In a recent interview with the UK Catholic weekly `The Tablet’, former bishop and head of the Episcopal Church in Scotland Richard Halloway spoke of his resignation after attending the Lambeth Conference of 1998. He is no longer even a practicing member of his Church having lost faith in the institution.
The Lambeth Conference is an event which happens in the worldwide Anglican Communion every 10 years, approximately. The 1998 Conference was particularly significant as it was hijacked on the question of homosexuality and whether people of that orientation could be ordained. It became divisive and bitter, with no shortage of personal abuse.
The irony was that the greatest opposition to change at that Conference was by closeted gay men in ministry but who hadn’t come to terms with their own sexuality. A similar situation is not exactly unknown in the Catholic Church today.
Holloway said that 1998 Conference was like witnessing a lynch mob. It became ‘a hate fest against gay people’. In the interview he said a more disturbing thought was that there is something in the very nature of religion that tended towards the kind of behaviour he saw at Lambeth.
In his book `Godless Morality’ Holloway writes: “it seems to me that religious dogmatism complicated the struggle to live an ethical life”. What he appears to be suggesting is that religion should remove its list of dogmatic certainties and replace them with the basic principle of showing kindness to all.
I have been reading up on developments in the US Episcopal Church from the 1970s to the turn of the century, as it was there the movement for such reform began and was most active. The struggle during those years bears an uncanny resemblance to what is now happening in the Catholic Church.
From the 1970s three dominant issues were discussed, debated, and even fought over in the US Episcopal Church. These were the ordination of women, the church’s attitude to homosexuals and whether they could become ministers and, probably most fundamental of all, the relationship between science and religious belief, encompassing the thorny question of how to interpret Scriptures for the modern world.
It has struck me that the US Episcopal Church was 50 years ahead of us Catholics in facing up to those challenges. I was surprised that, though I have followed closely the current synodal movement in the Catholic Church, and even taken part in it, at no stage did I hear any of the leading figures involved with synodality in Ireland refer to the Episcopal experience; how they went about it, what they did well, what mistakes they made, and how conclusions were reached by them.
Could it possibly be that we in the Catholic Church have an innate sense of superiority that entices us to believe that we don’t need to learn anything from any other Church? If so, it is a foolish error.
I was impressed by the systems and structures in the Episcopal Church put in place for dealing with these difficult questions. There was scope for very wide consultation, with debates at many levels and among many people, not just bishops and priests.
Yes, there was conflict, sometimes bitter divisions, personal attacks, and all the other things that are prevalent in human disputes. It was obvious, as Richard Holloway said, that no matter how high up the clerical ladder a person reached they were subject to the same prejudices, to be as self-serving and lacking in sympathy, as everyone else. Still progress was made, and new things began to happen.
The big advantage they had, as I see it, was that the Church within which their debates and discussions were happening actually had the authority to make decisions. There was no outside, overall authority that could overrule whatever the local church decided.
A big problem with the synodal process in the Catholic Church is that we don’t have that type of authority at local or national level and, as a consequence, the process is already showing signs of going around in circles.
We owe this, most of all, to Pope Pius IX and the First Vatican Council in 1870. Not only did that Council decree that the pope was infallible in certain circumstances, it said he had “full, supreme and universal jurisdiction over the Church, not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in matters that pertain to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world”.
It means that no matter what decisions are made at any level in the Church they can be wiped out by the stroke of a pen at the Vatican. Something of that happened at the Amazon Synod there a few years ago, where a large majority favoured the ordination of mature married men, but no change happened.
This gives a degree of unreality to the long series of discussions taking place in the ongoing Catholic Church synodal process and explains why we are looking so closely for signs as to where Pope Leo stands on it all.
We know he has the authority to put an end to the whole process. Hopefully, he won’t.
