A (W)holy Breakfast Group

This Sunday morning as I write there are thousands of men who are getting their game face on to go speak to millions of people and suggest that despite its current sins and difficulties the Roman Catholic Church is good for the long haul. That it has had huge problems before and survived, and that is because it remains God’s uniquely approved instrument in the world.

Pope Benedict’s eight page letter apologizing to the people of Ireland for the abuse of children by clergy is to be read today throughout the churches of Ireland and it is by most standards an extraordinary historical event—when has a pontiff ever apologized to a single nation for the misdeeds of his officials? Even so the letter is problematic, leaving the impression this is just a difficulty in Ireland, singling out the Irish ecclesiastical authorities, and failing to connect the abuse to systemic issues in the worldwide church. Now full disclosure: I have a personal stake in the matter, having both been a Roman Catholic priest myself and birthed by an Irish mother. I know about this stuff from the inside—both the generational cascades of cultural and actual violence which narrow human reality for a young man so he becomes a celibate priest or brother in the first place, and then the resulting privilege which places that man above and beyond the law—but my interest is not to rehash the past. What draws me is the anthropological consequence of this moment.

If you go online and follow the conversations in the various discussion forums there seem to be three key trends in response to the pope’s letter: wholesale and violent condemnation of the church and its criminal priests, specious attempts to salvage the situation arguing the number of pedophiles in the church parallels that of the broader population, and anxious remarks on how this whole thing will only serve to bolster fundamentalist or mega-churches with refugees from Roman Catholicism. The second two are relevant.

If you argue the church is no worse or better than the population in general you surrender a key concept of the RC church, and perhaps every church. You reduce it to sociological continuity with the rest of the world—something that the single most important book of late antiquity and the middle ages, Augustine’s City of God, denies with relentless dialectic. According to Augustine there is an ontological difference between the church and the world. But you don’t have to read Augustine to believe this. One of the tenets of the Nicene creed is that the church is “holy”. So when your last-ditch defense of this institution is that it is no worse and so no better than the rest of society it must forfeit that article of faith. Or it may be that the actual concrete form of a holy church is no longer the one claimed by that institution, or indeed any large scale institution. Really, you can’t have it both ways. This then touches on the issue of fundamentalism and the mega-churches. Let me give an example.

I have a neighbor who is a strong supporter of an RC parish here in Syracuse, one that has a solid reputation for working with the poor and disadvantaged. He and a bunch of guys attend a weekday mass at that church once every week. Afterward they go for breakfast together. I know a good few of these men, some ex-priests, some social justice Episcopalians, and they are among the greatest people I've had the pleasure to meet. In my opinion what these guys are doing is taking the eucharist in a traditional manner and then going off to find personal support and nourishment from a small-group faith community. They have a foot in the old and challenged institutional order and a foot in something new, something deeply human, relational and holy.

There’s no way of course of stopping people going to fundamentalist or big churches (and in some cases of the latter neither would you want to—for example perhaps Rob Bell’s church in Grand Rapids MI). But what is possible is to shift the theological accent progressively to these small face-to-face groups of committed this-world-rooted compassionate Christians which are springing up spontaneously all over the place. So that a group like this would not have first to do a cafeteria style eucharist and then turn to the vital matter of face-to-face relationship, but would consciously find the eucharist arising exactly from their own Christ-centered small-scale community. If this theological shift were taken then suddenly the whole tradition of the sacramental churches would take on a radically new and dynamic existence.

And lest anyone think I’m idealizing the small group I am totally aware that problems can occur there just as much as in the big legal structures. I am also aware of the reflex response that these groups could very easily turn fundamentalist or authoritarian. But in response to both challenges I believe there is something of the Spirit happening, something that arises from the rubble of the old order, that exemplifies the holiness claimed for the church and that it is possible to have faith in. It is something I call “the matrix of Christ” present in our actual cultural world (described in the forthcoming book Virtually Christian.) It means that there really is something to tap into, which represents the tradition but is not just in the past. It is the deep transformation in the human order brought about by Jesus, meaning forgiveness, compassion, nonviolence in the here and now and rising to the surface in all sorts of ways. Having faith in the life and truth of this human shift gives vigor and coherence to these small groups and allows genuine ecclesial life to occur among them. In other words, this is not a man-made phenomenon but a move by the Spirit in her own right and that carries her stamp of authenticity.

So although it’s not a bad thing that the pope makes his apology I don’t think it’s going to turn the clock back. He’s lost half of his Irish legions, the infantry that in the past carried the Roman cause across the world. Many of those disaffected troops, and surely many others from other failing institutions, are looking for a new, different model. My friends who meet every week to share eggs, bagels and coffee bear witness to this, and I believe they and others like them will continue to do so in a more and more consistent, radical and wonderful way.