COMMENTARY: Structure Doesn’t Work but Church Still Does

c. 2004 Religion News Service (Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) Do not mistake the dire headline stories about the Catholic Church for an obituary: […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Do not mistake the dire headline stories about the Catholic Church for an obituary: “The Catholic Church died today after a long illness.”


The vital signs in Catholicism vastly outnumber the woeful symptoms that refer to what philosophers used to call the accidents, rather than the essence, of the church.

This flood of stories flows from the same headwaters. They are all concerned with, and arise from, accidental rather than essential aspects of Catholicism.

The essence, the consistent personality, of the Catholic Church is found in its teachings, traditions and sacraments, through which it taps into the eternal. The accidents are its structures, that is, the vesture it has donned to express itself in time. These necessarily change, as our clothing, housing and tools of work do in our own lifetime. These changes do not hide or transform but better express our true identities.

When Bishop Thomas Wensky writes in The Florida Catholic that “a practicing Catholic cannot invoke `conscience’ to defy or disregard what the church holds as true,” we are encountering a good man trying to make a failing system work rather than a prelate challenging one of the church’s oldest teachings _ that we must follow our well-formed consciences in making our decisions.

And when Archbishop Raymond Burke writes in The St. Louis Review that “the apostles understood that the Sacrament of Holy Orders, which they had received in its fullness, was to be handed on in three grades or orders to different persons … bishops … priests … deacons,” we are encountering a churchman describing one of the structures filled with history’s hairline cracks rather than intentionally misleading us.

The latter leader knows that these concepts developed only after the age of the apostles and that there is no record of any ordinations in the first two centuries of the church.

Here is another loyal official attempting to cut the head to make the hierarchical hat fit where it now falls off as any adequate expression for the essential mystery of the church.


Recent charges of seminary faculty members being photographed in sexually compromising activities with young seminarians in Austria reveal the unhealthy growth in the dark places beneath a collapsed hierarchical system in contrast to the healthy church as a People of God.

This week in New York, when a monsignor was accused of taking half a million dollars from an elderly woman, his possible crime was at least clear. The archdiocesan response to a lawyer that the monsignor was “an independent contractor” was the bureaucratic disowning of a collapsing system rather than the forthright response of a living church.

The collapse of the archdiocese of Portland, Ore., into bankruptcy under the financial burden of settling sex abuse claims is a melancholy tale of hierarchy falling on its own sword after trying for years to control the problem from the top, a fated and failed choice that was not Catholic but was certainly hierarchical.

Ordinary in-the-pews Catholics understand that a style of church governance is collapsing, but not the church that they believe in and that they constitute as a People of God.

The question is when church officials will recall that the snake that sheds its skin is one of the most ancient Christian symbols because it refers to death and resurrection. The church is shedding an old skin not to surrender to death but to conquer it and find new life. Bishops would spare themselves needless stress and public embarrassment if they understood that they best support the church and their own authority by finding healthier ways to listen to their people and speak to the world.

DEA/MO END RNS

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