Meeting to launch Stand up for Vatican II

A meeting to launch Stand up for Vatican II will be held on the 26 January 2010, at St Vincent’s Carlisle Place, Westminster SW1P 1NL, (alongside Westminster Cathedral), starting at 7.00 pm.

 Stand up for Vatican II is a campaign designed to involve the whole Church, Catholic organisations and individuals, who recognise the benefits the Second Vatican Council brought to the Church to stand together to celebrate the forty fifth anniversary of the closure of the Council.  

Our speakers will be:

• Robert Nowell, as assistant editor of The Tablet he reported from the Council, subsequently report widely on Church affairs as well as translating the works of Hans Kung.
• Myra Poole SND de Namur - Educator, Historian, Feminist Theologian and activist for women in all churches but especially in the RC Church. Present main interest - 'Ecclesiology in a Different Voice'.
• Michael Winter is a theologian, and founder member of the Movement for Married Clergy. He is the author of several books on English Catholicism, including WHATEVER HAPPENED TO VATICAN II?

Who will each describe why they are standing up for Vatican II and why the whole Church should gather together celebrate this important anniversary.

In the chair Frank Regan

We hope that many people will want to join us on this important occasion and ask only that you let us know in advance that you will be coming. Please complete the form below or send an email to standup4vat2@yahoo.co.uk or write to Bernard Wynne at 180 Blackfen Road, Sidcup, DA15 8PT.

{FacileForms : Meeting2010 } 

In Memory of Vatican II

A few weeks after writing this piece I shall celebrate my seventy-sixth birthday. Since the invention of the custom that bishops tender their resignation on reaching seventy-five (a custom from which the bishops of Rome seem curiously exempt), I am therefore older than almost all the active bishops in the Catholic Church. There are, therefore, very few bishops still in office who were adults during Vatican II. For almost all of them, Vatican II is, like Nicea and Trent, merely an historical event – an event of which they read in books. It follows that, if the programme of renewal and reform which the Council initiated is to be prosecuted with success, it is of paramount importance that what it did and aimed to do is accurately remembered. And here we have a problem.

Between 1995 and 2006, the English edition appeared of the five volume History of Vatican II, edited by the late Giuseppe Alberigo of Bologna, and written by an outstanding team of twenty-seven scholars, including Roger Aubert, Henry Chadwick, Cardinal Avery Dulles, Cardinal Roberto Tucci and Joseph Komonchak. It has been generally agreed to be an outstanding work of sound historical scholarship.

            Agreed: except by the Roman Curia. A curial official named Agostino Marchetto has made it his business to discredit and denounce the Alberigo History as “ideological” and as purporting to claim (in a lecture which he gave in 2007) that the Council marked the emergence of a “new Church”, a transition to “another Catholicism”, “un altro cattolicesimo”. Marchetto’s book-length attempt to destroy the reputation of the Alberigo volumes - The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: A Counterpoint for the History of the Council – was launched in Rome in 2005 in the presence of Cardinal Ruini, the Vicar General of Rome. A news agency present at the launch described the book as giving “the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event” (for details, see my Theology for Pilgrims, pp. 245-263).

            “The Holy See’s point of view”. From the moment that John XXIII first announced his calling of a Council, throughout the years of its duration, and in its aftermath, the handful of Catholic bishops strenuously resisting the conciliar programme of reform has been led by, and largely consisted of, officials of the Roman Curia. To describe the Curia’s resolute opposition to the conciliar programme as “the Holy See’s point of view” may cloak it with apparent papal approval, but this does nothing to improve its thoroughly “ideological” lack of historical justification.

            The struggle for the decentralisation of power in the Church, for the restoration of appropriate authority to bishops and to bishops’ conferences, for liturgical reform, for lay ministries, and for so much else is, amongst other things, a struggle for the memory of what was said and done and dreamed between 1962 and 1965.

CHALLENGING BIBLICAL PATRIARCHY

A Christian does not follow social fashion blindly but does believe that we have to look for signs of the presence and purpose of the Holy Spirit in the trends of contemporary society. This is what is meant by the World Council of Churches' statement: 'It is the world that must be allowed to provide the agenda for the Churches' (The Church for Others, WCC, 1968). One trend becoming increasingly prominent is the role of women in society and consequently in the Church.

The values of the Western world are more biblically formed than we often realise. And the Bible is both patriarchal and hierarchical. This is certainly true of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Christians' Old Testament) right from its first book and the story of the creation of Adam and Eve. What we have to remember is that this is not an historical account of events but a mythological explanation to convey theological beliefs, written only several hundred years before the Jesus event, when patriarchy and hierarchy were already the social pattern of Jewish life and so it was written in this context.

The effect has been that throughout history till now, women have been submerged in this scriptural tradition and sin has been located and symbolised in women: Eve the temptress.

Yet we read in the Book of Genesis: 'God said: "Now we will make human beings, they will be like us and resemble us" ... God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female He created them' (1:26-27). Obviously an image of God in human form is not a mirror image. We human beings, as indeed the whole of creation, can say that we are the image of God, that we reflect God, in that the whole Universe is pervaded with God's energy. Nothing exists without it.

Throughout the two millennia of Christianity, God has been depicted in art, has been thought of and prayed to as male. By inference, the male image is more God-like than the female. St Augustine, known for his misogyny, held that man alone was the complete image of God and woman only as part of the complementary partnership. He wrote that man was the rational part of the image, while the woman was the bodily part!

The image of God as male has had an immense effect on both the male and female psyche. It has even been argued that God must be male because 'He' was the biological father of Jesus by creating a sperm in Mary's womb. And of course the resultant child, proclaimed as the Son of God, was a male.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray to God as a Father. He himself addressed God as Father in the familiar Aramaic term 'Abba'. This was a new and challenging way of addressing God at a time in Jewish history when God was more remote and majestic than in previous eras. Because the Church has retained the concept of God as 'Our Father' in its worship, we might be led to believe that this revelation about God was the ultimate stage of our spiritual evolution. It was not. It was simply the next stage which was appropriate two thousand years ago.

'The Faith' has frozen Jesus' words for all time and all cultures, forgetting that he was a man of his own time and culture. This was not meant to be the ultimate nor the total expression of Godhead. We have to employ models to enable us to handle mysteries. It is as if Jesus was saying: 'I will give you a model of how to relate to God: as a child does to his/her father'.

Jesus did not reveal all there is to know about God. He did not, for instance, refer to the Motherhood of God as Isaiah had done (42:14, 66:10-14). Indeed, he said at the end of his life: 'I have much more to tell you but now it would be too much for you to bear...' (John 16:12-13).

To get stuck at the level of Father-child relationship to God can become a form of idolatry. We would be transforming what is no more than a model into a reality. It is not even a model that appeals to everyone. For someone who in their childhood suffered abuse from their father or step-father, this model can be a real obstacle.

The Lord's Prayer, the 'Our Father', is not the epitome of the ultimate revelation of the God-humanity relationship. In fact the prayer was only introduced into Christian liturgy in the 3rd century after Tertullian, a theologian from Carthage known as the 'Father of Latin  theology', had made the claim that it was the ultimate revelation of God.

God is beyond gender. All language about God is metaphorical or analogical. It can never be a full expression. In place of those male biblical images - Lord, Judge, King, Almighty - we need to give greater worth to those biblical images of God as Life-giver, Source of vitality, Lover, Wisdom, Truth. When Jesus wept over Jerusalem at its lack of response to his Good News, he spoke of himself as a mother hen: 'How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused' (Matthew 23:37).

So long as we continue to think of and pray to God as a male, women will be less valued. This is a very important area of growth for the Church.

Adapted from the author’s book: Tomorrow’s Christian: A New Framework for Christian Living. John Hunt Publishing, Winchester, UK.  2005

Adrian B Smith

A CHURCH FOR THE TIMES WE ARE LIVING

About fifteen hundred years ago the Church lived the upheaval which accompanied the fall of the Roman Empire and in its wake the social and religious confusion which gave birth to the so called Dark Age. Five hundred or so years later came the Great Schism, the split which became a deep divide between Rome and Constantinople. Five hundred years ago Martin Luther proclaimed a Great Reformation of the Church which resulted in the foundation of the Protestant tradition in Western Europe and beyond.

Another five hundred years later we could well ask about the moment of crisis our Church is living at this moment in time.

Similar to those previous moments, our crisis is lived within a broader social, economic and political context also immersed in crisis. We have spoken before of the apocalyptic age in which we are living, an age in which the limits of arrogant human reason, the rapacity of human greed, the hubris engendered by imperial power, the violence in the human heart, the coldness of religious absolutism and the disregard for the integrity of the human person are being unveiled.

We the Church are also living in an apocalyptic moment. Something new is being unveiled. We are moving from a church whose authority we recognise in accepting its teaching, hearing its sermons, singing its hymns etc. This church, however, is in decline due to its recurring dreams of past glory, its inability to speak to the dominations and powers of this age, its lack of joy, its corrupt and corrupting clerical power and its obsession with structures, rites and sex.  

We are moving toward a church which is mystical, prophetic, freeing and at (dis)ease with the surrounding secular culture. That is to say that we understand its idiom but denounce its materialistic values.

The experience of moving is bleak, lonely and debated. We are in an experiential, perhaps liminal, mode of being church. We are anchored in the person of the Risen Transfigured Christ and in his living Body, the Church. That Church is changing, but not in all its members.

The experience of Christians of engagement with environmental concerns is engendering a new awareness of what it is to be church for the life of the planet. The engagement of Christians with the issues of peace and nuclear disarmament, arms sales, ethnic conflict etc is engendering a new awareness of what it is to be church for the fullness of life. The commitment of Christians in the alleviation of poverty, the reduction of international debt, the creation of just international structures which facilitate the participation of the most marginalised is creating a church at the service of the poor. The outreach of Christians to persons in danger, to ‘illegal’ immigrants and asylum seekers, to victims of sex trafficking, to the victims of sexism and racism, to those afflicted by aids etc is creating a church more sensitive to the dignity of the human person. Here outside the sanctuary is where a different church is aborning, where a new spirituality and mysticism are being experienced, where the Eucharist is taking on a denser more profound meaning and where the disfigured Christ awaits with his people their transfiguration.

Both churches will survive the crisis. Paradoxically, both need each other. The first will experience a revival as the experience of the second seeps into the life stream of the first. The experience of the second church will embed itself in the community and will find its way into the story and tradition of the perennial church.  

These last few months we of CCC have been brooding and mooting a concerted effort to Stand Up for Vatican II. Our context is a church in meltdown returning to past ritualisms and dogmatisms in the vain attempt to inject itself with new life, even to the ham-fisted manoeuvre of facilitating the ingress of a few misogynistic and homophobic Anglicans.

 What do we seek as we stand up for Vatican II?  We seek to be a church for the life of the world, not for the life of the church; a church for all of humanity, especially the poor of the depredated earth, the excluded, the vulnerable; a church without sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, an institutional ethos which corrupts its clergy and disesteems its laity; a church in the Spirit of Vatican II, inclusive, sensitive of the suffering of the planet and its most afflicted humanity; a church whose only concern is for a humanity living in peace, justice and wholiness.

Frank Regan
November 2009     

 

 

 

WHY STAND UP FOR VATICAN II?

Introduction

We feel that our Church is at a crucial point in its history. It is now forty five years since the Second Vatican Council and for many who are now members of our Church it is just an historical event in the past.

For those of us who lived at the time of the Council, we will never forget what an exciting time it was for us.

The changes in our Sunday worship were only part of the sense of renewal that was sweeping through our church. Pope John XXIII had asked for 'aggiornamento' the bringing up to date of our church and we felt that this was really beginning to happen. As the windows of the Church gradually opened the Spirit blew in, giving the People of God worship in the vernacular, breaking down post Reformation sectarianism, endorsing the work of biblical scholars, affirming the primacy of conscience, acknowledging the need to learn from the secular sciences, breathing Joy and Hope into the Church. The Council called for real collegiality and collaboration among all the members of the Body of Christ. The world, God's world, needs once again to embrace this spirit, not a retreat into a museum of the faith of yesteryear. We need a prophetic lead from our bishops to take up this challenge.

Where the Council was taken seriously people began to sense that the Church was not something outside of themselves to which they owed obedience and which consisted of the clergy but that they were the Church and that we are all involved in its worship and its work and mission. Sadly, of course, this was not happening everywhere and a great deal depended on the enthusiasm of our priests.

For those of us who were not around at the time of the Council we may not realise that many of the things we take for granted such as our involvement in the life of the church through Parish pastoral councils and finance committees and through sharing in the administration of the sacraments and the care of our communities are all the result of the teachings of the Council. The changes in our worship are only a reflection of what was to happen at a deeper level.

Again, so much has depended on our priests and while there are those parishes where all of this has been happening, there are some where the Council seems almost to have passed them by.

Added to all this, there are now signs that our church both internationally and in our own country is looking back to what some perceive as 'the good old days'. Recent actions emanating from Rome which appear to receive an uncritical reception by our own bishops lead us to believe that there is a real danger that the many blessings that the Second Vatican Council brought to our church are liable to be thrown away by what can only be called the 'restorationist' or 'rejectionist' view currently fashionable in some parts of the Church.

This movement seems to be gathering pace and the restoration of the Tridentine Mass in some parishes, even to its superseding the Mass in our own language and reducing the level of participation to which we have grown accustomed is only an external sign of something much deeper which is happening. The reasserting of the power of the priest together with 'his' control of all that goes on in the parish together with the discontinuation of various ways in which the people have been involved in both worship and the life and ministry of the church are all further reminders of this. The forbidding of the discussion of the ordination of women and even of married men is also just one more example of this.

We feel that the renewed theology of the Church and the spirit which grew out of the Council is being strangled and our Church is in serious danger of becoming more and more dysfunctional.

We believe that the time is short and unless we do something now it will be too late.

What do we want to achieve?

We want to make the occasion of the forty fifth anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council in 2010 an opportunity for our Church to celebrate all that the Council achieved and stands for and to petition our bishops to re-commit themselves to the teachings of the Council and to implement programmes for the further renewal of our church along the lines that the Council promulgated.

We note that the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris in the name of the French Church has already announced that he will be initiating a programme of five years preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council since so many have known nothing of it or remain unaffected by it.

Apart from this, in broad terms we are standing up for:

1. A recognition that the Church begins with us at the level of our local parish community and the universal Church is the communion of such communities. This affects the governance of our Church locally, nationally and internationally.

2. A recognition that lay people are the Church and should, therefore, have a part in the decision making of our Church.

3. A commitment to the renewed vision of the Church that the Council proclaimed, both as sacrament and sign of the coming Reign of God and the catalyst in the world for bringing this about in conjunction with those of other churches and other faiths.

4. The admission of women to the ministry of the Church at every level.

5. The admission of the married to the ministry and an end to compulsory celibacy.

Others may want to add to or subtract from these but our aim is to create an inclusive campaign which will have a broad appeal. If anyone would like to comment on this list or make suggestion please contact us at standup4vat2@yahoo.co.uk

To raise awareness

We want to raise awareness within the minds of the faithful of the importance the Second Vatican Council played in putting in place the Church many of us have grown used to as we have grown up. And we want to ensure that this is the Church that we pass on to our children and grandchildren. For example we believe that many people are not aware that one of the consequences of driving the Tridentine Mass into the centre of parish worship immediately excludes the reception of Holy Communion under both kinds, the use of Special Ministers of the Eucharist and the exclusion of females serving on the altar.

We do not believe that this is what the vast majority of Catholics want nor do we accept that many of the other changes being gradually introduced would be welcomed by the majority if they were informed and consulted.

Much that has been happening has been done without any consultation and people find that they wake up one morning and find that life in their parish and the nature of the way they worship has changed.

The strange death of The Sign We Give

In 1995 the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, after much research, consultation and discussion issued a report entitled The Sign We Give. In his introduction to the report Bishop Crispian Hollis, quoting a discussion held at the Bishops Conference says “We are convinced that the manner and style of relationships in the Church are part of the sign it gives and, for this reason, we must develop patterns for collaborative ministry as a key feature of Church life to come.”

The introduction goes on to say “The report addresses the urgent need we have to working and collaborating in the Church – patterns which respect and cherish the essential dignity and consequent responsibility for the life and mission of the Church which belongs to every baptised Christian.”

The introduction concludes with the following statement – “I believe that it (the report) contains the seeds of a revolution in the way in which we live and work in the Church today. The revolution is not simply one which will affect radically our internal structures: it is a revolutionary insight into the way in which we exercise our mission, which is to proclaim the Good News in today’s world.”

As Bishop Hollis says the report recommends that all of the structures of the Church in England and Wales must be opened up to all of the baptised to fully participate in. And that such is the importance the bishops place on collaboration, consultation and involvement of lay people and priests collaborating together they state that is a key feature of the ministry of the life of the Church to come.

We might well ask where this approach to collaborative and consultative ministry has gone and we see little evidence that more than token attention has been given to this approach to ministry anywhere in the Church.

Of course there are exceptions where an individual priest has enthusiastically grasped the opportunity of collaborating with his people in furtherance of the mission of the Church. But we fear that examples of true collaboration are few and far between. We recommend that the report, The Sign We Give, be taken down from the shelf in every diocese, dusted off and presented once again to the people as the way forward for the Church as intended when originally published.

To energise people

We want to energise people to recognise the new understanding of the Church that the Documents of the Council proclaimed and to stand up for the gains made during the Second Vatican Council in relation to the role of lay people in the Church and a greater recognition of the Council statement about the priesthood of the baptised; the commitment to a vernacular and participative liturgy; the governance of the Church locally and nationally. And also by placing aggiornamento (the opening of the windows as suggested by Pope John XX111) in a more central position in how we view the world.

To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Council

We hope and pray that our bishops will lead us in presiding at a Mass to celebrate the anniversary of the Council in their Cathedral churches some time during 2010 and inviting their people and priests to celebrate such a Mass in the parishes, perhaps on a common date fixed by them.

We want the whole Church in England and Wales to join together in celebrating the anniversary of this historic event which brought new life, commitment and participation to many thousands of lay people who had previously experienced a Church that appeared to be owned by the clergy.

We do not accept that the view current in some circles, that a Church following the mysterious notion of the hermeneutic of continuity, is truly representative of the legacy of the Second Vatican Council. We want to see a firm commitment by all to openness, lay involvement and a vernacular liturgy as the true legacy of the Council.

We would also like to see a process of education take place in every diocese and parish enabling people to deepen their understanding of the benefits which the Second Vatican Council brought to the Church in England and Wales. This could be done in every parish by encouraging a process of consultation as suggested in the document “The Sign We Give” recommended by the Bishops Conference in 1995, (referred to above).

In referring to the influence of the Second Vatican Council this document said “The Second Vatican Council gave the Catholic Church a renewed and dynamic understanding of its nature and purpose. It presented the Church as a communion of life, love and truth and an instrument for the salvation of all; as the light of the world and the salt of the earth it is sent forth into the whole world.

Two of the most striking new emphases in all the Council said about the Church are those which laid foundations for a collaborative ministry; the emphasis on mission, and the recovery of laypeople’s full share in the life holiness and mission of the Church.”

We call for a new commitment to true collaborative ministry throughout our Church which would support the celebration for this anniversary of the Second Vatican Council and help to reenergise the life of the Church in England and Wales.

How you can get involved

A petition

As we have already said, we hope and pray that our bishops will lead us in this celebration by presiding at a Mass in their Cathedral church some time during 2010. You can play your part by signing the petition calling on our hierarchy to support our call for a nationwide celebration of the 45th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. Details of how to do this are shown above.

Encourage all of your friends and fellow parishioners to visit this website and sign the petition or if you wish print a copy and ask people to sign it, or write to the address below and ask for a paper copy, completed copies should also be returned to -

180 Blackfen Road, Sidcup, Kent, DA15 8PT.

Ask your diocesan bishop to sponsor a Mass at the Cathedral Church to Celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council.

Ask your bishop to arrange to preside at the Mass and, if there is a priest who you believe would be an appropriate preacher and who would do justice to the event, suggest his name also to the bishop.

You could also explore the possibility locally of getting other people involved to assist with this. Our recent experience of listening to what people have to say suggests that there are many people who share our views and who may be willing to get involved.

To do this we need to identify who lives where so that we can group people into diocesan groups to enable the initial approach to come from a group of people in each diocese. To get this initiative under way we need to ask you to:

1. Confirm that you would like to be involved.
2. Confirm that you are happy for us to share your email address with other people living in the same diocese, so that you can communicate with each other.

You can do this by sending an email to standup4vat2@yahoo.co.uk

We can help by providing a draft letter for you to use or amend and perhaps by attending the Mass with you, but ideally this should be a local initiative.

Following the Mass we suggest that it might be possible for a short social event to be arranged either on church premises or nearby. A speaker could be arranged (we could help with this unless you want to make arrangements locally), to give a short address followed by a discussion.

From the Mass and this social event, further support could be generated perhaps leading to a local group being established and, eventually a larger meeting in the diocese so that as we approach the end of 2010 a further celebration can be held in every diocese.

If you would like to join us in this initiative please send an email to: standup4vat2@yahoo.co.uk – tell us what diocese you live in and give us permission to share your email address with other people in your diocese.

We would also welcome other suggestions for how we could celebrate this historic event and we invite you to post a short message on our notice board entitled Why I am Standing up for Vatican II.

Frank Regan, Derek Reeve, Pam Wearing, Bernard Wynne

About Stand Up 4 Vatican 2

Stand up for Vatican II came about as a result of a number of people becoming increasingly aware that certain actions being taken by the Vatican appear to be taking the Church back to the way it was prior to the Council. A few examples of our concern are:

• Encouraged by the Vatican, and increasingly evident in many parishes in the UK the celebration of Mass in Latin under the old Tridentine Rite, in some cases this happens not as an occasional event catering for a select group of people but as the main Sunday Mass in a parish.
• Ecumenical relationships which had improved between the Catholic Church and the other churches during and after the Council are now being called in to question by many and instead of seeking greater dialogue, barriers are being placed in the way of working together.
• Greater lay involvement in all aspects of Church life, a key recommendation of the Council, are still not encouraged in many areas of Church life and in particular the role of women in the life of the Church has not been developed.
•  The Council encouraged more openness and discussion in the Church with important decisions being made by the Holy Father in consultation with the bishops, yet it is clear that this sense of collegiality has now been discarded.  
• It is not unreasonable to assert that many of the decrees emanating from the Vatican in recent times have sought to put a brake on the developments that grew out of the discussions at the Council.

All of the above and many more examples led to a growing concern that the teaching and spirit of the Second Vatican Council was being reinterpreted and a return to the past, to a Church, which were it to come about, would be unrecognisable by a majority of Catholics today.

Those of us who are concerned felt that it was time to stand up for all the good things that happened in our Church as a result of the Second Vatican Council and Stand Up was developed.

We trust that a majority of Catholics in England and Wales will feel the way we do and join us in Standing up for Vatican II. We trust they will look at this website and sign the petition asking our bishops to join with us in standing up for Vatican II.

The Launch of Stand Up for Vatican II

Stand up for Vatican II is a campaign designed to involve the whole Church and we hope that many Catholic organisations and individuals who recognise the benefits the Second Vatican Council brought to the Church will join with us in this.

We want to make the occasion of the forty fifth anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council in 2010 an opportunity for our Church to celebrate all that the Council achieved and stands for;  to petition our Bishops to re-commit themselves to the teachings of the Council and to implement programmes for the further renewal of our church along the lines that the Council promulgated.

You can join in this celebration by campaigning locally for a celebratory Mass to be said in your Diocesan Cathedral and your local parish. You can also sign the petition asking your local Bishop to the teachings of the Council and to implement programmes for the further renewal of our Church in line with the Decrees promulgated by the Council.

On this site you will find articles of interest regarding the Second Vatican Council, links to other sites which may be of interest to you, you can add your personal comments in answer to the question Why I am standing up for Vatican II?

And most importantly you can sign the petition which will be presented to the Bishops of England a Wales at the end of 2010.

"THE SIGN WE GIVE"

The Sign We Give is a report prepared for the National Conference of the Bishops of England and Wales into Collaborative Ministry which was published with the endorsement of the Bishops Conference in 1995. It explores the idea of collaborative ministry at all levels in the Church in England and Wales.

The report suggests some difficulty in using the term Collaborative Ministry but accepts that it is probably the best way of describing the concepts used in the Report to describe ways of working together. Without wanting to use words that are not used in the report itself it seems to me that what is meant by collaborative ministry is a sense of the whole Church working together clergy and laity each respecting what the other has to bring.

In a parish this might mean that processes for full consultation regarding all important decisions would be put in place and we might recognise these as being the establishment of a parish pastoral council. A council which is truly accountable to all the people in the parish not just the priest, ideally it should be elected but one can see that it should also be representative of the various organisations working in the parish. Above all it needs to ensure inclusiveness for all, to seek to involve all, even when this is difficult as so many who have tried to establish parish organisations know only too well.

The authors of the Report place it firmly in line with the teaching, values and spirit of the Second Vatican Council. In a section headed “The influence of Vatican II”, they speak about how the Council gave the whole Church a renewed and dynamic understanding of its nature and purpose.  You can see the full report by clicking on this link  (You will find publications on the menu on the left, the sign we give is available in 1995, or you could Google The Sign We Give).

The Report provides advice and guidance on the steps to take and how to take them for any group that wishes to explore how collaborative ministry might be introduced in given situations. A lot of valuable advice and a plan for how to do it, is also included. In one section headed Parish – Leadership, people are asked to reflect on the link between leadership and priestly ministry, and to consider how leadership could be shared. One might even think that this issue goes to the very heart of the problem what is leadership and how should it be exercised?

The report concludes saying “Some people regard collaborative ministry as an option. Others see it as a necessity an unavoidable aspect of what the Church is. Others see it as a process of mild evolution, a gentle adjustment of how work is done, and others as a radical re-shaping of all that the Church is”.

The big question is why has such a gem been buried? Why has such a valuable and important contribution to the development of the Church been discarded?

The only answer I can think of to these questions is fear. For a very long time priests have been encouraged to think of themselves as being something apart, with the power of decision making being theirs alone. A consequence of this is that far too many fear having to share power with their fellow baptised. This prevents them from seeing the benefits to be gained from sharing, benefits to them, to the people, to the parish, to the Church and ultimately to the wider community.

There is, I believe, a deep clericalism embedded in the Church, a hangover from a time long gone which, some unfortunately, want to return us to. This clericalism though is what is getting in the way of the Church in its Mission to the World and from seeing that the way of operating that will be required in the future are not those that were used in the past (although even in the past they were not appropriate). If the Church is going to succeed in its Mission to the World, especially at a local, parish level it will need to draw on all the resources it has available and not rely only on the clergy. The Sign We Give provides a valuable resource to help people explore how people could learn to work together in a collaborative way.

I place great hope in The Sign We Give, but we desperately need our bishops and priests to think about it again and commit themselves to implementing it, not leaving it to gather dust on a shelf while the People of God are crying out for their voice to be heard.

Bernard Wynne
December 2009

WHY IS THE CHURCH NOT FACING UP TO THE SPIRITUALITY REVOLUTION

I am thoroughly convinced that humanity is making an evolutionary shift into a new consciousness. Already in 1936 Teilhard de Chardin wrote: We now have to accept it as proven that mankind has just entered into what is probably the most extensive period of transformation it has known since itsbirth. … Today something is happening to the whole structure of human consciousness: a fresh kind life is beginning to appear. (Science and Christ)

The horrors our world is experiencing today are the birth pangs of this transformation. Among the many signs of this upheaval, from a Christian perspective, is what is being named a “Spirituality Revolution”. Four books on this phenomenon have been published recently*.

No one can deny the words of the late religious broadcaster, Gerald Priestland: “Our western world is becoming less and less religious but more and more spiritual”. If evidence were required one need only to compare the dwindling number of people filling church pews with the increasing length of the bookshelves marked “Body, Mind & Spirit” in our bookshops.

Today’s common usage of the word “spirituality” is woolly indeed. Few words in the English language convey such a wide variety of meanings to such a wide variety of people. There is the traditional Christian use to describe a particular path towards God, as for example, Franciscan, Dominican or Ignatian spirituality. To some, spirituality is synonymous with spiritualism. To many, it conveys such practices as Reiki, Eastern meditation, Tai-Chi, hugging trees, using crystals and so much more. It has become a brand name for the search for meaning, for values, for transcendence. Many of these practices would be labelled “New Age” – and consequently dismissed as fads. But their increasing popularity reveals two things. First, that more people are seeking some way of giving their lives a meaning beyond the material and, further, that they feel drawn to something beyond, greater than themselves, which some would name “God”. Secondly, that people are not finding the answers they seek to their faith questions, nor an attractive path to follow, in the institutional Church, of whatever denomination. The words and explanations of Christian belief with which they are presented belong to a past age and not to the world, and indeed the Universe, as we experience and know it today. Their meeting with and being edified by people of other Faiths in our midst has shattered the doctrine that the Church possesses the sole Truth.

The spiritual path these people are taking today is causing them to depart from the religious roots of their childhood – if, indeed, such ever existed. They are turning to a pick-and-mix programme, especially towards the mystical traditions of other religions.

I am making no value judgements about this spirituality revolution, but simply observing what is happening around us. Why is it that Church leaders seem quite unaware of the phenomenon or ignore it as a passing fashion? As I travel round England visiting Catholic parishes I find that the great majority of priests are so overwhelmed by their duties to their parishioners – mostly to the tiny percentage of the population who are regular church-goers – that they have little idea of the spiritual temperature of the “people out there”. If the thrust of evangelisation is getting “the lapsed” back into church, what “Good News” do we have to offer the vast number of spiritual seekers who feel that “church” has no relevance to their lives? Are we afraid of parting from the theological language in which our beliefs are couched, to speak to people in the language of their everyday concerns? How many people in the supermarket are excited by the word “Redemption”? Do we expect people – the young especially – to embrace the culture of our liturgical prayers, our Victorian hymns and our 4^th century Creeds? Why are we not addressing them in their cultural terms – which, after all, is our own out-of-church day-to-day culture?

Is there a meeting point or have we to move radically, such that we shift from the prevailing Church paradigm to quite another? For example, a shift from traditional supernatural theism (belief in an interventionist God who operates from outside/above creation) to a panentheistic God who operates from within creation? Is that even a possibility? It is challenging. But surely no more challenging than the paradigm shift made by Jesus in turning the prevailing religious values of his own people upside-down.

How do we take the first steps in a new direction? By listening and looking: being aware, noticing, analysing what is going on in the spirituality revolution. It appears to have six characteristics. 1. It acknowledges that there is the Other, the Greater, the Transcendent, the Great Omnipotent Divinity (abbreviated as G.O.D). 2. This Other attracts people towards their higher potential, to become more, to achieve more, to grow. 3. It embodies spiritual values: compassion, forgiveness, peace, etc. 4. It recognises the interrelatedness, interdependence of everything in creation, ourselves included. It has an ecological component, named Eco-spirituality. 5. It recognises our shadow side (and in this it differs from the New Age scene). 6. It feels the need to be expressed in some form of ritual (notice the inclusion of the word in “spi-ritual-ity”) which might be meditating before a Buddha statue, sacred dance, placing candles round the bath.

All this is happening against the background of ever accelerating change. We notice the disappearance of a sense of tradition with the breakdown of traditional, stable society. People are seeking a meaning in life, ideals to live by. Has life a purpose other than that which we give it? Has it a meaning other than that drawn from a faith tradition?

Put simply, the popular contemporary view is that spirituality is seen as holistic, non-dogmatic, self-improving and therefore good, while religion is viewed as out-dated, irrelevant, conflict-causing and therefore bad!  What are we prepared to do about that?

*  Robert Forman. Grassroots Spirituality: What it is, Why it is here, Where it is        going. Imprint Academic. Exeter. 2004
Linda Woodhead & Paul Heels. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is giving way to Spirituality. Blackwell, London. 2004
William Bloom. Soulutions: The Holistic Manifest. Hay House UK. 2004
David Tacey. The Spirituality Revolution: the Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality. Brunner-Routledge, Hove, UK. 2004
Adrian Smith’s latest book: The Creative Christian: God and Us, Partners in Creation published by O Books, Winchester.

Adrian B Smith

DOWNSHIFTING THE CHURCH

The world-wide Church already has the majority of its members living in the Southern Hemisphere. Therefore the Church of the new century will be a Third World Church, which means a Church of the poor and non-powerful, non-clericalist, de-centralised, expressing itself in less legislation and organisation.

 

This will dictate a new pattern for the Church as we know it in the West. Our European Church will become more of a witness to Gospel values by downshifting in five particular areas.

1. Our large anonymous urban parishes will become the nodes of a network of neighbourhood communities. For the most part the life of Christians will be nourished by  their participation in small local communities of about ten-families size.
2. Within the Catholic Church there will be a shift of jurisdiction away from Papal/Vatican authority to local dioceses through which the Gospel and Church life will be inculturated in each country. The supreme authority of the Church will reside in collegiality not monarchy.
3. The present structures displaying ecclesial power (in the Catholic Church, the Vatican State and its Diplomatic Corps of Nuncios, etc,) will give way to structures which promote growth of and suited to Christians at the grass/cassava roots.
4. Today's pyramidical structure will downshift to a way of functioning in a networking, communitarian form.
5. There will be a downshift of the importance given to what Church members believe, in favour of how they live: from orthodoxy to orthopraxis. What will matter as each of us passes through death will not be how much we know or believe but how much we love. The former are only means to that end. A traditional Creed can be an instrument of exclusion - if you do not sign up to it you don't belong with us - rather than spiritual nourishment. Creeds will be composed in the idiom of each community's culture.
   
   Adrian B Smith

THERE ARE CATHOLICS AND CATHOLICS

I find myself meeting three different groups of adult Catholics. Their distinction lies in their age.  There are “the Young” (late teens to mid-thirties), "the Elderly" (60 plus) and "the Middle-aged" in between.  Each has a different way of regarding the Church and consequently has a different way of relating to it.   (What follows is, of course, a generalisation.) How do these different groups regard the Church?

How they regard the Church

The Young group are children of our post-modernist society, coping with rapid change, technologically educated, with global concerns, the new cosmology giving them their worldview. For these, what they find in the Church -- the symbols, the expressions of belief, the moralising, the hierarchy of authority, the liturgy, the clericalism -- belong to another culture than that in which they live their daily lives.

The Elderly are those who experienced the shift from the pre-Vatican II to the post-Vatican II Church.  They are more leisured people with opportunity to reflect on where the Church is now.  While acknowledging that a tremendous change has taken place in less than a lifetime, they are divided in their response.  While some are the ever-faithful, the backbone of every parish, not wanting more change, others are saddened that so much they had hoped for from the Council has not yet come about and they are depressed by the back-sliding on the part of the Church leadership.

Between the two, are the Middle-aged, adults who were children during Vatican II and have not experienced a previous form of Church.  They struggle to bring up their families in "the true Faith" which often means the same beliefs with which they were brought up (pre- Vatican II) about which they have little opportunity or inclination to question.

How they relate to the Church

Apart from a minority in the Young group who tend towards fundamentalism in their need for a secure spiritual home, this is the group in the forefront of what is recognised today as the "Spirituality Revolution".  More spirituality, less religion.  As in other areas of life they are prepared to "pick-and-mix" the ingredients of their spiritual life.  Those who have not left the Church already for its irrelevance to their lives, want to be involved less in the parish than in justice and social campaigns.  Their Christian ideals inspire their lives and they regard their local church, not as having demands on them, but as the supplier of what they want from it.  Their beliefs about doctrine or morals will be those which match their personal experience.  In fact they seek spiritual experience.  They live more with questions than with answers.

The Middle-aged are the group which is the least challenging to the Church.  Their church-going (two or three times a month) will be the centre of their Christian life. Few want to get involved in Church activities. They want to do the right thing by the Church and keep in with God, as they have been taught.  They have neither the time nor the desire to delve deeper into their Faith.

The Elderly form the largest group of church-goers.  Those with hopes of real renewal are the most challenging to the Church: challenging its structures and its authoritarianism.  They are articulate and aware of their place in the Church as educated laity. They are driven by their desire to see what had been promised by Vatican II become reality.  Being contemporaries of most of those in ecclesiastical office, they feel free to speak out as their brothers and sisters.  What is not to be doubted in either group of the Elderly is their loyalty to the Church.  But as they pass on, whither the Church?

Adrian B. Smith

 

THE POST-MODERNIST CHRISTIAN CHURCH

 'Post-Modernism' is the label given to the philosophy, or manner of living, of our times. Much has been written about this phenomenon, but put succinctly it is saying that people today feel free to question everything, even the most fundamental basis of society and the most traditional beliefs.

 

This has come about in the Western world due to a number of factors, each of which influences the other. Universal formal education has enabled people to be more enquiring. Our economic sufficiency raises our concerns from day-to-day survival worries to enjoy more leisure which in turn enables us to investigate a wide range of subjects which broaden the mind. The availability of knowledge on any subject, of scientific matters especially, through the media and the Internet and the opportunity to learn the opinions of the widest variety of people. Add to these, the enormous number of choices now open to every individual. These factors together promote the present trend to lead a life which is more personal, more individualistic, more self-sufficient, from which it follows that we have less regard for the authority of persons and institutions. This gives us freedom of expression and freedom of life-style.

More aware that we are all citizens of the same world influenced, through travel and immigration, by a large variety of cultures, we are questioning our own traditional cultural values.

Science, as a universal language unaffected by culture, is no longer believed to be the provider of all answers for our future. Nor is pure rationalism. In fact there is no longer a belief in any certainties, in any truth as absolute.  Everything we have relied upon in the past is thrown into the melting pot and has not yet been poured out into a new mould, nor, in fact is it ever likely to be. And among the elements of life thrown into the pot is religious belief.

Today, Christians are feeling free to question past religious teaching. They want to be persuaded that it is authentic, by which they mean that it relates to how they experience life within the total context of our present world. They are no longer prepared to have life's decisions taken by other people on their behalf, by people 'in authority'. They want to decide for themselves how they should live and the quality of life they want for their children.

There is a re-emphasis today on the conscience as the final arbiter in the choices with which we are faced.  When we say that people are conscientious we mean that they listen to their conscience, they live an ethical life. Literally, the word 'conscience' means 'knowledge alongside' (con-science).  The conscience is that 'still small voice' at the deepest level of our consciousness which nudges us into a way of behaving in line with our better self. In Christian terms, the conscience has been defined as our homing instinct for the Kingdom of God.

Far from meaning 'do what you like' or 'let the situation determine the morality', basing our moral decisions on our conscience does presume a formed conscience.

One's conscience is formed by sifting and accepting a variety of ingredients and the composite picture they give us. Among these ingredients are our Scriptures and  Church teaching. There is the Civil Law. Also the advice we receive from others and our own experience which we must learn to trust. Then there are the opinions of others expressed in discussion or dialogue, as well as consideration of the here and now situation in which we have to make our decision. And under-girding it all is our prayerfulness, our openness to the promptings of the Holy Spirit in whatever form this may come to us.

We need to distinguish between our moral conscience, as we describe it above, and our psychological conscience. This latter arises from our feeling guilt. It predominates among children who have not the maturity to arrive at a formed conscience. A feeling of guilt may arise from the blame or punishment one expects. It has no relation to moral evil.

In these times which may seem so chaotic and without reliable guidance, we are called upon  to build our personal bridge between religious doctrine - what the Church proposes for our belief - on the one side, and our present-day culture on the other. The belief system upon which we base our life has to be expressed, even to ourselves, in a language which rings true with our culture.          Our post-modern culture is challenging Christians to make a personal shift in their religious life. A shift from accepting religious truths as a 'given', to venturing to make our own journey of discovery. From relying upon what we are taught, to putting more reliance on what we experience. From the ideal of seeking perfection as 'soul business' - saving our souls - to seeking wholeness in body, mind and spirit, for  both ourselves and for others. From regarding opposites (different Faiths for example) as being in conflict, to accepting to live with the paradox of opposites. (If I maintain I am right, it does not follow that the different belief of others is wrong.)

In embracing this new paradigm, Christians may find themselves in conflict with a Church leadership which in many cases is still stuck in a pre-modernist model.

(Adapted from a chapter in Adrian Smith’s forthcoming book “Tomorrow’s Christian”, published by John Hunt)