Not long ago I was talking with a priest I know, a good man. He’s the sort of priest anyone would want to be their pastor. We were talking about perceptions of the Catholic Church, and he asked me sincerely, “Do you think it’s still Spotlight?” Do most people really still think of sex abuse first?
I said yes, of course. But I was struck by how fixed his imagination was by the idea that the Catholic Church could have weathered the abuse crisis by now and moved on. He didn’t say, ‘But, it’s been more than twenty years.’ I know he understands the scandal well and its impact on people. It just seemed like his imagination could not capture how much damage the church has taken.
I was thinking about that conversation recently while I was watching an episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The episode offered an unflattering, in-depth look at the management consulting industry generally, McKinsey & Company particularly. A feature of the report was how much McKinsey tells itself that it creates positive change in the world and how disconnected McKinsey’s internal culture seems to be from the rest of us who might have more ambivalent feelings about them.
A chasm separates McKinsey’s perceptions of McKinsey from how the world outside sees them. At one point, John Oliver quoted an unnamed person from McKinsey who said that only three great institutions remain in the world—the US Marines, the Catholic Church, and McKinsey. That suggests all by itself that the institution is not so great.
That claim elicited more than a laugh from the audience. There was an audible, loud gasp of shock. But the transcript of how that gasp came from the audience is important to understand why I’m talking about McKinsey—
JOHN OLIVER There are only three great institutions left in the world: The Marines, the Catholic Church…
AUDIENCE {gasp}
JOHN OLIVER …and McKinsey.
It is worth going to find that clip and hearing the gasp for yourself. There was no mistaking which of the three the audience found more surprising to claim as a great institution. It should shake up any one still committed to the Catholic Church.
Now it could be easy to dismiss the prejudices of a New York City studio audience that showed up to hear John Oliver skewer a corporate target. The trouble is, once we do that we’re saying that the Catholic Church, our great institution, has no power to reach that audience. We can go farther.
My larger point is to illustrate by that audience reaction how truly, truly over it is for this institution, how much ground has been lost that’s not coming back for as long as the Catholic Church keeps doing the same thing.
And my friend the good pastor is like all those McKinsey folks who are so deeply embedded in their own institution that they can talk about their institution changing the world with a straight face, as though anyone outside trusts them like they think they do. It’s an illusion, and it’s necessary to cast that illusion off before we can rebuild.
I think that is what Pope Francis has been struggling for eleven years to do, to call us to cast off the illusion and to approach the world with a new invitation of accompaniment in humility. And just look at the resistance that idea encounters.
This, I think, explains a lot of what we see in the Catholic Church when even my friend, the priest who loves Pope Francis, cannot open his imagination to see what everyone outside the Catholic Church knows (and what some of us inside the church, including the Pope also know): what the church was is over. Not the church in the sense of its mission or its people, not the Gospel, not our creed or the Scriptures.
But the church as an influential organization, the internal culture, and the whole feudal style of it—that’s gone, and it’s not coming back. At least, it is not coming back if by “it” we mean an institution with any cultural influence to evangelize at all.
We can be the “smaller, purer” remnant of a quaint medieval institution, I suppose. I know there are people who would be happy with that. But that’s not the church’s mission or our Gospel calling. That’s worldly attachment to an organizational style.
The Catholic Church needs to renew deeply. To do that, first we must open our imaginations to see how so much of how we think about the Catholic Church is both not so central to its identity as we often assume it is and see that many of those things we cling to are what build barriers between the church from the world it is meant to minister to.
We ascribe a lot of importance in Catholic life to elements of organization and style that are not essential. More and more, I think, the greatest obstacle in front of the church is our imagining of what the Catholic Church must be.
For example, penitence is essential; meatless Fridays are not. Ministry is essential; the disciplines of the priesthood are not. And I can go on. The list of what we insist “means we’re Catholic” is very long, and the idea those things should pose “a sign of contradiction” against the world is a problem.
The problem is not confined only to those who resist Pope Francis, either. Lately I have come to think the bigger problem is the people who are listening to Francis but who love the church so much they cannot abandon their nostalgic attachment to what the church once was.
They hold us back more than Francis’s critics.
Let me be very clear. When I talk about what we must cast off I’m not talking about Scripture, dogma, or any infallible proposition of Catholic faith. Mostly I’m talking about presentation and how we approach the world.
But so much has to change. So much ground and so much time have been lost. And, so many people. The mission is very clear: Go and preach the Gospel to all nations. Everything stems from that proposition.
Whether we will do it effectively or not in this time, it seems to me, depends on whether our commitment to the mission is greater than our commitment to elements of an institution.
Steven P. Millies, Ph.D. is Professor of Public Theology And Director, The Bernardin Center in Chicago
