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press release, 1 Februari 2001
by Paul Collins
After thirty three years I have decided to resign as an
‘active’ priest to return to being an ordinary Catholic believer.
Many people will justifiably ask: why? The reason is simple: I can no longer
conscientiously subscribe to the policies and theological emphases coming from
the Vatican and other official church sources. While the reason is
straight-forward, the decision to resign is the result of a personal and
theological process. This, of course, is not a step that I have taken lightly
and I have been considering it for some time. I will try to outline the reasons
in detail.
The core of the problem is that, in my view, many in ecclesiastical
leadership at the highest level are actually moving in an increasingly
sectarian direction and watering down the catholicity of the church and even
unconsciously neglecting elements of it’s teaching. Since this word
‘catholicity’ will recur often I will define it. It is derived from
the Greek word ‘katholikos’ which means
‘general’,‘broad or ‘universal’. The Shorter Oxford
Dictionary defines ‘catholicity’ as ‘the quality of having
sympathies with or being all-embracing; broad-mindedness; tolerance’.
But ‘catholicity’ also has a profound theological meaning.
The recently appointed American Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ has a fine book
entitled The Catholicity of the Church (1988). Catholicity, he says, is
characterised by (1) inclusiveness, which means openness to various cultures
and opposition to sectarianism and religious individualism; (2) by an ability
to bridge generations and historical periods; (3) by an openness to truth and
value wherever it exists; (4) by a recognition that it is the Holy Spirit who
creates the unity of the church through whose indwelling we participate in the
life of God.
This is the kind of Catholicism that I, and many others, have embraced
throughout our lives. Its foundations, which are deeply embedded in church
history, were given modern expression in the vision of the church articulated
at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. For Catholics like myself our
benchmark is a church that is defined as the living sacrament of God’s
presence and the place where God’s sovereignty is acknowledged, expressed
through a participative community of people dedicated to the service of the
world and characterised by collegiality and ecumenism. It is precisely this
image of Catholicism which I think is being distorted by many at the highest
level in the contemporary church. I increasingly feel that being a priest
places me in the position of co-operating with structures that are destructive
of that open vision of Catholicism and of the faith of the people who have
embraced it. If I am to be true to my conscience, resignation seems the only
option.
The fact that we are retreating from the Vatican II vision of
Catholicism may not be everyone’s view of what is actually taking place in
the church. I accept that, and I also accept that the tension between a broad,
open vision of Catholicism rooted in living experience, and a narrower, static
hierarchical view of faith, runs right through church history. It is my
perception that at present many in the hierarchy and some laity are moving
increasingly in this narrow, elitist direction. Over the last few years I have
watched with escalating concern as a series of documents have been published by
the Vatican, the last of which was the declaration of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Jesus (DJ), issued on 6 August 2000. DJ, which
claims to protect the uniqueness of Christ, in fact expresses a profoundly
anti-ecumenical spirit at odds with the sense of God’s grace permeating
the whole cosmos. DJ gives voice to a wider movement that is slowly but
pervasively turning the Catholic church inward in an increasingly sectarian
direction. It is this which concerns me most.
Sectarianism is incompatible with genuine catholicity. It is the
antithesis of the kind of openness to the world, tolerant acceptance of others
and a sense of religious pluralism that most thinking Catholics have been
formed in and have embraced over the last three or four decades. Thus many
Catholics find themselves involved in a corrosive disjunction between what they
believe and have experienced, and the views expressed at the highest levels of
the church. The reason is because those who claim to articulate Catholic belief
seem to be abandoning their ‘catholic’ spirit. As a result there is a
turning away from the other Christian churches, and a rejection of the search
for common ground with the other great religious traditions. Thus more and more
thinking Catholics who have been educated and live in pluralist, democratic and
tolerant societies, find themselves in conflict with church hierarchs who seem
to be moving in an ever-more sectarian direction.
Some times there is a hankering after a more genuinely Catholic
approach - as you find in John Paul II’s encyclical Ut unum sint (1995),
where he went so far as to ask the other churches for advice on papal primacy.
But ecclesiastical reality indicates that this hankering is, in fact, merely
ecumenical wishful- thinking, while the hierarchical reality is
exclusivist.
There have also been regular attempts to ‘muzzle’ and condemn
the discussion of issues such as the ordination of women through the use of a
new category of doctrine. This has received its clearest expression in the
apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem (30 June 1998). The letter argues that there
is an intermediary, ‘second-level’ of revealed doctrine between the
established and defined teaching that all Catholics believe, and what up until
now has been called the ‘ordinary magisterium’. Before the
introduction of this so-called ‘second-level’, all non-infallible or
non-defined teaching was exactly that: doctrine that should be respected and
offered various levels of submission of mind and will, but still ultimately
open to debate, discussion and development within the Church community.
What Ad Tuendam Fidem has done is to introduce formally through this
‘second-level’ a category of ‘definitive’ but
non-infallibly-defined doctrine. Cardinal Josef Ratzinger says that this
second-level teaching is, in fact, infallible. He says that it includes
‘... all those teachings in the dogmatic or moral area which are necessary
for faithfully keeping and expounding the deposit of faith, even if they have
not been proposed by the magisterium as formally revealed’. As examples of
second-level definitive teaching he includes the condemnation of euthanasia,
the validity of the canonization of a particular saint, the legitimacy of a
papal election, and even the invalidity of Anglican orders. The gratuitous
reference to ‘Anglican orders’ is astonishingly maladroit and
insulting; it reveals a real lack of ecumenical sensitivity.
There is also an emerging unspoken assumption among some very senior
church leaders that the contemporary western world is so far gone in
individualism, permissiveness and consumerism that it is totally impervious to
church teaching. Claiming to assume the broader historical perspective, these
churchmen have virtually abandoned the secularised masses, to nurture elitist
enclaves which will carry the true faith through to future, more
‘receptive’ generations. This is why the New Religious Movements
(NRMs) have received so much favour and patronage in this papacy. The NRMs have
embraced an essentially sectarian vision of Catholicism, are very hierarchical
in structure and theologically reactionary. This is true of some elements in
the Catholic charismatic movement, and also outfits like Opus Dei, Communion
and Liberation, the Neo-Catechuminate and the Legionaries of Christ, as well as
a number of other smaller, less significant groupings.
Over the years my public disquiet with increasing papal centralism and
the erosion of the vision of a more ecumenical Catholicism is well known,
especially in Australia. I have often been critical of the church’s
leadership, perhaps too harshly at times, in books, broadcasts, talks and
articles. I have been concerned with ecclesiastical narrowness and the de facto
denial of catholicity. But I also constantly argued that it was only by
‘staying in’ the priesthood that someone like myself could influence
things and bring about change. But it was always an every-day decision to
continue the struggle through the internal structures of the church. And there
can come a moment when you decide that both conscientiously and strategically
‘staying in’ no longer remains a viable or honest option. You realise
that you can no longer collude in what is happening by remaining in the
official priesthood.
While important, life-changing decisions may seem sudden to outsiders,
and even some times to the person who makes them, that is rarely the case. Such
conclusions are more likely to be the product of long unconscious reflection on
an issue. Slowly the connections, inferences and directional movement in which
the internal and unarticulated argument has been progressing comes into
consciousness. Often it will be a single event that focusses your thought and
impels you toward a decision. Suddenly you realise that, in conscience, you can
no longer allow your name to be associated with what is happening. Of course,
your judgement may be wrong, frighteningly so, but the Catholic tradition has
always been that you must follow even an erroneous conscience. Certainly you
must do everything you can to ascertain what is really happening and what your
obligations are, but in the end you must be true to conscience.
What helped to focus my mind was the article ‘Catholic
Fundamentalism. Some Implications of Dominus Jesus for Dialogue and
Peacemaking’ by my friend, John D’Arcy May. [The article is one of a
series of essays in the book, Dominus Jesus. Anstoessige Wahrheit oder
anstoessige Kirche edited by Michael Rainer]. DJ is primarily directed against
those Catholics involved in the ‘wider ecumenism’ who have been
trying to find common ground with the great non-Christian religious traditions.
But DJ also managed to offend many Anglicans and Protestants through an
awkwardly-worded passage that was so obscure that many journalists incorrectly
took it to mean that only Catholics could be saved. The passage actually says
that Anglicanism and the various forms of Protestantism ‘are not churches
in the proper sense’(DJ, Paragraph 17).
It was the opening sentences of May’s commentary that struck me
between the eyes. "There is no reason, in principle, why the Roman Catholic
church, despite its enormous size and global presence, could not become a sect.
Sectarianism is a matter of mentality, not size ... The deep shock Dominus
Jesus caused in ecumenical circles consisted precisely in their exposure to the
specifically Roman Catholic form of fundamentalism". This put into words what I
had unconsciously concluded but had not articulated.
It is precisely this movement in a sectarian and fundamentalist
direction with which I profoundly disagree. A person with a public commitment
like a priest is bound in conscience to ask: ‘Can I continue to co-operate
with this kind of regime in the church?’ I feel bound in all honesty to
say now: ‘No. I cannot’. But I emphasise this does not mean that I
have the slightest intention of leaving the community of the Catholic church,
nor of abandoning my work in writing and media, as long as that is available to
me.
But there is also a second constellation of reasons that have led to my
resignation. They centre around the book Papal Power (1997) which is currently
being examined by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), that
part of the papal bureaucracy that deals with Catholic belief. I have
consistently tried to keep this so-called ‘examination’ in
perspective and have not treated it too seriously. However, it is clear to me
that the CDF is moving toward an escalation of the issue. This inevitably
involves other people. The CDF demands that all correspondence with me pass
through a third party, the Superior General of my religious order, the
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSCs). This means that my superiors and the
order will be caught in any cross-fire between the CDF and myself. I do not
wish to put them in this position.
On 14 December 2000 the current Superior General of the MSCs, Father
Michael Curran, was summoned to a meeting in the Palazzo of the Holy Office in
the Vatican. This meeting happened totally without my knowledge and I only
found out about it five weeks later. At the meeting Father Curran was asked why
I had not responded to three issues raised in a letter from the CDF sent to me
via Curran and my Australian superior in April 1999. He responded by providing
the CDF with an article I had written in a theological magazine called Compass
responding to the CDF’s concerns. He felt the article ‘would go a
long way to answering’ the CDF’s questions. In the course of the
discussion reference was also made to a mildly critical media statement about
the CDF that I had made, which was briefly reported in the US National Catholic
Reporter (16 July 1999).
Ratzinger claimed in a subsequent letter to Curran (18 December 2000)
that my critical comments ‘may put [my] alleged adherence to magisterial
teaching in question’. In other words, even if my theological answers in
the Compass article were found to be satisfactory, the comments in the NCR
would show that I had not really repented because I was still criticising the
CDF after writing the Compass article.
However, the Cardinal’s chronology was wrong. His comments make it
clear that he believes that the NCR interview was published after the Compass
article. In fact, the 16 July, 1999 NCR interview was published several months
before the spring 1999 edition of Compass. I suppose you could forgive the
Cardinal for not remembering that spring in the southern hemisphere comes in
September-October, and not in April-May as in the northern hemisphere. The
Compass interview was published in the southern spring of 1999, which was
October-November. That is some three or four months after the July NCR
article.
Be that as it may, the whole tone of Ratzinger’s letter to Curran
makes it obvious that the CDF is preparing to censure me because the
Cardinal’s comments clearly prejudge the issue. The constant difficulty in
dealing with the CDF is that your accusers are also your judges. An accused
person is not even allowed to choose their own defence counsel; they are not
even permitted to know the counsel’s name.
This situation with the CDF will be exacerbated even more when a new
book that I have edited is published in March in Australia and in the northern
spring of 2001 in London and New York. It is entitled From Inquisition to
Freedom. It consists of interviews that I put together with six people who
have also been ‘investigated’ by the CDF. Those participating in it
are Tissa Balasuriya, Hans Küng, Charles Curran, Lavinia Byrne, Jeannine
Gramick, and Robert Nugent, as well as myself. I have contributed two other
essays, the first outlining the history of how the Roman Inquisition eventually
evolved into the CDF, and a second describing and critiquing the details of the
Congregation’s procedures. While the tone of the book is respectful and
moderate, I don’t think it will win friends and influence people in Rome.
I foresee considerable problems. The most important of these are that the book
will eventually place Father Curran particularly, and the MSCs generally, in
the likely position of being forced by the CDF to take some form of punitive
action against me.
I have no doubt that the Congregation will not go away, and that they
will not let this matter rest. As the experience of the six other people in the
new book makes abundantly clear, there is never any form of dialogue. The
Congregation simply demands that a person not only submit to what they define
as ‘doctrine’, but they are determined that you actually use the
words that they dictate. I knew exactly what I was doing when I edited From
Inquisition to Freedom, but I thought it was important these stories be told
for they expose the injustice of the CDF’s procedures and their
persecution of people who are clearly concerned to live a truly Catholic life
and to give ministerial and theological leadership to others. But there is also
no doubt that the book will lead to a further exacerbation of my relationship
with the CDF, and that the order and Father Curran will be caught in the
middle. My resignation will to some extent save them from that.
Finally, I want to make it absolutely clear that my resignation does
not mean that I have any intention whatsoever of leaving the Catholic church. I
am just changing status in the family. Catholicism is my home and I have no
intention of leaving - come what may.
Paul Collins, 1 February, 2001.
See also: ‘Resignation from the
priestly ministry’ by John Wijngaards, press release, 17 September
1998.
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