Openness to “A Desire of New Things” Rerum Novarum

 

During the second fifth centuries, the key words applied to Church were “service” (diakonia or ministerium) and “communion” (koinōnia). The term “Church” denoted a participatory community of all baptized. In that reframe of reference, Cyprian, as bishop of Carthage, claimed that he made no major decisions without consulting his elders and deacons, or without the approval of his people (Epistles 14.4, 34.4, and 38:1; cf 32). The entire community likewise participated in the election of a new bishop, who then exercised episcopal authority in a dialogue with the entire community. The “vicar of Peter” in Rome functioned within a “communion of bishops, “for which his Church and his “persona” served as a center of unity. During the middle ages, the structural elements found in the Church of the second to the fifth centuries were preserved, but rearranged (as the studies of Copernicus and Galileo later rearranged the earth): pope, bishops, and baptized were placed into new relationships, organized vertically from above to below. 

Among the factors contributing to the shift were the monarchical worldview of that era and the emerging papal claim, articulated amid the struggle over lay investiture, that priesthood or sacerdotum was the source, not only of spiritual power over the Church, but of the temporal rule or regnum exercised by emperors and kings. As a result of the debate about who wielded ultimate authority over “Christian society” or Christendom, the new “shared model” or “paradigm” of the Church was focused on a “mystique of authority.” As Congar has noted, the new key words were “power, jurisdiction, rule, and Vicar of Christ.” (Yves Congar, “The Historical Development of Authority in the Church: Points for Christian Reflection” in Problems of Authority, 1962:137).  In the period after the Council of Trent, even the term “Church” began to be equated with its leaders. Again to cite Congar, the key words became “the Hierarchy” and “the Magisterium.” The very meaning of the terms “laity” and “apostolic” would be transformed by the way both were subordinated to the power and authority of “the Hierarchy.”Although foreshadowed by certain earlier developments, the paradigm or “shared model” that positioned the pope at the top of the pyramid of authority and jurisdiction, for ruling and teaching, had begun to take shape after 600.

Avery Dulles has described the net result in terms of a “military analogy of the Church”: “It is almost a platitude to assert that the Catholic Church from the Middle Ages until Vatican II was pyramidal in structure. Truth and holiness were conceived as emanating from the pope as commander-in-chief at the top, and the bishops were depicted as subordinate officers carrying out the orders of the pope. (The Reshaping of Catholicism: Current Changes in the Theology of the Church, Chicago 1988: 24-25) The observation made by Cardinal Newman, where the pope as indistinct a power as he was in the first centuries, and the bishops as practically independent, the Church would still be the Church” raised the question whether the developments of the second millennium are absolutely essential to the Church. (John Henry Cardinal Newman, Essays, Critical and Historical, Vol.2 (London: Longmans: 1891:44)

Vatican I was convened by the pope beleaguered by the spirit of sweeping revolutionary challenges; its conciliar positions were undoubtedly conditioned by that historical context. Yet in the wake of the council there would be hints of change or a new mood in the air. In 1864, Pius IX’s encyclical Quanta cura and its appendix, Syllabus of the Principal Errors of Our Time, had censured “modern errors” and thus appeared to be predominantly restrictive. By contrast, the encyclicals of Pius IX’s successor, Pope Leo XIII, proved a more positive teaching about the relations of church and state, and about the freedom of citizens. (Immortale Dei (1885) and Libertas praestantissimum bonum (1888) Leo also revived the image of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ of which the Spirit is the soul.

Pope Gregory XVI’s condemnation of the liberalism in 1832 had responded to the reactionary wishes of the majority of the ruling classes; Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Rerum novarum, issued in 1891, responded to the needs of workers in the newly industrialized society. Acknowledging that a thirst for innovation, “a desire of new things (rerum novarum),”was sweeping through the world, Leo’s encyclical marked a move beyond the ancient regime that had simply presumed that the power was wielded by an upper class. The encyclical recognized that ordinary workers had rights and could organize themselves into associations to protect their rights in the face of those with power and wealth. The ability to claim such rights would be strengthened by the emergence of compulsory, public elementary education and the subsequent spread of literacy during the nineteenth century.

The idea that the Church itself should respond to “signs of the times” would be put forth by Pope John XXIII, soon after his election as Bishop of Rome in 1958. Besides advancing the discussion about the role of the bishops in the Church, the Second Vatican Council, which he convened, would also give rise to a new set of expectations and understanding about the role of baptized persons in the Church. “A desire of the new things” would emerge within the Church itself, among ordinary people who rediscovered that the Church is a “we” or a community of disciples, and not just a “they” or a hierarchy. Another paradigm shift would begin. The relationship among various roles within the Church would again begin to be rethought.