For a High-Intensity Church


The Catholic Church has an assimilation problem. Except that it concerns ordained priests, who are within the Church but no longer assimilated.

I am deliberately using a politically loaded word: remigration. Not, of course, to some country of origin. To civil, temporal society, to a life outside the Church: to that vast space in which everyone is free to be progressive, conservative, socialist, liberal, relativist, pacifist, an activist, or to construct a personal religion by choosing whatever they like from those already in existence.


This is because a priest is not simply a citizen who talks about religion. He has studied a doctrine, freely asked to be ordained, entered a hierarchical structure, received a sacrament and a mandate and, in many cases, a community to lead. The question, then, is not whether a priest can have personal opinions. Of course he can. But he has never received a mandate from the Church to invent his own personal version of the Church.


Canon law is fairly clear: canon 273 places clerics under a special obligation of respect and obedience to the Pope and their own Ordinary. Canon 279 requires them to continue their sacred studies and follow the ‘solid doctrine’ founded on Scripture and handed down by the Church. Canons 750–754 govern adherence to the truths of faith and to the Magisterium. And canon 528 says that the parish priest must ensure that the Word of God is proclaimed in its entirety and that the faithful are instructed in the truths of the faith. In its entirety is a demanding phrase. It does not mean choosing the least abrasive passage every Sunday. It does not mean skipping the Word when it might cause discomfort, or interpreting it as gently as possible.

The Congregation for the Clergy has explained this even more clearly: the priest must be a model of adherence to the Magisterium; the parish priest is responsible for preaching ‘authentic Catholic doctrine’ and must ensure that parish activities take place in accordance with sound doctrine and ecclesiastical discipline. The same document says that even ‘fear and inhibition’ must be overcome when invoking the discipline of the Church.

Drucker’s Paradox

Peter Drucker recounted an interesting case in Managing Oneself. He compared two American Protestant churches. The first sought above all to bring people in: first let us get them into church, then they will grow spiritually. The second, by contrast, demanded much more serious religious involvement and tended to turn away those who joined without genuinely participating in the spiritual life of the community.

At first glance, the second was growing more slowly. In fact, it retained a much higher proportion of new members, and its growth proved more solid. For Drucker, this was above all a matter of organisational values: an organisation must know what it considers truly important, and cannot prosper indefinitely if membership becomes incompatible with those values.

A few decades earlier, Dean Kelley had already described a similar phenomenon in Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: more demanding religious communities often showed a greater capacity to generate meaning, discipline and involvement.

In 1994, Laurence Iannaccone formulated the problem in even starker terms in his article Why Strict Churches Are Strong, published in the American Journal of Sociology. Under certain conditions, demanding religious organisations can reduce free riding: they discourage those who want only the advantages of membership and increase the participation of those who remain. Strictness acts simultaneously as selection and as investment.

The sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter had observed an analogous mechanism while studying nineteenth-century American utopian communities: sacrifice, personal investment, renunciation and communion were among the mechanisms that distinguished enduring communities from those that quickly dissolved.

The conclusion is not that more prohibitions automatically mean more faith. That would be childish. The conclusion is that belonging which costs nothing also tends to be worth little. And it is possible that the Church has made precisely this mistake: in trying not to lose anyone, it has progressively diminished what it means to belong and, in Italy at least, it is crumbling, losing little pieces every day.

A High-Intensity Church

I am not imagining a return to the caricature of the parish priest who measures girls’ skirts. I am imagining a high-intensity Church. A Church that anyone can enter, but where, on entering, it is evident that one has entered somewhere. The distinction is essential. The door can be open to everyone without the threshold having to disappear.

Christianity can welcome the sinner without declaring sin non-existent, but it cannot pretend that sin is not there. It can welcome those who do not believe without maintaining that believing and not believing are substantially the same thing. It can respect Muslims, Buddhists or atheists without thereby asserting that all religions are equivalent, even morally equivalent. It can and must have a moral scale of values to apply to religions or actions.

Dominus Iesus itself explicitly rejects the relativist idea that ‘one religion is as good as another’, while affirming respect for whatever is true and holy in other religious traditions. For Catholic doctrine, Christ is not one religious possibility among many equivalent ones: he is at the centre of its claim to truth. If one is no longer willing to say this, it remains to be understood in what sense that religion continues to be Catholicism. And the Church and those who belong to it, from the Pope down to the faithful, must uphold the word of Christ and repel attacks on the Church and on Christ.

Philosophy, too, helps us understand the problem. Alasdair MacIntyre insisted that human practices acquire meaning through internal goods, rules and shared standards of excellence. A practice is not simply whatever each participant subjectively decides to make of it. It exists precisely because it contains criteria that precede the individual participant and to which he learns to conform.

Playing chess while abolishing its rules to make the game more inclusive does not make chess more welcoming. At some point, it simply stops being chess.

Brothers, Truly

A high-intensity Church should also be a real community. If Catholics call themselves brothers in Christ, that word must have concrete consequences. It means helping one another find work, supporting one another when someone is in difficulty, lending time, skills and money, looking after children, the sick and the elderly, not leaving anyone alone when they are going through a difficult time. It means knowing that, if I fall, there is a community that will pick me up because I belong.

This internal solidarity should not become a closing-off from the rest of society. Christians live in the world, work with those who do not share their faith, respect them, love them and seek, through their own lives too, to bring them closer to what they believe. But openness does not mean indifference to where one belongs. If their witness is not received, Christians are not obliged to seek their relationships, their points of reference and their community in that very place. Naturally, they also seek out other Christians: people with whom to share prayer, values, the upbringing of children, mutual support and the same idea of the good. In a sense, they want to be where the air is good to breathe. It means distinguishing between openness towards everyone and intimacy with some. The Gospel itself sends Christians out to meet others, but does not ask them to become indistinguishable from what they encounter. Matthew tells us that, when the word is not received, the disciples must know how to move on; Saint Paul is even more direct: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals.’ A strong community can therefore look outwards without ceasing to gravitate towards its own centre.

Early Christianity had something far more radical than Sunday cordiality. Believers thought of themselves as members of the same body: if one suffered, all suffered; they bore one another’s burdens and made goods and resources practically available. ‘Brother’ was not a polite way of addressing a stranger during a religious service. It denoted a bond.

Perhaps even the sign of peace would have a different meaning if it once again represented this. Today we can shake hands with the person beside us, utter a formula and, a few seconds later, go back to being two strangers who may even detest one another. In a truly Christian community, peace should mean something more demanding: you belong to the same community as I do. If you need help, I am here. If you suffer, you are not alone. If you do wrong, that does not stop you being my brother. And I can expect the same from you.
A community of this kind would ask much more of its members, but would also give much more in return. Not merely a weekly Mass, a family tradition or a cultural identity, but the concrete certainty of belonging to a network of people who recognise one another, support one another and consider themselves responsible for one another. Identity, then, should not serve to separate Catholics from the world, but to allow them to enter it without dissolving into it. A strong community can be open precisely because it knows who it is.

Form Matters Too

This brings in seemingly minor questions: how one dresses in church, how one behaves, silence, phones, respect for the place, even whether it is appropriate to bring one’s dog into church, to the point of holding it in one’s arms during Communion. Let us not confuse different levels: Jesus did not proclaim a doctrine on closed-toe shoes, and shorts are not a heresy. But it would be naïve to think that forms have no importance at all. Émile Durkheim considered the distinction between the sacred and the profane one of the fundamental characteristics of religion: rites and practices mark out a space that does not coincide with ordinary life and help transform a collection of individuals into a moral community.

Human beings do this continually. We do not dress in the same way at a funeral, at an official ceremony and on the beach. Not because there is a metaphysics of the tie, but because outward behaviour communicates, to ourselves as well, how much what we are doing matters and what it means.


The social psychologist Marilynn Brewer has also shown that collective identities become particularly strong when they simultaneously satisfy the need for belonging and the need for distinctiveness: being part of an ‘us’, but a recognisable ‘us’. A group entirely indistinguishable from its surroundings loses one of the sources of its identification.

This is why rosaries, crosses, feast days, fasts, communal prayers, liturgical gestures and even certain rules of behaviour are also markers of belonging. If I can behave in church exactly as I do in a café, dress exactly as I do on the beach, talk as I do in the supermarket and think exactly what I thought before entering, sooner or later a fairly reasonable question arises: what makes that space different?
If I send my children to catechism only so that, when they grow up, they can marry in church and celebrate in a beautiful church, but then do not pray with them or attend Mass with them, my participation in the life of the Church ends up being reduced to the bare minimum required to acquire formally a right that has nothing to do with the Church or with Jesus.

Abortion Is Where the Misunderstanding Becomes Obvious

There are matters on which the Church allows enormous pluralism in prudential judgement. Economic policy, tax rates, pension systems or the practical implementation of migration policies can be the subject of differing opinions among Catholics. And there are matters on which pluralism is simply not envisaged. Abortion belongs to this category. Evangelium vitae does not use ambiguous language. It defines procured abortion as ‘the deliberate and direct killing’ of a human being in the initial phase of existence, and states that direct abortion always constitutes a ‘grave moral disorder’. It adds that no circumstance or law can turn it into a morally permissible act.

This doctrine can be challenged from outside. In a free society, it is perfectly legitimate to say that it is ‘the expulsion of a clump of cells’; it is rather harder, scientifically, to call it a clump of cells, given that those cells have their own DNA, different from that of the mother and father, and that they often also have a beating heart, but ignoring this doctrine from a Catholic pulpit is contrary to belonging to the Church.
Mercy does not resolve this contradiction. Pope Francis reaffirmed that abortion is ‘a grave sin’ because it puts an end to an innocent life. Forgiveness and moral judgement, in Christian logic, are not mutually exclusive. Forgiveness presupposes precisely something to forgive.

A merciful Church should therefore be capable of saying two things at once: ‘whatever you have done, you can be forgiven’ and ‘what you have done remains wrong’. If it can utter only the first sentence, it has not become more merciful but has arbitrarily altered the meaning of mercy.

This is the case with abortion, but the same also applies to euthanasia, surrogacy or adultery, among other actions tolerated by priests who invent their own rule. The Church should not turn a blind eye; priests should not be so indulgent as to change doctrine on the spot, but should communicate fully what it means to be Catholic.

And Voting?

Here, too, it would be convenient to take refuge in the phrase: ‘The Church does not do politics.’ That is true only up to a point. Canon 287 §2 states that clerics should not normally play an active part in political parties. But the Church makes moral judgements on political acts when goods it considers fundamental are involved.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Doctrinal Note on the political participation of Catholics states that it is not permissible to take part in campaigns in favour of laws contrary to the protection of life, or to support them with one’s vote. It adds an even more demanding sentence: a well-formed Christian conscience cannot vote for the implementation of a political programme or a law that overturns fundamental elements of faith and morality. And it explicitly cites abortion and euthanasia among the issues involving moral principles that admit of no exceptions or compromises.
This does not automatically produce a Catholic electoral slate. In a democracy, voting may present us with parties that are all imperfect and a multiplicity of moral goods to weigh up.
But one consequence is difficult to avoid: if a party does not merely acknowledge the legal existence of abortion, but includes in its programme the intention to facilitate, extend or promote abortion, euthanasia or surrogacy, a Catholic cannot simply behave as though that point were morally irrelevant, and a priest cannot fail to make things clear or wash his hands of these issues like Pilate.

Remigration

And here we come to priests. A priest can have doubts. He can study. He can raise theological questions. He can undergo a crisis of faith. All this belongs even to the great intellectual history of Christianity. But there is a difference between questioning doctrine and receiving from the Church a pulpit from which systematically to replace that doctrine with one’s own. The Code asks of him ecclesial obedience, continuing formation in ‘solid doctrine’, adherence to the Magisterium and proclamation of the Word in its entirety. It even asks him, barring exceptions, not to become a party activist. He has not been entrusted with a mandate to correct Catholicism on the basis of the political sensibility of the moment.

And so ‘remigration’ is a provocation, but it has a logic of its own.
A priest who considers the substantive elements of the doctrine he has chosen to represent definitively unacceptable might find in civil society a perfectly legitimate space in which to advocate his ideas. Canon law itself provides, through precise procedures and for specified causes, for the loss of the clerical state; this is obviously neither an automatic penalty for dissent nor some fanciful summary expulsion. If I no longer share an organisation’s fundamental aims, I can seek to debate them through its procedures. I can also leave it. What is harder to justify is insisting on retaining its role, authority, symbols and audience while unilaterally transforming the mission entrusted to me.

In this sense, yes: some priests seem to have an assimilation problem. Perhaps they should assimilate, or become assimilated again, into the Church they have chosen. Or remigrate to the temporal world, where nobody prevents them from founding an association, standing for election, engaging in politics, writing editorials and advocating a morality constructed according to their own conscience. In short, freely doing everything that simply has no place in a pulpit.

Fewer Faithful?

The most predictable objection remains: doing this would empty the churches even further. Perhaps. But Drucker posed precisely this question, which I make my own: what are we measuring? The number of people who pass through a door, or the strength of belonging among those who remain? A Church that, to retain a hundred people, must stop saying why it exists may discover that it has kept a hundred attendees and lost a community.
Kelley, Iannaccone, Kanter and Brewer, from different perspectives, suggest something counter-intuitive: boundaries, investment, distinctiveness and commitment are not necessarily enemies of growth. They may be precisely what makes belonging capable of producing loyalty. The high-intensity Church should not, then, be a closed Church. It should be a Church with a wide-open door and a clearly visible threshold through which anyone can enter.

But on entering, one must understand that here something is believed, something is studied, prayer is offered, a tradition is handed down, one belongs to a community, takes on duties, distinguishes good from evil and is sometimes even obliged to change one’s mind or behaviour. A religion that never asks human beings to change has probably already decided to keep changing itself to follow them.

The paradox I want to highlight, and the decline I hope will be reversed: the Church fears losing the faithful by asking too much, while it may have lost many precisely because, for too long, it has asked too little. In return, it may have gained a more numerous but weaker following: people who are close, occasional, nominally members, but who do not produce the same cohesion, the same continuity and the same capacity to transmit a strong religious identity over time. A community lives by how deeply those who enter it choose to belong, not by the curious or those who do so out of habit.

References

Brewer, Marilynn B., “The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 17, no. 5, 1991, pp. 475–482.
Catholic Church, Code of Canon Law, 1983, in particular cann. 273, 279, 287 §2, 528, 750–754 and 290–293.
Congregation for the Clergy, The Priest, Pastor and Leader of the Parish Community. Instruction, 4 August 2002.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus. Declaration on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, 6 August 2000.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life, 24 November 2002.
Drucker, Peter F., “Managing Oneself”, Harvard Business Review, vol. 77, no. 2, March–April 1999, pp. 64–74.
Durkheim, Émile, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Félix Alcan, Paris, 1912.
Francis, Misericordia et misera. Apostolic Letter at the Conclusion of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, 20 November 2016.
John Paul II, Evangelium vitae. Encyclical Letter on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life, 25 March 1995.
Iannaccone, Laurence R., “Why Strict Churches Are Strong”, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 99, no. 5, 1994, pp. 1180–1211.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, “Commitment and Social Organization: A Study of Commitment Mechanisms in Utopian Communities”, American Sociological Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 1968, pp. 499–517.
Kelley, Dean M., Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion, Harper & Row, New York, 1972.
MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1981.