As regular readers of Catholica by now well appreciate, our regular Tuesday lead commentator, Dr Andrew Thomas Kania, has become a passionate advocate for the Eastern rite Catholic churches who maintain their communion with the Latin Church headquartered in Rome. This week he has taken his advocacy to a new level scoring the lead story in The Tablet with a passionate commentary urging the Latin Church to pay greater heed to the universality and 'catholic' nature of Catholicism. It's an article that extends beyond simple advocacy for the Eastern churches and urges all of us to re-discover the depth, beauty and universality of our faith. Catholica is strongly supportive of the particular calls Dr Kania is making in his advocacy on behalf of Eastern Catholics in general and the Ukrainian Catholic Church in particular. We also believe there are themes in Dr Kania's expositions that might profitably be taken up within the Latin Rite Church to the benefit of its local churches around the world. You'll find a link to Dr Kania's article in The Tablet at the conclusion of this editorial. We invite you to return and share your views on Dr Kania's article and this editorial in our forum.

It is time for the Catholic Church en masse to move away from a monochrome form of Catholicism, and to understand that the message we hold is not one that has lost any of its salt. We do need to acknowledge that although the message we speak is universal, the language and the symbolism by which we convey the message is not.

The paragraph immediately above is a slightly edited lift of the penultimate paragraph of Dr Kania's article in The Tablet. It sums up the heart of the advocacy Dr Kania is putting forward on behalf of the churches in the Eastern lung of the Catholic Church to be accorded greater dignity and respect for their beliefs and practices and governance within that greater "communion" all of us seek to embrace and which we label as Catholicism.

There is perhaps no greater testimony to the allure and pull of Catholicism as an idea than the fact that around the world, despite many hundreds of millions for all intents and purposes largely giving up the regular practice of their faith, when they are asked on civil census forms to disclose their religious affiliation they still nominate the category "Catholic".

On Catholica in recent days we have had a vigorous, and at times tongue-in-cheek, discussion on what it means to be "in communion" with the Church. As editor of Catholica and despite my having come to have significant disquiets about where some of our ecclesial leaders have been trying to lead us, I have to confess that I continue to have a deep, deep love of Catholicism. I love this rich tradition we are part of where, down through the centuries, the best minds have applied themselves in contemplation and study of the deepest Mysteries of what it means to be human and what our relationship really is with this "unseen, mysterious and mystical" Creator whom we discern as both the Alpha and the Omega of literally everything. I don't want to see my Church die. It is dying though before my very eyes. And we seemingly have a present leader who is not interested in doing much about that. He seemingly sees it as some "will of God" that Catholicism is on the road to becoming "smaller and purer".

Catholica started out more than two years ago with much trepidation with little capital and simply fired by the vision of endeavouring to provide some kind of outreach to the more educated sectors of society who have become disenchanted with institutional Catholicism. Our constantly growing readership would suggest that the personal views I expressed in the paragraph above are shared by many others. Collectively, WE continue to have a deep, deep love of Catholicism. WE don't want to see OUR Church die!

The challenge seems rooted today down at very core questions — core questions to do with what does it really mean to embrace, or define oneself as a "Catholic"? How does our Creator-God communicate with Creation — is it through some kind of centralised, head office bureaucracy and "the faithful" are treated as some kind of worker bees or woker ants whom God doesn't speak to expect through "head office? Or does our Creator-God speak through ALL people — ALL women and men — and the role of our "churches" is one of a "servant mechanism" that endeavours to discern the commonalities and consensus of what God is saying through the diverse circumstances and experiences that are particular to their geographical location and life journeys? Is what our Creator-God ordained, and communicated to us through Jesus Christ, some extravagent institution modelled on notions of European Royalty and Roman Imperialism that seeks to micro-manage the individual human conscience?

Catholica strongly supports the call and advocacy of Dr Kania on behalf of the churches in the Eastern lung of Catholicism. We also strongly commend some of the arguments that Dr Kania advances as having relevance not just for Rome's "head office level" relationship with our Eastern rite brothers and sisters but we believe they also have high relevance to Rome's self-perception of its role with the member local churches, and national conferences of Bishops who represent those local churches, within the Western lung of our universality. We submit there is this deep human desire, disclosed by census evidence in so many countries, of the desire to embrace our "catholicity", our "universality" and a Creed that continues to acknowledge Jesus Christ as "the fullness" of our Creator-God's Revelation even if we, after 2000 years, might still perceive ourselves "in process" of discerning what that "fullness" actually embraces and means.

In short, we here at Catholica urge our bishops and ecclesial leaders to start discussing a new "model" of Catholicism. One that takes us away from what is increasingly viewed as a false model of God's prime channel of communication between through the Primacy of Peter to one where God's prime channel of communication is perceived to be through the Primacy of Conscience of each of God's people. The role of the "Primacy of Peter" in this alternative model is not one of dictator to the individual churches, nor to the individual consciences of their members, but it self-perceives itself as the "servant of those people, and their churches" in establishing the international processes, conferences and necessary mechanisms and collegiality that are necessary to discern the points of unity — the embraced "common beliefs" and "core beliefs" — that enable us to define, express, cherish and acknowledge God's ultimate authorship of our essential diversity within a universal "catholic unity".

We urge the foregoing thoughts on our bishops and ecclesial leaders not only as the beginning of a pathway to redressing the crisis in participation and vocations that is today decimating Catholicism across the face of the Western world. We also believe this change in self-understanding of the model of Church we are arguing will eventually lead to a healing of the rifts with the Eastern Orthodox churches that have for so long been hostile to Western attempts at ecclesial domination and, furthermore, it may eventually lead to a model that leads to a re-unification of Christianity in the entire world even embracing the Protestant and other Christian denominations that have chosen to go their own way separate from both the Eastern and Western lungs of the Roman church but from the Eastern Orthodox churches as well.

Brian Coyne
Editor & Publisher
Catholica Australia

Link to Dr Kania's article in The Tablet: www.thetablet.co.uk

We welcome your thoughts in response to this editorial in our forum.

©2008 Catholica Australia

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