Talking Treason in Church

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Contents

Preface...............................................................................................iA "Loyal Opposition" in the Catholic Church?..........................................................1"The Church Is Not a Democracy".......................................................................11Lay Catholic Renewal..................................................................................25"Do This in Memory of Me": The Mass of the First Three Centuries......................................45"Do This in Memory of Me": The Roman Mass and the Roots of the Eucharistic Prayer.....................65Governance in the Church..............................................................................81The Current Crisis and Democracy in the Catholic Church...............................................99Sharing Wisdom........................................................................................113The Dream of a Universal (Catholic) Church............................................................125Bibliography..........................................................................................131Timeline of Key Works Dealing with Christian Origins..................................................141Index.................................................................................................147About the Author......................................................................................151

Chapter One

Is there room in the Catholic church for a Loyal Opposition?

Loyal in the sense that it reveres the church of the past and the present for all of its good works and its striving for holiness in the following of Jesus Christ.

Loyal in its desire to support the priests and sisters whose numbers are declining, who are being neglected in their old age.

But Opposition that rejects the way in which leadership is currently selected and exercised in the Catholic church.

Opposition to the current structure of the church because it is supported upon a rickety framework of lies and half-truths that only cloud the minds of the unwary, secure power to the present leadership, and keep the great mass of the church in a state of ignorance and graceless subserviency.

The church is not simply a divine institution. It is an amalgam, both divine and human. This is a key insight. Jesus Christ founded the church, but our human response to that foundation, the ways in which we Catholics have chosen to worship God, the structures and practices we have created-almost all that we now call the Catholic religion-is of human manufacture. Even Baptism was invented by John the Baptist, or at least adapted by him from Jewish tradition. The only practice left us by Jesus Christ is the Eucharist.

And it seems obvious that the Catholic church, in the sense of the religious structure we have put in place, is in dire need, not of reform-because that would leave the same human constitution in place-but of a revolution! A revolution like that produced by Jesus Christ in the Jewish "church." A revolution like the American Revolution, in which Americans accepted the English tradition in everything but the monarchy and out of that tradition produced a nation governed by its own people.

We need a thoroughgoing revolution to free the energies of Catholics to make the best of their tradition and to downgrade or eliminate values that are purely organizational and anti-Christian. What are the grounds for this revolution? The signs are easy to see.

Take the Mass, for example. The Mass is the birthright of every Catholic Christian. It is the one thing that the Lord asked us to do in his memory. Yet because of the current organizational values in the Catholic church, the Mass, with its ability to focus and renew the Catholic Christian community, is denied to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Catholics every week because there is no priest available.

This is wrong. It may be Catholic tradition now, but it was not so in the beginning. The New Testament knows nothing of a Catholic priesthood such as we have at present-a kind of trade union without which no Eucharist can be held. It is time for this tradition to be uprooted.

As a matter of cold, hard fact, the earliest Masses, as we know from St. Paul's letters, were conducted in people's homes, in house churches by ordinary people. Since many of the earliest Christians were, in fact, Gentiles who had converted to the Jewish faith and who then came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, many of the leaders of these house churches in Gentile communities were women. It was far easier for women to become Jews than for men, since women didn't have to be circumcised. And since Mass was celebrated by the leaders of the house churches, it is inevitable that women who were not priests in our sense celebrated some of the first Masses.

Today, it is taken for granted that the Catholic multitudes in the rural areas of Latin America and other parts of the world may celebrate Scripture services and even bring new Catholics into the church through Baptism. The one thing they may not do is precisely what Jesus asked them to do, remember him in the Eucharist. This is nonsense!

Take another example, the papacy. Looked at coldly and objectively, the papacy is the longest surviving totalitarian government in the world today. It is modeled exactly on the Roman Empire of the second, third, and fourth centuries, which divided imperial administrative districts into dioceses and archdioceses. In time the empire disappeared as an organic unity, but the church modeled on it did not. If the Italians had not taken from the pope the Papal States in 1860 and the City of Rome in 1870, the pope would still be a temporal autocrat and far less of a spiritual leader than he is today.

The papacy's adherents would have you believe that Jesus instituted that office when he said to Peter, "Thou art Peter (a rock), and upon this rock I will build my church" and when he gave him the keys to the kingdom of heaven and the power of binding and loosing (Matt. 16:18-19). But these arguments are self-serving in the mouth of a hierarchical church. They are made by the papacy and its promoters to consolidate power over their fellow Catholics in the hands of the hierarchy. Otherwise they are made out of ignorance and because, "That's the way it's always been." In other words by appeal to an unexamined "tradition."

This tradition, too, deserves to be rooted up, because, whatever else St. Peter may have been, he was not the first bishop of Rome, he was not the first leader of the Roman Christian community, and in fact he died before the notion of bishop (Greek: epskopos) as monarchical leader of the Christian community came into existence.

St. Paul, before coming to Rome for the first time, writes his longest and most carefully worded letter, to the Romans, probably about 55-56 CE. Several facts are clear. There is already a Christian community at Rome. It consists of both Jews and former Gentiles. Peter is not then at Rome; otherwise, Paul, who had met and...