The Church in the Age of the Holy Spirit

Cross Currents, Spring-Summer, 2000 by JOHN J. McNEILL

The Church authorities do not know what God wants of us.

A prophetic Cistercian Abbot in Italy named Joachim of Flores foresaw in the early thirteenth century the total transformation of the Catholic Church and a new form of spiritual life in which the Holy Spirit would speak directly to the human heart without ecclesiastical mediation. He believed that there is a sequence of historic stages in the Trinitarian God's self-revelation over time. The first stage of that self-revelation was the stage of the Father, the law of Moses, and the people of Israel. The second was the stage of the Son, the New Testament, and the Church. He said the third will be the age of the Holy Spirit, when the Church "becoming superfluous would in time dissolve."

I think that this third stage is what is going on in the Church today. I don't see the Church dissolving, but I do see its being transformed into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a purely democratic Church. The task of anyone who has a leadership position in the Church of the Holy Spirit is to listen, just listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying through the people of God.

The most important message of the Holy Spirit for today's Church has to do with the development of mature spirituality based on freedom of conscience and discernment of Spirits. How can we develop a mature spiritual life? I want to put the emphasis on mature because as I see it the Church is twenty going on twenty one, which is the age of maturity. The issue is not just our individual growth to maturity; but the development of humanity and the Church into a mature stage. The possibility is opening up of a real spiritual maturity for every human being on the face of the earth.

It is important for us to understand what that maturity is and in what direction things have to move. A healthy maturing process is one by which we separate from all dependence on external authority and achieve genuine authenticity as autonomous human beings. We must make our own choices and take responsibility for those choices. None of us should any longer be what I call "Eichmann Christians." You remember that in his trial Eichmann argued that he was brought up to be a good Lutheran whose primary responsibility was to obey authority. Legitimate authority ordered him to put all those Jews in the gas ovens. As a good Christian he obeyed. That was his defense.

The authentic Christian message is that God speaks to you directly and immediately in your own experience. You must discern what God is saying to you and take total responsibility for your own actions You can't put them off on any external authority. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux observed that the "spiritual life is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own personal spiritual experience. In spiritual life everyone has to drink from his or her own well." The first mark then, of a healthy adult spiritual life is that it will be based primarily on personal experience. People used to live their spiritual lives in a community where everything was decided for them; all they had to do was obey and conform. Viktor Frankl argues in his book, Flight from Freedom, that many people fear the responsibility of freedom and would gladly give up their freedom for the security of a provident leader. Paul in Galatians 5:1 urges us: "For freedom Christ has set us free, Stand firm, therefore, and do not subm it again to a yoke of slavery." More than thirty years ago, Karl Rahner wrote that all the normal supports of Christian faith are fast going away and unless Christians based their faith on personal experience, on a "mystical" experience of the presence of God, there would be no Christians at all.

As children we had to obey mother and father. We were under authority and it was legitimate to obey it. But when we mature, that stance is no longer legitimate. We can no longer base our lives on extrinsic authority. We have to base them on our own personal experience. We become aware that if our parents had been infallible we could never have matured to be autonomous and responsible adults. We would never have been able to develop our capacity for independent judgment and, consequently, would never feel personal responsibility for our actions. We had to distance ourselves from their authority and make our own choices. This was part of our growing up. God blessed us with fallible parents so that we could mature.

Now God has blessed us Roman Catholics with fallible Church authority. There is the blessing of fallibility. In recent years, when the Church tried to give orders to the whole Church, it frequently fell flat on its face. It refuses to listen and, as the saying goes, just doesn't get it. The Holy Spirit, I believe, is very much involved in this situation, and the result is that fewer and fewer people listen to the Church. It has diminished its moral authority. For example, the Church authorities say that artificial birth control is a serious sin. A committee was set up and after listening to the laity the committee advised the pope and the Vatican that they should change this teaching. Rome refused to listen to what the Holy Spirit was saying through the people of God, and now 90 to 95 percent of the faithful practice artificial birth control in good conscience. When the American bishops decided to write a letter on the role of women in the Church, they set up listening sessions for women all over the U.S.A. They produced an excellent letter based on the results of those sessions. The Vatican returned the letter to the American hierarchy with the statement: You misunderstood your task! Your task is to teach, not to listen!