'Clericalism'.

It has been apparent in recent months (from articles and letters in the press), that there has been an increasing hostility and growing agitation by some groups to abolish the Catholic school system in Ontario, with the first order of priority being to swing public opinion in this direction. What I find most dismaying is the weak and disinterested response by the Catholic laity. For a Catholic population that boasts in the millions, this incredible ineptness and complacency in defending our Catholic schools I trace strictly to an ecclesiastical mindset prevalent in the parishes.

For decades there has been little initiative to engage the participation of the laity in the thought-life of the Church. In its place, a heavy burden has been placed on the Sunday sermon, which is simply not up to the task. As a result, our parishes are spiritually and intellectually sterile environments where the creatively rich potential of lay participation is denied outlet or simply never encouraged.

One would conclude from the viewpoint of Church politics that it is not safe to encourage the laity to think or initiate, to express passion or enthusiasm, to indulge in random experimentation with various forms of communication, whether through the arts or the spoken word, and thus provide a picture of the Catholic faith not through intellectual erudition but as a lifestyle, an ideal presented in concrete form easily comprehensible. Instead, while we have shown a vacuum of imagination in portraying Catholic life, our modern-day paganism extols and glorifies its lifestyles and values endlessly through multiple forms of the media.

Under this influence, a growing secularization of the laity has led to an increasing separation from the Church as a spiritual and cultural centre.

The appetite for power and control seems to be embedded in the priestly culture, so that in the parish, as a result of being set apart by his sacerdotal character, the pastor places himself at the top of the pyramid, in a power and control status where he assumes the role of the thinking shepherd, leading unthinking sheep who hold minor positions or none at all.

With this hierarchical notion of authority is little inclination to work in partnership with the laity, to humbly listen to or learn, to engage in dialogue, to take a back seat occasionally, to take the thoughts of others seriously and not simply ignore them. There seems to be a fear of thought-life in the parishes, as this could lead to clamouring voices, conflicting opinions and controversies that will disturb the sleep in those parishes.

As a result, interest in religious matters becomes the property and expression of a minority and its dissemination restricted to the monopoly of the class.

Thus, the clergy elite create a Church with a laity so immature and so poorly rooted in their faith that they have become vulnerable to every alien philosophy to which they are exposed.

Obviously, anarchy and chaos can result in misused freedom, but on the other extreme, we can have a destructive or misguided authoritarianism, which provides fertile ground for religious indifference.

In order to escape from this form of clericalism, we need to create alternative forms of organization, which are designed to place the layman into mature roles in the Church so that Catholic thought can overflow from the parishes into the secular channels of the media.

In a secular society, the day of the clergy as opinion leaders is severely restricted and the vacuum created can only be filled by an articulate and educated laity, who are not afraid to speak boldly on behalf of the enduring values of the Church.

The failure to recognize this and seriously to implement it in Church policies has led to a weakened Church and a silent Church owned and controlled by the clergy while the vast part of its membership, who are denied genuine participation, give it only token attention or none at all.

Editorial note:

Speaking of the specific subject of "schools," one should note the following:

The Ontario Catholic school system's legal owners are the trustees, laymen and women, not the bishops.

Clergy--bishops and priests --have no automatic right to enter schools and no right at all to prescribe what to teach. In addition to the trustees, the real power of the schools lies with the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA). It has 30,000 members, from among whom priests and nuns have long since disappeared.

In the late sixties, a still-small OECTA began to change its membership from clergy to laity.

Also in the sixties, Religious Education--still in the hands of the clergy, but now a post-Vatican II clergy--abandoned the old Catechism and memorization, replacing it with the new catechetics dubbed by some as "The Creedless Catechetics," called the Canadian Catechism (See Lorene Collins, Salvation Redefined: Catholic Parents and Religious Education in Post-Vatican II Canada, Toronto, Catholic Insight, 2003, p. 188).

After the rejection of the encyclical Humanae vitae (1968), dissent from Catholic moral teaching became widespread.

With full funding in 1985, the number of schools and teachers exploded, including the hiring of teachers who dissented from Catholic teaching or who were in irregular marital situations.

By then, OECTA had adopted a "union" stance, i.e. a strict labour union approach, interested in material benefits and grievances only. Not unlike the other unions, it was not beyond pushing a feminist, anti-Catholic ideology, including hostility towards outsiders (in this case, bishops and clergy).

In addition, OECTA radicals, under the influence of dissenters from Catholic doctrine, were promoting their own inside ideology and adopting secular positions, such as joining with other unions that were openly pro-abortion.

The organization set up by the Ontario bishops to help guide Catholic education, the Institute of Catholic Education (I.C.E), is a semi-secret, Potemkin village-like, front-store window without much inspiration, conviction, skill or educational clout behind it. It is so fearful of offending the existing power (OECTA) that at the last province-wide so-called "consultation" with parents, the meetings were completely choreographed beforehand. In Toronto, even the floor microphones were turned off so as to prevent anyone from asking an embarrassing question (such as: why are Catholic school boards permitting the promotion of the homosexual lifestyle?)

Conclusion: So, is it clericalism we are suffering from or is it laicism? Or should we all give it some more thought?

From C. Plaza

Etobicoke, ON