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	Don’t Look to Rome for the True Catholic Voices By Andrew J. Bacevich Boston Globe April 9, 2010 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/04/09/dont_look_to_rome_for_the_true_catholic_voices/ THE DETONATIONS occur with all the regularity of bombs going off in downtown Baghdad: the Church of Rome — the church of pomp, hierarchy, and authority — is imploding. The damage already sustained qualifies as catastrophic. There is more to come. For Catholics, Easter this year was a joyless occasion. Rather than celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus, anguished pastors lamented the continued disintegration of the institution to which they have devoted their lives. In the pews, their dwindling flocks listened with a combination of sadness, dismay, and disgust. The crisis touched off in 2002 by the clergy sex abuse scandal in Boston has now gone global. The Holy See’s obtuse response, combining self-denial with self-pity — it’s all the fault of a gossip-mongering media apparently — has shredded the last vestiges of Vatican credibility. Simply put, what Rome says no longer matters. The bishops — those of this country in the vanguard — have already squandered any claim to trust. The pope himself now seems hell-bent on forfeiting what remains of his authority. If Wall Street rules applied, the Catholic Church would today be filing for Chapter 11 protection while fending off an Anglican takeover bid — depending on your point of view, a delicious or ironic prospect. Yet this moment of painful mortification holds great potential for clarification and renewal. The collapse of Christendom — the concept of a secular order based on Christian precepts — is now fully complete. So too is the triumph of modernity. No encyclical handed down from on high will reverse that verdict. We ourselves must deal with the consequences. To its proponents, modernity implied liberation. To others, it suggested moral anarchy. Either way, the quickening tempo of change diluted and then dissolved established authority. Truth became first malleable and then seemingly obsolete. For decades, the Roman Church placed itself at the forefront of those resisting these developments. Resistance proved futile. In a particularly squalid and reprehensible fashion, the Church’s very leadership has now succumbed to what it had long warned against. Why would anyone choose voluntarily to affiliate with such an organization? In offering his own answer to that question, the novelist Walker Percy, himself a convert, once wrote: “The reason I am a Catholic is that I believe that what the Catholic Church proposes is true.’’ Yet if truth exists and if a Catholic Christian interpretation of truth retains any potential for illuminating the human condition, its advocates will henceforth have to come from somewhere other than Rome. Here lies the challenge facing present-day believers. Members of a discredited hierarchy are no longer capable of articulating the truth entrusted to the Church. So people of faith must assume responsibility for doing so, interpreting the message of the Gospels for our time and thereby fashioning a much needed critique of the cultural confusion that modernity has wrought. In this undertaking, Catholics in this country have a large role to play. Preoccupied with keeping discipline and order and with preserving their own status (no ordination of women!), American bishops will have little to offer. The main burden of engaging the world from an authentically Catholic perspective will fall elsewhere. We must look to universities like Notre Dame and Boston College that remain seriously committed to their Catholic identity; to independent publications such as Commonweal magazine and the Jesuit weekly America; to grassroots lay organizations such as Voice of the Faithful or to the radical Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day; and to the communities of religious men and women, their numbers in decline, who in forsaking worldly ambition pursue lives of quiet holiness. This church — the real church, not the institutional one — will necessarily speak with many contending voices. Out of introspection and before discernment comes disagreement and dissent. A season of debate is upon us, with the outcome revealing what — if anything — a movement based on the teachings of Jesus Christ still has to say to a post-Christian world. The prospect of that debate — which the hierarchy will seek to suppress — is something that serious Catholics should relish. Seldom has the summons to witness to truth been clearer. Whether we Catholics will answer that summons now becomes the issue.
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