How We Can Reclaim Our Church

By Robert Blair Kaiser

From a talk presented to Call To Action Western Washington, May 4 and 5, 2007

You are all aware that our Church is in trouble, and, because of our current troubles, many Catholics, young and old, are leaving the Church. According to the nation’s demographers, Catholics make up the largest religious denomination in the U.S. The second largest denomination? Former Catholics.

Garry Wills made the case in his book Papal Sins that the Church is a corrupt institution, led by an elite that cares more about saving themselves than serving the people of God. No wonder that people are leaving this Church, most particularly young people, even more particularly young women, once they realize they’ve been relegated to third-class citizenship. In official Church circles, women are not only members of the laity, but defective members of the laity as well -- because they do not have penises and cannot, therefore, “image Christ.” Whatever that means.

Wills published his book in June of the year 2000. Since then, things have gotten worse. In January 2002, the sex scandals began to make their way to Page One of the New York Times. Because of all the press attention, you know a great deal about the sex-scandals, about the sorry priests who have been having their way with little boys and girls for decades.

Maybe you do not yet know about the financial scandals that promise to eclipse the sex scandals. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an archbishop can try to hush up his blackmailing gay lover by writing him a check for $450,000. A monsignor in Florida comes home to Del Rey Beach, Florida, from a long vacation in Ireland to face charges that, over a period of twenty years, he has raided his parish to the tune of more than seven million dollars. In Montecito, California, a parish’s financial committee discovers its pastor has stolen more than a million dollars. When they tell their bishop, he fires the finance committee.

One more sign of trouble: our bishops, who have covered up and continue to cover up for the sex scandals and for the financial scandals. Our bishops do not understand the concept of accountability, not to the people they are vowed to serve.

Interestingly enough, this very lack of accountability in our Church offers us a way to correct our course. I am here tonight to argue that those who are upset by this corrupt, crumbling Church in America do not have to leave it. I will show how we can create our own people’s Church in the U.S. – and still be good Catholics. How? Not by changing what we believe, but by demanding changes in the way we govern ourselves.

The Church was not always governed the way it is today, by an absolute ruler ruling absolutely, elected in a secret ballot by 115 superannuated cardinals at a papal conclave. For the first six centuries, the people of Rome elected their bishops – eventually called “popes.” We didn’t have a Catholic Moses who brought down the granite tablets of Canon Law from Mount Sinai. Men invented canon law in the 12^th and 13^th century. Men (and I hope women) can reinvent other forms of governance that are more suited to our time and our place.

I haven’t conceived this plan all by myself. I have been mentored by a host of Catholic historians and theologians (mostly in Rome) who fear to say in public what they confidently prescribe in private: that an American Catholic Church can correct the kind of absolute power exercised absolutely by Churchmen who do not understand the thoroughly American concept of accountability. In the Italian language, there is no word for “accountability.” Please ponder the meaning of that. It is one reason why the men in Rome (no women) continue to try to run the Church from the top down, even though they are living in a bottom up kind of world.

I will ask the question here tonight: must Roman Catholics in the United States live forever in this kind of monolithic Church? In my current book, A Church in Search of Itself, I tell about my dawning realization that the Church is not a monolith. After two trips around the world, looking in on local churches in five continents, I found a Church that is united in one faith, but one that takes on very very different shapes in various countries – and theoretically at least the pope’s bureaucrats ought to applaud that situation. I like to say that, since and because of the Council, the Church is more catholic, less Roman. And, if we can believe Jesus’s words to the Apostles about authority, the Church was never intended to be a monolith. Much less a monarchy – which is an accident of history.

I do not think monarchy is what Jesus had in mind when he told the Apostles he was giving them a new kind of authority, an authority of service, not domination. In the 22d chapter of Luke (and in other places in the Synoptic Gospels), Jesus said “Let those who would be the greatest, let them think of themselves as the least.” Of course, the Apostles didn’t get it right away. They kept arguing, as we recall, about who would be “the first.” But if we unpack Jesus’s words, we can conclude that his Church had to be a listening, serving Church, a Church in which his shepherd bishops would be in constant conversation with their people, so they could better serve them. Jesus, who was probably a close observer of shepherds and their sheep on the grassy hills of his native Galilee, highlighted the kind of communication that ought to prevail between a bishop and his people. His Good Shepherd would say, “I know mine, and mine know me.”

How many people in this room know their bishop? How many bishops in any city in America know their people? My own bishop in Phoenix, Arizona, shies away from his people-people and from his priest-people, too. On Wednesday morning, I attended a fund-raising breakfast in Phoenix for Catholic Charities. Some 700 of the Catholic movers and shakers in Phoenix were there. The bishop was a no-show. I know a monsignor who was sent in recently to take over a troubled parish in a Phoenix suburb. For six months, he couldn’t get his bishop on the phone. Nor did his bishop phone him. “I know mine and mine know me?” Apparently not in Phoenix. Nor in many American cities where it is far easier to get a hearing with the mayor.

In Baltimore last fall, the American bishops met in solemn assembly and crafted statements that further demonstrated how deaf they are to the things that concern most Catholics. They talked about birth control and about gay marriage, and suggested that those who practice birth control (by their estimate some ninety-six percent of American Catholic couples) and those who have “a homosexual inclination” shouldn’t go to Communion. Were they throwing a red herring in our path, hoping, out of fear, that, perhaps by threatening us, we won’t notice what they’ve done, and what they continue to do, to our Church?

Well, I am here tonight to report that we have noticed. And that there are gathering voices in the United States that are asking why we cannot have an American Church – an accountable, listening Church in America. They are suggesting that our American Church isn’t American enough. It is too Roman and not enough catholic, and by that word “catholic,” I mean universal. The Church isn’t a monolith. It is different in different parts of the world. It always has been, and I think it always will be, as long as we emphasize our unity in faith -- along with our cultural diversity.

I started learning about the Church’s diversity when Time magazine sent me to cover Vatican II in the fall of 1962. During the first session of the Council, I stood out in St. Peter’s Square shortly after noon every day with my fellow members of the Vatican Press Corps waiting for some 2,200 Council Fathers to emerge from their morning session so we could talk to our favorite sources, the bishops and the theologians who were inside the Council while we waiting outside. We watched this literal United Nations of the Church pour down the steps of St. Peter’s, looking like a kind of purple waterfall. And oh how different they were! Black faces and brown faces and yellow faces and bearded faces and ruddy Irish faces. For the first time, we had vivid evidence of the Church universality, that is its catholicity.

We saw more evidence of the Church’s different way of being in the Council’s liturgies that started the proceedings every day. Not only the Roman Mass in Latin, but Masses celebrated in turn according to the Melkite rite, and the Byzantine rite, and the Coptic rite. These rites represented a little known part of the Church (to us Westerners at least), the 20 other ancient and modern autochthonous Churches, some of them like the Chaldeans more ancient even than the Roman rite Catholics, mainly from the Middle East, with their own governance, their own patriarchs, their own liturgies in their own languages, their own clergy, some un married, some married. But all of them bona fide Catholics,

The Council itself repudiated the view of Pope Leo XIII, who condemned something he called Americanism in 1899 – the very idea, he said, that American Catholics thought they could introduce democracy into Church structures in the U.S. and try to be different from the Church he knew in Rome! Leo’s letter (he called it A Testimony of His Benevolence) threw the American hierarchy into a catatonic state; the bishops pulled back into a craven deference to Rome, allowing Rome to exert a growing centralism and (I should add) a conformity that was quite out of keeping with the freedom from Church domination that Christ preached during his public life.

Tom Doyle said it quite well at the recent national convention in Milwaukee of the organization Call to Action. The chief villains in the Gospel story were the ancient equivalent of the Church’s cardinals today, the scribes and the Pharisees who lorded it over the people and strangled them with a net of inhuman rules and regulations that purportedly came “from God.” Jesus didn’t like that. In fact, Doyle said, “The only time Jesus ever got mad was when he went to church.”

At Vatican II, the Council Fathers wrote a charter for a new kind of people's Church trying to turn the old pyramidal structure on its head. In the project called De Ecclesia (the one that ended up as one of the Council’s chief documents, Lumen Gentium) they re-defined the Church as the people of God. The pope and the bishops who occupied a prominent place in Chapter One were taken out of Chapter One and put in Chapter Three, and given a new mandate: not to dominate, but to serve the people of God. In a series of other documents, they emphasized and re-emphasized the fact that this ought to be a Church of the people. Time prevents me from going into every one of these documents, but just to mention one: the Council’s decision to give the Mass back to the people, by taking it out of the language of the elite and put it in the vernacular. The Fathers debated that for a month. The Vatican Press Office told us about an apparently equal division of opinion on each side of the issue. Imagine our surprise when the Fathers voted for Mass in the vernacular by a count of roughly 2,000 to 200! Wow! By voting for Mass in the varied languages of the whole planet, they were making the Church less Roman, more catholic.

The Fathers planted the seeds of further creative change when they worked out the rationale for an encultured Church, revising 400 years of Roman imperialism by righting Church history and re-writing its theology. They recalled the 15th century, when European missionaries began to arrive in Africa and Asia, and imposed their culture and their language on the so-called God-less savages. Backed by colonial soldiers, and relying on colonial law, they taught colonial devotions and a colonial theology in colonial churches styled on the architecture of Lisbon and Paris and Rome. Enough of that, said those writing the charter for Vatican II. Christ had to have African face in Africa and an Asian face in Asia. Jesus shouldn't need a passport anywhere.

Since Vatican II, authorities in Rome have cautiously endorsed enculturation, most notably in the Congo. There, the native Congolese clergy and its people have fashioned a native Congolese liturgy, with drums and dancing and Mass in any of a number of Congolese dialects. American Catholics can understand why Africans need a Church that accords with the way Africans think and feel. But few Americans have thought about building a Church in the United States in keeping with the way most American think and feel.

Some Americans tried to do that at the beginning of American history. The first American bishop, John Carroll, was elected by a popular vote of the nation's priests in 1789. And in the 1820s, the Bishop of Savannah, Georgia, John England, wrote a constitution for his diocese that gave his people a voice and a vote. After that, unfortunately, Rome insisted on the right to name this country's bishops, often foreigners chosen for their loyalty to Rome, not their willingness to serve the people, American style, and those bishops set a pattern for the American Church that has persisted to this very day. Many bishops act like they work for the pope, and many priests act like they work for the bishops, and the people-people are left to pray, pay, and shut up.

What can we do? Some say nothing, given Rome's 200-year-old chokehold on America, and the habitual, almost automatic suspicion in the Vatican itself toward any kind of change. Some say we can revolt, following the example of America's Founding Fathers. But we say it's not necessary to go into formal or practical schism. We just have to persuade the bishops (never underestimate the power of public opinion) to enculturate the Gospel in the United States, creating a modern autochthonous American Church, on the model of the Maronites, the Melchites, the Byzantines, the Copts and sixteen other autochthonous churches in the Middle East.

“Autochthonous” is a fifteen-dollar Greek word to express a concept that is easier to understand than it sounds. Autochthonous doesn’t mean “autonomous.” It means home-grown, home-spun, home-made. It means “real.”

Could the U.S. Church become a modern, autochthonous Church? It is not unthinkable. In 1925, the pioneering Belgian Cardinal Mercier proposed that the Anglican Communion be brought back into union with Rome as an autochthonous Church – with its own married clergy and its own English liturgy. Mercier was ahead of his time. Now, a little more than 70 years later, however, there is more talk about autochthony. The Indonesian bishops called for an autochthonous Church in Indonesia at the 1998 Asian Synod in Rome, on the stated grounds that Rome had “neither the knowledge nor the competence” to make pastoral decisions in Indonesia. In 2001, at another synod in Rome, the Indonesian bishops called for a new ecumenical council, one that would launch the radical decentralization implied in the concept of autochthony. “Only then,” they said, “can we be free to proclaim the gospel.”

Soon after Vatican II, a theologian named Joseph Ratzinger suggested that the future of the Church, particularly in mission lands might lie in autochthony. Pope John Paul II once said he, too, would consider approving new autochthonous Churches in mission lands. He may have been thinking of China, where he so dearly wanted to get recognition for the Catholic Church that he was ready to pay Beijing's price — the right to nominate new bishops. If Benedict XVI does that, he would give the Church in China a measure of autochthony.

He might also approve autochthony in the United States if he realized this was a way (maybe the only way) to make the American Church credible once more and, by the way, reverse the extraordinary outflow of young people, particularly young women, from a Church that finds itself stuck, for example, in a theory of ministry that bars half its members from serving as priests at a time when priests are in terribly short supply.

I dare to say, however, that we do not have to wait for Vatican approval to go into autochthony. In my opinion, the Indonesian bishops made a fatal mistake in asking permission to create an autochthonous Church. As the Nike commercial suggests, they should have “just done it.” Would Rome have declared the Church in Indonesia in schism simply because it needed to create an Indonesian Catholic Church in Indonesia? The Indonesian archipelago -- one of the biggest countries in the world? I doubt it. Sometimes, as I learned when I a novice in the Society of Jesus, it is better to ask forgiveness than permission.

So how do we create an American Catholic Church? Canon law endorses a time-honored way for Catholics to re-structure their governance in every nation. It is called a regional, or national synod. The American Church had three of them in the 1800s, the First, Second, and Third Councils of Baltimore, where rules were set for American Catholics by the delegates, all bishops, no laymen. Updated canon law now says, however, that a national synod can include non-bishops -- up to fifty percent of the delegates. If those delegates were elected by Catholics in every state and claimed active voice, the synod might take on the character of a constitutional convention, and delegates could end up writing a charter for a people's Church. Delegates would surely wrangle over the charter's specifics, as the Founding Fathers of this country did in 1787, in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It took them three whole hot months to write the U.S. Constitution. And even then it wasn’t perfect. They had to come back and write ten amendments, what we now call The Bill of Rights. And even then they didn’t get everything right. The Founding Fathers didn’t deal fairly with the slavery question, and that issue brought on a racist fever in this nation that we still haven’t thrown off.

But if delegates to a Fourth Council of Baltimore want to lead a Church of and for the people, they might well follow an American constitutional model, with an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. They might call for the popular election of two parliamentary bodies -- a Senate of Bishops and a House of Commons, an elected president (or executive board), and a judiciary appointed with the advice and consent of both houses.

Radical? Yes, radical comes from the Latin word radix, root. Such a change in the way we govern ourselves (not a change in what we believe) goes to the root of our problems. Revolutionary? Yes, that too. We're Americans, proud that our country began with a revolution. But what would prompt the bishops (and the pope) to open the gates to such a radical revolution in the American Church? We would. We the people would do it – if and when we reach a tipping point, a critical mass of public opinion. If it is massive enough, public opinion can topple governments overnight.

And it doesn't even have to be that massive. Experts in group dynamics say as little as five percent of the people are enough to create the kind of public pressure that moves even the most dictatorial governments. Did the whole population of Manila (some eight million people) march against President Ferdinand Marcos and force him to flee the Philippines in 1983? No. Just five percent of them: some 400,000, marched down the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a main highway in Metro Manila, while Marcos' military stood aside without firing a single shot.

We make the modest assertion here that Catholics in the United States have the power to start a radical revolution in the American Church. What we need most is the realization that we are not alone. Before the revolution begins, we need to know who we are, how many we are, and where we want to go. This is why you should visit a website called www.takebackourchurch.org and sign on to the revolution. If taking back our Church is a good idea – if, that is, it is inspired by the Holy Spirit, she will let us know. If it is not a good idea, it will fall of its own weight. But we have to do our part. In this context, I like to quote Pope John Paul II. In 1978, he traveled to Warsaw, Poland, and told millions of Poles, “You can take back your country if you demand it.” We’re saying the same thing. “We can take back our Church if we demand it.” It is time we seized ownership and citizenship in our Church with a voice and a vote.

Those words may frighten some American Catholics. If so, good. It is time in our crumbling Church to become seriously frightened, and the feeling should stir us to act as our Founding Fathers did when they wrote a Declaration of Independence, and resolved to fight for it with musket and ball. But we're not talking about a violent revolution. We won't even write a Declaration of Independence. We will write a Declaration of Autochthony, one that will challenge our priest-people and our people-people to work out a constitution for the American Church that carefully puts aside the Rome-based secretive, half-vast, culturally-conditioned, legalisms codified in canon law in return for the kind of servant Church envisioned at Vatican II.

If you'd like ownership and citizenship in your Church, please go to takebackourchurch.org – and sign in. We want a million people or more to support the cause. We are not calling for a schism nor are we challenging the faith we hold and the beliefs we express at Mass in the Nicene Creed. We are not even advocating the overthrow of our bishops. We’d like to love our bishops, because their very presence tells us we are part of a tradition that goes all the way back to the men who first followed Jesus, the Apostles. We just want them to be what Jesus wanted them to be: servant bishops, not lord bishops, in a world that needs the saving message of the Gospel now, today, than ever before.