On the day Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope, Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told CNN how delighted he was with the selection: “What you saw is an affirmation by the cardinals that the church is not going to change, even though maybe Europe and North America want it to,” he said. “It is going to stay the way it has been for two thousand years.”
With all due respect to the gentleman from Pennsylvania, the church has been changing for two thousand years. In fact, if she is to remain true to herself, she cannot stop changing. Though some politicians and theologians live in a black-and-white world-both politically and religiously-history makes it clear that the only constant in the human condition is change. Take a closer look at church history and you find an enduring pull of opposites, of both change and continuity-sometimes in conflict, sometimes in creative tension.
Why is change frightening? Case in point: John Paul II’s hundred-plus apologies. These were, at bottom, about change: neither an individual nor an institution like the church can move forward if there is no reckoning with past mistakes. As anyone going through therapy or a career switch knows, this means having the courage to change. Who wants to admit error and acknowledge the need for change? Yet such an admission is a humble sign of strength, not weakness, for institution and individual alike. Change is at the very heart of metanoia. Some of the late pope’s biggest fans weren’t happy about the apologies for this reason: if the pope could admit the church had been wrong in the past-and by implication could condone change-aren’t we sliding down the proverbial slippery slope? If (this thinking often goes) the church were to soften her stand on divorce, for instance, might the complete ban on artificial birth control fall next?
It’s critical to remember that the church does not have the option to give up what makes her church: she will not delete a doctrine like transubstantiation simply because those with MTV-conditioned attention spans can’t spell the word, let alone understand it. What the church can do-and, in fact, what she has done many times over two millennia-is to alter the way she communicates those doctrines and to adapt religious practices to the diverse and changed cultures in which she lives. It’s also worth remembering that no catechism, canon law, complete Bible, or list of seven sacraments came flying down from heaven after Ascension Thursday. Vatican II taught us to read the signs of the times and to make sure the church is actively engaged with the world. It was not a novel dictum. The church has often done precisely that since the earliest apologists tried to explain Christian beliefs on life after death to a pagan Greco-Roman culture fixated on the here and now.
What might be perceived as revolutionary change today-such as a greater lay voice in selecting bishops-is deeply rooted in church history, but that history is quite varied and nuanced. Lay participation in the selection of bishops looks attractive today, but it produced the investiture controversies of medieval times, when local lords often put their ne’er-do-well brothers-in-law in charge of dioceses and monasteries. Medieval popes changed that practice by reserving episcopal appointments to themselves. They were trying to keep the church free of outside control-a worthy goal. Along this line, John Paul II was the most medieval pope in history: he often ignored local input and appointed bishops to dioceses without an informed understanding of affairs at the grass roots. It may be time to switch back, taking the best of both procedures and avoiding the worst.
This episcopal-appointment example reminds us that change involves development and reevaluation. Change is rarely a case of strictly recreating the past. Nor is it usually a complete break with the present. Angela Merici (c. 1474-1540), founder of the religious community that became the Ursulines, instructed her sisters to keep their options open: “If according to times and needs you should be obliged to make fresh rules and change certain things, do it with prudence and on good advice.”
Change must also be explained. Martin Luther had to hold back his more radical followers who advocated dramatic changes to the Catholic Mass. “It should be preached and taught with tongue and pen that to hold Mass in such a manner is sinful,” Luther preached during Lent 1522, “and yet no one should be dragged away from it by the hair.” But Luther’s sound advice was typically not followed in the decade after Vatican II, remembered today as a time of excitement, but also confusion.
Opponents of change must reckon with the fact that some aspects of the church they love were brought about by change or adaptation. Those who extol the Latin Mass as the “real” Mass should keep in mind that while Jesus probably spoke Latin to Pontius Pilate, he used Aramaic or Hebrew at the Last Supper. Only over time did the Mass move from Greek, the common language of many of the first Christians, to Latin, when more people spoke that tongue. The move to the vernacular in the twentieth century was simply a long overdue continuation of this same evolutionary process.
So change happens, again and again, and in new ways. If we want to turn back change, then we must return to married ministers before the change to mandatory celibacy. The church would not have Franciscans or Missionaries of Charity, groups that emerged to adapt to changing urban needs. Should we return to a church that still blames all Jews, then and now, for the death of Jesus? Before the Middle Ages, believers did not pray the rosary as we have often done since then. After Vatican II, the rosary fell into some disuse, but now it is being rediscovered. As John Henry Newman advised: “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
Of course, the worth-or even the price-of change is in the eye of the beholder. After giving a talk about the history of church reform in a parish, I was approached by an angry attendee who said, “I’m tired of all these changes: English, guitars, priests facing me-and this Communion in the hand, that’s the worst change of all. Where did that come from?” I responded: from the early church. In the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem talked about making a throne with your hands to receive the Lord as king. This “change” after Vatican II was really a return to a past practice we had lost. There had been a change away from the practice in the middle of the first millennium, perhaps for the good reason that the Eucharist was so precious it shouldn’t be soiled by dirty medieval hands. But we have indoor plumbing now, so returning to Communion in the hand isn’t an innovation, but a kind of restoration. This parishioner wasn’t buying it: “Well, if they got rid of it, it probably wasn’t very good in the first place!” And she stalked off.
To be fair, change for change’s sake is often as dangerous as never changing at all. Such change risks making the church seem trendy and ephemeral; it may lead to some short-term gains, but at a long-term cost of identity and authenticity. On the other hand, fear and opposition of reasonable, genuine, and appropriate development and change produce rigidity, intolerance, and even the denial of accountability or dialogue. The church has taken those paths before and, as John Paul II taught us through his apologies, those paths ended badly. We must continue with a gift of the Jubilee Year 2000-the courage to change.
