Church as Mystery; Church as Corporation

It’s clear that the church can’t do its job if it ceases to exist as an organization. We’ve seen enough corporations die of late (e.g., Lehman Brothers, Arthur Anderson, and even, sadly, Salerno–goodbye Jingle Christmas cookies). And I lived through the bust up of AT&T as an employee and it was not pretty (even though old Ma Bell seems to be rising up from the dead and reconstituting herself again from her various parts). The point is, it’s worthwhile for the church to protect its corporate structure. But only with the realization that this structure is only a very small part of the richness, messiness and mystery that is the fullness of the church. And clearly any *protecting* that goes via the sacrificing of the innocents, as so often was the case in the pediophelia scandals, is sinful. The church is special, but not so special that it gets to escape the bounds of morality.

I think we should recognize that the sacred role of the priest has become thoroughly enmeshed with the authority of the bureaucracy. In his book What Happened at Vatican II, John O’Malley describes the discussion that took place on The Decree on Ministry and Life of Priests. “Two opinions emerged from the speeches: the first tended to see priests primarily as cultic figures who were empowered to consecrate the eucharistic body of Christ and to forgive sins in God’s name, who exercised an almost exclusively top-down authority, and who were under bishops who exercised the same authority in their regard. … The other orientation saw priests in a more active role  in society at large, saw them as having a collegial relationship with their bishops and as fostering a similar relationship with those unto whom they ministered.”

Well the second opinion clearly won the day (which was a good start), but the enmeshment of “empowered to consecrate the eucharistic body of Christ” with “an almost exclusively top-down authority” still stood. What we ended up with was a diminishment of the sacredotal role of the priest without much dent at all in the authority structure of the church. Hmmm. A negative double-whammy.

I think we need to envision a priesthood that is able to execute the sacred rituals of the church with full and glorious transcendence (as is the nature of the sacred), while implementing an authority structure in the church that is much more fully collegial, all the way up and down the line, from the pews to the Pope.

Tags: bureaucracy, church