Church needs to be humble

To counteract polarisation in the Church and the country, the Catholic Church needs to approach both with humility — which is also an appropriate response to its mishandling of clerical sex abuse.

Apr 13, 2019

By Heidi Schlumpf
To counteract polarisation in the Church and the country, the Catholic Church needs to approach both with humility — which is also an appropriate response to its mishandling of clerical sex abuse.

“We were not humble, and now we have been humbled — humiliated even, which comes from the same word — by what we have done and failed to do,” said theologian Brian Flanagan of Marymount University in Arlington, USA.

Lack of humility was a “contributing factor” to the twin crises of sexual abuse and cover-up. Besides “a false theology of the Church unable to name ecclesial limitation and ecclesial sin,” and instead saw “ecclesial holiness as perfection.”

But by reclaiming humility as a virtue for the institution as a whole — rather than only for individuals — the Church could offer a powerful model of Christ’s humility, through truth-telling that acknowledges both the Church’s holiness and its sinfulness.

Such truth-telling “says that we are not God and do not have all the answers, but that we also have a story to tell and a truth to share about who we are and what God has done for us and for our world,” he said.

Only a humble Church can enter into dialogue, not as a superior, but as a dialogue partner. The Church should be open to learning from the world about things such as human rights, sexuality and religious liberty.

This comes with the caveat — when humility is misinterpreted and misused to encourage the powerless to accept their lot, Flanagan said.

“Encouraging that kind of humility is precisely the sort of thing that keeps lay people in their place, paying, praying and obeying, keeps clergy quiet in the face of mismanagement or injustice, keeps abuse victims silent or told to ‘offer it up,”’ he said.

A “vision of humility as a form of Christ-like power,” that would include a Church that is small, poor and even weak.

Smallness would not necessarily refer to numbers, as in a “holy remnant” but rather, the idea of “becoming like little children” or like a God who speaks in the “still, small whisper.”

A humble Church would not just be — and be for — the materially poor, but also embrace “the greater poverty of spirit that also might be called for: a Church that has nothing of its own and that relies upon God for its life, for its identity, for its existence.”

Looking to the example of Jesus, “who fought against the powers of the world with his words and with his self-giving rather than with an army of angels,” the Church could model weakness, “in comparison to the ideals of power that we find in our world,” he said.

A self-emptying Church would be one that empties itself in fidelity to its mission but holds nothing back for its own security except its trust in God.

Humility will require confessions, repentance, lament and reparation of the Church’s sins and honesty about the Church’s past. No dialogue succeeds without truth-telling.
Can we be humble?

(This article first appeared on NCRonline.org, the Website of National Catholic Reporter, and is being used with permission)

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