Two churches: fixed menu or a la carte?

Last fall I wrote a speech for a college leadership conference on what it was like to be a layperson in the Catholic church for most of its history in this country. Perhaps I should have been prepared for the astonishment expressed at this reflection on the part of many of the audience. But it had not occurred to me that so many mature Catholics today do not know or remember a church in which the role of the laity was so minimal - to be a passive receiver of spiritual goods and services, on the one hand, and to support the good works of clergy and religious, on the other.

In a 1979 essay for the collection Why Catholic? compiled by John J. Delaney for Doubleday, I wrote, "The question is usually posed to me a bit differently. Why, I am asked, am I still a Catholic?" More and more often, I continued, the question is posed by women who shared many of my own concerns. And I concluded my answer by writing, "I suppose if I were to abandon Catholicism because the juridical and legal church puts me in a secondary place, I would have left long ago. I am, after all, a layperson and whatever I suffer in the church as a woman, I suffered first as a layperson."

The attitude toward the laity in the past was that the work of the laity was not the work of the church. The work of the church in the world was provided by clergy and religious. If laypersons were needed and employed in Catholic institutions, it was as what I can only call second-class citizens. For example, shortly before I joined the faculty of a Catholic college, lay teachers were excluded from faculty meetings - it was thought that there was no need for them to be there. This was quite usual at Catholic colleges in general.

Laypersons were also discouraged from launching any action in the name of the church. When, for example, in the 1940s my husband and I sought to reopen a closed Catholic high school with a corps of dedicated Catholic teachers (and with a priest as head of religious instruction!), we had the support of the local pastor, but the archbishop of the diocese decreed that while he was archbishop no school run by laypersons would be allowed. Rather no Catholic school than one managed by the laity! (Remembering this, we can smile as we think how dependent on lay teachers are Catholic schools at all levels today.)

Despite the prevailing attitude toward the laity, many were caught up in the great struggle for social justice which became the hallmark of the church in the '40s, '50s, and early '60s ending in Vatican II and its results. The great social encyclicals had been working as a leaven.

Ever since Leo XIII and his labor encyclicals, Catholic thinkers had been struggling with the problems of economic justice. These pioneers concerned themselves in theory with the criticism of capitalism and laissez-faire economics. In the United States this had had its practical effect in Catholic involvement in and support of the labor movement, and in the organization and professionalization of charity. It also included the beginning of an attack on racism.

And, willy nilly, Catholic lay persons launched actions in the name of the church, albeit without church sponsorship or imprimatur. Commonweal was one of the first journals founded and staffed by Catholic laymen. It already had a substantial circulation at the time other laypersons were still experiencing incidents like those recounted above. And Commonweal's welcome by clergy in positions of authority was far from general. In fact, it was banned on many Catholic campuses. The students in the seminary near the college where I taught used to take delight in smuggling it in. (Its appearance in the hip pocket of an actor in one of the annual skits caused uproarious laughter when he turned his back on the audience.) The welcome of the influential Catholic Worker, both paper and movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, was equally ambivalent. Dorothy, regarded as a saint today, was often persona non grata on Catholic campuses. One could cite one example after the other of lay initiative and clerical resistance.

Nevertheless, there has been a lay revolution. As former Commonweal editor Daniel Callahan wrote as long ago as 1966 (The New Church, Scribner's):

The revolution has been long in the making - both clergy and laity have contributed to bringing it about. From the clerical side, the innumerable exhortations of recent popes that the laity become more active in the service of the church, the work of important clerics on the theology of the laity, and the widespread desire of many bishops, pastors, and priests for lay assistance have been a major influence. From the lay side, the emergence of an educated class of laymen, the heeding of papal and episcopal words, and a general rebirth of Christian spirituality have all made a profound difference. Taken together, these developments are nothing less than revolutionary.

And yet as Callahan wrote then, "for the most part the revolution remains one of attitude, expectation, and aspiration - not one of profound change in the church itself....Given the present status of the laity in the church, it is exceedingly difficult to see how, in fact, lay inspirations can be realized....As things stand now, lay aspiration is for the most part in direct conflict with possibility." And yet he entertained a hope, however faint, that Vatican II would find a means of giving the laity a hearing on the hierarchical matters which concern them without sacrificing the necessary authority of the hierarchy and clergy. But this did not happen.

What did happen was the rise of an emboldened laity growing more visible as initiators, activists, leaders, and lay-ministers, and more vocal as teachers and theologians, while at the same time the magisterium became more rigid and less inclined to share authority, and paid laypersons little heed except where they were needed as workers in the parish vineyard. As a consequence we have the flourishing of the "cafeteria Catholic." The "cafeteria Catholic" picks and chooses among the teachings of the church. And he can make his disagreement felt. Ten years ago sociologist Andrew Greeley reported on the lay reaction to the stiffening of authority. There was no great defection of Catholics from the church but "the overwhelming majority of American Catholics reject some, but by no means all, of the church's sexual teachings." And American Catholics have registered their protest by a lowering of their financial contributions to the church (see, Greeley, "The Lay Reaction" in The Church in Anguish, Harper & Row, 1986). In Commonweal's September 13, 1996 laity issue, another former Commonweal editor, Peter Steinfels, analyzed a current report on the Catholic laity entitled Laity, American and Catholic. He pointed out that for the post-Vatican II laity "a certain kind of tightly structured church with precisely articulated doctrines, clearly differentiated roles, detailed codes of conduct, and sharply delineated boundaries, is passing into history." More and more Catholics believe that they alone should determine what is right or wrong - especially in matters of sexual morality - using church teaching simply as a helpful guide. The danger is that the laissez-faire attitude toward sexual teaching may be extending to social teaching. Opposition to capital punishment, for example, and a concern for and an obligation to help the poor are for the majority no longer considered essential to being a good Catholic.

Herein lies our present danger: two churches - one tightly structured with precise doctrines, the other largely laissez-faire - still existing as one and neither wholly faithful to the founder. Who will reunite them?