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Is there any good reason for the Church to return to those baptized into Christ?
LCWR Leadership Award Schneiders
LCWR
has nearly 1500 members who are elected leaders of their religious orders,
representing approximately 57,000 Catholic sisters. The conference develops
leadership, promotes collaboration within church and society, and serves as a
voice for systemic change. Pegado de <http://www.enewspf.com/latest-news/human-interest/35518-catholic-sisters-assembly-decides-next-steps-in-response-to-vatican-assessment.html>
August
10, 2012
St.
Louis, Missouri
ACCEPTANCE
ADDRESS
I can
find no words to adequately express my appreciation to the Leadership
Conference of Women Religious for their choice to associate me in this special
way with their extraordinary ministry of leadership not only to women
Religious, but to the whole Church, and to the world to which the Church is
missioned. Wonderful as this occasion is, however, it would be disingenuous to
pretend that this year’s meeting of LCWR is simply an “annual event.” As its
president, Sister Pat Farrell, said in opening the meeting, “this is a meeting
like no other.” It was only a couple weeks after I received the call from Janet
Mock telling me of this award that the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith launched a staggering assault on LCWR that stunned its leaders and
members and shocked many in the larger Church and beyond.
I do not
want to minimize the seriousness and even danger of the distressing situation
with which our leaders have been dealing over these past days, much less
whitewash the genuine scandal it has caused. But in the context of this
evening’s gathering which, despite everything, is meant to celebrate the
remarkable history, the current life and vigor, and the free and hopeful future
of this wonderful organization, I want to focus on something that I think is
both more
important
for our present and our future, and infinitely more worthy of our attention.
Without negating the very real sociological, psychological, and political
issues involved, to which our attention has been called over these past months
by the analyses of various professionals, I would like to focus, in this golden
jubilee year of Vatican II, on the theological issue at the heart of this
struggle and of others that are stressing our Church at this time: that of
ecclesial leadership in the context of the theology of Vatican II.
The
leitmotif of the Council was the nature and mission of the Church. The Council
recognized that if the Church was to be for the modern world what it is called
to be, the Body of Christ at the service of the world that God so loved as to
give God’s only Son for its salvation, the Church’s self-understanding,
structures, procedures, and relationships required thoroughgoing aggiornamento,
both reform and renewal. The most important documents that emerged from the
Council concerned divine revelation [Dei Verbum] which is the ground of the
Church and its life and whose mediation into the world is the Church’s primary
vocation and responsibility; the nature of the Church [Lumen Gentium] expressed
and celebrated in the liturgy [Sacrosanctum Concilium] and lived in its mission
to the modern world [Gaudium et Spes]; freedom of conscience [Dignitatis
Humanae] which enables people to personally engage revelation, to participate
in the Church’s internal life, and to take responsibility for its mission as
adult human beings called to share in God’s life; and the promoting of the
Church’s relationship in mutuality with all people including non-Catholic
Christians, people of other spiritual TRADITIONS[Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra
Aetate] , and even non-believers. I want to concentrate for a moment, then, on
the theology of the Church, its identity and mission, in order to raise the
issue of what kind of leadership the Church needs in this time of crisis.
The
Council took us back to the roots of ecclesiology in the Old Testament, to the
theology of the Church as the Pilgrim -- that is, the not-yet-arrived -- People
of God, created in God’s own image as male and female who are (CO) equal
partners with each other participating in God’s own responsibility for creation
itself, including the human family, on it historical way through this world to
the New Jerusalem. In the New Testament that Chosen People was called deeper
into the mystery of God, called to become not only a “light to the nations”
(see, Is.42:1-9; Lk. 2:29-32; Mt. 12:15-21; Acts 26:18-23) but the very Body of
Christ, the presence of the Risen Jesus, acting in the world for its salvation
(see, Eph. 4 and Rom. 12:3-8). God, in the person of Jesus, acted out for us
what that salvific work should look like. In Jesus we contemplate the
paradoxical relationship of God, the all powerful Creator, to power. Jesus did
not come to exercise coercive power over recalcitrant sinners, to forcibly mold
them according to some abstract divine plan of moral perfection. Jesus did not
even found a family of which he would have been, in his culture, the
patriarchal head and absolute authority. He neither sought nor accepted any
office or position of authority or power in his religious community of Israel.
He was called to be a prophet (see Lk. 4:16-21), to exercise a spiritual
ministry that was not guaranteed by any official appointment, conferred no
office, and gave him no institutional leverage. As a prophet he exerted only
the influence of truth and love, the authority of his own integrity in
witnessing to the God who sent him. Jesus never resorted to violence,
thought-control or loyalty oaths, intimidation through shaming or threats of
rejection, expulsion from the covenant community, execution, or eternal
damnation. Rather, Jesus taught by world-subverting parables, challenging
questions, insistent dialogue, by patient persuasion, repeated invitation,
probing argument, and especially by his original and arresting interpretations
of Scripture which were sometimes startling in their radicality because Jesus
favored people and their needs over the requirements of even the most sacred
laws (see, e.g., Mt. 12:1-8). He questioned and challenged both the ordinary
people he dealt with and the authorities of his religious tradition. He, though
divine by nature, refused to be made complicit in anyone’s program of playing
God (THOUGH HE WAS GOD HIMSELF)in relation to others (see Jn. 8:1-11). But he
also allowed himself to be challenged, for example, in regard to his sense of
the exclusivity of Israel’s vocation (see, Mk. 7:24-28). But finally, when he
was rejected by the leaders of his religious community and sentenced to death
by the powers of the Roman Empire, he accepted death rather than change or
suppress the message he had come to offer: the radical, almost unbelievable,
message of God’s absolute and unconditional love for every human being, a love
that would not be withheld from or defeated by even the most serious sinner.
God raised the executed Jesus from the dead and restored him to his followers,
whom he then empowered to continue to be his saving presence in the world,
warning them that they would face the same fate he had if they remained faithful
to his “scandalous” message of God’s all-inclusive, law-relativizing love. This
is the nature and mission of the community called Church, the Body of Christ in
this world.
The
spirituality of Christian leadership is determined by the kind of community the
Church is and the kind of mission with which it is charged. The Church that
Jesus formed around himself is not an imitation of any secular model of
community and therefore its leadership cannot and must not mimic (or copy) the
exercise of authority of secular power structures. The Church is not a divine
right monarchy in which some individual person is vested by God with absolute
divine power over all the members. Nor is it a one-person-one-vote democracy in
which truth or even policy is decided by a majority, leaving the minority to
fend for itself. It is not an oligarchy or rule by the powerful few whether
they be titled nobles, or military officers, or corporation moguls, or vested
clergy. It is not a plutocracy or rule of the very wealthy, nor a totalitarian
dictatorship in which truth is decided and right is established by the brute
force of the most powerful. It is not even that probably best form of secular
government we humans have devised so far, the republic in which power is vested
in, and exercised representatively by, the governed. (ALL AUTHORITY COMES
DIRECTLY FROM GOD)
The
Church is a unique kind of community, the union of those baptized into Christ,
formed by his Word which is not bound (see 2 Tim. 2:8-9) -- never fully grasped
nor controlled by anyone -- gathered around the table where we share Christ’s
Body in order to become his Body for the world. It is a community in which
there is no slave or master, no national or ethnic superiorities, no gender
domination, no inequality that is theologically or spiritually significant
except holiness, and in which even distinctions of role and function are not
titles to power but differences which must serve the unity of the whole. It is
a community in which all vie for the lowest place, wash one another’s feet,
lift rather than impose burdens, and dwell among their sisters and brothers as
those who serve.
What
kind of leadership is possible and appropriate in such a community, in the
Pilgrim People of God called to be the Body of Christ in this world? What is
the spirituality of leadership that Jesus modeled and taught among the somewhat
ragtag group of very ordinary women and men whom he formed into the first
Christian community? What does such leadership look like on the ground, in our
day and age, in our post-modern culture? Let me make three suggestions about
what, minimally, Gospel leadership would look like. First, the leaders would
emerge from the community rather than imposing themselves or being imposed upon
it. They would be chosen because they share, incarnate, model, and articulate
the faith and hope and commitments of the group. Several times since the
mandate of the CDF was imposed on the LCWR the bishops in charge have insisted
that they have no problem with the Sisters whom they love and admire. It is
only their leaders who are problematic. But, unlike clerical leaders who are
regularly imposed, without consultation, on communities to whom they have no
relationship, because of the loyalty of the appointee to the higher authority
rather than to the community to whom he is sent, the leaders of Religious
Congregations are freely elected by the members precisely because they do
represent the best hopes and commitments of the community. Leaders of Religious
communities are chosen from the community, for the community, (by the
community) and when they complete their term of service they will not move up
to a higher post in a power structure but will resume their place in the
community,
Leaders
in Religious communities are and remain fundamentally equals of their sisters
or brothers. They are not called or empowered or sent to dominate or lord it
over the community, to take the first place in the assembly or dress in finery
or give themselves honorific titles or demand obsequious marks of respect, but
to be the servants of all, even to the laying down of their lives in various
ways for those they serve. Secondly, the leader of a Gospel community, a
community with a mission to the whole world which God so loved, would, like
Jesus who prepared his disciples for what lay ahead, exercise what Pat Farrell
in her recent National Public Radio interview called “anticipatory leadership.”
Anticipatory leadership is not just crisis management, or shop-tending, or
status quo preservation, and certainly not a channeling of abstract absolutes
from without. It is an active fostering of discernment about what is coming
toward us from the future and how we can be prepared (and trained), like good
stewards drawing on treasures both old and new (see Mt. 13:52), to meet those
new challenges with the riches of the Gospel tradition but also with the best
contemporary resources and communal reflection. Third, the leaders of a
genuinely Christian community must be capable of leading that community not
only to do what is needed in this world but also to be what is needed by this
world, not only to act efficaciously but to live with integrity. It is not
enough that leaders themselves not abuse or dominate the members of the
community but, like the Good Shepherd who does not abandon the flock when it is
in danger (see Jn. 10:11-13), they must resist and energize the community to
resist whatever threatens its integrity (and fidelity), whether such threats come
from within or without, whether they are spiritual or societal or
ecclesiastical. To incarnate, promote, and above all witness to the freedom of
the Gospel in the face of interlocking domination systems, both secular and
religious, is a primary task of the Christian community, the Body of Christ in
this world, and we have been made very aware in the past six months of just how
urgently the Church, and even people outside the Church’s formal boundaries,
are looking to Religious communities for leadership, for a witness to
integrity, for a living model of what it means to be Church in these difficult
times.
Given
the project that is Religious Life it is not at all surprising that this
lifeform has genereated, and is still developing, a form of Gospel leadership
which is increasingly emerging into public view as a genuine alternative to
ecclesiastical or secular leadership defined as dominative power. This, for me,
and I think for people all over this country and beyond, is what LCWR kin. This
kind of servant leadership in this kind of Gospel community is as baffling to
those in power today as was Jesus’ mode of leadership to the Temple hierarchy
and the Roman Empire of his time. Those in power only wanted to know, under
penalty of death, whether in fact, Jesus was a king, a dangerous challenger
subverting their domination systems. But Jesus replied, “You are the ones who
are talking about power. For this have I come into the world, to bear witness
to the truth. Those who are of the truth hear my voice” (cf. Jn. 18:37). It is
that witness which I have so long admired not only in the leadership of my own
Religious congregation, the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
which is, in an important sense, the real recipient of tonight’s award, but
also in the courageous and visionary leadership of those gathered in this room
and their predecessors. Thank you for this honor, but most of all, thank you
for your service and witness to all of us, your Sisters, and to the Church and
world we serve.
Sandra
M. Schneiders, IHM
Jesuit
School of Theology of Santa Clara University
Berkeley,
California
