Democracy in the Church, by Andrew Hamilton, Eureka Street, July 20, 2011

Democracy in the Church

By Andrew Hamilton
Eureka Street
July 20, 2011

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=27273

In recent weeks the media have given some coverage to a petition circulating among Australian Catholics. The petition was composed by a lay group called Catholics for Renewal, comprised of Catholics who have been active in parish life. They hope many Catholics will sign the petition, and that the Bishops will communicate its content to Pope Benedict when they meet him later in the year.

The petition offers a sombre picture of the state of the Catholic Church. It speaks of a Church that has lost contact with young people. Many older Catholics have also become increasingly disaffected. The Church has been unable to provide ministry to communities, especially in rural areas.

The document attributes the malaise in part to defects in governance, displayed in the handling of sexual abuse by Church representatives, in the process by which Bishop Morris was dismissed, by the attitude to women within the Church, and by the inability of Bishops to adopt pastoral strategies suitable to their own dioceses. It then offers a vision of a faithful Church, and proposes that pastoral synods be held, bringing together the resources of laity and clergy.

The petition raises two questions: about the truth of its argument, and about the place that such petitions generated by the laity have in the governance of the Catholic Church.

Although some media reports have presented the petition as radical, its assertions and requests are moderate. Its reading of the general loss of contact by the Church with young people is supported by the decline in Mass going. The alienation of young Catholic women has been remarked on for many years, and observers have also noted the more recent disillusionment of many older Catholics.

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The dire lack of resources, especially in rural dioceses, and the inadequacy of presently available pastoral strategies to address them are increasingly evident. So too are the corrosive effects that the early failure to deal adequately with sexual abuse has had on trust in governance.

The lack of due process evident in the new Mass translation and in the treatment of Morris has also been widely criticised. The desire for a Church in which women are treated as equals, which is free from homophobia, and in which the state of the Church and pastoral strategies can be discussed honestly ought to be unexceptionable, even though how this desire might best be enshrined in practice is a matter of debate.

The proposal that diocesan synods be held is modest. But although they are unlikely to include those who have given up on the Church, and lack executive power, open and honest discussion of the situation of local churches and of their remedying can only be helpful. They can form the foundation of pastoral strategies that will be based on more than rhetoric.

The second question raised by the document concerns the place of petitions within the Church.

To some Catholics petitions will seem inappropriate. They believe the Pope and Bishops are given responsibility by God for guiding and leading their people, and that they are responsible only to God. Petitions by lay Catholics presume a level of ownership of the Church that they do not have, and can only muddy the waters. Australian Bishops should therefore consign them to wastepaper bin, as have many European Bishops when lay Catholics have pressed for reform of the church.

This view is unpersuasive. It supposes that the bishop's responsibility from God for his people is incompatible with his responsibility to his people, and with the responsibility for the Church that all people receive with baptism. These forms of responsibility work at different levels and are consistent with one another. Each should be expressed in the way in which bishops and people engage with one another.

In this context, occasional petitions seem as appropriate a form of engagement within the Church as they are in political life. The pressure which a petition exerts on rulers of church or state is not normally a pressure to act, but to recognise a reality which they prefer to ignore and the strength of public concern about it. That pressure is proper.

Petitions have the value once attributed to canaries in the mineshaft. Their witness could be dismissed by mine owners who wished business to continue as usual. But that dismissal did not make the mineshaft a salubrious living space. To promote the health of the enterprise and of the human beings involved there, it normally proved better to feed the canaries and to listen to their song.