Archive for the ‘power of the faithful’ Category
“Hertz: There are already companies that have a cooperative business model. Start-ups in Silicon Valley or the suppliers of open-source software are just some examples. These industries are not driven by Gucci capitalism. They work on principles that explicitly value collaboration, partnership, networking, relationships and social forces — values that were not really seen as having any economic worth. But we have seen that sometimes they can be far more successful than the old models.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,685491,00.html#ref=rss
This is the kind of thing the Church should be advocating, instead of blathering on about condoms.
Tags: tradition recreating itself
The line is from the 3/15/10 edition of Sightings, Martin E. Marty’s weekly newsletter, and it describes one of the ongoing lunacies of Glenn Beck. “The fact that Mr. Beck charms millions of devotees tells more about the sad state of truth-telling and the high state of lie-receiving than civil citizens should want to hear.”
When reading the John Allen interview in NCR with Mother Clare Millea, who is heading up the Vatican “investigation” of American religious women, this patient and sane-sounding woman says the following in answer to John Allen’s question about the reaction the visitation has generated:
NCR (aka John Allen): A year into this process, are you in a better position to understand some of the fear and resistance it’s generated?
Mother Clare Millea: Initially I got many reactions along the lines of, “We were not consulted, we were not warned, this was just thrown on us.” That’s certainly foreign to our American mentality, and our way of doing things. … One time I said to a major superior who lives in Rome, “You and I both live here, and we know this is what happens. Why don’t we just get over it?” She laughed and said, “You’re right. Let’s do it.”
Here in the third millennium, the Church has a structure of governance that is a divine-right, absolute monarchy. It is grossly unrepresentative, lacks checks and balances, deadens the global and national voice of the bishops, excludes the sense of the faithful, compromises liturgy, paralyzes needed development in canon law, ignores the lessons of modern jurisprudence, is obsessed with obedience and secrecy, conflates traditional doctrine with papal opinion, and compromises the intellectual life of the Church. The sexual abuse scandal has shown time and time again that the hierarchy will value the institution over the safety of innocent children, rotting the Church spiritually (and financially) from within.
Yet otherwise sane people continue to accept this governance structure. As Mother Clare Millea said, ”You and I both live here, and we know this is what happens. Why don’t we just get over it?”
Little will change in the Church at the top. When it happens, it will happen from the bottom when people like Mother Clare Millea refuse to accept that “this is what happens” and start exercising some civil (i.e., papal) disobedience instead of just getting over it.
Tags: papal disobedience, structures of governance
In Thoreau’s 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, the driving idea was that one does not necessarily have to physically fight the government, but one must not support it or have it support one (if one is against it). This essay has had a wide influence on many later practitioners of civil disobedience. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican-American War.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Thoreau argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.
Thoreau tells his audience [in relation to slavery and the Mexican-American war] that they cannot blame this problem solely on pro-slavery Southern politicians, but must put the blame on those in, for instance, Massachusetts, “who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.… There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them.”
He exhorts people not to just wait passively for an opportunity to vote for justice, because voting for justice is as ineffective as wishing for justice; what you need to do is to actually be just. This is not to say that you have an obligation to devote your life to fighting for justice, but you do have an obligation not to commit injustice and not to give injustice your practical support.
Paying taxes is one way in which otherwise well-meaning people collaborate in injustice. People who proclaim that the war in Mexico is wrong and that it is wrong to enforce slavery contradict themselves if they fund both things by paying taxes. Thoreau points out that the same people who applaud soldiers for refusing to fight an unjust war are not themselves willing to refuse to fund the government that started the war.
In a constitutional republic like the United States, people often think that the proper response to an unjust law is to try to use the political process to change the law, but to obey and respect the law until it is changed. But if the law is itself clearly unjust, and the lawmaking process is not designed to quickly obliterate such unjust laws, then Thoreau says the law deserves no respect and it should be broken.
Existentialist Martin Buber wrote, of Civil Disobedience
“I read it with the strong feeling that here was something that concerned me directly.… It was the concrete, the personal element, the “here and now” of this work that won me over. Thoreau did not put forth a general proposition as such; he described and established his attitude in a specific historical-biographic situation. He addressed his reader within the very sphere of this situation common to both of them in such a way that the reader not only discovered why Thoreau acted as he did at that time but also that the reader– assuming him of course to be honest and dispassionate– would have to act in just such a way whenever the proper occasion arose, provided he was seriously engaged in fulfilling his existence as a human person.
The question here is not just about one of the numerous individual cases in the struggle between a truth powerless to act and a power that has become the enemy of truth. It is really a question of the absolutely concrete demonstration of the point at which this struggle at any moment becomes man’s duty as man.…
—”Man’s Duty As Man” (1962)
Some interesting food for thought here for approaching how the faithful might use money and voice to affect positive change.
Tags: papal disobedience, power of the faithful
It’s entirely possible that passion is getting the best of intelligence here, but of late I have been coming to two realizations: the first is the true extent of the damage the current structures of governance are perpetrating on the Church, and the second is the additional damage done by the acquiescence of the faithful to the situation. It’s one thing to be fighting the good fight and failing, and another thing to assume the situation is hopeless and just go about your business. I even sense a bit of self-satisfaction in the post-Vatican II church, like we’re all so cool because we have girl altar boys. None of this is to say that what goes on is bad, it’s not, it’s marvelous. Girl altar boys are marvelous. It only looks bad in comparison to what it could be if certain things were changed. Like the ordination of women priests to go along with those girl altar boys.
The faithful will be the source of change in the church; it will not come from the top. We don’t run the joint yet but we are not powerless: we have money and voice. We just need to get off our butts and figure out how to use our money and our voices appropriately to initiate change for the good.
I think the first step is being realistic about the kind of relationship the faithful often have with the Vatican and the bishops. As the “visited” sisters are finding out, it is not one necessarily based on respectful communication (which you’d hope) but one often based on power and control. If the Vatican was really intent on helping the nuns for example, they could have just talked with them and listened to them. This is not rocket science. Rode was not interested in this; he admits he was concerned about “feminism” and “secular influence.” So rather than a useful conversation the sisters got an exercise of power: a million-dollar visitation, intrusive, secretive, intimidating, the exact opposite of a respectful conversation. In effect, a punch in the nose. How does one respond to a punch in the nose? I think the first thing is to recognize that you have in fact been punched in the nose.
I think in the Church today (incoming generalization) we’ve become benumbed so much through lack of hope for change that we tolerate the intolerable. To haul out a trope from the 60s, I think we need another consciousness-raising so we can act accordingly if we have the opportunity. In our networked world, consciousness of injustice makes a difference. The alternative is being complicit in the downward spiral of the Church.
I also think it important to see questions of collegiality, centralization, sanctions, etc. as questions of power, not theology. Theology (and common sense) point to a much different structure of governance than the one we got. This is why I think the faithful should consider options such as alternative funding structures and acts of “papal” disobedience as a means of forcing change.
Tags: papal disobedience, power of the faithful
