THE NATIONAL PASTORAL CONGRESS
By Michael Hornsby-Smith
In Roman Catholics in England
Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. pp.37-43.
Published on our website with the author’s permission
The Congress was a key event in the attempts of the Church in these countries to come to terms with a rapidly changing world. It was attended, mainly by lay people but included 42 bishops, 255 clergy, 150 religious men and women and 36 ecumenical observers. In the two years preceding the Congress, the attempt had been made to involve as many Catholics as possible in the preparations and, to a considerable extent, the agenda was framed on the basis of responses of discussion groups at the parish level and by Catholic organisations (Anon., 1981). The bulk of the delegates were selected at the diocesan and deanery levels on the basis of one delegate for every 1,000 Sunday Mass attenders. Roughly equal numbers of men and women attended and there were over 300 delegates under 25 years of age, including about 100 still in their teens. The attempt was made to ensure representation of minority groups such as the Poles and members of the Latin Mass Society but there is evidence that the delegates were disproportionately articulate, educated, middle class and active members (Hornsby-Smith and Cordingley, 1983).
At each stage of the deliberations the bishops, clergy and members of the religious orders were all fully involved as participating members of the discussions. Before the Congress, doubts had been expressed that the whole exercise would simply be an elaborate, ‘triumphalist’ celebration but that serious debate and probable confrontation on such controversial issues as contraception or the morality of nuclear deterrence would be carefully stage-managed. The fears that the Congress proceedings might be manipulated in this way were sufficiently acute for some discussion-group leaders at a preliminary briefing on the first evening to challenge the desirability of playing a video-taped message from the Pope at the first session. They feared that this might be an attempt to pre-empt the agenda construction and discussion. In the event Pope John Paul II congratulated the delegates for the initiative they were taking in shared responsibility and the bishops shared fully in the discussions as participating members. There was no evidence that tolerance was not extended to minority views and the Congress was widely regarded by the delegates to have been a ‘conversion’ occasion and a remarkable and exhilarating experience of an open, participative, sharing and celebrating Church, unfamiliar to many delegates from parishes where liturgical worship was more traditional and ritualistic and where priest-lay relationships were more formal. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Congress concluded with considerable euphoria and the highest expectations for the future of the Church in the two countries.
The reports presented by the sector presidents on the final morning of the Congress were in many ways remarkable documents, characterised by an absence of obsequiousness to ecclesiastical authority but a firmness in expressing the views of the delegates on a wide range of religious, social and moral concerns with an unassertive tact. The bishops were urged, for example, by an overwhelming majority of sector A delegates to ‘consider the possibility of making provision for eucharistic hospitality in certain cases’ such as inter-Church marriages (Anon., 1981: 135). Sector B delegates hoped that ‘the possibility of admitting women to the ordained ministries’ would be explored (ibid.: 156). Sector C delegates voted overwhelmingly for ‘a fundamental re-examination of the teaching on marriage, sexuality and contraception’, the majority feeling that this ‘should leave open the possibility of change and development’ (ibid.: 170, 189). Sector G confessed ‘our failure as a Church to combat the prevailing national mood of insularity, to identify with the poor in our midst and to work vigorously for a more peaceful world’ (ibid.: 290), asserted that membership of the Church was incompatible with membership of the National Front and urged ‘the search for credible non-violent alternatives’ to war (ibid.: 293).
To many delegates the bishops’ message to the Church ‘in the light of the National Pastoral Congress’, The Easter People, published in August 1980, was a considerable disappointment. It is true that it opened with a long theological reflection on ‘the sharing Church’ which unambiguously recommended the participating, open model of the Church experienced at Liverpool. But when it came to respond in detail to the many specific recommendations of the Congress, the bishops were far more circumspect. On matters of general orientation, such as the value of small groups or the centrality of concern for the poor and the powerless, and on matters which did not explicitly require any further decision-making or shift of resources, such as the condemnation of racist organisations, the bishops generally endorsed the Congress recommendations. Decisions on other matters such as seeking full membership of the British Council of Churches or the question of a married clergy were either accepted only with qualifications or postponed for further consideration. Some pastoral requests such as intercommunion in the case of non-Catholic spouses and the admission to the sacraments of the invalidly married were rejected outright. Finally the bishops indicated a number of gaps in the concerns of the Congress resolutions, for example the evangelisation of our own society (Pro Mundi Vita, 1980: 27-8).
This uneven response to the Congress can best be interpreted as an attempt to conciliate a number of quite different audiences. In this sense The Easter People was a ‘political’ document. First, in their theological reflection on ‘the sharing Church’ they clearly did not repudiate the experience at Liverpool and offered substantial encouragement to those who favoured the full implementation of the pastoral teaching of the Second Vatican Council. These included the bulk of the Congress delegates, even if many of them were deeply disappointed by the lack of response to the specific recommendations relevant to their work especially in the declining inner cities.
The bishops also had to take account of the reaction of the Roman authorities. With the lessons of the Dutch Church (Coleman, 1978) in mind and the Dutch Synod of January 1980 as a warning against excessive independence on the part of the local Church behind them, and the uncertain prospect of the Synod on the Family in Rome in September-October 1980 ahead of them, the questions of contraception, intercommunion and the pastoral care of the divorced and invalidly married clearly had to be handled with great care, if the full power of a traditionalist and centralist Pope was not to be provoked so as to limit the autonomy of the bishops in England and Wales. In the event, the Congress delegates expressed their concerns on these controversial issues with sensitivity and restraint. Subsequently, in their interventions at the Synod on the Family, Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Worlock expressed the concerns which the vast majority of Catholics in these countries had articulated through the Congress delegates. Cardinal Hume referred to the ‘special authority in matters concerning marriage’ of married couples and argued that it cannot just be said that people for whom ‘natural methods of birth control do not seem to them to be the definitive and only solution … have failed to overcome their human frailty and weakness’ since they ‘are often good, conscientious and faithful sons and daughters of the Church’ (Catholic Information Services, 1980: 6). Archbishop Worlock pleaded for the restoration of full eucharistic communion for the divorced and remarried and pointed out that pre-synodal consultations had not indicated that Catholics would be scandalised by such a healing ministry of consolation. These representations by Etglish Catholics did not call forth a sharp rebuke from Rome, but the authors of The Easter People must have been concerned to ensure the challenge to the traditional teaching of the Church, on the one hand was not suppressed in such a way as to provoke a new and hijhly public explosion of discontent by the laity, or on the other hand, allowed to get out of hand and provoke the wrath of the Roman authorities.
The bishops in their response to the N.P.C. also had to bear in mjad the reaction of the huge mass of relatively passive and uninvol- ved, as well as the traditional Catholics in the parishes. These Catholics tended to regard the Church in static and unchanging terms and to consider any changes in rituals or routines with suspicion. Traditional Catholics tended to distinguish sharply between Catholicism and other forms of Christianity and to interpret Catholic teaching on social and moral issues in black-and-white terms. It seems at least likely that in their responses, for example on intercommunion or the pastoral care of the divorced or invalidly married or on the question of a married clergy, the bishops would have been concerned to take account of the views of this constituency. Inchapter 7 it will be suggested that the religious worlds of the active minority and the passive majority are sharply distinguished and that tht delegates to the N.P.C. overwhelmingly represented only the former. In The Easter People it is likely that the bishops took account of tht need to make progress slowly and not to antagonise or bewilder thtvast constituency of the latter group of Catholics.
It is too early to judge the lasting effects of the National Pastoral Congress on the life of English Catholics. A significant outcome mitht well have been the realisation, analogous to that of the Latin American Churches in the years of reform since the Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellin in 1968, that reform starts at the grsis-roots level and cannot be enforced from the top downwards. Brice the slogan ‘roots before fruits’ coined by a former pastoral doctor from the northern seminary at Ushaw. In his final homily at Liverpool, Cardinal Hume concluded by saying: ‘The Congress will be#ver: and work begins’ (Anon., 1981: 304). There are some signs of ne* developments at grass-roots levels in the dioceses. For example tfote has been a small growth in the justice and peace movement and tforeligious authorities were at pains to insist that preparations for tht Pope’s visit would not be allowed to divert attention from the concrete needs in the dioceses, deaneries and parishes. Initially, the visit was portrayed as an occasion for further spiritual and pastoral renewal in the light of the Congress, and as an opportunity ‘to report on what has been done in the dioceses and organisations to help on our becoming the Easter People’ (ibid.: xvii-xviii).
In the immediate aftermath of the N.P.C. it seemed possible to regard it as a major turning point in the history of the emergence of Roman Catholicism in this country over the past two centuries. The representatives of the active minority gained confidence at the Congress and a new maturity in an identity as co-partners with their bishops, with ‘different ministries but shared responsibility’ (ibid.: 318). The Congress may also have strengthened the awareness of the bishops of their own proper independence and authority vis-a-vis the Roman authorities. For all its great promise, however, the lasting effects of the Congress have been disappointing. Only one-half of the delegates 18 months later, expressed satisfaction with the bishops’ response and only one-quarter with the follow-up to the Congress in their own dioceses and Catholic organisations (Hornsby-Smith and Cordingley, 1983: 42). In the event, too, the Pope’s visit bore little direct relationship to the Congress in spite of the fact that it had occasioned the initial invitation.
2.6 THE POPE’S VISIT
If the Church in England and Wales is truly to emerge from the defensive ghetto which is its historical heritage, then it will be necessary for it to shed the ultramontanist tendencies of past years. The remark of one bishop that ‘the local Churches have yet to take on Rome’ suggests that such tendencies may well have become attenuated in the post-Vatican years. However, any such strains towards independence must necessarily take account of the firm leadership style of Pope John Paul II and his conservative and traditionalist teachings on sexual morality and stress on popular piety. It is these which aroused apprehension among some active ‘progressive’ Catholics before his visit. They feared that the steady formal legitimation of the Vatican II theology in recent years, with its emphasis on the collegiality of the bishops and the participation of all the ‘People of God’ in the life of the Church, had so far grown only shallow roots in England and Wales, so that any stern rebuke from a traditionalist pope would have enabled a latent conservatism to manifest itself again in a triumphant reassertion of unquestioning loyalty, obedi- ence and conformity to Rome, even on matters of local pastoral judgement and decision-making.
In the event, none of these fears was realised and the Pope’s homilies (John Paul II, 1982) reflected an awareness of and sensiti- vity to the concerns of English Catholics as they had been articulated in the sector reports from the N.P.C. (Anon., 1981). Nevertheless
in spite of its origins, the organisation of the visit bore very little relationship to the N.P.C. At no time did the seven Sector Presidents who had been influential in the planning and execution of the Congress and the writing of its radical, if tactful, reports formally meet the pope. In fact, in spite of all the talk about the ‘Sharing Church’, organised laity had no opportunity at all to talk with the pope. Pope John Paul II came to speak to the laity, and in the euphoria of the visit only the Catholic Renewal Movement seemed to object at all loudly. In fact, the only people the pope appeared to have the opportunity to listen to were representatives of the British Council of Churches at Canterbury. (Hornsby-Smith, Brown and O’Byrne, 1983: 131)
The Pope’s visit was also paradoxical in other ways. Catholics appeared to be divided about his leadership style; they were attracted strongly by his warm humanity yet in the main were insistent on making up their own minds on social and moral issues, despite the Pope’s teaching, for example on contraception. In general the response of English Catholics to the visit reinforced the interpretation that
there has been an irreversible shift from the view of the pope (or for that matter the parish priest) as having authority as a ‘sacred’ person to that which recognises the special guiding ministry of the pope (or priest at the local level) to offer religious and moral guidance in situations where, in the last analysis, the individual Catholic makes up his/her own mind … it seems that English Catholicism has at last come of age and become acceptable to the British people. As one nun put it: ‘we can come out now from under the bushes!’ (ibid.: 133)
It remains to be seen whether this potentially new status and security of English Catholicism will manifest itself in a confident, challenging and prophetic presence in British society, or rather as an historical relic, cosily absorbed and dissolved as a ‘domesticated denomi- nation’ in an increasingly secular society, indistinguishable in its religious beliefs and values from other Christian bodies, and in its social and political morality from other citizens. It will be argued later in this book that the bulk of the evidence points to the latter alternative.