Blueprint for Vatican III: Catholics worldwide map church future - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, May 3, 2002

This is the request NCR's editors circulated to Catholics in various parts of the world:

Which three issues do you believe a future general council of the Roman Catholic church must address, with a sentence for each explaining why. What are up to 12 additional items you would want to see on a council agenda, with a sentence on each.

No names will be mentioned. No one will be quoted by name.

We want the voices weighted toward Asia, Oceania, Africa and Latin America/Mexico.

The tag, "Vatican III," is purely utilitarian. Obviously the sessions ought to be held in cities large and small throughout the developing world, with perhaps the final session held in Rome. This council realistically, ought to be Haiti I, or Calcutta I, or Benin City I or World Church I.

Preamble

The editors undertook this project because we believed there was a compelling need to gather the people of God around their shared views as we look to the future. With the clergy culture and hierarchy in disarray, there is a growing yearning for shared leadership and vision.

The Blueprint illustrates -- at a time when the U.S. and Western Catholic church focuses anxiously but almost exclusively on the clerical sexual abuse scandal and the leadership crisis it illustrates -- that there is a larger call for reform.

This Blueprint is not the final answer, and the fact that it is not a final outline is not the point. This Blueprint hopes to jumpstart the imagination of the church and promote a global conversation.

The point is that this Blueprint illustrates -- to church leaders and those who may one day call for a general council -- how they need to approach the people of God, as equals, in designing and reforming the church to meet the future. The voices of those closest to the people's needs and the issues of the day have to be seen as coequal and co-responsible in shaping the church and its decision-making.

The Blueprint lets their voices be heard.

What impressed us in this Blueprint project was the range of responses to the editors' request. The volume of returns from the worldwide church was reassuring -- some 60-plus from an estimated 300 people contacted. The respondents were in thirds -- about one-third women religious, one-third laity and one-third priests. There was at least one cardinal, and at least three bishops.

The range was from Catholics in a rural El Salvador village who sent in their hopes for their local church, to an authority on science who said the "whole idea that our destiny is inseparable from cosmic destiny is barely on the fringes of contemporary soteriology [salvation accomplished through Jesus]." There was a cardinal from a developing country who called for openness to Eastern and other religions; a woman religious who wrote, "the world is dying"; an Asian priest who asked, "Please excuse my English," then in very good English wrote that the issues should be:

The concept of Revelation: God reveals himself and his will in the Old and New Testament, also in human nature (according to the Roman Catholic tradition). What about in the other religions? Those other religions, as a path to salvation? Again, as in Vatican II: the role of the conscience. The authority of the magisterium. A complete rethinking of the sexual ethics in every aspect. Maybe also a reflection, prior to that, about the pleasure of the body and a theology of the body.

There was no litmus test for respondents. A Venezuelan candidly warned we might not like his views. "The Western World must urgently be re-evangelized" as "it is quickly falling back into paganism," throwing away 15 centuries of Christianity's civilizing work," he wrote. And continued, Catholics "must get rid of the ridiculous `democracy mindset' for the church." They must reestablish "pride in being a Catholic and Christian," abjuring "stupid self-deprecation, apologetic attitudes" while establishing "a strategy to frontally combat secularism and the enemies of religion all over, especially politicians and the press."

Another writer asked, examining "evangelization in an age of pluralism and religious diversity -- how does the church respond to Jesus' command in the Great Commission at the end of Matthew's Gospel in a global village reality where followers live side by side with others of different beliefs and no beliefs?"

The need to reform church governance was the primary focus of the Blueprint respondents.

As will be seen, ordination and human sexuality issues were major topics. Immediately opening ordination to married men was seen as essential, en route to ordaining women, because of the general lack of availability worldwide of the Eucharist. (This was a constant point among the respondents.) Equally, practically every respondent mentioned at some point that the Catholic church has not dealt openly and realistically with human sexuality in the light of 21st-century understanding. (The leadership crisis over sexual abuse was directly linked to the limits on who may be ordained coupled with the lack of shared leadership, shared responsibility in decision-making.)