Unexpected unity part 6: The Catholic Church
“All revivals are preceded by three features. Extraordinary prayer, unexpected unity... and heightened expectation.” Dr. Stuart Piggin, Australian Christian Historian.
In the spirit of unity, CATCH has reached out to several denominational leaders around Aotearoa to share with us what’s special about the place they call ‘home’. We have heard from Presbyterian Dr. Rev Malcolm Gordon, Anglican Assistant Bishop Ana Fletcher, Elliot Rice from Central Baptist Church, Clint Ussher from the Wesleyan Methodist Tradition, and Rev. Dr. Joseph McAuley from an AOG Church.
This week we hear from Dr John Kleinsman from the Catholic Church.
I’m what is called a ‘cradle Catholic’, someone raised in the Catholic tradition since birth. Apparently, 90% of adult Catholics share that status. In that sense, I am a typical Catholic but, in other ways, I am far from typical. My faith journey includes six years of theological and spiritual formation in a Catholic Seminary before deciding that God was calling me to marriage. The graces of that time, including the relationships and friendships I made, have ultimately allowed God to lead me in a very different direction from my earliest qualification as an electrical engineer. I am a full-time theologian and researcher in bioethics as well as a husband, father and now grandfather. For all of this I am immensely grateful to God.
I have always been attracted by the rich spiritual, philosophical, moral and theological inheritance that is part of the Catholic tradition, something that underpins our ongoing search for truth and enlightenment in the rapidly changing world in which we live; a tradition that provides a robust and varied intellectual heritage that offers clear principles and teachings at a time in human history when, for many, respect for moral and spiritual authority has been supplanted by a more individualist and relativist approach to finding the truth; a tradition that holds tightly to the idea that human dignity is innate and inviolable no matter who we are or how able and functioning we are; a tradition that upholds a preferential option for the poor; a tradition that values the gift of all God’s creation and experiences God through the gifts of creation; a tradition based on the idea that faith and reason together guide our individual and collective search for truth and that they complement each other when they meet in genuine service of others, especially those who are suffering.
If asked to define the Catholic Church that I have known and been part of for 60+ years, I would describe it in terms of growth and reform in tension with tradition and continuity.
As a child growing up in the 1960s, I was part of a triumphant church that promoted itself as “Institution”. Clerics – priests and bishops – were perceived as the ones ultimately responsible for the Church’s mission of teaching, sanctifying and ruling. At the same time, Catholic theology promoted the idea that we alone constituted ‘the one true Church’. This perception, informed by a particular and impoverished, reactionary, theological worldview, positioned us to see and understand other faith traditions as ‘heretical’ and requiring conversion. I recall a story my mother, a faith-filled and strong-willed woman, told of going against the advice of her parish priest to attend the funeral of a Presbyterian friend in the late 1950s. She, acting according to her conscience, prefigured the changes that would come to define the Catholic Church from the mid-1960s, changes ushered in by the Second Vatican Council held between 1962-1965.
Over that period of four years, during which time bishops from around the world gathered in Rome with their theological advisors, the Catholic worldview shifted dramatically. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, this shift was captured in numerous theological documents that covered all aspects of church life and belief. This wrought many changes.
One of the most significant of those changes was a new way of imagining and speaking about ‘the Church’. It’s a change captured by the use of the term ‘People of God’. It draws on an Old Testament image of the Israelites in the wilderness. It is scriptural and, importantly, inclusive of both laity and clergy. It reinforces a church in which ministry, discipleship and responsibility for evangelisation are responsibilities that ultimately flow from the sacrament of baptism (and are therefore shared by all), rather than originating primarily from the sacrament of Holy Orders.
As theologian Richard McBrien wrote in 2011: “Calling the church the People of God … means that we all have responsibility for its life and mission, especially at a time when its leadership sometimes functions as an obstacle rather than a facilitator.”
I believe the significance of the shift from a static and inorganic image of church to an organic one cannot be overestimated.
It has been liberating for Catholics in many ways, including that it helps us recognise all Christian believers as fellow pilgrims that we walk alongside, work and worship with and learn from. It’s an image that invites us to think more in terms of being a community and building community – the Church as a community of communities on a pilgrimage. Furthermore, with respect to how we approach and understand the Eucharist, a key sacrament for Catholics, it shapes us to see it as an act of community worship and thanksgiving rather than being primarily an act of individual private worship; to see it as a celebration whereby we are both challenged and given the grace to go out and be the broken body of Christ that we have received in a broken but graced world needing healing and justice.
The current and recent focus on “synodality” represents the ongoing working out of the post-Vatican II organic way in which we Catholics now understand what it means to be church. As the final document of the 2024 Synod Assembly notes: "In simple and concise terms, it can be said that synodality is a path of spiritual renewal and structural reform to make the Church more participatory and missionary, that is, to make her more capable of walking with every man and woman radiating the light of Christ."
Personally speaking, I could never be anything other than Catholic. I say that not out of a pre-Vatican Council belief that we are ‘better’ than other churches, but because it is the Catholic Church that first helped me to encounter the Risen Christ and continues to do so, despite its failings and imperfections; because it’s a Church led by the Holy Spirit and enriched by the inspired lives of so many ‘saints’, my/our ancestors in faith, those still living and those who have ‘passed over’ into the reward that awaits us all.
Dr. John Kleinsman
Dr John Kleinsman is kaitohu / director of the Nathaniel Centre for Bioethics. He currently serves on various ethics committees and advisory boards. He has previously worked in the disability and addiction sectors. He has a passion for the outdoors and has completed all of the Great Walks in Aotearoa as well as many other wilderness hikes. One of his regular happy spaces is in a kayak, early morning, on Wellington Harbour. He is a self-described DIY fanatic and also loves gardening and many sports.