Church, Sacrament of the World

Introduction

The work which follows can be described as a fundamental ecclesiology. It is an ecclesiology because it is a theological reflection on the mystery of the church, the community of faith that is grounded in the mystery of Jesus Christ who commissioned it to bear witness to him until the end of time. It is fundamental because it is an exercise in theology that takes its cue from 1 Peter 3:15 – an attempt to render an account of Christian hope in a context where the church is in crisis, mired in scandal as a result of the sexual abuse of children by clergy and religious, so that it appears to most right-thinking people as an utterly corrupt institution that has betrayed the Gospel it ostensibly proclaims. As a consequence, six decades after Vatican II, the renewal of the church set in train by the Council seems to have stalled and the community of faith is battered and bruised, reeling from the exposure of its corruption and the crimes of those members who preyed on innocent and vulnerable children.

Engaging in such an ecclesiological exercise at this time is obviously a task fraught with risk, for the pitfalls are many and stumbling into them is rather easily managed. One such pitfall is to gloss over the scandals, which can be done in a wide range of ways: for example, by opting for a lofty spiritual perspective which identifies the “real” church with the perfect communion of saints in heaven while carefully distinguishing it from the very imperfect communion of sinful disciples “here below” that barely deserves to be described as church; or simply by viewing the church, and the Catholic Church in particular, as the epitome of evil and utterly toxic in every respect, so that a personal commitment to justice and to love, beyond all forms of ecclesial and even religious expression, becomes the measure of genuine integrity and worth. Finding a pathway between divergent viewpoints such as these and indeed many others, all of which are not short of adherents, is anything but easy.

While it is absolutely essential to name and identify the toxicity of evil within the church, it is also vital not to go overboard in blaming the church and its clerical leadership not just for specific instances of abuse and scandal but also for all the ills of society. Although individual religious and clergy, particularly those who are engaged in social apostolates are frequently lauded for their work, the overwhelming impression conveyed by much of recent popular commentary is that the scandals besetting the church are directly traceable to the machinations of an institution that is quite intent on maintaining firm control over society, even if that means suppressing individual freedoms in a way that is quite regressive and repressive. Ireland of the 1950s is frequently held to have been such a place: effectively ruled by bishops and clergy, politicians were merely pawns who “rubber-stamped” the doctrinal and moral teachings of the church which underpinned the constitutional framework of the entire society.

In this rather neat scenario, everybody else in society is basically left “off the hook” for the evils which occurred: parents, teachers, politicians, the entire legal system including the police and the judiciary, the press and media generally, the medical and nursing professions, the civil service and everybody else too – apart from a few honourable exceptions, most were sufficiently cowed that they were happy to cede control to a power-hungry hierarchy intent on bending society to its will in a fashion that even Machiavelli could scarcely have envisaged. Yet, notwithstanding the church’s failings and the excesses of an era which have been well catalogued, the scenario is far too simplistic to do justice to the complexity of the issues at stake. In finding an ecclesial angle for every social failing, it actually succeeds in highlighting how the church has now come to function as a convenient scapegoat for all of society’s failings, so that everyone else and every other institution, including various governments down through the decades, are absolved to a greater or lesser degree.

Descriptions of the church today are often sharply contrasting. On the one hand, there are those which affirm the extraordinary intimacy between God and the church as the body and bride of Christ witnessed to in the Scriptures; while, on the other hand, others prefer to focus on the flawed nature of the human institution that is marred by human corruption and sinfulness. These point to a fundamental tension that characterises every aspect of ecclesial life, but that is easily overlooked or even dismissed because of the particular standpoint one adopts. Over recent decades, in Ireland at any rate, an intriguing transposition from the former viewpoint to the latter has occurred: from a position where the church was perceived to dictate society’s agenda over against the perceived evils of the day, to one in which for many in society today it has come to function as the institutional embodiment of the evils over against which a free people stands and never ceases to denounce and reject.

This transposition presents huge challenges to faith, with which the reflections undertaken in the following pages attempt to grapple. The work is divided into three parts. In the first part, comprising four chapters, a theological analysis is undertaken of the current state of the church. Chapter 1 identifies numerous popular images of the church which are currently in vogue but which are also hugely problematic. In Chapter 2, the teaching of three popes – John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis – is examined with a view to presenting and evaluating their responses to the crisis as it unfolded during their pontificates. That is followed in Chapter 3 by a theological analysis of the crisis from structural and spiritual perspectives with a view to identifying a pathway forward. Chapter 4 then seeks to indicate in very general terms what approaches need to be avoided and which directions are preferable, if the different perspectives that have arisen are to be integrated coherently on the path to a more unified ecclesiology.

In Part II, the focus shifts to the relationship between the church and the world in order to probe that relationship from a perspective that highlights the sacramental nature of the church. In so doing, it highlights the manifold nature of that relationship, the complexity of which is such that different facets and stances must be held in tension: the church’s affirmation of a grace-filled world (Chapter 5); the church’s resistance to the sinfulness of the world (Chapter 6); the church’s outreach to the world in need of salvation (Chapter 7); and the church’s openness to learn from the world as created by God and gifted in myriads of ways (Chapter 8).

The third part of the work attempts to probe in greater depths a number of practical issues where the relationship between church and world varies from uneasy tension to downright hostility. Chapter 9 investigates how the church has struggled to find the correct balance between its remit as teacher and its need to be open to and learn from others. Chapter 10 takes its cue from Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, the encyclical on birth control which brought huge scorn on the Pontiff but was far more prescient than most are willing to concede. In the final chapter, then, the attempt is made to bring things together by focusing on the acute challenges facing the church at a time of unprecedented scientific progress, which is also marked by a sense of dread because of the catastrophic impact on the planet itself resulting from that progress.

A work in ecclesiology along the lines undertaken here, beginning with the scandal of clerical child and ending with the spectre of catastrophic climate change, is not for the faint-hearted. Yet unless believers are willing to name and confront in faith the grim realities that are now writ large in daily life and experience, their Christian theologies may be rather lacking in credibility. As I indicated in a previous work – From Misery to Hope: Encountering God in the Abyss of Suffering (Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010) – theology of the “armchair” or “lecture hall”¹ variety has little relevance in the context of the suffering that now characterises the lives of so many people across the world. Theology cannot be cocooned from that suffering, but rather must face it directly and seek to learn from the experience of those who endure it while also seeking to empower them and help them transcend it.

In that previous volume, the reality of suffering that provided a basis for reflection arose in Africa, that extraordinary beautiful continent which for centuries has disproportionately borne the burden of human evil in all its extremes and viciousness. The reality of suffering with which this work grapples is rather different, since it concerns the suffering of those abused by the clergy and religious of the Catholic Church in Ireland. The scandalous nature of that abuse was compounded by huge shortcomings in the response of those with ecclesial authority at the time, with the result that the credibility of the church’s witness to the Gospel was seriously compromised and the faith of many devout believers undermined. Acute theological and ecclesiological questions arise from that context, not least in relation to why anyone should continue to believe in a church where such wrongdoing is allowed to happen. Hence, how can one render an account of Christian hope in the church in a context where that hope seems to have been critically subverted by the church itself, so that victory of Christ over evil may be more even more clearly manifest and the salvation he achieved may be ever more effective in our lives?

In some respects, therefore, though its focus is very different this work represents a continuation of the earlier one, with ecclesiological questions that are contextual and experiential now very much to the fore. Likewise, the response to them is grounded on Christian tradition, displaying an openness to dialogue with other disciplines and learning from their insights, while all the time manifesting an eschatological orientation to the consummation of all things in Jesus Christ at the end of time.

The bulk of this work was written during the Covid-19 pandemic, when several lockdowns and periods of isolation presented opportunities for reflection, research and writing, and it would not have been possible without the contribution of so many. I wish to extend gratitude to former colleagues at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy who initially stimulated my reflections on this topic and helped me to bring it to completion. In particular, I am deeply grateful to Pat Claffey, co-editor with Marie Keenan and me of a volume – Broken Faith: Why Hope Matters (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2013) – that emerged out of a conference on the clerical child sexual abuse scandals at the Milltown Institute, Dublin, 6–9 April 2011. I wish to acknowledge all the contributors to and participants at that conference for the insights and experiences they shared. Special thanks go to Michael McCabe who, with great patience, read the entire work in draft form not just once but twice and whose insightful response and recommendations proved to be invaluable in helping me to maintain its focus and to develop it further. Last but certainly by no means least, special thanks go to my own family for their enduring love and to all my colleagues in the Society of African Missions (SMA), particularly those with whom I reside, for their continuous help, support and encouragement.

1 See Egan, From Misery to Hope, 159, and the references to the work of Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (London: Burns & Oates, 1980) 151; and the second edition of the same work, translated from the fifth German edition, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Crossroad, 2007), 141.