “power perverted in the name of religion” and promote a truly radical reform of its structure, one which could renew its being in accordance with a spirit historians detect in early Christianity where women as well as men shared roles of leadership and authority?
Anything less than such a reform is destined to leave essentially unchanged a fetid system.
In response to Ilia’s essay:
The crisis of sexual abuse isn’t just embedded in the ecclesiastical power structures, but in the clergy in general to a greater degree than in the population at large.
In my opinion, Catholic disaffiliation is primarily disaffiliation with a theology that isn’t accurate and isn’t meaningful. The foundation of a theology that is accurate and would be affiliating would begin with understanding that God became “enmeshed” with the world from the beginning of creation, not since the person of Jesus Christ. A better way to say it is that God incarnated, God became physical creation, and all that is, living and not living, is God incarnate, including Jesus. All that is, living and not living, is sacred. This theology is a foundation for respect and compassion for self, one another, and the world. Based on it, we would treat self, one another and this world as sacred because they are.
A church deeply involved in evolution would be based on a theology that makes sense. We are overdue for current theology to evolve. Some quantum leaps are needed. The belief that the sun revolved around the earth sufficed for a long time, and then it became obvious that the belief was inaccurate, people other than the church disaffiliated from it, and once the quantum leap to belief that the earth revolved around the sun became unignorable the Catholic Church went along.
Not only is Catholic disaffiliation related to Catholicism’s antiquated and inaccurate theology, wide spread clergy sexual abuse and cover-up of it also is. Our world is sick, and it would be a great help if there was a healthy theology and church that was healthy based on that theology. For the sake of transformation and new life we need to let the current theology die, and allow new and accurate theology to grow. Allow it or not, it will happen. I don’t think Catholicism is up to being a religion of the evolution that is needed, but life is up to it and life is evolving with or without Catholic theology or the Catholic Church.
Theology is an important part of life, and life in its evolution, currently by some quantum leaps, will evolve a theology that makes sense, will be whole and healing, and will be one with which people will want to affiliate.
Peace.
I have enjoyed the blog and all the comments. Don’t know how far I will get on the phone texting! But…since everything is connected, hard for me to be concise. When Keating discusses the contemplative mind or the evolution of consciousness, this is a becoming…. a being pulled forward in love ( in Christ) Omega!
I have been in a long lamentation…… not about The Church, per se, more about what I can’t help but feel is a de evolution of humanity.
All matter becomes something else as the atoms and particles of our bodies will become somethingelse …. what of the God particle within us, within all wonderfully created stuff? ???
In this moment , I feel free of Church. And for once, maybe momentarily, without lament. Perhaps because of connections like this!
Oh,
but this is church !? Really.
Finally, to put in some context, I know that our human egos have been on this planet for such a short period on time within the eons of time of Earths creation, the Cosmos.
Would that we fall down with laughter. ????
I believe the US Church is in trouble because too many Catholics are fat, lazy and satisfied, and so, don’t need Jesus. Most people who came to Jesus had a deep need, for healing or nourishment, social reintegration, etc. Most Americans are too satisfied.
Eastern AND African brothers and sisters.