| The editors
of the National Catholic Reporter undertook this
project because we believed there was a compelling need to gather the
people of God
around their shared views as we look to the future. With the clergy
culture and hierarchy in disarray, there is a growing
yearning for shared leadership and vision. The Blueprint illustrates -- at
a time when the U.S. and Western Catholic
church focuses anxiously but almost exclusively on the clerical sexual
abuse scandal and the leadership crisis it
illustrates -- that there is a larger call for reform. What impressed us in this Blueprint project was the range of responses to the editors’ request. The volume of returns from the worldwide church was reassuring. The respondents were in thirds -- about one-third women religious, one-third laity and one-third priests. There was at least one cardinal, and at least three bishops. A Venezuelan candidly warned: “The Western World must urgently be re-evangelized...it is quickly falling back into paganism. The respondents see a Catholic church straining to move away from its Western and Eurocentric model to a regional and inculturated local church with collegial connections to the center. This is in the face of the current Rome-based Vatican leadership’s determination to retain its 19th-century European structures and models of church. There is genuine anxiety about a two-tier church, separate and unequal; genuine concerns expressed about the environment of “fear” in the church, particularly as it affects bishops and theologians. Rome and a hierarchy have lost two-way contact with the lives and hopes of the People of God. In less than a generation from now, the Catholics of color, Catholics of the non-Western world, will either have taken on the challenges, joys and burdens of shaping the church or will have left for other faiths and denominations where the welcome is more genuine, and the opportunities to minister and serve not subject to limitations. The next council must take seriously the question of freedom in the church. We need a new style of papacy that will reform present structures and present a type of decentralization that emphasizes the life of the people of God. Vatican II presented a theology of the people of God that has been ignored in practice in the life of the church. Clerical power must be inculturated and the church enter into the conflicts of the modern world. The church must prophetically and actively recommit
itself to the poor, and on behalf of peace. Restructuring the hierarchical/clerical systems of the church is No. 1 priority. Of course with full inclusion and participation. Roman centralization -- liturgy, theological expression, procedures, organizational structures,seminary training -- has become an obstacle to unity within the church. The council needs to promote a genuine respect for local churches and the leadership of those churches, including national conferences and the local bishop. Leadership within the church: Sad to say, too many of our bishops are more worried about having good relationships with the Vatican, obeying without question what is decided there, than about the real needs of their people. Synods should take on the character of genuinely consultative bodies with decision-making responsibility, rather than carefully staged comic operas. The responsible exercise of the teaching charism requires lifelong learning. If they aren’t learning, they have no business teaching! The issues of growing world poverty need to be addressed. Jesus came as poor to the poor. The church is more and more the church of the rich. The marginalization of the poor nations from the new global economy (the giants are mostly the “Christian” countries) is the very opposite of Jesus’ invitation to the poor and the marginalized. The question of our relation to the poor must be a primary issue in today’s Christian community. Church needs to speak out against the present globalization/free trade that makes corporate profit the top priority and governing value and is destroying the environment, and all social and political ties, and concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, hands that are not accountable to anyone. We need an unwavering and radical option for the poor that would give birth to a global campaign to arrange church financial and people resources toward the eradication of poverty, conflict, the oppressions of global capitalism and the destruction of the environment. The church in the new millennium must take the risk to shed the trappings of wealth and power. To do this the church will have to challenge others who hold the wealth and power that keep others down. The church of the poor: This very important theme was
just mentioned during Vatican II by a few participants,
but it remains a fundamental issue in our world. The church has to make
clear its unconditional option for the poor,
meaning for those who have been and are being excluded and ignored by the
neoliberal politics that almost
dominate our planet. |