Shatter, from Take Heart

By Brian Doyle

The most extraordinary moment of my Catholic lifetime was when little Angelo Roncalli politely grabbed the Church he loved by its ancient hoary arrogant throat and shook it until the dust fell like snow.

But that was forty years ago, and that twenty-third John died before he could bend the biggest corporation on earth back toward its original incredible idea, relentless love, and away from its addiction to control, and since then the hierarchy, up to and including the remarkable man who now steers the ship, has maybe been more interested in conserving power than in correcting pride.

The priesthood, including the late public relations genius of a pope, has in general wished to protect the cherished idea of a paternal and pastoral Church that led and taught its flock, even as the flock, at least in the Americas, increasingly found many of the men who vow to be their servants uninterested in and dismissive of what they thought and how they lived.

Which is why in my lifetime millions of American Catholics, including me, have saluted the hierarchy with respect and often affection even as they steeled their resolve to make their own moral decisions.

And then came revelations of rape, and more rapes, rapes beyond counting.

But none of us, not even cowards like the bishops and cardinals who with their lies let children be raped and ruined in their parishes, knew the true horror – how many twisted troubled priests there were and are, how many cruel inept bishops, how deep the squirming evil in the corporation expressly designed to fight evil. “The smoke of Satan,” as the American bishops themselves have said.

I have three small children; I am enraged; I am afraid; I am bitter. The organization into which I was born, in which I was schooled, to which I have devoted much of my professional life, is caught with its pants down, revealed to be a place where men at the highest levels shut their eyes to the screams of children in the next room.

Yet this acid bath may heal the church, may force it back into the clean future little Angelo Roncalli dreamed for it.

From these crimes may come a new Church – one that will, I pray quietly, be what it has always had the extraordinary potential to be: a stunning voice against poverty and hunger and greed and violence, a force beyond national and political and ethnic snarling, a clan of brothers and sisters bound by the insane faith that love will conquer blood.

A clan, an idea, a force, an energy, a prayerful verb that reaches for its brothers and sisters among other faiths and creeds; that reunites with other Christian faiths and with its parent and root, Judaism; that links arms with the other faiths that sense the One under all; that joins hands with the faiths that chase the holy miracle of life and call it many names; and together, the motley clan now comprising most of the people in the world, dream a new planet.

Probable? No. I am no fool.

Possible. Yes. I believe.

The Catholic hierarchy isn’t the Catholic Church. The men and women who take vows as priests and nuns, and the ones who are elevated to authority, like the many dozens of admirable cardinals and bishops in America and around the wild green bruised planet, are overwhelmingly brave and graceful and honest and unbelievably selfless – but they are a tiny percentage of the Catholic world.

So “the Church” will not be shattered by this horrific unveiling of rape and twisted sex and cowardly mismanagement, because the Church is us – mothers, fathers, children, single people, gay and divorced and separated men and women, all the people in the fifteenth pew and very many who never sit in pews at all but savor Christ’s words in their hearts.

What will shatter, what I pray will shatter, is a culture of paranoid power in the Catholic Church – a culture the Church has wrestled with for many centuries, because the Church is a human construct draped on an incredible idea, and human constructs, as you and I know all too well, are utterly liable to violence and greed, craven cupidity, arrogance, lies.

I do not forget the early Church, that band of brothers and sisters who grew up around the ludicrous idea that a young skinny intense devout poetic confusing dazzling Jew preaching love love love was Himself the distilled essence of the unimaginable Force that created all that is. A crazy idea, and they were crazy men and women, addicted to His stunning idea that love would conquer blood.

But they persisted – against the enmity of their Jewish brethren, against the enmity of the world’s greatest empire then, against the enmity of time. They did so in the early years by communal love: they chose their own priests from among themselves, they did not fetishize celibacy, they elected their own bishops, they met in fields and forests, they steered clear as best they could from power and money, and tried to stay focused on the young Jew’s message, and the carrying of that love to the ends of the earth, the forging of that wild message into a wild new peace, a new way of being, a revolution of the heart.

Inevitably it took an organization to carry that message, and no organization can persist for two thousand years without being subject to all the million sins and vices of the human engine: lust, greed, violence. And the Catholic Church has suffered them all in spades, being nothing more and nothing less, ultimately, than a corporation to house and protect the original crazy idea.

The corporation is brave and extraordinary and flawed and cruel. It has been responsible, perhaps, for more blood and death than any other corporation in the history of the world. It is, in its modern incarnation, egregiously mismanaged. It has far too few managers for its workforce – remember, this is a clan and corporation numbering more than a billion people – and those managers are all male, all unmarried, and almost all elderly. It is, despite its worldwide scope and influence, headquartered in a single vast ancient Italian castle where a cadre of mostly Italian men persist in trying to control the lives and loves of people around the planet. It is, despite its own very public cry for openness – aggiornamento! – forty years ago, in real ways closed to women, closed to gay people, closed to divorced people, closed to the very same scattered democracy of the first days after Christ, when a handful of men and women dispersed from Jerusalem to carry the news of a love that did not die.

But I suggest that this closed corporation, which I have loved and hated, which enrages me and has immensely enlivened and enlightened my life, which has fueled a million memoirs and movies, which has harbored the most amazing grace and genius and the most savage rape and sin, is dying and being reborn before our eyes. It is crumbling and shattering and turning to ash and roiling and churning and something in its hammered and flinty heart is struggling to be born anew.

I suggest that these days are the first blinking mewling days of the new Church.

I suggest that the Vatican as imperial corporate headquarters may someday become Buckingham Palace, a beloved and respected and necessary and nutritious element of Catholicism, but not at all crucial, and certainly not in charge.

I suggest that the pope will someday be elected not by cardinals but by worldwide acclamation of his people every bit as inspired by the Holy Spirit as their cardinals locked in a room together have been in the past.

I suggest that the Curia will someday be vastly expanded and vastly diluted.

I suggest that synods of bishops around the world will someday really be the leaders of the faithful in their nations, beholden not to Rome but to the people they have sworn to serve.

I suggest that dioceses and archdioceses may someday again elect their own priests and bishops.

I suggest that women will someday take their rightful place in the first rank of teachers and pastors in the church.

I suggest that the financial status of churches and schools and parishes and dioceses and archdioceses, already teetering, will change utterly into entities designed not as outposts of the diocese but as independent spiritual villages in large part devoted once again to what built the American Catholic Church in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, schools.

I suggest that my church will soon welcome and celebrate its gay members with all its heart, not in the current way of public speech and private disdain.

I suggest that my church will welcome and celebrate its divorced and remarried members without the clownish and Byzantine apparatus of annulment.

I suggest that the legacy of John Paul II will eventually be not his continued marginalization of women and insistence on corporate control, but his ferocious insistence that Christ’s message can destroy totalitarian governments without smart bombs, that wars are inarguably failures of the imagination, and that we are brothers and sisters with all people who pursue holiness.

I suggest that my church will slowly but eventually turn itself over, as it were; that its leaders in the future will be lay men and women, and the hierarchy, a brave and creative and committed and admirable tiny minority, will be celebrated for the extraordinary choice of life they have made, not feared for the crimes they may commit.

I suggest that my church will always be a struggle and a mess, will always be a human yearning and failure, will always be striving and falling, will always be a house for wonder and woe, will never be what it wishes to be; but will be closer to the spirit of its astounding and miraculous birth, in the years to come, than it has been in two millennia. And that, my friends, is a miracle.

The Catholic idea, all these years after Christ died and rose and his friends scattered around the world on their incredible public relations mission, remains stunning and unbelievable – and crucial. And the church which eventually enfleshed that idea, the church which has meant so much to so many, which has meant so much to Western civilization, which has in the most real sense imaginable saved so many souls and so many lives from despair, stands now at a crossroads the like of which it has not faced since the Emperor Constantine saw a sword of fire in the sky and reconsidered the whole idea of massacre of Christians. It will, in the years to come, fall into dusty insignificance, or be reborn and resurrected in a wild motley creative roiling singing form we can only dimly see; but I hope and pray with all my heart that before I die I see clear a church that matters more than it has since the skinny dusty confusing mysterious gaunt testy riveting devout Jew Yesuah ben Joseph selected his first team and so birthed an idea that might heal the bruised and wondrous world.

Amen and then again amen.

From Brian Doyle, “Shatter,” in TAKE HEART, Ben Birnbaum, ed. (c) 2007.

Used with permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

Brian Doyle (bdoyle@up.edu) is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He is the author of seven books, including Epiphanies and Elegies (Sheed & Ward, 2007), and most recently The Wet Engine, about hearts, and The Grail, about a year in an Oregon vineyard. His work appears in the Best American Essays collections of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005.

Comments

[Mychals Prayer]

Mr. Doyle,

Very inspired commentary. I’m going to send your link to friends. You outline a vision of the Church, in both Spirit and structure, which is close to Christ’s own vision and the model presented in Acts.

I’d like to focus on one comment you made -- “I suggest that my church will soon welcome and celebrate its gay members with all its heart….”

When the Pope visits Ground Zero, he will be greeted by a vigil honoring the late FDNY chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, the first official casualty of the 9/11 attacks.

Mychal was considered a living saint by many even prior to his heroic death. His extraordinary works of compassion have been compared to Mother Teresa (see http://SaintMychalJudge.blogspot.com )

But ironically, Fr. Mychal Judge would be barred from the priesthood today because he was openly gay, though celibate. He often asked, “Is there so much love in the world that we can afford to discriminate against any kind of love ?!”

We have no illusions that this pope is going to change. Rather, we are bearing witness to two truths -- that God created and loves gay people, and that the pope does not speak for the whole Church, the Ecclesia, on these matters.

Indeed, two-thirds of U.S. Catholics-in-the-pews reject the pope’s views and support either civil unions or full marriage rights, according to numerous surveys.

As Fr. Mychal also said -- and this can apply to everyone who is frustrated by the Roman hierarchy for any reason -- "Don't let the (institutional) church get in the way of your relationship with God."