Footnote
55 of Mulieris Dignitatem (8/15/88): The point being the “substantial priority” of
the lay faithful [the Marian dimension] over the ministerial priest [the
Petrine dimension], and the “functional priority” of the ministerial priest
over the lay faithful.
This Marian
profile is also—even perhaps more so—fundamental and characteristic for the
Church as is the apostolic and Petrine profile to which it is profoundly
united…. The Marian dimension of the Church is antecedent to that of the Petrine, without being in any way
divided from it or being less complementary. Mary Immaculate precedes all
others, including obviously Peter himself and the Apostles. This is so, not
only because Peter and the Apostles, being born of the human race under the
burden of sin, form part of the Church which is ‘holy from out of sinners,’ but
also because their triple function
has no other purpose except to form the Church in line with the ideal of
sanctity already programmed and prefigured in Mary”[i]
(italics mine).
The
Greatest Enemy of the Church:
Clericalism (Pope Francis)
How
do you see the laity in Argentina?
As
I have said before, there is a problem: the temptation to clericalism. We
priests tend to clericalize the laity. We do not realize it, but it is as if we
infect them with our own thing. And the laity – not all but many – ask us on
their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar
boy than the protagonist of a lay path. We must not enter into that trap, it is
a sinful complicity. Neither clericalize nor ask to be clericalized. The layman
is a layman and has to live as a layman with the strength of his baptism, which
enables him to be a leaven of the love of God in society itself, to create and
sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from a pulpit but from his everyday life.
And by carrying his daily cross as all of us do. And this is the cross of the
layman, not that of the priest. Let the priest carry the cross of the priest,
since God gave him a broad enough shoulder for this.”
Sunday, June 25, 1944: “was a day of great rejoicing. The three
young men said good-bye to the founder at Diego de Leon and went by car to the
bishop’s residence, where they were to be ordained in his chapel. The crowd was
larger than the chapel could hold and spilled over into adjoining rooms. At ten
o’clock, Bishop Leopoldo entered and began the ceremony. After Mass, as the new
priests were still removing their vestments, people pressed forward to kiss
their newly consecrated hands. Among those present were people from the
nunciature and from the bishop’s staff, priests from Madrid and surrounding
areas, relatives and friends and acquaintances of the new priests, members of
the Work, and a large number of representatives of religious orders and
congregations. Hieronymites, Dominicans, Piarists, Augustinians, Marianists,
Vincentians…. In the meantime, while the ceremony was taking place, the founder
was celebrating Mass in the oratory of the Diego de Leon center, assisted by José
Maria Albareda.”
The
bishop dined with the new priests and a few invited guests. Later that
afternoon, Father Josemaria introduced him to the members of the Work who had
come from other cities for the ordination. Soon the ground-floor living room
was full of young people. The family gathering lasted for quite a while as
Father Josemaria laughingly described the merits of each of the new priests.
The bishop, too, was in very good humor, although it had been a long day for
him…
“He
ended with affectionate words and gave them his blessing. But before getting
into his car to leave, he asked to have a photo taken of him embracing Father
Josemaria.
“A
little later everyone went to the oratory and Father Josemaria gave a meditation.
Commenting on some phrases from Saint Paul that he had jotted down ten years
earlier, he insisted on prayer and sacrifice, as the foundation for all
interior life, and on humility, both individual and collective. ‘When the
youngest of you who are here,’ he said, ‘are doing gray – or sporting splendid
bald spots, like some that you see – and I, by the law of nature, have long
since departed, others are doing to ask you: ‘So what did the Father say on the
day of the ordination of the first three?’ And you will answer them: ‘He said
that you are to be men of prayer, men of prayer, and men of prayer
“What I Would Have Said At
The Consistory” (Interview: 30 Days)
This is valid also for lay people…
BERGOGLIO: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests
clericalize the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is
sinful abetment. And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of
those Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for
more than two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them
all baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead
had had a Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts
of grace that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only
baptism and had also lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One
must not be afraid of depending only on His tenderness… Do you know the
biblical episode of the prophet Jonah?
I don’t remember it. Tell us.
BERGOGLIO: Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on
what He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was
outside the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God
broke into his life like a torrent. He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the
symbol of all the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of
all those who are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only
to tell all those people that the arms of God were still open, that the
patience of God was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and
nourish them with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him
to Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward
Tarsis.
Running away from a difficult mission…
BERGOGLIO: No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as
the boundless love of God for those people. It was that that
didn’t come into
his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s
what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer
it all. His stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his
preordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with
the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God
and opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his
heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that
God leads His people with the heart of a Father.
A great many of us can identify with Jonah.
BERGOGLIO: Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that
imprisons
the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path
of the
people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains
hope. That
is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the
closed
world of their Tarsis complain about everything or, feeling their
identity
threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be
still more
self-concerned and self-referential.
What should one do?
BERGOGLIO: Look at our people not for what it should be but for
what it is and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and
recipes but
with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God spoke.
Allowing
the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest
with the
words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of
interest.
The apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who
has loved us
from the beginning.
For you, then, what is the worst thing that can
happen in the
Church?
BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls “spiritual worldliness”. It
is the
greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. “It
is worse”,
says De Lubac, “more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that
disfigured
the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes”. Spiritual
worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw
going on
among the Pharisees: “… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory
to
yourselves, the ones to the others”.
Opus Dei spiritually and
institutionally destroys clericalism by ordaining ministerial priests in the
service of the laity understanding both to be radically equal as “other Christs.”
“Graphically, the founder told the
Work’s priests that their task is to be a ‘carpet’ for others. He wrote: ‘In Opus
Dei we’re all equal. There’s only a practical difference: priests are more
bound to place their hearts on the floor
like a carpet, so that their brothers and sisters may tread softly.”[1]
The
real ontological structure of the Church—its true hierarchical structure—is not
a clericalized pyramid of power[ii] in
which “advancement” means “raising the laity ‘upwards’ into the structural
level of the hierarchy, promoting them into the ranks or at least into the
function of the clergy.”[iii]
“The ‘ontology’ of Church structure indicates the substantial priority
of the ‘Christian condition’ (the common priesthood). ‘With you I am a
Christian; for you I am the bishop,’ said Augustine of Hippo. With respect to
the common priesthood, the ‘priestly ministry’ element has a relative
character, theologically subordinate: ‘Christ instituted the hierarchical
priesthood for the benefit of the common priesthood.”[iv]
The
common priesthood belongs to every member of the Church as such. It is a
specific existential participation in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Its
pattern is Mary. The crucial point is
that this is the basic condition of all christifideles—from the Pope
down—and is in a sense the love of the Church.
Consequently, “layman” no longer means merely one who is not an ordained
priest. Rather it means, positively, one who embodies the reality of the Church
in a specific sharing in Christ’s priesthood.
This takes away nothing of the fact that the ordained priesthood is an
office, requiring a distinct ontological configuration, representing Christ
vis-à-vis his Bridegroom.
What
is at stake here, then, are not functions of power in an objectified structure,
but an “organic convergence”[v] of service
performed by subjects oriented in distinct ways toward the common
mission of evangelization.[1] The Note rejects the notion that
priests and laypeople fall under a sort of general rubric called “ministry,”
differing only in their function. Rather, “layman” and “minister” are
irreducible ontological configurations of the human person as Christifidelis.
Consequently, laity and ordained priests simultaneously share a common
experience of the one priesthood of Christ, even as this common experience is
intrinsically differentiated in terms of the irreducibly distinct dimensions of
the self-gift that this one priesthood implies.
“Ontological Configuration” of
Laymen and Priests
The
positivism that has us all enthralled deflates ontology to function and
inflates “ministry” to a “mission” that reduces the Church to a clericalized
structure apart from the world. The mission that is the proprium[vi]of
the laity then becomes “ministry,” while the world is emptied of the presence
of Christ. The Church becomes clericalized, while the world becomes
“secularized” in the pejorative sense. By calling us to transcend the “level of
our categories,”[vii]
the Note[2]
encourages us to cease replacing the layman’s experience of being within
the horizon of the existential priesthood with an abstract and objectivized
category of “ministry” as a functional performance. The Note touches the
epistemological root of the problem when it says, “our modern frame of mind
leads us to understand far more easily the concept of function and far less
easily to understand what is meant by ontological configuration.”[viii]
If you want more of this, go to my
blog for “Why Laity Are Not Ministers: A Metaphysical Probe” ( Communio 29
[Summer 2002] 258-286.
[1]
Pedro Rogriguez, “The Place of Opus Dei in the Church,” Opus Dei in the
Church Scepter (1994) 38.
[2] Of
1997 accompanying the 1997 “Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the
Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priests.”
[i]
“Address to the Cardinal and Prelates of the Roman Curia” (December 22, 1987)
in L’Osservatore Romano, December 23, 1987.
[ii]
“‘Authority means power.’ In the Church too this concept of authority has been
and still is widespread. If we start from the principle that all authority
comes from God (cf. Rom 13:1; Jn 19:11), it is easy to form a mental picture of
how authority and power descend from God through the different ranks of the
hierarchy and finally reach the people. This could be depicted graphically in
the form of a ‘structure-pyramid’ or a ‘power-pyramid:’ God is at the
top of the pyramid. Under him, we are presented with the visible authorities
(the ‘power-structure’) of the Church: the hierarchy, the clergy; and under
them—in the lowest place, as the ultimate subjects— the Christian laity…. For those who conceive the Church in terms of
the pyramid just drawn, advancement of the laity can appear as a
straightforward matter, a goal whose pursuit takes an obvious direction. It
simply means raising the laity ‘upwards’ into the structural level of the
hierarchy, promoting them into the ranks or at least into the functions of the
clergy” (Cormac Burke, Authority and Freedom in the Church [Scepter,
1988], 109-110).
[v]
“The organic convergence of priests and laity is one of the privileged areas
which will give life and pastoral solidity to that ‘new energy’ whereby we all
feel invigorated after the Great Jubilee” (Address during an audience for
participants at a seminar on Novo millennio ineunte” March 17, 2001).
[vi]
It is important to grasp that the most profound meaning of evangelization is
not only imparting concepts, but also sharing and helping share in the
experience of the Person of Jesus Christ, and thus fostering knowledge of him
by that experience. Of course, to know him, is already to possess eternal life
(cf. Jn 17:3): “To evangelize means to reveal this path—to teach the art of
complete living. At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: ‘I have come
to evangelize the poor’ (Lk 4:18). This means, ‘ I have come to respond to the
fundamental question of your existence. I am here to show you the path of life,
the path to happiness, I am, in fact, that path” (Joseph Ratzinger, “The Way to
True Happiness,” Inside the Vatican [August-September 2000]: 20).
[vi]
“Similarly, by not making a clear
distinction, including in pastoral practice, between the baptismal and
hierarchical priesthood, one also runs the risk of underrating the theological proprium
of the laity and of forgetting the specific ontological bond which unites the
priesthood to Christ the High Priest and Good Shepherd” (Pastores dabo vobis
11).
[vii]
“It is also a feature of our culture to have the honesty, the frankness, the
ability to tell things as they are and in this case to say that truth demands
that we admit that we are here confronted by a revealed mystery that is not on
the same level as our categories and that the way we use reason must preserve
its nature as mystery, and not replace it with our church structures” Note.
5.
[viii]
Ibid., 5.
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