Catholics for a Changing Church

A great deal is being said these days in Church circles about the desirability and development of Collaborative Ministry. But it seems to me that it is more spoken about than acted upon. While one must be full of admiration for the vision of Church institutions to tap all human resources - of clerics, of Religious, of laity - and pool them for more effective mission, so often the motivation for bringing this about is the diminishing number of available priests to maintain an institution that in the past was the sole responsibility of clerics, rather than having as its motivation the priesthood of all believers.

From my experience of facilitating the Chapters and Assemblies of Religious Congregations, I have come to the conclusion that too many excellent initiatives in collaborative ministry do not come to full maturity because they start from a limiting basis, namely that there is not the opportunity for all the collaborators to be able to accept full responsibility for the total project because the dominating power and final decision-making body is the Religious Order that owns the property.

There has been a mass exodus from church attendance at Christian worship, including by Roman Catholics, during the last half century.  In my book, Living Love (D.L.T. 2004) I gave detailed statistics from several Western countries, of both a decline in attendance at mass and of candidates for the priesthood.  Statistics apart,  attendance at any Sunday mass tells the whole sad story: the virtual disappearance of young people and the fact that those present are mostly in the second half of life.  In the West, the Catholic Church is haemorrhaging towards the point of extinction.

On the surface there is little change.  The reduction of priests is camouflaged by new boundaries and amalgamations.  The churches appear full, even if the bulk of the congregation is elderly, or made up of young children.  Even in Ireland, a very devout country, Catholicism is on the point of collapse.  Despite all these signs of disaster, there is a blanket denial of the crisis, reminiscent of the way in which the band on the Titanic continued to play while the ship was sinking.

Worker Bishop in the Vatican II Style

Jesus said “Blessed are the poor” and since Vatican II, the People of God and the institutional church have both shown an increasing awareness of the importance of serving the poor in the world, whatever their religious, or non-religious, affiliation. One bishop in Europe has recently come to represent the western world’s commitment to what is now known as ‘the option for the poor’ --- his name is Jacques Gaillot, former bishop of Evreux in France. ‘Former’ betrays that ‘the option for the poor’ was no more than another token phrase on the lips of Pope John Paul II, who sacked this bishop for taking seriously the demand of Jesus to help our more unfortunate neighbours. Behind this event lies a problem which plagues the Church: is a bishop of Jesus and his local people, or is he a branch manager under the Pope?

A number of Christian house groups (house churches, base communities etc) celebrate what they call ‘table liturgies’ together and CCC has groups today that do this too. What are they?

Well, they are not house Masses or Eucharists presided over by an ordained priest, whether or not wearing a stole or some other vestment indicating his special status, and following the text of the Roman Mass. They are the spontaneous celebrations of lay Christians who wish to re-create the open table-fellowship of Jesus.

The feeding of the five thousand is a prime example of Jesus’ practice of wanting to share a meal with all comers.  This is quite different from the current discipline in the RC Church where admission to the Eucharist is permitted, except in rare cases, (Pope Benedict XVI has publicly given communion to the Protestant Brother Roger of Taizé for example) only to those who pass certain tests: being in formal communion with the Holy See, belief in the Real Presence, freedom from unabsolved serious sin.  Jesus on the other hand was accused of eating not only with the ritually impure, but also with public unrepentant sinners – lumped together by the gospels as ‘prostitutes and tax-collectors’.