This article was first published in The Tablet 11 September 1976
In his very interesting Letter to a distressed Catholic (The Tablet 31 July) Bishop Butler suggests that the crisis through which the Catholic Church is passing today can be compared with that through which the apostolic Church passed in the first century, when it ceased to be the Church of the Jews and became the Church of the gentiles. This seems to me to be an extremely important suggestion and to give a unique insight into what the Church is experiencing today. I would like to draw out some of its implications in the hope that it may enable Catholics to understand in the light of the Church’s own past history what is happening in the Church today.
Let us remind ourselves that the Church which came into being on the day of Pentecost was composed entirely of Jews. There may have been, as Bishop Butler says, some proselytes, but all alike accepted the Jewish religion. They accepted the Law of Moses and went up regularly to the Temple to pray. Christianity at this stage was simply a Jewish sect, and no one apparently expected that it would ever be anything else. When Cornelius, the first gentile converted to be received into the Church, approached Peter, he had to have a special vision to enable him to see that a gentile could become a Christian. (Acts 10). Moreover most of those Jews spoke Aramaic rather than Greek or Latin. They celebrated the Eucharist in their houses, reclining at table, in the course of a meal (at which presumably the bread was consecrated at the beginning and the wine at the end) according to the Jewish custom. There was no church, no altar, no candles, no vestments and, of course, no crucifix. The only Bible was the Old Testament, read in Hebrew and commented in Aramaic. There were no priests of bishops. The leaders of the Church were the apostles, and the administration was in the hands of the ‘elders,’ modelled on the elders of the Jewish synagogue. The theology of the Church was a Jewish theology, using entirely the categories of Jewish thought. There was no doctrine of ‘Trinity’ or ‘incarnation’ or ‘sacrament.’
Such was the Catholic Church at its origin, and yet in 50 years that Church was to be radically transformed. Instead of speaking Aramaic, the Church now spoke Greek (Latin was not to come for more than a century). Its ‘New Testament’ was written in Greek and the Old Testament was also read in Greek. The Eucharist was celebrated in Greek and began to undergo those changes which were to lead in the course of time to something like the Greco-Roman rite with which we are familiar. Bishops were beginning to appear to take the place of the apostles and the Church had spread to Rome, the capital of the Empire, where both Peter and Paul had been martyred and were held to be its ‘founders.’ A theology had begun to emerge, still based on the categories of Jewish thought but beginning to open itself to Greek influence. In the course of the next three centuries these changes were to continue in an increasing volume. The Greek liturgy became ever more elaborate and the Roman church, following the African church, began to use Latin. The Church began to organise itself on the model of the Roman Empire with ‘dioceses’ corresponding to the divisions of the state. The bishops were followed by archbishops or ‘metropolitans’ and patriarchs, centred on the great cities of the Roman Empire: Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome. Theology began to speak the language of Greek philosophy and ‘pagan’ customs, derived from the Greek ‘mysteries’ were introduced into the Church.
If we try to think back into the mind of a Christian and a Catholic (for by this time there were many forms of non-Catholic Christianity), how bewildering all these changes must have seemed. There was first of all the abolition of the Jewish law – the law given by God and believed to be eternal – and the destruction of the Jewish temple, which was expected to last for ever. Then there were all the changes and language and custom, which are always felt so deeply. Then there was the gradual infiltration of Greek and Roman habits of thought and behaviour, all of which would have been regarded at first as ‘pagan’ and incompatible with Christian life and thought. Must not many Christians have asked themselves, what has this Church in common with the Church in the time of Christ and apostles? Everything seemed to have changed, liturgy, theology, church government, even the basic practices of Christian piety. Yet we know that this Church which emerged in the 4th century was in direct continuity with the Church of the apostles, and when we examine it closely as Newman did in his Development of Christian Doctrine, we can see how beneath all these changes there is a principle of continuity, or in other words a principle of growth. For growth is change in continuity. Without continuity there is no growth but disintegration, but without change there is also no growth because there is no life. The Ebionites, as Bishop Butler observed, remain a pathetic example of a church which refused to grow.
Let us compare this with the situation of the Church today. Most of us grew up in a church which was Latin in language, in custom and tradition. The Eucharist was celebrated in a rite which had been elaborated in the western Church in the Middle Ages. Latin was the only language used in the liturgy, including all the sacraments and popular devotions like the rosary and benediction novenas and stations of the cross were the devotions of the medieval Latin Church (unknown of course in the Churches of the East). Our theology was a Latin theology, elaborated by St Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, with the help of the philosophy of Aristotle and theology was taught in most seminaries in Latin. Above all, the system of church government, with the Pope and the Roman Curia controlling the whole Church, was that which had been elaborated by canon lawyers in the Middle Ages and given its final shape at the Council of Trent. Let us remember that in the years before the second Vatican Council it appeared as though this system, of liturgy, theology and canon law, had reached its apogee. There had been a revival of the liturgy spreading from the monasteries through the parishes, restoring the liturgy to its ancient beauty and dignity. There had been a prodigious revival of Thomistic theology and philosophy which seemed to answer all the needs of the Church in the face of the modern world. Finally, the papacy under Pius XII with his great encyclicals like Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei seemed to have established the papacy in undisputed pre-eminence. And yet in a few years since the council the whole of the vast imposing structure has collapsed like a house of cards.
What then has happened? Let us go back to our comparison with the early Church. Our Latin Church was like the Jewish Church at the time of Christ. It was a magnificent structure built up over many centuries, embodying the highest principles of worship and doctrine and organisation. But just as that Jewish Church had to go out into the Roman Empire and adapt itself to a totally new world, involving changes in language and worship and culture and behaviour, so the Church today is being compelled to move out of the world of the Middle Ages and adapt itself to the new world which has come into being in these last years. The challenge to the Church today comes not only from the modern secular world with its science and technology, its economic and social change, its new patterns of life and thought, but also from the new world of Asia and Africa, which is now beginning to emerge as another form of culture, totally different from the European culture in which the Church grew up. Not long ago I met an African priest, studying at the university of Louvain, and deeply concerned about African Catholicism. The question which he was asking was, does an African in order to become a Christian have first to become (culturally) a European, and he saw it as essentially the same problem as faced the early Church, does a gentile in order to become a Christian have first to become a Jew?
This then is the challenge facing the Church today. At the second Vatican Council the Church opened herself first to other Christian Churches accepting the principles of ecumenism; then to other religions, accepting the principle of dialogue; and finally to the secular world, seeing herself as essentially at the service of the world. It is obvious, as soon as we begin to reflect, that the structures of the medieval Latin Church cannot possibly meet this challenge. The Latin liturgy has gone, and though some may regret its passing (with all its rich cultural heritage), yet no one seriously thinks that it can be restored, except on a modest scale here and there (much as many of the eastern rites remain). Though the theology of St Thomas will, no doubt, continue to be studied, no one now supposes that it can ever again be an adequate basis for a Catholic theology. Biblical criticism has by now advanced so far that a new basis for theology has necessarily to be found. Finally, though the papacy continues to retain its position, no one doubts that the whole system of church government will undergo profound changes in the coming years. But these changes are no more profound and far-reaching than those which the Church experienced in the first four centuries of her growth. We are entering on a new age of the Church and the Church which will emerge in the coming centuries may be as far removed from the Latin Church of the Middle Ages as that Church was from the little Jewish sect which came into being at Pentacost.