A Leap of Faith

I am a born Roman Catholic who became an Episcopalian more than 20 years ago. I made the change in all sincerity, and yet in my heart I regard myself as a member of both churches at once, or, better, as “proleptically” (by anticipation) the loyal member of a Christian church that does not yet exist.

In 1982, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, I was one of a number of writers whom Commonweal asked to say how the council had changed them. My short answer was that it had made me a Protestant, but that answer concealed as much as it revealed. I return to that moment now because, as I have learned from an article by Peter Steinfels in the current Commonweal magazine, a good few American Catholics find themselves at a similar turning point today.

Steinfels writes: “Seasoned observers of Catholicism are straining--and failing--to find a comparable event against which to measure the current crisis. Polls of Catholics register their massive loss of confidence in their leaders. Interviews surface raw anger. Catholics report friends and family members who have started attending other churches.”

I do not propose that all of those troubled Catholics should leap to become Episcopalians. Most will and should remain Catholics, but the church, like the Sabbath, was made for man, not man for the church (Mark 1:27). Just what kind of church American Catholics will have is, more than they may realize, up to them to decide.

Most Americans have forgotten, but older Catholics remember well the Catholic sex crisis of 1968. In October of 1962, when Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, millions of Catholics hoped for a change in the teaching that holds abortion as a crime equivalent to murder and artificial birth control a crime equivalent to abortion. According to the latter half of this teaching, a woman who has sex while using a diaphragm or a man who does so with a condom commits a sin as grievous as murder.

Would John XXIII allow the council to revise this teaching? Many hoped so, but “the good pope” died midway through the three-year council, and his successor forbade the assembled prelates to even debate the issue. Instead, Paul VI created a commission of lay as well as clerical experts to advise him on whether a change should be made. The council ended in 1965. The birth-control commission did much of its work in 1967. Its advice to Paul VI--leaked to the press in an electric moment--was that artificial birth control should indeed be allowed.

Now came the crisis. Could Paul VI rise to the occasion? Could he, by admitting error and correcting his predecessors, redeem and validate papal authority itself? Alas, the pope instead overrode the recommendation of his commission and issued in 1968 an encyclical titled “Humanae Vitae” reaffirming the traditional teaching without qualification. Faced with the choice between clerical solidarity and the needs of the faithful, a cautious man chose clerical solidarity. The irony, of course, was that his action undermined the very authority he invoked to take it.

It did so because, within a few years, the vast majority of Catholics, worldwide, were ignoring the papal ban on artificial contraception. Their priests and bishops knew this perfectly well; but the more the mistaken morality was abandoned in the bedroom, the more loudly it had to be proclaimed from the Throne of St. Peter. For John Paul II, loyalty to “Humanae Vitae” has reportedly been a litmus test eclipsing other, absolutely crucial considerations. John L. Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter, wrote recently in the New York Times: “Every pope seeks bishops who will defend the church’s teachings. But some, like Paul VI, sought other attributes as well: good pastoral sense, lively engagement with the culture and support from the local church. For John Paul II, however, it is often enough that a candidate supports Humanae Vitae

Rigor in policing the clerical ranks for signs of child abuse has all too evidently not been high on the current pope’s list of desirable attributes. It is in this way that the contraception debacle and ensuing anxiety about the state of papal authority may be said to have contributed to the pedophilia debacle. Boston’s tainted Cardinal Bernard Law--a “Humanae Vitae” loyalist--was, until the scandal, a Vatican favorite.

For me, in the post-”Humanae Vitae” Catholic debate, the decisive intellectual intervention was that of British theologian Charles Davis. What was there in the patrimony of Christianity, Davis asked, other than papal authority that a Roman Catholic like himself could not find in some other Christian communion? Would it be the Eucharistic liturgy? The other sacraments? Devotion to Mary? Franciscan spirituality? Davis implicitly invited his hearers to lengthen the list, but his own conclusion was clear: Everything that mattered was indeed available elsewhere; it was papal authority alone that was only available in Rome. But was it not papal authority that Humanae Vitae had now discredited? Why, then, remain a Catholic? And thereupon Davis left the church.

It took me a few years, but I followed him. Then, as now, the issue was not sexuality per se but authority and how it is exercised. I hasten to add that when it comes to authority, the origins of the Episcopal church are downright repellent. King Henry VIII did not break with Rome on any matter of principle. The royal roue simply wanted to play pope in his own kingdom, adding papal lands to his own and granting himself his own many divorces on his own authority. But when the newborn United States threw off the authority of the king of England, the Church of England in the United States did the same. The Episcopal church, born at that moment, became a democracy, electing its local bishops, and electing a national “presiding bishop” who, like the president of the country, serves for a specified term. It was this, finally, more than the deep kinship in doctrine and ritual between the Anglican and the Roman traditions that made a convert of me.

But it made me, as I continue to insist, a proleptic or anticipatory convert, for the kind of change that American Anglicans made 200 years ago American Catholics could make today if they so chose. And if they did, the Episcopalians and they (and perhaps a good many other American Christians) would wake up to find themselves seated together in a greater church. Moreover, since no national church within the Catholic communion is more powerful than the American, a change here would change the Catholic church as a whole. In retrospect, American Catholics could be seen to have used American democratic institutions--the courts and the free press--to deliver the church not just from a passing sexual scandal but from an abiding institutional handicap.

According to former Russian leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the great lesson of the 20th century is that enormous changes can come with enormous suddenness. There is nothing inherently un-Catholic about democracy. When a pope dies, his successor is not appointed but elected. That principle could be extended from within, and democracy could, in time, make the successor of Peter as good at admitting sin and error as Peter himself was. In Acts 10:26, the first pope, embarrassed when a new convert kneels before him, says “Stand up. I too am a man.”

“Stand up. I too am a man” might be the motto of a new Catholic democracy. Peter spoke those words at a moment when he had just recognized and publicly admitted the confusion of his earlier thinking on a matter of decisive importance to the church. History will note that not only did the church survive his admission of error, so did his own reputation for wisdom, humility and sanctity.