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The RC hierarchy in Ontario is getting more thoroughly involved in the tussle over Gay/Straight Alliances (see ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rfmcdpei's post for the general background). What I find interesting from a more general perspective is what this type of reaction indicates about the shifting of the RCs on the church - sect spectrum.
The Church of Rome has, for about a thousand years, give or take a few centuries[1] identified itself as "the Church", with some vague accommodations regarding the Eastern Orthodox and a detailed theory of church-like bodies coming out of the Reformation. Since the days of Theodosius it has (until recently) also assumed itself (at least in theory) to be coterminous with society -- a church in Troeltsch's classification. There have been irregularities locally -- e.g. the situation in England prior to the "late Roman aggression" where there was no local hierarchy and where the C of E made the same assumptions but only locally -- but broadly speaking the two positions have coexisted hand in hand.
It continues to hold the first position: the relative thawing of oecumenical relations after Vatican II were accompanied by a clear delineation of the traditional view in the Council documents, restated in Dominus Iesus from the Sacred Congregation of the Faith in 2000. However, especially since the accession of Benedict to the papacy, it's possible to argue that it is moving deliberately in the direction of a remnant theology-driven view of the position of the church in (Western) society. It would like to be coterminous with society, and sees itself as the guardian of universal ethical values on which it has a duty to speak out, but much of Benedict's agenda can be seen as adjustments to make the distinction between inside and outside starker. Effectively, it is deliberately taking on more of the sociological shape of a sect and less that of a church.
Put simply, Benedict's approach involves a willingness to pay the price of losing adherents in favour of protecting its doctrine and structure.[2] The upper hierarchy would like to eliminate "cafeteria Catholicism". Of course, the closer to the ground you get the priests and bishops also want to retain the resources which come from larger congregations, so there has been a lot of a sort of DADT attitude at the ground level towards dissenting views on women's orders, female participation in the liturgy as lay ministers, divorce, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality (all areas where the divergence between Catholic doctrine and popular practice is particularly marked[3]) as long as they are kept relatively private. (This has been accompanied by a considerable relaxation in the principle that anyone receiving communion should go to confession immediately before the eucharist, and a tendency not to ask about certain areas of opinion which a penitent might not mention in the confessional.) There has been increasing pressure, however, to enforce greater conformity in all of these matters, as well as liturgical distinctiveness[4]. Ecumenical dialogue has also become less fluid and more take-it-or-leave-it.
You might expect this to lead to large-scale defections. From where I stand, it looks very much as though the fact that there hasn't been a mass schism in western Europe and North America as a sort of delayed Modernist controversy is due to the increase in a personal, almost fetishistic, devotion to the papacy over the last thirty years or so. Most of the people I know who have left the RCs formally (as opposed to lapsing) have done so either as a reaction to the administrative -- not doctrinal -- catastrophic mishandling of abuse issues by the hierarchy, which is a very different issue (there are complicated connections involving the RC desire to be autonomous, but this is shared by many other ecclesial and non-ecclesial bodies (e.g. Boy Scouts and many school boards) which all seem to share the knee-jerk reaction of trying to manage abuse issues internally to avoid scandal), or because they are GL (usually not BTQ), feel personally excluded by the RCs, and now find other groups (Anglicans, notably) to be gay-friendly in a way which they were not a generation ago. There has been no large-scale breakaway along the lines of the Old Catholics in 1870.
The shift in the direction of sect is a long way from complete, though. The hierarchy (and many of the laity) still want / assume the benefits of churchiness while pushing in the direction of sectiness. The consistent thing for Cardinal Archbishop Collins to push for would be the severing of ties between the province and the Catholic board system. If you want to erect limina between the inside and the outside then it's a good idea to render yourselves as independent of the outside as possible. But just as the low-level handling of cafeteria Catholicism has been grudging and slow, nobody in the hierarchy wants to jeopardize the substantial flow of funds which supports the Catholic Board system. It's a complicated dance (after all, there's also a significant component of Catholic school supporters who support the GSA legislation, including the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association) which becomes less tenable the more firmly delimited the gap between society as a whole and the Church of Rome becomes.
[1]It's actually rather hard to pin down, because the only reference point is the Eastern church (the Oriental Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian churches, largely Syriac-speaking, were effectively invisible to the West (except for the Armenians) during much of the period, and certainly didn't bulk large in ecumenical discussions), and even at the beginning of the Great Schism it's not really clear how the two sides viewed each other. I think it's fair to say that by the thirteenth century or so Roman ecclesiology simply assumed that it was the church as such (conveniently ignoring the East whenever possible), and that prior to about the eighth century formulating the idea of the Latin-speaking church as "the church" would have been ludicrous to just about anyone -- plus there's the fact that as long as East and West were in communion the issues just didn't arise. The fully developed set of distinctions don't appear until Trent, but they were implicit a long time before.
[2] The giveaway is where it is structure and not doctrine which is involved, principally on matters of order. There is nothing doctrinal preventing the Western Rite church from allowing married priests or from having women as lay eucharistic ministers, but the hierarchy has set its face firmly against both (well, except for married ex-Anglicans, which are a narrow special case, and which much of the ordinary hierarchy dislikes in any case).
[3] The convergence of all of these issues together is a mark of conservative protestantism as well, but evangelical and antinomian protestantism has always had a more sect-like set of traits. The convergence -- tending towards treating these disparate[5] issues as one big issue -- becomes especially disconcerting when publications which are supposedly single-issue (on abortion, usually) also are vocal about contraception and gay rights. (After all, in principle it would make sense for anti-abortion activists to be wildly in favour of contraception, as effective contraception ought to render abortion much rarer.)
[4]The introduction of the new translation of the missal is interesting here: it really adds nothing new and (from where I stand) it's a better representation of what was there in the normative rite. But it was hotly resisted and even more firmly imposed in part because it sets the space of worship more firmly apart from the secular, by retaining a different level of formality of language. It's not Latin or Old Church Slavonic, or even Cranmer, but it marks off the RC rite as different and distinct. (The ICET language was not only less formal, it had also been adopted by everyone and his/her sibling.)
[5] Theologically, there's a tight connection between the opposition to contraception and the opposition to homosexuality, but issues with women's orders (for conservative protestants, the presence of women in positions of authority in ministry), divorce (the RC position is quite different from that of the Eastern Orthodox here, for example), and abortion are all distinct issues. Socially, they have become the bundle of values that is, de facto, the defining set of shibboleths for social conservatives.
rfmcdpei's post for the general background). What I find interesting from a more general perspective is what this type of reaction indicates about the shifting of the RCs on the church - sect spectrum.The Church of Rome has, for about a thousand years, give or take a few centuries[1] identified itself as "the Church", with some vague accommodations regarding the Eastern Orthodox and a detailed theory of church-like bodies coming out of the Reformation. Since the days of Theodosius it has (until recently) also assumed itself (at least in theory) to be coterminous with society -- a church in Troeltsch's classification. There have been irregularities locally -- e.g. the situation in England prior to the "late Roman aggression" where there was no local hierarchy and where the C of E made the same assumptions but only locally -- but broadly speaking the two positions have coexisted hand in hand.
It continues to hold the first position: the relative thawing of oecumenical relations after Vatican II were accompanied by a clear delineation of the traditional view in the Council documents, restated in Dominus Iesus from the Sacred Congregation of the Faith in 2000. However, especially since the accession of Benedict to the papacy, it's possible to argue that it is moving deliberately in the direction of a remnant theology-driven view of the position of the church in (Western) society. It would like to be coterminous with society, and sees itself as the guardian of universal ethical values on which it has a duty to speak out, but much of Benedict's agenda can be seen as adjustments to make the distinction between inside and outside starker. Effectively, it is deliberately taking on more of the sociological shape of a sect and less that of a church.
Put simply, Benedict's approach involves a willingness to pay the price of losing adherents in favour of protecting its doctrine and structure.[2] The upper hierarchy would like to eliminate "cafeteria Catholicism". Of course, the closer to the ground you get the priests and bishops also want to retain the resources which come from larger congregations, so there has been a lot of a sort of DADT attitude at the ground level towards dissenting views on women's orders, female participation in the liturgy as lay ministers, divorce, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality (all areas where the divergence between Catholic doctrine and popular practice is particularly marked[3]) as long as they are kept relatively private. (This has been accompanied by a considerable relaxation in the principle that anyone receiving communion should go to confession immediately before the eucharist, and a tendency not to ask about certain areas of opinion which a penitent might not mention in the confessional.) There has been increasing pressure, however, to enforce greater conformity in all of these matters, as well as liturgical distinctiveness[4]. Ecumenical dialogue has also become less fluid and more take-it-or-leave-it.
You might expect this to lead to large-scale defections. From where I stand, it looks very much as though the fact that there hasn't been a mass schism in western Europe and North America as a sort of delayed Modernist controversy is due to the increase in a personal, almost fetishistic, devotion to the papacy over the last thirty years or so. Most of the people I know who have left the RCs formally (as opposed to lapsing) have done so either as a reaction to the administrative -- not doctrinal -- catastrophic mishandling of abuse issues by the hierarchy, which is a very different issue (there are complicated connections involving the RC desire to be autonomous, but this is shared by many other ecclesial and non-ecclesial bodies (e.g. Boy Scouts and many school boards) which all seem to share the knee-jerk reaction of trying to manage abuse issues internally to avoid scandal), or because they are GL (usually not BTQ), feel personally excluded by the RCs, and now find other groups (Anglicans, notably) to be gay-friendly in a way which they were not a generation ago. There has been no large-scale breakaway along the lines of the Old Catholics in 1870.
The shift in the direction of sect is a long way from complete, though. The hierarchy (and many of the laity) still want / assume the benefits of churchiness while pushing in the direction of sectiness. The consistent thing for Cardinal Archbishop Collins to push for would be the severing of ties between the province and the Catholic board system. If you want to erect limina between the inside and the outside then it's a good idea to render yourselves as independent of the outside as possible. But just as the low-level handling of cafeteria Catholicism has been grudging and slow, nobody in the hierarchy wants to jeopardize the substantial flow of funds which supports the Catholic Board system. It's a complicated dance (after all, there's also a significant component of Catholic school supporters who support the GSA legislation, including the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association) which becomes less tenable the more firmly delimited the gap between society as a whole and the Church of Rome becomes.
[1]It's actually rather hard to pin down, because the only reference point is the Eastern church (the Oriental Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian churches, largely Syriac-speaking, were effectively invisible to the West (except for the Armenians) during much of the period, and certainly didn't bulk large in ecumenical discussions), and even at the beginning of the Great Schism it's not really clear how the two sides viewed each other. I think it's fair to say that by the thirteenth century or so Roman ecclesiology simply assumed that it was the church as such (conveniently ignoring the East whenever possible), and that prior to about the eighth century formulating the idea of the Latin-speaking church as "the church" would have been ludicrous to just about anyone -- plus there's the fact that as long as East and West were in communion the issues just didn't arise. The fully developed set of distinctions don't appear until Trent, but they were implicit a long time before.
[2] The giveaway is where it is structure and not doctrine which is involved, principally on matters of order. There is nothing doctrinal preventing the Western Rite church from allowing married priests or from having women as lay eucharistic ministers, but the hierarchy has set its face firmly against both (well, except for married ex-Anglicans, which are a narrow special case, and which much of the ordinary hierarchy dislikes in any case).
[3] The convergence of all of these issues together is a mark of conservative protestantism as well, but evangelical and antinomian protestantism has always had a more sect-like set of traits. The convergence -- tending towards treating these disparate[5] issues as one big issue -- becomes especially disconcerting when publications which are supposedly single-issue (on abortion, usually) also are vocal about contraception and gay rights. (After all, in principle it would make sense for anti-abortion activists to be wildly in favour of contraception, as effective contraception ought to render abortion much rarer.)
[4]The introduction of the new translation of the missal is interesting here: it really adds nothing new and (from where I stand) it's a better representation of what was there in the normative rite. But it was hotly resisted and even more firmly imposed in part because it sets the space of worship more firmly apart from the secular, by retaining a different level of formality of language. It's not Latin or Old Church Slavonic, or even Cranmer, but it marks off the RC rite as different and distinct. (The ICET language was not only less formal, it had also been adopted by everyone and his/her sibling.)
[5] Theologically, there's a tight connection between the opposition to contraception and the opposition to homosexuality, but issues with women's orders (for conservative protestants, the presence of women in positions of authority in ministry), divorce (the RC position is quite different from that of the Eastern Orthodox here, for example), and abortion are all distinct issues. Socially, they have become the bundle of values that is, de facto, the defining set of shibboleths for social conservatives.
