Collapse

Last week I wrote about the possibility of the collapse of the Catholic Church. Now we have two spectacular examples of collapse, tragic collapse.

As more details become known about the condominium in Florida, we learn about warnings that were never addressed. I’ve never seen such a tragic example of the mote and the beam from the Sermon on the Mount; officials required changes to the lights and the gates and ignored the literal beams supporting the building. The official mind-set cannot deal with the big problems. 

The release of Bill Cosby from prison signaled the collapse of the judgment of sexual abuse against him, tragic for the women who came forward and for others who might be deterred from doing the same. The narrow constitutional grounds found by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, set in motion by Bruce Castor, a prosecutor who characterized himself as “sovereign” in Montgomery County, should not mask the temptation to hierarchy and privilege that persists in our society.

Can you tell where this is going? Our church is not free from petty officials or from those who flaunt their position. 

We have been writing for weeks about the USCCB and its decision to develop a document on the Eucharist. 

Michael Sean Winters takes a swipe at the “Q and A” on the USCCB website: “The document is a tad disingenuous at times, employing a tactic similar to the age-old one of announcing a change in the teaching of the church with the words, ‘As the Church has always taught …’” 

The USCCB page is slick, which might please but not convince John Gross, a diocesan director of digital media. In America he describes his experience of the bishops’ meeting: “As our bishops lined up, one after another, to speak during their virtual meeting, Catholics of all political and theological persuasions were commenting on Twitter in real time. Some were cheering on the bishops, or at least their favorite ones, one tweet at a time, and heaving insults and accusations at their fellow Catholics with the same gusto. I couldn’t help but feel disheartened. The display, both of bishops calling out politicians and political parties by name, and lay people, religious and clergy levying ad hominem attacks at one another online, did more to foment church disunity and division than anything I have seen online during my time in ministry.” I guess this is what I miss not being on Twitter! 

Gross acknowledges how hard the job of bishop is, but this “was a display that did not align with the concerns of most young people the church is trying to reach.” So much for slick digital media. This specialist asks: “Why would anyone want to affiliate with a group like that? How could anyone take seriously the call to love one another, to love our enemies, when this is the example we offer?” Not dealing with the foundations leads to collapse. 

Years of not dealing, Tom Roberts argues in NCR. Fatally distracted by Roe v. Wade, he suggests, and I would remind him that it’s an inability to deal with women that’s at the base of this myopia. Roberts goes on to quote Eugene Kennedy’s analysis, “The foundational crisis is the impairment, or complete loss by church leaders, of the sacramental sense, that feeling for the theological principle of sacramentality, the notion that all reality, both animate and inanimate, is potentially or in fact the bearer of God’s presence.” Note the foundation. 

Could anything the bishops discuss now address the collapse? Roberts suggests, “They have shown themselves minimalists in facing other moral issues, including an obscenely immoral military buildup; new generations of nuclear weapons that make a mockery of their previous pastoral statement on the issue and threaten life as we know it; vast inequities in the richest democracy in the world; ongoing consequences of systemic racism; a climate crisis that threatens Earth itself.” Not exactly motes. 

Centuries of not dealing, Ilia Delio answers, especially about that last concern. The worldwide church has failed to develop “a new theology, one that aligns with our current understanding of cosmology, evolution and quantum physics. Without such a shift, ideological conflicts will likely deepen in the Church, eventually causing an implosion.” This is the most accessible piece I have read by Delio, more a comment about me than about her. I recommend it to you in its entirety. She has convinced me that, by not acknowledging those who are writing a new theology for this century and the future, our church has furthered its own collapse: “we have a medieval Church in a posthuman world.” A good metaphor always attracts me: “Our theological limping with a medieval cane is shown in the persistence of ‘unsatisfied theism.’” 

But here Delio is not arguing that God is dead, despite the increasing number of people, especially the young, who claim unbelief. She’s arguing that God is united with all creation, and that this position is so much more than pantheism. “In the 21^st century, to be religious is to be devoted to care for the earth and care for the poor, whether or not one prays or goes to daily Mass…To hide in the pews of a Church without care for the earth is to pray before an empty tabernacle.” 

Delio’s conclusion begins, “A world of true interdependence wherein humans form a single community with all the other living beings that exist upon the earth calls for new forms of worship and new levels of action. If the Church is to survive, it will need to relinquish its medieval theological grasp. We humans are simply not that special, and we may be replaced by super intelligent machines in the future if we continue to ignore the cries of the earth and the cries of the human heart in search of a living God.” This blows me away because I have cowered in fear at this very idea, that humans will become irrelevant when computers take over! If a new theology can save the earth and humanity, not to mention the church, I need to get on board and be ready to embrace the future. Collapse is not as simple as I have imagined.