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THE SENSUS FIDELIUM (PART II)

by Ted Schmidt

You know how among the gentiles those who seem to exercise authority lord it over them; their great ones make their importance felt. Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest. Whoever wants to rank first among you must serve the needs of all. The son of man has not come to be served but serve.
Mark 10:42-45

But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'
Gal. 2:11-14

If the weight of the responsibility that now lies on my poor shoulders is enormous, the divine power on which I can count is surely immeasurable: 'You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.' Electing me as the Bishop of Rome, the Lord wanted me as his Vicar, he wished me to be the 'rock' upon which everyone may rest with confidence.
Joseph Ratzinger on his accession to the papacy, April 20, 2005

Everyone gets a tongue to speak
and everyone hears an inner voice.
Paul Simon: "How can you live in the Northeast?"

For you, I am a Bishop; with you I am a Christian. The first is an office, the second a grace, the first is a danger, the second salvation.
Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 CE)

 

One of the great changes in our lifetime is the move of the Roman Catholic Church from a medieval institution to one which honours and takes seriously the gifts of all the baptized. In my last essay, I traced in broad strokes the gradual move away from the communio of the early Church, up to the Constantinian arrangement where the Church took on the external trappings of empire and forgot the servanthood of Jesus. This newfound temporal power reached its apogee in the phenomenal arrogance of the medieval papacy which Aquinas deemed "utterly necessary for salvation for every human creature."

     The Protestant reformation rose up as a necessary corrective to the abuses of the papacy. At Trent (1545-1563), the Church attempted to deal with these abuses and as entirely understandable defined itself in contradistinction to everything that was cherished by the Reformers (tradition and scholasticism over scripture, a highly idealized Mariology, authoritarianism and centralization over democratizations, an exaggerated misogyny building on Augustine and favoured by Aquinas --all bolstered by the celibacy of the clergy). The result was not reconciliation, but two warring camps, which denigrated organized religion and paved the way for the rise of the secular.

     As religion cooled and lost power, the void was filled by the Enlightenment. Scientific discoveries, symbolized by the microscope and the telescope, rapidly opened new horizons. The world was exploding with new vistas, not the least was the breakthrough in decoding the Bible. In 1678 Richard Simon, a priest, reiterated Spinoza's theory that Moses could not possibly have written the Torah.

     To ensure reform the Church began to organize the papacy around the absolute monarchies which were still operative in Europe. Papal legates and the newly formed order the Jesuits became arms of the Roman command centre. Tensions inevitably arose between Popes and Catholic rulers who were less and less inclined to submit to Roman decrees, which impinged on their authority. And so the papacy lost power. It was the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon which resuscitated it.

A Church in a cultural ghetto

After the traumatic chaos of the Robespierrian Terror, and the imperial pretensions of Napoleon, a surge of nostalgia and yearning for order gripped Western Europe. Despite Bonaparte's temporal power, the Pope (Pius Vl) was mobbed by ordinary people as he made his way to crown Napoleon in the historic cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. As Pius entered the huge basilica on December 2 1804, five hundred voices sang out "Tu es Petrus." It was the supreme irony that, as the papacy receded as a centre of power, it increased its stature as a stabilizing force in a world run amok. We might arbitrarily assign this date as the beginning of the rise of a centralized papalism, which would hobble the spiritual role of the Pope within the house of Roman Catholicism. Hans Kung comments, "The march of the official Catholic church into a cultural ghetto had begun."

     A reactionary papacy, the enemy of modernity and progressive causes in general, would hold sway until the Second Vatican Council. The Church had nowhere to go but within. Ironically in 1801, a man was born whose felicitous life would span the nineteenth century and who would help save the Church from its worse excesses. His name was John Henry Newman.

     Before setting the table for Newman's contribution, we need to take a final look at the first half of the nineteenth century.

     Before Pius Vl's death in 1799, he published The Triumph of the Holy See, a work whose title is self-explanatory. Pius rejected the increased power of the episcopacy generally referred to as Gallicanism. Gallicanism today has a largely pejorative meaning yet it upholds some central truths first articulated by Bishop Bossuet in 1682. One is the superiority of a general council over against unilateral decrees of a pope. Secondly the Pope should respect the traditions of local churches (absolutely ignored by John Paul ll) and thirdly, while the Pope indeed has the final power of discernment, this must be mitigated by the reception of the rest of the Church (Humanae Vitae being the most notorious example).

     Gallicanism had its disastrous side. This was the meshing of throne and altar, Church and State, a terrible intrusion on the spiritual role of the Church. Napoleon held Pius Vlll prisoner in 1809, increasing sympathy for the person of the Pope. After the Congress of Vienna (1815) the Papal states were restored to the Church thereby ensuring a further catastrophic development, the defense of the ancien regime and its reactionary politics already abrogated forever by the French Revolution. Liberté, fraternité and egalité were here to stay. The institutional Church sadly has yet to come to terms with egalité, the co-responsibility of the baptized in the governance and decisions of the Church.

     In 1832, when John Henry Newman was thirty-one and a young Anglican cleric, Gregory XVl (1831-1846) released Mirari Vos a ferocious condemnation of modernity which had fallen under the sway of "wicked men, impostors and propagators of new ideas." His pontificate would be followed by that of Pio Nono (1846-1878), one which radically inflated the creeping infallibilism of the papacy, and forget that the Church was always enmeshed in history, always a work in progress and open to the further promptings of the Spirit. God the Unknown, the Incomprehensible Mystery, would end up a captive of the Petrine Office and the narrow men of the Curia.

     Newman, who entered the Catholic Church in 1845, wrote in his diaries about the Church which constantly found itself on the wrong side of history, human rights and progress. Under Pio Nono it had become "a stern nemesis...a tyrannous use of his (Pio Nono's) spiritual power...he claimed he exercised larger power than any Pope ever did."

     Pio Nono was followed by another interminably long pontificate, that of Leo Xlll (1878-1903). Mildly reformist in his social agenda, Giaocchino Pecci ruled like a king. As the well respected historian Eamon Duffy wrote, " Leo surrounded himself with the trappings of monarchy, insisted that Catholics received in audiences kneel before him throughout the interview, never allowed his entourage to sit in his presence, never in twenty-five years exchanged a single word with his coachman." The nineteenth century ultramontane to the extreme, was not kind to the lay voice.

     It is fascinating to read Church history of this period. As the papacy arrogated more and more power to itself, it drained more and more from lay people. One of the extraordinary results of this very masculine, hierarchical and patriarchal institutional configuration was the growth of the feminine in the heart and life of believers. It was in these years that Marian devotion grew --as well as that of the feminine side of Jesus-- the phenomenon of the Sacred Heart, an omnipresent icon in Catholic households. Catholics driven inward appeared very strange to Protestant contemporaries.

     Newman the convert never bought into the strange cult of the papacy, "A church within a Church," he called it. With his Anglican background, he was never trapped by the ultramontane worldview of his Catholic contemporaries or the sterile Neo-Thomism it espoused. He brought to the Catholic Church a historian's deep appreciation of the entire people of God as the bearer of the Spirit. By the time of the Second Vatican Council (1962), infallibility or indefectability belonged not to the papacy but the whole church. This is why Pope Paul Vl referred to Vatican ll as "Newman's Council."

Cardinal Newman

John Henry Newman's great contribution to our modern ecclesiology and the role of the sensus fidelium was his insistence that the whole church was the bearer of revelation, that infallibilty had in fact been exercised in many ways --in councils, papal pronouncement and the witness of the entire people. His famous essay "On Consulting the Faithful" (1859) staked this position out. He showed particularly in the period of the Arian heresy that it was the lay people (the sensus fidelium) who were closer to the truth. The Magisterium by itself could never be the sole locus of truth. It must be received as well by the faithful. He broadened his thinking to also include the great theological schools of the Middle Ages whose role it was to articulate mystery, truths which were deemed supernatural. Men like Aquinas, Albertus Magnus set boundaries, and refined definitions etc. These learned men (sic) through the free interplay and exchange of ideas were the necessary mediators of mystery for the laity.

     We owe to John Henry Newman the insistence of a more organic, less juridical sense of the Church. When he was 75-years of age, the First Vatican Council (1870) ended in a shambles, polarized by the very narrow definition of papal infallibilty which would hold sway until Vatican ll. It was here on June 18, 1870 that Cardinal Filippo Guidi, representing the Dominican order tried to bring Pio Nono to his senses. Guidi insisted that papal infallibility could only be considered within the total episcopacy. The Pope was so incensed that he summoned Guidi to his apartment and accused him of treachery ("You, on whom I bestowed the Cardinal's hat"). Guidi insisted he was within the broad tradition of the Church. And then the infamous remark which summed up the arrogance of the ultramontane papacy. "Tradizione! Io sono la tradizione.. Io, io sono la Chiesa"(no translation necessary!). This narrow definition reigned until Vatican ll where theologians like Yves Congar dealt papalism a near fatal blow, and it was here that the growing clamor for the respect for sensus fidelium took hold.

Vatican Two and onwards

The great achievement of Vatican ll, acknowledged by the overwhelming majority, was an ecclesiology of communion, the idea that the Church primarily was relational, a People of God modeled on the equality of the Trinity. A slow but inexorable paradigm shift had taken place which moved the Church beyond a mere juridical and institutional understanding. Ironically it rediscovered its first millennium roots. In Congar's words, "It is a community of salvation not so much an institution of salvation."

     The statement Gaudium et Spes correctly analyzed the paradigm shift: "The human race has passed from a rather static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one." The 1960s exploded with an insistence on respect for human experience and inclusion. This holy demand showed itself everywhere --in African countries throwing off colonial pasts, in women battling patriarchy, gays demanding equality, blacks insisting on civil rights etcetera.

     The Roman Church acknowledging this period as a "kairos," a moment of great grace, rediscovered pneumatology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. A new humility seized the Church, which increasingly defined itself as a pilgrim on the way, hardly the societas perfecta of earlier ages. The Church indeed had made wrong turns in its all too human existence, and one of those temporary dead ends was the freezing out of the lay voice as absolutely necessary to include and heed in the handing on of tradition. The great statement Lumen Gentium ratified this.

     Before the Church is hierarchical it is a communion, a society of equals led by the Spirit to hear and discern God's word. Bishops before they can teach must listen. Same for the Bishop of Rome. All of the baptized are "the faithful" bound to the head of the Church, Jesus Christ.

     Since the 1960s this idea of the sensus fidelium has grown in its insistence, its inexorable and commanding demand to be heard. It is Christ who empowers the laity " and provides them with an appreciation of the faith (sensus fidei) (LG 35)."

     Fundamentalism has many disfigured faces in our suffering world today. Sadly within the oldest Christian communion of all, the Roman Catholic Church persists in an almost adamantine feudal fashion, to deny that the Holy Spirit moves through all and all must be consulted. There are Church mechanisms in place to enter into this necessary conversation, but frightened bishops as of now refuse to use them.

     This will not last much longer. Bishops are good men and they will ultimately come to the conclusion that it is a grave mistake to sin against the Holy Spirit.

Ted Schmidt is the author of Journeys to the Heart of Catholicism (Seraphim). He is currently editor of New Catholic Times: Sensus Fidelium (newcatholictimes.com). He may be reached at jtschmidt@rogers.com