December 2002 Call to Action News

Crosby: Church at "Kairos" moment

In 1985, in a turning-point document on apartheid, South African religious leaders said the society was at a "kairos" time - "a moment that demanded conversion from the usual way of doing business into a whole new way of life." The hierarchical Catholic Church now faces its own "kairos," said theologian/author Michael Crosby.

"We will never be able to move beyond the conflicts between clerics and lay people, women and men, gays and straights, until we have a structural reordering of the core relationships that give one of the entities in the relationship absolute/virtual power over the other. Until this occurs, all we will have is more clericalism, sexism and heterosexism."

Though the hierarchy constantly attack fundamentalism in other religions and denominations, they are completely fundamentalist, Crosby said, in how they use Scripture to maintain their clerical, male, heterosexual structure. Even worse, they use that same fundamentalist approach in their statements about the historical Jesus. Dwelling on his historical masculinity, they choose to ignore the risen Jesus in our midst who, according to Paul, is neither male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free. Put into present day terms, the risen Jesus is neither male or female, cleric or lay, straight or gay.