December 2002 Call to Action News

Haight: Beyond crisis, U.S. Catholics have gifts for world church

Jesuit theologian Roger Haight of Cambridge, Mass., though still banned from teaching by the Vatican, painted a serenely idealistic scenario in which the American Catholic experience will change universal Church doctrine in four key areas: religious freedom, the role of women, the place of laity, and openness to other religions.

1. Religious liberty has already become Catholic doctrine in the Vatican II document shepherded to enactment by U.S. Jesuit John Courtney Murray. The American experience of religious pluralism and freedom as a totally positive birthright is still being internalized elsewhere, but will eventually enrich the whole church.

2. Women in the Church, as in the world, suffer massive injustice. Haight listed five areas of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, the prevalence of masculine cultural norms, and violence. Yet even though the institution is officially sexist, the vast majority of ministers in the U.S. are women. And American Catholic women have responded with "a massive movement of Catholic feminist theology," distinctively American but universally relevant. Haight believes these theological values are sure to take hold here, and the American church's special role is "to midwife these values into the consciousness and then the doctrine of the universal church."

3. The rise of the laity in the U.S. Church since World War II and since Vatican II is for Haight a genuine if quiet revolution. Over 300 centers in the U.S. now train laity for ministry, and highly educated laity function at all levels in many parishes. Whether or not priesthood is opened to the married and to women, collaboration and power-sharing by clergy and laity in many parishes is a brand new equation. The current sex abuse crisis reveals how little the clerical system has opened up to lay people at the diocesan level. But the wave of the future is the maxim, "Trust the laity." As the U.S. Church devises new, non-competitive collaboration of clerics and laity in dioceses, it has a chance to restructure patterns of authority for the universal church.

4. Openness to other world religions is evolving for American Catholics because most new immigrants since the 1960s are neither Christian nor Jew, but Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist. Haight said the instant broad resistance among U.S. Catholics to the recent Vatican document Dominus Iesus shows "an evolution of consciousness." American Catholics believe there is salvation outside of Christianity, but also believe Jesus Christ is the real mediator of salvation. The latter doctrine must be "taught in a new pluralist context and a non-competitive spirit," Haight said. Acknowledging the "autonomous truth" of non-Christian religions is happening both among theologians and in the sensus fidelium of American Catholics. Translating this into doctrine "is still far off, but one can see it on the horizon." As with religious freedom at Vatican II, the American Catholic experience of religious pluralism can become a gift to the worldwide church.