a talk given by Bernard J. Lee, SM
Assistant Chancellor, St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas
at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio
February 18, 2003

Stating the Case: Something truly major is afoot. Lay people are not just temporarily replacing priests and religious.

Metaphors both Interpret and Shape Reality: Clues from the novelist Milan Kundera.

The Pharisees as Metaphor: This for many Christians would be a most unlikely comparison, but it has foundations in reality.

The Pharisee Metaphor and Contemporary Lay Education: Knowledge helps validate an interpreter’s "credentials."

People of God as Root Metaphor: A root metaphor shapes the whole story. Giving priority to all the people as Church as a starting point.

Historical Context for Change in the Guild of Interpreters: The developments noted here are part of a long historical development in culture.

Conclusion: There may be changes in the guild of interpreters that amount to a sort of hidden revolution (in Edgerton’s sense).

I will state my conclusion up front, then present the case for it through a metaphor and through empirically demonstrable trends in current Church life. For most of the Church’s history, what it means to be a Catholic has been interpreted by the hierarchy who wrote the creeds, wrote the documents of the great councils, were the theologians, wrote the Catechisms, said what could be published and what could not, and did nearly all of the preaching (although in the Middle Ages there was some lay preaching). The guild of interpreters was entirely male, nearly always celibate males, with institutional charges.

Because of the education of the laity in the U.S. Catholic Church, the growing number of positions of influence which they occupy, and the decrease in the number of priests, the lay voice is increasingly an interpreter of the Catholic story. It is new growth, tender growth, often tenuous growth, clear growth, and perhaps the true beginning of a new situation, a hidden revolution. Here is a telling comment from a book on interpretation (The Passion of Interpretation, W. Dow. Edgerton, 62-63).

The fundamental shape, the social structure of a community, is its interpretive authority writ big.

The location of interpretive authority . . . patterns the shape of community. A community lives out a pattern of interpretive authority and recreates that pattern at level after level of its own life.

The shape of a community is a direct result of who has say in the interpretation of its central texts and its situation, and who has no say, and how that is decided . . . and what happens to the voices of those whose interpretations are not granted authority.

The broader the community of interpretation, the more complex and difficult it will be to define its identity. But its identity will also be more fully formed . . . because it will more nearly reflect the actual breadth of the community’s life. A process that is more open, plural, social, and dialogical changes a community.

To open the process of interpretation, therefore, beyond the guild of interpreters who have accepted (or taken) the authority to say what meaning is, is revolutionary.

When I speak about a clerical interpretation and a lay interpretation, this is what I mean: We always see what we see from where we stand. Those who stand on the inside of organizational structure tend to focus on issues that impact upon the organization, its health, and its stability. In shorthand, I am calling this a clerical interpretation, and it knows important things for the life of the community that those not in the organizational structure will often miss, or at least not defend.

Those who are not part of the organizational structure are often closer to the front lines of daily living and all that impacts in us day to day, month to month: raising children, loving in conjugal contexts, working to buy a house, a car, and medical insurance, praying, going (or not going) to church, etc. When these people tell the Catholic story, they will know some important things to which clerical attention would be far less likely to attend.

Of course, some clerics are more aware of and sensitive to lay issues than some lay people. And some lay folks are just as preoccupied with institutional concerns as clerics and have equally profound insights into them. But this is not the overall norm. Our social location has an incredible impact upon what we see or don’t see, and therefore, upon how the story gets told.

The question is not whether lay women and men will have a significant impact upon how Church is developing in the early 21^st century. That goes without saying. The question is whether their voice will be included in the guild of interpreters who tell the Catholic story, i.e., impact upon its moral and social thought and practice, upon Christology, ecclesiology, sacramentology, liturgy, canon law, etc.

I will develop a thesis, beginning with the Pharisees as a metaphor, and then track with some concrete trends which offer some hope to the validity of the metaphor.

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera muses about how characters develop for a novelist. Tomas has just recently met Tereza and ponders what metaphor he might explore to understand and shape their relationship. Kundera says about him that "Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love" (p. 11). Later in the text, Kundera muses about how the characters in a novel get developed. "Characters are not born," he writes, "like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nut shell a basic human possibility. . ." (p. 221).

As one way of assessing the essential passion of the Second Vatican Council and of understanding both splendor and turmoil in the Church today, I will focus upon the metaphor of "People of God" for the Church, whose symbolic weight is not only in the image, but especially that it is prioritized in front of the Church as an institution. To enter into this discussion I will offer another metaphor that most of you will find surprising, Pharisees as a metaphor for contemporary laity in the U.S. Catholic Church (which is a far more positive metaphor than popular versions of Pharisees would allow). I will start with the Pharisees.

My Jewish brothers and sisters are rightly incensed at the dictionary definition of pharisaical as "marked by hypocritical censorious self-righteousness." The condemnation of the Pharisees by Jesus (Mt 23:12-36) is no small part of the reason. The language there is biting and fierce. This has to be cleared up before the real achievement of the Pharisees can be used to interpret a present situation in Catholic culture, a task being addressed by both Jewish and Christian Writers (Neusner, Rivkin, Saldarini).

Given very tight table fellowship among the Pharisees in the time of Jesus, how is it that Jesus could be invited to their table and still say the things he said? Given the frequency that Jesus taught in the synagogue and given the powerful influence of the Pharisees in Jewish religiosity, how could Jesus say the things he is reported to have said? If Jesus spoke as he was reported, why would Pharisees have been among the early followers of Jesus, as Luke recounts in Acts?

In the early stages, the followers of Jesus understood themselves as Jews within Judaism who were doing a Jewish thing to follow Jesus. This is especially clear in the Gospel of Matthew. But some Jews do not follow Jesus, and the conflict between these two groups about who correctly understands the God of Israel becomes vicious. The critique of Pharisees in Matthew’s Gospel is a critique from around the year 80, of those who do not follow Jesus by those who do. It is a pitched battle for the soul of Judaism. The fierce rhetoric from 80 CE is retrojected into the mouth of Jesus in 30 CE.

The fact is, in both Christian and Jewish scholarship, the Pharisees were in many ways the finest flowering of Judaism in Jesus’ time, and they are the forerunners of the rabbinic tradition from which came the Mishna, Talmud, and a vast body of Midrash.

The Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes make a first appearance about the middle of the first century before Jesus. The Pharisees and Sadducees appear frequently in the Christian scriptures. The origins of the Pharisees are very obscure. By the time they make an appearance, they are a significant presence in Jewish life. Until their appearance, Jewish religiosity is dominated by the priests, with whom the Sadducees are associated and whose positions they support. I offer some summary statements about the Pharisees, with present developments in Catholicism in mind.

• First, Pharisees appear at a watershed time in Jewish history, about 150 years before Jesus, and produce a tradition, as we shall see.
• Second, they are basically a lay movement, even though some members are priests.
• Third, by the time they make an appearance in the written historical tradition, they have significant power in Jewish life.
• Fourth, their power base is their learning. They are as literate in the history and tradition as the priestly class. That empowers them to interpret.
• Fifth, while the priestly tradition focuses upon the written Torah as complete revelation, the Pharisees insist that an ever-accumulating oral Torah carries an equal authority with the written Torah. To this, Judaism owes the openness of the tradition to ongoing, critical transformation through interpretation.
• Sixth, the Pharisees break the unilateral hold of the priestly tradition upon how the normative story of the relationship between YHWH and the Jewish people is told. They do not replace the priestly interpretation, but they introduce a healthy power dialectic between lay and clerical interpretation, as is evident from the debates between Pharisees and Sadducees in the Christian scriptures. This dialectic was a decisive transformation of the tradition.

There are just over 3,000 men in the four years of theology preparation for ordination. A study of ministry students conducted by AGPIM and funded by Lilly Endowment indicated that there are over 6,000 women (mostly) and men in graduate theology programs. Aware of institutions not in the study and of Catholic graduate students in theology programs in non-Catholic institutions (like Yale, Harvard, the University of Chicago, etc.), I would guess the number at 8,000. The typical student is 70% more likely to be a woman, a person in his or her mid-40s, and in ministry as a second or third career. The students bring with them abundant lived experience as spouse, parent, business person, etc.

In many urban and suburban parishes there are women and men who are as knowledgeable in theology, Church history, and canon law as the pastor, as well as in administration and counseling. Part of the reason for the clerical hegemony as interpreters is simply that they were the best educated in the fields I just named, and this knowledge base is critical to interpretive credibility.

Now, five years later, the difference would be considerably more marked because, as the research indicates, there are no signs of a significant reversal of this trend. Further, the percentage of religious in the non-ordained pool is rapidly decreasing. Over 80% of these parish ministers are women.

I will now name some positions that are largely held by lay people and that were formerly held largely by clerics, each of them a position of influence.

Principals of Catholic grade schools and high schools
Religious teachers (including chairs) in Catholic grade schools
     and high schools
Campus Ministers in Catholic grade schools and high schools
Presidents of Catholic colleges and universities
Theology department chairs in Catholic colleges and universities
Theology professors in Catholic colleges and universities
Campus Ministers in Catholic colleges and universities
Pastoral leaders in parishes without a resident priest pastor
Directors of Christian Formation
Marriage preparation in parishes
Baptismal preparation in parishes
Director of Adult Education
Members and chairs of parish pastoral councils and parish
     finance councils
Youth Ministry in parishes
Pastoral Counselors
Parish Administrators
Diocesan directors in areas of schools, religious education, finances
Members of diocesan tribunals
Editors and sometimes publishers of Catholic newspapers
     and periodicals
The number of books now published by lay Catholics
     in theology and spirituality 

I would also include the worldwide movement of small Christian communities, whose membership and leadership are almost entirely lay, a phenomenon that did not spring from hierarchical initiatives. There are over 40,000 small Christian communities in the U.S. Catholic Church.

When I name all of these positions, I am not saying that all of these folks are self-consciously attempting as lay Catholics to tell the Catholic story from their own life’s experience. Probably only a rare person would be deliberate in that sort of way. But the fact is that their work in interpreting the tradition to new generations is profoundly conditioned by their social location as lay People of God.

I would also name lay Catholic organizations that are perhaps more explicitly committed to the lay articulation of Catholic life, e.g., an international organization like "We Are the Church," and national organizations like "Call to Action" and the more recent "Voice of the Faithful." These groups deliberately speak from the context of lay Catholic experience and are aware of the power issues involved in telling the Catholic story.

Call to Action, perhaps the best known of the lay organizations in the United States, has often been criticized by institutional figures. In a recent study of small Christian communities in the U.S. Catholic Church, we found Sunday church attendance in the general Catholic population to be at 32%. Among small Christian community members associated with Call to Action, the attendance is at 66%. In the general Catholic population 6% are eucharistic ministers; but 61% of Call to Action small Christian community members are eucharistic ministers.

There is a very loaded statement about the nature of the Church in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (# 773), drawing upon Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. The text affirms that our communion with God governs everything and that the structure of the Church is "totally ordered" to this end. "Mary goes before all of us in the holiness that is the Church’s mystery . . . . That is why the Marianist dimension precedes the petrine dimension." The holiness of all of the People of God, lay and ordained, is that to which its leadership is to be ordained.

In his justly renowned book on Models of the Church, Avery Dulles affirmed that many images are needed to capture the mystery of the Church. He names five: Institution, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald, and Servant. Of these, Dulles notes, institution is the model with the least New Testament support. We cannot be Church without being institution, but institution should never be the primary model even though a necessary model. He defines institutionalism as "a system in which the institutional element is treated as primary" (p. 32). He adds that "A Christian believer may energetically oppose institutionalism and still be very much committed to the Church as institution"(p. 320). Today there are numerous church indicators of the tension which Schama named in the French Revolution, that between centralized authority and a community.

To say, as the U. S. Bishops have recently (and Rome approved), that the assembled community at Eucharist should kneel during the eucharistic prayer while the presider stands is not supportive of full, active, conscious participation in the universal Church, standing is the norm. The difference in posture between presider and community is not a liturgical exigency, but a power statement—as is, similarly, the new instruction that lay ministers of the Eucharist are not to approach the altar until after the presider has communicated himself, which contravenes a growing practice of presider and communion ministers to communicate after everyone else, as a symbol of servant leadership. Again, there is no liturgical exigency here, but there is surely a power issue.

The desire to be citizens and not subjects is deep in Western culture (and not there alone). The issue is not to try to turn the Church into a version of American democracy—that would be historically a great naivete. But there is wide room for more participative structures (many of which have existed before), and I conclude that the lay developments I have named belong to a legitimate and poignant lay longing to be empowered citizens of the Church.

In the epilogue to Citizens, Schama observes that "What killed the monarchy was its inability to create representative institutions through which the state could execute its program of reforms" (p. 851). I am suggesting that the fuller implementation of Vatican II can be served precisely by committing the implementations to representative institutional forms within the Church (always with accountability). John Kelley’s recent book, Freedom in the Church: A Documentary History of the Subsidiary Function, traces the development of the principle of subsidiarity within the church (more a theoretical than practical development, thus far). In Vatican II deliberation of the Church documents, Augustin Cardinal Bea said that "the role of authority is not to replace individual members in what they can do by themselves, but only to supply what they cannot do" (Kelley, p. 42). Two days later Bishop Joseph Schoiswohl elaborated further that "the principle of subsidiarity whereby a lower society does not yield to a higher in anything it can do by itself is as applicable to the Church as it is to civil society" (Kelley, p. 42). I cite these as articulations from within the Church hierarchy to widen the participative activities of the People of God.

Conclusion

One of the major challenges of the People of God is the fuller empowerment of all of the people of God. The Roman Catholic leadership structure has almost always had the interpretive advantage because they were the only ones who studied Scripture, theology, Church history, and canon law. Knowledge is a huge power base. I have suggested that the Pharisees, as a lay group who found their way into the interpretive structure of Judaism, can be a metaphor for lay Catholics today. And they did it with knowledge. The widening of the interpretive guild in Judaism was not without dialectic tension, but it did not rent the institutional fabric—it enriched it greatly.

"Infallibility" has become one of the ways in which interpretive locations has been addressed. In the first Vatican Council, the infallibility of the pope was proclaimed. The Second Vatican Council affirms this when unerringness also belongs to the People of God as a whole (Lumen gentium, #12). The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to the entire People of God. Although it is hard to find an instance where this has been functionally acknowledged or invoked, the openness to the entire People of God to interpret Christian life is affirmed by a Council of the Church. To open the process of interpretation, therefore, beyond the guild of interpreters who have accepted (or taken) the authority to say what meaning is, is revolutionary.

I am suggesting that the growing role of the lay voice in U.S. Catholicism (not only here, but that is my focus) is responsive to deep changes in Western civilization and to the new narrative invited by the Second Vatican Council. Lay Catholics are quietly and surely telling their experience of the Catholic story, and their telling is leaving its mark on what it means to be a Catholic. They are not hijacking the interpretive role, but broadening it into a dialectic. What we experience is a beginning, nothing fuller than that, but a true beginning of an expanding guild of interpreters. I believe that it is one of the most significant hidden revolutions. But that is a lot.

Bibliography

Edgerton, W. Dow. The Passion of Interpretation. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992.

Kelley, John J. Freedom in the Church: A Documented History of the Principle of Subsidiary Function. Dayton: Peter Li, Inc., 2000.

Murnion, Philip, and David DeLambo. Parishes and Parish Ministers: A Study of Parish Lay Ministry. New York: National Pastoral Life Center, 1999.

Neusner, Jacob. The Pharisees: Rabbinic Perspectives. Hoboken: KTAV, 1973.

Rivkin, Ellis. A Hidden Revolution: The Pharisees’ Search for the Kingdom Within. Nashville: Abingdon, 1978.

Saldarini, Anthony. Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees: A Sociological Approach. Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1988.