Does the papacy have a future?

by Jean Francois Nothomb

Gary MacEoin's book (The Papacy and the People of God, New York: Orbis, 1998, $12.95 [paper]) is a major resource for anyone thinking seriously about the possibilities of the papacy in the next millennium. Before discussing the book, however, I want to stress the importance of John Paul II's encyclical Ut Unum Sint (May 25, 1995). In the present climate of relations between the Christian churches, it is difficult to emphasize adequately the pope's courage in daring for the first time to place in doubt the dogma of 1870, "not its substance, but in its application" (no. 95). In no. 96 he appeals to the church leaders of our separated brothers to aid him in this delicate task, an appeal which in general was very favorably received. Can John Paul II doubt that, in offering this encyclical, he has begun a process whose result he cannot foresee with certitude? The Papacy and the People of God may help us anticipate its consequences.

The book contains eleven essays by informed observers from several continents. Three deserve special attention because their subject matter goes beyond purely ecclesiastical themes: Joan Chittister's "Women in the Church," Pablo Richard's "The South Will Judge the North: The Church Between Globalization and Inculturation," and Francis X. Murphy's "Jubilee 2000 and the Quality of Life."

Chittister states an elementary truth: "The scientific revolution, once the very bastion of the male control of nature, has in our lifetime put the lie to male autonomy . . ., to the notion that the world was made for disposal of man. . . . Males were made in the image of God. Women made in the image of man. Women were 'natural' by virtue of a physiology designed for birthing rather than thinking" (6, 7). As a commentary, let me cite Maria Teresa Porcile Santiso, a young Uruguayan liberation theologian, who points out that

society will be fully human only when the two fundamental "modalities" of being human, male and female, contribute their specific qualities. Today, as for centuries, we are acting out a caricature of God's creation by tacitly accepting that "man" means "male." That is why it is indispensable. It is equally necessary for men to discover their own profound identity, which is still unknown to them because during all these centuries of patriarchal culture they have believed that "human" meant accepting the masculine as norm. The challenge of such a change poses itself in terms of creativity and creation; its protagonists are man and woman, united and distinct, in complete participation and otherness. (La mujer, espacio de salvacion [Montevideo, Ediciones Trilce), 144)

For the Church there is much research to be done in this domain. The moving meditation of John Paul II, Mulierem Dignitatis, marked a point of no return. With the exception of paragraph 27, where, in the name of the Christ-Church (man-woman) symbolism, it categorically rejects the possibility of priesthood for women, this letter makes a clean sweep of all the ready-made cliches which Roman Catholic and Orthodox hierarchs have been repeating for generations and proves that the evolution of the role of women in modern public life has brought about changes in the church's mentality.

As Joan Chittister puts it: "The next papacy will be required to demonstrate a clear appearance of the equality of women or the credibility of the church in a world awakening to equality will be severely, if not mortally, compromised. . . . Women must be included in that same theological debate with that same sincerity or the work of the church is only half finished" (10, 11). "We need a Pentecost papacy in the next millennium," she concludes, "that can hear the many voices of women - each speaking in her own tongue - and understand them" (14).

I found Pablo Richard's essay (131-143) especially moving because it reminded me of what I had learned during the eight years I spent with my yecuanas and yonomamis friends in Venezuela. Citing John Paul II's 1984 homily at Namao, Canada - "In the light of the words of Christ, this poor South will judge the opulent North" - he presents the paradigmatic colonial scorn and disdain of whites for the "savage": Man, Adult, Human, Soul, Reason (Spaniards) over Woman, Child, Animal, Body, Appetite (indigenous people). Why, for example, was Bartolome de Las Casas not canonized by John Paul II in 1992, as many Latin American bishops had requested? Las Casas, after all, was the father of liberation theology and an advocate for human rights. Richard states emphatically: "The church has to choose between inculturation and globalization. The church is universal and catholic if it chooses inculturation. The universality of the church can only be established in defense of the life, spirit, and culture of the peoples who are oppressed and excluded by Western globalization. . . . Globalization is ecclesial, Eurocentric, patriarchal, authoritarian and hostile to the body" (134). He echoes many of Chittister's themes: "The intellectual training, the obligatory celibacy, and the exclusion of women all follow the same logic, which is also the logic that excludes the indigenous, people of African descent, and the poor in general. The Third World church, which opts not for power but for the poor, enjoys, in this world, an overwhelming power that is specific to it: the power of the Spirit, of the Word, and of Theology" (138).

It is from this vision of a church that shares the lot of the despised of our world - especially those of Asia and the South - that the sufferings of the poor, united to those of Jesus on the cross, became a forceful dynamic for change. These churches of the Third World will be the cornerstone of a new way of living Christianity "in which the participation of all women and men - especially the outcasts of society - is possible and basic" (135).

The paper by Francis X. Murphy, C.S.S.R., "Jubilee 2000 and the Quality of Life" (90-101), touches on the cultural problem the churches - and all of us - have to confront. "New values had begun to emerge, such as the supremacy of human reason and the sacredness of human freedom. Amid the fierce political tensions of the age, people were beginning to suspect that God was yielding his place to man as the center of gravity. Instinctively, the church began to feel that the long-overlooked laity were the key to the situation. . ." (95). Murphy emphasizes the influence of The Divine Milieu of Teilhard de Chardin and its importance for the council of John XXIII.

Like Chittister and Richard, he makes clear that the church has to rediscover the language of ordinary people, in order to understand them, and in order to be understood when she speaks.

All the authors who collaborated in The Papacy and the People of God echo, in one way or another, the criticisms Archbishop John R. Quinn put forth in his well-known conference at Oxford in 1996. The late Bernard Haring, for example, speaks of the letdown after the hopes aroused by the election of John Paul II in 1978: "The past two decades...have disillusioned me" (16). John Wilkins shows that there cannot be a true reform of the church without a reform of the papacy. Such a reform has not occurred. After the parenthesis of Vatican II, the absolute monarchy already in place before the council of Trent restored world Catholicism, at least in governance, to a monolithic bloc more solid than in the time of Pius XII. Paul Collins remarks that "John Paul II has achieved a centralization of papal power unmatched in history" (22). Wilkins observes that "John Paul II towers over the church" (123).

What a contradiction there is between the open-minded perspectives toward those outside the church expressed in Ut Unum Sint and the tightening of discipline within the church! The episcopal collegiality rediscovered by Vatican II has remained ineffective. The pope is, indeed, a man apart. The personality cult which surrounds the sovereign Pontiff, not just in Rome but in the whole Catholic world, is expressed in the second great prayer of Good Friday which is for the pope alone. There is no way to convince the ordinary Catholic faithful and the other Christian confessions that the church is above all the people of God, as Vatican II defined it. This solitude of the pope even appears in Ut Unum Sint (n. 95): "I am convinced that I have a special responsibility in this regard, above all when I hear the request which is addressed to me . . . ." A pope convinced of the necessity of episcopal collegiality would never speak like that. Giancarlo Zizola calls attention to this "inhumane" solitude: "It is necessary to reduce the physical and psychic overload to which the pope is subjected. . . so as not to exceed the limits of fatigue a human being can tolerate" (53, citing Cardinal Koenig of Vienna). If we rightly admire the ecumenical openness of the pope, we also have the right to ask why this openness does not extend first of all to the episcopal college and to those of the Catholic laity who have affirmed that "we are the church" and have expressed themselves on a national level in "appeals of the people of God." The adult laity should have their word to say in questions which are of vital interest to them.

The fact remains that John Paul II is the author of Ut Unum Sint, a remarkable document which seems to me to be the culmination of the work of the World Council of Churches which has been spearheading the search for Christian unity for the last half-century. What I have never understood is why the Catholic Church is still not a full member of the World Council, especially after the recent "Copernican revolution" in ecumenism. We have gone from a "catholicocentric" perspective to a "christocentic" perspective; today each of the Christian confessions gives to the others all that is positive in its special charisma, as suggested in 1 Cor. 12:1-30. As John Paul II said, "The gifts of each should develop for the unity and advantage of all" (Beyond the Threshold of Hope, c. 23). Christian unity should be rebuilt, starting from the mutual schism of 1054 and the sixteenth-century rupture of Latin Christianity. Let's finish once and for all with this idea of a "return" to the one true church which possesses the truth!

Essential to this search for unity is the role of the petrine ministry of communion and service, which includes infallibility and circumscribes the different primacies. The dogma of infallibility, as it was defined by Vatican I, is the stumbling block between the Catholic Church and the other Christian churches and should have been treated more extensively in The Papacy and the People of God. Had the Eastern churches participated in the councils that we Latins qualify as "ecumenical," and which took place after the rupture of the undivided church, the definition of infallibility would obviously have been quite different. For non-Catholic Christians these "ecumenical" councils are only local councils - important, to be sure, but "western" and not binding as far as they are concerned. On this point I think it is significant that Paul VI, on the occasion of the seventh centennial of the council of Lyon, very deliberately referred to it as the "second general council of Lyon" and then, more explicitly still, as the "sixth of the general synods held in the West" (letter addressed to Cardinal Willebrands in 1974 and read publicly in the cathedral of Lyon that year). Paul VI opened up a road which should be followed. As Msgr. Elias Zoghby, retired bishop of Baalbeck, Lebanon has said: "Infallibility depends on ecumenicity" (Il Regno-Attualita, 14/96, col. 422).

MacEoin and his collaborators should have treated the Great Schism of 1054 with the same attention it gave to the councils which were held after the rupture. Did Rome or Constantinople have the authority to declare the other party schismatic? It seems evident that neither party had such authority, nor did either party have authority to convoke an ecumenical council and thus "define a truth of the faith," as did Vatican I. While the East accepted this situation, the West did not; witness the three "dogmas" of 1854, 1870, and 1950.

It is thus necessary that the Catholic Church muster the courage to review a so-called "dogmatic," irrevocable decision defined "ex cathedra" by only one of the parties concerned. Olivier Clement, the French Orthodox theologian, is optimistic: "At the horizon of the year 2000 - or a bit later - there will be a truly ecumenical council (where the Protestants will also be present, since Rome and its Reform cannot be separated) which will be able to examine, in the light of Apostolic Tradition and the Communion of the Saints, what each has defined separately. We shall then understand that the aged bishop of Rome desirous, in his very weakness, to bring his pontificate to a fulfillment in a different manner has, by his appeal to unity, truly become servus servitorum Dei" (Contacts, no. 170, p. 158).

At this point it may be asked whether the Western church is not caught in a vicious circle by defining the dogma of infallibility in such a way that the Latin church alone justifies it. By qualifying realities which are not explicitly revealed as "irreformable," it closes the door to any type of evolution, whether historical or cultural. We have already had, in 1896, the case of Anglican orders judged invalid by the Bull Apostolicae Curae, of Leo XIII; numerous Catholic theologians have requested that the subject be reconsidered, but they have been impeded from proceeding further by this "forever" attached to a question which is not part of revealed doctrine.

The 1994 Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, on the ordination of women, declared that this teaching belonged to the deposit of faith but was not a dogmatic definition. Archbishop Weakland commented: "The church has two options: a first is to slam the door on all discussion about the ordination of women and accept the consequences which ensue. The other is to leave the door open to discussion and to continue a very important dialogue, painful as it might be, between the tradition of the church and the currents of modern society." Olivier Clement, for his part, wrote: "I doubt that this letter, pathetic in its desire to impose a definitive position, will interrupt the reflection under way within the Christian world, the Catholic Church included. The risk for the Catholic Church, perhaps, will be to divide itself into a militant minority which will consider every declaration of the pope as quasi-infallible and a rather uncertain majority which will envisage its adhesion to the church in a different manner - or no longer envisage it at all. It seems to me that neither of these attitudes corresponds to the authentic Tradition, which is life in the spirit in the Body of Christ and always marked by the search for communion" (La Croix, Paris, 6/1/94).

This decision is an example of the harshness of the Apostolic See - actually, of the Roman Curia - negating the breakthrough of John Paul II in Ut Unum Sint. Unfortunately, we need to point out three other cases where there is the same negation of views proposed in that document. First, there is the recent Instruction on the Role of the Laity in the Pastoral Mission (Aug. 15, 1997), which caused a genuine stupefaction and led to protests by many bishops whose dioceses are acutely in need of priests. Cardinal Koenig is quoted as stating: "The bureaucratic apparatus of the Vatican has developed its own life to such a level as to take on (de facto, not de jure) functions which are proper to collegiality" (53). It is no surprise that the tone of this Curia document is extremely juridical; the closer John Paul's pontificate comes to its conclusion, the bolder it becomes. When John Paul II is away from Rome, he is relaxed and content - for example, during his recent visit to Cuba, where the freshness of his message astonished everyone. At Rome, however, he returns to the control of the ultra-conservative Curia. Fr. Bernard Sesboue, S.J., points out the paradox of a pontificate inspired, from its very first day, by the leitmotif, "be not afraid," generating a document like this in which fear is the dominating theme: fear that there be confusion between the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood, for example. "Eight Roman congregations cooperated in producing this text, which is a slap at episcopal collegiality in so far as it is addressed to the bishops as though they were under suspicion of not carrying out their episcopal obligations" (Il Regno-Attualita, 2/98, col. 13).

This intolerable situation cannot continue, and it is the pope - or a council - that should put an end to it. As things stand, the 4,600 functionaries of the Roman Curia (cf. Zizola, 52) form a totally masculine power, without any other preoccupations or responsibilities, so that they can devote themselves full time to playing a quasi-papal role! People of God makes this point. As Paul Collins writes: "There is a sense in which the papacy of John Paul II is the natural result of all that was decided in 1870"; it is what Alain Woodrow calls creeping infallibility (78).

The excommunication - and its revocation a year later - of the Sri Lankan theologian, Fr. Tissa Balasuriya, is another example of this tendency. How could Rome, which is always calling for the inculturation of the church's theology and liturgy, cut the feet out from under the research undertaken by one of its most courageous theologians? Nevertheless, the revocation of the sentence is a positive sign which proves that the vehement protests of bishops and other personalities can finally have some impact. The church in Asia, in Africa - even in Latin America - is far from being in communion with the deep-rooted local cultures of these continents. As an example of this I recommend the last novel of the Japanese author Shusaku Endo, Deep River.

A text prepared by the Japanese bishops before the Asian synod illustrates this problem: "In order to give a new visage to the relations between the Holy See and the churches which are in Asia, it is necessary to consider a new system of relations no longer based on 'centralization' but on 'collegiality.' We ask that Rome recognize a just autonomy for the local churches. It is strange, for example, that the Holy See has to approve a Japanese translation of liturgical and catechetical texts which the bishops' conference has already approved. For the evangelization of our peoples, for the encouragement of inculturation, for the construction of an authentic collegiality among the churches of Asia, there must be confidence in the local churches and their independence must be respected in everything which concerns administration and all other matters" (Adista, 20/98, 5).

The removal of Jacques Gaillot from his episcopal see of Evreux (France) in 1995 was another instance of this indifference to collegiality. The French Episcopal Conference could and should have resisted the pressures of the Roman Curia. Earlier (1983), the Vatican had forced the resignation of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Luanda (Zambia), because he had acquired too much influence through his exorcisms (cf. Matt. 10:1 and 10:8) and was threatening the authority of the President of the Republic, M. Kaunda. More recently, the Vatican wanted to force the retirement of Dom Samuel Ruiz, the bishop of San Cristobal de Las Casas, in Mexico - the responsibility of the nuncio in this case is enormous. He was "saved" because he was the only mediator acceptable to the Zapatist Front of National Liberation. The Holy See, however, named a coadjutor bishop with full powers alongside Bishop Ruiz. This backfired, however, when the coadjutor quickly became "converted" to the struggle of the poor peasants of Chiapas - something like what happened to Archbishop Romero.

Episcopal collegiality is a wonderful ideal, but what is it in reality? "Above all, the popes (Paul VI and John Paul II) finally refused to give the synod of bishops any real decisional power, such as, for example, the election of the pope, preferring what they called "affective" collegiality to an authentic episcopal force that might threaten papal prerogatives...." (Alain Woodrow, 82).

Reflection on The Papacy and the People of God only supports the statement of Paolo Ricca, pastor of the Vaudian church in Italy: "John Paul II should be aware that the papacy, such as it is understood now, has no realistic chance. If it is to have a chance it must change. But only a pope can change the papacy. By writing Ut Unum Sint John Paul II has begun the process. . . ." (Irenikon, 97/1, 31).

JEAN FRANCOIS NOTHOMB, who worked for many years with the Indians in the Amazon as a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, lives in Rome, where he is an editor for the International Maritain Institute.