Richard Lennan
“At the same time we are seeking to proclaim a shared faith, one that ‘transcends the particularities of time, place and culture.’ We claim that there are ‘norms of faith’ – norms dependent on past events, located in texts, associated with particular offices and authorities.”
So there are crucial challenges in trying to take context into account whenever we talk about God and our practice in our faith in God. “We can imperil the likelihood of effective communication of the very truth that our norms seek to protect.”
All this pertains to consideration of the ordained priesthood.
Back in 1988, richard had spoken at the NCP Convention in Perth, where the logo for the convention featured an ordained priest, laptop in hand and riding a surfboard.
On that occasion Richard said:
“The notion of ‘surfing’ in the logo for this convention captures well the dilemma of today’s priests: we live in a society and even a Church where more and more people seem to live by the Microsoft question – ‘Where do you want to go today?’ Priests, however, can resent the freedom implied in that question, can resent it because they feel themselves to be the guardians of a form of surfing which is not about change and possibilities, but about preservation, and whose mantra comes from another form of surfing: stay within the flags.
“We are not only observers of the future of the priesthood, but we are also participants; the future of the priesthood will look like what we help to make it and if we don’t participate out of a sense that some group of “them” will tell us what the future is to be, then we will share some of the responsibility if the ‘Wave 2000’ sees the priesthood washed up on the beach and face-down in the sand with people concluding that the priesthood was always dispensable in the life of the Church.
“If we do not look critically at the present placement of the flags then, I believe, the only question about the future is: How long can the priesthood survive? Reducing the question about the future to one about survival only happens, however, if we assume that the priesthood can exist in no other form than the one we know today, that the flags can be in no other place than where they are today.
A creative response to the question about the future presumes that things can be different from the way they are today, but that the difference does not mean either a rupture with the continuity of faith that the flags were designed to protect or that the priest himself is going to be pounded into a different shape; indeed, it ought to be possible for changes to enhance both the Church’s faith and the priest.”
These paragraphs are disturbing, said Richard, because:
“… much that wasn’t being addressed in 1998, still remains unaddressed. Consequently, our present context derives, to a considerable extent, not from events that have happened since 1998, not from what we did not, and could not, anticipate, but from what we could have addressed, but failed to do. Indeed, as we are all only too painfully aware, it is issues that were already named in 1998, and even earlier, issues such as sexual abuse, the aging of the clergy, and piecemeal attempts to paper over the impact of the declining number of priests, that continue to cause anguish in the church about the ordained priesthood and its future, that continue to impair our mission.”
Richard also shared his struggles with two concerns about our language describing the ordained priesthood:
“… there can be a desire for the application to the priesthood of a more straightforward language of ‘function’, to replace the sacral vocabulary that has featured so strongly in our history. “Advocates of this approach regard it as a necessary pre-condition for doing justice to the burgeoning of non-ordained forms of ministry in the church, forms of ministry that struggle for oxygen when the emphasis is primarily, even exclusively, on the priest as alter Christus.
“On the other hand, the sexual abuse crisis, as we know well, has sparked demands that priests be held more accountable for their ministry and life, an accountability that the social sciences can frame, an accountability that can all too easily be evaded when the claim that the priest acts in persona Christi becomes, even if implicitly, a justification for the privileges and, more darkly, the destructive behaviours inextricably linked to clericalism.”
“…we can, and often do, talk about the priesthood as if it’s a Platonic form, a pure, unchanging, and timeless absolute, immune from contamination by the messiness of history, questions, or human imperfection.”
“…faith grounded in the Incarnation cannot legitimately abstract itself from history – the importance of context, again. The human and social sciences provide insight into what God chose to be in becoming ‘one like us’, they help us to understand how to live if we are to be no less human than the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ. Thus, if our religious talk becomes formulaic or glib, if it lacks the integrity that can come only from our own struggle to live, here and now, what we proclaim, then we will have succeeded only in converting the language of the gospel into something shallow and vapid. Secondly, there is frustration with the contemporary church, with the fact that we are still, in so many ways, a ‘topdown’ institution that seems to resist openness and shared decision-making even while maintaining our exalted rhetoric about the freedom of the Holy Spirit, the equality of all the baptised, and the universal call to holiness.”
Richard stressed three ‘learnings’ which he had personally experienced in recent times, all of them both ‘new’ and ‘ancient’.
“A change of rhetoric and worldview will not remake humanity. In short, it’s not idealised portrayals of the church or its ministry that are the problem, but our sinfulness, our failure to live what we proclaim, and our resistance to the Holy Spirit, who seeks to change our hearts so that our actions might also change. It’s important to underscore that acknowledgment of our ongoing need for conversion neither excuses mediocrity nor grants immunity from responsibility. It does provide, however, the foundation for compassion, which is born of recognising our common need for the mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ.
“Secondly, it is surely true there does not need to be a strict division between the insights of the social sciences and the concerns and language of faith and of the theology that seeks to articulate the implications of faith. Part of the catholic genius, of the fact that being able and willing to walk while chewing gum is intrinsic to the catholic worldview, is the openness to learn from a variety of sources, to be attuned to the particular ways in which the Spirit can be at work outside of designated channels. Vatican II is a model of this, particularly in Gaudium et spes with its endorsement of the human and social sciences. To the extent that we have lost this openness in recent decades, we need to reclaim it. The catholic worldview, with its emphasis on Christ in relation to all dimensions of life, is able to rejoice, as Avery Dulles expresses it, ‘in everything good and wholesome, no matter by whom achieved’.
“Reference to the work of the Spirit brings me to the third and final element in the resolution of my dilemma about the value of theology, and more particularly, the value of the visionary and exhortatory language that theology uses. The task here is to balance the recognition that all language can be distorted or blunted with the affirmation not simply that language matters, but that language can be sacramental, that it can be a means of encounter with God, which is surely what the words of Jesus did and do. At its best, this is what the language of theology also seeks to do. Theology does so, as Nicholas Lash phrases it, through language that aims at ‘stripping away of the veils of self-assurance by which we seek to protect our faces from exposure to the mystery of God.’
“Exposure to the mystery of God does not require a new language, as if salvation came through novelty; it does, however, require that we resist domesticating the language that we have, robbing it of its capacity to mediate God.”
God as ‘interrupter’
“The idea of God’s presence as ‘interruption’ is prominent in the work of Johann Baptist Metz and, more recently, has become a central theme in the writings of the Belgian fundamental theologian Lieve Boeve, who describes it this way:
Interruption… disturbs the anticipated sequence of sentences following one after the other, and disarms the security devices that protect against disruption. Interruption refers to that ‘moment’, that ‘instance’, which cannot occur without the narrative, and yet cannot be captured by the narrative… Interruptions cause the narrative to collide with its own borders.
For Boeve, God is the ‘Interrupter’, not a vandal interested only in doing damage, but passionate to ensure that ‘the Christian narrative is never allowed to close itself. When it does the God of love breaks the narrative open.’ This emphasis on interruption can serve as a powerful reminder that revelation has not given us control of God; rather, it has drawn us into relationship with the God who is always ‘other’ than us, who always exceeds our grasp. In addition, the work of the Holy Spirit, whose task is to remind us of all that we have learnt through Jesus, involves challenging our tendency to ‘close’ our narrative, to act as if we can exclude the possibility that we might need to change and grow if we are to live our discipleship faithfully. Closed narratives, Boeve insists, produce victims because it is easier to suppress and silence than to acknowledge that our narrative might not have said all that there is to say.
“God’s interruption, like our whole relationship with God can be understood sacramentally; in other words, ‘interruption’ does not suggest the direct causality of an arbitrarily interventionist God, but the challenging experience of grace, of God’s holy Spirit, embodied in the persons and events of our lives. It is, of course, always difficult to say with certainty that any particular interruption we experience is the work of the Spirit, rather than of lesser forces that might need to be resisted. On the other hand, a biblical criterion allows us to say with some certainty that a particular interruption is likely always to be a manifestation of God: the cry of the poor, of those who are, in the phrasing of liberation and political theologians, the victims of history and of closed narratives.
“It may well be, therefore, that in hearing the voices of those who have suffered as a result of abuse, we are hearing the voice of the Spirit calling for a conversion of what distorts the gift that the ordained priesthood is meant to be for the world.
“To be open to interruption is other than a humiliating acknowledgment that we were wrong, it’s a recognition of the gap that exists, irreducibly, between God and our ideas about God; it’s a reminder that we are dealing with mystery, with the God who remains for us almost ridiculously exhausting and demanding. In short, our openness to interruption can express our willingness to enter again into the paschal mystery.”
Hope
“The willingness to be interrupted, to accept that there are questions that we need to face if we are to act not simply with integrity, but with faithfulness, can be an expression of hope. The dimensions of hope not only transcend confidence in our own capacity to construct a satisfying environment, they are also free of the requirement that the world and its history be benign. Indeed, hope, far from being synonymous with positive thinking about one’s present circumstances, ‘stirs when the secure system shows signs of breaking down’, when we are able no longer to maintain even the pretence of being able to regulate life comprehensively.
“Hope is inseparable both from trust in God and from acceptance of the fact that God is for us never less than mystery. Hope is, as Nicholas Lash expresses it, ‘less eloquent than either optimism or despair (both of which, knowing the outcome, confidently complete the story). Sometimes in silence, sometimes in more articulate agony or Job-like anger, the mood of the discourse of Christian hope is less that of assertion than request: its form is prayer’.”
A framework
“What we have in the theology of interruption, of sacramentality, of hope, and of the pilgrim nature of the church, all of which are inextricably linked with our belief in the centrality of paschal mystery, is a framework that not simply justifies, but renders necessary, the willingness to ask questions about our the limits of our prevailing theologies of the ordained ministry. What we have in the present circumstances of the priesthood, in the circumstances that have, for a generation now, showed us that ‘business as usual’ was impossible, is an urgent motive for opening ourselves to such questions. What we have in the methodology of the Second Vatican Council, in its marriage of the aggiornamento and the ressourcement, the reappropriation and recontextualising of the tradition, is a model for how rereceiving the tradition in the light of an evolving history can work. That Vatican II did not apply its methodology to a thoroughgoing reshaping of the ordained priesthood has long been a source of disappointment, even if it’s understandable in light of the way that priesthood was perceived at that time; for us, however, there is no longer such an excuse.
“One of the temptations that can lead us away from confronting the hard questions through which the Spirit might be interrupting the present practice of the priesthood is ascribing that task to ‘them’, that group in the church that never does what it ought to do, while managing simultaneously to prevent me doing what I’d like to do. Yes, we are a hierarchically-structured community in which the actions or inactions of those in authority can have a significant impact, but we are also, and more fundamentally, a community formed by the word of God, a community in which the Spirit gifts each of the baptised with the sensus fidei, and calls us all to give priority to the reign of God. Consequently, each of us as individuals and all of us collectively as presbyters need to claim our own agency, not over-against any other members of the church, but as an expression of what it is to be ‘church’. It is difficult to see how else the realisation of the prophetic office of all the baptised might be expressed. Authentic catholicity, the coming-together not just of all of the members of the church at this moment, but of the faith that impels both unity and diversity across time and cultures will never be neat. Neatness, however, is not what the gospel promotes, not an expression of the trinitarian life of God into which we have all been baptised.”
As Richard said, this is difficult and challenging material – we can even claim busyness as an excuse from facing it. He concludes:
“Will our appropriation of the theology of interruption, of hope, and of a renewed understanding of sacramentality, no less than the conversations between us, make a difference, will it change the perception and exercise of the priesthood? Clearly, I can’t claim to be able to give a definitive answer to that question. On the other hand, what I would be willing to assert unequivocally is that a failure to engage with these or other challenging frameworks for evaluating the theology and practice of the priesthood will not leave us where we are now, it will hasten our decline. I do not believe that that decline is either inevitable or necessary. Accordingly, if I were to be invited to address the NCP convention in 2022, I would rejoice to find that, for all the right reasons, what I had advocated in 2010 was no longer relevant.”
Richard Lennan
Richard grew up in Newcastle, New South Wales, and is a priest of the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle. He has a degree in history from the University of Newcastle, a
Baccalaureate in Sacred Theology from the Catholic Institute of Sydney, a Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford, and a doctorate in theology from
the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
From 1992 to 2007, he taught Systematic Theology in the Catholic Institute of Sydney. He is also a past President of the Australian Catholic Theological
Association. In the academic year 2007-08, he taught at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, before becoming part of the Boston College School of Theology and
Ministry, where he serves as Co-director of the Licentiate in Sacred Theology program.
Richard’s principle fields of study are ecclesiology, ecumenism, and the theology of ministry; he is particularly interested in the theology and spirituality of Karl Rahner.
