Catalyst for Renewal

Seeking truth and renewal through conversation

Robert Blair Kaiser Forum

Friday 4th July 2008 - Sydney

CHURCH IN  CLERICAL STRANGLEHOLD

 Catholics around the world, including in Australia , should take back their church from a

clerical stranglehold that had been tightening up for a thousand years, American author and religious commentator Robert Blair Kaiser said in Sydney last month. 

 Kaiser, who was speaking at a forum arranged by Catalyst for Renewal, said he was working hard in the United States for an autochthonous—“homegrown”—Catholic church similar to that of the Meccanites, Melanites and 18 other eastern rites churches that “have their own quality, their own clergy--some married, some unmarried—their own liturgy, their own language, their own culture” and functioned independently yet in communion with Rome.  He saw this as a model for Catholics in other countries where the church was in crisis because of diminishing numbers of priests and declining Mass attendance.

 The concept of an autochthonous church is a theme in Kaiser’s just-published book Cardinal Mahony—a Novel.  Kaiser has written widely on Catholic church matters, both as an author and a journalist, for many years.  Two previous books, A Church in Search of Itself and Benedict XVII and the Battle for the Future both sold well.

 The Catalyst forum took the form of an interview of Kaiser by the ABC National Radio religion presenter Stephen Crittenden after which there was a period of questions and discussion. 

 During the interview, Kaiser expressed dismay at the Church’s attempt to thwart Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s recent tour of the United States to promote his controversial book Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church.  He hoped, he said, that Robinson’s “standing up will lead to the Australian bishops banding together and saying to Rome , ‘Stop trying to micro-manage the church in Australia .  We are going to do it ourselves in Australia .  We will still be in the draw but we don’t need Rome to be telling Bishop Geoffrey Robinson or the Australian bishops that he is a heretic because he dared to criticise John Paul II over the sexual abuse scandal.”

 Kaiser said every place in America where Robinson spoke was booked out. “The people there were Catholics who I imagine were just like the people here tonight,” he said.

“Bishop Robinson said things that they had been saying themselves for years and finally they were hearing a bishop saying them.  So it was very powerful for them.  We in America love our bishops and respect our bishops especially when they are listening bishops and serving bishops who are there to tell the truth instead of covering up.”

 As a Time Magazine journalist, Kaiser reported on Vatican II.  He said he was so thrilled to cover the council in those “four shining years” that “if Time Magazine hadn’t paid me I would have paid Time to be there, to hear it and to be a part of it. 

 “We had free speech in the church for the first time in history and then after the council they clamped down and we don’t have free speech,” he said.  “When Geoff Robinson has to be accused of heresy for exercising free speech then that is an indication that we don’t have free speech in the church today.”

 Referring to World Youth Day, Kaiser described it as “a show” designed to demonstrate by “the music, the processions, the costuming and the stateliness of it all the holiness of the Pope and therefore the holiness of the church.”  It gave the Pope and the institutional church a lot of power and encouraged Catholics to believe everything the Pope said. “We climb into that; the pope is a demigod; everything he says must be true and therefore we must believe it and must pray, pay and obey. 

 “We have to capture our own voice, we have to seize our voice, we must demand ownership in our church—and citizenship.  That’s a word that we never hear in our church, we always use the word negatively and when we do we are automatically acquiescing that we are second-class citizens.  Geoffrey Robinson said quite appropriately in his book, ‘What does the word citizen mean?’  He said it implied accountability of those who serve us.  I go back to Luke 22 where Jesus told the Apostles, ‘I have given you a new kind of authority, not the authority that kings and princes enjoy but an authority of service not of domination.’  The church has turned that upside down.”

 During the interview, Kaiser criticised the “lord and master” attitude adopted by some clergy to the Catholic laity.  “I can’t speak for Australia ,” he said, “but I know that in the United States most of the bishops are totally unapproachable.  I can’t get my own bishop on the telephone and neither can any of his priests for that matter.  He is not a servant cleric at all, he has a lord and master attitude and if you don’t enjoy what he is doing to heck with you.

 “The church has become more clerical not less since Vatican II.  It is not the people’s church that the council wanted. At the same time in Denver where I come from we know a lot of priests who are very unclerical; they are open, they are responsive, they are caring, they work their fingers to the bone and if they are needed they are available any time of the day or night; these are great priests but there are not enough of them.  Too many priests are out of touch with the real world of their parishioners and are not willing to listen.  Their attitude is ‘we know better’. 

 “Post Vatican II, the high and mighty in Rome tried to bully us by confusing faith and morals.   They implied that if we did not honour Humanae Vitae [the encyclical confirming the church’s prohibition of artificial birth control] we were in heresy; that we were not faithful Catholics because we didn’t believe anymore.  

 “Faith and morals are two different things.  The theory of morals is really the reasoned application of the natural law, the primary law which says what is evil.  With birth control, the church issued a decree in 1968 and if people can’t work it out maybe it isn’t reasonable,   The Pope said that artificial birth control was an intrinsic evil.  The fact is that if artificial birth control is moral we don’t need the Pope’s permission to use it.  If it is immoral the Pope can’t give permission.”

 Crittenden spoke of a friend who argued that the problem for the world of the church, not just the Catholic church but also the Anglican church as well as other institutions, was that centrifugal forces were pulling the continents apart.  “That to some extent,” he remarked to Kaiser, “is your autochthonous church.  That may be part of what the post modern world is about: the centre no longer holds. 

 There was an old Catholic phrase, Kaiser responded, that was both social and biblical that “you don’t do anything at a higher level that you can do at a lower level.”  [In Australia] down at the lower level where the people were they were likely to think that “better decisions were made by people who knew what is happening in Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane and so forth than at the top where they really don’t know what is happening.”