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Charles Davis still feisty after 30 years: theologian asks how to live authentically in the midst of change - includes related article on Davis leaving the Catholic Church - Interview
National Catholic Reporter, Feb 28, 1997 by Joan Chittister
I met Charles Davis where much of the world might not now expect to find him -- at Mass.
Davis, a former English Jesuit who startled the world when he left the priest, hood in the 1960s, was sitting in front of me in the Catholic chapel at Cambridge College in England.
A renowned theologian and incisive critic of a rigid and inexorable pre-vatican II church, Davis holds the title professor emeritus of religion from Concordia University in Montreal.
He left the priesthood in response to Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's encyclical banning contraceptives, in the tumultuous and precipitous 1960s when vision far exceeded the rate of change provoked by the council. The reigning assumption at the time was that those who depart from church offices or protocols also depart from the faith.
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The truth may be that those who question are those who have a faith deep enough to care.
In that case, finding Charles Davis at Sunday Mass makes perfect sense. He is indeed a man of living faith and probing mind. His work has been a light to many across the years, challenging protocol and requiring faith of all of us.
The Promise of Critical Theology: Essays in Honour of Charles Davis, edited by Marc P. Lalonde, is described as a tribute to one of North America's most impressive religious thinkers.' Thinking, in fact, is Charles Davis, calling. In his 70s now and battling Parkinson's disease, Davis continues to work on the reconstruction of theological thought every day of his life, not because he does not love the faith but precisely because he knows that old answers to new questions fail to persuade in the presence of postmodern science, society and philosophy. Both the world and organized religion, he knows, are clearly in the process of reconstruction, but to what and out of what values and from what perspective is yet unclear.
He's working on that.
My interest in his attitudes and insights are derived from a different viewpoint. Seeing him at Mass, at the supper table, in lecture halls and in the small English row house with its tiny living room lined with books where he and his wife, Florence, an equally avid thinker, live in Cambridge, I wanted to know how he views and responds to the Catholic world at the present time. What does it look like to him now?
Thirty years after his public separation from the church as priest and theologian, what does Davis think about the church and its present directions? His answers were as straight and clear as his life would lead us to expect. No posturing, no dazzling, no masquerading. Just straight answers.
NCR. Thirty years ago, a renowned theologian and respected teacher, you removed yourself from the institutional definitions of the Roman Catholic church.
How would you describe what you did and why you did it and what would you say to someone considering a similar move today?
Davis: I would describe what I did as a protest against the imposition of the hierarchic structure of the church as being of divine law. This imposition is to ignore the development of democracy in modern societies and to insist upon an obsolete constitution of the church.
The reason I protested when I did is that I experienced in both my intellectual and pastoral activities a twofold corruption flowing from this obsolete concept of the church. The first corruption was the development over the centuries of what can be called "the institutional man." To give an example of the total indentification of a person with the institution: A member of the hierarchy agreed with me on the birth control issue but said that if the pope came out with a statement condemning birth control he would have to go on television and support the pope. This hierarch was not in the least concerned with the truth of the issue.
The second cause of corruption was the distortion created in the laity. They suffered an agonizing confusion, being caught in a conflict they could not solve. On the one hand, their conscience approved their actions; on the other hand, on a number of issues they found themselves in contradiction to the official teaching.
What about the situation of people today?
The situation has changed radically although not entirely. People today stand away from the church, they feel free to differ with the church in important matters such as contraception, women pries intercommunion. They can openly reject the official teaching without breaking with the church.
While I recognize there are some people, especially priests, who find them selves in a situation similar to mine there are many who can follow their conscience while remaining in the church. So, I could say that I have overemphasized the negative. What needs further discussion is a development of a genuine constitutional structure for a modern church. In the present day if one finds the institutional church weighs on one, taking away personal freedom, one simply leaves the priesthood, for example, and that is accepted and understood as a personal option by most Catholics. The community aspect of the church has become more important than an institutional regularity.
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