Church as Sacrament | John Cavadini about:reader?url=https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/08/church-a...

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Church as Sacrament | John Cavadini

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Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church

by George Weigel
Basic, 304 pages, $27.99
In his bracing though sometimes problematic new book Evangelical
Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church, George Weigel
advances a vision for “deep reform” that he calls neither “progressive”
nor “traditionalist” but precisely “evangelical.” “Evangelical Catholicism”
is heir to a “deep reform” movement begun by Leo XIII—“deep” because
a fundamental reform of a centuries-old “Counter-Reformation” model
of the Church to one open to engagement with modern culture.

Instead of allowing the Church to retreat in the face of increasing

marginalization by the forces of modernity, Leo mobilized the
evangelical energy of the Church to affect the ambient culture in ways
that were based in the Church’s unique witness to the Gospel. Vatican II
was not so much an innovation as a further manifestation of what Leo
had already begun.

The twenty-first-century Church will continue true to this reform if its

terms of reference become increasingly evangelical, for example, moving
from saying “the Church teaches” to “the Gospel reveals” when
discussing the faith. Further, “friendship with Jesus Christ” will be the
center of Evangelical Catholicism, not reliance on “canonical status” and
the predominantly juridical terms in which Counter-Reformation
Catholicism defined its identity.

Evangelical Catholicism “begins with meeting and knowing the Lord

himself.” Catholic identity is approached “not primarily through the legal

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question of canonical boundaries, but through the theological reality of

different degrees of communion with the Church,” on the analogy of the
degrees of communion used to describe the relative closeness or distance
remaining between the Catholic Church and separated Christian
communions. Members of the Church can also be said to exist in
different degrees of communion with the Church according to their
adherence to Church teaching and their robust friendship with Jesus.

Weigel argues that the twin criteria of truth and mission, the goal of
which is sanctification, are the criteria for the reform of all of the
vocations in the Church. Truth and mission both bring their gifts to bear,
in a spirit of continuing conversion, on missionary proclamation of the
truth, building up a culture conducive to Gospel values. The “deeply
reformed” Church becomes an evangelizing presence in the modern
world, wherever she finds herself.

There is much to commend in this vision of the Church. If the Catholic

reader experiences some feeling of discomfort, the feeling is surely partly
due to being called out of the Catholic comfort zone in which one takes
one’s religion for granted, as an essentially private affair that places no
particularly urgent demands for proclamation of the Gospel in word and
deed.

But it is also sometimes hard to distinguish this beneficial discomfort

from the worry that, despite Weigel’s disclaimer distinguishing
Evangelical Catholicism from Protestant Evangelicalism, the ecclesiology
implied in his descriptions of Evangelical Catholicism threatens to leave
behind fundamental features of Catholic ecclesiology.

For example: “Evangelical Catholics know that friendship with the Lord
Jesus and the communion that arises from that friendship is an
anticipation of the City of God in the city of this world.” Despite the echo
of Augustinian language, the theological syntax is foreign to the
Augustine of the City of God and to the Catechism of the Catholic
Church, which invokes his ecclesiology of the totus Christus. The
communion of the Church does not arise from personal friendship with
the Lord Jesus, but from Christ’s undeserved, atoning love which,
mediated by the sacraments, makes the Church. The Church is the bond

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of communion, whether it is consciously known in a subjective

friendship or not.

Weigel’s account of this friendship and its relation to what constitutes

the Church is ambiguous. He says it is “found in the Church” and yet
insists strongly that “You are a Catholic because you have met the Lord
Jesus and entered into a mature friendship with him”which is to say, in
evangelically Catholic language, that the sacramental grace of your
Baptism, should you have been baptized as an infant, has been made
manifest in the pattern of your life.” But the truth is, you are a Catholic
because you were baptized and thereby made a member of the one Body,
espoused into one flesh with the Bridegroom. There is no amount of
subjective friendship that can replace or add anything substantial in
comparison with this utter gift. Weigel’s formulation reduces this
sacramental bond to something merely legal.

Weigel claims that “evangelical Catholics who adhere to the Gospel? . . .

are in fuller communion with evangelical Protestants who affirm classic
Christian orthodoxy” than they are with prominent dissident (but not
excommunicated) Catholic theologians. But surely it is precisely “classic”
Catholic orthodoxy on the Church that is the fundamental difference
separating Evangelical Protestants and Catholics.

Weigel’s claim is intended to illustrate his idea of “degrees of

communion” within the Church, an idea not referenced to any
magisterial source. If thematized consistently, it would mean that the
blood of Christ is not really efficacious unto communion, but it is rather
the purity and virtue of core individual members of the Church that form
the real bonds of communion.

Weigel seems to recognize, with Augustine, that the Church is a mixed

body of wheat and tares. He says that deep reform “is not a matter of
preemptively burning out the weeds, although it will involve some
radical clarification of what are in fact weeds.” But Augustine’s point is
that you cannot now clarify this at all. This does not mean that we
cannot identify false teaching and bad behavior and lovingly exhort or
require correction, but it does mean that the identity of the Church is
radically sacramental, not based on advance knowledge of eschatological

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clarity.

It is significant that Weigel claims Dei Verbum, not Lumen Gentium , is

“the key Vatican II document for the deep reform of the Catholic
Church.” He never mentions the doctrine, prominent in Lumen Gentium
and emphatically repeated in the Catechism, that the Church is the
sacrament of communion with God and of unity among human beings.

In fact, this is its “first purpose.” The Church can be this because she is
born not primarily from our works, confession, or conduct, but because
she is “born primarily of Christ’s total self-giving for our salvation
anticipated in the institution of the Eucharist and fulfilled on the cross,”
and she comes forth from his side as his Bride, joined to him in one flesh
as one Body.

Weigel substitutes for this teaching the doctrine of Christ as the

primordial sacrament of the human encounter with God, an expression
not used in the Catechism. He uses it, in effect, to replace the doctrine of
the Church as sacrament: “Evangelical Catholicism begins with meeting
and knowing the Lord himself, the primordial Sacrament of the human
encounter with God.”

Repeating Schillebeeckx’ formula without any corresponding emphasis

on the sacramental nature of the Church tends to separate Christ from
the Church, despite Weigel’s best intentions, replacing the sacramental
nature of the Church in the world with “the Lord himself,” who is thus
ambiguously located relative to his own Body. The intimate one-flesh
union of Christ with his Spouse is vitiated. The “Lord himself” becomes
ambivalently available for subjective experiences of personal friendship.

Weigel comments, “The joy of being in the presence of the Lord is the
sustaining dynamic of the communion, the unique form of human
community, that is the Church.” But is that really true? The sustaining
dynamic of the communion that is the Church is the all-surpassing
sacrifice of Christ. Establishing Christ as the “primordial sacrament”
without any evident relationship to the Church as sacrament leaves the
Church as simply a “unique form of human community.”

Ironically, for a cultural critic, this weakens the perspective that the

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Church can bring to bear on all of the absolutizing claims of the

kingdoms of this world. For it is only a community that is not formed on
the basis of claims of human purity, achievement, or excellence, however
unique, that can mediate perspective, simply by its very presence in the
world, on those that are.

To be fair, Weigel does not develop the ecclesiology drawn above. Yet it
is not clearly blocked, and it would seem the author’s responsibility to do
so. Otherwise, the “deep reform” of the Catholic Church will, despite the
author’s laudable goals, turn out to be not merely a reform, but a
rejection.

That being said, one is hard pressed not to admire the contagious spirit
of evangelical zeal that fills Weigel’s call for specific reforms, and
perhaps the textual infusion of this spirit in the reader is the major
contribution of this book. Weigel first argues that the reform of the
episcopate, and of overly bureaucratized episcopal conferences with little
mechanism for fraternal correction or evangelical response, is the most
pressing reform needed.

The sexual abuse scandal was essentially a “grave crisis of episcopal

malfeasance and misgovernance” and “the key” to reform involves a
change in criteria by which candidates for bishops are identified. He is
right that we need to have new criteria for electing bishops and a new
process that includes broader consultation, rectifying “the absence of any
serious lay input.” He notes the irony that Karol Wojtyla, only thirty-
eight when ordained a bishop, and known more for his preaching,
teaching, and friendships with layfolk than for his oiling of the gears of
episcopal advancement, would not have been likely to have been selected
today.

A reform of the priesthood away from clericalism is the next

desideratum, with reforms in seminary education, especially in the
teaching of Scripture. Clericalism substitutes for effectiveness. A
pedagogy that relies too exclusively on historico-critical methodologies,
without corresponding, equally sophisticated attention to understanding
how Scripture is the Word of God, undermines confidence in Scripture
as the Word of God, contributing to lackluster, moralizing preaching that

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does not know how to reach into the spiritual depths of the text. The
teaching of Dei Verbum, which called both for historical
contextualization and contextualization in the “analogy of faith,” is left
largely untried.

Also, reforms of liturgical styles that over-emphasize the personality of

the celebrant, and of hymnody that trivializes the doctrines it sings, are
clearly desirable. The continuing reform of the papacy such that the
“evangelical” modes of popes from John XXIII to Benedict XVI continue
to displace the model of “CEO of Catholic Church Inc.” is surely a
desideratum, as Weigel suggests. So is a reform of the College of
Cardinals making it more globally representative, and a reform of the
Roman Curia, source of recent scandals and safe haven for professional
incompetence.

Oh—I was conveniently about to forget what cuts closest to myself—the

laity are by no means exempted from evangelical reform, especially
where the practice of the faith requires a countercultural witness that
demands us all to step out of our Counter-Reformation Catholic comfort
zones and take a greater responsibility for evangelization in the home,
family, work, society, and public square.

John Cavadini is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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