DISQUISITIONS ...being thoughts on Synod 2015 from various observers

Doubts About Devolution – III

Catholics of the Second Class? The “universal call to holiness” identified and explained in the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, is widely celebrated as one of Vatican II’s most compelling ideas. It’s also one of the building blocks of what Pope St John Paul II called the “New Evangelisation”: the Catholic Church’s rediscovery of herself as a community of “missionary disciples” (in Pope Francis’s happy term).    Thus it comes as a surprise, indeed something more disturbing and unpleasant than a surprise, that some Synod fathers are pressing the question of whether the universal call to holiness is, in fact, universal. The question isn’t put quite like that, of course. But it’s not easy to interpret in any other way the claim by some members of Synod-2015 that the Church’s teaching on chastity, marriage, and the family is simply too difficult to live out, and therefore some Catholics – perhaps many Catholics – should be exempt for it (and thereby exempt from the universal call to holiness). Those given this pass by their local bishops may, it seems live with the Church’s tacit blessing in relationships long considered obstacles to moral and spiritual health. The exempt may receive the sacraments without being fully in communion with the Church in their manner of life. They may continue for an indeterminate period of time in what amounts to a kind of de facto personal schism that effectively detaches them from the global communion of Catholicism. They may, in sum, live as if the universal call to holiness were not universal, but something for the saints alone. There are at least two serious problems here. First of all, sanctity, as Vatican II insisted, is for everyone. Why? Because it’s only by becoming, with the help of God’s mercy and grace, the saints we were baptized to be that we fulfill our Christian and human destiny. This coming Sunday, Pope Francis will canonise Blessed Louis and Blessed Zélie Martin, the parents of St Thérèse of Lisieux – living proof that sanctity in marriage is possible in modernity. Doesn’t their example apply to all? Don’t those who offer an exemption from the universal call to holiness understand that the Church canonizes saints, not for their sake – God bountifully takes care of his holy ones – but for our sake: that we might see, in this case in our own times, the nobility of which men and women are capable, if we cooperate with the divine pedagogy inscribed in the world and in us? The second problem is that deconstructing the universal call to holiness into a call issued only to the few creates an entire, vast class of Second-Class Catholics: people whose leaders think them incapable of greatness and immune to the attraction of heroic sanctity; people who thereby come to think of themselves that way. Is that the way of “pastoral accompaniment?” Is that any way to be the “Church permanently in mission” for which the Holy Father insistently calls – by telling people they’re just not good enough? It seems a most unlikely evangelical program. We are all sinners who live by grace and mercy alone. But it is precisely as sinners that we know the power of witness as an incentive to deeper conversion. And that witness often comes from surprising people and venues (a carpenter’s son in the backwaters of Galilee; a bourgeois family in a small town in Normandy). Devolving the authority to give exemptions to the universal call to holiness to local churches whose leaders seem to have lost confidence in the power of the Gospel and the power of Gospel witnesses is not, it seems to me (and I suspect to many others), something that Synod-2015 should endorse. George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center