Sunday, 18 December 2016

We don’t need clericalism in the Church

  Pope Francis has broached the subject of clericalism again in the church, much to the discomfort of clergy. 
  The spirit of clericalism is an evil that is present in the Church today, and the victim of this spirit is the people, who feel discarded and abused. That was the Pope’s message in the beginning of December. If there’s someone who consistently opposes the clerical attitude in the Roman Catholic Church, that’s the Pope himself.  He has understood that the menace of clericalism is at the root of most of the problems troubling the Catholic Church.
  Unam Sanctam Catholicam defines clericalism as a state of affairs in which there is an unnecessary or overly exaggerated importance attributed to clergy, in such a way that the laity relate to them as subjects to be ruled rather than a people to be lovingly pastored. “Basically, a clericalist ideology is one that places too much emphasis on the clergy or attributes undue importance to their actions. It is a defect of the virtue of temperance by excess as applied to the government of the Church,” it says.
  It has often led to sacramental blackmails in the church which are suppressed within its four walls.
  Pope Francis warned pastors of the dangers of becoming “intellectuals of religion” with a morality far from the Revelation of God. The poor and humble people who have faith in the Lord are the victims of the “intellectuals of religion,” those who are “seduced by clericalism,” who will be preceded in the Kingdom of Heaven by repentant sinners.
The law of the high priests is far from Revelation
  The Pope directed his attention to Jesus, who in the day’s Gospel turns to the chief priests and the elders of the people, and focuses precisely on their role. “They had juridical, moral, religious authority,” he said. “They decided everything. Annas and Caiaphas, for example, judged Jesus. They were the high priests who decided to kill Lazarus; Judas, too, went to them to bargain, and thus Jesus was sold. They arrived at this state of arrogance and tyranny towards the people, Pope said.
 Judas was a traitor, he sinned gravely. He sinned forcefully. But then the Gospel says, “He repented, and went to them to return the money.”
 And what did they (priests) do? “It’s your problem,they said and left him alone discarded. The poor Judas, a traitor and repentant, was not welcomed by the pastors. They had forgotten the First Commandment, which God had given to our father Abraham: “Walk in my presence and be blameless.” They did not walk: they always stopped in their own convictions. They were not blameless.
 Pope said they had forgotten the Ten Commandments of Moses: “With the law they themselves had made – intellectualistic, sophisticated, casuistic – they cancelled the law the Lord had made, they lacked the memory that connects the current moment with Revelation.” In the past their victim was Jesus; in a similar way, now their victim is the humble and poor people who trust in the Lord, those who are discarded, those who understand repentance even if they do not fulfil the law, and suffer these injustices.
 They feel condemned and abused, Pope said, by those who are vain, proud, arrogant. And one who was cast aside by these people, Pope Francis observed, was Judas.
  They were the intellectuals of religion, those who had the power, who advanced the catechesis of the people with a morality composed by their own intelligence and not by the revelation. The evil of clericalism can still be found in the Church today.
 “There is that spirit of clericalism,” he explained. “Clerics feel they are superior, they are far from the people. They have no time to hear the poor, the suffering, prisoners, the sick,” he said.
 The evil of clericalism is a very ugly thing. It is a new edition of these people. And the victim is the same: the poor and humble people who await the Lord. The Father has always sought to be close to us: He sent His Son. We are waiting, waiting in joyful expectation, exulting. But the Son didn’t join the game of these people. The Son went with the sick, the poor, the discarded, the publicans, the sinners – and that is scandalous – the prostitutes. Today, too, Jesus says to all of us, and even to those who are seduced by clericalism: “The sinners and the prostitutes will go before you into the Kingdom of Heaven.”
  Writing in National Catholic Reporter, Robert McClory said, “clericalism is contagious, breeding a kind of mentality that revels in ecclesiastical ambition, status and power. For some, especially those attracted to the episcopacy, it often leads to indifference toward the experiences and needs of ordinary Catholics. It encourages the creation (or repetition) of teachings and regulations worked out in ivory-tower isolation from the real world.”
 “For many generations earnest, young male seminarians have been taught that they are aspiring to a higher level not available to the laity, a level at which they will have the authority to teach, sanctify and govern those below,” he says.
 “In effect, they become members of a kind of boys club that is warm, supportive and exclusive — and never breaks ranks. For what they give up, they can expect a relatively high standard of living and the respect, even adulation (at least until the abuse scandal hit), of their grateful congregations,” McClory writes.
 “Priests were so well respected that they were often times feared rather than loved, the sacraments so revered that their power was almost magical, the stress on clerical obedience so emphatic that independent thought was stifled, and the hierarchy exercised so much power that the priesthood became in effect a boundary restricting the faithful's access to God rather than an intermediary who brought their petitions to God,” says Unam Sanctam Catholicam.
 Will Pope succeed in eliminating clericalism from the Catholic Church? He himself set an example with his frugal lifestyle, avoiding pomp and pageantry, after becoming the Pope. It’s not going to be an easy task.
 The following incident is a classic case of clericalism happened over two years ago. Similar incidents are frequent in the Catholic world but remain unreported.
 An unmarried woman with a baby had to embark on a depressing pilgrimage around Buenos Aires city to find a place where she could have her baby baptised. She was turned away by priests.
 The Archbishop of the region questioned, “Why a poor girl, who has resisted the temptation to have an abortion and stood up at great cost to herself for the right to life should be persecuted in such a way.”
 The Archbishop reminded the priests that the young woman was requesting baptism for her child, not herself, and that they have no right to deny a sacrament in that manner.
“I say this with sadness and if it sounds like a complaint or an offensive comment please forgive me: in our ecclesiastical region there are presbyteries that will not baptise children whose mothers are not married, because they have been conceived outside holy wedlock,” a Vatican insider quoted the Archbishop as saying.
 The Archbishop said he was making a call to end what he called sacramental blackmail.
 He went on to speak about the hijacking of a sacrament, calling it an expression of a rigorous and “hypocritical neo-clericalism”, which uses the sacraments as tools to affirm its own supremacy.
 He was critical of priests for what he described as rubbing the fragility and the wounds of people in their faces by hosing down their hopes and expectations, simply because they do not fit squarely into parish requirements or live up to someone else’s moral expectation.
  He said that apart from being misleading, such pastoral models distort and reject the dynamic of Jesus Christ’s incarnation, which he pointed out cannot be reduced to a doctrinal slogan or used to serve the power hungry.
 The Archbishop was none other than Jorge Mario Bergoglio – currently Pope Francis. This happened months before his selection as Pope.