Crises and Challenges of Catholicism Today
Rosemary Radford Ruether

Given at CTA Wisconsin meeting, May 1998

 

Being a Roman Catholic in America has never been an easy experience. But in 1985 being Catholic in America, or specifically a Catholic of liberal-left convictions, is particularly fraught with contradictions. On the one hand, the Catholic community has gained credibility enormously in the last two decades by a new spirit of intellectual freedom and social justice. A great burden of absolutism and defensiveness toward the world around us has been lifted from our shoulders. Catholic religious studies in Catholic colleges and seminaries have come into dialogue with the mainstream of scholarship and no longer hides in its own mental ghetto. In critical areas of service to the poor, both in the United States and in the Third World, and in opposition to militarism, Catholics have given significant witness. The two pastoral epistles by the American bishops on peace and on the economy, while leaving some things to be desired, nevertheless are landmark documents for an American Catholic social ethic.

On the other hand, we see alarming evidence of retrenchment f from a Vatican leadership, which had never welcomed the liberalization brought about by the Second Vatican Council and would like to return us to the closed, authoritarian world of preconciliar times. We also see renewed a right-wing Catholicism, organized internationally around groups like Opus Dei, and nationally by groups like CUFF, gaining the ear of Vatican conservatives. Although historical -critical thinking and social justice issues generally are on the hit list of these groups, the chief victims are those concerned with sexual rights; i.e., reproductive rights, equality for women, both in the church and in society, gay rights and optional celibacy. It is in this area of sexual questions that the Catholic Church is most conflicted, unable to give decisive or credible leadership, most ready to capitulate to those who would repress open discussion and dissent in the Church.

I shall focus this discussion around three major areas of crises which I think will shape the American and global Catholic community in the next twenty years. How the Catholic community responds to these three challenges will determine in large part whether Catholicism will be able to use its enormous human resources as a witness for truth and justice in this critical period of human history or whether it will lose its creative leadership and its opportunity for both its own renewal and its witness to the world. These three challenges are: 1) the challenge of democratic values and human rights in the Church's institutional life, 2) the challenge of feminism and the crises of sexual morality in church teaching, and 3) the challenge of Third World liberation struggles. I also want to say some things about why it is important to take seriously our responsibility, as liberal-left lay Catholics, for the future of the institutional church and how we can find continued bases for creative leadership and action in what appears to be an era of reaction both in our Church and in the society around us.

The Challenge of Liberalism

In the nineteenth century the Vatican rejected political liberalism. Religious liberty, freedom of conscience, democratic government, women's suffrage, and other such liberal reforms, were repudiated by the Catholic magisterium. In 1864, in the infamous conclusion of the Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX condemned as an error the thesis that the "Roman pontiff can and should reconcile himself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization. "

However, gradually in the second half of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church began to accommodate itself to liberalism. in the Second Vatican Council the principle of religious liberty was affirmed as Catholic teaching. In Pope John XXIII's encyclical, Pacem in Terris, in 1963, almost one hundred years after the Syllabus of Errors, the whole gamut of civil liberties were affirmed in language that echos the American Declaration of independence and Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. In a key statement, the encyclical says:

"Every human being is a person; that is, by nature endowed with intelligence and free will. Indeed, precisely because he (sic) is a person he has rights and obligations flowing directly and simultaneously from his very nature. And as these rights and obligations are universal and inviolable, so they cannot in any way be surrendered." (9)

Among the basic human rights affirmed in the encyclical are freedom to search for, express and communicate one's opinions and to be truthfully informed about public events, freedom of religion, freedom of democratic participation in political life, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom to choose one's state of life. The encyclical goes beyond classical liberalism in also affirming socio-economic rights that have been traditionally identified with socialism, such as the right to work, to have safe working conditions and fair wages. The rights of the working classes and of women to justice and to equal participation in public life were singled out for particular mention. Some of these questions of the rights of workers have been further elaborated in the papal encyclical of John Paul II, On Human Work, and also in the pastoral epistles of the American and the Canadian bishops on the economy.

This movement of Roman Catholicism toward an affirmation of liberal and democratic-socialist values in social, political and economic questions is very significant. In Latin America particularly, political repression has forced many bishops to become spokesmen for human rights. In the national security states of contemporary neofascism, a consistent human rights position becomes a radical and heroic option and puts Church leaders in danger of arrest, torture and even assassination.

The position of the present pope toward liberalism, however, is ambivalent. Although he defends, in moderate ways, the rights of workers to organize, and also a certain freedom of dissent and cultural expression in society, his views are shaped and limited by a communist society that lacks democratic values. Although he is hostile to the spread of communism in the Third World, he is also unsympathetic to Western democracies which he associates with materialistic decadence.

This rapprochement but also ambivalence of Catholic leadership toward liberal values comes at a time when these values are increasingly uncertain in secular society as well. Marxism was traditionally critical of liberalism because it saw questions of political equality as meaningless in an economic system of vast inequality of wealth. It was assumed that human rights would automatically flourish once private ownership of the means of production was abolished for social ownership. But social ownership was interpreted to mean state ownership, with special economic privileges for the managerial elite of the state bureaucracy. in communist societies an anti-liberal ideology became the rationale for depriving the people of political and cultural tools of dissent and change.

In the capitalist, industrial world of the West, the heritage of civil liberties is retained, but with great inequality in their actual exercise. These Western nations, particularly the United States, also live in an exploitative relation to Third World areas. Their affluence depends on the control of cheap labor and raw materials of these dependent nations. "Defense of democracy" becomes the rational for imperialist intervention to maintain neo-colonialist relations. So the U.S.A., the leaders of these "free world" nations, has supported fascist regimes in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Central and South America and Southeast Asia, when such regimes were the cooperative allies of American control. For many Third World people then the word "democracy" comes to be a facade to cover brutal tyranny. The farcical elections of El Salvador, acclaimed by our leaders, are the most obvious example of this manipulation of democratic forms without substance to maintain American hegemony.

Catholicism has a unique opportunity to bring a universal ethic to the conflicting values that divide the capitalist, socialist and, Third Worlds. it is not insignificant that the pope is probably the only global leader in the world today who could get an enthusiastic reception in all three of these regions. If this world religious leader could really speak credibly, out of a deep conviction of the best in both civil libertarian and socialist values, and the need to unite the two in a comprehensive vision of a free and just society, he would provide an invaluable witness in a world bereft of credible moral and political leadership. But it is not at all clear that Catholicism will be able to rise to this occasion. The pope himself speaks with a particularly contradictory voice in this regard. He and many other church leaders have too little real understanding or respect for the intrinsic value of liberal principles.

Recent papal insistence that nuns and priests should not be involved in politics fits poorly with the close collaboration of the Catholic hierarchy and the Christian Democratic ruling party in Italy. When the pope speaks of priests and nuns not being involved in politics what he seems to mean is that official ecclesiastical personnel should not take jobs in political systems outside church control, and not that the church as an institution should not function as a political power in the world. Thus the liberal principles of separation of church and state are used in a mystifying way that conceals the political role of the leaders of the Church.

The partial rapprochement of the Catholic Church with liberal values is contradicted most blatantly by the inability of the Catholic hierarchy to apply these principles to itself as an institution. It is hard to believe a church that defends religious liberty, freedom of dissent, the equality of persons before the law, just wages and fair political processes and fails to apply these principles within its own institutional walls. In the last ten years it has become increasingly evident how little things have changed in the Catholic Church in terms of structure. Institutionally, Catholicism is the last survivor of absolute monarchy. The Second Vatican Council released new ideas, but not a reform in this essentially undemocratic structure. In recent years we have seen the reassertion of the absolutistic mentality that goes with and justifies this absolutist structure. Theologians have been called before the renamed, but unchanged, office of the Holy Inquisition for investigation. There they are denied the basic rights of modern judicial systems to know the charges against them and to confront their accusers. Some have been deprived of their jobs or their official positions as Catholic theologians.

Thus it seems that the hierarchy, particularly in the Vatican, is far away from understanding dissent and freedom of conscience, not only as a private, but also as a public right. This has become most evident in the recent American dispute over the public right of dissent and open discussion on the question of abortion. Underlying this dispute is a fundamental difference in the understanding of truth and how to best discover and preserve it. The present Vatican leadership basically thinks of truth as single, unitary, and verbally definable. It also seems to believe that it has a charisma to define such truth that makes it immune from the ordinary human processes of verification through experience. Its pronouncements against the ordination of women feels no need to consult with biblical scholars on the current state of the question of women in the New Testament. Nor does its pronouncements on reproductive rights take seriously either the work of demographers and other social scientists nor the experiences of married people.

In many other areas, such as fair wages, just contracts, the right of church employees to unionize, the right of assembly and free press, the Catholic Church fails to apply to itself the civil rights it has defended in society. It defends itself against these questions of freedom of thought and democratic processes in the Church by declaring itself to be a divine, rather than a human society. What is implied is that Christ directly founded the Catholic Church and intended it to have this monarchical structure. Monarchy is of the divine essence of the Church.

Such a claim is questionable both theologically and historically. Historically, it is evident that the Church evolved from a congregational to a hierarchical structure primarily by growing up into and imitating the imperial bureaucracy of the Roman Empire. It further forged this structure by taking on feudal and then absolutist elements in medieval and early modern Europe. The political form of the Church is a historical construct influenced by the political systems around it, not a divine given. Theologically, one should at least be able to ask whether a democratic polity would not be a more adequate expression of a community of salvation than one modeled after Roman imperialism, medieval feudalism and Renaissance absolutism.

Thus the first challenge to the Church today is whether it will be able to internalize the principles of human rights in its own institutional life. If it cannot do so, it will not be able to be a credible witness for human rights in society.

Sexism and the Catholic Church

The second major challenge to the Catholic Church today has to do with sexual morality and the status of women. Fear of sexuality and the marginalization of women is deeply embedded in both Catholic spirituality and polity. Both have a long history that goes back to early Christianity. The call of the Reformation to return to married clergy and to a more Hebraic sense of the goodness of sexuality was rejected by counter-Reformation Catholicism, although the Reformation continued the patriarchal hierarchy of men over women both in society and in the Church.

For Catholics, however, it falls to the recent decades after the Second Vatican Council to try to deal simultaneously with this whole heritage of the imposition of celibacy upon the clergy, the negation of sexuality and the fear of women. one might say that the two least discussable things in the Catholic Church are sex and authority. Moreover, every conflict over sexual morality also becomes a conflict over authority.

Celibacy began as a lay tradition linked with monasticism. its imposition upon the ordained clergy was slow and imperfect through the Middle Ages and resulted primarily in the illegitimizing of priestly marriages and children, rather than really preventing them. This results even today in a church policy which is far more lenient toward clerics who indulge in illicit sex, but without moral commitment, than men who want to build committed relationships. This extends also to ambivalence toward homosexuality in the clergy. Committed love relationships are viewed much more negatively, from the perspective of an institutionalized celibacy, than are sexual "falls from grace" routinely repented of. Such contradictions hardly lend themselves to good moral development.

Recent efforts by Catholic seminarians to enhance the moral development of seminarians by bringing in women pastoral counselors has been viewed with particular negativity by the Vatican. It has made the removal of such women the particular object of its regulation of seminaries. We have here a basic contradiction between an ascetic spirituality that saw sacramental purity as effected through banishing sexuality and the physical presence of women, and our present understanding of what makes for mature, well-balanced pastoral leaders. Women and married men are also kept from ordained ministry by this same ascetic spirituality. A male celibate clergy is thus being maintained at the expense of the needs of the people for an adequate pastoral ministry.

The rejection of the ordination of women is also based on an obsolete anthropology which regarded women as lacking in full human nature and as being in a state of subjugation both in the order of nature, and as a result of women's presumed greater guilt f or sin. In the 1975 Declaration against the Ordination of Women, the Vatican abandoned the implications of this doctrine of female imperfection and subjugation for the social order, while attempting to retain it for the Church. The maleness of the historical Jesus was construed as a "sacramental mystery" that could only be embodied in male human beings. Needless to say, semitic facial features were not equally regarded as a "mystery" necessary for this "physical resemblance between the priest and Christ."

What is concealed behind this sacramental language is the Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology which denied to women full human status as autonomous representatives of humanity. Such a truncated doctrine of women's lack of full human status and inability thereby to represent Christ raises the basic theological question of female redemption. If women can't represent Christ because Christ was a male, does Christ represent women? Or, as the women's ordination movement has put it, "either ordain women or stop baptizing them"

Reproductive rights is the other main area where the Church has been unable to respond to the feminist challenge. Currently, this conflict focuses primarily on the emotional question of abortion. But the "pro-life" stance of the Catholic hierarchy conceals the fact that they have never come to terms with the question of contraception. A well-developed argument for the morality of all methods of contraception within the fundamental framework of committed marriage, voted by the majority of the papal birth control commission in 1968, was rejected by Pope Paul VI primarily because of an inability to face up to the question of error in previous church teaching. The present pope, who was a member, but failed to ever come to the meetings of the birth control commission, seems to be of a mind to make the anti-contraceptive stance "infallible." Thus, in practice, the Church actually promotes the high abortion rate that it claims to abhor.

What lies underneath all of this is a fundamental inability to affirm women as moral agents of their own reproductive life. Women are viewed as sexual temptations to be avoided on the one hand, or bodies owned and used as sources of relief from concupiscence and vehicles of male fertility on the other. The inability to deal with reproductive rights in the Church is ultimately rooted in an inability of a patriarchal Christianity to deal with women as autonomous persons and moral agents in their own right.

The Challenge of the Third World

Historically, Roman Catholicism has been the Church of Western Europe. It's spread to the Americas, Africa and Asia was closely related to Spanish, Portuguese and French colonial expansion. From its roots in the Greco-Roman Empire it could believe that the defense of Catholicism meant the defense of Western civilization whose mother and teacher was Rome. From this center emanated the light which illuminated the outer "darkness" of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Its model was imperial. It made its concordats with kings, and only reluctantly with elected officials of constitutional democracies, indeed, preferring fascists to either liberals or communists.

Increasingly, however, the balance of the Catholic population has shifted. The Catholicism of the future will be, more and more, a Church of the Third World, a Church of Asians, Africans, and, particularly, of Latin Americans. Western Europeans and North Americans will be a dwindling segment of global Catholicism. Even among Europeans, Catholics are more likely to be among the marginalized people. In the British Isles they are the Irish colonized by the British. In Western Europe, they are the Italians, the Spanish and Portuguese, looked down upon as migrate labor for Northern Europe. In Eastern Europe they are the Poles, whose land has long been a pawn between Germany and Russia.

In the United States, Catholics have been the Irish and the Southern and Eastern European immigrants despised by the WASPS. In Canada, they are the French colonized by the British. Today, they will be, more and more, Hispanic. Catholics of the future will be mostly brown, black or yellow rather than white; poor rather than affluent; on the revolutionary side of struggles over global military and economic power.

This shift in the center of the Catholic community has already had a profound effect on the understanding of the Church's mission. In the past the Church tended to operate as the ecclesiastical arm of the ruling classes. Conversion to Christianity for native peoples meant submission to these ruling classes. The Church justified the colonial order as divinely ordained and taught a spirituality of humility and fatalism to the poor. The rites of the Church comforted people in their tribulations and promised relief in heaven, but opened no vistas of transformation of this world.

Within a remarkably short time a new consciousness has transformed the theology and practice of a segment of the Latin American Church. Reversing colonial relations, this new consciousness is now evangelizing the churches in Europe and North America, particularly through returned missionaries, inviting them to a new understanding of their role. The key to this new consciousness is summed up in the phrase "preferential option for the poor." "Option for the poor" is not merely a charitable outreach to the needy by the affluent. Indeed, it is not, first of all, we, the affluent, who opt for the poor. God's option for the poor is a judgment against our unjust wealth and power. Conversion, becoming a Christian, means a repentant shift in the basis of our social identity as Church. It means following Christ's identification with the poor by seeking to transform the social structures which generate deprivation and dehumanization.

The challenge of the Third World calls for a church that starts at the base, identified with the poorest, rather than with those in power. This new vision of the Church's mission deeply divides Catholicism, both in Latin America and in the global Church. Vatican retrenchment, that directs its attacks upon dissent and women's rights, is equally threatened by liberation theology. The continual admonitions from the Vatican to avoid Marxist analysis and involvement of priests in politics, which have culminated recently in the removal of the priests in the revolutionary government of Nicaragua from their religious orders and priestly functions, and in the admonition against liberation theology by Cardinal Ratzinger, reflect a Church fearful of losing its place in the seats of power. It wishes to extend charity to the poor, but not to be identified with them in a way that would stand in conflict with the interests of the economic and military elites. This is the real meaning of its hostility to "class analysis" and "class struggle."

In a polarized world of vast wealth and grinding poverty, class conflict is not a theory with which one agrees or does not agree. It is the social reality in which we live. Not to choose the side of the poor is to choose the side of the affluent. To defend the rights of poor is to make oneself the marked target of those in power. This is quite evident to missionaries among the Indians in Guatemala, for example. To opt for the poor is to lose one's place among the powerful, to choose vulnerability, perhaps torture and death. It is to choose to be a martyr Church. This is the Church which, in Latin America, is learning anew what it means to be baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. The cross ceases to be a gold and jeweled artifact hanging on a church wall and becomes a living reality that one bears in one Is own body. This is the witness of the Latin American Church to the churches of residual Euro-American Christendom.

With the Vatican attack on liberation theology, it becomes evident that class conflict divides the Church as well, separating a Church of the poor from a Church who wants to extend condolences to the poor from the side of the powerful, while concealing and denying their own political option. This means that when new revolutionary regimes come to power, this Church will be seen, as it was in Cuba, as the enemy of the people. But, unlike Cuba, a new popular Church has been born that can bring a new dimension of compassion to the revolutionary process. Thus the key to the future of Catholicism in the Third World rests on the extent to which it chooses to stand with the future of the poor, rather than with the maintenance of the old order.

What Is To Be Done?

Many Catholics in recent years have found the resistance of the hierarchy to these challenges so discouraging, their own position in the Church so untenable and the expectations of change from the top so unlikely that they ask "why bother with the Church at all?" Isn't the effort to work within it simply helping to perpetuate a bad system? Why not get out of it and work for change in secular society? Such questions cannot be taken lightly, because they are asked from an experience of existential despair rooted in personal experience. But the questions sometimes contain several confusions. First, secular society is hardly free of these same problems. Basic conflicts in the church mirror those in society. Secondly, it is assumed that if only we, the critical ones, disaffiliate with the Catholic Church, it will dry up and disappear. On the contrary, the history of Western Christianity since the Reformation shows that Roman Catholicism goes along the same as ever when dissatisfied people leave it, happily relieved of their critical presence. The question I want to ask is this: how can we, those concerned with intellectual freedom and social justice in the Catholic Church, both provide ourselves with the religious nurture and vehicles of ministry that we need and also continue to work to make change in this historical institution?

I believe the first question is not what we should do for the Church, but what we should do for ourselves. What is it that we need to nurture and express our Christian vision? If we had time at this conference, I would have liked this whole assembly of Chicago Catholics to sit down together in groups of ten or twelve and ask themselves that question seriously for several hours and then catalogue and compare their answers. one should then explore what institutional vehicles the church presently has for responding to these needs. What kind of liturgical community would make weekly worship a feast of the soul, rather than a barely tolerable duty? What kind of ministry do we need to support our personal, moral and spiritual development in community with others? What kinds of ministry do we feel called to exercise? What do we think the Church should be about in the world? Is it possible to do these things in the local parishes to which you have access? in religious orders? in other existing institutional vehicles, such as retreat centers?

When it is evident that the existing institutional Church has put insurmountable obstacles in the way of even beginning to ask, much less answer, these questions, then we should invent new vehicles of spiritual community and ministry, although the first line of exploration should be how to make use of existing ones. I believe that we are empowered by the Holy Spirit, as the People of God, to create for ourselves the expressions of worshiping community and ministry that we need and this power cannot be alienated from us by any ecclesiastical hierarchy. This is what the Italian Base Community movement calls reappropriation theology"; that is, the reappropriation of the ministry of Word and sacrament and service alienated from the people by an ecclesiastical ruling class. Reappropriation theology means the basic spiritual revolution in our own consciousnesses which puts us at the center of the Church's life, rather than at the periphery banging on locked doors.

Once we have reappropriated our own spiritual power, then we can be about forming base communities for worship, consciousness raising and mutual support; peace and justice centers to express our praxis in society; study groups to develop our theology; new non-canonical religious orders that can covenant to serve the poor, and so forth. Although this appropriation of our own spiritual power to form community and ministry may seem like the exact opposite of remaining concerned for the reform of the Catholic Church, I would suggest that it is actually the only basis by which we can continue to do so. Only when we are no longer operating from a position of emptiness, frustration, anger, loneliness, and mental and spiritual exhaustion, through struggling with unresponsive institutional structures, but have a secure base of support of our own personal spiritual life, will we be liberated enough to address with maturity, objectivity and compassion the problems of reforming this ancient juggernaut called the Roman Catholic Church.

One might then ask why even bother to try to reform it, if we are already doing "our thing?" It is at this point that I think that Catholic liberal-leftists need to gain greater respect and understanding of the function of historical institutions. Because we have been so deprived of meaningful political participation in church leadership, we easily become naive anarchists. We forget that no matter how great our living-room liturgy may be, it is only going to last a few years. The parish will go on and will continue to be the main vehicle for gathering and socializing the Catholic people throughout the world and down through the generations. Unless we manage to insert what we are doing in more autonomous settings back into these main institutional vehicles of ministry and community, breathing new life and activity into them through sharing the fruits of our work, it will have no lasting historical impact.

I see church reform as a dialectical process, a constant welling up of new movements of the Spirit, which express themselves in small intentional groups gathered to express new visions and needs, and the constant gathering in of these new movements into the institutional church. In this way the institutional church itself is given new life, but also the institutional church gives lasting historical impact to these new movements of the Spirit.

Institutional church leaders have always felt threatened by new movements of the Spirit outside their control. They have always sought to marginalize and stifle them, and so the new movements have tended either to give up or to get mad and go away and found another church which, in turn, becomes another historical institution resistant to new movements for change. Thus do schisms and denominations proliferate in the history of Christianity. Although I am not totally against forming new churches, what is clear to me is that forming new churches never did much to reform the church that you left. It is precisely reforming this particular historical institution that concerns me.

This concerns me for two reasons. First, I believe it will continue to be around and even to grow, particularly in the Third World, whether we stick with it or not. Secondly, I think that, through a series of historical accidents, the Catholic Church today finds itself in a unique position of being a major global institution that links the communist, the capitalist and the Third worlds. 'It is, therefore, in a critical position to bridge these three worlds and to witness to the needs of our planet for peace and justice. So it seems to me extremely important that critical and justice-minded minorities stay in this Church and use whatever parts of it they can get their hands on to respond appropriately to these critical challenges of human survival.

Moreover, these critical minorities will have far more impact both on the Church, and on the world, if they continue to find ways to work through this Church than they could possibly have if they separated out of it. One should only think of how few are the liberation theologians of Latin America and yet what an enormous impact they have already had, precisely because what they do is broadcast through this global network called the Roman Catholic Church. This is like the difference between shouting with the unaided human voice and speaking through a global system of telecommunications. This means we need to figure out how to use institutional networks creatively, rather than feeling powerless before them

We can do this by creating new vehicles of ministry, community and communication, and then "attaching" to the edges of the existing historical church, so they become new vehicles within and for the whole Catholic community. American Catholicism has been particularly adept at doing this. Almost all of the most lively expressions of American Catholicism come from new initiatives, developed either by religious orders or by laity, which operate autonomously or quasi -autonomously of the hierarchy, but nevertheless function as expressions of the Catholic community. One has only to think of the Catholic Worker Movement, the Catholic colleges, increasingly today under lay boards, the independent Catholic press, the network of Peace and Justice centers, the networks of Catholic women, both religious and lay, such as the National Association of Religious Women and Chicago Catholic Women, Catholic advocacy groups of various kinds, such as Dignity, Catholics for a Free Choice and the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, not to mention the Chicago Call to Action.

I believe that a failing of these parallel groups is a tendency to get too separated from the ordinary vehicles of Catholic life, particularly the parish. Whenever possible, one should use these ordinary structures f or such activities (although, if this is blocked, one should not hesitate to meet in other structures, while still calling oneself Catholic). If one has a liberation or feminist theology lecture series, one should try to hold it in a Catholic college or parish. If you are producing a new newspaper, you should try to distribute it in parishes. If you have a study group that is open to new members, one should advertise it in the parish bulletin. It is in this way that new initiatives interpenetrate and renew ordinary Catholic life, and also how we stay in touch with ordinary Catholic life and do not imagine that it is better or worse than it actually is.

I believe, above all, we should divert our financial giving to the Church to our new vehicles of ministry and community and let as little as possible get into the hands of those who want to stifle our vision, whether that be bishops or the Vatican. Only by drying up their financial resources as much as possible will we be able to force them finally to come to terms with a more participatory church, a more participatory church which we are already creating at the base.

In conclusion, I believe that the challenges to the Catholic Church at this time are great. It has a unique opportunity to be a positive witness to the Christian vision. But it could fail to rise to the occasion and regress into a reactionary stance against the challenges of intellectual freedom, mature sexual -morality, justice for women and homosexuals, and service to the poor. The ability of its critical minorities to find the creative ways to use it, and to express their vision through it, will make the difference as whether it does some of the first or only does the second.