Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time there was a CEO who was painfully aware that his business was failing, but he was afraid to confront the reasons for the failure head-on.

Fear seemed to be prevalent throughout the company. The board was afraid of the CEO,  the CEO  was afraid of the board, and the management teams were afraid of both. Some individual site managers were afraid too; many were frustrated, disconsolate, or angry.

Customers were perplexed by the company's poor showing. It had a great product, the public need was as strong as ever, but consumption was down.

Recognizing that some top level response was needed, the CEO and the board issued a series of memos. The memos did not address the issues actually responsible for the decline. Instead they cited employees for failing to follow the policy handbook or they reiterated policies that had proved ineffective for decades.

One memo insisted that employees in their official business capacity should use a style of language which was awkward and in some cases simply odd.

Many managers, employees, and even some customers tried to understand and implement the company directives. Some responded half-heartedly. Some walked away.

The owner of the business showed remarkable restraint. He waited patiently for the fear to dissipate, for the board to review its mission, for the customers to return. He never gave up, but sometimes the customers and the site managers, the supervisors and the management team members wondered, "Where is he?  When will he step in and do something about the business he so deeply loves?"

What I Believe

Swiss theologian Hans Küng's latest book is titled What I Believe.

He wrote it, he says, in answer to one of the most persistent questions posed to him: "Be quite honest: just what do you personally believe?"

Küng's response is couched in terms theological and philosophical, but not for that reason divorced from everyday life. He writes about the meaning of life, about a basis for ethics accepted by all human beings, about his personal trials and disappointments with Church leadership.

Küng's explanation of his personal beliefs made me ask myself, "And you, what do you personally believe?"

I have never organized my personal credo in such a way that I could write a summa of my faith and life. I suspect I would discover areas into which I have never ventured, and perhaps some that are contradictory one with another.

God, Church, spirituality, ministry, relationships, sin, grace, Scripture, Eucharist, knowledge --these would be at the top of my list of concerns, but I am regrettably unable to spell out conclusively even for myself what I personally believe about each one and whether those various beliefs are compatible with one another.

"Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope" (cf. 1 Peter 3:15).

At this moment of my life Church looms large as an area of concern. I have been reviewing the documents of the Second Vatican Council and reading histories and analyses of that historic event. I am old enough to recall those so-called "heady days" when we were surprised by what we heard from Rome and excited about the possibilities.

Fifty years later my excitement has abated and surprise has turned to a heaviness of spirit. The hopes, dreams, and promises of the past have clashed with the polarization, ennui, and regression of today.

In 1932 young German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer shocked the congregation which had assembled for Reformation Sunday in Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin when he said that the Protestant Church was in its eleventh hour, and that it was grotesquely inappropriate for them to be in a celebratory mood when they were in fact attending a funeral.

Bonhoeffer advised the assembly to wake up and stop playing church. He saw blindness among his co-religionists; he also saw the coming hegemony of the Nazi party. Bonhoeffer's analysis is eerily appropriate today.

Since I am still assessing what I believe, and I leave open for myself the possibility I will change my mind should I discover something new, I at this moment conclude that the Catholic Church is currently idling, in neutral, low on gas and hesitant about which road to take.

The Church, opened by the council to dialogue and involvement with the world, now sits in a paralysis of navel-gazing, overwhelmed by internal scandal, inept in evangelizing, irrelevant to some of its members, and officiously engaged in re-arranging the oft-mentioned deck chairs.

"No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God" (cf. Luke 9:62).

I believe we have lost momentum, enterprise, and direction. History reports that this has happened before. And that history of confusion, doldrums, and dullness gives me hope. For it is in just such circumstances ("darkest before dawn") that something or someone comes on the scene to breathe new life and effect the answer to our prayer for a new Pentecost in our time.

I believe that both history and the Lord's promise to send the Holy Spirit are reasons to be confident about the future.

"Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age" (cf. Matthew 28:20).

I may not live long enough to see it, but I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new age in the Church. As Francis of Assisi revitalized the Church in the Middle Ages and Pope John XXIII refreshed the Church in the 20th century, someone or something will re-invigorate the Church of the 21st.

I believe the mission and ministry of the Church will be fulfilled. I believe in the dreams inspired by Vatican II. I believe what Archbishop Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil, once professed, "If one person dreams alone it remains a dream. But if we all dream together, it becomes reality."

Perhaps you do not share my beliefs or my dreams, but I think I am in good company when I am with Küng and Bonhoeffer and Camara --and Christ.

Tomorrow's Church

There is a formula, popularly known as the Hegelian dialectic, for investigating how an idea or movement develops. Although German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831) did not in fact initiate the specifics of this "thesis + antithesis = synthesis" formula (he gave his contemporary Immanuel Kant the credit), the "Hegelian formula" can be useful for assessing why things turn out the way they do.

Put most simply, how things turn out (the synthesis) is the result of the tension between an idea (the thesis) and its opposite (the antithesis).

You can see such tension in the deliberations and documents of the Second Vatican Council. As the Council developed, there emerged an obvious tension between two groups of bishops, a minority and a majority, sometimes described as traditionalists versus progressives.

The final documents often reflect the ongoing contest. For example, the majority wanted to emphasize the God-given rights and role of the laity in the Church's mission by affirming that the laity receive their commission through their baptism and confirmation (cf. Lumen Gentium 33).

The minority wanted to emphasize the divinely-appointed rights and role of the hierarchy by insisting that "the laity should, as all Christians, promptly accept in Christian obedience decisions of their spiritual shepherds, since they are representatives of Christ as well as teachers and rulers in the Church" (cf. LG, 37).

These two ideas or emphases are not strictly contradictory, but the final Dogmatic Constitution on the Church reflects the rivalry between the two forces. The give-and-take of the two Council parties is obvious. The document (the synthesis) is marked by compromise.

The collegial role of the bishops versus the monarchical role of the pope is another hotly contested issue, and in fact remains subject to debate and begging clarification. It will probably take Vatican III or its equivalent to sort out the differences and distinctions.

Perhaps another example of the contrasts can be found in the underlying dynamic of two themes: aggiornamento and ressourcement. Pope John XXIII described the Council as an occasion for updating and renewal (he used the Italian term aggiornamento). Several influential theologians at the Council urged a return to the sources, especially to the Scriptures and to the teachings of the early Church Fathers (they used the French expression ressourcement).

The juxtaposition of two seemingly opposing themes resulted in a synthesis which updated and renewed the Church by consulting the ancient past to rediscover the direction, simplicity and enthusiasm of our Church's origin.

Still another possible form of dialectic is operative today in the struggles between so-called conservative and liberal Catholics. There are those who want to restrain the direction and "spirit" of Vatican II and there are those who believe the Church has a long way to go before achieving the values proposed by the Council.

There are priests, sometimes dubbed "John Paul II priests" who emphasize liturgy, clerical dress, and blind obedience to papal teaching. There is also a cohort of priests, sometimes described as "Vatican II priests," who emphasize social justice, the role of the laity, and critical analysis of Vatican leadership.

There are Catholics in the pew who maintain that the Church has gone too far (too many lay people in the sanctuary, a loss of the sense of the sacred, too much dissent from official teaching and discipline), and there are Catholics in the pew who believe the Church has not gone far enough.

If the Hegelian dialectic is accurate (and experience seems to verify it), it is reasonable to say that the Church of the future will be a synthesis of the theses and antitheses of today. It looks as if the Holy Spirit, the promised guide and guardian of the Church, is working in the dialectics and resulting tensions of ecclesiastical politics.

I haven't studied Hegel's philosophy in many years, but I recall his proposing that Christianity (which he called the absolute religion) is a synthesis of two stages of religious consciousness: the religion of nature and the religion of the individual spirit.

He may not agree with my application of his insight to the Church of today, but neither would he fault me for trying to make sense of the tensions and contradictions we experience as members of that Church.

Tomorrow's Church then is likely to be a synthesis of the theses and antitheses of today --with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.