15. THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH

 15.  THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH:  

    Earlier Reflections available on my website have been relentlessly critical of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, officials in the Curia, and the Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops appointed during the reign of Pope John Paul II.  Taken out of context, these protests might seem to suggest that I agree with those Protestants who (in principle, not in practice) deny the need for an institutional Church endowed with an institutional memory.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

    Though I struggled with the call of God which led to my ordination as a priest, my experiences as a priest have again and again evoked gratitude for the role assigned me by that Sacramental ritual.  My first significant involvement in pastoral work occurred when the Catholic community at an airbase in England was entrusted to my care.  The base was too small to have two chaplains.  Though I was only an Auxiliary Priest, I was the most recognizable representative of the Catholic Church on the base.

    I was immediately in over my head, but, since I was a Catholic priest, people who were merely strangers a moment before let me into their lives in times of crisis.  Old-timers, Catholic and Protestant, respected my zeal.  But when I was doing something particularly inexperienced (and dumb), they would take me aside, put their arm around my shoulder, and simply tell me the facts of life, without ever telling me what I should do instead.  And I gladly confess that, without my role as a priest, I could never have became perhaps the only one who knew almost everyone on the base, Catholic and Protestant.

    My anguish and outrage proceeds from such experiences.  It targets members of the hierarchy who want to impose on me their understanding of what it is to be a priest.  I cannot live in such a small world, and I am horrified again and again by the violence inflicted on lay people, especially women, by those in positions of authority.  In sum, the imperial papacy is hardly the God-given structure of the Catholic Church, and exercises of power and judgment cannot voice a living call to deepening intimacy with the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and other human beings.

              

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