Understanding the Need for Reform

Gregory X, a forgotten but great reformer pope

Walk into your neighborhood parish for Sunday morning Mass and look at the families with children, especially those with few children. Then ask yourself "How many of these kiddies will be attending a Sunday Mass with any regularity in ten years, when they are out of college on their own?" The answer, if historical trend continue, is about one in five, which is the same reduction in fidelity Americans saw in transitioning from the so-called Greatest Generation to the detestable Baby Boom generation.

The most important element of the faith, aside from working toward one's personal salvation, is the transmission of that same faith to other people. There are national churches in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but on the whole Apostolic Christianity, not unlike its Divine Founder, "has no where to lay its head." Like the Presence of Christ after His Ascension into heaven and the descent of the Holy Spirit, the Church is ubiquitous while belonging to no place in particular. The descent of the Holy Spirit, paralleling the giving of the Decalogue to Moses, means that unlike the Ten Commandments, written on stone for all to see, the fulfilled Law resides within the illumined heart of the believer.

More to the point, we must understand and live the Catholic faith if we are to pass it on to posterity. It is not enough to remember a few bits of the Nicene Creed recited during Sunday Mass at Saint Michael's in Manhattan or that everyone was always hopping up and down in the pews at the Jesuit church on Farm Street or that Sister Agnes told us not to use condoms during a sex ed class at Catholic high school. Even among the more devout and instructed, one must go beyond remembering swatches of the [latest] Catechism of the Catholic Church. Faith and its adherence to Our Lord's wishes must be very alive and intuitive as breathing. It must be the sort of faith that drives people to their knees when a priest walks by with the Holy Eucharist or which inspires families to create their own customs around major feast days. This sort of understood Christianity, constantly aware of the power of the Incarnation and Resurrection, has met both firmer and weaker degrees of resistance from the European and American hierarchies the last five decades and in some places has survived in spite of the bishops. While it may be surviving, even healthily so in some parishes, this faith is not flourishing and it is time to understand why.

The liturgy changed, industrialism shifted the social paradigm, political revolutions threw off traditional order, and doctrine has been undermined in favor of seminar-room affability. What do we do about it? What would reform look like? And what should "reform" be understood to mean?

Reform represents a hard point in Church history, since every change inevitably has its losses and additions to custom. The essence of reform is that it introduces nothing new, refreshes what is precious, and excises what is dead to the transmission of our religion. Anything else is either failure or novelty, or in the case of the 20th century, both. What is most in need of reform right now is not the Mass, which needs restoration; it is not doctrine, which requires polish rather than the crud of recent years; it is the papacy. The Roman bishopric itself needs dire reform.

The main problem with the modern papacy is not so much its power as much as its potency, its potential to exercise power over the Universal Church. What prior popes held to be untouchable—either by fear of retribution, respect for place, or heartfelt conviction that a matter was beyond their authority—the modern papacy can and does touch. The Roman liturgy is the most obvious example of this problem, but turmoil over Paul VI, John Paul II, and now Francis' dilution of discipline and the verbiage of doctrine demonstrates that the papacy as it exists today is incapable for its most essential function, that is, guarding Christianity in a way that the faithful can truly understand and can safely pass on. The papacy, not to be confused solely with the pope, selects cardinal-archbishops who will lead national episcopal conferences which will in turn lobby and manipulate the choice of his successor. It changes, or can change, the worship of God at whim, something that previous generations held to be the active work of the Holy Spirit. It can formulate and re-formulate doctrine to suit post-modern European political sensibilities rather than a realistic understanding of human nature. The Roman Pontificate and its entourage can de facto do anything.

History tempts one to pinpoint Vatican I as the beginnings of this turgid bureaucracy, but the trouble is really a little older and less complicated than that. The popes were once crowned as "Father of princes and kinds, ruler of the world, earthly vicar of Our Redeemer, Jesus Christ." Today they are "inaugurated" as the spiritual rulers of 1.3 billion registered voters. What once was an independent state meant to safeguard the independence of the Church and regulate disputes between the rulers of Christendom became a machine of superfluous politicians co-prisoners with Pius IX inside the Apostolic Palace after the Papal States fell apart and the various monarchies of Europe shortly there after. The energy and infrastructure found itself with little to do on a grand scale, so, like any committee, sought and found new ways to justify and perpetuate its existence. The Vatican and the papacy became more and more interested in the regulation of daily Christian life, be it fasting (reduced several times in the 20th century), the Mass and Office, Canon Law (two new codes in the same period), Catechism, episcopal selection processes, and private devotions (how many extras were approved). Aside from a few dicasteries like the Penitentiary and the Rota, one would be hard pressed to justify the existence of any office in the Vatican, staffed with friends of previous administrators and soon to be staffed with their pupils. And at the heart of it is the Pope himself, the successor of Saint Peter and an Apostle in his time as Peter was in the first century. Unfortunately, the Roman Pontiffs have seen fit to travel the world where other faithful are already in possession of their own Apostolic successors, disempowered by both Canon Law and episcopal conferences. Meanwhile, the Church of Rome, which Saint Irenaeus said demanded assent from all other churches, languishes in decline.

In this respect the papacy is not unlike the Mass itself during the Renaissance, the end of the Middle Ages. At no time in history was the Mass more loved, more desired, more imminent in the lives of the faith; at no time was it more abused, more used for bad purposes, and amenable to rebellion. Liturgy, Offices, votive rites, grand processions, and local traditions proliferated in these years. The faithful demanded Requiem Masses by the dozen for a deceased ancestor, supported priests whose only purpose was to say certain votive Masses, they heard Mass at least once daily, and made up their own parts for the cycle of Divine drama that unfolded throughout the year. Simultaneously, monks would celebrate a missa sicca, an imitation of the first half of Mass sans the chasuble, and charge the faithful stipends for their intentions. Laity would go into a cathedral on a Sunday and hop from altar to altar after Prime just to see the elevation as many times as they could, all the while missing the public Mass and procession at the altar after Terce. Reformers like Luther grew to hate the Mass for its abuses and read the disposition of people towards the Mass as evidence for its hollowness. The Tridentine Fathers, far from disposing of the Mass, recognized need to purge malevolent influences so that the command of Christ to His Apostles "Do this in anamnesis of me" might continue.

Like the late medieval Mass, the papacy is an essential element of Christianity that currently suffers from vitiations that obscure its purpose and complicate its transmission to future generations. In fact, some might be well tempted to ditch it altogether, be it through sedevacantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or outright loss of faith. And as with the Mass five centuries ago this is too far.

The essential elements of the papacy, as detailed by Adrian Fortescue in his survey of pre-Chalcedonian Church Fathers The Early Papacy, are:

1. the pope's place as chief bishop in the Church
2. universal episcopal jurisdiction
3. Rome as the point of Communion for all other bishops within the Church
4. infallibility in judgments of doctrine

At face value these are difficult elements to reform, especially the first and second points given the administrative and spiritual centralization around the papacy. The pope's duty to "confirm his brethren" mandates that he be able to correct them and their mistakes when necessary, meaning his episcopal power overrides others, even if his decisions in this regard do not enjoy the inerrancy of doctrinal teaching. 

What reform might look like in this respect is a world in which papal acts of immediate episcopal jurisdiction do confirm the Pontiff's brethren rather than do their duties in their stead. Let the bishops truly run their churches and let the pope's intervention be just that, an intervention rather than a corporate check up on how a franchisee is performing. One may ask what would have happened in Los Angeles during the '90s when Roger Mahony was Cardinal-Archbishop and the Vatican watched to make sure he could not go too far. Is not the Vatican "thing" precisely what prevents liberal bishops from going fully public with their views? On the contrary, Roger Mahony would never have been a deacon in an age in which the Pope was the guardian of the faith and the local ordinary its primary means of conveyance. A loosening of the pope's active binding and loosing might mean immediate problems, but there is no other way to give the faith sufficient room to gain roots. Otherwise we will continue to play the game pro-life Republicans have played with the Supreme Court for years: we just need to get one more person who agrees with us in place and everything will be right with the world. 

Unlike earlier generations, when papal reform meant freeing the Roman bishopric and lending authority to its Petrine prestige, a modern reform to reduce its immediate influence has very few precedents. One might be the invention of the College of Cardinals. Before the 12th century Cardinals were merely the archpriests and deacons of the major collegiate churches of Rome and the bishops of the surrounding suburbs. The pope was elected by popular acclaim in the Lateran Square and his election confirmed either by the Byzantine or Frankish Emperor. Sometimes approval was not sought; sometimes a bribe from a forgettable Italian nobleman was sought. The popes of the late first millennium were generally impotent hostages to outside forces for the very reason they had nominal power: they were the rulers of central Italy. The erection of the College of Cardinals ended this external influence on Church elections and government (while introducing other considerations, as any reform does) and freed the popes of the Middle Ages to refine the Roman rite, promote Benedictine monasticism, condemn simony, and encourage upright standards of clerical living. Something similar, if more drastic, is needed today, only today the albatross is entirely self-imposed and not from the House of Spoleto.

At a recent house party the topic of conversation turned to the current state of the papacy. A general consensus emerged that great change is needed. Some wanted Pope Francis to resign. More forthright than most, I confessed to ignoring most anything out of Rome in recent decades and suggested a serious reform of the office might be needed for it to regain its proper place. One attendee piously suggested we should still give Francis an ear before disregarding what he has to say. Another, who sees me at weekday Masses, asked if I was a Catholic. My answer now, which I did not think to say then, would be "Yes, and I would like to ensure future generations can be Catholic, too."