1999 Conference Speaker's Texts
Hubert Feichtlbauer "Between Resignation and Hope: Survey of the Current State of Church Reform in Europe"Miriam Therese Winter "An Alternative Eucharistic Tradition"
Bishop Samuel Ruiz "Indigenous Cultures: A New Springtime for the Church"
John J.McNeill "Achieving Spiritual Maturity: A Necessary Step in the Pursuit of Global Justice"
Sr. Mary John Mananzan, OSB "The Jubilee from an Asian Woman's Perspective"
Kaye Ashe, O.P. "Women Celebrating Eucharist: Path to Transformation"
Mary Jo Meadow "Faith and Tolerance in an Interfaith Perspective"
Between Resignation And Hope:
Survey of the Current State of Church Reform in Europe
By Hubert Feichtlbauer, Vienna
Presented at Call to Action National Conference Milwaukee, 11/06/99
One year ago, it was all Halleluiah in Austria: A national assembly of delegates handpicked by the bishops and drawn from all walks of life and all regions had just endorsed with huge majorities in a meeting in Salzburg nearly all of the demands voiced in the church petition (referendum) conducted in June 1995. Everybody knew these results carried no canonical force, but they were interpreted in a broad public as dramatic evidence of the depth and breadth of support for reform. Virtually all factions of the Catholic church from the Neocatechumenate to the We Are Church Platform had participated in the "Dialogue for Austria", and all bishops had listend for three days to their deliberating and praying and singing together.
Wrote the National Catholic Reporter (Nov. 6, 1998): "Though their focus was on Austria, the decisions made...are likely to reverberate around the world." Thank you for still having this reverberation in your ears and minds and inviting me to this presentation. But the sound of music has changed meanwhile. Only one month later when Austria's bishops carried the report on these events to Rome one of them publicly disassociated himself from its contents thus inviting waverers to stumble and Vatican hardliners to tighten the leashes.
Conclusion 1: The fires of hope have been suffocated, but not put out; they smolder and will be rekindled.
Never has Helleluiah been followed by "Dies irae, dies illa" ("That day of anger") so quickly. Never has resignation been invited so promptly to substitute for jubilation. But I want to assure you that I have accepted this invitation in order to tell you that hope is still more in place than
resignation. My main argument is: This delegates'assembly in Austria has to this day been the strongest argument not only in our country that the main demands of church reform groups are not products of frustrated outsiders but shared by mainstream Catholics -- to the surprise of no one except those bishops who have lost touch with church realities.To be sure, the Delegates' Assembly in Salzburg had probably nurtured too many highflying hopes which, like Vatican Two, could not be fulfilled in a few years. In Austria, the episcopal confernce unable to come to unanimous conclusions decided to commission a few discussion groups and leave it to individual diocesan bishops to make the best of it: a strategy followed by most European episcopal conferences at present.
Some bishops try seriously, some do not try at all. But all of them must know they will not escape the questions inundating them from all corners of the world: Why does the Catholic church preach water and drink wine, as we say in German, when it comes to subsidiarity? Why do we call sexuality a special gift of God and deny this to our pastors? How can we assert the equality of men and women in our teaching to the world and not apply this principle in our church practice? How can we exclude church members from the eucharist meal and call our message "good news"? How can we call our church an important element of society and culture and defy a culture of democracy with authoritarian styles and feudal customs?
We cannot and we know it. But reform is resisted and renewal denied because the state of the church on the European continent once considered the hotbed of Catholicism has deteriorated dramatically over the last years. After World War Two gratitude for the outcome and hope for a new beginning made churches strong. The weakening came with a lessening of international tensions and growing abundance. Vatican II had brought a last wave of enthusiasm. It quickly died with the return of Roman power politics. The downfall of Communism again nourished hope for a new heyday of church life. This was the greatest mistake.
Conclusion 2: Europe's Catholic church lies in shambles. Renewal will come, but not from more power play.
Western Europeans in ever-growing numbers find the Catholic Church unattrative because it is completely out of step with the march of times. Eastern European nations show the strains from Communist rule: In the Eastern part of Germany and in the Czech Republic self-proclaimed atheists form majorities of 62 and 52 per cent respectively. Strong atheist minorities influence public opinion in Hungary (58%), Slovenia (58%) and Slovakia (22%). Poland's 90% of believers belie reality: Many of them simply came to decorate their nationalism with Vatican flags.
By the way - these figures also seem to belie accusations that without Vatican II we would have fewer atheists and agnostics: Eastern Euro- peans have hardly internalized the latest Council in their church lives (which explains their scarce representation in European reform groups), and yet their situation can hardly be considered exemplary for the West, just as Western standards are no model for the East either.
Statistical figures showing the growing shortage of priests in the U. S. A. recently revealed that church management in a few years would be faced with the choice between closing one third of the parishes or giving up the idea that the pastor of a parish would have to be a priest (National Catholic Reporter, Sept. 3, 1999). The situation in Europe is no better. In France the number of priests dropped from over 41,000 to under 29,000 in the two decades before 1996. In Germany the decline in this period was from 24,000 to under 21,000; in Belgium from 13,000 to 9,000. In Germany only 8000 out of some 13,000 parishes have their own priest. Many European priests cover several, in France up to ten parishes.
Sunday observance doesn't make the church look better either. In West Germany it dropped from 51 per cent in 1950 to 22 per cent in 1989, and the situation is pretty much the same in other Western European countries. Catholic baptisms in the Netherlands decreased from 36 per cent of all newborn children to 24 per cent between 1992 and 1996.
However: At the same time a strong wave of spiritual interest seems to sweep Europe. The Center for the Study of New Religions in Torino (Italy) says 90 per cent of Europeans believe in God -- up an astonishing 20 per cent in the last decade. Many Christians maintain at least one tie to their church: 95 per cent of the funerals are religious. For spiritual nourish- ment, however, more and more Europeans turn to new movements and to an eclectic blend of spiritual practices. Esoteric and New Age groups grow rapidly, especially thanks to young people who are increasinlgy alienated from their church, as the European Values study conducted regularly since 1990 reveals.
Conclusion 3: The "secularization" deplored in the working document of the Bishops' Synod is really a crisis of the institutional church; people seek spirituality outside Canon Law.
The recent Synod in its working document (instrumentum laboris) acknowledged the miserable situation of the church without belittling or beautifying it. This is positive. But the papers and speeches almost exclusively looked for reasons outside the church and blamed secular humanism, individualism, egotism, nihilism, hedonism, consumerism and whatever --ism offered itself for an explanation, but hardly thought of pointing the finger toward themselves: Could the indifferentism of the institutional church toward reform be one of the reasons, too?
The bishops chose the story of the Emmaus disciples who would walk and talk with Jesus and recognize him only when he broke the bread with them, as a starting point for their deliberations: a very good idea! Yet, somehow it all came out very arrogant: Look, we are Jesus whom you all, sinners of the world, do not recognize! We will open your eyes! But the fact is: We all are Emmaus disciples in need of Jesus opening our eyes -- we all, the bishops and the pope included!
This debate was not on the bishops'agenda, though. In spite of strong Vatican urges in the working documents to include as many believers as possible in preparatory discourse such discussions took place practically nowhere. One of Austria's bishops whom we had invited to answer a few questions concerning the synod wrote us back that he needed no "lecturing", he knew what was his business as bishop and he would not succumb to "pressure groups" like We Are Church. Friends from the International Movement We Are Church (IMWAC) informed us that the situation was very much the same in most other European countries although they could not even as our bishops indicate we had had our "Dialogue for Austria" already, and that was enough talking.
Conclusion 4: In the Bishops' Synod celibate gentlemen talked behind the walls of the Vatican (from which women and children are banned) to each other -- supposedly about "the joys and hopes, the sorrows and fears" (gaudium et spes...) of human beings from whose lifestyles, however, they have long estranged themselves momentously.
The International Movement of the Church and the European Network Church on the Move chose a different approach. Representatives of IMWAC (founded in 1995 after the Church Referendum in Austria, international meetings in Rome 1996 and 1997 and in Mamolsheim near Frankfurt, Germany, 1998) and of EN (founded in 1991, active in eleven European countries at present) met in Santa Severa outside Rome in October 1999 while the Bishops' Synod did business in the Vatican. Some one hundred women and men from mainly Central and Western European countries, joined by most welcome guests from North and South America talked an listened to each other, debated and celebrated, sang and drank together and finally passed a document
describing Europe as a continent of stark contrasts where war and the taming of war through law, where holocaust and human rights had had their origins.Today, the document said, Europe is a continent of great intellectual and spiritual diversity, illustrated by, amongst others, the presence of over six million Muslims and some three million Buddhists in addition to followers of other faiths plus millions of atheists and agnostics. The church, we demanded, should accept this diversity as an opportunity and help establish a culture of peaceful dialogue to come to grips with it.
The final Declaration of IMWAC and EN calls for an "extensive reform of the Roman Catholic Church" and calls the "Jubilee Year" of 2000 an "occasion for initiating bold changes in ecclesiastical structures and in some papal decisions which cause so much suffering to many Christians, e.g. not allowing (diocesans) to choose their pastors; forbidding contra- ception; denying the Eucharist to divorced and remarried people; forcing presbyters to remain single; rejecting the full equality of women and men in ordained ministries; desregarding the rights of homosexual people; forbidding interconfessional Eucharist of sisters and brothers of different Christian churches; refusing the reintegration of married priests." The document also appeals to the Holy See to finally "reverse their disgraceful refusal to sign the European Convention on Human Rights" passed more than half a century ago.
Conclusion 5: Eureopean reform groups are in total agreement about what should be changed in the Catholic Church: the authoritarian approach to pastoral issues.
The main achievement of the IMWAC and EN meeting in Santa Severa last October in my opinion was something that truly revealed the working of the Holy Spirit in this assembly of some one hundred representatives from thirteen European countries and regions: the emergence of a cohesive concept of our church. We have often been criticized that our demands were patched together without convincing connection: Bishops' appoint- ments and celibacy, women's ordination and language of catechesis -- what do they have in common? The answer which emerged in hour-long discussions in Santa Severa: All these demands can be derived from a certain concept of church differing from the one we experience today.
What we know today is a men-oriented church with authoritarian structures and feudal forms of governance in which decisions are made behind closed doors and without consultation of those concerned; reprimands for strayers like favors paternalistically extended are both dealt at discretion. The church we envision is a church of brotherly and sisterly exercise of power with members of equal standing based on the founding sacrament of baptism but endowed with a great diversity of gifts and charisms for service. This church will be a church of shared respon- sibilites with clerics and laypeople of both sexes participating indecision-making and the principle of subsidiarity not only taught all governments of the world but applied on all levels of church life, too.
The age-honored principle of Leo I in the fifth century Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari debet ("What concerns all should be treated by all") will be revived and allow no decisions of central church authorities without transparent consultations of those concerned, individuals or institutions like parishes, dioceses &c. Before proclaiming truths of faith in "definitive" terms the pope would have to consult not only all bishops of the world but make sure that before they answer they have first consulted theologians and knowledgeable laypeople in their dioceses so that what is put forward "definitively" is truly the universal belief of the church (sensus fidelium). And "the whole community of the faithful...cannot err in matters of faith," as Lumen Gentium says in # 12 (referring to 1 John 20 and 27: "You have had the Holy Spirit poured out on you by Christ") and as the Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats and confirms in # 92. The community of the faithful consisting of men and women with equal rights within and without the church is ready to shoulder this burden of their responsibilities.
Only a church whose leaders asccept for themselves what they expect of us "others" will be trustworthy and trusted again. Therefore the IMWAC/EN meeting in Santa Severa called for "the establishment of a representative council to provide for statutory government within the church" which would have to include "the participation of all concerned in decision-making, the separation of powers and responsibilites, due process, subsidiarity in all areas and at all levels" and "freedom of conscience guaranteed in every case." We called for a bishops' synod on a permanent basis, open to full participation of all the People of God, to govern the entire Catholic Church.
Finally we strongly urged new intiatives to continue the ecumenical dialogue with reformist and orthodox churches, called for the Christian Community at large to recognize each church's ministries and sacraments ("Theological disputes must no longer stay in the way of intercommu- nion"), requested the starting of "a process towards a truly Universal Council of all churches which may allow for the reconciliation of all disciples of Jesus" and urged interfaith dialogue especially between the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. "The Church," the Declaration concludes, "is the Assembly of God's People. It is our common task to bear witness to the love of God."
Conclusion 6: Our demands for reform are not a patchwork of disorderly wishful thinking but a set of goals directly derived from a consistent concept of church.
IMWAC and EN members wanted to deliver this Declaration to the Synod's Secretary General, Cardinal Jan P. Schotte. He let us know in a letter that it would suffice to drop it in a mailbox. We chose the fax machine to do the job before we presented our message to national and international media. Then we made a serious attempt to find some repre- sentative of the Synod fathers to accept a copy at a Vatican entrance which Italien police didn't like because it was an "unregistered demonstration". Registered or not: A member of the Swiss Guard, after some phone calls, finally picked up the envelope, even wrote a receipt, and the connection between Bishops' ancSynod and "Shadow Synod" was made.
It was also made inasmuch as journalists present at our press conference carried questions from there to the press conference of the Synod which took place an hour later and gave German Auxiliary Bishop Reinhard Marx a chance to repeat the old dictum that "questions of church structure" were not the most important ones. When I asked him whether it was a question of structure or of principle if we believe in and pray to a God who would despise women celebrants Bishop Marx felt truly saddened: "How can we use such an approach to defining God? We must not thus dictate God who he has to be." O.k., but who did: the questioner or the pope ("We have no mandate...") or Bishop Marx who said "he"?...
Conclusion 7: The curial organizers of the Bishops' Synod did not want any contact with the faithful outside. They preferred closed doors and sealed walls to keep other People of God at a distance.
Well, the participants of the Santa Severa Forum of European Catholics had good reasons for being happy and satisfied, media coverage of their meeting included. However, they must ask themselves a few critical questions too in order not to deceive themselves. The questions are asked frequently also from the outside: Whom do you represent? Who mandated you to conduct a "shadow synod" near Rome? In whose behalf do you raise issues and propose solutions for the church?
The theological answer is easy: Baptism authorizes each and everyone of us. Fine. But baptism authorizes our Catholic opponents too. (Which we do not deny.) Then: over two million people who put their signatures under our petitions authorize us. Over one half million alone came from small Austria -- roughly every second regular churchgoer. But didn't anger and ire over provocative behavior of Church prelates contribute more to these signatures than the longing for women priests? In 1995: Maybe. But empirical research carried out by church and non-church academic insti- tutions have proven time and again that virtually all of our demands are shared by huge majorities in most countries at least of the Western hemisphere. And the already-mentioned Delegates' Assembly of bishop-picked participants in Austria a year ago again showed that mainstream Catholics, not eccentrics on the fringe, favor equal rights for women in the church, a more positive teaching of family and sex morals, optional celibacy for secular clergymen, equal rights for women and decentralization of power in our church by 80 and more per cent!
As a matter of fact, all these topics were dealt with in other regional synods too: by representatives from North and South America in 1997, by Asians and bishops from Oceania in 1998. The call for decentralization has been voiced over and over again -- by former Archbishop John P. Quinn of San Francisco (who called subsidiarity within the churc h a "dogmatic necessity"), by former Archbishop Franz König of Vienna (who recently said bishops were true collaborators and not mere agents of the pope and decentralization was a most important task for the next pontificate), by the late Archbishop of Westminister, Basil Hume, and by numbers of other bishops from a broad spectrum of viewpoints. One of the most tradition-alist members of the European Synod, Archbishop Cardinal Joachim Meisner, deplored the "mounds of paper" flowing from the Vatican to the dioceses and hardly bearing fruit all the time. Meisner called for a new partnership between the curia and the local churches: an appeal that surely suggested "the concern cuts across the usual ideological divisions." (National Catholic Reporter).
The most outspoken among the bishops, it seemed, was Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Archbishop of Milan, often referred to as papabile, who supposedly called for a gathering of bishops from all over the world together with representatives of religious congregations and laity of both sexes to talk about church government of the future. This, it is true, could only be read in independent newspapers because the official release of the Sala Stampa had castrated his speech completely. The same thing happened, of course, in many other instances as it had happened in previous synods. And it happened within the synod proceedings that curial bishops blocked debates on certain themes.
Scottish Archbishop Keith Michael Patrick O'Brien of St. Andrews and Edinburgh in a statement to the U.S. reporters referred to "opposition to any discussion" about topics the curia didn't like. This created tension between curial and diocesan bishops, O'Brien said: "It hasn't quite come to blows, but views were put across very, very strongly." He cited the issues of married priests, celibacy and general rites of reconciliation as examples where curial cardinals forbade further debate on proposals put forward by diocesan bishops even if they were excellent theologians too.
Such behavior, of course, reminds us of the humiliating treatment accorded the episcopal conference of Germany this year whose near-unanimous consensus on continuing pregnancy counseling before abortion decisions was twice turned over by Vatican officials who pretended to know better what was good for the church in Germany. The fact that Germany's bishops in secret balloting reelected Karl Lehmann of Mainz their leader with 75 per cent of the vote clearly proved even conservative pastors were upset about such interference.
Conclusion 8: Over-extended Vatican centralism is a sure bet to be counterproductive. The call for decentralization of power and subsidiarity within the Catholic Church will be irresistible in a new pontificate.
Sharing of power and responsibilites would, by the way, also facilitate reform. If curial officers fear reforms demanded in certain parts of the world could have detrimental effects on other regions why not try them out where they are requested and test them there? If useful, they can be introduced in other regions or worldwide; if they are a flop they can be discarded without harming the whole church.
So we have good reasons to carry on our work in a growing number of European countries, but we must not close our eyes to the fact that the number of people ready and willing to engage themselves in such reform activities is small. Majorities are aware of the necessity for reform. Only minorities, however, are ready to work for it. A growing number of the faithful just lean back and see whether the church is still able to improve its conduct and its appearance.
This is quite clearly the case with the younger generation. They are faced with innumerable offers in all areas of everyday life. They are used to pick and choose. They are not used to fight. Even if our own children may consider themselves active Catholic Christians in parishes, in youth groups, in charity work, they wonder how on earth their parents or grandparents could get so angry over bishops or the pope. They couldn't care less what is said in a pastoral or an encyclical letter.
They take from the church what they like, and leave what they dislike (which is ever more). And therefore they do not work for a better church in our groups.Conclusion 9: We lack young people. We must not close our eyes to this harsh truth. We are an army of gray panthers with just about a platoon of youngsters in it. We have a deficiency. If it continues the victims will not be us but our whole community of faith. We must beseech the bishops: In the interest of our church - cultivate your critics!
O.k., they have at least cultivated us, and so we will carry on. I will therefore draw to a close by telling you about some of the activities just undertaken or planned for the near future in European countries. In ITALY the Communità di Sant'Egidio managed to reach hundreds of thousands in their own state and in other countries with their appeal to all governments of the world to observe a moratorium on the death penalty by the Jubilee Year of 2000. We pray their signatures will not be ignored.
In GERMANY We Are Church people strongly support plans for lay organizations to take over the legally established pregnancy counseling system to be given up by the bishops on Vatican orders. Numerous purple stole activities reminded the public of our concept of egalitarian gender roles also within the church. Next April 29 was proclaimed Day of the Deaconess. On Vocations Sunday 1999 a strong appeal was made for lay preaching. We Are Church also stressed attempts to seek coperation with other reform groups such as Building the Church Together by Kolping (Catholic young workers association) and the Church From Below initia- tive. In 2000 our grassroots movement will also participate in the 94th German Catholic Rally (Katholikentag) in Hamburg if an implementation of at least some of the demands of the church referendum can be expected. Last summer We Are Church also published a Publik-Forum special entitled Christian Freedom Instead of Holy Dominium.In BELGIUM Catholics of the organization A Different Face of the Church on the occasion of the establishment of an official Muslim Council
elected by Muslims living in the country demanded a similar institution for Catholics who would no longer be satisfied if their problems were dealt with in negotiations between the government and the bishops or the papal nuncio only. They demand a Catholic Council to be elected in every diocese and to send representatives to an Episcopal Council for negotiations with the government. A Flemish Working Group for Human Rights in the Catholic Church founded in 1992 continues to collect reports from people who feel their rights were violated by church superiors; so far some 300 such reports have been presented, mainly concerning sexual abuse in " pastoral relationships."The Eighth of May Movement in THE NETHERLANDS has concentrated on efforts to spotlight situations of injustice and the denial of human dignity in church and world affairs of the country. Instead of one big event the organization in 1999 held small-scale meetings in seventeen places; in the year of 2000 another national convention will be held. The Movement called for a humane policy vis-à-vis "illegal" refugees and supported the demand for condoms to control the frightful effects of the HIV virus. It continues to work for the ethical, spiritual and social dimensions of a multi-cultural and multi-religious European Union as demanded by the Maastricht Manifestation of August 1998.
We want to commend the European Network Church on the Move for concentrating on the projects of a statute (constitution) for the Catholic Church and an analysis of the financial situation of local churches. We are happy that brothers and sisters in tiny Liechtenstein quickly founded an "organization for an open church" which joined IMWAC after Bishop Wolfgang Haas, totally disliked in Switzerland, in a move typical of Vatican "diplomacy" had been appointed pastor of the newly-created archdiocese of Liechtenstein. We also welcome the openness of the Council of Episco-pal Conferences of Europe whose secretary received Network delegates for a long and relaxed informal dialogue in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Finally, We Are Church in AUSTRIA despite all setbacks experienced has just published a booklet containing the wording of all votes taken at the Salzburg Delegates' Assembly a year ago and advising users on ways and means to implement them with or without the bishops. We also started a training program "to prepare" for future women priests which shocked timid bishops and published volume # 3 of the "pastoral letters written by the flock" (on Women, after # 1 on sexuality and # 2 on power in the church). Next year an international theological symposium will be staged in Vienna which was iniated by We Are Church and will be cosponsored by Catholic Action, the School of Catholic Theology at the University of Vienna and public radio and television (ORF). The theme will be: How does the Catholic Church reach "definitive" assertions of truth? We are proud of these cosponsors because it shows that our movement is considered a serious partner in a serious, indispensable debate in society at large. I think we can now also draw some conclusions as to how our work could and maybe should be carried on.
Conclusion 10: To be even more effective in the future we should cooperate closely with notable theologians and with organizations of mainstream Catholicism to underline our intention to renew, not to rebel, to improve, not to destroy, and to lift up, not to discour- age the hearts and minds of all who love the church of Jesus Christ
Ours is a time of rising despair and frustration. Ours is also the duty to be "ready at all times to answer anyone asking to explain our hope" (1 Peter 3, 15). And why don't we look for an answer at Jesaiah (43, 18) to whom God said: "Do not cling to events of the past...Watch for the new things I am doing! They are happening already -- you can see it now!"
