The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church
By | Mar 29, 2007
(Extract from The Liberation of the Laity: in search of an accountable church By Paul Lakeland) Let us examine the existential condition of laypeople in the church. The test case will be laypeople in the North American Catholic Church. Among the so-called developed countries in the world, the church in the United States retains the highest level of practice, and is the church in which the laity have come to assume increasingly visible roles in the day-to-day work.
If the vocation of the laity is to human freedom, their existential predicament is that they are in chains. The freedom of the children of God, proclaimed by the gospel, and in many ways the goal of Christian mission to the world, is transgressed within the community of the faithful itself. Great advances have indeed been made but it is not the same thing to be active and free. The slaves who maintained the economy of the southern states for so many years were active, talented, creative individuals, but they were not free. The Catholic laity, for the most part, do not know of their oppressed condition and would deny it if it were argued in their presence. There are, of course, many forms of oppression. Perhaps the worst, spiritually, if not physically, is the one in which the captives have been induced to embrace their own oppression. It is just such a condition of “structural oppression†that I believe is the present condition of the laity in the church. Because the laity are oppressed, the church itself is oppressed.
The leadership crisis that has rocked the American church in the first few years of the new century has provided the church with a kairos, a moment of opportunity, to recognize and respond to the structural problems. However, recognition of the problem did not need to wait for such a deplorable example of its effects, any more than dealing with this problem will necessarily remove its underlying causes. Here, we need to paint a picture of the crisis of leadership in the life in the church and of the squandering of lay experience that it reveals.
The crisis of leadership in the church today
There is a crisis of leadership in the church and the laity need to come to the rescue. In so many ways the promise of Vatican II has been unfulfilled, none more so than the issue of co-responsibility about which Cardinal Suenens wrote so presciently some thirty years ago. The last thirty years have seen a consistent return to a highly centralized authority structure in which even the bishops are frequently reduced to advisory roles. Some find intrusiveness extending to extraordinary levels. Witness the former Archbishop of Milwaukee Rembert Weakland’s forceful rebuttal of efforts to deny his authority to make architectural modifications in the cathedral in Milwaukee. If at least some of the bishops feel harassed, then what of the priests, and still more the laity?
Consider some examples. Large numbers of the laity feel that the time is right for the ordination of married men to the priesthood. Many have no objection to the ordination of women. Many believe that homosexual Christians should not be expected to live celibate lives. The church’s teaching on artificial contraception is a dead letter. What the people want is sound preaching on the scripture, help in living holy lives in the midst of challenges of our world, and leadership that has some sense of the priorities of Christians today.
What we have is an episcopate of men selected more for their commitment to the party line on outmoded ideas about contraception, ordination and homosexuality, more for their administrative capabilities than for their stature as spiritual leaders. Often fearful and disengaged from ordinary life, for the most part unimpressive rather than evil or Machiavellian, they do not carry conviction. The capable minority, especially if they are to show any independence of judgment (which in most cases means they were made bishops before the present pope took office) are struck in small dioceses or hidden away in assistant bishop positions. The major metropolitan sees tend to be occupied by people who are made in the image of John Paul ll, though not of the same stuff. Often bright, frequently personally holy, usually extremely hard-working, they are there to block change and to shore up the present system.
This crisis of leadership is not attributable to the fact that all bishops are celibate, or that they are all men. The crisis is linked much more to the fact that leadership is the province of an elite caste, two of whose characteristics happen to be celibacy and maleness. Looking at the church as a system we can see clearly that the greater the authority the individual possesses in the structure of the church, the further divorced the individual is from the ordinary life of the people he is supposed to lead . There is nothing wrong with being a male celibate but the restriction of leadership to celibates impoverishes the institution by the exclusion of so much experience that the celibate can not access.
The Liberation of the Laity
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Catholic tradition currently squanders lay experience and that this is directly connected to the church’s dysfunctionality. This is most tragically apparent in the effective absence of lay experience from the formation of teaching on personal, and particularly on sexual, morality. In the Catholic tradition, of course, laypeople have neither active nor passive voice. They cannot be elected to church office and they are not allowed to participate in the election of others….
Given the fact of lay exclusion from the voice of the church, why is it that there is little or no organized attempt to change this? Why, if the problem of lack of lay voice exists, is resistance so spotty? Is it that most people do not see a problem and those who do are just constitutionally indignant, or is there some other explanation?
The low level of lay protest at the role in the church is a product of the systemic or structural oppression of the laity. The concept of structural oppression was developed in religious reflection first of all in Latin American theology of liberation and it by no means requires that we understand the individuals occupying positions of power within the system to be consciously engaged in the physical or emotional abuse of those victimized by the structures, in this case, the claim that the clergy consciously oppresses or abuses non-clergy. The claim is only that the division between clergy and laity, as understood in the Catholic tradition, systematically subordinates and undervalues the lay lifestyle, lay talent, lay leadership, lay experience and lay spirituality. While the patterns cannot be equated to those of slavery, they certainly reproduce in striking ways the structures of racism and sexism.
The issue under consideration here is more fundamental than a mere call for a better attitude on the part of the clergy or laity, or for the laity to be allowed to exercise more non-sacramental functions in the daily life of the church. On the one hand, the “clergy†in the clergy/lay distinction simply indicates those members of the church who happen as a matter of fact to have been singled out in the community to lead in its sacramental leadership, while the “laity†are those who do not feel called to this particular ministry. This in itself is not oppressive. The problem lies much more in the fact that the “clergy†is also a designation for a group of people who hold all authority and exercise all leadership in the church by virtue of possessing a call to preside at worship, which is by no means the same thing.
While it would undoubtedly be beneficial to the church to have many more laypeople in visible leadership positions, and while their exclusion is symptomatic of their subordination, it is not that we should locate the principal battleground of systemic oppression. Much more troubling is the crippling effect on lay consciousness of lack of voice and its concomitant marginalization, a phenomenon that as a matter of fact has as one of its consequences the decreased probability that many laypeople would be qualified to put themselves forward for just the sorts of positions of leadership in the church, while the notion of the “laity†is not in itself degrading or inappropriate, the impoverishment of lay culture is and lay expectation resulting from a systemic oppression is deeply problematic … Like the denizens of a culture of poverty, the laity are depressed. And because they are depressed, they are less likely to be aware that they are oppressed.
The first step in emergence from structural oppression is for the laity is to move from depression to a recognition of their oppression, and the prerequisite for this is to be able to name their own oppression. In liberation this is called “conscientization.†And it is the primary awakening of a community, through which it begins the struggle to pass from being an object or victim of history, as defined by someone else, to subject of its own history. Through conscientization people begin to take charge.
The conscientization of large segments of the Catholic laity, at least in Massachusetts, took place in the full glare of the media spotlight during the early months of 2002 and was symbolized by the extraordinary growth of the Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) from a few hundred members to about sixteen thousand during the first half of the year. Over and over again we saw hordes of ordinary, faithful, churchgoing Catholics standing up to protest against the behaviours of the church in general, and their archbishop in particular. Beginning with protests over Cardinal Law’s poor handling of the sex-abuse crisis, the movement quickly broadened its attention to structural reform of the church in general, accurately seeing that the cardinal’s behaviour only hinted at a much larger problem. But while Catholic laity all over the country mirrored Boston’s protest, and while some of them joined VOTF, the voices continue to be heard most loudly in Boston. The catalyst for conscientization was so much more flagrantly evident in Massachusetts. While the catalyst was not obvious, the move out of depression into conscientization did not take place to the same degree,
Infantilization. Conscientization. Self-definition. These are the Egypt, Sinai and promises land of lay liberation.
These basic historical moments in the story of liberation theology may well be paralleled directly in the story we shall one day be able to tell about lay Catholic experience and the emergence of a lay theology of liberation. In the local parish situation at the present day most of the laity are relatively passive and uncomplaining at least in public. Some parishes allow for lay involvement but the majority do relatively little of this, sometimes because the laity willing to involve themselves do not exist, in itself a further sign of the reality of the culture of oppression/depression.
A major element in intensifying division between laity and clergy is the issue of clergy lifestyle (celibate, male) which creates a class division as pronounced as that between rich and poor in Latin America. The division is not largely along economic lines, except in the poorer parishes, where the pastor is living at a level of material comfort unknown to his parishioners. Lay and clerical lifestyles represent two different worlds. Different forms of security, responsibility and accountability mark the two ways of life.
Catholic clergy have the most secure lifestyles of anyone in the community, except perhaps the fabulously wealthy. While not highly paid, their material circumstances are never under threat of downsizing, outsourcing and the other forms of new social barbarism that render even the upper middle-class anxious today are unknown to the clergy. They have few if any worries for themselves. As celibate individuals they do not know many of the more demanding forms of personal responsibility and as essentially private, bachelor individuals, their ethical accountability in small matters and large is located in their own consciences. The laity, on the other hand, typically live with those who hold them accountable and to whom and for whom they are responsible.
The lifestyle divide is not the source of the problem of lay oppression. The real problem is that all forms of authority, influence, leadership and power in the church are reserved to a small minority of Catholic Christians distinguished from others by their possession of a radically different lifestyle. What we see is a true caste system, by vocation if not by birth. The laity are defined by the clergy. Laity, however well qualified or with whatever virtues and talents, are children in the house of the Lord. Attempts at real resistance, sporadic as they are interpreted as trouble-making, grumbling dissent that is not to be tolerated.
If change in the church is to occur, there must be a mechanism and an agenda. There is a clear need for mass conscientization. If the laity are ever to be given voice in the church we must speak out.
The Liberation of the Laity: in search of an accountable church, by Paul Lakeland, New York, continuum, 2002, 311 pp.
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