“I just want to go back to before,” says FBI Agent Olivia Dunham to Special Agent-in-Charge Phillip Broyles in the pilot episode of the science fiction series, Fringe (2008-13). Dunham is a good agent who found herself in the middle of something very big and very scary.
“I don’t think you can,” says Broyles, and then they’re away on a romp through five seasons of top-notch sci-fi that—like all real and really good sci fi—is a dramatization of fundamental theological questions.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that, of late.
I mean to say about the desire to go back to before, and about how we just can’t, and about how much of our present malaise—because, let’s face it, we’re in a rut around here and have been for a while—is really owing to our desire to go back to before: to before Francis, to before Benedict, to before JPII, to before the Council (Vatican II, Vatican I, Trent, Lateran V, Florence, Constance, take your pick—you get the idea), to before the collapse of Christendom, to before the Great Schism.
There are days I’d like to go back to before the abuse-and-coverup crisis exploded into worldwide scandal, and that desire is perhaps the most pernicious of them all.
I’ve written about how, when the gruesome business began to come into the light, we longed for “the good old days, the happy time, when ignorance was bliss and Father could be trusted and the Bishop was a smiling cipher who confirmed our children and otherwise did neither good nor harm in any way we could discern or cared to.”
“We wanted what we knew, which was little, and we wanted all of it.”
I wrote those lines in 2018 about Buffalo and Bishop Richard J. Malone. Buffalo has been back in the news lately, not in a good way. The diocese has put its headquarters up for sale and historic churches like the stunning St. Casimir’s are fighting to stay open. For what it’s worth, I hope the folks at St. Casimir’s find a way to save their church or at least keep it going long enough for me to visit.
We set ourselves up, like so many ecclesiastical Gatsbys, beating against a current in a hopeless struggle that dissipates our strength and makes us hopeless idiots. The only way out of this mess is through it. The only way through it is dangerous—mortally perilous—but there is no way back. Whoever the next pope turns out to be, he will do well to be mindful of that.
Here are three things—just three—the next guy should do to help the whole Church through the awful morass and into the fast water.
First and foremost, he should publish the list of bishops who have faced investigation under Vos estis lux mundi, along with the findings of those investigations and the results of any trial(s) or other criminal proceedings against them. If any bishop chose resignation rather than trial, he should say so. He should issue a decree making the announcement of investigations and the publication of the investigators’ reports a matter of course.
There are ways to do that while also protecting the people and institutions who deserve it. It is frequently messy and never perfect, but practicing opacity and calling it transparency is a fool’s errand.
Second, he should liberalize the use of the old books—by Apostolic Constitution, if possible—and let the faithful decide with their pastors which books they want to use. He should take steps to reward bishops who show genuine care for dignified celebration in their jurisdictions according to the rubrics—whatever they are—and lead the way by jettisoning the practice of stadium-style papal liturgies in favor of something like the old Missa coram Summo Pontifice, perhaps even very like.
This would doubtless go better in some places than in others, but it would everywhere separate the questions regarding the reception and implementation of the Vatican Council II from the intestine conflict over the books Pope St. Paul VI promulgated in 1969. In short, it would hasten the end of the ridiculous liturgy wars and allow Catholics to receive the late Council on its merits.
Third, he should convoke an actual synod of bishops and give it something real to consider—some real problem of governance to discuss—like the practicalities of reforming diocesan financial structures and practices so that real responsibility is really shared. He should hear experts among the lay faithful about how to craft and implement real financial reform.
Sure, there are folks who would see the next guy give serious thought to things like removing the obligation to celibacy for secular clergy or the restoration of Minor Orders and the Major Order of Subdeacon in the West, or restoring the Order of Deaconesses (not to be confused with ordaining women to the diaconate), and maybe he should, but the fact is that such and similar reforms would require dioceses to have much more stable financial footing than they do now.
Fringe was terrific, by the way.
It starred Aussies John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop and Anna Torv as Olivia Dunham, Joshua Jackson of Dawson’s Creek as Peter Bishop, Jasika Nicole as Agent Astrid Farnsworth, Blair Brown as Nina Sharp, and featured Leonard Nimoy as William Bell. The one-offs are a veritable Who’s Who? Of Hollywood over the past four decades: Christopher Lloyd, Peter Weller, Martha Plimpton, Michael Kelly, Chadwick Boseman, even Meghan Markle.
The late, great Lance Reddick (+3/17/2023), perhaps best known for his stint as Cedric Daniels on The Wire and for Charon in the John Wick movies, played the aforementioned Phillip Broyles.
Noble’s Dr. Walter Bishop needed to figure out whether he even wanted to be good but was willing to give it a go if it meant repairing his relationship with his son, Peter, and was certainly both impossibly brilliant and mad as a hatter. I’d watch John Noble in anything, as willingly as I’d watch James Earl Jones count to ten, but Fringe was ultimately a story about redemption through love stronger than death, and that’ll get me every time.
It’s a story told through some of the most thoroughly researched sci-fi absurdity ever committed to film, but Fringe is ultimately a story of a love that heals the fabric of whole universes—plural—through the willingness of a fellow named Peter Bishop, whose very self is a bridge between worlds, to lay down his life.
I hope there’s not a Catholic alive who ain’t a sucker for that.
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Living a life of lying and apostasy in the establishment (bishops, cardinals, a pontiff, “universities-in-the-jesuit-tradition,” universities “imitating-universities-in-the-jesuit-tradition,” etc, etc) is shown to have consequences.
One cannot pretend to be a Catholic Christian, while living as if Christ is not “Our Lord and King,” and expect anything other than the wasteland.
Jesus is the Way and the Truth and the Life.
“The more things change, the more they are the same,” said Alphonse Karr. For Catholics it was normal during 1500 years for the World to change, but the Truth and the Mass to Remain the same.
The desire to return to Catholic Normality is NOT a desire to return to the past. It is a desire for the World to get his fat permanently changing ass out of our Church and hierarchy.
We just want timeless Catholic Normality.
I came to the Roman Catholic Church after studying Catholic mystics, especially Carmelites. I naively expected to find a living mystical tradition and Saints having a prominent place in the liturgical life of a parish. To my utter astonishment, I found that even the priests I met know nothing about mystical theology. During homilies no one discourses about the lives of the Saints. Over my ten years in the local parish there was only one priest who had a habit of talking about Saints and reading fragments of their writings. It was long ago. It is beyond my Eastern Orthodox mind how one can celebrate Mass on a Saint’s day and not to say anything about him.
I also could not understand why the parishes have so-called “centering prayer” or “Christian meditation” (it is not) and other non-Christian ways of a prayer while we have Carmelite and other Orders “methods”. Reading about Thomas Murton I learnt that he, being a monk, was not aware or own mystics (!). That I really could not get.
A few days ago I just finished reading ‘Milestones’ by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is a very interesting book and I obtained some answers to my questions at last. I am quite shocked with how the Liturgy was treated, the attitude. The future Pope Benedict XVI wrote that what was organic growth for centuries was suddenly taken, demolished and reassembled – so the people got a new idea, that they can do anything they want with the Liturgy (Mass). So-called “popular piety” also was discouraged – I guess a devotion to Saints and mystics fell into that category and so on.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church there is a saying that monasteries (contemplative) are the stronghold of the Church. Of course, Saints and those who are dedicated to a life of prayer as well. Saints are our necessary friends and their writing teaches us what is authentic spirituality and what is not. And so, I am sure that a current crisis cannot be overcome unless that “popular piety” is restored, Saints are spoken about during Mass and the contemplative Orders grow. I wrote this because the article misses that stream of quiet but indispensable life in the Church.
You and me, both, kid…I came to the Church via a roundabout way from an initial pathetically shallow fundamentalist background. Looked for answers most anywhere as my own upbringing had too much contradiction, starting about age 14. Had hoped college, especially in religion and philosophy, would have those answers, but soon was apparent these were outsiders looking in and only theorizing, and generally only question-generators. Buddhism made a lot of sense but was missing something, and I was thinking if there was any truth at all to Christianity, then it also would make simple sense, and if God was real, God would not leave it up to church/religion shopping to find answers. Then I realized one of my earliest readings from youth, The Cloud Of Unknowing and sequel The Book Of Privvy Counsel from the 1200s showed very similar common sense things/aims/dangers/techniques as Buddhism, but with that missing something, which is the scriptural God is Love and that it is in this God that we live and move and have our being. I then figured any religion which could give birth to such works was the place to be, plus ever so much easier to stay in one’s own culture rather than taking on the impossible task of absorbing another to where one had the insight/nuance sense of one born in that culture. Intellectually, the ancient Churches did a fine job of showing that everything is quite rational and free of contradiction, and that God did indeed provide that sure path to union.
And me also experiencing shell shock to find most of the adherents utterly clueless of their own spiritual treasures.
Yes, I think this is a very important thing, re-integrating our lives into the communion of saints. I’ve always loved it when we had a priest who would do that. At the other end of the spectrum I was flabberghasted once when a priest said from the pulpit that he had never heard of St. Paul of the Cross, despite the fact that the Passionists were one of primary historic missionary groups to the nearby city of Pittsburgh. What one learns in seminaries can be a head-scratcher. I will add, possibly offending some, that we have too many parishes named after a few very well known select saints. I am always impressed and intrigued, and learn more about the communion of saints, when I encounter a parish named after a rarely heard of saint, for instance one nearby diocese parishes named after St. Eulamia and St. Fiacre. And how wonderful it would be if the western church would become more familiar the the saints of the eastern church. But of course, as with other matters, the Church seems inclined to move in the opposite direction and dumb everything down to the most flattened, familiar level. A shout out therefore to St. Casimir’s in Buffalo, I hope everyone sends them a small donation.
Thanks for the better translation reference, Anna, I will surely look into it, as San Juan de La Cruz was certainly a master and well worth reading.
With respect, there isn’t a Catholic alive expressly seeking to go back to the days before the council of Constance. What nostalgic Catholics want is for the Bark of Peter to possess a minimal seaworthiness as she did not so long ago. And they are hardly to blame for wanting it, much less at fault for the crimes of the heresiarchs who, for now, sit at the top of the hierarchy.
If you read much you find sexual abuse by clergy quite known, if not common, for much of history. Molesters have always gone into fields where the children are, this includes teaching, boy scouts, the DJ at the roller rink, the ice cream truck, wherever.
Majority is homosexual and those also go where there will be a lot of others of same sex, duh….in the 1950s, one US seminary was very well known in the gay underground as THE place to be, and graduates of that/those seminaries of course networked.
In short, same as we said about the Army, “The Church isn’t what it used to be, but then, it never was.”
We read of “…restoring the Order of Deaconesses (not to be confused with ordaining women to the diaconate).”
Not to be confused? How not so?
As in eclipsing Lay Ecclesial Ministers (remember that?) now with non-ordained deaconesses? As in “civil unions” as not really being a transitional step toward the oxymoron “gay marriage”—now adorned with sorta-blessings? As in further reconfiguring–not doctrinally but only in practice!—the Eucharistic Church in ever more Lutheran terms–as a de-centered multitude of congregations rather than as a united assembly around the Eucharist—which and Who is the very same and singular sacrifice and communalism, both, as was/is accomplished once and for all by Christ at Calvary, except now in an unbloody manner.
So, adding to Altieri’s third recommendation regarding a “real problem of governance to discuss”…
How about recalling the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops? And which among other things suggested “greater dissemination of the Council Documents” themselves (!)—to expose the progressive divergence of too many synodal themes—from the “real” Council versus the “virtual” Council (Benedict’s more recent words)—and peddled to a devolutionary secular world. And aided and abetted by a few chameleons in red hats.
“Time is greater than space,” (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013). Quo vadis?
Before, unfortunately, contained the seeds of Now. As far as legible those seeds are the brilliant elocutions [plural because they changed] on dogma, variations similar to those of the musician. What was lost was essence retained the lesser variable. What will save us, Lord!
Best perhaps is what Anna laments on the dearth of knowledge and expression from the pulpit of the rich treasure of Catholic mysticism [her Russian Eastern Orthodox tradition was more inclined to the mystical]. So then, briefly put, it’s not a return to rather a turn to the greats that put into words the mysteries of faith, the intense beauty of the interior life, figuratively if not actually lived within the heart of Christ.
The Church essentially gave up on spiritual catechesis after Constantine when it became a game of absorbing entire kingdoms with zero to only rudamentary faith catechesis. As generations went by, this left priests and bishops more managers than shepherds of a spiritual life with ever rarer exceptions….
same for the lay folk who managed to become true saints united to God by mostly own efforts, where some erred seriously for lack of guidance, leaving hierarchy deeply suspicious and hostile to any spirituality past simple pius acts, the brevary, missal and later Ignatian exercises which are all mental rather than contemplative.
The closest we have today is adoration, which is spot on so long as it actual adoration rather than being treated as a library reading room. Love is something you do, not something you read about.
If folk did this, it would cure most all the ills of the Church and the world. Union with God is the aim, and all the rest are only aids to that union, while all those aids today treated as things and aims in themselves. Hard to imagine heaven filled with sacrament consumers who do not love God, but that seems to be a common attitude.
Good observations Bob [my earlier response to you went South for some reason]. St John of the Cross left us with a form of manual the content which is accessible [unlike the Ascent of Mount Carmel intended for advanced contemplative religious] to the common layman, The Living Flame of Love.
No slight to St. John of the Cross, as he was a spiritual master who went into great depth showing all the ways we fool ourselves in the spiritual life, and the purification required to draw closer to God, or even avoid insanity or becoming a tool of Evil.
The problem with his writings for the English reader is that he wrote in a florid Castilian Spanish often hard for even native modern Spanish speakers to nuance or even understand at times. This leaves the English reader at the mercy of the translators, most of whom are anything but spiritual adepts, in the interpration and emphasis in phrases.
This is why I generally advise seekers of a how-to manual to go to the apparent predecessor of much of St. John’s thought and writings, The Cloud of Unknowing and sequel Book of Privvy Counsel, as they were written in Middle English which is far easier to translate accurately into modern English. The Spearing translations as published by Penguin are quite accurate, and if in any doubt, one can obtain a paperback TEAMS Middle English Texts series edition which footnotes every unfamiliar word, where they will find Spearing wihout fault. As for orthodoxy, excepts from The Cloud appear in the Liturgy Of The Hours. A very easy read, short chapters written as directly to you across the ages by someone deeply concerned as to your welfare.
There are good translations. I find Carmelite edition ‘The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross’ translated by Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Fr. Otilio Rodriguez, OCD to be the best. Their rendition of St John’s poetry is sublime, without sentimental sweetness (which is present in many translations) that ruins it all.
Like you, I feel a spiritual kinship with the mystics and contemplatives. The Church needs Mary as well as Martha, but nowadays, with so much emphasis on getting things done and committees and evangelizing (none of which I’m criticizing), one would think that Jesus got it wrong when He told Martha that Mary had chosen the better part. I sometimes think that today’s extraverted emphasis, as opposed to the more introverted emphasis of contemplation and mysticism, is reflected in how the final words of Luke 17:21 get translated. Older translations rendered the passage, “The kingdom of God is within you”; modern translations prefer “the kingdom of God is among you.” I’m no Greek scholar, but I’ve read that the preposition εντος can mean both “within” and “among,” depending on context. The Vulgate, however, uses the Latin word “intra,” which carries more the idea of “within” as in intramural. Had the early Church understood the meaning as “among,” certainly St. Jerome would have known enough Latin to use “apud.”
Yes, the Eastern Orthodox Church is perceived in the West as mystical but it may be difficult to get through its mysticism so to speak, even for an Orthodox. When I converted, I could not understand what exactly I needed in the Church and how to obtain it. Because of the peculiarities of my psyche (an early attachment trauma), I needed things to be spoken clearly, about Christ and about me, about the relationship which is possible. I tried to read Desert Fathers (monastics/ascetics) but they all spoke a lot about the means (prayer, fasting, repentance) but almost nothing about the purpose of those means. The stated purpose was salvation and it sounded abstract to me. So, when I came across the Roman Catholic mystics I could understand and relate because they very clearly stated that the purpose of a Christian life is a relationship with Christ, right now and the ultimate purpose is a union with Christ, in love. Carmelite mystics put it in especially personal terms. Paradoxically, my childhood trauma enabled me to fall on Christ so to speak. By no means I am thankful for having trauma of a loss of a primary attachment though – as some like to write “I bless my trauma” but I am grateful though that Our Lord used it to attach me to Himself.
Later I understood that my own tradition has similar writings but they are either poorly translated or unavailable in my native language. Later I read St Dionysius, St Simeon the New Theologian, St Maximus and other Orthodox (well, of the undivided Church) mystics in English translation and I saw that their message and the message of the Western mystics are the same – a mad love for Christ and an urgent desire for transformation so one could be with Him forever.
I must say though that I consider Carmelite spirituality (especially St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila) to be the best suited for our times, with its very psychological, “attachment focus” approach and a total surrender to Our Lord, in love and trust. Our time is characterized by an atomization and a disruption of attachments which ruins the psyche and to withstand it one must have a secure attachment to Jesus Christ. So, honestly, utilizing mystical writings is a matter of life and death now – or at least of sanity.
The Eastern Orthodoxy teaches that the Church is a hospital, we are all ill without exception. The task then is to realize our total hopelessness without Christ and ask Him to demolish our sick psyches and rebuild them around Him. It is a move from being built around ourselves, “the beloved” (a fake self in psychology) to being rebuilt around Him, the true Beloved, a kind of a total reorientation of a soul. We have nothing to lose because He will preserve everything good in us (all good is from Him).
I will add that I see no contradiction between, let’s say, Erich Fromm’s or James F. Masterson’s ideas about disorders of the human psyche with the insights of the Carmelite mystics. In fact, I can reinterpret the Carmelite mystics using strictly the terms of human psychology re: an attachment. Where clinical psychology speaks about the disruption of an attachment and a necessity of a secure attachment for a person, the mystical offer the solution: a secure attachment to Christ.
Anna, St John of the Cross apparently drew heavily upon the Cloud of Unknowing from 400yrs prior as there are a huge number of shared thoughts/ideas/parallels quite striking when listed.
You use the word psyche, while the western mystics use the ideas of self and greed/grasping (including greed for spiritual consolation as an obstacle to same), and existence centered on self as the original sin and root of all others, but all seems to say the same thing. And love of God/Christ above all other things until self is consumed and only God reflected in us. Buddhism says much the same in identifying the grasping self as the cause of all suffering, but rather fizzles on what is left when self/concepts subdued.
I have seen up close much death, destruction, and suffering in life, but have been able to be thankful for them drawing me closer to God and his will, including at one point dying from an internal bleed and a young nurse I engaged in conversation had lost a child and I was able to explain a few things to her that had her hugging me with tearful gratitude, and when she left, I was able to tell God, and mean it, thanks for putting me there no matter how things went. That marked a turn around in my own prognosis, as well.
To clarify, in my work I use all the words you mentioned. “Psyche” is a general term as it is used in clinical psychology, “a suffering human psyche” or “disorders of a psyche”. As for “self”, I in fact draw on the ideas of J.F. Masterson about how an early attachment trauma stunts a normal development of a true self (as it is intended by God) and creates a fake self for the purpose of survival. A true self is about an authentic being, a fake self is about doing without being (see Fromm for it). An extreme stunting of a normal development of self is observed in narcissistic personality disorder, so as an extreme development of a fake self. In my opinion though we all have at least some features of that fake self which becomes very visible when a person enters a path towards Christ.
A true self, created by God is to enter a union with God while the fake self must go/burn down because it stands in the way of a soul to her Bridegroom. The true self does not disappear otherwise there would be no such a thing as “mystical marriage”. Marriage requires two, a soul and God.
As for the personal suffering and being grateful for it I mention it before only because too many times I witnessed shallow homilies about a pseudo-forgiveness (not biblical “letting it go of hatred and a desire to destroy the abuser” but a light-hearted “forgive and forget”). I understand your experience though.
I would simply (ha!) say there is the soul/self/person meant for union with God and there are the inclinations we have to be self-centered, greedy (including holding onto pain which we replay like a horror movie from which we cannot look away) and be like unto gods, which is false, and which soul must be cleansed of such illusion… where we need let go of all attachments/greed and simply return God’s love, as those inclinations are not worthy of being called an alter self….where if the attachments are clutched for all of life, they go on for eternity, and it is not a false self doomed for eternity, but the soul, doomed as it sees the separate self as existing independent of what gave it birth.
But, it still seems we are saying the same thing in different ways….and the cure quite simple, to follow the first and greatest commandment quite literally, rather than treating it as hyperbole, then all the others follow naturally…a more accurate translation of the commandments says “there is no” rather than “thou shalt not”, and united to God in love and self/selfish extinguished, there is no greed, covetousness, other gods.
Bob in my reading you sound like you made up a whole bunch of organized stereotypes; where, like, people are actually unhappy on account of not being a stereotype but if they could just begin to discover stereotypes, they would jump at the chance for someone such as yourself to organize that for them.
Go back to the old days…I only wish we could just go back to teaching what the Bible is trying to teach and what the outcome will be if we don’t abide as best we can to its teachings. I am not looking for fire and brimstone yelling at me, but I also don’t want to walk out of Mass thinking that all is well because the homily was about being nice to my neighbor and doing good works. I want the homily to talk about what the readings are telling me at that Mass, I want the priest to always remind me that my actions will always impact how eternal life will be judged. In the end we will be judged and the judgement and penance will be just. I/We need to be reminded of that everyday…we need to always work towards a “good death” and dying to Christ. Today, there is a fear that more people will leave the church or attend less if they are told the facts of the Bible and what we need to do individually for our own salvation. Also, the church needs to come clean with all the hidden things done by many leaders of the church so that the congregation can then see openness and true transparency in our leadership. Until then people will assume that the church is hiding something. I agree with the steps outlined in the article.
Perhaps to better express my previous comment, to meet Altieri’s rightly put premise, ‘going through’, we need something to manage that, which I suggest as one recommendation an investment in the rich mystical theology of Catholicism, a theology of the elixir of Christ’s blood poured out for us, and our participation in figuratively suffering crucifixion for sake of that love.
Again, I will simply say, “What use to be, no longer is, and what is now, is not what it seems to be.” We are living in the “times of tribulations” and the evil bat crap crazy that Satan has enveloped Mankind with is pure demonic manifestations. I was born in 1955 and I know evil when i see it. And Jesus said, “In the end white will become black and black will become white.” COME LORD JESUS!
What is going to unfold when, after the synodal synod completes its sessions and supposing it achieves its purpose: is it then moved back into a synod on family life? Amoris was not well received following the Synod of the Family with Pope Francis, 2014-2015; and that synod itself was a cauldron of disputation.
Classic homosexualist strategy and tactics are deflections and distractions. By this they build “dialogues” and “accompaniments” and “inclusions”. How this has mushroomed.
The difficult problem, handled poorly today, actually is that of “going through.”
Remove the smoke and mirrors, and the endgame is to link the interior life to our expanded exterior situations (no longer the local ethnic parish), by eliminating the interior life. The endgame is to state the perennial (not merely looking back) truths while at the same time enabling a drift that separates this dogmatic faith (said to be “abstract”) from “concrete” practice. Why not bless a homosexual couple, as such (!), if you can upholster this rupture with 5,000 words of flim-flam qualifications on letterhead? It’s okay to turn completely around if we use small steps…
Again, the Church has always seen coming this practical denial of the Incarnation, and in 1993 St. John Paul II dealt with it in an encyclical (consistent with the Catechism, and higher than any declaration!):
“A separation, or even an opposition, is thus established in some cases between the teaching of the precept, which is valid and general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision [no longer a ‘moral judgment’!] about what is good and what is evil. On this basis, an attempt is made to legitimize so-called ‘pastoral’ solutions contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium, and to justify a ‘creative’ hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept [‘Thou shalt not…!]” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 56).
Compared to fluid and forwardist version of “going through,” the only mortal sin is “rigid, bigoted, and fixistic backwardism.”
Good observations. St John of the Cross left us with a form of manual the content which is accessible [unlike the Ascent of Mount Carmel intended for advanced contemplative religious] to the common layman, The Living Flame of Love.
“The Church essentially gave up on spiritual catechesis after Constantine … “. Well said, Bob. Something happened to the Church with Constantinian acceptance.
The early Christians understandably hailed the day when their beleaguered and persecuted Church acquired political acceptance under Emperor Constantine in 313 A.D. No doubt, with political acceptance, Christian teachings flourished for a time, perhaps for a century or so.
Political acceptance, however, eventually grew into a political power that lasted through the middle ages. Catholic Christianity developed a professional bureaucracy to protect its political power. I would venture to suggest that somewhere in the midst of that new political acceptance and power, the spiritual power of Jesus’ teachings, when mixed with pragmatic necessities accompanying political power, suffered a pragmatic dilution. The blood and courage of Christian martyrs that had been the growth-seed of early Christianity was, I believe, a stronger, more unifying catalyst than the new and different growth-seeds of political acceptance and political power.
In the aftermath of Constantinian acceptance, politics intruded into the developing structures of Christianity. The early pre-Constantinian structure of Christianity was modeled on the preaching and teaching structure of the movement that Jesus created—His teaching hierarchy of Apostles, with their successors coming to be known as bishops, and with the bishops’ selected disciples coming to be known as priests.
The post-Constantinian era of Christianity, with its development of a bureaucracy model of political professionalism, added a new and, in my opinion, unfortunate ingredient into the structure of Christianity with the preaching and teaching of Jesus’ message mixed with and diluted by the pragmatic necessities accompanying political power.
Excellent points.
As a parallel, historians of Islam suggest that the early centralization of Islam was, likewise, a response to the centralized power of competitor Byzantium (Constantine’s legacy). Something, too, like the Old Testament Israelites asking for a king, largely to better fend off the better organized Philistines.
In the West the chanceries inherited management responsibilities as the Roman Empire dissolved into feudalism (the old municipal and the continuing diocesan boundaries were more or less congruent). A problem to be sorted out later. We have the 10th-century Investiture Crisis wherein the Church began to extricate itself from the emerging State system—in the matter of selecting bishops and popes. (As a lingering carryover, in 1903 the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph exercised his imperial prerogative to blacklist a papal candidate not of his liking.)
Prior to that, in 1870, surrender of the Papal States and Rome itself (except for the Vatican City State’s 109 acres) to the new nation-state of Italy set the stage, in a way, for Pope John Paul II to sidestep the Church bureaucracy altogether to personally evangelize, with clarity, 129 countries. No more “prisoner of the Vatican.” Also, to play a leading role in the take-down of the Soviet Union as the last empire on the globe…
…Except now for a resurgent Islam and its archaic certainties, alongside what many see as an uncertain trumpet within a rootless post-Christian West.
Oversimplified here and not new. So, the accountability of the Apostolic Succession to the Deposit of Faith—within all of lumpy and fluid human history: the singular Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection. This event and its reach within history as no secular counterpart. Neither monarchy nor an inverted pyramid. And, admits to no fused hybrid or confused aggregation. Unless, of course, the incarnate Jesus Christ is just another pumped-up founder of just another religion, within a “pluralism” of supposedly converging religions.
QUESTION: how to do institutional/personal accountability by the sacramentally ordained, together with communio and consultation with the baptized, both, but in no way mongrelized?
We have no choice. Somebody who was once famous said, “If you put your hand to the plow and look back, you aren’t worthy of Me.”