c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Two seemingly unrelated stories about institutional religion broke just before the year ended. Schism rose like a specter over the Episcopal Church as several Northern Virginia parishes voted to depart and affiliate themselves with a conservative archbishop in Nigeria.

At almost the same moment, a mushroom cloud curdled out of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lincoln, Neb., whose bishop, Fabian Bruskewitz, won Vatican backing of his excommunication of members of the reform-minded Call to Action group as virtual heretics.

These stories are really about the same problem: the nature and exercise of authority in organized or _ as found these two cases _ disorganized religion.

The Episcopal Church seems to be a once stout barrel of belief whose staves, unbound by any steel band of central authority, are so loose that they cannot hold the contents together anymore. Bruskewitz, having called for backup from central authority, is applying so much pressure to tighten the hoops that he may shatter the barrel so that it won’t hold anything at all.

The Episcopal situation is the latest evidence of the permeable boundaries of this church in America. This esteemed denomination was the breakthrough site for ordaining the first women priests 30 years ago and, more recently, ordaining an openly gay man as bishop and a woman as presiding bishop.

These historical moves have occurred not because Episcopalianism is so theologically progressive but because its authority structures have not been strong enough to control or contain its internal revolutionary impulses. Many conscientious Episcopalians are searching for a center that will hold rather than shift whenever traditional positions are challenged.

Bruskewitz, on the other hand, may claim that he is exercising authority when he is an authoritarian at heart. There is an enormous difference between authority and authoritarianism. Authority comes from the Latin “augere,” which means “to increase,” “to create,” or “to make able to grow.” Authoritarianism is a corruption of the same root and means “to control.”

Episcopalianism may long for the centralized authority of a Roman Catholic pope and Vatican departments to firmly settle questions about ordaining homosexuals or women to the priesthood. American Catholicism, meanwhile, longs for some freedom from the absolute rejection of even discussing such issues by an authoritarian bureaucracy that tends to emphasize control and conformity.

Rome backs Bruskewitz not as an individual and certainly not as a model leader of American Catholicism. His positions are endorsed to help support a system whose integrity, in their judgment, is absolutely essential if the Catholic Church is to maintain itself as a shield against the rude shocks of history.

So different is Bruskewitz that no other American Catholic bishop could get a skin graft or a blood transfusion from the man. By keeping the hierarchical system up to Roman Code and accepting the losses and disappointments that may result, church leaders believe they are avoiding the uneasy tumult that now plagues the more protoplasmic Episcopal structures.

The Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church are struggling with different ends of the same problem. The healthy _ or unhealthy _ exercise of authority will continue to be the problem underlying all their surface difficulties in the years ahead.

(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.)

KRE/RB END KENNEDY

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