Two-tier Church undermines laity’s ‘shared dignity’
“We still think that there are Christians, and then there are the Religious,” Thomas O’Loughlin told Spirit Unbounded.
The Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience should be replaced by equality, dignity and neighbourliness, Professor Thomas O’Loughlin has said.
The Emeritus Professor of Historical Theology at Nottingham University said the “greatest weakness” of the three traditional counsels was their role in creating a “fundamentally unequal” two-tier Church.
In his address to the Spirit Unbounded assembly, Professor O’Loughlin said: “The Evangelical Counsels of the traditional form have been a central plank and a distinguishing mark since the Reformation.” Chastity, poverty and obedience, he said, are the hallmarks of vowed religious men and women.
While Vatican II went a long way towards removing that two-tier Church, Professor O’Loughlin said sixty years on from the Council “many traces” of the two-tier church remain.
“We still think that there are Christians, and then there are the Religious. We only have to look at the make-up of the Synod to see this,” he said, as there was “no element of pro rata representation” for the laity.
A two-tier church and a two-tier notion of how the Church works “goes against the very essence of the notion of our shared dignity in baptism,” he observed.
Obedience, he highlighted, was not obedience to the Gospel or to the truth or to the demands of discipleship, it was obedience to Church authority. “While that may be necessary in a highly structured organisation such as a religious order, it raises the question of power and control.”
The theologian said the scandals over the last twenty years had “shown just how often obedience has been used and abused in the Church”.
Calling for equality to be at the centre of the Christian life he said developing a “better notion” of the Evangelical Counsels would do “a great deal to reform and renew the Church in which we are all born as equals with dignity and as brothers and sisters in baptism.”
Separately, former Minister for Children in Ireland, Dr Katherine Zappone, has said the Catholic Church must stop “burying the voices of girls and women” and embrace human rights.
In her address to the Spirit Unbounded assembly, the US-based former politician spoke about the “institutional abuse of children, girls, boys and women at the hands of Roman Catholic orders supported by the State”.
“Until those voices are unearthed, listened to and heard” she said, the Church would “continue to violate girls and women”.
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