c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) An “autochthonous church” may be a mouthful of Greek to most American Catholics, but it may also be the best hope for the future of Catholicism in this country. So contends Robert Blair Kaiser in “A Church in Search of Itself,” just published by Knopf.

The big fat Greek word derives from “khthon,” or earth, and it means “one sprung from the land itself.” For Kaiser, who has covered religion for Time magazine and CBS and is now a contributing editor in Rome for Newsweek, it describes a “home-grown church,” one that is loyal to Rome and true to its American values at the same time.

Kaiser surveys the church in such apparently differing places as South America and Asia, noting how these “local churches,” as they are called, draw on their own traditions and customs to express themselves in their own true cultural voices. This leads him to a spellbinding account of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s measured but unmistakable campaign to succeed John Paul II in the papacy.

Ratzinger was the great crimson hope to many conservative Catholics. Writer George Weigel interpreted his election as a validation of John Paul II’s tightening the screws of orthodoxy and centralizing all authority in himself. Whether Benedict will fulfill these longings or not, Kaiser’s play-by-play of his election is as mesmerizing as it is revealing of the low politics that take place, as my grandmother used to say, “everywhere, including hell.”

Benedict XVI and the cardinals who elected him are not diminished by these conclave revelations. In fact, they seem more human, a word that comes from the same Greek word “khthon” found in an autochthonous, or home-grown, church. As a theologian, Ratzinger had supported such local churches.

Kaiser, who covered Vatican II, foresees a return to churches that, following that historic council’s documents, recognize the collegial rather than autocratic structure of the church. They would have authority to resolve their local issues without submitting everything for censorship by Vatican bureaucrats or the approval of the pope. Collegiality recognizes the theological principle that local bishops have their own authority from their ordination rather than by delegation from the pope.

In an interview, Kaiser noted that “Autochthonous churches are nothing new” and that Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that the patriarchates allow local churches to embrace unity with the pope without “being incorporated into a uniform administration.”

Kaiser describes the home-grown church as an “ancient idea” and the answer to the question raised by many Catholics about what they can do to strengthen their church after the devastation of the sex abuse crisis.

Kaiser argues that the American church would be reinvigorated through more participation by its well-educated members in electing their own bishops, another early church practice. The sex abuse crisis, he feels, is a function of the autocratic church top-heavy with clergy who feel that, by being hierarchs, they are above the people and above the laws that bind everybody else.

“They got away with it,” Kaiser claims, “because, in Bill Clinton’s phrase, `they could.”’

The time is coming, Kaiser says, when theologically sophisticated American Catholics will expect a regional council to be convened like the 19th century Council of Baltimore.

“Canon law says that up to 50 percent of delegates can be non-bishops and non-priests,” Kaiser points out. “This would be a church in which Catholics would feel they were citizens. The first thing new citizens say is `I can vote now.”’

“A church of 1.1 billion members,” Kaiser contends, “cannot be micro-managed by one man in Rome.”

This church was defined by Vatican II as a “people of God” rather than a collapsing clerical church in whose ruins the sex abuse scandal sprouted. As Kaiser points out, “We have reached the moment to implement that theology that supports the local church as springing from the land itself.”

MO/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Eugene Cullen Kennedy, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.