This is a slightly abridged version of a talk I gave to the 2005 Quest Annual Conference held in Liverpool. The theme of the Quest Conference was ‘Our Place as Equals’. Quest is a group for lesbian and gay Catholics. It has a network of local groups across the country which meet regularly for Mass, discussion and social events. Quest believes that the Church could do more to provide welcome and support to lesbian and gay Catholics, both nationally and within parishes. I was impressed by the fact that Quest was one of the few Catholic organisations which marked the 25th Anniversary of the National Pastoral Congress (NPC). Liverpool was a natural venue since the NPC took place there. No doubt my having been a participant influenced their inviting me to be one of their speakers. Because Quest members felt somewhat on the margins of the Church, collaborative ministry was a very appropriate theme, especially since it had been such a major topic at the NCP. Because Quest is a group for lesbian and gay Catholics, it is appropriate to add as an Appendix the text of a short letter on the spirituality of gay and lesbian relationships which I wrote to the Tablet (13 February 2010). That letter gives a brief account of where I now stand on the issue of gay and lesbian relationships. A much fuller treatment is found in my book, NDSE, especially chapter four, ‘Sexual Ethics – Denying the Good News to Gay Men and Lesbian Women.’
Introduction
Let me begin with a few words about the National Pastoral Congress – as seen by one who was there. It took place over the long Bank Holiday weekend in May 1980. 2115 Catholics came from all over the country, including forty-two bishops, 255 clergy and 150 religious. That meant, in fact, that the vast majority attending were lay men and women – 1568 in all. I have a memory of Archbishop Worlock preaching at a preparatory Mass for the Liverpool delegates a few months beforehand and stating very bluntly: ‘People have often said to me, “Aren’t you nervous at inviting so many lay people together to express their views openly and honestly?” and I always reply: “Don’t you believe in the Holy Spirit in the Church?”‘
Enormous efforts were put into the preparation for the Congress at diocesan, deanery and parish level in all the dioceses. In each parish meetings were held, giving people the chance to raise whatever topics they wished and express their frank and honest views on them. Over 20,000 replies were received and more than 100,000 people took part in this preparatory process. This process provided the agenda for the Congress. Participants came as delegates, not just nominal representatives, of their parishes and dioceses.
A fascinating summary of the diocesan reports drawn from these parish discussions fills nearly fifty pages of the volume, Liverpool 1980: Official Report of the National Pastoral Congress (St Paul Publications, Slough, 1981), which gives the proceedings of the whole Congress. The full text of this summary was given to each of the more than 2000 delegates before Congress. The Congress itself met in seven sectors, each devoted to one of the main themes coming from the grass-roots consultation – 1. Co-responsibility and relationships; 2. Ordained ministries; 3. Family and society; 4. Evangelisation; 5. Christian education and formation; 6. Witness; and 7. Justice.
A precious seam of gold in the Liverpool 1980 volume is the very full report of the group discussions in each of the seven sectors and the final report which was voted on and approved by everyone in each sector. In the course of the whole Congress only twice did the whole entire group of delegates meet together. The first occasion was on the opening Friday evening for a solemn Liturgy of Renewal and Reconciliation in the Metropolitan Cathedral. The second was for the closing session which began in the Philharmonic Hall with the whole assembly listening to the Seven Sector Reports and ended with the closing Eucharist in the Metropolitan Cathedral.
A word about the documentation available on the Congress. The volume, Liverpool 1980 is of immense value and contains most of the key preparatory and final documents. The Liverpool Archdiocesan weekly newspaper prepared a daily broadsheet for all the delegates informing them of the previous day’s proceedings. A few months after the Congress there appeared a major document, The Easter People – prepared by Derek Worlock and a team of helpers with the full approval of the whole Bishops’ Conference and billed as their reflection ‘in the light of the Congress’. Its text is also printed in Liverpool 1980. There are many good things in The Easter People. For instance, its very first heading is ‘The Sharing Church’ and it opens with a sub-heading, ‘Initiative in shared responsibility’ in which the opening sentence speaks of the Congress as ‘an extraordinary experience of what the Church is and a foretaste of what it can grow to be’.
The title, The Easter People, was chosen because of its obvious reference to the Resurrection. Ironically, The Easter People effectively buried the Congress. This was not due to any deliberate intention on the part of those composing it. In fact, some excellent people were involved. The basic problem was that this written document took the place of any effective vehicle for keeping alive the fire which had blazed in the hearts and minds of the participants. What was needed in the wake of the Congress was some kind of collaborative group, involving laity and clergy, to keep the fire alive and help it spread throughout the whole Church in England and Wales. Sadly, the only follow up was this written text. Effectively, the initiative for any further action was left in the hands of the Bishops’ Conference. It would be churlish to lay all the blame for this on the bishops. Those of us who shared in the Congress must bear our share of responsibility for not creating any effective structure to carry forward the exciting impetus given by the Congress.
I would not want to suggest that the Congress failed to achieve anything. One important impact was the fact that the views of the Congress delegates calling for a deeper listening to the experience of married couples and greater compassion for those who had suffered the tragedy of marriage breakdown was clearly heard in the halls of the Vatican when Basil Hume & Derek Worlock both made impassioned interventions at the 1980 Synod on the Family. Another very positive result was the major impact it had on the minds and hearts of most of the delegates. I am told on good authority that that impact still influences many of them twenty-five years later.
In 1995, fifteen years after the Congress, a remarkable document, The Sign We Give, from a Working Party of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, was published by the bishops. It is a report on Collaborative Ministry and, to my mind at least, is a fruit of the kind of thinking and experience that took place at the Congress. It is almost as though the seed needed to lie in the ground for fifteen years before germinating. The Chair of the Working Party was Pat Jones, who had been one of the group which produced The Easter People. Amazingly, the Congress is not mentioned anywhere in the text! I would recommend The Sign We Give very highly. It is essential and inspirational reading for all committed to genuine ‘collaborative ministry’.
‘Collaborative ministry’ is not the most attractive term. For the older among us it evokes memories of the war against Hitler when ‘collaboration’ was a bad word. It meant helping the enemy. Whereas in the Church of today – at least in theory – it touches on what we are all about as Church. All the baptized share the mission given by Christ to the Church. We are all co-workers (co-labourers – collaborators) under the one Lord.
When I celebrated my seventieth birthday I told the parish that I was starting to retire on that very day. My retirement would be a long process and they were all involved in it. It was not a disaster but a God-given opportunity for them to grow still further in shared responsibility for the parish and its life and mission. I was anxious to make the point that collaborative ministry is not some kind of stop-gap, temporary measure to cope with the present shortage of priests ‘until normal service was resumed later’. Rather it is a key part of our self-understanding as Church which the Spirit seems to bringing to the fore in our age.
There are three sections to this paper:
1. THE THEOLOGY OF COLLABORATIVE MINISTRY
When The Sign We Give was published in 1995, the Editor of The Tablet praised it very highly and remarked that ‘Vatican II remains an event in the future waiting to happen rather than one which ended 30 years ago’. His point was that ‘the post-Vatican II understanding of the primacy of baptism has not yet worked through into ordinary Catholic life’. For that to happen there needs to be a “complete overhaul of the culture of clergy-laity relationships”. Such a relationship change needs to be worked out in terms of ‘partnership, equality, mutuality, cooperation and collaboration’. I would add two other relationship qualities to the Editor’s list, co-responsibility and collegiality. These are all Vatican II markers for relationships within the community of the Church.
The following are some key quotations from what The Sign We Give says about collaborative ministry. I have prefaced each quotation with a heading of my own and have added a short comment in italics after each.
Life of the Trinity is the theological basis of collaborative ministry
The central mystery of faith is the Trinity; the belief that God’s very being is relationship. God is Father, Son and Spirit, a communion of persons. In God’s own life, there is communion and relationship, distinction and diversity. Our faith in the Trinity is not just about who God is as God, but also about who God is for us. Trinitarian life is also our life, as we have been included as partners in God’s own life. As human persons, we are made in the image of a God who is Trinity … We will reflect God’s life if we live in the spirit of communion and collaboration and if our relationships are characterised by equality, mutuality and reciprocity (pp. 19-20).
To understand the theology of collaborative ministry, we need to go the very heart of our Christian faith. Collaborative is not just a passing fad – and certainly not a merely temporary measure.
Priesthood of all believers
(Vatican II) re-discovered the scriptural insight that all the baptised share in the one priesthood of Christ, that it is the whole Church that is a priesthood (p. 18).
Hence, there can be no such thing as a ‘priest-less parish’!
Theology of communion, collaborative ministry, inclusion and diversity
The theology of communion, especially when expressed in today’s cultural context, has an important message about inclusiveness. Communion means that unity can be found within diversity and that differences can be respected and accepted as enriching and not divisive. In an important sense, to be inclusive is what it means to be catholic … As many kinds of difference as possible should be represented in some way as a sign of the inclusiveness or catholicity of Church communion. Collaborative ministry is the most obvious and effective way of doing this (p. 26).
This has profound and very obvious implications for Quest members – and all gay and lesbian Christians.
Equal Terms and equal valuing
The theology of communion implies a radical and true equality among all those who share in that relationship. This equality is based on what it means to be human persons and the dignity and integrity which follow. It incorporates diversity of vocation, role and activity… In collaborative ministry there is a genuine need and desire to work together on equal terms… The theology of communion implies equal valuing based on personhood and gift (pp. 24-25).
This is a very relevant passage in the light of the QUEST Conference subtitle i.e. ‘Our Place as Equals’.
The role of the ordained priest in collaborative ministry
If the priest’s primary task is to enable communion to grow, rather than to ‘run the parish’, the quality of relationships he develops will be central to his ministry. It is through the quality of relationships that he will most effectively invite people to make full use of their gifts and energy in ministries and other activities (p. 23).
Leadership is about empowerment, serving others through enabling their gifts to be recognised and allowed to grow and flourish.
Collaborative ministry involves (p. 17):
Collaborative ministry is essentially an attitude of mind even though it needs to be translated into practical ways of acting and appropriate structures.
The following are some other important points made in The Sign We Give. They do not need any further comment from me.
Implications for formation of ordained priests –
Formation for the priestly ministry must be a preparation for the exercise of this collaborative ministry … It should be clear before ordination that each student is capable of the relationships of mutual trust, recognition and collaboration with both men and women which will be expected of him in today’s parishes (p. 37 & 39).
Relational skills needed for collaborative ministry:
… evaluation, self-appraisal, listening, consulting, discerning, consensus decision-making, planning, group facilitation and handling conflict (p. 30).
Collaborative ministry as an attitude of mind, more than cooperation or layinvolvement
There may be parishes with strong lay involvement but little genuine collaboration … Collaborative ministry does not happen just because people work together or cooperate in some way. It is a gradual and mutual evolution of new patterns, new attitudes and new self-understanding … The decision to make a parish more collaborative needs to be made by priests and laypeople together; both have to be willing to change themselves, rather than anxious to change each other (p. 28 & 36).
Spirituality of collaborative ministry
Collaborative ministry draws deeply upon faith in the Trinity. It is not simply a way of re-organising work or structures. It is a way of expressing …what God is like in the ways we live and work together (p. 35).
Some additional comments of my own regarding what collaborative ministry should mean in practice.
The task (‘labour’) of the Church in a particular parish is the shared task (‘colabour’) of the whole parish, not just of the clergy. All members of the parish have a shared responsibility for this task. They are all co-labourers i.e. involved in collaborative ministry. Hence, it is vital that everyone feels a shared ‘ownership’ of the parish, its life and mission
This is because we are all fully and equally members of the Church through the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and eucharist. These are the basic sacraments of membership. There cannot be a membership fuller than full membership. Even the Pope himself or our own local bishop are not fuller members of the Church than we are. The sacrament of orders is secondary to baptism, confirmation and eucharist and is meant to be at their service. The ministries of lay people are not delegated by the priest because he cannot manage to do it all himself. They flow from their full membership of the Church.
When Bishop Gray came as Auxiliary Bishop to Liverpool, he remarked at the reception following his Episcopal Ordination: ‘When I was ordained priest, I thought it was the greatest day of my life, to share in the priesthood of Christ. Now I see that this is the greatest day of my life, when I share in the fullness of Christ’s priesthood.’ A short time afterwards Archbishop Beck was introducing him to members of the Southport Deanery and mentioned this remark of Bishop Gray. The Archbishop commented: ‘He left out the most important day of his life – when he was baptised.’ I warmed to that comment, even though a bit of me felt that the most important day of his life was when he was born, loved into existence by God.
It is not the laity who are there to help the hierarchy be the Church; it is more the other way round. The hierarchy helps the rest of the People of God exercise their ministry and mission. Priests enable parishioners to become community, to become a living and loving parish. By virtue of their baptism, lay people are the Church, the parish, the diocese. Ministry is not a privilege. It flows from our baptism. When I was Leader of the Team Ministry in Skelmersdale New Town, some of the parishioners used to say: ‘You priests come and go. It is we the lay people who really are the Church here in Skelmersdale. This is our Church. We are not just passing through.’
There is always a danger of ‘Churchifying’ collaborative ministry i.e. reducing it to liturgical ministry or Church administration. The ministry of the Church is to the world, outgoing, sharing people’s joys and sorrows. The last parish where I served as parish priest helps to support a HIV/AIDS Home Care project in Livingstone, Zambia. I have been out there twice – on the second occasion along with four parishioners. The project is spearheaded by a little group of nuns with much of the work being done by about one hundred volunteers. It seems to be completely independent of the local clergy. I have never seen any priest involved in the work. CAFOD is another example of ‘out-going’ ministry with a strong basis of lay-leadership and responsibility. This dimension is underlined in The Sign We Give:
Ministry overlaps with, and flows into, mission. It is the forms of life and activity through which the baptised express their discipleship in the various areas of their life; home and family; neighbourhood and wider society; parish and diocese … these activities are indeed mission (p. 18).
It is also brought out forcefully and very beautifully by Denys Turner in his Summary of Sector B, Topic Four of the National Pastoral Congress (‘The Apostolate of the Laity’), cf. Liverpool 1980, pp. 146-150. A few quotations to whet readers’ appetites:
Though the Gospels and the Council are unequivocal about this calling (i.e. to be apostles in our daily lives), we do not in practice see the Church calling us in a manner which makes such clear-cut demands on us … far too often the clergy would rather have us as willing sheep in the administration of our parishes – if that – rather than as apostolic leaders in the world (p. 147).
It is important that the voice of the laity is listened to far more attentively within th Church than it is at present … too many clergy are dragging their feet over consultation within the parishes. We urge the hierarchy to listen to and trust our own distinctive insights and experience when they are drawing up statements and directives on the many social and moral issues which form so central a part of our apostolic programme … the value of our apostolate in the Church derives from our unique experience of being the Church in the world. This experience must not be lost to the Church (p. 147).
We must emphasise, we are not the people in the Church who have no vocation. Ours is the basic vocation of service and love in the world. The ordained ministers are servants of that service … there is no reason why lay people should not be asked to preach more often and good reasons why they should (p. 149).
An important dimension of the leadership role of the priest in the faith community consists in drawing out, drawing upon and drawing together the gifts, talents and leadership qualities in the parish. Even the specific ‘leadership of the faith community’ role of the priest should be exercised collaboratively. To lead is to empower, not to replace (cf. Sign, p. 19).
In the final analysis, collaborative ministry is not a way of doing something more efficiently. It is a way of being Church more authentically.
2. COLLABORATION IN THE CHURCH’S TEACHING MINISTRY
The Church’s mission of teaching and evangelization is essentially a collaborative mission. Often when we talk about ‘teaching’, we think of someone called the ‘teacher’ passing on knowledge, information or skills to other people called the ‘pupils’ or ‘learners’. The word ‘teaching’ focuses on what the teacher is doing. It makes his/her activity the major ingredient in what is happening. If I as the teacher know my material and put it over clearly, then the responsibility rests with the pupils if they fail to learn. For much of my time teaching moral theology in the seminary that is how I thought of teaching. I taught; my pupils were taught. However, some years ago, as a result of a course on the processes of adult learning, I underwent a kind of Copernican revolution in my understanding of my role as a teacher. I came to realize that I was working within the wrong frame of reference.
The principal frame of reference is not ‘teaching’, but ‘learning’. Our main concentration must be on the learning process. If no learning occurs, no real teaching is taking place, however well a teacher might think he or she is teaching and however excellent their material might be, objectively speaking.
As Church we are not a community divided into two groups,
That kind of presentation was a nineteenth-century innovation and went very much against the more traditional and biblical notion which saw ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ as two activities involving the whole Church. As Christians we are all learners and as Christians we are also all teachers. Unpacking the two halves of that statement might help us to appreciate the collaborative nature of Christian teaching.
‘As Christians we are all learners’. We remember the words of Jesus: ‘You must not allow yourselves to be called teachers, for you have only one teacher, the Christ’ (Mt 23, 10). In fact, the word ‘disciple’ means ‘learner’. Moreover, we are all equally dependent on the Lord for the gift of faith, be we pope or peasant. We are all believers. At this level we are all equal. At this level, strange though it might sound, we all share equally in the charism of infallibility. This is the infallibility of the Church in believing (cf. LG, 12).
In any group gathered together to share a learning experience there is always a certain dynamic element at work. In the Church it is the Holy Spirit who is the dynamic element in the learning process. (cf. Karl Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, passim) That is why the Church needs to have a basic trust and confidence in its internal learning process and should allow it to take its natural course. Archbishop Worlock voiced that trust in his ‘Don’t you believe in the Holy Spirit’ comment to the assembled Liverpool delegates for the National Pastoral Congress quoted earlier
The heart of this learning process in the Church does not lie in the passing on of correct teaching from one generation to the next. Revelation, or Tradition, is not a block of objective knowledge committed to the apostles by Jesus and passed down from age to age. In his book, The Theology of Vatican II (London, 1967), Bishop Butler states that ‘a revelation is not fully given until it is received’. In other words revelation is a living reality which occurs in every generation, in the sense that the process of self-discovery in Christ has to be worked through by the Church in every age and in each culture. The Word of God being received and appropriated in each generation is the living process of revelation. That is the heart of Christian tradition.
‘As Christians we are all teachers’. This is true within the learning community of the Church. We all share our faith with each other and thus help on the growth process in the body of the Church – parents, teachers and catechists doing this in a very crucial way. By virtue of our baptism we also share in the missionary function of the Church. ‘Go and teach all nations’ is a word of the Lord spoken to all of us. This is put forward very forcefully by Paul VI in his Apostolic Letter, Evangelization in the modern world, following the 1974 Synod of Bishops. In this letter the pope seems to opt for the learning frame of reference rather than the teaching one when he says: ‘In fact, the proclamation only reaches full development when it is listened to, accepted and assimilated, and when it arouses a genuine adherence in the one who has thus received it’ (23). In other words, the heart of evangelization does not lie in what we do but rather in what happens in the hearts and minds of those with whom we are trying to share the gospel. This links in with one of the insights of modern literary theory. There is a dynamic interaction between the text and the reader, between the word and the listener. The reader or listener brings his or her own experience into their interpretation of the text or their reception of the spoken word. It is amazing how often the same homily conveys a different message for different people! Yet this should not be surprising. The gospel is being shared by people who, within their unique situations in life, are hungry for the word of God.
What about the teaching authority of the pope and the bishops?
Again it depends on whether one adopts the teaching frame of reference or the learning one. If we go for a rigid teaching model, the pope and the bishops are in an impossible position. They would need to be one-person universities – experts in the bible, theology, philosophy, ethics, pastoral care, and Church history. Obviously that is humanly impossible. If a learning model is accepted as the prime process, the leadership role of the pope and bishops lies within rather than outside the learning process. They remain one hundred per cent members of the learning community. Their particular function is to facilitate the learning process within the community. It is worth exploring what this role means within the Church.
First
Ultimately Holy Spirit is the one teacher in the Christian community – the lifegiving spirit of truth which Christ has breathed into his Church.
This Spirit permeates the whole Church and so those exercising ‘teaching authority’, whether pope, bishop or the CDF, should not see themselves as the repository of all wisdom and knowledge or as having some kind of ‘hotline’ to God. Gerard Hughes SJ offers a timely warning on this point:
We cannot confidently lay claim to the guidance of the Spirit, whether as individuals or as a Church, unless we take the normal human means to try to arrive at the truth (cf. ‘Natural law ethics and moral theology’, in The Month, 1987, p. 103).
They will see themselves very much as listeners, trying to discern all the riches of the Spirit’s wisdom coming through different members of the community. When they discern the voice of the Spirit, coming from whatever quarter, they will see it as part of their role to enable that voice to be heard as widely as possible in the Church.
Second
Vatican II has made us more aware that the Spirit-guided learning community must not be restricted to the Roman Catholic Church. Even outside the gathering of Christian believers, the learning process is going on and the Spirit of God is active. Only if the Church is true to the listening and learning dimension of its teaching role in each age and culture will the heart of revelation be clothed in the best riches of the world’s true self-understanding (Cf. GS, 58 & 44).
Third
Dialogue is an essential part of teaching according to the learning model. In his very first homily as Pope as his Mass with the Cardinals, Benedict XVI laid great emphasis on dialogue, mentioning it no less than four times in the course of a very brief sermon. Listening and speaking lie at the heart of genuine dialogue which is directed partly towards listening and learning and partly towards sharing one’s own beliefs and convictions. Cardinal Walter Kasper has recently stressed the ecumenical importance of dialogue – it helps us to become truly ‘Catholic’:
The truth is always bigger than our formulas. None of us has the truth, but the truth has us. Through dialogue, with its exchange of gifts, we don’t reach a new truth, but we come to a fuller understanding of the truth, which we believe we have in Jesus Christ. This is the dynamic dimension which helps us discover our full ‘catholicity’.
The late Jacques Dupuis remarks on the importance of dialogue in the field of inter-faith relations: ‘The same God is present and acting in both dialogue partners.’ It involves ‘getting inside the skin of the other, walking in the other’s shoes, seeing the world as the other sees it, asking the other’s questions.’ Dialogue is something sacred: ‘The same God speaks in the heart of both partners, the same Spirit is at work in both.’
Fourth
Dialogue can offer an interesting model for ‘teaching statements’. Roman Catholic authorities can be open to the temptation of thinking that all Church statements should be infallible or at least one hundred per cent certain. In fact, such an expectation is normally virtually impossible. So a different temptation raises its head – either the Church is silent when some kind of tentative statement could be helpful to the debate or else it claims a level of’ authority for its statements which they will not bear.
In the dialogue model, Church statements can be seen as contributions to an ongoing conversation – ‘I may be wrong, but …’. In my book, New Directions in Sexual Ethics, I explore statements from various Churches on sexual issues in the light of that ‘ongoing dialogue’ model (cf. chapter five, especially pp. 96-99).
The way the US bishops went about the writing of their two pastoral letters on peace and the economy are good examples of this dialogue process in action. Draft versions were made public and comments were invited from all and sundry. The reason why the document on the Common Good published by the Bishops Conference of England and Wales had such a major impact, apart from the richness of its content and its accessibility, may have been because it was presented not as a dogmatic statement but as a serious contribution to the thinking of the nation prior to an important General Election.
Fifth
The role of articulating the community’s grasp of the truth when it reaches sufficient clarity and agreement clearly demands attentive listening and careful discernment. It includes listening to earlier teaching, as is witnessed to by the wise saying of a medieval theologian: ‘We see further than our forebears. We are like dwarfs sitting on shoulders of giants.’
Yet it also includes accepting the possibility of a development of doctrine or even of a change of teaching when a growth in moral sensitivity in the human family makes us aware that certain things we held as true in the past are now seen to be erroneous or at least in need of a radical restatement. This has occurred with regard to slavery and certain aspects of our self-understanding in the area of sexuality. It is an ongoing refining and reforming process that we can expect to continue in the future. If teaching develops or changes, this must be acknowledged and the reasons for it understood.
Christian tradition is something alive and active. Healthy development and change is not a betrayal of our forebears. It is being faithful to the living tradition they handed on to us.
Sixth
Prophecy is not linked necessarily to the role of the teacher, though some teachers in the Church have also been prophets. However, part of the teacher’s role is to listen out for the voice of the prophet and then enable that voice to be heard as widely as possible.
In that sense, it could be argued that the most important exercise of teaching authority last century was the calling of Vatican II by Pope John XXIII. He enabled the prophetic voices in the community to be heard by the whole Church.
What about dissent from authoritative teaching in the Church?
Provided it is not tantamount to the denial of the heart of our Christian faith, within the learning frame of reference there is room for dissent in the Church. Personally, I prefer the term ‘disagreement’ to ‘dissent’ since it is more in keeping with the conversational model. Within the teaching model dissent usually involves confrontation, since it is virtually saying to the ‘teaching authority’, ‘You, the teacher, are wrong. You are in error.’ Despite that, it is still allowed for in exceptional circumstances even in the traditional manuals of theology.
In the learning model, disagreement need not involve any confrontation with teaching authority, since it is simply suggesting that the articulation of the teaching put forward by the teacher does not do justice to the full riches of what the Church really believes. Hence, rather than being seen as a negative confrontation, it presents itself as an attempt to collaborate in the Church’s teaching ministry. A helpful indicator of its value may be found in the reaction of the rest of the community, especially those most intimately involved through their own experience in that specific issue. That is why the ‘non-reception’ of some of the Church’s teaching on sexual and marital issues cannot be dismissed too easily. It has even been suggested that such ‘non-reception’ is actually the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit in the minds and hearts of those who know the truth of the matter in the light of their own experience. After all, it was Cardinal Hume who reminded the Rome Synod on the Family in 1980 that the experience of Christian married couples is a genuine source for the Church’s understanding of the theology of marriage.
Collaboration in the Church’s mission of teaching and evangelization is a privilege and responsibility of us all. The Church will be truly honouring collaboration in this aspect of its mission when the voice of the Spirit is heard and listened to, through whomsoever it speaks and from whatever unlikely quarter it might come.
3. QUEST AND THE TEACHING MINISTRY IN THE CHURCH
‘Arising from your experience, what would you say to the Pope if you had the chance to speak to him?’ ‘I could put my message into one word: Listen. Listen to people’s stories so that we can discover the sacred in them. The difficulty I have with the Church and the hierarchy is a positive inability to listen to people’s stories, so they’re not dealing with a movement I believe to be of God’s spirit.’
This was the answer given by a US Catholic priest who had been ministering to gay men in the US living with HIV/AIDS (cf. NDSE, p. 70).
Another person commented:
AIDS has opened a door between gay people and the Church. It has been an agent prompting reflection on sexuality … they see heroism and selfless activity in the gay community. They come to ask: How could this be bad? How could this be what the Church is telling us it is? (NDSE, p. 94).
The word ‘Listen’ has cropped up frequently in this reflection on collaborative ministry and the Church’s teaching ministry – seen from a learning/teaching perspective. In 2004 the Bishops of England and Wales launched a LISTENING 2004 project. Like many such things, it seemed to go off half-cock. However, one fruit of it was an Assembly here in Liverpool which I attended and which I found quite remarkable. From morning until teatime one Saturday over 100 people, including our bishops, listened to what people throughout the diocese had been saying on the theme, ‘My Family, My Church’.
One of the presentations was entitled ‘Joe’s Story’:
Our son’s name is Joe. He was thirty-three last week. Joe was a lovely child, the happiest baby going, full of life as a toddler and buzzing with energy and love of life. As he got older he always seemed to be involved in things and had lots of hobbies and interests. But as he got into his mid-teens, he became quiet and subdued. He stopped mixing and would withdraw from many social situations. He became moody and irritable. We put this down to the teenage blues and were concerned but felt it would all pass in time. It didn’t. He started to be skitted at school and had episodes of real misery, not wanting to go out any more. We were at our wits end –what had happened to our lovely young son? We talked with him, tried to get him to talk to us, we shared our anxieties with some of our closest friends, talked with our doctor. Nothing seemed to help. One night we came home to find he had swallowed a lot of tablets and was unconscious. A rush to hospital followed and … well, I won’t go on. But to cut a long story short, what emerged was that Joe had started to realise that he was gay.
Although we accepted him completely and continued to give him all our love, Joe despised himself, felt different, as if there were something wrong with him. There followed many years of unhappiness and he attempted suicide on two more occasions. He found it difficult to accept himself. His self-esteem was at rock bottom and there was little joy in his life. His sense of being different dominated his existence and ours.
And then, when he was about twenty-six or twenty-seven, he met Brian, a lovely fellow. They had such a lot in common. They started to meet up regularly and then had a holiday, something Joe hadn’t done for years. He started to pick up hobbies and interests again instead of drowning himself in work and TV.
That was six years ago. They have been living as partners for the last five years and these days Joe is much more like a grown up version of the lively youngster we knew. He is happy, fulfilled, enjoys life and is involved in all sorts of worthwhile activity. He is a fantastic uncle to his nieces and nephews. My wife and I are so delighted to see him happy again and thank God daily that he has come through those terrible times. I know this is another of the stories, where things aren’t right by the book but to us it feels as if salvation has come to our son.
What I found remarkable on that Saturday was the complete and unquestioning acceptance by all present of how Joe’s parents feel at the end of the story. Remember their closing words in the story: – ‘Salvation has come to our son’ – a perfect example of Mahoney’s ‘making faith-sense of experience and making experience-sense of faith’. Margaret Rogers, one of the organisers of that Saturday’s listening session, finished her presentation in this way:
What has been highlighted is how much love and energy go into creating and supporting the family, whatever shape or structure it may have. It is an awesome task, truly worthy of the name vocation. It is what occupies most of our time. This daily working and reworking of relationship embodies the mystery of life – of creation, growth and resurrection.
How can we, as Church, find ways of giving due emphasis to this business of living and relating that people are finding so challenging? Because when it goes wrong, people really do perish.
Families (relationships) can be places of love, support, warmth, tenderness, fun & joy (Creation). They can also be places of bitterness, hurt, harshness, cruelty, abuse & domination (The Fall). It is through the daily struggle (Redemptive Love) that families (relationships) become communities of love (Salvation).
The other organiser of the Liverpool Listening assembly, Fr Tony Slingo, began his final summary with a very challenging statement: ‘When it works, Church is massively important for people. When it doesn’t work, it is massively wounding. The voice of the families challenge me about making room at the table.’ He pointed out that the Church can be rigid, judgemental, excluding, rejecting and cruel when people do not come up to the Church’s norm. And this is made all the worse when it is a norm to do with personal relationships and one which does not seem to fit with the reality of people’s lives. The result is legalised exclusion or people withdrawing and hiding away. Tony closed his reflection by saying: ‘There seems to be a call for our Catholic culture to continue broadening out to value much more visibly what is good human living in itself and not only what is fully paid-up, card-carrying officially Catholic.’
What has all this to do with collaborative ministry. Collaborative ministry is based on the theology of communion. In other words, it goes in the opposite direction to exclusion. It is about having a place at the table – not by invitation of the priest or bishop, but by invitation of the Host who is notorious for his open hospitality. All kinds are welcome at the table. It is a gathering of wounded people – and that means all of us. It involves the patience needed for the seed to grow, even in the midst of choking weeds, as the parable of the darnel reminds us. Disputes and conflicts have their place around the table. They should not covered over or hidden away, as in a dysfunctional family. The Sign We Give makes that point very strongly in its section, ‘Learning to deal with conflict’ (p. 30-31): ‘If collaboration is to grow, conflict must be brought into the open. It can be paralysing when it remains hidden. The courage to face and work through conflict … are not weaknesses, but signs of maturity and commitment.’
What does the teaching on collaborative ministry say to QUEST members in terms of your involvement in the learning/teaching ministry of the Church?
Most of all, value your place at the table. You are a gift to the other guests, as they are to you. Often cruel and rigid opposition to gays and lesbians is due to people never having had the healing, grace-filled experience of personal contact with gay or lesbians, whether individuals or couples. You in QUEST are uniquely qualified to remedy this. It is only people like yourselves who can help the Church find the appropriate language for making ‘faith-sense’ and ‘experience-sense’ of the lives of gay and lesbian members of the Church.
When Christians in general first began to be challenged by the ‘grace-filled’ experience of gay partners living lives which carried all the marks of a ‘loving relationship’ – and so revelatory of God - the initial reaction of theologians like myself was that this experience must be listened to. However, that initial reaction presumed that heterosexual theologians like myself would do the listening. We would examine the experience presented to us and then evaluate whether we needed to reformulate our sexual theology to take account of what we had learnt in this process. In this reaction we were missing the point. The language about homosexuality which we had all been brought up on was not adequate for expressing the positive experience of gays and lesbians. Hence, new ways of speaking about gay and lesbian experience had to be found. Initially, this could only be done by gay people like yourselves since it was your experience as persons which was being expressed. Gay theology can only be done by gay people. James Allison is an outstanding example of this.
Moreover, what theologians like myself were failing to appreciate was that gay Christians seeking to articulate their experience are actually ‘doing theology’. Finding the right language is actually part of the theological process. This kind of work needs to be accepted gratefully by the Church as a rich contribution to its ongoing commitment to the truth. Without this kind of theological reflection and its public expression, there is no possibility of real dialogue on this issue in the Church. And without dialogue there is no collaborative ministry in searching the truth.
Of course, to present the Gospel positively as genuine ‘good news’ for gay men and lesbians does not mean that the Gospel does not challenge them to eradicate from their lives whatever violates the dignity of persons or is destructive of personal and social relationships. Part of a more open dialogue towards a positive spirituality for homosexual persons will surely need to have on its agenda how to discern which kinds of gay and lesbian relationship are expressive of genuine love and which are abusive of persons? And also which kinds can develop the capacity to sustain faithful loving commitments and which prevent growth in personal and emotional maturity? These same questions apply equally to heterosexual relationships. I have never forgotten the comment of my US Jesuit friend, Jon Fuller, an expert in integrated HIV/AIDS care: ‘There is nothing so similar to heterosexuality as homosexuality. They are both about loving persons precisely as persons.’
Sexuality is a dimension to our being human persons which we all share, whatever our sexual orientation. As a Christian, I believe that this sexual dimension is an important aspect of our being made persons in the image of a relational, loving and life-giving God. We are most true to ourselves as sexual human persons, therefore, to the extent that we realise the potentiality of our sexuality by going out to each other in love, by joyfully expressing that love in a way which is appropriate to the character and depth of our relationships and by contributing to the life-giving enterprise of receiving our human existence as gift and accepting our responsibility to prepare a future worth passing on to future generations.
A Christian sexual ethics which is able to embrace and express the positive goodness to be found in loving gay and lesbian relationships should be all the richer – and Christian – since it is now based on a more comprehensive appreciation of the giftedness of the human person. Such a positive evaluation would help gays and lesbians to feel that ‘it is wonderful for us to be here’. I am suggesting that QUEST members have the privilege – and responsibility – of making their own unique contribution to that positive evaluation. It is a task which, in today’s climate, will often be painful and which, sadly and tragically, will sometimes be met with rejection.
I cannot resist quoting my favourite text from Timothy Radcliffe, words spoken to the 2002 National Conference of Priests:
When Jesus ate and drank with tax collectors and prostitutes,
it was not a duty.
It was utter delight in their company,
in their very being.
When he touched the untouchable,
it was not a clinical gesture,
but a hug of joy.
So it belongs to us as Christians
that we rejoice in the very existence of people,
with all their fumbling attempts to live and love,
whether they are married or divorced or single,
whether they are straight or gay,
whether their lives are lived
in accordance with Church teaching or not …
The Church should be a community in which
people discover God’s delight in them.
I have never ceased to wonder at the semi-mystical experience Thomas Merton had in a shopping mall in Louisville when he was suddenly overwhelmed by his oneness in God with the vast throng of people all around even though all total strangers. He was inspired to write:
How can you tell people that they are all walking around shining like the sun... If only we could see ourselves and each other through the eyes of God. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, London, Sheldon Press, 1977 edit, pp. 155).
God’s Kingdom will come a stage nearer for our Catholic community when we are prepared to fall down and ‘worship’ our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters as the persons they really are in the eyes of God!
APPENDIX
Letter to The Tablet (13 February 2010) on Homosexual Relationships
Dear Editor,
As a moral theologian, my view on same-sex relationships has changed radically over the years. I now believe that God’s call to lesbians and gays is to accept themselves as they are as a gift from God; to accept their homosexual orientation as the way God has gifted them to live their lives as loving persons.
Consequently, provided their loving tries to be self-giving, faithful, life-enhancing, just, mutually respectful and not self-centred nor exploitative (all demands applying equally to heterosexual loving), then their relationship and their loving can truly be experienced as a sharing of God’s love in their lives – and, in that sense, sacramental.
Although what I have written above is not the approved teaching of the Catholic Church, I believe that it expresses more adequately the richness of a Catholic sexual ethic based on the person-centred theology of Vatican II. For me to say anything else would be to betray my vocation as a moral theologian.