Response to “Called to Be Catholic”
Apr 14, 2005
August 12, 1996, given in response to the statement by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin entitled "Called to be Catholic: Church in a Time of Peril." By Cardinal Bernard Law.
Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago has announced today a project which he has agreed to lead that is called "the Catholic Common Ground Project." He is joined in this effort by a group of Catholics including bishops, priests, religious, lay women and men. The several signatories from within the Archdiocese of Boston are persons for whom I have great esteem.
In connection with the announcement of this "project," a statement has been released which was prepared by the National Pastoral Life Center. This statement, titled "Called to Be Catholic," is proposed as "a good framework for fostering careful reflection on issues of concern."
It is, I think, unfortunate that the cardinal's initiative has tied itself to this statement. The statement is not very helpful. Throughout there are gratuitous assumptions, and at significant points it breathes an ideological bias which it elsewhere decries in others. The fundamental flaw in this document is its appeal for "dialogue" as a path to "common ground."
The church already has "common ground." It is found in sacred Scripture and tradition, and it is mediated to us through the authoritative and binding teaching of the magisterium. The disconnect that is so often found today between that Catholic common ground and faith and practice of some Catholics is alarming.
Dialogue as applied to this pastoral crisis must be clearly understood, however. Dissent from revealed truth or the authoritative teaching of the church cannot be "dialogued" away. Truth and dissent from truth are not equal partners in ecclesial dialogue. Dialogue as a pastoral effort to assist in a fuller appropriation of the truth is laudable. Dialogue as a way to mediate between the truth and dissent is mutual deception.
The statement raises the issue of the faithful's "reception" of a truth or in the incorporation of a decision or practice into the church's life. Surely this is an issue worthy of ongoing theological consideration. Reception by the faithful cannot be measured by polls which are subject to all the pressures of contemporary culture, however, anymore than the schism of all the bishops save one in Henry VIII's England can be ascribed to an exercise of collegiality.
Recent pastoral statements of the bishops of the United States on peace and on the U.S. economy were not universally well received by the faithful. If polls are to be believed, the position of the bishops of Massachusetts in opposition to capital punishment does not enjoy overwhelming support from the faithful. The church must teach "in season and out of season, when convenient and inconvenient." Careful discernment must be used in assessing what is called "reception."
The statement proposes as the sixth of seven "working principles" for dialogue the following: "We should not rush to interpret disagreements as conflicts of starkly opposing principles rather than as differences in degree or in prudential pastoral judgments about the relevant facts." Fair enough, as long as it is admitted that "conflicts of starkly opposing principles" can occur. When such conflict involves dissent from authoritative church teaching, that conflict cannot be dialogued away. Dissent either yields to assent or the conflict remains irresolvable.
In Paragraph 18 of 27, the statement introduces the thought that "Jesus Christ, present in Scripture and sacrament, is central to all we do; he must always be the measure and not what is measured." I would have preferred to have the statement begin at that point.
The crisis the church is facing can only be adequately addressed by a clarion call to conversion. Jesus' question to Peter must be responded to by each of us: "Who do you say that I am?" Only with this beginning will institutional renewal and reform be authentic.
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Response to “Called to Be Catholic”