OneEarth/OneSpirit : OneHumanity/OneChurch

“All of us long for a Pentecostal church; a church in which the Spirit rules, and not the letter; a church in which understanding breaks down the fences we erect against each other. We are impatient with a church which seems so unpentecostal, so unspiritual, so narrow and fearful”. Joseph Ratzinger, May 28, 1977. [AMERICA Magazine, John Jay Hughes, “Longing for a Pentecostal Church”, pp 23-26, Vol. 196, No. 10, Whole No. 4767, March 19, 2007]

Recently, Pope Benedict XVI has specified some fine-tuned disciplines of ritual, etc, in his SACRAMENTUM CARITATIS, by which the church institutional seems to distance the hierarchy from the laity. The promotion of division isn’t helpful to unity. Corporate overreach is hugely destructive. To institutionalize is to incorporate; rules, ideologies, and control define corporations. “Imperial” bureaucracy is recognized for what it does.

Consistent with its imperial culture, it isn’t surprising that the corporate leadership of the Roman Catholic Church continues its imperial style of control over the people; the people should, however, know and affirm steadfastly their own authenticity and right against institutional overreach, and object with firmness but always with charity.

In Jesus’ time, the corporate (church) ideology was characterized by Judaism and the Roman political authority—neither of which Jesus endorsed, both of which he eschewed. Jesus, like life, is about something immensely larger and beyond being institutionally defined and narrowly confined by imperial worldview and dogma. This doesn’t mean that institutions have no right or claim to legitimate self-interest, or that they are not of social value; it does mean they are not above the people they serve and their obligation to serve.

Institutions have their ideology, self-identity and need of self-maintenance; but above all, they are about serving the universal good and the people locally. Life, like Jesus, eschews abusive definition and confinement by corporate overreach. To enthrall people in service to the institutional hierarchy by edicts, demands and division is inappropriate. Institutions that violate, alienate, impoverish and frustrate the people are inauthentic. If church fails to serve, it defrauds. Papal identity is “Servus Servorum”, servant of servants. People need to disenthrall themselves from institutional overreach when it fails authenticity.

Institutional Catholicism has self-perpetuating objectives, which, intentionally and by culture of hierarchical bureaucracy, have historically been given priority consideration over the people. Outdated, self-arrogated requirements of imperial church no longer well serve the people. Ovid writes, “tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis” (times are changing, and we change with them); another way to say it: Populi mutantur, et ecclesia mutatur in illis (people change, and church changes in them). Institutional ideologies and objectives of one time (as in the time of Trent and Vatican I) may lose credibility in another time, as the circumstances of today clearly indicate vis-à-vis Vatican II.

Institutions tend toward commercialism, toward pursuits of money by which to expand bureaucracies. Corporations almost of necessity conform to contemporary corporate models. As Catholicism morphs into the modern corporate model, it almost certainly will adapt to market strategies; conventional money-making devices of hyped self-promotion (idolatry) and bureaucratic profiteering (prostitution) are unseemly. Jesus preached a Pentecostal church, what people want and need—not a church of overreach which uses threat tactics of guilt, fear and alienation in interests of self-advantage and corporate arrogation.