Whither the Church?

As I mentioned in Mass Movement, I have been reading Francine du Plessix Gray's Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism. This book, from 1970, is apprently out of print, and I can find no image of its cover on the Web.

That's too bad, since it captures a spirit that has been too long absent from most of Catholicism. It is the spirit of revolutionizing the world.

The brother priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan had it when as part of the Catonsville Nine they protested the war in Vietnam by seizing and burning draft files at a Selective Service office in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland.

Ms. Gray profiled the Berrigans in the New Yorker essays which formed her book. This was in a time before the title "Ms." was even yet known. The Church itself had recently been revolutionized by Vatican II. Ms. Gray wrote (pp. 67-68):

Docile seminarians though they were in their youth, Daniel and Philip were soon affected by the progressive theology that poured out of Europe after World War II. The French, Belgian, and Dutch churches had been radicalized by Catholics' participation in the Resistance Movement, by priest's and laymen's militant political involvements under the Nazi occupation. Even liturgy had been renewed by the improvised Masses which were often said, during wartime, in private homes, factories, or open fields. The Berrigans' vocations were deeply affected by the ideology of the French Resistance. In the late 1940's, when Daniel Berrigan was studying at Weston [a Jesuit seminary] and Philip was at Holy Cross College nearby, the French avant-garde was a favorite theme of their Sunday afternoon conversations. Their heroes were men like Cardinal Suhard, a guiding spirit of the Missions de France and of the worker-priest movement, whom Philip regards as the greatest single influence on his life; the Jesuit Father Henri Perrin, who became a factory worker after his return from German concentration camps; Abbé Pierre, the Resistance leader and MRP [Mouvement Républicain Populaire] deputy who ministered to thousands of homeless families in the Paris suburbs, and needled the French government into starting a new housing program for the poor. These men had preached, in Cardinal Suhard's words, "a fearless involvment in the temporal and social spheres." The classical missionary tactic of Saint Paul ("With the Jews I live like a Jew, to win the Jews") had been put into reverse gear by the worker-priests. The Berrigans had learned from them that their task was not to convert the world to the Church, but, rather, the Church to the world.

I interpret that as meaning that the struggle for human life, liberty, and dignity and against poverty, oppression, and degradation is at the heart of the Church's concern, just as the late Pope John Paul II said it was, and not a matter peripheral to the faith.

The conventional wisdom, however, is that JPII was a "conservative" and the Berrigans "radicals." I admit that I myself cannot resolve that dichotomy to my own satisfaction. I don't fully understand why the late Holy Father did not go "all the way" and make women the full equals of men in the Church, for instance. But never mind. My point here is that the Church today needs to reclaim the spirit of worker-priests in the French Resistance, Vatican II, the Berrigans, and John Paul II on his better days. It needs to allow itself to be
"converted to the world" once again, so that it might once more expend its energies in making the world a more hospitable place for all God's children.