By PHILIP TROWER
In its voyage across the ocean of time or journey through the waters of history, the hull of the bark of St Peter inevitably gets encrusted with barnacles from the civilizations and cultures it passes through.
Examples would be the sedia gestatoria on which the Popes used to be carried into St. Peter’s and the flabellae or ostrich feather fans which accompanied him. Another example would be the bishop’s or cardinal’s cappa magna, a kind of cloak with a long train carried by an altar boy used on solemn occasions to emphasize the exalted nature or dignity of the episcopal office.
These “barnacles” were not bad in themselves and they could have a practical purpose. The sedia gestatoria was a kind of early Pope-mobile before the age of cars, a way of ensuring that when the Pope came into St. Peter’s for a solemn High Mass, as many people as possible could see him.
But over and above this they showed the way in which a particular age or culture gave expression to fundamental ideas like sovereignty, authority, dignity, solemnity, magnanimity, and so on. They are not or were not essential for the Church in expressing or getting her message across. But they helped in the particular culture, time, or place in which she found herself. Today this adoption for religious purposes of symbols taken from secular life is called inculturation.
For most of her history the Church has been incultured in monarchical, aristocratic, or oligarchic societies with the characteristic barnacles attaching to her hull. Kissing the Pope’s slipper or an episcopal ring would be another example.
However, increasingly over the last 200 years she has been sailing into waters where the prevailing ideas about government, social organization, and the relationship of men and women to each other are egalitarian and democratic. It is therefore to meet this situation that Blessed Paul VI and his Successors started the process of “de-barnicalization” which Pope Francis is merely carrying on faster and more radically. Indeed the Second Vatican Council could in some respects be seen as a massive work of re-inculturation, particularly in its reform of the liturgy.
The problem is that there are certain currently unfashionable ideas which neither the Church nor common sense can entirely dispense with. Hierarchy is one of them. Authority and subordination are others. Children will remain subordinate to their parents up to a certain age in any sane society.
As the head of one of the congregations in Rome said to me in the 1980s with something like exasperation when, on behalf of The Wanderer, I spoke to him about some of the way-out things that were being taught in certain U.S. seminaries: “Don’t the Americans realize that the Church isn’t a democracy?”
God — are we to say, unfortunately? — isn’t an elected president and bowing to Him or kneeling before Him is not a derogation of human dignity but a prerequisite for it.
However, insofar as some re-inculturation is necessary, there are shifts of emphasis which can help and others which have already been made. The Synods of Bishops in Rome every few years are an example. Introduced in the wake of the council, their object is to give the entire episcopate a role in the government of the universal Church. Their decisions do not bind the Pope. They are consultative. But their views are seriously considered by him and summarized in a post-synodal document addressed to the whole Church.
Also, fundamental to the Church has always been a strongly populist dimension. Indeed, are we not the populus dei?
In the Church, the poor and unimportant, the little ones are in a sense our aristocracy whom those in authority exist to serve. “The last shall be first and the first last.” “Blessed are the poor” not the rich. And “I thank thee, Father, for hiding these things from the wise and prudent and revealing them to little ones.” One thinks of the deacon St. Lawrence who, when asked by the Roman authorities to hand over the “treasures of the Church,” presented himself with a crowd of poor people.
Related to all this is the notion of the sensus fidei and Newman’s idea about consulting the faithful in matters of doctrine. Neither of these ideas means that the faithful determine by some voting process what is to be believed, or can change doctrine to conform to the spirit of the times. Nor can they replace the Magisterium as final arbiters of belief. But, together with their priests, and under their bishops, they are not a purely passive component of the Mystical Body. Here is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the situation under the heading “The Supernatural Sense of Faith.”
“All the faithful share in understanding and handing on revealed truth. They have received the anointing of the Holy Spirit, who instructs them and guides them into all truth. The whole body of the faithful…cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown when ‘from the bishops to the last of the faithful’ they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals.”
This is why before proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Pope Pius IX asked the bishops of the world to let him know what they and their priests and people together believed about the matter.
In spite of all this, de-barnicalization and re-inculturation remain an extremely tricky business. How are the majesty and holiness of God or the Eucharistic Mystery, for instance, to be expressed in terms of a Western secularist pop-star celeb culture without serious damage to the people’s faith and practice? How are we to express devotion and loyalty to our fathers in God if we are not to kiss their rings? Give them a bear hug? But that only expresses fondness, not happy obedience to their fatherly authority.
I humbly suggest that re-inculturation carried out wisely and safely should be a major prayer intention throughout the Church.
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(Philip Trower, a longtime contributor to The Wanderer, is the author of Turmoil and Truth: The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Church and A Danger to the State.)
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