|
Jan
Blom, OFM In a critical analysis of the Lineamenta for the proposed Synod of Bishops in 2001, the author reflects on some of the questions raised. The tittle of the Lineamenta of the Bishops’Synod is,The Bishop: Servant of the Gospel of Jesus for the Hope of the World. Reading through the document is not very exciting. Nothing really new and nothing much of joy. The tendency of the document is a going back to the status quo ante Vatican II. It is a document of the so-called ‘restoration-ideology’ with not much very hopeful. The main stress is again on inflating the hierarchy, instead of Vatican II’s stress on the People of God. The thrust is again towards the Church instead of towards the ‘kingdom of God’. It is as if the writers, reading the words of Christ, ‘where two or three are gathered in my name I will be in their midst’ would not hesitate to add ‘provided a bishop is present’. The Lineamenta suggests that the bishops are the sole means through which Christ and the Holy Spirit are allowed to work. A monopoly on the ‘service of hope’ for the bishops is not only against the movement of Vatican II, but is also a distortion of the Gospel. Eph 4:4-7 is very clear about this ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as there is one hope to which God has called you. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; there is one God and Father of all mankind, who is Lord of all, works through all and is in all. Each one of us has received a special gift in proportion to what Christ has given’. The Lineamenta mention that the bishop is to be a ‘servant’ and a ‘good shepherd’. Yet this is done in such a way that it makes a caricature of this noble ministry of ‘serving and shepherding’. The Lineamenta put the bishop high on the throne of powerful canon law, with on one side of his desk, ‘the Word of God’ and on the other, the ‘Magisterium’. From this high position the bishop has to rule, to teach and to sanctify. But how could a ruler rule unless he listens to the ruled? How can a sanctifyer sanctify unless he listens to the sinner? How can a teacher teach unless he listens to his students? Without listening he will land up ruling, sanctifying and teaching in a vacuum. This vacuum will be avoided if the ‘servant’ bishop sincerely believes in Vox populi, Vox Dei (= that the voice of the people is the voice of God). Therefore a good shepherd has courageously to walk in the midst of the flock. There in the middle of the flock he will discover why people cry, how they are burdened, how they suffer, and how their faith strengthens them to trek along on the way of the Lord. There in the middle of the flock the ‘shepherd’ will be able to hear the ‘voice of God’ in a loving communion. Listening to this ‘voice of God’ in a loving communion. Listening to this ‘voice of God’ from the people the ‘servant-shepherd’ will find his way to real leadership, he will find his way to encourage people and he will find his way of making his service into a healing service. If a bishop relies on a ready-made fixed agenda then he will be walking in front of the flock in a vacuum. Even Jesus himself did not have a ready-made fixed agenda ‘from on high’. In his everyday ministry. Instead he discovers his mission in the voice of people wherever he meets them, when they cry out to him, when they appeal to him or when they just put their misery before him. To take examples from just one Gospel: ‘Then he came to Bethsaida and some people brought him a blind man whom they begged him to touch’ (Mk 8:22). ‘And they brought him a deaf man who had an impediment of speech and they asked him to lay his hands on him’ (Mk 7:32). ‘In the storm on the lake… they woke him up and shouted, "Master, do you not care? We are going down’" (Mk 4:38). ‘Jairus pleaded: "My little daughter is desperately sick. Do come and lay your hands on her to make her better and save her life". Jesus went with him’ (Mk 5:21-24). In these voices of pleading people Jesus hears ‘the voice of God’, clarifying his mission then. In this way he really did become ‘the good shepherd’ and the ‘faithful servant’. If however, the ‘service’ of the bishop is time and again translated into terms of power and authority, then the Church will discover that the more authoritative it tries to be the less people will care. Humanae Vitae and its non-reception is one example. Another destructive example is the appointment of ‘restoration’ bishops in certain dioceses. Three of them in Holland, and they were enough to kill all the enthusiasm generated during Vatican II. Confusion, painful divisions, and public apathy was the result. Some Questions Raised by the Lineamenta There is still in the document, a very strong division between the secular/worldly vs the religious/spiritual. The clergy have to look after spiritual matters and the task of the laity is to take care of the ‘worldly affairs’. The Incarnation does not allow such a division. Jesus teaches that God is present, with all his power in the ordinary and secular events of life. Jesus is the ‘Emmanuel’, the God-with-us, both when we pray and when we eat rice. When Jesus feeds the hungry, do we call that secular? Or when he teaches people to pray, would that be spiritual? All spheres of life are geared to his kingdom and all are the concern of the whole Church. I get the impression that the authors of the Lineamenta did not study any modern exegesis or an up-to-date church history. I believe that the study of history is able to free us from many an ideological virus. History challenges us to face some serious questions. In what sense, e.g., can we say that Jesus founded a church? Did he have — and give us — a blueprint of the church with a hierarchy of pope, bishop, priest, deacon, with the proper division of clergy and laity, with the seven sacraments and jurisdiction and everything else in place? In what sense are the bishops the successors of the apostles and in what sense are they not? Is the pious ‘holy pedigree theory’ (Brown) historically maintainable? Infected by an ideological virus the Lineamenta does not hear the questions. The questions are not new and were already very much alive at the time of the Council. If I were allowed to give the curia some homework I would advise reading: Church History, by John Dwyer (No 1.24 & 1.25) Translated in Urdu; the article on ‘Church’ in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary; and Priest and Bishop, by Raymond Brown. Lineamenta No. 15 Today, however, the family is facing many threats, ranging from a consumer mentality to a widespread hedonism, and from a moral permissiveness to a harmful promotion of deviant forms of sexuality. The means of social communication often advocate behaviour which degrades the dignity of the person. Such conduct is opposed to the moral life set forth in the Gospel and taught by the Church. Added to this situation is the myth of a ‘demographic explosion’ and the fear of an over-population which would keep humanity from providing for vital needs. These occurrences and fears pave the way for the great evils of abortion and euthanasia, above all, because they are nourished by a widespread and oftentimes deceitful ‘culture of death’, against which Pope John Paul II has raised his voice in the Encyclical Evangelium vitae (25 March 1995). The Lineamenta speak about the ‘myth’ of a demographic explosion. Do the authors live on the planet Mars? Here on earth the ‘population explosion’ is a problem which worries thousands of thinking people. And the author just brushes the problem away by calling it a ‘myth’. Does the ideological bug also prevent him from seeing what is going on in the world? As homework he could profitably read The Tablet of 12 September 1998, p. 1172. Lineamenta Nos. 16 and 63 This situation poses an obvious difficulty for the episcopal ministry and causes notable concerns for many Bishops. Each Christian community has its enduring sources in the Sacrament of the Eucharist of which the priest is the minister. Priestly vocations, then, are a necessary pre-requisite for the growth of the Church and an unmistakable sign of its spiritual vitality. One of the more pre-eminent duties of the Bishops is to provide that the faithful of the particular Church have the possibility to approach the table of the Lord, above all on Sundays, the day on which the Church commemorates the Easter Mystery and the faithful, in a spirit of the joy and rest from work, give thanks to God by whose great mercy ‘we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’ (1 Pt: 3). Here mention is made of the scarcity of priests on account of which not all communities are able to take part adequately in the celebration of the Eucharist. I think a very wrong development is taking place. What is happening is that the Eucharist is sacrificed for a highly trained sophisticated, celibate, male priesthood. This would have been unintelligible in the early Church. Wherever there is a reasonable community that wishes to celebrate the Eucharist there is also always someone who is able to preside. The people have a right to the Eucharist as it is the centre of all Christian life. If the authorities, on account of some man-made legalistic fixation, are not able to provide ample ministers for the Eucharist, then the authorities are in the wrong. I am hesitant about the ‘lay presidency’ of the Eucharist, as already practiced in some dominations, but I would be inclined to prefer ‘lay presidency’ over ‘no Eucharist at all’. Besides, is it I wonder, historically maintainable that there were already priests in the early Church? Who presided over the Eucharist before there were priests on the scene? Church history may lead us to a more qualified attitude about the ‘president of the Eucharist’. Openness to this early history may be able to give us insight for a solution of the present eucharistic impasse. A very unhealthy way out of this impasse is that on account of the ‘scarcity of priests’ recourse is being taken to ‘communion services’. These services are a distortion of the Eucharist, solely geared to receiving the ‘consecrated host’. The Eucharist is far more than that. I hope for some new fiery tongues of the pentecostal Spirit to shake up the bishops, before people seize their right in their own way, or fall away from eucharistic starvation. Lineamenta No. 17 The challenge of the sects. It is clear that very few of these ‘new religious movements’ have anything in common with an authentic search for God. As a result, both in their teachings and methods they promote themselves as alternatives not only to the Catholic Church but also to other Churches and ecclesial communities. The widespread expansion of these new religious movements requires a pastoral response in works which have the person as their central principle, each person’s need to be part of a community and each person’s yearning for an authentic intimate relationship with God. The existence of these new religious movements suggest in each case the need to re-vitalize catechesis at all levels, using catechetical methods which take into account the people’s mentality and their manner of speaking, always making central the unfathomable riches of Christ, the one and only Saviour of Humanity. The sects certainly are a problem. But should we not search for the causes of this problem in our own bosom? Could it not be that, our highly organised, feudalistic and triumphalistic Church is experienced as a smokescreen though which the Servant of Yahweh from Nazareth is no more visible? Might it not be that people experience a certain closeness to Jesus in these smaller, more dynamic sects? Instead of experiencing these sects as evil, would it not be better to see them as challenges of the Spirit for our own renewal? Could it not be that also these sects, in many ways, are really from God? Would it not be good for us to be less negative and adopt the patience and wisdom of Gamaliel? (Acts 5:34-39) Lineamenta Nos. 75, 77 The great world religions. The Bishop has the duty in his particular Church in his teaching and pastoral work to help all the faithful to respect and esteem the values, the traditions and convictions of other believers, and also to promote a sound and appropriate religious formation for Christians, so that they might know how to bear witness with conviction to the great gift of the Christian faith. The Bishop also has to keep watch over the theological dimension of inter-religious dialogue, ensuring that in his particular Church the exchange be pursued in such a manner as never to be silent about, nor hesitate to affirm, the universality and the unique character of the Redemption accomplished by Christ, the one and only Saviour of the World and Revealer of the Mystery of God. Since the Church is the sacrament of salvation for the world, I am surprised that in describing the role of the bishops, the authors do not seriously reflect on the function of other great religions, who, willed by God, are, de facto, the ordinary means of salvation for the majority of mankind. Mapping interreligious dialogue will be the greatest challenge for the Church in the third millennium. Making this map will mean a new crossing of the Red Sea and venturing out again into the uncertainties of the desert. The only guideline we will have is that God loves all people as they are and wants to save all as they are. The only way we have is to follow, gropingly, the road of loving dialogue. This road will be long and arduous but also full of surprises. But as we trek along we may discover how God not only spoke his word at Creation and at the Incarnation, but that he goes on speaking his word till the end of history when the kingdom will be fully realised. Only then will God’s Word stop. In the meantime, let us cross over courageously and be humble enough to believe that God is leading us even though he has not provided us with hyper-qualified map makers for this totally New Exodus. The people leading us on this Exodus will not be the administrators of the old establishment, they will rather be the prophets and visionaries, creative architects of a New Heaven and a New Earth. It will be good to be on the lookout for these prophets. And when we find them, let us not kill them. Kenosis It may have been the need of the Church for super-centralisation around the beginning of the second millennium. This resulted in a strong monarchal form of government, complete with all powers of jurisdiction and law. All these things were expanded in various ways in the course of the second millennium, with many positive and negative results. My question is: Must we carry all our baggage, which we picked up in the second millennium, along into the third millennium? Do our present times not ask for an overhauling of the archaic structures and modes of functioning of the hierarchy? Are we faithful to the Gospel and the Church at its present stage in history if we do not seriously consider afresh the words: ‘They left everything they had and followed Jesus?’. It may take courage to read the signs of the times and accept Jesus’ invitation in a prophetic way. If the bishops are called to be ‘the shepherds and the servants’ they should not function in the ‘top-down’ way of the Lineamenta but in the down-to-earth way of the humble Jesus of Nazareth. Only in a kenotic service will Christ be recognised. I do hope and pray that the coming synod will be a synod of real renewal for the whole episcopate and the Church, in which the movement of Vatican II is taken up again and carried on. It will mean homework for all the bishops. If they do not pick up the challenge and remain stuck in the present Lineamenta then the coming synod will only contribute to the further irrelevance of the episcopate. And this would be a sad celebration at the beginning of the third millennium. I pray that the powerful Pentecostal Spirit will not let this happen, and that the whole Church may enter the third millennium full of hope.
|