A discussion on a listserv yesterday about the choice of next pope led Robert Blair Kaiser to respond that "The pope — and the papalotry he encourages — is the problem, not the solution." He sent his comments for publication on Catholica also because they fit closely with themes covered in a number of commentaries and recent forum conversations here.

Papalotry is the problem, not the solution...

I find it strange and ecclesiologically somewhat retro to see us looking for a cure by asking who the next pope will be. The pope — and the papalotry he encourages — is the problem, not the solution. We, the people of God, hold the solution in our hands, if only we understood that we are the Church, not the pope and the bishops. This may sound to some pious ears like heresy, but it is not. We must lean on Vatican II's Lumen Gentium and assert not only this, but insist on a corollary notion: that the role of the pope and the bishops is not to rule, but to serve. Therefore, we have to demand this: if our Church is to regain its credibility, it has to re-structure itself in ways that make each of us accountable to the others. Len Swidler has been pointing this out for at least 20 years. We the people need to call for a constitutional convention and, there, write a constitution modeled after the U.S. Constitution, with three branches of governance, each of them a check and balance on the other.

I think it will take decades for the men in the Vatican (no women!) to understand that history itself is calling for an end to the kind of hierarchy we have been saddled with for centuries. The Vatican's statement yesterday on the future of the Legionaries is proof enough of that. The pope calls for "a purification" of the order. What does that mean? The Legionaries do not need "purity." They need a form of governance with checks and balances on the absolute power of its leader. In NOT seeing that, the guys in the Vatican, led by Papa Ratzinger himself, broadcast their own blindness. How can they ask the Legionaries to apply this antidote to their ills without seeing that this is precisely the Rx for the fix they find themselves in right now?

Walter Cardinal Kasper

So if, realistically, we cannot rely on the Vatican to do the right thing, what then?

We, the Catholics of every nation, have to call for constitutional conventions in our own lands. (In canon law, they are called regional [or national] synods.) The U.S. had three of them, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Councils of Baltimore where rules were written for the U.S. Church. This was done by clergy and laity working together. To rebuild Catholicism today clergy and lay people, working together, have to rely on their own national histories and the comfort of their own cultures to create their own form of governance, giving themselves a certain autonomy from the so-called universal Church, which is an abstraction (or maybe the Roman Curia itself), as Cardinal Kasper pointed out in 2001 in a famous public argument with the then Cardinal Ratzinger. The real Church, Kasper maintained, is the local Church — all the local Churches in the world enculturating the Gospel in their own lands. Kasper never said these Churches had to cut themselves off from Rome. He was not talking about autonomy, but autochthony. The local Churches would still be in union with Peter — as are the Melkites and the Maronites etc. etc. But they would have their own governance — ideally electing their own bishops, which would certainly make them accountable to the people — and they would toss out Roman Canon Law (which gives all power to the clerical caste and none to its citizens) and replace it with their own constitutions.

Such a plan puts the responsibility for reform of our beloved Church in our own hands. The plan is, admittedly, "revolutionary" — a turning of the ecclesiastical pyramid upside down, with the people "at the top" and the bishops in their rightful place, not lords, but servants of the people. Which is what Pope John XXIII suggested the Council Fathers should do when they were re-writing De Ecclesia. And they did. Which, IMHO, is why Papa Ratzinger and company have been trying to dumb the Council down for the past thirty years, at least. We have the solution in our hands, then. All we have to do is grow up and assert ourselves. And renounce our papalotry.

Robert Blair Kaiser

[Index of Commentaries by Robert Blair Kaiser] | [Index to the Serialisation of his novel "Cardinal Mahony"]