We are the successors of Peter but not his vicar. Nor any man's nor any apostle's. We are the Vicar of Jesus before whom every knee shall bow.
Pope Innocent lll (d. 1216)
Who is a Christian? One who obeys the pope and the pastor appointed by him.
Robert Bellarmine S.J. (d 1621)
An individual layman by reason of the knowledge, competence, or outstanding ability he may enjoy, is permitted and sometimes even obliged to express his opinion on things which concern the good of the Church.
Lumen Gentium #37
The Christian faithful have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church, and they have a right to make their opinion known to the other Christian faithful.
Canon 212
In a representative democracy the people are sovereign; in the Roman system the people and clergy are excluded from the election of pastors, bishops and the pope. In a democracy there is a division of authority (legislative, executive and judicial); in the Roman system all authority is in the hands of the bishops and the pope (primacy and infallibility).
Hans Kung
When the Voice of the Faithful was formed in Boston as the response to the shocking pedophilia scandal which roiled through the Catholic Church in 2002, the leader of the group Jim Muller stated that "the core of the problem is centralized power, with no voice of the faithful..."
Muller and the Boston group appeared to channel the collective voice of millions of Roman Catholics worldwide who had grown disenchanted with the institutional leadership of the Church they loved. The abuse of defenseless children was bad enough, but the issue which brought the laity to a point of barely controlled fury, was the absolutely abysmal leadership of the current crop of bishops. These men had been imposed on the People of God by a Pope who seemed to care little for the collective wisdom of those who comprised 99.5 percent of the baptized.
Since the death of John Paul ll and the hagiography which surrounded his pontificate, there has been a much more realistic appraisal of his tenure as Pope. While this essay does not deal with this, it can be safely said that this magnificent man, faith filled and compassionate, like many, was not overly blessed with a capacity to transcend his personal and cultural history.
It was an extraordinarily difficult journey to move from living under a totalitarian regime, and a Church frozen in time, to suddenly feel the rising tide of an increasingly educated laity insisting on a greater voice within the Church. I remember the serene yet comical words of a great Latin American churchman, who told me 20 years ago not to fear or be unduly depressed about John Paul ll's refusal to hear this increased demand for the lay right to be heard. The priest insisted that God had a plan. When I enquired what that was he chuckled and said, "He's using this Pope to dynamite the Church as we know it."
What he meant was not hard to fathom. It was well phrased by Fr. Tom Doyle, the Dominican canon lawyer who ran afoul of the United States hierarchy when he spoke plainly about its egregious failures of leadership in the pedophilia crisis:
"What we see before us are the beginning death throes of the medieval monarchical model that was based on the belief that a small select minority of the educated privileged and power-invested was called forth by God to manage the temporal and spiritual lives of the faceless masses on the presumption that their unlettered states equaled ignorance. This is 2002 not 1302. We have grown up, we are educated and demand a voice."
This important voice we call the sensus fidelium.
An historical look
In this essay, I would like to set the table for a deeper understanding of this concept. This will mean a general overview of the rise and fall of the lay voice in the Catholic Church. Before doing so, a few comments on the above.
The aforementioned Muller seems an apt symbol for the stifled lay voice in the present Catholic Church. Not only is he an eminent cardiologist at Harvard Medical school with a graduate degree in Russian studies, Muller is also a Nobel Laureate for his founding of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Surely not your average Catholic, but he will do as a representative of the best-educated generation in the Church's history.
Though Doyle does not comment on the year 1302, I am sure he is aware of the significance of that date, but readers may not be. While it may be true that John Paul ll and the present Pope Benedict XVl are guilty of "creeping infallibilism," no sane person would doubt their goodness, sincerity, and great intelligence. What we have here is a family squabble which will be ultimately settled. However, if one wished to pick a pontiff who ranks among the worst in history (and whom Dante consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell for his mass murder in Palestrina, near Rome) Boniface Vlll would make an excellent choice.
It was in the year 1302 that Benedict Gaetani (Boniface) issued his disastrous papal bull Unam Sanctam. "Creeping infallibilism" (almost anything which comes out of Rome can't be challenged as it is part of the Church's teaching) is mild compared to Boniface's megalomania: "We declare, announce, and define that it is altogether necessary for salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff." Wielding the papal "we" as a sword, he informed the world that, "There is one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church outside of which there is no salvation or remission of sins." This arrogant nonsense lasted until the Second Vatican Council.
Be grateful that we have come a long way since Boniface Vlll. However, the year 2002 can serve as a watershed moment of the recovery of the lay voice.
In a short article such as this we can only proceed with very broad strokes.
The early Jesus movement needed to be structured as it moved through history and we know that massive changes occurred as the Church became co-opted by the Constantinian arrangement of the early fourth-century. Still, leaders like St. Cyprian (c. 250 CE) insisted on the full participation of the laity who elected their bishops. For Augustine (d 430 CE) the Magisterium was God and the bishops served the Word and the People. The persecuted Church, soon after Constantine fell prey, as institutions often do, to act like an unfeeling bureaucracy its raison d'être forgotten as it moved through history.
Bad enough for any organization, disastrous for one which strove to incarnate the nonviolent inclusive spirit of Jesus. Sadly, the formerly persecuted Church became the persecutor. The proclamation of the Gospel, the lived lives of the ecclesia, the community of all the believers, became institutionalized. The People of God, the communio of all the baptized, was usurped by the hierarchy. Mass education was far on the horizon.
Gregory Vll and Innocent lll
By the twelfth century with the rise of the great schools (universities) "teachers" like Aquinas, Bonaventure, Abelard etcetera were acknowledged as having great competence in theological questions. It was the monk Hildebrand, Pope Gregory Vll ("the Pope cannot make a mistake" 1073-1085) who tipped the scales in favour of absolute papal power. The lay investiture of clerics ceased, celibacy was enforced. His twenty-seven theses drawn up to outline the papal powers make for a fascinating catalogue of ecclesial hubris. From the power of deposing emperors, to sacking bishops, to infallibility, this brilliant small man dubbed "the Midget," proved just how small one can become when consumed by power. He seemed a far cry from the Man of Nazareth whose kingship lay in service.
It was Gregory who created the Roman Catholic Church, and destroyed the richness of communio lived out in thousands of towns and cities. Now all eyes looked to Rome where the Vicar of Peter had become the Vicar of Christ. As well, it was Gregory who ruthlessly in 1139 turned all priestly wives out of parsonages as concubines. This highly unpopular move (German priests enquired where he would find angels to replace them) had the deleterious effect of separating clergy from laity and it would not take Sigmund Freud to analyze the psychic disaster this has produced. "Those set apart" soon became convinced that ecclesial power devolved from the Pope to the bishops to them. As the ultramontanist Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal phrased it in the mid nineteenth century: "Let each say in his heart I hear my curé, the curé hears the bishop and the Pope hears our Lord Jesus Christ."
Gregory proved a mere prelude, a John the Baptist in reverse, to the ultimate medieval Pope Innocent lll (1198-1216). Here in this pontificate Romanism achieved its medieval zenith --Pope as monarch, head of a vast bureaucratic structure, one which relied more on jurisprudence than the organic spirit of a communio. It was Innocent who mounted the tragic crusade against the Eastern church in Constantinople (1202-1204) assuring the division in Christendom which continues today. "The Ruler of the world" was not content until all Catholics were Romanized.
Reformation renaissance and riots
The Protestant Reformation became the historical response to all the above. While it liberated people to read the scripture (Catholics never read the Bible, Tradition was our strength) it produced its own problems as the rise of fundamentalism has proved. Catholicism with its now centralized bureaucracy avoided some of the bizarre biblical interpretations and weird sects which have proliferated in the last five centuries. The Counter Reformation rose to defend the Church which gradually retreated into its castle, drew up the moats, and became more Roman, a highly centralized organization speaking with one voice. Tradition, hierarchy, and magisterium became one. The living Gospel gradually became canon law. There was now the ecclesia docens (the teaching Church), and the ecclesia discens (the learning Church), a move which further distanced the Church from its more organic model of its earliest incarnation.
The Renaissance followed by the Enlightenment heightened the rise of the importance of the individual. The Scientific Revolution further shattered the idea of a static world locked into a rigid chain of being. Robert Bellarmine's description of the Church as a "societas perfecta" looked more and more suspect and out of touch with the rapidly evolving European society. The French Revolution (1789) which exposed the deep chasm between the "higher" and "lower clergy" put an end to any idea of a European theocracy. The terror it unleashed along with its lamentable deification of Reason and Progress, had a cataclysmic effect on the Catholic Church. The megalomaniac excesses of Napoleon heaped on top of the Revolution simply added to the accumulated fear of a beleaguered Church. The response was to hunker down into an intellectual ghetto, a reactionary institution terrified of the modern age.
Much like today after the shocks of globalization, 9/11, and global warming natural disasters, a powerful type of nostalgia for a simpler time emerged, a romantic sentimental period we call ultramontanism, an unconditional obedience to the Pope. This was hardly the time for anybody to raise the issue of the "sensus fidelium." Yet one man did and we begin with him next time.
Ted Schmidt is the author of Journeys to the Heart of Catholicism (Seraphim Press). He is also editor of New Catholic Times: Sensus Fidelium a new online Catholic newspaper. He may be reached at jtschmidt@rogers.com
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