c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)
UNDATED _ Before the millennium, somebody should print the good news about the”`good news.” Relishing bad news is a cottage industry in American Catholicism that, if all you know is what you find in the media, sounds more like”Cross Fire”than Christianity. But the good news about American Catholicism far outweighs the conflicted tales carried about the church in most media coverage.
Item: Catholicism has been more successful in the United States than anywhere else, prospering in a republic separating church and state in a far more healthy way than in countries where church and state have been hopelessly entangled. Within a few generations, and largely thanks to the religious women and men who staffed them, Catholic education succeeded in transforming immigrants into citizens with a deep understanding of their country and their faith.
Item: As a result, American Catholicism presents us with a profound interpretation of Christ’s saying,”The Kingdom of God is within you.” The consciousness of the kingdom’s being within rather than outside us is evident in the easy and confident way that so many Catholics understand that they are the church, they are a people of God. For them, the center of the faith is found in no geographical space, not even in the Vatican, but wherever they gather in Jesus’ name.
This good news about the”good news”means Vatican Council II is, as Andrew Greeley has observed, an ongoing event rather than a now concluded historical incident. In other words, millions of Catholics have internalized what so often remains externalized, their religious identification and affiliation. It is not a box to be checked but a life to be led.
These Catholics do not feel they”belong”to an organization, as one does with the Knights of Columbus, a country club or, God knows, even Opus Dei. The latter recruit and review potential members, entering them in their rolls in a provisional way. Many people belong to perfectly respectable churches in this fashion.
Great numbers of Catholics, however, understand they are the church and the vast deployments of officialdom, right down to the most recently minted monsignor, exist to make it possible for them to be the church in the world. And they carry out its mission in a hundred and more ways every day, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison, bringing the waters of eternal life to the thirsty in the name of the church as a mystery and a way of life.
These Catholics may be found streaming out, as spokes from the hub, from the great wheel of any parish, drawing their strength from that center through which their unifying and binding identity with Roman Catholicism is made evident and secure.
What is more, these remarkable Catholics do this without inflicting the wounds or the indignities that are the curse of so many”do-gooders.”The latter often need to do good more than people need to have good done unto them.
If you want to test whether any religious movement brings the Kingdom of God to life, ask this simple, never-fail question: Whose needs are being met here? If it is truly Catholic, it is the need of the helped rather than the helper.
The idea that the Kingdom of God is within us describes a mystery, but it is not mysterious in the scientific or detective story sense. Millions of Catholics have internalized their faith, bringing the eternal kingdom into real-time existence in their everyday lives.
These good people give the lie to all the headlines about banning women priests and ministering to homosexuals. Look into their lives and see that, even though officials claim they are incapable of it, women are enriching the ministry of the church beyond any measuring of it so, in a real sense, they are priests already. The real test of priesthood is whether people can minister rather than whether they are men or women.
Yes, and gays are being ministered to, embraced on that level of the kingdom where we find the true consciousness of what Catholicism is. Nothing will stop that ministry because it is the spontaneous and healthy response of so many American Catholics who know Jesus did not ask the spiritually needy for their membership cards or whether they had an episcopal moderator, a prize held up recently to a gathering of gays on the condition they behave themselves.
But Catholicism is precisely the religion for people, like the rest of us, who have a hard time behaving ourselves. In short, the good news about the”good news”is that this Kingdom of God, the one within us, is found wherever Catholics bring their faith to bear in their lives.
DEA END KENNEDY
