It Is Telling...

...that the Roman church recognized the distinction between traditional society and modern society in the 1960’s. Some tried to proactively lead the Church into modernity as witnessed by, The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern Era, commonly referred to as Vatican II. We were a part of a doctoral seminar that grew out of this document and that focused on nurturing dialogue among Christian denominations in the early 1980's. But the Catholic Church has never progressed beyond its continued clinging to traditional roles. By the 1990's dialogue had essentially ceased, and then reversed. Today diocesan hostilities toward other Christian denominations are prevalent where we live. Ongoing clericalism, to which innumerable laity also still subscribe, demonstrates the failure of Catholicism to recognize the distinctive of the God-given value of each individual within the body of Christ. This clericalism also even refuses to allow for the distinctives of expression even found in the practises of other traditional cultures that intersect traditional European Catholicism. There are simply too many in the magisterium who cannot accept the modern understanding of the person and in so doing work to protect a socially defined egotism that is severely out of step with the rest of the world's progress into modernity. And there are too many lay people who have not been educated about their true selves, or who are for any number of reasons uncomfortable with the notion that they have an identity outside of these roles. And this is not unique to Catholicism, because the church overall is dying as a direct result of the isolation it is imposing upon its members as it refuses to come of age psychologically, as it would if it was simply open to honouring the human person as we indeed exist as gifted, unique beings and not as people who are cut out to be something other than who we are. This is by no means contrary to the Word, but it is contrary to the prescribed, damaging, and imprisoning roles that keep people subservient to traditional hegemonic structures of administrative institutional religious power.

It is interesting that there is a distinctly modern understanding of the person contained in primitive, contemplative Christianity. This statement is not ideological fodder; it is a fact proven out in the written record of the lives of innumerable Christians who sought to live lives of direct experience with God in the fourth and fifth centuries, and which was blessed by the church at the time. But today what they wrote and how they lived is all but ignored, erased, and excorated by the church. The institution has sought to tame this Spirit of direct intercourse by subtly subsuming it, which is no doubt done out of fear of losing control.