Paradoxes and Temptations
image, structure and morality in Christianity
James O'Connell
Introduction
There is a tight connection between the paradoxes of the Church and its temptations. Many of the temptations come from the paradoxes, that is, they come from apparently contradictory characteristics and tasks that make and bind the Church. However the Church is given life by truths and ways of living that are held in benign tension with one another and out of which initiative and renewal emanate. Not least, in overcoming temptations that belong to the historic situation of humanity the Church grows. But saying these things does not mean that paradoxes may not overbalance into contradictions and that temptations may not lead to a fall. Hence, the case for teasing out both paradoxes and temptations.
B: Paradoxes of the Church
Before reflecting on the paradoxes of the Church I want to reflect on the image of the Church in Western society and on its tendency towards moralism. The image is not always an attractive one, and it does not reflect the inner reality of the Church. Yet we need to take care over images because through them we become known, even in measure to ourselves. We have also however to admit that Church leaders who often address society in highly moralist terms on our behalf do not warrant us a likeable image. For that reason it seems worthwhile to think briefly on the Church and morality. Finally, in the section that examines directly the paradoxes of the Church I want to set out vibrant aspects of the Church of our faith.
1): The image of the Church: Whether we like it or not, we have to admit a particular awkwardness in presenting latterly the Church in Western countries. Mentioning the Church conveys to contemporaries a vision of bishops in exotic garb; it sends a message of negative teaching axed on sexuality; and it conveys an institution propped up by respectable but drab lay persons who would not recognise a socially radical idea if it were explained to them in words of one syllable. Moreover, the actual working of the Church suggests gathering people together once a week for ceremonies that relate little enough to our times. Those who attend church are faced by forms of worship, language and preaching, music and singing that are mostly mediocre and that seem to be out of kilter with the more pulsating parts of contemporary communications and aesthetics.
The Church is organised and presided over autocratically by an ageing and numerically diminishing clergy who are hardly charismatic, greatly energetic or well organised. If the publicised decade of mission had ever succeeded in getting people through the doors of churches, they would not easily have lingered within. In the words of the 8th century Irish poem: if you go to Rome to find Christ, you won't find him there unless you bring him with you. Only when we bring strong faith with us to church, does it remain there at work through the badly sung hymns, the poorly read and often impenetrable readings, the homilies that seldom seem to connect with life, the banal language of the liturgy and the passiveness of Sunday congregations.
2): The misshapen Church of morality: As we seek to convey the relevance of our faith we need to avoid more than anything else an issues approach, an approach that asks what we have to say about homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, and even about poverty and injustice on local and global scales. Jacques Ellul writes aptly: "In the eyes of most of our contemporaries, Christianity is a morality first of all. And have not many epochs of Christian history been characterized by the church's insistence upon actions and conduct?" (To Will and To Do, Philadelphia, 1969, p. 201). Avoiding an issues approach does not imply insensitiveness to what concerns us and our neighbours. But if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, decent attitudes towards all the other problems will come. We will then as individuals and as churches discern the morality of cases and situations; we will use our resources to support just causes; we will operate as conciliators between groups in dispute; and we will offer witness in compassion. We will not however seek to impose our morality on other persons and groups.
3): The paradoxes of the living Church: There are several paradoxes with which the Church has to live. They come from its divine-human nature. The divine and human elements in the Church are inextricably mixed. No one can say where the divine finishes and the human begins; and it may well be the case that the mixture varies from one epoch of history to another. This is not the place to expand at length on these paradoxes but there is merit in at least attempting to suggest their existence and to sketch their nature.
a) perfect and flawed, holy and sinful; The Church is meant to be perfect, holy and without spot. Christ has however associated limited, flawed and sinful people with him in his work, and so the Church will remain in history an imperfect vehicle for the kingdom of God. There is for ever a tension between the ideal and the actual. Yet great achievement may come as good Christians strive to overcome the limitations of the human and yet stretch humanity to its finest efforts.
b) leaven and mass: Christians are the 'salt of the earth' and the 'leaven in the flour'. There is a sense in which it will never be easy to broaden the following of Christ; and there is bound to be an elite dimension to the best Christians. Yet they follow a man who had compassion on the multitude. No matter how necessary it is to form an elite, we may never abandon the masses of the people.
c) community and organisation: Those disciples who were faithful to Jesus set out to preach to the whole world. In the process they had with time to move from a community to a community of communities, and indeed from a movement to an organisation. Inevitably the question of order arises in an organisation, especially in a large-scale organisation; and where order is required, then law enters in. Christian communities early on had to set aside the temptation to impose Jewish law, and to set aside the even more insidious temptation to attempt to legislate their own communities into morality. Laws of their nature are related to particular historical circumstances. The gospel orientations - the call of Christ to his disciples - endure but that is not true of laws. For one thing, laws have to change as circumstances change; and, for another, laws are by their nature general and must never be applied to individuals except in taking account of their personal and particular circumstances. Law is an easy choice for organisers and administrators but it is no part of the essence of Christianity. Every time we look at the Code of Canon Law and look back from it to the Gospels, we should ask ourselves: did the Gospels need to end up codified in this book?
Following also from the need to organise comes the role of organisers. In every organisation there tends to be a tension between organisers who follow their professional, and sometimes out-of-touch, agenda, and their own vested interests, and the members of the organisation who have other concerns and interests. In the case of Christianity the issue of organisers became complicated as they turned from the 'supervisors' [bishops] and 'elders' [presbyters] of the early communities into sacred ministers who were ordained sacramentally. All organisations are in constant need of reform but reform becomes more difficult when it has to be carried on against those who have imposed themselves historically as sacred rulers. Yet if they have presided over the triumph of organisation over community, there is no avoiding the struggle of reform against them.
d) culture and counter-culture: We are meant to be all things to all people. In other words, we meet people in their culture and circumstances. There is no other way to meet them. St. Paul spoke in the synagogues to the Jews about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and he spoke to the Greeks on the Parthenon about the unknown God. Yet cultures and times are like people: limited in their ambitions and values, flawed in their achievements, and sinful in their ways and structures. If we set out to redeem the times, we may have to preach change to the times. The Church is simultaneously cultural and counter-cultural.
5) repentance and forgiveness: Christians are called to repentance, especially in the call to love our neighbours, whether in loving each neighbour personally and more strongly or whether in striving to rework structures that are unduly limiting or that are unjust to our neighbours. Yet Christians are also called to forgiveness. Not only are they called to forgiveness but they are called to the unlimited renewal of forgiveness. For such reasons we have to live with a tension between repenting and forgiving.
The Church is unthinkable without Christ, being the body of which he is the head. If we want to work for the Church and to work on the Church, we need time and again to go back and read the Gospels. They are bright with a simplicity that we must never forget. Christ called the marginalised and the outcast to him as he did also a Sanhedrin member and comfortably off fishermen. He suggested that we did not try to separate the wheat and the weeds before God's time for doing so. He meant - and he means - his community to call us all to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect which stretches us considerably. He meant too - and he means - ours to be community in which we can be comfortably at home.
B: The Temptations of the Church
A central tension
In setting up his community Christ accepted a central and crucial tension: by associating flawed men and women with his enterprise there was bound to be a gap between the ideal and the actual, between the mystical and the institutional, and between saintly and mediocre witness. Yet from the endeavour to bridge that gap have come some of the great achievements of a Church that endured through the early persecutions, came to terms with Constantine and the empire, moved to embrace the barbarian peoples, survived the Great Schism in the Middle Ages and the loss of organisational unity at the Reformation, withstood the attacks of the Enlightenment, joined the population shifts to the New World, seized the fresh global opportunities of the 19th and 20th centuries, and now resists the pervasive agnosticism of our times.
The Church as an institution is however open to special temptations: its organisers (like all bureaucrats) are tempted to put their interests before those of the community; Christian notables, clerical and lay, are tempted to become entrenched elders of their societies; and Christian moralists are tempted to formulate laws for the respectable rather than stress the law of love for everyone. I will look briefly at each of these temptations.
A: The temptation of organisers: Christ founded a community. His followers were united by their allegiance to him; and their sense of belonging together was confirmed by the resurrection-event and the Pentecost experience. This community had however to organise itself. The New Testament documents reveal glimpses of the early organisation, including the roles of apostles such as Peter, James and Paul and the emerging roles of supervisors and elders. The latter leaders came from, and organised, the local communities; and they maintained linkages between the communities. Their roles were modelled on the organisation of the Jewish communities of the diaspora; and in the wake of the apostles they worked to preserve doctrine as well as formulate evangelisation policies. Later on again, as the Church made its peace with the empire it had to organise more comprehensively. Its organisation became increasingly elaborate and in the context of the empire and medieval Europe highly territorial. Its clerics were increasingly educated and professional; and they have remained like that down to our time.
To maintain a large religious community organisation is indispensable but it is not in itself sufficient. The first problem with professional organisers as with all bureaucrats is that they develop interests of their own that do not always coincide with the interests of the community. The second problem is that while the first Christian organisers took their authority from the early apostolic witnesses, the Church with time became permeated by the cultural traditions of pagan Europe and by models of the cultic priesthood of the Jews (the early Christians kept the title of 'priest' for Jesus only and not for their organisers). In consequence, subsequent generations of organisers came to see themselves as sacred rulers because they controlled the deposit of the faith and the Eucharistic assemblies. The term 'hierarchy' itself means sacred rulers. Yet because these men - and they were almost exclusively men - still retained human frailties it was necessary from time to time to seek abler and more upright officials and create more efficient organisational structures. The reforms associated with Gregory VII and the post-Tridentine popes were examples of such movements. So were the reforms set in motion by Vatican II that now seem to have in good measure run into the sand.
Movements of reform were historically apt to collide with a tightly knit, powerful and relatively educated caste who believed that they had, based on scripture and tradition, a sacred right to rule. Even the Reformation churches that initially reacted against priestly or clerical rule became within a short time as clericalised as their Roman opponents.
Moreover, reform was made more difficult by the slow territorial organisation of the Christian bodies which the Lutheran, Anglican and Scottish Presbyterian churches entrenched; and it was paradoxically compounded in the case of the Roman and Catholic Church by a post-Tridentine centralisation that still retained strong territorial features. Eamonn Duffy notes: 'Rome had originally been conceived [in the West] as the court of final appeal: in the course of the twelfth century it took on the role of a court of first instance. The pope became the 'universal ordinary', exercising direct jurisdiction in every corner of Christendom, dispensing judgements which were built into the precedent books and became the basis of law.' By the 19th century Popes had moved far beyond the early ideas of the papacy as preserving a succession from Peter and a right to monitor faith and had begun to claim a universal jurisdiction, for example, in naming bishops everywhere in the world. The exercise of that claim would have been impossible in centuries of less advanced communications. Rome gradually built up a Curial bureaucracy that accumulated power at the expense of the far-flung bishops. Between bureaucratic interests, sacred rule and territorial organisation reform in the Church is for ever both difficult and necessary. Efforts to reform and modernise are however in a highly legalist system readily stigmatised as disobedient and disloyal.
B: The temptation of elders: For historical reasons - and in this connection the leaders of the Church belong to the same tradition as did the leaders of the Synagogue - churchmen came to play a role not only as leaders of a religious community but as notables/elders of society; and there was, and is, constant danger that office-holders in the Church may confuse - or at least not disentangle - their roles as clerics (ecclesiastical administrators) from those of notables/elders (persons wielding political and/or social influence in secular society). One has only to think of the role of the clergy in pre-independence Ireland or, on a lesser scale, the role of a 19th parish priest in a Scottish or Northern English immigrant parish. Indeed in Northern Ireland clerics have come close to being 'chaplains to the warring tribes' as has happened also in the conflict of the Yugoslav break-up.
Though elders tended to pride themselves on being practical men, there was built into the mentality of community elders a conservative inclination to cling to historically inherited organisational structures and moral ideas that should have faced revision as technological and modernising changes took place in societies. In an organisation where practical men carried more authority than intellectuals, ageing Churchmen have had in recent times difficulty in coming to terms with historical and scientific technologies that have challenged accepted interpretations of scripture; they have been slow in taking on board the biological evolution of the human and other species that seemed to contradict creation stories in Genesis; they have not so far integrated the implications of recent discoveries that have challenged the bio-genetic roots of human life; and they look bewildered as they confront newly raised moral issues in contraception, divorce and homosexuality. In earlier centuries they had taken ages to catch up with better technical thinking on interest-taking and with a more humanitarian rejection of slavery. In the last decade they have shown that they have no idea how to deal with a contracting ministry and the sudden loss of younger members to the Church as its traditional enclaves have imploded.
C: The temptation of moralism: Since the commandment of love lies at the heart of Christian behaviour, Christian communities have felt obliged to monitor the behaviour of their members - and indeed of others outside their community - and to institutionalise such monitoring in the form of laws. Over many centuries and in spite of Paul's clear strictures on law, churchmen - and in this area of morality the roles of bureaucrats and elders again converged - laid down social and individual morality for communities. They were, for example, usually oblivious that laws dealing with marital consanguinity derived from the customs of the European aristocracy rather than from Christian love or that Eucharistic fasting laws came more from cultic and legalist notions than from reverence for the sacrament. A recent Roman instruction on celebrating the Eucharist that confines priests at Mass to the sanctuary seems based on the idea of sacred space and the separation of the priestly caste from the laity. One might compare Christ's words to the Samaritan woman (John 4:21-24) that embody a different concept of worship. Against this background a temptation has constantly been to teach Christian morality as a series of binding moral and cultic laws and individualistic injunctions to confessors rather than to emphasise Christ's double commandment of love. In the process rulers have tried to end discussion - whether on re-marriage after divorce, contraception or approaches to Aids - by decisions from the centre with little input from the local churches.
Final Reflection
It is important to be conscious of the temptations of the Church if we are to deal with them. Not for nothing did Christ put into his own very prayer: 'lead us not into temptation' (Matt:18:13). Yet he also said: 'For it is necessary that temptations come' (Matt: 18:7). We must deal with them as they arrive. As an American theologian, McBrien says: the 'Church as such is always in need of radical conversion to the Gospel.'
Fortunately Christ gave us his promise to be with us all days to the end. It is the presence of the Spirit of God whom Christ has sent to the Church that recruits committed clerics who serve the community before themselves, inspires upright social notables who distance themselves from entrenched communal interests and traditions and bear witness to peace and justice, and raises up great saints who witness to the centrality of love rather than support the moralism of the respectable that has enabled the Church to overcome temptations and to endure powerfully. In other words, there is fortunately at work in every generation a leaven of Christians, working through the Spirit, who strive to bring the reality of the Church into conformity with its ideal and who discard the stuffiness of bloated inheritances for the austerity of Christ. For such reasons the Church is ever reformed and ever requiring to be reformed.
image, structure and morality in Christianity
James O'Connell
Introduction
There is a tight connection between the paradoxes of the Church and its temptations. Many of the temptations come from the paradoxes, that is, they come from apparently contradictory characteristics and tasks that make and bind the Church. However the Church is given life by truths and ways of living that are held in benign tension with one another and out of which initiative and renewal emanate. Not least, in overcoming temptations that belong to the historic situation of humanity the Church grows. But saying these things does not mean that paradoxes may not overbalance into contradictions and that temptations may not lead to a fall. Hence, the case for teasing out both paradoxes and temptations.
B: Paradoxes of the Church
Before reflecting on the paradoxes of the Church I want to reflect on the image of the Church in Western society and on its tendency towards moralism. The image is not always an attractive one, and it does not reflect the inner reality of the Church. Yet we need to take care over images because through them we become known, even in measure to ourselves. We have also however to admit that Church leaders who often address society in highly moralist terms on our behalf do not warrant us a likeable image. For that reason it seems worthwhile to think briefly on the Church and morality. Finally, in the section that examines directly the paradoxes of the Church I want to set out vibrant aspects of the Church of our faith.
1): The image of the Church: Whether we like it or not, we have to admit a particular awkwardness in presenting latterly the Church in Western countries. Mentioning the Church conveys to contemporaries a vision of bishops in exotic garb; it sends a message of negative teaching axed on sexuality; and it conveys an institution propped up by respectable but drab lay persons who would not recognise a socially radical idea if it were explained to them in words of one syllable. Moreover, the actual working of the Church suggests gathering people together once a week for ceremonies that relate little enough to our times. Those who attend church are faced by forms of worship, language and preaching, music and singing that are mostly mediocre and that seem to be out of kilter with the more pulsating parts of contemporary communications and aesthetics.
The Church is organised and presided over autocratically by an ageing and numerically diminishing clergy who are hardly charismatic, greatly energetic or well organised. If the publicised decade of mission had ever succeeded in getting people through the doors of churches, they would not easily have lingered within. In the words of the 8th century Irish poem: if you go to Rome to find Christ, you won't find him there unless you bring him with you. Only when we bring strong faith with us to church, does it remain there at work through the badly sung hymns, the poorly read and often impenetrable readings, the homilies that seldom seem to connect with life, the banal language of the liturgy and the passiveness of Sunday congregations.
2): The misshapen Church of morality: As we seek to convey the relevance of our faith we need to avoid more than anything else an issues approach, an approach that asks what we have to say about homosexuality, divorce and remarriage, and even about poverty and injustice on local and global scales. Jacques Ellul writes aptly: "In the eyes of most of our contemporaries, Christianity is a morality first of all. And have not many epochs of Christian history been characterized by the church's insistence upon actions and conduct?" (To Will and To Do, Philadelphia, 1969, p. 201). Avoiding an issues approach does not imply insensitiveness to what concerns us and our neighbours. But if we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, decent attitudes towards all the other problems will come. We will then as individuals and as churches discern the morality of cases and situations; we will use our resources to support just causes; we will operate as conciliators between groups in dispute; and we will offer witness in compassion. We will not however seek to impose our morality on other persons and groups.
3): The paradoxes of the living Church: There are several paradoxes with which the Church has to live. They come from its divine-human nature. The divine and human elements in the Church are inextricably mixed. No one can say where the divine finishes and the human begins; and it may well be the case that the mixture varies from one epoch of history to another. This is not the place to expand at length on these paradoxes but there is merit in at least attempting to suggest their existence and to sketch their nature.
a) perfect and flawed, holy and sinful; The Church is meant to be perfect, holy and without spot. Christ has however associated limited, flawed and sinful people with him in his work, and so the Church will remain in history an imperfect vehicle for the kingdom of God. There is for ever a tension between the ideal and the actual. Yet great achievement may come as good Christians strive to overcome the limitations of the human and yet stretch humanity to its finest efforts.
b) leaven and mass: Christians are the 'salt of the earth' and the 'leaven in the flour'. There is a sense in which it will never be easy to broaden the following of Christ; and there is bound to be an elite dimension to the best Christians. Yet they follow a man who had compassion on the multitude. No matter how necessary it is to form an elite, we may never abandon the masses of the people.
c) community and organisation: Those disciples who were faithful to Jesus set out to preach to the whole world. In the process they had with time to move from a community to a community of communities, and indeed from a movement to an organisation. Inevitably the question of order arises in an organisation, especially in a large-scale organisation; and where order is required, then law enters in. Christian communities early on had to set aside the temptation to impose Jewish law, and to set aside the even more insidious temptation to attempt to legislate their own communities into morality. Laws of their nature are related to particular historical circumstances. The gospel orientations - the call of Christ to his disciples - endure but that is not true of laws. For one thing, laws have to change as circumstances change; and, for another, laws are by their nature general and must never be applied to individuals except in taking account of their personal and particular circumstances. Law is an easy choice for organisers and administrators but it is no part of the essence of Christianity. Every time we look at the Code of Canon Law and look back from it to the Gospels, we should ask ourselves: did the Gospels need to end up codified in this book?
Following also from the need to organise comes the role of organisers. In every organisation there tends to be a tension between organisers who follow their professional, and sometimes out-of-touch, agenda, and their own vested interests, and the members of the organisation who have other concerns and interests. In the case of Christianity the issue of organisers became complicated as they turned from the 'supervisors' [bishops] and 'elders' [presbyters] of the early communities into sacred ministers who were ordained sacramentally. All organisations are in constant need of reform but reform becomes more difficult when it has to be carried on against those who have imposed themselves historically as sacred rulers. Yet if they have presided over the triumph of organisation over community, there is no avoiding the struggle of reform against them.
d) culture and counter-culture: We are meant to be all things to all people. In other words, we meet people in their culture and circumstances. There is no other way to meet them. St. Paul spoke in the synagogues to the Jews about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and he spoke to the Greeks on the Parthenon about the unknown God. Yet cultures and times are like people: limited in their ambitions and values, flawed in their achievements, and sinful in their ways and structures. If we set out to redeem the times, we may have to preach change to the times. The Church is simultaneously cultural and counter-cultural.
5) repentance and forgiveness: Christians are called to repentance, especially in the call to love our neighbours, whether in loving each neighbour personally and more strongly or whether in striving to rework structures that are unduly limiting or that are unjust to our neighbours. Yet Christians are also called to forgiveness. Not only are they called to forgiveness but they are called to the unlimited renewal of forgiveness. For such reasons we have to live with a tension between repenting and forgiving.
The Church is unthinkable without Christ, being the body of which he is the head. If we want to work for the Church and to work on the Church, we need time and again to go back and read the Gospels. They are bright with a simplicity that we must never forget. Christ called the marginalised and the outcast to him as he did also a Sanhedrin member and comfortably off fishermen. He suggested that we did not try to separate the wheat and the weeds before God's time for doing so. He meant - and he means - his community to call us all to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect which stretches us considerably. He meant too - and he means - ours to be community in which we can be comfortably at home.
B: The Temptations of the Church
A central tension
In setting up his community Christ accepted a central and crucial tension: by associating flawed men and women with his enterprise there was bound to be a gap between the ideal and the actual, between the mystical and the institutional, and between saintly and mediocre witness. Yet from the endeavour to bridge that gap have come some of the great achievements of a Church that endured through the early persecutions, came to terms with Constantine and the empire, moved to embrace the barbarian peoples, survived the Great Schism in the Middle Ages and the loss of organisational unity at the Reformation, withstood the attacks of the Enlightenment, joined the population shifts to the New World, seized the fresh global opportunities of the 19th and 20th centuries, and now resists the pervasive agnosticism of our times.
The Church as an institution is however open to special temptations: its organisers (like all bureaucrats) are tempted to put their interests before those of the community; Christian notables, clerical and lay, are tempted to become entrenched elders of their societies; and Christian moralists are tempted to formulate laws for the respectable rather than stress the law of love for everyone. I will look briefly at each of these temptations.
A: The temptation of organisers: Christ founded a community. His followers were united by their allegiance to him; and their sense of belonging together was confirmed by the resurrection-event and the Pentecost experience. This community had however to organise itself. The New Testament documents reveal glimpses of the early organisation, including the roles of apostles such as Peter, James and Paul and the emerging roles of supervisors and elders. The latter leaders came from, and organised, the local communities; and they maintained linkages between the communities. Their roles were modelled on the organisation of the Jewish communities of the diaspora; and in the wake of the apostles they worked to preserve doctrine as well as formulate evangelisation policies. Later on again, as the Church made its peace with the empire it had to organise more comprehensively. Its organisation became increasingly elaborate and in the context of the empire and medieval Europe highly territorial. Its clerics were increasingly educated and professional; and they have remained like that down to our time.
To maintain a large religious community organisation is indispensable but it is not in itself sufficient. The first problem with professional organisers as with all bureaucrats is that they develop interests of their own that do not always coincide with the interests of the community. The second problem is that while the first Christian organisers took their authority from the early apostolic witnesses, the Church with time became permeated by the cultural traditions of pagan Europe and by models of the cultic priesthood of the Jews (the early Christians kept the title of 'priest' for Jesus only and not for their organisers). In consequence, subsequent generations of organisers came to see themselves as sacred rulers because they controlled the deposit of the faith and the Eucharistic assemblies. The term 'hierarchy' itself means sacred rulers. Yet because these men - and they were almost exclusively men - still retained human frailties it was necessary from time to time to seek abler and more upright officials and create more efficient organisational structures. The reforms associated with Gregory VII and the post-Tridentine popes were examples of such movements. So were the reforms set in motion by Vatican II that now seem to have in good measure run into the sand.
Movements of reform were historically apt to collide with a tightly knit, powerful and relatively educated caste who believed that they had, based on scripture and tradition, a sacred right to rule. Even the Reformation churches that initially reacted against priestly or clerical rule became within a short time as clericalised as their Roman opponents.
Moreover, reform was made more difficult by the slow territorial organisation of the Christian bodies which the Lutheran, Anglican and Scottish Presbyterian churches entrenched; and it was paradoxically compounded in the case of the Roman and Catholic Church by a post-Tridentine centralisation that still retained strong territorial features. Eamonn Duffy notes: 'Rome had originally been conceived [in the West] as the court of final appeal: in the course of the twelfth century it took on the role of a court of first instance. The pope became the 'universal ordinary', exercising direct jurisdiction in every corner of Christendom, dispensing judgements which were built into the precedent books and became the basis of law.' By the 19th century Popes had moved far beyond the early ideas of the papacy as preserving a succession from Peter and a right to monitor faith and had begun to claim a universal jurisdiction, for example, in naming bishops everywhere in the world. The exercise of that claim would have been impossible in centuries of less advanced communications. Rome gradually built up a Curial bureaucracy that accumulated power at the expense of the far-flung bishops. Between bureaucratic interests, sacred rule and territorial organisation reform in the Church is for ever both difficult and necessary. Efforts to reform and modernise are however in a highly legalist system readily stigmatised as disobedient and disloyal.
B: The temptation of elders: For historical reasons - and in this connection the leaders of the Church belong to the same tradition as did the leaders of the Synagogue - churchmen came to play a role not only as leaders of a religious community but as notables/elders of society; and there was, and is, constant danger that office-holders in the Church may confuse - or at least not disentangle - their roles as clerics (ecclesiastical administrators) from those of notables/elders (persons wielding political and/or social influence in secular society). One has only to think of the role of the clergy in pre-independence Ireland or, on a lesser scale, the role of a 19th parish priest in a Scottish or Northern English immigrant parish. Indeed in Northern Ireland clerics have come close to being 'chaplains to the warring tribes' as has happened also in the conflict of the Yugoslav break-up.
Though elders tended to pride themselves on being practical men, there was built into the mentality of community elders a conservative inclination to cling to historically inherited organisational structures and moral ideas that should have faced revision as technological and modernising changes took place in societies. In an organisation where practical men carried more authority than intellectuals, ageing Churchmen have had in recent times difficulty in coming to terms with historical and scientific technologies that have challenged accepted interpretations of scripture; they have been slow in taking on board the biological evolution of the human and other species that seemed to contradict creation stories in Genesis; they have not so far integrated the implications of recent discoveries that have challenged the bio-genetic roots of human life; and they look bewildered as they confront newly raised moral issues in contraception, divorce and homosexuality. In earlier centuries they had taken ages to catch up with better technical thinking on interest-taking and with a more humanitarian rejection of slavery. In the last decade they have shown that they have no idea how to deal with a contracting ministry and the sudden loss of younger members to the Church as its traditional enclaves have imploded.
C: The temptation of moralism: Since the commandment of love lies at the heart of Christian behaviour, Christian communities have felt obliged to monitor the behaviour of their members - and indeed of others outside their community - and to institutionalise such monitoring in the form of laws. Over many centuries and in spite of Paul's clear strictures on law, churchmen - and in this area of morality the roles of bureaucrats and elders again converged - laid down social and individual morality for communities. They were, for example, usually oblivious that laws dealing with marital consanguinity derived from the customs of the European aristocracy rather than from Christian love or that Eucharistic fasting laws came more from cultic and legalist notions than from reverence for the sacrament. A recent Roman instruction on celebrating the Eucharist that confines priests at Mass to the sanctuary seems based on the idea of sacred space and the separation of the priestly caste from the laity. One might compare Christ's words to the Samaritan woman (John 4:21-24) that embody a different concept of worship. Against this background a temptation has constantly been to teach Christian morality as a series of binding moral and cultic laws and individualistic injunctions to confessors rather than to emphasise Christ's double commandment of love. In the process rulers have tried to end discussion - whether on re-marriage after divorce, contraception or approaches to Aids - by decisions from the centre with little input from the local churches.
Final Reflection
It is important to be conscious of the temptations of the Church if we are to deal with them. Not for nothing did Christ put into his own very prayer: 'lead us not into temptation' (Matt:18:13). Yet he also said: 'For it is necessary that temptations come' (Matt: 18:7). We must deal with them as they arrive. As an American theologian, McBrien says: the 'Church as such is always in need of radical conversion to the Gospel.'
Fortunately Christ gave us his promise to be with us all days to the end. It is the presence of the Spirit of God whom Christ has sent to the Church that recruits committed clerics who serve the community before themselves, inspires upright social notables who distance themselves from entrenched communal interests and traditions and bear witness to peace and justice, and raises up great saints who witness to the centrality of love rather than support the moralism of the respectable that has enabled the Church to overcome temptations and to endure powerfully. In other words, there is fortunately at work in every generation a leaven of Christians, working through the Spirit, who strive to bring the reality of the Church into conformity with its ideal and who discard the stuffiness of bloated inheritances for the austerity of Christ. For such reasons the Church is ever reformed and ever requiring to be reformed.