The horrific midnight massacre in Aurora, Colorado confronts us first of all with the mystery of human evil. But it also challenges us to reflect on how violence has pervaded our culture--and even our leisure. Amid renewed calls for tighter gun controls come reports of death threats to critics making negative comments about the new Batman movie, even while the alleged killer portrayed himself as the Joker. Are we seeing something new: violence as play?
Actually, I suspect that violence has always overlapped with play, fantasy, and make believe. After all, western culture inherits a classic literature has always been shot through with violence. We cannot say Oedipal, or Achilles tendon, or Trojan horse, or Pyrrhic victory without evoking ancient images of assault, death, and treachery. Do we imagine that children in the ancient world never pretended to be the violent heroes of their epic tales?
I’m assuming, of course, that human nature was more or less unchanged by the time my peers and I donned fake armor and wielded plastic swords, or shot cap guns or air rifles or toy bows while impersonating soldiers, knights, cowboys or Indians. Over the years my own alter egos included Sir Lancelot, GI Joe, Zorro, Hopalong Cassidy - -all were on the side of good, but all were heavily armed, and all imposed their will by violence.
Such violent make-believe was reinforced by toy armies (from lead crusaders to plastic bazookamen), by cartoons and by comic books. Some of these simply portrayed the violence-without-consequences typical of Looney Tunes characters, but others showed real menace and super-heroic violence: Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and others.
In all such make-believe, my peers and I assumed we were watching or acting out fictional events—yet the context was the real world: medieval Europe, World War II or Korea, the far west, or a modern Metropolis or Gotham. And we knew such recourse to violence was typical of the real world as well.
That’s why my father sometimes drew the line with violent movies and barred me from viewing films like “Sahara” or “Purple Hearts” or even TV shows like “Dick Tracy” on the grounds that they were “too real.”
But the days are long gone when kids can be easily isolated from such violence. Cable TV and DVDs and the Internet combined with computer generated special effects and massive advertising and products spinoffs to ensure that young people’s lives are awash in fictional villains and heroes of every violent stripe.
Nor do kids have a merely passive role. Video games have “matured” dramatically since “Super Mario” days, and now kids (of all ages) can rent or buy or download or stream games that echo their favorite violent movies, or fictional accounts of terror attacks, or even scenes from real-war situations in Iraq or Afghanistan. For some youth, such violence-saturated games are their chief recreation. And they all allow the player to participate in the carnage by killing at will with a click of a button. The active destruction on the screen takes a little effort and entails few if any consequences.
Historically, by contrast, real violence generally required physical effort (often grueling and painful) and entailed genuine risk (while killing, one might be killed). So real violence occupied a different plane of reality from play violence. In young people’s minds, the two were easily distinguished.
But not anymore.
Because while play combat has been getting more and more like a real combat, real combat has also been getting more like play. The science fiction notion of conducting war by remote control--by robots--has arrived in the form of drone aircraft.
Most people will be surprised that the first drones - -unmanned planes for military use--flew in World War I. But of course Hitler’s V-1 was a drone-like bomber: it flew like a plane with wings but lacked any remote control, and simply crashed and exploded when it ran out of fuel.
By the Vietnam War, drones were still crude and more vulnerable than piloted planes to being shot down, but they offered a decisive advantage: they did not risk American lives. By war’s end drones flew more than 3000 missions!
Since 9/11 drones have made dramatic advances, and if the Bush administration made drones a key player in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration has made them the dominant weapon in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
The temptation to rely on drones is obvious. Militarily, they’re now capable of pinpointing targets small as a truck or even an individual. And drones cancel out the major downside of manned aircraft: what was once the highest-risk of all military tasks was now a “no-risk” proposition: whenever drones fly, US servicemen remain safely back on base.
But those drones are not flying blind. They are guided by military technicians. They guide the drone on its assigned route, spot the intended target, launch their attack, and bring the drone home--all while sitting at digital screens before images not unlike consumer video games. In this sense, conducting war now comes to resemble child’s play.
So if drones preserve the benefits of war while driving down its costs, where is the problem? The problem is not military or economic; it is moral, for two reasons.
First, by making war so easy, so painless, so risk-free, drones are making the moral costs of war invisible. People may argue, for example, whether the use of drones against targets in Pakistan and Yemen is justified. We may argue if the civilian deaths in those attacks should be labeled “collateral damage” or if, instead, they earn Barack Obama (who authorizes each attack) the label “child killer.”
But what is beyond debate is this: the US killing of civilians by drones has been consistently ignored by the general public. Such killing is an indisputable violation of Catholic Just War Theory, yet I am willing to wager all I own that it will never become a major campaign issue in 2012.
Second, as drones threaten to become the future of war, war itself becomes less “real.” For drone warfare is warfare waged by computer, and it makes the violence of war an increasingly “virtual” experience, and thus less “real.” In so doing, it threatens to merge the practice of war with the rest of our “virtual” lives--not only our fictions and fantasies, but the virtual worlds we all now inhabit through smart phones, social networks, streaming videos, and digital games.
Indeed, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr brilliantly suggested that, whatever the Aurora killer’s motive, his murderous behavior not only carries terrifying echoes of the virtual violence all around us--but also reminds us that we all now hide behind the “mask” of our digital screens, just as the super heroes and villains that have become such a staple of our culture’s contemporary folklore:
It is possible for any of us, of any age or gender, to avoid reality all day in America by keeping our eyes fixed on our screens. They’re on our walls at home and in restaurants, in our living rooms and bedrooms, toted around in our knapsacks, fitting neatly into our hands. The screens sell us many things: video games both benign and ultra-violent, empty “news” about celebrities, Facebook posts from our most intimate 2,864 friends, trailers for the latest Hollywood blockbuster in which men fly through the air and blow up everything bad in their lives. The screens tell us that we matter, each and every one of us. To look away from the screens is to confront a world that says, in most cases, no, you really don’t.…The superhero movies that dominate our box offices are all about mild-mannered secret identities and the power that comes with donning a facial covering. We live each day through digital masks: screen names, online personas, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and on and on, each an attempt to show the world the face we want to be, rather than the face we fear we have.
As a kid, I generally could recognize the bad guys in westerns: they wore masks. Today our country kills behind the mask of computerized remote control, and most of us join in protecting our identities online while maintaining “virtual” contact with the world around us.
Then, one dark night, into this world steps a masked man with a gun who reminds us that virtual reality--especially virtual violence--is not real violence at all. And that real violence--like killing by drones--is no less real for happening beyond our digital screens.
©Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
#361 Compare and Contrast
We all remember school exams that required us to “compare and contrast” two items. The idea was to demonstrate our understanding of both by identifying their similarities and differences. Are you ready to compare and contrast the Catholic Church with Penn State University?
The Penn State sex abuse scandal, it seems to me, cuts both ways for Catholics. Based on this week’s report by a group led by former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, what happened at Penn State simultaneously (here is “compare”) echoed the cover-up behavior of many U.S. Catholic bishops and (here is “contrast”) differed sharply from the visionary leadership of one Catholic college president.
The Freeh report portrays how Penn State officials either minimized or avoided or outright denied the significance of Jerry Sandusky’s criminal abuse of boys on the Penn State campus over a period of years. In effect, school officials protected Sandusky from exposure and enabled his abuse of more kids. Guilty parties included legendary football Coach Joe Paterno, athletic director Timothy Curley, and then-president Graham Spanier.
The charge against these men is creepily familiar to Catholics: the men in charge feared that the truth would create a scandal which could be damaging to the reputation of the institution, so they did everything they could to keep it quiet. This is, of course, exactly what happened when US bishops covered up for abusing priests. In both cases, the officials’ behavior backfired: eventually the truth emerged anyway, and this caused worse damage to the institution by doubling the scandal, adding cover-up to sexual abuse. In both cases, this outcome exposed a deeper corruption than the abuse itself: an abuse of power where officials atop these institutions failed to hold abusive subordinates accountable. In both cases, those officials also avoided or even blocked attempts to report criminal behavior to the authorities.
The lesson in both cases: power corrupts, so it must be checked by some system of accountability. For both Penn State and the Church, that accountability finally came from the legal system (in the recent verdict against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, a diocesan official was found guilty of criminal conduct for participating in such a cover-up)--but it came too late to protect the victims.
But the Penn State story contains a second lesson, connected to the death last week of John E. Brooks, S.J., the president emeritus of Holy Cross.
Father Brooks has recently been celebrated as a champion of racial justice and social diversity for his role in recruiting and mentoring black students beginning in 1968. This achievement, chronicled in Diane Brady’s book Fraternity, earned him special “Today Show” coverage just two days after his death (see the video at http://news.holycross.edu/blog/2012/07/02/tomorrow-holy-cross-to-be-featured-on-nbcs-today-show/). I wrote about these events in CrossCurrents #346. After becoming president of the college in 1970, he also inaugurated co-education at HC.
But Fr. Brooks first taught at the Cross in the mid 1950s and early 1960s, in an era when Holy Cross football routinely scheduled big-time rivals like Syracuse, Rutgers, Pittsburg, VMI, Boston College and—yes—even Penn state.
By the time Brooks became college president in 1970, he saw trouble on the horizon: the encroachment of big money into big-time college athletics. He feared the dominance of the sports industry over the academic priorities of the institution. He feared the exploitation of athletes at the expense of their education. And he feared the corruption of the culture of colleges and universities in which sports became the driving force for admissions, budgets, alumni support, and expansion.
He foresaw a looming culture in which the president of the college would become less visible, influential, and powerful than the athletic director, the football coach, or the basketball coach.
Father Brooks was right. Over the last 40 years big-time college sports has become a multibillion dollar industry, coaches and athletic directors and are routinely millionaires, graduation rates for their athletes dip well below 50% at many schools, and the college’s entire well being is driven by the way athletics fuels the support of alumni and local communities.
This certainly happened at Penn State. The community of Happy Valley was dominated by the local football program, and Coach Joe Paterno was Happy Valley’s patron saint-in-residence, with a statue honoring him installed even during his lifetime. Employees who witnessed Sandusky’s rapes now say they hesitated to blow the whistle because to take on Paterno would be like “taking on the President of United States.”
Perhaps Penn State is the only campus where a culture corrupted by big-time sports has revealed sex abuse--but it is not the only campus where such corruption thrives.
But if Fr. Brooks was right 40 years ago to fear such corruption, he was not alone. Many college presidents saw the rising lure of money, and its power to seduce colleges into two pudding academic life that the service of big time sports.
So what did Brooks do? First, he began to communicate his concerns to alumni--a community tough to convince, given Holy Cross’ history: the only New England undergraduate school with Division 1 teams in all major sports, past winner of national championships in basketball and baseball, one time Orange Bowl football competitor.
Second, Brooks took the dramatic step of refusing the invitation to join the new Big East basketball league in 1979. None of the other charter schools (Providence, St. John's, Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Connecticut, and Boston College) had yet won a national championship, so adding HC was an obvious prestige move. But Brooks believed the Big East was the wrong direction to go.
Finally, Brooks collaborated with several other northeast college presidents to form a league of their own in 1986: the Colonial League, now renamed the Patriot League. These schools had much in common: small size, mostly undergraduate populations, and high academic reputations. But the league itself was built around two dominant principles: (1) schools would field genuine scholar athletes by banning most athletic scholarships; (2) the league would be run by the presidents themselves (league by-laws state: “The business and affairs of this League shall be managed by its Council of Presidents”), not by an independent commissioner or by dominant athletic directors.
Over the years the Patriot League has expanded to all major sports. In football, it has become a sort of second Ivy League: both leagues playing nearly all non-league games against each other.
For Holy Cross, the Patriot League required sacrifices. The cherished football rivalry with Boston College (college football’s oldest Catholic school rivalry) ended in 1986. Holy Cross had to drop football scholarships. Alumni support shifted grudgingly from the traditional sports-fueled loyalty to a new pride in Holy Cross as America’s #1 undergraduate Catholic college. Holy Cross largely disappeared from its former high profile media coverage: (no more front page headlines in the sports sections of the Boston Globe or New York Times--although in 2008 Sports Illustrated ranked it #3 for student athletes after Stanford and Princeton).
But for Fr. Brooks, the move was the right move, and worth the sacrifices. He (and his fellow Patriot League presidents) remained steadfast in the conviction that his school was keeping college sports were it belonged--as an extra-curricular activity, secondary to academics and thus only ancillary to the school’s overall mission.
This meant, of course, that coaches and athletic directors could not function independently. They worked within a chain of command, and in that chain the final accountability was to the president. The buck stopped with him.
It may seem a trivial matter. It may even seem outlandish to contrast a collegiate athletic conference with the Catholic hierarchy. But the Penn State case has shown that abuses of power--and particularly sexual abuse--can occur wherever the chain of command breaks down, where perpetrators are not held accountable. When athletics gets “too big to fail.”
Recent years have taught us this lesson in the most terrific way imaginable. And Penn State reminds us that, in the Catholic Church, the hierarchy failed this lesson miserably, while one heroic Catholic college president showed us how it should be done.
Too bad Penn State’s culture was more like the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (“compare”), and not more like Holy Cross (“contrast”).
©Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012
The Penn State sex abuse scandal, it seems to me, cuts both ways for Catholics. Based on this week’s report by a group led by former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, what happened at Penn State simultaneously (here is “compare”) echoed the cover-up behavior of many U.S. Catholic bishops and (here is “contrast”) differed sharply from the visionary leadership of one Catholic college president.
The Freeh report portrays how Penn State officials either minimized or avoided or outright denied the significance of Jerry Sandusky’s criminal abuse of boys on the Penn State campus over a period of years. In effect, school officials protected Sandusky from exposure and enabled his abuse of more kids. Guilty parties included legendary football Coach Joe Paterno, athletic director Timothy Curley, and then-president Graham Spanier.
The charge against these men is creepily familiar to Catholics: the men in charge feared that the truth would create a scandal which could be damaging to the reputation of the institution, so they did everything they could to keep it quiet. This is, of course, exactly what happened when US bishops covered up for abusing priests. In both cases, the officials’ behavior backfired: eventually the truth emerged anyway, and this caused worse damage to the institution by doubling the scandal, adding cover-up to sexual abuse. In both cases, this outcome exposed a deeper corruption than the abuse itself: an abuse of power where officials atop these institutions failed to hold abusive subordinates accountable. In both cases, those officials also avoided or even blocked attempts to report criminal behavior to the authorities.
The lesson in both cases: power corrupts, so it must be checked by some system of accountability. For both Penn State and the Church, that accountability finally came from the legal system (in the recent verdict against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, a diocesan official was found guilty of criminal conduct for participating in such a cover-up)--but it came too late to protect the victims.
But the Penn State story contains a second lesson, connected to the death last week of John E. Brooks, S.J., the president emeritus of Holy Cross.
Father Brooks has recently been celebrated as a champion of racial justice and social diversity for his role in recruiting and mentoring black students beginning in 1968. This achievement, chronicled in Diane Brady’s book Fraternity, earned him special “Today Show” coverage just two days after his death (see the video at http://news.holycross.edu/blog/2012/07/02/tomorrow-holy-cross-to-be-featured-on-nbcs-today-show/). I wrote about these events in CrossCurrents #346. After becoming president of the college in 1970, he also inaugurated co-education at HC.
But Fr. Brooks first taught at the Cross in the mid 1950s and early 1960s, in an era when Holy Cross football routinely scheduled big-time rivals like Syracuse, Rutgers, Pittsburg, VMI, Boston College and—yes—even Penn state.
By the time Brooks became college president in 1970, he saw trouble on the horizon: the encroachment of big money into big-time college athletics. He feared the dominance of the sports industry over the academic priorities of the institution. He feared the exploitation of athletes at the expense of their education. And he feared the corruption of the culture of colleges and universities in which sports became the driving force for admissions, budgets, alumni support, and expansion.
He foresaw a looming culture in which the president of the college would become less visible, influential, and powerful than the athletic director, the football coach, or the basketball coach.
Father Brooks was right. Over the last 40 years big-time college sports has become a multibillion dollar industry, coaches and athletic directors and are routinely millionaires, graduation rates for their athletes dip well below 50% at many schools, and the college’s entire well being is driven by the way athletics fuels the support of alumni and local communities.
This certainly happened at Penn State. The community of Happy Valley was dominated by the local football program, and Coach Joe Paterno was Happy Valley’s patron saint-in-residence, with a statue honoring him installed even during his lifetime. Employees who witnessed Sandusky’s rapes now say they hesitated to blow the whistle because to take on Paterno would be like “taking on the President of United States.”
Perhaps Penn State is the only campus where a culture corrupted by big-time sports has revealed sex abuse--but it is not the only campus where such corruption thrives.
But if Fr. Brooks was right 40 years ago to fear such corruption, he was not alone. Many college presidents saw the rising lure of money, and its power to seduce colleges into two pudding academic life that the service of big time sports.
So what did Brooks do? First, he began to communicate his concerns to alumni--a community tough to convince, given Holy Cross’ history: the only New England undergraduate school with Division 1 teams in all major sports, past winner of national championships in basketball and baseball, one time Orange Bowl football competitor.
Second, Brooks took the dramatic step of refusing the invitation to join the new Big East basketball league in 1979. None of the other charter schools (Providence, St. John's, Georgetown, Syracuse, Seton Hall, Connecticut, and Boston College) had yet won a national championship, so adding HC was an obvious prestige move. But Brooks believed the Big East was the wrong direction to go.
Finally, Brooks collaborated with several other northeast college presidents to form a league of their own in 1986: the Colonial League, now renamed the Patriot League. These schools had much in common: small size, mostly undergraduate populations, and high academic reputations. But the league itself was built around two dominant principles: (1) schools would field genuine scholar athletes by banning most athletic scholarships; (2) the league would be run by the presidents themselves (league by-laws state: “The business and affairs of this League shall be managed by its Council of Presidents”), not by an independent commissioner or by dominant athletic directors.
Over the years the Patriot League has expanded to all major sports. In football, it has become a sort of second Ivy League: both leagues playing nearly all non-league games against each other.
For Holy Cross, the Patriot League required sacrifices. The cherished football rivalry with Boston College (college football’s oldest Catholic school rivalry) ended in 1986. Holy Cross had to drop football scholarships. Alumni support shifted grudgingly from the traditional sports-fueled loyalty to a new pride in Holy Cross as America’s #1 undergraduate Catholic college. Holy Cross largely disappeared from its former high profile media coverage: (no more front page headlines in the sports sections of the Boston Globe or New York Times--although in 2008 Sports Illustrated ranked it #3 for student athletes after Stanford and Princeton).
But for Fr. Brooks, the move was the right move, and worth the sacrifices. He (and his fellow Patriot League presidents) remained steadfast in the conviction that his school was keeping college sports were it belonged--as an extra-curricular activity, secondary to academics and thus only ancillary to the school’s overall mission.
This meant, of course, that coaches and athletic directors could not function independently. They worked within a chain of command, and in that chain the final accountability was to the president. The buck stopped with him.
It may seem a trivial matter. It may even seem outlandish to contrast a collegiate athletic conference with the Catholic hierarchy. But the Penn State case has shown that abuses of power--and particularly sexual abuse--can occur wherever the chain of command breaks down, where perpetrators are not held accountable. When athletics gets “too big to fail.”
Recent years have taught us this lesson in the most terrific way imaginable. And Penn State reminds us that, in the Catholic Church, the hierarchy failed this lesson miserably, while one heroic Catholic college president showed us how it should be done.
Too bad Penn State’s culture was more like the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (“compare”), and not more like Holy Cross (“contrast”).
©Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
#360: Not a Democracy?
While re-reading the Declaration of Independence this 4th of July I was reminded of that puzzling expression we hear every once in a while: “The Church is not a democracy.”
Perhaps I know what people mean by this, and even why they say it, but it remains a strange notion nonetheless. “Democracy” is a political term, and those of us who think of the Church as the People of God or the Body of Christ--that is, as a spiritual reality--tend not to think of the Church in political terms.
Yet it is true that the Roman Catholic Church has evolved a vast and complex institutional structure which makes it the largest organization and the world. And that structure also includes a system of governance—a polity.
In addition, the Roman Catholic Church includes the Holy See, or Vatican City, which is a sovereign city state. Thus the pope is not only the Church’s spiritual leader, but also a head of state recognized as such by other states around the world, including the US and the UN and the European Union.
But I suspect when people say “the Church is not a democracy,” they’re not referring to the Holy See. They are referring to decisions or teachings of the institutional church. Often they are saying these things cannot be determined by surveys, polls, or ballots. The implication is that the opinions of rank and file Catholics do not matter--even if those opinions are deep convictions rooted in conscience.
To clarify, let’s begin with a concrete focus: not on the administration of Vatican City, nor on the spiritual lives of one billion Catholics comprising the People of God, but on the way the institutional Church shapes those lives by the decisions it makes. This focus leads to three questions: who make such decisions? How did they make them? And if the church’s governance is not a democracy, then what is it?
We immediately encounter a paradox. Sometimes in my parish work I present a pyramid-image of leadership development in the church. Often someone objects to the “top-down” connotation of the pyramid shape. They are surprised and pleased when I point out that every pyramid ever build was built the same way: from the bottom up!
Similarly, many perceive the Roman Catholic Church as top-down, and begin their view of church polity or governance with the pope. But the proceedings of Vatican Council II (1962-1965) reflect a different view.
In preparing its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), the Council commission drafting the document did an about face. The first draft began, predictably, with the hierarchy—pope, bishops, and clergy—then moved on to religious orders, and finally mentioned lay people. But the final document alters the order; first it treats the Church as a mystery, then it focuses on the Church as the People of God, recognizing the common lot of all the baptized faithful, drawing on the famous body-imagery from St. Paul:
As all the members of the human body, though they are many, form one body, so also are the faithful in Christ. Also, in the building up of Christ's Body various members and functions have their part to play. There is only one Spirit who, according to His own richness and the needs of the ministries, gives His different gifts for the welfare of the Church.
Only later does the final draft describe the hierarchical structure of the Church. This editorial history suggests an important truth: the Church is the entire body of Christ and the Church’s hierarchy serves that body.
True, this vast body is personified by one person positioned at the “top” of the organization: the pope. But that is also true of most secular democracies, including the US with its presidency atop the executive branch.
Nor is the papacy a hereditary monarchy presided over by a royal dynasty. It is an elective office, often held in the last century by men of modest means (in contrast to our presidency, now monopolized by millionaires). In both the US and the Church, election is not by popular vote (or Al Gore would have become US president in 2000) but by a small group of electors.
The main difference: the Electoral College is chosen in state-level balloting, but the College of Cardinals is chosen by previous popes. Similarly, the pope also selects bishops who preside over dioceses, and they in turn select pastors who preside over parishes (in effect, the full-service local branches of the world’s largest organization).
So at first glance it does seem clear that the Church’s operation is a top-down affair. But two facts reveal a more complex truth: (1) the church has not always had the same structure in the past, so it may not always have it in the future; (2) even this present structure does not justify the idea that the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the rank and file do not matter.
One example: during the ordination rite of priests, after candidates are presented to the bishop but before they are actually ordained, there is a moment reserved for the “acclamation” of the congregation. By the 21st century this is merely a polite, pro-forma affirmation of the candidates by their families and friends, usually accomplished by applauding them.
But in fact this part of the ritual is a remnant of history. It originated in a time when clergy were popularly chosen, and the “acclamation” was made by a congregation of locals who functioned more like a town meeting or party convention to nominate those men whom the bishop would then ordain.
My point is not that the old way was better. My point is that the old way was just as Catholic as the new way is. The lesson: we might be right saying “the Church is not a democracy” if we are merely describing our current system. But we are wrong if we mean that the Church cannot ever run more democratically. It was in the past, and could be in the future.
Indeed, Edward Schillebeeckx built much of his career as a titan of 20th century Catholic theology making just this point: the way the Church operates today is the product of human history, not divine will. The institutional Church has adapted to changing times, and will continue to do so. There is no one, absolute way to run the Church.
Now, how does this affect questions of Catholic belief and practice? The chief factor here is also a matter of human history: although the institutional structure of the Church has not radically changed in recent centuries, its power has.
The papacy was once a political force capable of coercing kings and queens. Then it lost that power and hibernated behind its own walls, a prisoner in the Vatican. Now, since Vatican II, the papacy’s outreach to the world (first with John XXIII’s open heart, then with Paul VI’s travels to the Holy Land and the UN, finally with the globetrotting of both John-Paul II and Benedict XVI) has reshaped it into an international moral authority.
But while political force can coerce people’s behavior, moral authority must secure their compliance. Because church officials depend on their moral authority, they cannot govern unless people are willing to comply. In other words, the hierarchy’s governance depends on the “consent of the governed”--which just happens to be Jefferson’s definition of democracy in the Declaration of Independence.
The willingness to comply depends on many factors, and we all know that such consent is no longer automatic. Shifting secular cultural values, the side-effects of Vatican II, the fallout from Humanae Vitae, the scandal of hierarchical malpractice revealed by the sex abuse crisis--all these have combined to reduce the willingness of rank and file Catholics to comply with church authorities.
So “the Church is not a democracy” remains a curious expression. I know no one who believes that voting can decide what is true or false, right or wrong.
But “democracy” is a kind of government, and governing always means getting the people to follow the leaders. Rank and file Catholics do not get to vote on church doctrine, but when it comes to their own behavior within the Body of Christ, they do get to vote with their feet.
While polls cannot determine church teaching, and while the Church’s governance is no longer “by the people," still the governance “of the people” is always “for the people,” since in the Body of Christ every single member matters:
But God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy. --1 Corinthians 12: 24-26
Perhaps I know what people mean by this, and even why they say it, but it remains a strange notion nonetheless. “Democracy” is a political term, and those of us who think of the Church as the People of God or the Body of Christ--that is, as a spiritual reality--tend not to think of the Church in political terms.
Yet it is true that the Roman Catholic Church has evolved a vast and complex institutional structure which makes it the largest organization and the world. And that structure also includes a system of governance—a polity.
In addition, the Roman Catholic Church includes the Holy See, or Vatican City, which is a sovereign city state. Thus the pope is not only the Church’s spiritual leader, but also a head of state recognized as such by other states around the world, including the US and the UN and the European Union.
But I suspect when people say “the Church is not a democracy,” they’re not referring to the Holy See. They are referring to decisions or teachings of the institutional church. Often they are saying these things cannot be determined by surveys, polls, or ballots. The implication is that the opinions of rank and file Catholics do not matter--even if those opinions are deep convictions rooted in conscience.
To clarify, let’s begin with a concrete focus: not on the administration of Vatican City, nor on the spiritual lives of one billion Catholics comprising the People of God, but on the way the institutional Church shapes those lives by the decisions it makes. This focus leads to three questions: who make such decisions? How did they make them? And if the church’s governance is not a democracy, then what is it?
We immediately encounter a paradox. Sometimes in my parish work I present a pyramid-image of leadership development in the church. Often someone objects to the “top-down” connotation of the pyramid shape. They are surprised and pleased when I point out that every pyramid ever build was built the same way: from the bottom up!
Similarly, many perceive the Roman Catholic Church as top-down, and begin their view of church polity or governance with the pope. But the proceedings of Vatican Council II (1962-1965) reflect a different view.
In preparing its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), the Council commission drafting the document did an about face. The first draft began, predictably, with the hierarchy—pope, bishops, and clergy—then moved on to religious orders, and finally mentioned lay people. But the final document alters the order; first it treats the Church as a mystery, then it focuses on the Church as the People of God, recognizing the common lot of all the baptized faithful, drawing on the famous body-imagery from St. Paul:
As all the members of the human body, though they are many, form one body, so also are the faithful in Christ. Also, in the building up of Christ's Body various members and functions have their part to play. There is only one Spirit who, according to His own richness and the needs of the ministries, gives His different gifts for the welfare of the Church.
Only later does the final draft describe the hierarchical structure of the Church. This editorial history suggests an important truth: the Church is the entire body of Christ and the Church’s hierarchy serves that body.
True, this vast body is personified by one person positioned at the “top” of the organization: the pope. But that is also true of most secular democracies, including the US with its presidency atop the executive branch.
Nor is the papacy a hereditary monarchy presided over by a royal dynasty. It is an elective office, often held in the last century by men of modest means (in contrast to our presidency, now monopolized by millionaires). In both the US and the Church, election is not by popular vote (or Al Gore would have become US president in 2000) but by a small group of electors.
The main difference: the Electoral College is chosen in state-level balloting, but the College of Cardinals is chosen by previous popes. Similarly, the pope also selects bishops who preside over dioceses, and they in turn select pastors who preside over parishes (in effect, the full-service local branches of the world’s largest organization).
So at first glance it does seem clear that the Church’s operation is a top-down affair. But two facts reveal a more complex truth: (1) the church has not always had the same structure in the past, so it may not always have it in the future; (2) even this present structure does not justify the idea that the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the rank and file do not matter.
One example: during the ordination rite of priests, after candidates are presented to the bishop but before they are actually ordained, there is a moment reserved for the “acclamation” of the congregation. By the 21st century this is merely a polite, pro-forma affirmation of the candidates by their families and friends, usually accomplished by applauding them.
But in fact this part of the ritual is a remnant of history. It originated in a time when clergy were popularly chosen, and the “acclamation” was made by a congregation of locals who functioned more like a town meeting or party convention to nominate those men whom the bishop would then ordain.
My point is not that the old way was better. My point is that the old way was just as Catholic as the new way is. The lesson: we might be right saying “the Church is not a democracy” if we are merely describing our current system. But we are wrong if we mean that the Church cannot ever run more democratically. It was in the past, and could be in the future.
Indeed, Edward Schillebeeckx built much of his career as a titan of 20th century Catholic theology making just this point: the way the Church operates today is the product of human history, not divine will. The institutional Church has adapted to changing times, and will continue to do so. There is no one, absolute way to run the Church.
Now, how does this affect questions of Catholic belief and practice? The chief factor here is also a matter of human history: although the institutional structure of the Church has not radically changed in recent centuries, its power has.
The papacy was once a political force capable of coercing kings and queens. Then it lost that power and hibernated behind its own walls, a prisoner in the Vatican. Now, since Vatican II, the papacy’s outreach to the world (first with John XXIII’s open heart, then with Paul VI’s travels to the Holy Land and the UN, finally with the globetrotting of both John-Paul II and Benedict XVI) has reshaped it into an international moral authority.
But while political force can coerce people’s behavior, moral authority must secure their compliance. Because church officials depend on their moral authority, they cannot govern unless people are willing to comply. In other words, the hierarchy’s governance depends on the “consent of the governed”--which just happens to be Jefferson’s definition of democracy in the Declaration of Independence.
The willingness to comply depends on many factors, and we all know that such consent is no longer automatic. Shifting secular cultural values, the side-effects of Vatican II, the fallout from Humanae Vitae, the scandal of hierarchical malpractice revealed by the sex abuse crisis--all these have combined to reduce the willingness of rank and file Catholics to comply with church authorities.
So “the Church is not a democracy” remains a curious expression. I know no one who believes that voting can decide what is true or false, right or wrong.
But “democracy” is a kind of government, and governing always means getting the people to follow the leaders. Rank and file Catholics do not get to vote on church doctrine, but when it comes to their own behavior within the Body of Christ, they do get to vote with their feet.
While polls cannot determine church teaching, and while the Church’s governance is no longer “by the people," still the governance “of the people” is always “for the people,” since in the Body of Christ every single member matters:
But God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy. --1 Corinthians 12: 24-26
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