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Empowerment for laity: how it can be Jun 12, 2009
By Thomas R. Keene
"Tom Keene"
Some forty years ago, a fresh wind blew through the Roman Catholic Church. In an historical gathering of the church's bishops, windows opened to new understandings about freedom of conscience, dialogue with people of other religions, how to worship meaningfully, and especially how to be authentically a People of God in this modern world. The event was called Vatican II. Catholics came to see their heritage as empowering them to dream and achieve new possibilities for themselves, their church and the world.
Out of that came a prophetic vision of a church radically empowered by its members. Donald Nicodemus's book, The Democratic Church, outlines an essential part of that vision. Imagine a two thousand year old institution having modeled itself on the character of the Roman Empire reshaping itself into a model of democratic self-government. This is exactly what Nicodemus does. Chapter by chapter, Nicodemus draws on eight principles long innate within the church's history and tradition to show how an empowered people can change themselves and the world for the better. He works like an archeologist digging out buried pillars that can support a democratic church.
In the chapter titled, The Existentialist Perspective, Nicodemus shows the church moving form a self-image of Platonic idealism to a perception of itself grounded on the realities of experience and clear-headed recognition of its strengths and weaknesses.
With The Principle of Doctrinal Development, we see the church becoming free of old formulations that restrict thinking and developing new ways of understanding essential truths and articulating them so we and the world can grasp them.
The People of God shows how Vatican II defined the church as a holistic, organic body empowereed by a common Spirit, each part essential and serving the whole. No longer would the laity be limited to "pray, pay and obey."
With The Personal Right to Religious Freedom, Nicodemus shows how such a right can be spelled out in constitutional forms and structures that vitalize the exercise of the responsibilities that come with all rights and thereby enliven the life of the church community.
Explicating The Experiential Basis for Assent, Nicodemus describes how for any faith to be an authentic base for integrity and spiritual growth it must be grounded on experience rather than just logical conceptualizations. Such experiential grounding of one's faith engenders one's personal conscience with a confidence to explore the mysteries of one's own religion and that of others with openness and respect.
Nicodemus shows how The Supremacy of Conscience as a traditional Catholic principle will work to ground the members of a democratic church on the essentials of personal and communal integrity that a functioning democracy requires.
In The Principle of Subsidiarity, Nicodemus explains how this mainstay of Catholic social justice teaching claims that at all levels of any society, church or organization, a preferential maximizing of personal and collective responsibility at the base, rather than at higher levels, makes for a more effective and just organization.
Finally, Nicodemus articulates The Prophetic Principle, which has its roots in the Catholic belief that each person baptized into the life of Christ shares in the prophetic dynamic of Jesus. Nicodemus shows how this is the dynamic whereby church leaders are informed about what works and does not work.
Readers of this newly reprinted book published in 1968, at the peak of church members hope for renewal, may wonder what happened to this vision of a democratic church. What happened is lucidly documented and analyzed by historian Gary Wills in two recent works: PAPAL SIN: structures of deceit (2000) and Why I am a Catholic (2002). In sum, the dream of a wholly renewed church was systematically undermined over the forty some years since Vatican II by the Vatican Curia spearheaded by the leadership of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
For readers of any faith who hunger to see religious power democratized, Donald Nicodemus's, The Democratic Church, constitutes a blue print for the future.
Nicodemus has lived his life pushing the envelopes of compassion, truth and justice from civil rights in the 1950s to advocating and organizing for lay empowerment in the church in the Sixties and Seventies and presently raising awareness of the spiritual implications of environmental issues.
Tom Keene is a retired professor of religious studies and lives in San Antonio.
Reflections On The Democratic Church May 02, 2009
By Don Nicodemus
REFLECTIONS ON THE DEMOCRATIC CHURCH
By Donald E. Nicodemus
The surge for democracy is an important sign of the times. I don't mean a democracy run by the rich, but a people's democracy, an indigenous form of democracy that the Iroquois Nations established before the Europeans occupied this land. In the Iroquois culture the elected leaders were poorer than the rest of the people, and only women elected their leaders. The Tree of Peace meant something! How different that was from what we have today. But times are changing, and so is our governance. Someday, hopefully soon, we will have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Maybe religion can help, maybe the Catholic religion--wouldn't that be paradoxical? As we all know, stranger things than democracy have happened in the church--who would have thought that priests would become perverts and cost the church $5 billion in court settlements? Who would have thought that more than 10,000 priests would abandon the altar to find God in the marriage bed? But look at the bright side of these strange things; there are many good leaders left, and they now realize the church is not perfect. Reality has dawned. And the rest of us will have to take more control of things. That's called democracy! After the church gets religion, it will become a sign or sacrament to the state, which may then get political and break the corporate chains that bind it. Maybe then we will no longer be a failed state. But we will still have to be wary of becoming a mobocracy. Many perverts hide in the mob.
No, the church is not perfect, and its doctrines change from time to time. This is just a fact of life. The old wine skins cannot hold the new wine. We know from looking at creation that things evolve; they have from the beginning of the big bang. Jesus said "I am the vine and you are the branches." Things change, doctrine develops, the church evolves. The church is like a caterpillar that changes into a cocoon and then changes again into a butterfly; it looks dramatically different in each stage, but it's still the same creature. However in the intermediate stage, inside the cocoon, nothing is the same as it was before. The inside is just a lot of tiny balls that seem to have no connection with each other; they seem to be separate, but in reality they are now all one in the spirit. Later they will all be one in the flesh. In the cocoon of Christianity, there is neither man nor woman, gay nor straight, slave nor free. Each is a separate hologram and contains the whole church, just as a crumb of broken bread contains the whole Christ, just as an atom contains the universe. Cocoon today, butterfly tomorrow. That's a beautiful thing worth coming together for.
In the present cocoon-like stage, the People of God have been double crossed, particularly the women, who carry two crosses--the cross of the church and the cross of the state. According to the bible, God made a covenant (unbreakable relationship) with all people, with animals, with all living things, and with the earth. Then he put a rainbow in the clouds to remind himself that he should not destroy the earth. He also wants the rainbow to remind the People of God that they have a spiritual insight, a sense of the faithful, which they must convey to their leaders. He also wants the rainbow to remind the leaders that they are not the church but that all the People of God are the church. He especially wants the rainbow to remind the leaders (how could they forget?) that women belong in all areas of the church, including the hierarchy and the papacy! As well as in the bridal bed of Latin Rite priests, as they always have been in the Eastern Rites (how could they forget?)! Before Christianity was born, there were only two women in the stable--Mary and the Holy Spirit, two First Ladies and no Gentleman, until Jesus was conceived. (How could they forget that Jesus was the fruit of a symbolic lesbian union?) If amnesia could affect the mind of God and cause him to create a rainbow to help his memory, I can see how amnesia could shape the mind of a patriarchal church--it's a guy thing.
As People of God, we have a personal right to religious freedom. Authority does not bestow rights. It is not absolute. Authority is limited by rights, which inhere in the person. If we have the right to freedom in the state, then we have an even stronger right to freedom in the church; for grace builds on nature. Peter is called a rock because he is the foundation, the support for the freedom of the people.
Real faith cannot be forged by logical formulas or pious rhetoric. According to John Henry Newman, the father of the Second Vatican Council, real faith is triggered by probability, not by abstract notions and formal logic. There is an experiential basis for assent. This means that if the pope tries to impose a notion that goes against the experience and common sense of the faithful, they are really not able to believe it. This explains why a high percentage of Americans rejected the papal encyclical on birth control; it is experientially unacceptable. Sure, an impotent old man might believe in birth control, but this is notional faith rather than real faith. He doesn't have to change his habits.
Abraham had a real--but faulty--faith. He was willing to kill his son, thinking he was following God's will. But he was mistaken. So an angel stayed his arm that held the knife to Isaac's throat. What we can learn from this is not that we should do things that don't make sense, but that God will not let his covenant with us be broken by blind (faulty) faith, even if it is real.
Moses was another patriarch who made mistakes. We think of him as the great law maker. But he was, like the people he served, a great law breaker. That's why God kept him from going into the promised land. What we can learn from this is not that we are saved by the law, but that god will not break his covenant with us even if we break the law. Dogma and canon law do not take priority over conscience. And of course sometimes we must break the law to do the right thing--obey our own properly formed conscience, even if it goes against the laws of the church or the state. This is known as the supremacy of conscience. When Newman was asked to propose a toast to the pope, he said if he had to make a toast, he would drink first to conscience and then to the pope.
The words of the prophet should not be abandoned or spoken in an unknown tongue when the pastor preaches in the pulpit. The preacher should proclaim the prophet's words, or the pulpit should be torn down. That's what happened in the Tower of Babel. Many words were spoken, but there was no communication. So God destroyed the Tower and dispersed the people who lived there. If the prophet's words are not proclaimed from the pulpit, the doors of the church should be nailed shut and the people sent out to listen to the poor and take communion from them. Prophecy is a form of free speech prompted by pathos, which is a preferential empathy for the poor, a painful expression of God's love for his unfaithful bride. Prophetic speech is the religious form of free speech.
Faith without works is dead. And personal piety without social piety is a faulty practice of the faith. When the leaders promote personal piety at the expense of social action, they scandalize the faithful. Social piety calls for creating social structures that promote the common good, structures that allow subsidiary groups to function freely. This is called subsidiarity, which is brought about by building relationships. Purposeful association is the religious form of free association.
Prophetic speech and purposeful association constitute the Spirit of Democracy. Without the Spirit of Democracy, the majority can become a mob. In fact, majority rule is the Achilles Heel of democracy. Without the Spirit of Democracy, majority rule can tear the Achilles Heel and cripple the Mystical Body. But, even then, even without the help of the hierarchy (the withered Right Hand of God), the pursuit of paradise is possible, for the Left Hand of God is at work. As long as two or three are gathered in the wilderness of the diaspora, subsidiarity can be built, and the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can be exercised. As Jesus and Omar Khayyam and Thoreau and Jack London believed, in wilderness there is salvation. For somewhere under the rainbow of the covenant, bluebirds fly and butterflies float--wilderness is paradise. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of one hand clapping, the Left Hand of God. It is clapping to the call of the wild, which is enough to make the hierarchy stretch forth its withered hand and join the applause. Listen to the call of the wild coming from Omar Khayyam: "a book o f verses underneath the bough, a flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou beside me in the wilderness." That is paradise, the fruit of the Spirit of Democracy.
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