Authority and Obedience in the Church Today—I

Extract

It is a truism—and one repeated so often that it is starting to become tedious—that the issue of Humanae Vitae has precipitated a crisis of authority and obedience in the Church. Indeed the Roman authorities have been talking in these terms for several years now.

What, of course, is tedious about the phrase is the indiscriminate way in which it is employed. It may be helpful just to look at what the term ‘crisis’ basically means. It means, of course, simply ‘judgment’, ‘testing’, ‘questioning’. So, if we talk about a crisis of authority and obedience, we mean that authority and obedience are under question. But many jump immediately to the conclusion that this means that an attempt is being made to overthrow all authority and obedience in the Church. This seems to me a peculiarly obtuse misreading of the situation. There is undoubtedly a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction within the Church at the current theory and practice of ecclesiastical authority, but this is something quite different from wishing to throw overboard all authority in the Church, lock, stock and barrel. I do not see why this dissatisfaction in the Church should not be as much a ‘sign of the times’ for the Church as was the dissatisfaction with, say, the Church’s attitude to other Churches, or with the sclerosed ecclesiology that dominated in post-Tridentine times till our own days. These dissatisfactions had a fruitful result: the spirit and theology behind Vatican II. Why should we weep and be fearful regarding the dissatisfaction about authority?