Call to Action Authors’ Forum Talk
The Authors’ Forum is an innovation for the Call To Action (CTA) Convention of 2010. CTA had never done this before. All authors who wish to promote their books met on Friday, November 5, between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. in the main exhibition hall. Each was placed at his or her own table and was not be allowed to use any audiovisual or other electronic devices. One large placard was set up on each table to advertise each author’s book. The time was broken into half-hour portions. Audiences gathered at each table.
The authors began the half-hour session with a 10-minute presentation or sales-pitch for his or her book. That was followed by a 15-minute Q&A session, followed by five minutes in which the authors were allowed to sell their books. At the end of the half hour, the audiences went to other tables.
This was the gist of my talk:
My name is Joseph Marren. My book is called Talking Treason in Church: The Lay Person’s Guide to Renewing the Catholic Church.
I wrote the first chapter in 1998 to assure my children that I was not an idiot for remaining a Catholic. When the Clerical Sexual Abuse scandal broke in 2002, I wrote the rest of book to examine the divine right of bishops to rule the Catholic Church. I found that that right does not exist. Jesus Christ did not die to preserve Roman imperialism in the Catholic Church.
This book is unlike anything you will read anywhere else about the Catholic Church. It supplies you with a plan, which you yourself can put into effect, for taking back the Church from the hierarchy.
It provides you with the history of the early Church that demonstrates clearly that the hierarchy—the “priest-leadership” of our Church—is a historical accident. The leadership of our Church, as it stands today, takes almost all of its ruling ideas, not from Jesus Christ, but from ancient Rome.
Jesus Christ was a layman. He was not a priest. He was critical of the priestly leadership of his time. You can see this from the Parable of the Good Samaritan. His most revolutionary act against the priestly leadership was his overturning the tables of the money-changers in the Temple. This symbolically cut off the High Priests’ income stream. When questioned by the High Priests’ emissaries, he forcibly challenged the priestly rule, the hierarchy. “It is written,” he said. “‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of thieves!”
The gospels attest that Jesus was a marked man from that moment on. The High Priests saw him as a threat, and they conspired with the Romans to put him to death.
Not only was Jesus Christ a layman, but the movement he began for the reform of Israel was a lay movement. And that lay movement was to be bound together by a celebration, a common meal that we call the Eucharist. The gospels are full of symbols and types of the Eucharist. Seen in a certain way, the gospels are practically an instruction-book telling us how to celebrate Mass.
The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmāus at the end of Luke’s gospel gives us one of the clearest lessons. It is Easter Day. The two disciples are walking from Jerusalem to Emmāus and talking about “all the things that had occurred” around the crucifixion. They are heartsick. They thought that Jesus would restore the kingdom to Israel, and now here he is, dead—killed by the “chief priests and rulers.” Then Jesus falls in beside them unrecognized. He asks them what they are talking about. He begins to explain to them from the scriptures how it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things. Their hearts burn within them to hear his words, and they beg him to stay with them.
At table, he blesses the bread, breaks it, and gives it to them, and their eyes are opened. He vanishes, and they rush back to Jerusalem to tell the brothers and sisters.
That is clearly a Mass—the service of the Word, followed by the sharing of the bread and wine. It is the primordial sacrament of Christianity. It is what binds us together as Church. And one of the most foul crimes of the Catholic hierarchy is to make the Mass their personal property, as if it belonged to them alone and not to every Christian as part of his or her own birthright.
My book will tell you how to get started celebrating home Masses. It will advise you to continue to support your parishes. The parishes are the only hope for the survival of Catholicism. But rule by the hierarchy is a dead letter.
How did we get the priesthood and the hierarchy, or “rule by priests?” It took a long time.
One fact cannot be overemphasized: Christians of the first generations celebrated the Eucharist in their own homes. In Acts 2:42-46, they go to the Temple to hear the Apostles preach the Word. Then they adjourn to their own homes to celebrate “the breaking of the bread,” as the Eucharist was then called.
In 1 Cor. 11, St. Paul upbraids the Corinthians for what was reported to him about the way they were celebrating the Eucharist. The wealthy were eating and drinking to excess. The poor were going hungry. Lost was any sense of the presence of Jesus Christ in the gathering or in the ‘elements’ of bread and wine. Paul is upset about how the Corinthians celebrated the Eucharist in this house-church. He is not upset about the fact that they are all lay people. There were no Christian clergy at this time. The New Testament is clear on this point.
But the example of priesthood was widespread throughout the ancient world. Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans—all had priesthoods to whom these ancient societies assigned their relationships with the gods. In particular, the Jews had a priesthood. And that’s what led the new Christians astray. When the Christians studied the Jewish scriptures, they found the priesthood of Aaron depicted in all its glory. “But we are the new Israel,” they said. “If the old Israel had a priesthood, we must have one, too!”
It was bad theology, but very seductive. The Jewish scriptures gave the new Christians ready-made thought patterns to use when thinking about God. These seemed to include a priesthood. What the Christians did not take into account was God’s action in history.
The Jewish hierarchy—the High Priests and Rulers of the Temple—had killed Jesus, using the Romans as their instrument. It is easy to see the hand of God returning the favor 40 years later, when the Roman Army destroyed the Temple and thus put an end to that same priesthood in the War of 66-70 CE.
God had set up that priesthood, the priesthood of Aaron, at the time of Moses. Evidently it was a temporary expedient. But the lesson was lost on the Christians.
Two hundred years after Jesus’ death, we see in The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome a priesthood and a hierarchy in the process of formation. The structure is modeled on that found in the Jewish scriptures. But bishops are still being voted into office by the lay people as Church leaders were from the beginning.
Three hundred years after Jesus’ death, the emperor Constantine liberates the Christian Church and summons all bishops to his summer palace at Nicaea for what will be the first ecumenical council. He supplies the bishops with free transportation and a meeting place. All the laws passed at that council become equally laws of the state and of the Church. Constantine is thus the first pope. He has complete authority over what is sacred in the Christian Church. And in the fourth canon (or law) of Nicaea, it is for the first time stated that bishops will be voted into office, not by the laity, but by their fellow bishops. No mention is made of the usual prerequisite of a vote by the laity.
Within a few generations, the settled custom of lay people voting for their bishops is done away with. The bishops become a law unto themselves, consultation with the laity ceases, and “the schism of the hierarchy” is in full force. When they do get to exercise their franchise, it is noted as an unusual event, as in the election of St. Ambrose of Milan in 374 CE.
This book returns the Church to the 99 percent of the faithful who have been denied a voice in choosing Church leadership for nearly 17 centuries—though they had it for the first three. I’d appreciate it if you’d buy a copy. Let’s get this revolution started. Thank you.
Women’s Ordination is Equal to Sexual Abuse?
Women were Among the First Celebrants of the Eucharist
Flailing about as usual to distract people’s attention from the clerical sexual abuse scandal, the Vatican has decided that women’s ordination is the equivalent of sexual abuse.
Jesus’ appraisal of the Sadducees comes to mind. “You go astray because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Matt. 22:29).
Women were among the first in the Pauline communities to preside over house churches. Therefore it is a moral certainty that they were also among the first to preside at the Eucharist in Paul’s communities.
Spiritually, Jesus in his own practice shattered the misogyny of the ancient world, both among Jews and pagans. He spoke directly to women: to the Samaritan woman (John 4:7ff), to Mary and Martha, his friends but also his disciples, listening along with others of his disciples in the room (Luke 10:38-42). Jesus traveled with an entourage of women (Luke 8:1-3), which was scandalous in contemporary Jewish society.
Sociologically, Paul found some of his most receptive hearers among women who had achieved a certain status and were in a position to maintain their own households. Women of the ruling class, both Roman and Greek, often became Jewish proselytes or “god-fearers,” which means they were interested enough in Judaism to attend the synagogue and study the Jewish way of life but were not yet converts. [Cf. Acts 13:50.]
It was much easier for women to accept Judaism than men. If women decided to convert, they simply underwent a baptism; men had to be circumcised.
Paul’s letters and the Acts of the Apostles give examples of women “god-fearers,” who converted to Christianity. Others of his women “fellow workers” were born Jews.
Here is a list of women church leaders, probably not exhaustive:
Phoebe, a deacon of the church of Cenchreae, a harbor city of Greece between Corinth and Athens (Romans 16:1). As the formidable biblical scholar, John L. Mackenzie, S.J., pointed out in his essay, “St. Paul’s Attitude Toward Women,” hers “was surely an ecclesiastical office.”
Priscilla, who with her husband Aquila, had many dealings with Paul, in fact “risking their necks” for him. They had a church in their house at Rome to which Paul sends greetings (Romans 16:3-5). Lest anyone think that Priscilla was the junior member of this husband-wife evangelization team, Acts 18:24-26 recounts that the pair heard Apollos speaking in a synagogue at Ephesus in favor of “the Way” (of Christ), and, inspired speaker and scripture scholar though Apollos was, they drew him aside and instructed him more accurately in the Way. Aquila’s name is never mentioned without that of his wife, and, as here, Priscilla’s name usually comes first.
Evodia and Syntyche. These are the names of two otherwise unknown women who had “struggled at (Paul’s) side in promoting the gospel.” Paul urges them to come to a mutual understanding in the Lord (Philippians 4:2-3). These women were leaders in the church at Philippi. Either they were the joint leaders of a house church or led two separate house churches. If they were not leaders in the church their misunderstanding would be a private matter and would not be mentioned in Paul’s letter to the entire Church of Philippi.
Lydia of Thyatira was “a dealer in purple cloth” whom Paul met on first entering Philippi in Macedonia. She was a “god-fearer” who, after listening to Paul, was converted along with her entire household. Paul and Silas are not long in Philippi when they are thrown into prison. Upon their release, they are asked by the magistrates to leave the city. Before leaving, however, “they went to Lydia’s house where they saw and encouraged the brothers, and then they left” (Acts 16:13-15,40). Lydia, obviously a wealthy woman, was Paul’s first convert in Europe. The first house church in Europe was hers. The Eucharist is the primordial sacrament of the Christian Church. Without it, there is no Christianity. Guess who presided at the Eucharist in Lydia’s house.
All of these women were evangelists, fellow workers of Paul’s, and church leaders worth mentioning in Paul’s letters and in the Acts of the Apostles. It is inevitable that they celebrated the Eucharist in their own house churches.
As John L. Mackenzie said in his 1970s essay (referred to above),
“The office of priest (hiereus or sacerdos or kohen) was known in Greek and Roman religion and in Judaism; its absence in the apostolic church cannot be merely coincidental. I once suggested that the apostolic church rejected the whole category of the sacred as known in its predecessors and contemporaries—sacred places, persons, objects—and that the reintroduction of the sacred was an intrusion of a pagan element into Roman Catholicism. Possibly I am arguing that women are not ordained and men should not be. Paul did fairly well with no consciousness of ordination but a great sense of mission.”
Mackenzie was exactly right. I am sorry it took me so long to encounter that statement, but I agree with it entirely.
As for the Vatican’s latest statement, they are certainly experts at sexual abuse. They have once again abused every woman on the planet.
Does anyone doubt that they are unqualified to lead the Catholic Church?
Ignatius of Antioch: A Bad Example for the Church
Ignatius of Antioch was bishop of Antioch in Syria at the turn of the 1st century CE. He was arrested by the Romans and taken to Rome where he died as a martyr in about 107 CE.
On this journey, Ignatius wrote seven letters to various Christian churches. These letters have been preserved.
Supporters of hierarchical rule in the Church—that is, autocratic rule by priests and bishops—have long cited Ignatius’s letters as proof that monarchical rule by bishops was in place at the beginning of the first century. They are wrong. They have misread Ignatius’s letters.
Ignatius himself would very much have liked to see bishops as monarchical rulers in their own churches. He was trying very hard to sell that idea, but his letters show that that development had not yet taken place in the Church.
Two other bodies shared leadership in the Church with the bishop. They were the presbyters, the elders of each church following the synagogue model, and the deacons, the staff of the church, who were undoubtedly responsible for church’s charitable works and for its functioning as an institution.
Ignatius wanted to be able to give commands to the presbyters and deacons. This is clear from some of his letters. Instead, from the fact that he hardly dares mention the bishops without quickly mentioning the presbyters and deacons, it is clear that all three groups shared leadership in the Church.
A Three-Part Leadership Structure
Here are some examples from Ignatius’s letters:
“…with the bishop presiding in the place of God and the presbyters in the place of the Council of the Apostles, and the deacons, who are most dear to me, entrusted with the service of Jesus Christ…” Magnesians 6:1
“Likewise let all respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, even as the bishop is also a type of the Father, and the presbyters as the council of God and the college of Apostles. Without these the name of ‘Church’ is not given.” Trallians 3:1
“That is to say, whoever does anything apart from the bishop and the presbyters and the deacons is not pure in his conscience.” Trallians 7:2
“…especially if (you) be at one with the bishop, and with the presbyters and deacons, who together with him have been appointed according to the mind of Jesus Christ…” Philadelphians Intro.
“Be careful therefore to use one Eucharist (for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup for union with his blood, one altar, as there is one bishop with the presbyters and the deacons my fellow servants)….” Philadelphians 5:4
“Give heed to the bishop and to the presbyters and deacons.” Philadelphians 7:1
“See that you all follow the bishop, as Jesus Christ follows the Father, and the presbyters as if it were the Apostles. And reverence the deacons as the command of God.” Smyrnaeans 8:1
“I salute the godly bishop, and the revered presbyters, and the deacons my fellow-servants….” Smyrnaeans 12:2
“I am devoted to those who are subject to the bishop, presbyters, and deacons….” To Polycarp 6:1
…But what are Ignatius’s true feelings?
In a few places, however, Ignatius lets his true feelings show. He believes that the Apostles gave commands to the rest of the Church. That’s what he wants for the bishops.
To the Smyrnaeans (8:1), he writes:
“Let no one do any of the things appertaining to the Church without the bishop. Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop, or by one whom he appoints.”
And, again to the Smyrnaeans (8:2):
“Wherever the bishop appears let the congregation be present; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful either to baptize or to hold an ‘agapé’ without the bishop; but whatever he approves, this is also pleasing to God….”
And, again, (9:1):
“It is good to know God and the bishop. He who honors the bishop has been honored by God; he who does anything without the knowledge of the bishop is serving the devil.”
To Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who is apparently not as domineering as Ignatius, he writes (4:1):
“Let nothing be done without your approval….”
That’s the real Ignatius. “It is good to know God and the bishop.” For him, the bishop is the visible manifestation of God on earth.
Ignatius was horribly wrong, as we see from the sexual-abuse scandal. But he is one of those misleaders of the Church on whom the hierarchy (the priest-leaders) depend to justify their assertions of power.
Ignatius the Scoundrel
Of course, Ignatius never mentions how he got his job. He was voted into office by his church. We learn this from the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. This document is thought to have been written “in the last decades of the first century in Syria” according to Prex Eucharistica, a scholarly collection of ancient Eucharistic prayers edited by Anton Hänggi and Irmgard Pahl [Univertätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz, 1998].
In other words, the Didache was written in the very same Syrian church where Ignatius was bishop!
What a scoundrel he was to betray the laity in this fashion! To deprive them of their right to celebrate the Eucharist in their own homes after they had voted him into office!
Yet he is a true Catholic. You can trust him on much of what he has to say on other subjects, but not a bit on what he has to say about power or governance in the Church.
The Fisherman and the Emperor: A Fable
I wrote this fable in 1968. It appeared in Ave Maria magazine in the Nov. 9 issue. The magazine was published at Notre Dame, IN, by the Congregation of Holy Cross, a Catholic religious society of priests and brothers. The magazine, at one time the largest-circulation Catholic publication in the English language, was founded in 1865 and ceased publication in 1970. Joe Marren
ONCE UPON A TIME in a far country there lived a fisherman. He was a young man, vigorous and strong, and he did a good day’s work. The Lord of Heaven beheld the Fisherman and said to himself, “Here is a good man—one I can trust to do a good day’s work and stick to his business.”
So, one day, the Lord of Heaven leaned down from Heaven and spoke to the Fisherman. He gave him a message and said, “Now forget your fishing and carry my message.” The simple Fisherman felt very happy that the Lord of Heaven had seen fit to speak to him. So he carried the message to the great City where the Emperor lived.
When he reached the Imperial City, he did as the Lord of Heaven had told him. He began telling all the people the message. From all parts of town people started coming to hear what the Fisherman had to say. They would walk away saying, “So that’s what the Lord of Heaven has on his mind. It’s certainly not what we expected, but it sounds true. In fact, it sounds wonderful!” News of what the Fisherman was doing reached the Emperor, and he was greatly disturbed. He didn’t like to see people leaving their work to go listen to a simple fisherman. Why, even some of his own soldiers had gone to listen to him! A stop would have to be put to this nonsense!
The Emperor, you see, envied the Fisherman the large following he was gaining. He began to worry that people might begin to think more of the Fisherman than they did of him.
The Emperor, therefore, dispatched his soldiers with orders to seize the Fisherman and put him in prison. But one of the soldiers who had gone to listen to the Fisherman said to himself, “This isn’t right…. The Fisherman has done nothing wrong. I will go and warn him.”
And so he did. The Fisherman escaped and went into hiding, and the Emperor could not find him.
As time passed, the Emperor did his best to capture the Fisherman, but to no avail. He told the people they were not to go visit him, but they went just the same.
Little by little, the Emperor changed his mind.
“I don’t know what the Fisherman is telling the people,” he thought to himself, “but at least he isn’t stirring them up to revolt against me. Maybe the Fisherman isn’t such a bad sort after all. I think I’ll publish an amnesty and let him come out of hiding.”
This the Emperor did.
The Fisherman, for his part, was glad to be free once again. He was even grateful to the Emperor for letting him continue his work. And as time went on they came to be somewhat friendly, the Emperor and the Fisherman. The Emperor would invite the Fisherman to his parties and to stay at the palace. And at length, the Fisherman invited the Emperor to hear him tell the message of the Lord of Heaven.
At this, the Emperor snorted.
“Hmph!” he said. And then he said, “Well, I guess I ought to come and hear you tell the message. But I won’t be found in a crowd of my gawking subjects. Even if I were to come in my sedan chair, carried by 12 slaves, it would not be enough to insure the proper recognition due to my Imperial Person.”
The Emperor stopped and thought a moment. Then he said, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll build a lofty Imperial Chair above the heads of the crowd. I’ll have it decked out sumptuously. And you must have a high chair too, a Telling Chair, from which to speak to me—and proper clothes—just so people will know it’s all right for you to address the Emperor.”
The Fisherman didn’t know what to say to this, but he went along with it. He felt uncomfortable in the fine clothes at first. And the Telling Chair, which was on a level with the Emperor’s, did not permit him to mix with his friends as before. But the Fisherman reconciled himself to all this. “At least,” he thought, “it will impress the people to see the Emperor coming to hear the message of the Lord of Heaven.”
So the lofty Imperial Chair and the Telling Chair were duly erected in the marketplace.
After the Emperor had sat several times in the Chair to hear the message of the Lord of Heaven, it occurred to him how rapt the people were and how intent on hearing the Fisherman.
“He certainly has power over them,” thought the Emperor, “though I don’t understand why. What he says is so simpleminded and so obviously false.”
Afterwards, he summoned the Fisherman and said to him, “You know, you do a good job of work out there speaking to the people, and I admire you for it. However, let me give you some advice, since I am more experienced in dealing with the people than you are.
“You will get far more respect for your (hem!) Lord of Heaven if you insist a bit more on your privileges as his ambassador,” said the Emperor. “People, after all, will more readily credit what they see than what they don’t see. If you use a more commanding tone and intersperse a few threats here and there, why, it’s certain to carry weight. And didn’t the Lord of Heaven give you a few Laws to pass out? That would give people pause!”
The Fisherman frowned and said he wasn’t sure at the moment.
“Besides,” said the Fisherman, “we don’t seem to need any Laws.”
“Nonsense, my man,” the Emperor said. “You don’t need any Laws of course, but they surely do. How can you have Order without Law? Here, let me show you how it’s done.”
The Emperor spoke to his servant. “Publish an Imperial Edict as follows: By order of the Emperor (hem!) and the Fisherman it is hereby decreed that anyone who wishes to hear the message of the Lord of Heaven must be in the square of the marketplace by 10 o’clock.
“There, that ought to do it,” said the Emperor.
“But nobody ever comes after 10,” said the Fisherman.
The Emperor looked very wise. “They will now” he said in a droll voice.
“And, don’t you see,” he continued, “you can catch them at it. That will give you a great advantage over them and inspire a great deal of respect for what you have to say.” The Emperor grinned and winked broadly.
The Fisherman left the Emperor’s presence in a perplexity. The Lord of Heaven had told him to carry his message. He had done so. Everywhere he delivered it, it had been joyously received by some of the people, at least.
“Now the Emperor builds me a high Telling Chair, dresses me up in fine clothes and bids me take a more commanding attitude. I really don’t know,” thought the Fisherman.
Nevertheless, he tried to follow the Emperor’s advice on these and other matters and thus prolonged the friendship between them for many years.
At last the Emperor died. There was mourning throughout the land. When the Fisherman came and sat in his Telling Chair, he was sorry to see the richly decked Imperial Chair opposite so empty, day after day.
The people, too, who arrived promptly at 10 o’clock every morning, were sorry to see the Emperor’s Chair so empty—at first. After several months had passed, however, they began to feel a little differently.
“The old Emperor’s dead, now,” said one man. “Why doesn’t the Fisherman come down from that Chair? Why doesn’t he get rid of those clothes and talk to us the way he used to?”
“Why, I imagine those are his Lawful Clothes and his Lawful Chair,” said another. “And you’ve got to have Laws, you know. You don’t see the Fisherman doing away with the All-in-the-Square-by-10-O’Clock-Law or the No-Escargot-or-Pate-on-Tuesdays-Law, do you?”
“But we didn’t have any of these Laws when the Fisherman first came to town,” said the first man. “And he wasn’t making Laws when we hid him in our houses. Now half the time he talks about the Laws instead of the message of the Lord of Heaven. Let’s ask him if we can be done with the Laws.”
They called up to the Fisherman and put the matter to him. But the Fisherman was afraid to change. He remembered what the old Emperor had said, who had much experience in dealing with the people. “Besides, if I get rid of my Clothes and the Chair and the Laws, what’s to become of me,” he thought.
So the Fisherman called down to the people, “The Laws must be kept. The message of the Lord of Heaven requires it.”
” ‘The message of the Lord of Heaven requires it!’ ” said several people at once.
“Has the Lord of Heaven spoken to the Fisherman again? He hasn’t mentioned this requirement before.”
Then a dispute arose. Some people said: “Obviously the Fisherman is the expert…. Otherwise why would the Lord of Heaven have chosen him?” Others said: “What have the Laws got to do with anything? And why does the Fisherman now spend so little time talking about the message?”
The dispute was not settled that day.
For his part the Fisherman continued to talk about the Laws. So a great number of the people who used to come to the square every morning ceased to come. This called forth from the Fisherman the All-Who-Stay-Away-from-the-Square-Cannot-Understand-the-Message-Law.
Months and months went by and it appeared there would be no new Emperor. Shouts were heard in the streets, “Autocracy of the People!” This, children, simply means that the people felt capable of managing their own affairs. When the Fisherman heard the shouts, they only made him upset. He was acting like an old grandfather now. Everything the young people did, he criticized.
One day a small and rather distinguished company of men entered the empty square with a large siege-engine-looking thing on wheels. They bowed ceremoniously to the Fisherman.
Then they fastened the engine to the old Emperor’s lofty Chair. Before you could blink an eye, they had uprooted the Chair and were letting it fall to the ground.
“Here, now! Stop that!” called out the Fisherman. But it was too late. The paving stones were replaced so you could hardly tell the Emperor’s Chair had stood there.
The Fisherman fretted and vowed he would never come down from his Chair till they had put the Emperor’s Chair back up again. Days and weeks and months went by.
Eventually, the Fisherman got heartily sick of remaining up in his Chair. He longed to see the City once again. At last he decided to take a walk.
Just as his feet touched the ground, a strange thing began to happen. The elaborate old imperial garments, with their double thickness and deep textures and rich colors, began to lose some of their substance. And the Fisherman, who began his promenade quite stiff in the joints, little by little began to feel quite spry—even young again.
The people he greeted in the City congratulated the Fisherman on how well he looked. Many people thought he might call them all to come to the marketplace, just as he did in the old days, to tell them the message of the Lord of Heaven. But the Fisherman didn’t realize what the people were thinking.
The people also noticed that the Fisherman’s ornate clothes were becoming more and more transparent, so that he seemed to have on only his fisherman’s tunic. But no one said anything about it, until a small child called out to his mother: “Where are his funny clothes?”
The Fisherman looked at himself for the first time since beginning his walk, and his eyes opened wide. He was amazed that he had on only his fisherman’s tunic, practically no clothes at all!
He made a grab for his knees, as if to cover them up, and in this fashion took his leave. He ran and ran through the town until he reached the lofty Telling Chair. Up the ladder he raced and collapsed at the top, huffing and puffing.
And that’s where he sits today, children, aging once again. His imperial clothes have returned, and he seems quite the same as before, except that now he nods from time to time to people passing through the square.
“Hello,” he says in his squeaky voice. “How do. Good morrow. Good day.” And his head tilts and turns as if it were balanced on gimbals. The people sometimes pass by unaware.
At times he looks as if he were trying desperately to remember something of vast importance.
It is impossible to say whether the Fisherman will ever find a way out of his perplexity or the courage to come down again and speak with human beings. THE END
Epilogue
In November 1968, Catholics were still dealing with the aftereffects of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962-1965). Most, I believe, were pleased with the “fresh air” it had brought into the Church. In July 1968, however, Pope Paul VI released Humanae Vitae, commonly called his birth control encyclical. This was a thunderbolt. It attempted to establish as Catholic doctrine the rule that artificial birth control was mortally sinful.
The pope made a mistake. He had formed a commission to advise him. It met from 1963 to 1966. It included many people experienced in marriage and population questions, both clergy and lay. Against all expectations, the commission voted to advise the pope to reform previous teaching and to trust married couples to make the correct decisions about family planning questions.
After the commission ended its work and gave the pope its report, Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, exerted pressure on the pope to sway his decision away from the conclusions of the Birth Control Commission’s report. He succeeded. Paul VI, a weak character, eventually issued Ottaviani’s opinions in the form of an encyclical. It was not received by the Catholic faithful. It is a dead letter.
The story is extremely well told in Robert McClory’s book, Turning Point [Crossroad, 1995].
Lay Catholic Renewal: First Blog—Editorial Policy
This blog is intended to explore and develop the ideas set forth in Talking Treason in Church: The Lay Person’s Guide to Renewing the Catholic Church. The blog has for its object the renewal of the Catholic church.
[The book was published by iUniverse in January 2010. It may be ordered in bookstores and through Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. Click on one of the links at the upper right.]
The intent of this blog is to give the Catholic laity of the world a voice they have not had for perhaps 1700 years—since the third century CE, when they elected their leaders.
The Holy Spirit has been communicating with the laity all over the world in horrendous headlines since 2001. The Spirit has been saying, “The leadership of priests and bishops is FALSE. The church structure of hierarchy is FALSE. A certain number of priests molest children, they lie, they cover up their crimes, and then the bishops shelter them. The bishops lie, they cover up the crimes, and then they lie about the cover-up. And it is the system of hierarchy, the need for secrecy, the need to prevent ‘scandal’ that induces all of them to lie. To protect the organization. To protect hierarchy.”
Yet under the system of hierarchy, the laity have no voice. They have no standing. They cannot even complain about the destroyed lives of their children and be heard. The laity count for nothing.
Is this the church that Jesus Christ founded? Well, is it? Is this the church structure that Jesus Christ put in place?
No! No! A thousand times No!
It must never be forgotten that Jesus Christ was a layman. The movement he began in Israel was a lay movement. The High Priesthood saw his teaching and his movement as a threat against themselves and their priesthood. They reacted by conspiring with the Romans to kill Jesus Christ.
But Jesus Christ’s movement survived. Christians continued to gather in the Temple to hear the word of God from the apostles. Immediately afterward each family went home for the “breaking of the bread,” the New Testament’s phrase for the Eucharist. This is all in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2.
It took another 250 years and a great deal of historical ignorance to provide the Christian church—which is the people who follow Jesus Christ—with a priesthood in imitation of the Jewish priesthood.
Sure! God had founded the priesthood of Aaron. But it turned out to be a temporary expedient. When that priesthood killed God’s son Jesus Christ, using the Romans as an instrument, God seems to have returned the favor 40 years later, using the same instrument. The Romans laid siege to Jerusalem and destroyed it, burning the Temple to the ground in the process. That was in the war of 66-70 CE. That war removed every Jewish priest from his employment. Permanently.
But the Christians, blissfully unreceptive to this historical lesson, studied the Jewish scriptures in ignorance of their new-found faith and its dependence on the Holy Spirit.
“We are the new Israel,” they said. “We must have a priesthood like theirs!”
With the passage of time, the church’s leadership structure, which had evolved from the apostolic structure of apostles-prophets-teachers to a community-based structure of bishops or overseers-elders or presbyters-helpers or deacons, gradually began to be thought of as a priesthood similar to the Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish priesthoods. The lay character of Christianity was entirely forgotten, and a division began between priesthood and people.
It is time to reverse that historical error. Certainly the church needs leaders. Every organization does. But leaders should be considered a necessary evil. They should always be kept on a short leash. They should always be subject to recall. And they should always be elected by the people they are supposed to serve. Election is the only way we have of asking the Holy Spirit’s guidance.
Not that the election should always be parliamentary style. Voting, after all, makes winners and losers. Consensus voting is far more preferable. But all that is explained in the book.
By this criterion, the Catholic Christian church has not had a leader chosen by the Holy Spirit for about 1700 years. They have all been self-appointed. Self-elected!
It is time to end this charade. Jesus Christ warned us about the hirelings, the false shepherds the wolves in sheep’s clothing. The flock is not their own, and so they ignore it.
Or to use another metaphor that Jesus Christ used, they begin to beat and mistreat the manservants and maidservants. Enough of them! Let them stand for election against qualified lay leaders, or let them simply begone!