Robert Blair Kaiser's summary of last week's events: In Chapter Thirteen, a Mahony adviser, Father James Kowalski of Notre Dame, appeared on Fox Television News to debate the chancellor of the Archdiocese of New York about the pros and cons of a people's Church. Kowalski maintains, "Give the people a voice and a vote, and the people will get to work. Not for the hierarchical Church. For their Church, the people-of-God Church. For themselves." Mahony is starting to get the idea, that in order to re-form the Church, he has get into politics--as Nike Pike tells him, "up to his eyeballs." "What I need," Mahony tells a friend, "is a campaign manager, someone who, the less he knows about the Church, the better, someone who won't feel his hands are tied by our archaic customs. Or by canon law." Now here's Chapter Thirteen...

Chapter 13: Rackham

MAHONY WAS SURPRISED when he first saw Ted Rackham, motoring into the main hallway at Queen of Angels Hospital in his state-of-the-art wheelchair with Nick Pike trailing behind. Rackham maneuvered with such ease that Mahony guessed he'd been in a wheelchair for a long, long time.

"I got polio when I was a senior at Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn," Rackham explained before he was even asked. "That's where Al Davis started his football career—quite a few years before I showed up. But I never let the polio stop me from being me. At Northwestern, I lettered in football—as an assistant manager. I learned to drive my own special car. I've been married twice, had three kids, lots of girlfriends."

Mahony grinned. He liked Rackham's rugged good looks, shaved head, strong nose, heavily muscled upper body. There was something about a man—or a woman—who suffered severe physical handicaps and went right on living their lives without a whimper. He'd met these people on occasion. He had several paraplegics working in the archdiocesan offices, and he found it easy to work with them because they did their jobs with such alacrity. In fact, Mahony was pleased that when Nick Pike phoned and said he was bringing him an organizer, he never mentioned Rackham's disability. He took that as a cue; he certainly wouldn't either.

After introducing Rackham, Pike took off, pleading another appointment in Hollywood, and Mahony led Rackham into the elevator and up to his small suite on the eleventh floor. Coming out of the elevator with Rackham,

Mahony said, "Nick Pike said you helped César Chávez organize the farmworkers?"

"I had a role there. I had a good tutor, Saul Alinsky, the community organizer from Chicago."

"And you used the lessons you learned from Alinsky for your work in the labor movement?"

"That's all the labor movement is: helping the little guys use the only power they have, numbers."

"I've been reading a piece of labor history," said Mahony, grabbing a book off the shelf behind his desk. "This one was written by George McGovern, before he got into politics. It's all about the coal miners in Colorado, in a battle with John D. Rockefeller, who owned most of the state's coal mines. The miners lost that battle when the Colorado National guard, paid by Rockefeller's mine managers, opened fire on the strikers and killed more than a hundred of them." He handed Rackham the book.

"The Ludlow Massacre," read Rackham. "I remember it." He opened it to an early chapter and found a passage on Joe Hill, by most accounts the father of the labor movement in America. "'Don't mourn. Organize.' That was Joe Hill's slogan. From what Nick Pike told me, this is what the Church in America needs to do."

Mahony tested him. "The Church is already organized, isn't it?"

Rackham said, "We're not talking about that kind of organization. According to Nick Pike, you may be trying to overturn that beautiful pyramidal structure of yours, with the pope at the top and the people at the bottom."

Mahony flinched. This was so unlike him. He used to kiss the pope's ring. And now? "Well, Nick was right. We are trying to do something like that—figure out how to organize the people of God."

"'People of God?' Does that expression have some special meaning? You gotta spell things out for this Jew."

"In fact, Ted, we got the phrase from the Jews. In the Old Testament, the Jews were the people of God."

"God's chosen people?"

"Right! Now, ever since Vatican II—you know about Vatican II?"

Rackham nodded.

"Since Vatican II, we have adapted the expression and made it stand for the notion that the only thing special or 'chosen' about any of us is that we have a greater responsibility to the oppressed."

"I like that," said Rackham. "All my life, I been working with the oppressed."

"Maybe this is why Pike brought you here."

"Yeah, well, sort of. If this is what you really want to do."

"Yes," said Mahony. He told Rackham—and this was the first time he ever said it so clearly, "We want to organize the people of God. How do we do that?"

Rackham gave Mahony a long look. Finally, he said, "Not exactly the way John L. Lewis did it with the mine workers. Or the way Walter Reuther did it with the auto workers We're not talking about jobs and a living wage, are we?"

"No. I have made some moves, Ted, that the Vatican does not like. And they have made some moves, too, moves that I have deflected." He told Rackham about Sister Phoebe turning Bishop Dimleigh away from the doors at St. Priscilla's. "But my theory is that if I have the support of the people, the Vatican will be happy to back off. It doesn't want a schism."

"A split?"

"Right," said Mahony. "The Vatican doesn't want to see a split. Neither do I. So, how do we go our own way without absolutely going our own way?"

"Your Eminence—"

"Call me Roger."

"Okay. Roger. I do not know. But I think I know how to find out. There's gotta be some smart Church scholars out there somewhere. The Church has had such a long history. There's got to be some lesson, some precedent maybe in the Church's history. I will find someone who has an answer."

"Okay. That's a deal. But don't tell them who you're working for."

"Am I working for you?"

"No. Not really. you're not on my payroll."

"So I cannot tell them I am working for you, can I?"

"I guess not."

Rackham spun around in his wheelchair, then turned back to Mahony. "Just so you know. Nick Pike is taking care of me, for now. He's a man who isn't happy unless he has a cause. Or, preferably, three causes. He needs men like me to keep him happy. I guess he's also paying a substantial salary to Juana Margarita Obregón. We try to keep Pike happy. Understand?"

RACKHAM DIDN'T FIND ONE SCHOLAR. He found several of them, all authorities on Church history—not only Sunnyhill, whom Pike had told him about, still in temporary residence at LMU, but others, too, in different parts of the world. This was no problem for Rackham. He had a powerful laptop, he'd become good on the Internet and he was not afraid to use a telephone. So being wheelchair bound was more of an asset than a liability: It gave him a good excuse not to travel, or even fight the bumper-to-bumper traffic on LA's freeways in his special van for the handicapped.

And so, Rackham did his research—on the telephone and in cyberspace. There he found all the theoretical underpinnings that any loyal Catholic revolutionary could possibly need.

He found that the Church didn't even think of itself as "lay" and "cleric" in its earliest years. Only half way through the first millennium did "hierarchy" really begin to take hold and give the clerics the notion that they could make the Church their own private feudal kingdom. With some major exceptions such as John Henry Newman's describing the Church as a conspiratio pastorum et fidelium—"a breathing together of pastors and the faithful"—this clerical view prevailed from the Council of Trent right up to Vatican II itself. The twentieth century commenced very badly. In 1906, in his encyclical letter Vehementer Nos, Pope Pius X said, "The laity have no other rights than to let themselves be guided and so follow their pastors in docility." The Catholic Church set itself apart as something "of the clergy, by the clergy, and for the clergy."

Rackham found something out of Australia called eJournal of Theology with an article in its premier issue by a scholar named Peter Price. Price's piece maintained that the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council was supposed to usher in the end of all that, but one of his most stunning finds predated Vatican II. It was a quote from a rather conservative pope, Pius XII, who said in an allocution to the College of Cardinals on February 20, 1946, "The laity are the Church." What could be plainer than that?

Price discovered any number of passages in the documents of Vatican II itself that affirmed the same thing. The Council saw the world as a beautiful place created by God and redeemed by the Incarnation of the Word into its material flesh—a redemption that would go on through history through the action of the men and women who lived and worked in that world. laymen. laywomen.

Rackham also read parts of other conciliar documents that contradicted this view, passages that reflected a preconciliar view of the layman as a subordinate, a subject of the hierarchy. He phoned Sunnyhill. "How can this be? I thought Vatican II changed all this?"

"Vatican II tried to change it," said Sunnyhill, "but the settlements of Vatican II didn't take." It took him an hour to explain how the clerical party at Vatican II had fiddled with the Council documents toward the end of the Council—precisely to blunt their populist thrust. "The majority of the Fathers," he said, "let them get away with it because they were tired and because they thought they'd already won the battle. The upshot is that those who wanted to keep tight control over the people could always cite chapter and verse—verses they'd inserted into the documents at the eleventh hour—to justify their moves."

Sunnyhill said that, after the Council, the pope and the bishops kept urging greater involvement of laypeople in the Church, but always as subordinates. Bishops put laypeople on various committees—as advisors. Pope John Paul II invited laypeople into his synods, but they had no authority there either, even in their own areas of expertise—for example, marriage and the family. They had no voice in the Synod on the Family in 1980. And no voice in the Synod on the Laity in 1987. At the synods, the nonclerics were simply auditors. After the Synod for Oceania in 1998, Pope John Paul II described the relationship between laity and clergy as "deep complementarity—not equality."

Rackham asked, "How does this square with the equality of all believers in Lumen Gentium?"

Sunnyhill laughed at Rackham, a Jew and a labor organizer, quoting a key document from the Second Vatican Council. "It doesn't. You've put your finger on the problem. For more than twenty-five years, we had a clerical-minded pope. More than once, he squelched moves to get laypeople more involved in ministry; he said he was worried about what he called 'the clericalization of the laity.' And Cardinal Ratzinger backed him up. Ratzinger kept harping on something he called 'an ontological difference' between the ordained priesthood and the priesthood of the laity."

"What does that mean?"

"It's all smoke and mirrors," said Sunnyhill. "Just designed to maintain a class system in the Church.

"Who's to gain from that?"

"My opinion? No one. The guys at the Vatican, of course, have far more effective control over ordained priests than they have over laymen. Maybe it is all about control."

"Then they can't be serious about wanting to change the world."

"Why do you say that?"

"Simple numbers," said Rackham. "Worldwide, you got a billion Catholics or more, and only two hundred thousand priests. Are the priests saying they don't need any help in getting the job done?"

"This is interesting," said Sunnyhill. "In the beginning, we had some smart Jews running things. Peter was a Jew. Paul was a Jew. Now, maybe this is what we need again, some smart Jews like you. Tell me, what do you think the job is?"

Rackham pondered for a moment. "Well, I've been listening in on a lot of conversations—in cyberspace—among American Catholics. I read them online, on half a dozen forums, right-wing lists, like www.ewtn.com, middle- of-the-road lists, like www.votf.com, left-wing lists, like www.vatican2.org. I see these forums in England, too, in Ireland, even Australia. Far as I can tell, these listers are free to say what they think about their Church. For the first time in history, maybe, we see bunches of Catholics who glory in free speech."

"Yes, But I wonder where their free speech will lead us."

"We'll see," said Rackham. "No one really knows. Free speech? Not the first thing we think of when we're talking about the Roman Catholic Church. I wonder if it's ever been tried. But I ran into another quote from Pius XII. He was not my favorite pope, because of the way he played footsie with Hitler when he was nuncio to Germany. But in some of his papal allocutions, he gave Catholics all the permission they needed to express themselves freely. He said that a society is healthy if it has a healthy public opinion. At Vatican II, Lumen Gentium said the same thing, even more strongly."

Sunnyhill was fairly in awe of Rackham, for being so conversant with what a pope had written more than fifty years before, and what the Council had decided in 1966, and he said so.

Rackham smiled. "As a labor organizer," he said, "I got some of my best ideas from the social encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII and Paul VI. Truth is where you find it."

"You were going to tell me what our job is?"

"From what I can see, Catholics want bread and justice. They can get it, they say, by creating communities that aren't afraid to demand bread and justice. Which pretty much come down to the same thing. If men and women get justice in the workplace, they will earn their daily bread, for themselves and for their families."

"What do they think of Sister Phoebe?"

"She's helped the people see they can provide their own Eucharistic bread."

"Without benefit of clergy?"

"Yes. And she's made it very clear she doesn't want to be a priest. She parts company here with a lot of women who want to be ordained. She believes that priesthood itself is a pagan institution, created to preside over barbarous sacrifices that moderns find distasteful—to say the least. Jesus wasn't a priest. In fact, he opposed the Jewish priests. They were the ones who had him crucified. So she calls ordination 'an idolatry'—because it helps set up an adoring relationship between the people of God and the clerics. The people treat the clerics like little Gods. And you know where that leads."

Sunnyhill frowned. "I think Phoebe is a little bit ahead of her time. In fact, way ahead. For now, she ought to be pushing for the ordination of married men. That's much more doable."

"But John Paul II wouldn't hear of that."

" John Paul II is gone."

"You're saying the new pope might?"

"Well, maybe my wish is father to the thought. If I were a betting man, I'd bet this pope will stick to the status quo."

Rackham said, "Looks to me, then, like celibacy trumps the Eucharist every time."

"Afraid so, mate. Except in the Eastern autochthonous Churches where they have married priests."

Rackham frowned. "These Catholic Churches?"

"Yes."

"How do they get away with that?"

Sunnyhill said, "go read up on autochthony."

"Aw what?"

"Another Greek word, not as violent a word as the word schism."

Rackham tried it out. "Aw-TOCK-thu-knee?"

"Right. It doesn't mean autonomy. It means home-grown."

"How do you spell it?"

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Other books by Robert Blair Kaiser:
A Church in Search of Itself
Clerical Error
The Politics of Sex and Religion
“R.F.K. Must Die!”
Pope, Council and World
Co-author (with Tim Smith): Jubilee 2000, A Musical Comedy

[Index of this serialisation of Cardinal Mahony — A Novel]