The Servant Church

My favorite writers on the Church are Adrian Dulles and Edmund Schillebeeckx, neither of whom were notable liberals. Both have significantly influenced my concept of the Church as well as that expressed by the Bishops at Vatican II, Dulles in delineating various models of Church, Schillebeeckx in forming my vision of the Church as the Body of Christ who acts and speaks through it in the world today. Richard P. McBrien’s “The Church” is probably the best and most readable book on the subject in fifty years. When I started to formulate my vision for the Church of the future, not the heavenly New Jerusalem, but the church down and dirty in its members, I tried to put that vision in words in the context of the world today. I think it is the same vision as that expressed by Vatican II in the document De Ecclesia (About the Church).

My vision harks back to the early church we find in the Acts of the Apostles. It is the church described by Paul who wrote, “Have that mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross”. (Phil 2:5-8). It is the church of the ghetto and

Times they are a changing(1)

From time to time we all need to look around and see where we are going. We need to do so in the Church as well as in our personal lives. At my age we will find that things have changed not once but many times and we must constantly reevaluate these changes.For the next few days I plan to share my vision of how the church in Florida has changed in thr last fifty years. I would love to get your feedback.

I said before that one can never go back, but an institution and its leaders can go backward. To my mind the community that is the Church in Central Florida has not gone backward. Its members are still active and committed to living and sharing their faith in their communities. Many priests and many parishes, despite the handcuffs of a rigid ecclesiastical bureaucracy, are doing truly wonderful things to help the poor and needy, the migrants and the homeless, to support missions abroad, to

Listen and get involved

I forget now what I wanted to tell you! How often do we find ourselves in this position? It can be very frustrating as we lose a thought that we felt a moment ago was significant enough to share it with another. To make it worse we were probably interrupted by someone sharing a valuable insight into the dog's need to take a walk! Why do people always interrupt me on those rare occasions when I'm thinking? These rare thoughts are such precious gems of wisdom so thoughtlessly squandered.

And we then waste so much time trying to regain that momentary, fleeting vision, so fleeting that we did not have time to put it in words. I can drive all the way to Orlando trying to recall it without success, unless I'm distracted ny my wife's screaming: "Billie, the light is red". Now I'll never have the opportunity to share with Mario Rubio how to solve the country's economic problems.

It's a sad fact that brilliant minds cannot get a hearing when boring blow-hards grab the floor and

laicization & bishops

We’ve talked about “laicization” and the dismissal of priests from the active ministry, but it might be interesting to dig a little deeper into what the implications are. Back in grade school I learned that three sacraments cannot be repeated, they are conferred permanently. As I recall the image was that they put an “indelible mark or stain” upon our soul, somewhat “like indelible ink”. These sacraments were Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders. Their effects were irreversible. I’m not a Graham Greene fan and I’m not suggesting that he is an expert on the details of Catholic sacramental theology, but I seem to remember that this was a basic element in his depiction of the “whiskey priest”. This was a distinction between “ex opere operato” and “ex opera operantis” in traditional theology, a distinction between the work done and the one who did the work.

So it seems that laicization does not deprive the priest of his priestly powers, specifically the power to preside at the celebration of the Eucharist, it merely forbids him to do so. Given that the penalty is usually imposed as a consequence of the priest’s disobedience to an order from a superior, bishop or pope, such a prohibition is unlikely to prevent him from doing what his conscience tells him is

Canonizing John Paul II

Apart from the fact that we are all called to be saints and that canonization merely recognizes officially that the subject has heroically fulfilled his responsibilities in the role to which God has called him, the process of canonization is primarily intended to present the subject as one worthy of emulation by the faithful. The Vatican has announced that Pope John Paul II will be beatified (the first step to canonization) in the near future, probably on May 1st.

Several questions arise about the whole process which has been fast-tracked by dispensing with the traditional delay of several years before beginning the investigation of the candidate’s life and

Church leakage : personal & institutional failures

A recent report by the Pew Foundation says that one in three Catholic school graduates have left the Church and that 10% of the members of Protestant churches are former Catholics. Somehow I doubt that 10% of Catholics are former Protestants. The leakage figures are alarming and exceed my own experience in Florida, but they may be true nationally. If 30% of a school’s enrolment each year dropped out before graduation we would demand a shake-up in the school’s staffing. But that is what these figures tell us about the Church. Either the staff or the system is at fault  (or  both)..

The Pew report on “:Leaving Catholicism” shows that half of those who left the Catholic Church joined other churches. Of these “ 71% said that they left the Church because their spiritual needs were not being met.” Richard Gaillardetz, professor of theology at Toledo University, explains this as “because the quality of Church life is poor and church leadership is inattentive to their real pastoral concerns.” By “quality” he seems to refer to

Laicization of a priest.

This week Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, a Vietnam veteran and a well-known peace activist, was notified by his superiors in the Maryknoll order that he must withdraw his views on the ordination of women as priests and cease all involvement in, support of this cause. If not he would be reduced to the lay state and excommunicated from the Church. He would cease to be a priest and no longer  allowed to celebrate the Eucharist. This was an order that had come down from Rome.

 Without mentioning that Pope Benedict XVI has written that man's conscience is the final arbitrer of the morality of his action, superior even to directives from the Pope, and that one is bound to obey it, this was the order. When he was ordained