The Catholc Church, because it is sustained by a core group of people who are deeply sane, always has and always will adapt and survive. This core group derives its sanity from its being deeply aligned in a way suitable to their historical cultural circumstances to the Transcendent Real. Sometimes people from this core also have roles in the Management class (see diagram below), but often enough the Management class has an ethos that is out of alignment with the Transcendent Real. The American bishops and everal of the Renaissance popes come to mind.
When the management class is out of alignment, it's destructive at its worst and embarrassing at best, but never fatal. Because the life of the Church does not depend on its managers; it depends on its Prodigies and Disciples.
And so it is they, the Prodigies and Disciples, who provide the ballast from generation to generation and from century to century that sustains the life of the Church because whether the Managers are aligned or not, the Prodigies and Disciples always are. But often enough, Prodigies and Disciples play roles in the Management class. In my lifetime we have seen the emergence from within the Management class two popes, John XXIII and currently Pope Francis–both insiders and Church bureaucrats who, like Gorbachev did in the Soviet Union, realized that their organization was out of alignment with the Real. But the difference between the Church and the Soviet Union lies in that the Church has the historical-cultural and spiritual ballast to survive these necessary adjustments. The Soviet Union did not. It was from the beginning the paradigm of the deracinated Liberal project, and as such it was doomed to eventual failure.
So you might say, why do we need the church bureaucrats and all the institutional claptrap? Maybe the Quakers are the only Christians who have an organization that is truly shaped by the spirit of the Gospel. There's a part of me that is sympathetic to that point of view. It's so much simpler and cleaner, but I would argue that we have to resist the desire for the simple and the clean. Purity is not a Christian virtue, and the obsessive preoccupation with it is deeply misguided, indeed sinful when it leads to what I have called elsewhere 'whited sepulcher syndrome': squeaky clean on the outside, stinking soul rot on the inside. The goal is to be Real, inside and out, if by Real we mean evermore aligned with the Logos, who we Christians believe is the deep ground of the Real.
St. Augustine said that 'the Church is a whore, but she's our mother', and that points us to an imagination of the Church that is more complex and interesting because it is never anything more or less than a reflection of the full humanity it embraces–with all its vices, foibles, and farces, as well as its prodigies, its saints and prophets. Saints and prophets are not Prodigies of Purity; they are Prodigies of the Transcendent Real, a transcendent Real that we believe is deeply embedded in the heart of everything that is dark, messy, and impure. 'Neatness' and 'purity' are not Christian values. Jesus was not fussy. Repentance, humility, compassion, menschiness, and the greatness of soul that follows from their practice are the deep Christian virtues, and the Church is at its best when it embraces its understanding of itself as cultivating and exemplifying virtues.
I want to belong to a Church that is as messy as all humanity is, and which is also capable of recognizing its folly and adapting when its ideas are out of alignment with the Real. I want to belong to a Church that can show the world it can repent, that it has the humility to understand its limitations, but also the courage to say No to everything that seeks to diminish our humanity. I want to belong to a Church that provides the infrastructure that cultivates the full humanity and development of its singers–its Prodigies and Disciples–a transnational, transcultural infrastructure that includes monasteries and universities, soup kitchens and mission hospitals, local parishes and regional synods. I want to belong to a Church that provides a venue for its current prodigies to sing about the Transcendent More that inspires their lives, a Church that honors the ancestors in preserving and celebrating the memory of its Prodigies who have lived in every century since at least the time of Abraham. And I want to belong to a Church that celebrates and faithfully reenacts the central turning point of human history, which it does every day and every where in the Mass.
The life of the Church is cyclic. It has its ups and downs. But when the Church is most itself, it is a force for human progress. Are its efforts sometimes clumsy and misguided? Yes, of course. But if it's capable of horrible things, it is also capable of repentance and reform, and it is uniquely capable of providing the Christian Humanist frame that I have argued is essential for resisting the Conservative and Neoliberal agenda that is working so hard to diminish our humanity.
Leave a Reply