Talking Treason in Church draws from the practices of the first three centuries of the Catholic Church to provide a plan to restore the sacraments and governance of the church to lay people’s hands.
Talking Treason in Church
The Lay Person's Guide To Renewing the Catholic ChurchBy Joseph P. MarreniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Joseph P. Marren
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-9517-4 Contents
Preface...............................................................................................iA "Loyal Opposition" in the Catholic Church?..........................................................1"The Church Is Not a Democracy".......................................................................11Lay Catholic Renewal..................................................................................25"Do This in Memory of Me": The Mass of the First Three Centuries......................................45"Do This in Memory of Me": The Roman Mass and the Roots of the Eucharistic Prayer.....................65Governance in the Church..............................................................................81The Current Crisis and Democracy in the Catholic Church...............................................99Sharing Wisdom........................................................................................113The Dream of a Universal (Catholic) Church............................................................125Bibliography..........................................................................................131Timeline of Key Works Dealing with Christian Origins..................................................141Index.................................................................................................147About the Author......................................................................................151
Chapter One
A "Loyal Opposition" in the Catholic Church?
Is there room in the Catholic church for a Loyal Opposition?
Loyal in the sense that it reveres the church of the past and the present for all of its good works and its striving for holiness in the following of Jesus Christ.
Loyal in its desire to support the priests and sisters whose numbers are declining, who are being neglected in their old age.
But Opposition that rejects the way in which leadership is currently selected and exercised in the Catholic church.
Opposition to the current structure of the church because it is supported upon a rickety framework of lies and half-truths that only cloud the minds of the unwary, secure power to the present leadership, and keep the great mass of the church in a state of ignorance and graceless subserviency.
The church is not simply a divine institution. It is an amalgam, both divine and human. This is a key insight. Jesus Christ founded the church, but our human response to that foundation, the ways in which we Catholics have chosen to worship God, the structures and practices we have created-almost all that we now call the Catholic religion-is of human manufacture. Even Baptism was invented by John the Baptist, or at least adapted by him from Jewish tradition. The only practice left us by Jesus Christ is the Eucharist.
And it seems obvious that the Catholic church, in the sense of the religious structure we have put in place, is in dire need, not of reform-because that would leave the same human constitution in place-but of a revolution! A revolution like that produced by Jesus Christ in the Jewish "church." A revolution like the American Revolution, in which Americans accepted the English tradition in everything but the monarchy and out of that tradition produced a nation governed by its own people.
We need a thoroughgoing revolution to free the energies of Catholics to make the best of their tradition and to downgrade or eliminate values that are purely organizational and anti-Christian. What are the grounds for this revolution? The signs are easy to see.
Take the Mass, for example. The Mass is the birthright of every Catholic Christian. It is the one thing that the Lord asked us to do in his memory. Yet because of the current organizational values in the Catholic church, the Mass, with its ability to focus and renew the Catholic Christian community, is denied to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Catholics every week because there is no priest available.
This is wrong. It may be Catholic tradition now, but it was not so in the beginning. The New Testament knows nothing of a Catholic priesthood such as we have at present-a kind of trade union without which no Eucharist can be held. It is time for this tradition to be uprooted.
As a matter of cold, hard fact, the earliest Masses, as we know from St. Paul's letters, were conducted in people's homes, in house churches by ordinary people. Since many of the earliest Christians were, in fact, Gentiles who had converted to the Jewish faith and who then came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, many of the leaders of these house churches in Gentile communities were women. It was far easier for women to become Jews than for men, since women didn't have to be circumcised. And since Mass was celebrated by the leaders of the house churches, it is inevitable that women who were not priests in our sense celebrated some of the first Masses.
Today, it is taken for granted that the Catholic multitudes in the rural areas of Latin America and other parts of the world may celebrate Scripture services and even bring new Catholics into the church through Baptism. The one thing they may not do is precisely what Jesus asked them to do, remember him in the Eucharist. This is nonsense!
Take another example, the papacy. Looked at coldly and objectively, the papacy is the longest surviving totalitarian government in the world today. It is modeled exactly on the Roman Empire of the second, third, and fourth centuries, which divided imperial administrative districts into dioceses and archdioceses. In time the empire disappeared as an organic unity, but the church modeled on it did not. If the Italians had not taken from the pope the Papal States in 1860 and the City of Rome in 1870, the pope would still be a temporal autocrat and far less of a spiritual leader than he is today.
The papacy's adherents would have you believe that Jesus instituted that office when he said to Peter, "Thou art Peter (a rock), and upon this rock I will build my church" and when he gave him the keys to the kingdom of heaven and the power of binding and loosing (Matt. 16:18-19). But these arguments are self-serving in the mouth of a hierarchical church. They are made by the papacy and its promoters to consolidate power over their fellow Catholics in the hands of the hierarchy. Otherwise they are made out of ignorance and because, "That's the way it's always been." In other words by appeal to an unexamined "tradition."
This tradition, too, deserves to be rooted up, because, whatever else St. Peter may have been, he was not the first bishop of Rome, he was not the first leader of the Roman Christian community, and in fact he died before the notion of bishop (Greek: epskopos) as monarchical leader of the Christian community came into existence.
St. Paul, before coming to Rome for the first time, writes his longest and most carefully worded letter, to the Romans, probably about 55-56 CE. Several facts are clear. There is already a Christian community at Rome. It consists of both Jews and former Gentiles. Peter is not then at Rome; otherwise, Paul, who had met and talked with him for some weeks shortly after his own conversion, would have sent him greetings in the letter. Thus Peter could not then have been that community's sole leader. The community has leaders, but Peter is not one of them. The leadership that exists is evidently communal, a leadership of cooperation in the service of the gospel.
The Acts of the Apostles depicts Paul's first visit to Rome-as a prisoner. Acts does not finish Paul's story. We are indebted to tradition for the knowledge that Paul was freed from prison, left Rome, and later returned to meet his death along with Peter, probably in the persecution of Nero in 64 CE. Clement, writing for the church of Rome to the church of Corinth probably about 96 CE, mentions the deaths of Peter and Paul. He calls them the "good apostles" and "the greatest and most righteous pillars of the church." But even though Clement's purpose in his letter is to establish good order under bishops (or "overseers," "administrators") and presbyters ("elders"), he does not call Peter or Paul by either of these titles. The whole tenor of his letter makes it clear that the monarchical episcopate does not yet exist in Rome.
Ignatius of Antioch is the first and strongest proponent of the bishop as sole ruler in the church. Shortly before his martyrdom (ca. 107 CE), he writes seven letters to various churches throughout the Mediterranean world, including Rome, strongly advocating the monarchical episcopate. The very urgency of his assertions, however, shows that that institution does not yet exist in most of the churches of his time.
The earliest succession lists of bishops of Rome date from 160 CE (Hegesippus) and 180 CE (Irenaeus of Lyons). It is about this time that the notion of one-man rule in the Roman church begins to take hold. So about this time, shared leadership among prophets, teachers, and elders has probably given way to a minimally shared leadership by the single administrator, the bishop. The succession lists were therefore made up to trace into the past the line of succession back to the apostles. This activity retroactively made "bishops" of community leaders who were not in fact monarchical or, as we now say, hierarchical leaders in their own times.
In short, the pope's claim to monarchical leadership of the church is specious, since even St. Peter, from whom he claims to take his example, did not exercise such leadership in the Roman church. Peter must have had a place of honor in the Roman church as the most important apostle. Whatever leadership he had, however, was shared with St. Paul, if they were in Rome at the same moment, but certainly was shared with the leaders of the Roman church, who were there before him.
Once the political debris is cleared away from the texts recounting Jesus' giving to St. Peter the "power of the keys" and the "power of binding and loosing," the church will be able to concentrate on finding out what the true spiritual meaning of those texts is. It could well be that Jesus was illustrating the qualities that should enable the church as a whole to discern its true leaders. In this case, these passages would have nothing to do with priesthood, papacy, gender, or celibacy. They would have to do with faithfulness, spiritual insight, the ability to nourish the faith of others, and the ability to show where the Spirit of God is leading.
Take another example. Why does the Roman Catholic church have a priesthood? Despite what the present leadership of the church asserts in this matter, Jesus Christ was not a priest. He could not be a priest. He was of the house and family of David, which was not a priestly house. True, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews does call Jesus a priest, in fact "our great High Priest." But that is a metaphor to point out to the author's Jewish contemporaries the superiority of Jesus' redemptive death and true atonement for the sins of the world in comparison to the actions of the Jewish High Priest, who entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple once a year, and ever year, repeatedly, to attempt to atone for the sins of the people.
The Jewish priesthood existed to worship God in the Temple. That was its role. In support of that role, elaborate checks had been developed to determine just who was eligible to be a priest, or a High Priest. One of the rules was that your family must be able to produce a genealogy going back a number of generations, showing that your ancestors were of pure blood. These genealogies were kept in archives in the Temple and in major cities like Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee.
Within 40 years of Jesus' death, during the first of two wars between the Jews and the Romans, the Temple was destroyed. It was never rebuilt. In the course of the two wars (66-70 CE and 135 CE), the genealogical archives on which the priesthood depended were also destroyed. These two events made it impossible to revive a legitimate priesthood. One could easily draw the conclusion that the God of history had acted to terminate the priesthood of the People of God. Meanwhile, what do the Catholics do? They decide that the old Israel had been superseded (poor theology at best) and that the Catholics are the New Israel. And if the Jews had a priesthood, as the new Christians discovered by reading the Jewish Scriptures, the church should have one, too. Besides, the ancients loved their priesthoods. The Greeks and the Romans had many of them. It was the most natural thing in the world for the new Roman Christians to set up their own priesthood to compartmentalize and administer their religious business. Administration and governance, after all, were the Romans' forte.
It was the work of perhaps a century and a half-from the mid-second century to the fourth century, in fact-to fit together all of the pieces and come up with an ideology that would justify and give employment to a Catholic priesthood. This effort of conscious and unconscious imitation first excluded women from the leadership positions they had previously held and then gave ownership and supervision of all Catholic religious practices to the male priesthood. At the end of this historical movement, the Roman talent for imperial administration had provided succeeding generations of the church with monarchical rule through a male priestly administration-a hierarchy.
That's why we have a male Catholic priesthood and monarchical clerical leadership in the Catholic church today-because it suited the cultural climate of the second and third centuries. It does not suit the cultural climate of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even in the early days of the church, it was not unheard of that Catholics should vote for their bishops. The first letter of Clement testifies to that. But the present fossilized structure is wrong.
Jesus Christ did not die on the cross to preserve the cultural values of the Roman Empire. He did not die on the cross to preserve the Jewish priesthood-or any priesthood. That was our choice. And we can choose to change it. The most advanced nations in the world have seen the shortcomings of dictatorship, tyranny, absolute monarchy, and fascism in any form. We in the Catholic church can certainly take the same lesson from the God of history.
Rule by authoritarian fiat in the Catholic church hurls anathemas at the very God who placed the Holy Spirit in every human heart and mind. We have one Father in heaven and one Lord and teacher of us all, Jesus Christ. And the Spirit within us tells us whom to obey and who the hirelings and false shepherds are.
A simple proof of all of this is that the pope and the bishops are self-elected. They have created a walled city in the midst of the church. Only clergy may enter, and only clergy may vote-when they permit a vote. The rest of the church, the so-called "laity," remain outside, unconsulted and ineligible for leadership in the church. This two-tier Catholicism has a theological name. It is called schism, from the Greek, schsma-that which is torn in two, a division. It is a sin against unity, and it invalidates the claim of the "hierarchy" to leadership in the Catholic church, because they have set themselves apart from us.
In practice, priesthood is a cult of superiority. In their training, priests are encouraged to think of themselves as "other Christs." This vitiates St. Paul's idea of the church as the Mystical Body of Christ, with the whole assembly of the faithful mystically continuing the presence and work of Christ in the world. If only the priests are other Christs, then, to use Paul's phrase, Christ is divided up.
And the pope's title, "the vicar of Christ," is downright blasphemous. As if the pope is the sole incarnation of Christ on earth! What does that assertion do to the theology of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or the real presence of Christ in the assembly, the body of the church?
The hierarchy have acted as the caretakers of the rest of the church, as if we were minor children incapable of making decisions for ourselves. They have taken away the freedom of the children of God won for us by Jesus on the cross and instead have substituted an imperial papacy. But as in the children's story, this emperor has no clothes.
The Mass, the papacy, and the priesthood. What else can I criticize? It sounds as if I should go and join a church where these ideas would be more congenial. My reply? This is my church. I am a committed Catholic. I have been delving into the origins of the Catholic church for more than 50 years. I have attended weekly and sometimes daily Mass willingly all my life. My understanding and respect for this church and for the many priests I have known has increased enormously over the years. I will match my commitment with the pope should leave the church before I do. Otherwise, he should forsake his mistaken commitment to a false authoritarianism that sets the values of his caste above the good of the faithful.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Talking Treason in Churchby Joseph P. Marren Copyright © 2010 by Joseph P. Marren. Excerpted by permission.
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