Theologian Paul Lakeland, addressing several hundred Catholic
theologians last Friday, called for a good dose of additional humility as
our church looks out at the world.
His talk came on the second day of the 66th annual gathering of the
Catholic Theological Society of America, the largest body of Catholic
theologians in North America.
Lakeland is professor of Catholic Studies and chair of the Center for
Catholic Studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
In a talk titled, “I want to be in that number: Desire, Inclusivity
and the Church,” Lakeland used both contemporary literature and gospel
imagery, primarily the parable of the Good Samaritan, to build his
humility case.
But first he asked: “Why should we focus on the virtue of humility in
a presentation on the conference theme of “all the saints”? Answering
his question, he said a good reason is that “humility is a defining
virtue of holiness.”
The more important ecclesiological reason for attention to humility,
he said, is that without it any examination of “all the saints” will
inevitably gravitate towards the vice of exclusion.
“Indeed, I feel comfortable saying that many of our ecclesial ills
today are products of the sin of exclusion and can be addressed by
attention to the virtue of humility.”
Said Lakeland: “Whether we are engaged in invidious and often
ignorant comparisons between the holy church and the sinful world or
spiritually empty comparisons between the fullness of truth in ‘our’
tradition and the defects of others, we are about the business of
exclusion, sweeping aside God’s holy mystery to impose our fallible
human considerations about where saints can be found.
“Inside the church similar crimes are being committed when a
sub-group of the community, in the name of its convictions of what
purity looks like and persuaded that it can speak for God, marginalizes
others, whether they are the divorced, or gays and lesbians, or
religious sisters going about their jobs, whether they are working in
Catholic hospitals or in Congress, or, indeed, even if they are just
theologians.”
Lakeland then explored several facets of ecclesial humility, building
his talk, in part on passages from the writings of Flannery O’Connor
and the Good Samaritan. He also quoted from the writings of Fordham
professor of theology, Elizabeth Johnson.
“Elizabeth Johnson, in whose shadow anyone writing on this topic
sits, has written that because ‘the communion of saints does not limit
divine blessing to its own circle… it comprises all living persons of
truth and love.’ … Most if not all of us are confident that salvation is
offered to all, not merely to the baptized, or theists, or believers in
‘the transcendent.’”
Lakeland went on: “We should all daily be chastened by the warning
in Matthew 25 that the Last Judgment will be a day of great surprises.”
Yves Congar, Lakeland said, once wrote that church and world are not
to be imagined “like two crowned sovereigns looking sideways at one
another as they sit on the same dais” but “much more like the Good
Samaritan holding in his arms the half-dead man, whom he will not leave
because he has been sent to help him.”
“In the theological moment of celebration, the identification of the
church with the Good Samaritan reaching out to the wounded victim is an
important assertion of the priority of mission that draws attention to
the fact that the church throughout history has been a source of succor
and consolation to suffering people, Catholic or not.
“In the Catholic tradition in particular, the many orders of
religious women have always made an enormous contribution in the fields
of nursing and education. Religious, both men and women, exercised a
preferential option for the poor many centuries before the phrase was
coined. Even today, Catholic Charities is the largest private network of
social service organizations in the U.S., much of their work being
direct aid to the needy, Christian or not. Whether one calls this work
humanization, pre-evangelization or preparation for the Gospel, it is an
integral component of mission and witness without which the
proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ is incomplete."
“The self-referentiality or centripetal tendencies of the Church are
evident in ecclesial life today. They are the shadow side of the good
that we do and the holy community that we are, but they follow clearly
from an undialectical emphasis on celebration. In terms of the parable
of the Good Samaritan, they are what happens when we rejoice in our
identification with the model of concern for others and forget the
disquieting context in which the parable is told. If we are the Good
Samaritan who comes to the aid of the victim, then we are also the
priest and Levite who is too busy about the ‘things of God’ to be aware
of the cries of the victim.
He went on, saying that the parable of the Good Samaritan is less a
story about doing good than it is about “breaking boundaries.”
“Even more, the story insists that there are no boundaries to
neighborliness. Love your neighbor as yourself is not about limits (“who
is my neighbor?”) but about the absence of limits (“Everyone!”). The
lawyer, the priest and the Levite work within the Law and want to know
what it requires. Jesus teaches them to abandon it. The consequences of
this parable for construing the right relationship between church and
world are thus considerable.”
In her “Hesitations Concerning Baptism” Simone Weil presents a
challenging set of reflections on the presence of the church in the
world cast in the form of an explanation of why belief in God does not
mean that she will necessarily seek to enter the Church, Lakeland said.
“Weil writes that the fear she has for the church is that it can too easily become an ‘us’ over against the ‘them’ of the world.
Lakeland said that Weil points to the dangers of the kind of
ecclesial xenophobia, which dogged the church in the past particularly
in what John O’Malley calls the ‘long nineteenth century,’ stretching
from the French Revolution to the eve of Vatican II.”
Lakeland went on, saying it is hard not to see something like the
Syllabus of Errors or the definition of papal infallibility at Vatican
I, however formally correct they may have been in their times, as driven
by a determination to assert the rightness of the church over against
the wrongness of the world.
“Where, indeed, in that whole long century is there any
ecclesiastical humility in face of the world? And if after Vatican II we
have largely got beyond the demonization of the religious other, it
still remains true that when the church uses language like that in
Dominus Iesus, or creates an “ordinariate” for conservative Anglicans
fleeing their church, however formally correct these may be, they do
nothing whatsoever to draw the church and the world closer together.”
“ When the Second Vatican Council fathers said that there is a real
sense in which the church must learn from the world, they meant that we
need its help in order to be more fully the church of God.
Lakeland concluded, saying a critical ecclesiology is one that “takes
seriously the limitations of the church.”
“That the church exists not
for itself but for the sake of the world, the saving mission which God
has entrusted to the church, is a given of contemporary ecclesiology.
What is not always so clear is that in being a sacramental community it
is at one and the same time positive and negative. It is the love of God
for the world, and it is also in need of God’s love for the world. It
is God as present and God as absent. It is graced and sinful. It is the
place of ordered desire and of disordered desire. It seeks integrity and
falls short. It heals and it needs healing, it is the Good Samaritan
embracing the victim and the victim embraced by the Good Samaritan. It
is the Church that teaches and the Church that is always in need of
being taught."
“Because the world needs the Gospel as much as ever, it needs a
church that doesn’t think it has all the answers but that is prepared to
work in solidarity with others in the search for the truth that will
set us all free, a church that sees dialogue with our secular world as
an encounter of grace with grace and sinners with sinners, and saints
with saints.”