On the Patriarchate of Constantinople

The office of the Roman papacy, of course, attracts huge attention, including from scholars. But the patriarchate of New Rome attracts considerably less attention. A new book, however, will help remind us of its venerable nature and complex history: A Companion to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, eds. Christian Gastgeber, Ekaterini Mitsiou, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, and Vratislav Zervan (Brill, 2021), 322pp.

Part of the series Brill's Companions to the Byzantine World, Volume: 9, this book, the publisher tells us,

provides an overview of the development of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from Late Antiquity to the Early Ottoman period (4th to 15th c.). It highlights continuities and changes in the organizational, dogmatic, and intellectual framework of the central ecclesiastical institution of the Byzantine Empire in the face of political and religious upheavals. The volume pays attention to the relations of the Patriarchate with other churches in the West and in the East. Across the disciplinary divide between Byzantine and Ottoman studies, the volume explains the longevity of the Patriarchate beyond the fall of Byzantium in 1453 up to modern times. A particular focus is laid on an original register book of the 14th century. 

You will note on the list of contributors some of the leading scholars of Byzantium today: 

Contributors are: Claudia Rapp, Frederick Lauritzen, Tia M. Kolbaba, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Marie-Hélène Blanchet, Dimitrios G. Apostolopoulos, Machi Païzi-Apostolopoulou, Klaus-Peter Todt, Mihailo S. Popović, Konstantinos Vetochnikov, Ekaterini Mitsiou, Vratislav Zervan, and Christian Gastgeber.

Michael Plekon on the Church and Community

I recently drew your attention to Michael Plekon's new book, Community as Church, Church as Community. In keeping with longstanding custom on here, where I have interviewed him in the past about other books, I recently sent him some questions about the book, and here are his thoughts. 

AD: Tell us about your background, especially recent changes

MP: The biggest change is that in late August 2017 I retired almost 40 years to the day I began at The City University of New York, Baruch College. I had begun this new book then, but it mostly was completed and revised in the last three years. I was graced with a number of friends and colleagues—yourself included--who were willing to read a draft and offer criticism. I believe the book is much better for this. 

I also have asked for retired status in the church. Living half the year in the desert in San Diego county has added almost another “life” to what we had before. It shows in Jeanne’s painting, now both East Coast and Desert works (www.jeanneplekon.com).

As for retirement, I still am an active scholar. I gave the Florovsky Lecture for the Orthodox Theological Society (OTSA) in America last November, presented a paper at the recent biennial conference of the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS), hopefully to soon be published. And I have been writing book reviews, at least a dozen a year, for journals such as The Wheel, The Journal of the Orthodox Christian Studies, Cistercian Studies Q, among others. I have been doing two different weekly ZOOM talks with discussion since the start of the lockdown. I am not bored.

AD: What led you from your last book, The World as Sacrament (which we discussed in this interview) to this new one? 

MP: Easy. The request to present at a conference at Loyola-Marymount’s Ecumenical Institute a few years back, then the collection of essays by laity and clergy I edited, The Church Has Left the Building, as well as several other talks, all led to the project of this new book. I place a lot of trust in the personal experience that shaped me and then leads me by the nose. 

I have since 1983 been a “worker priest,” that is a non-stipendiary priest at several Northeast parishes, Lutheran and Orthodox. I think the large parish at which I began serving and its parish culture and “world” now strike me as a time and world gone by. In almost 40 years I have seen so much change in the life of the parish—and that is chronicled in the book, also supported by a lot of research from Pew, and various institutes that study congregational life, as well as researcher like Nancy Ammerman, Nick Denysenko, Nancy Gallagher, and commentators like Andrew Root, Jason Byassee, Same wells, to mention a few. Also, the parish I last served had seminarian interns. So, following the lives of these young people was an important source of inspiration.

AD: Every author, I imagine likes to think the timing, the moment, for his book is just perfect, but yours really does seem that way, focused as it is on community, whose loss we have all suffered in the pandemic. How much did Covid change the shape of the book you thought you were going to write, and in what ways? 

MP: I have said, almost ad nauseam, that blaming everything on the pandemic is a forgetting of the state of things before the Covid appeared. Parishes were already shrinking, declining. We have been aware of the religious “nones” and “dones” for over a decade. All of us have written about the disasters passing as responses of the institutional church—to the sexual abuse situation, to so many “culture war” issues such as the status and rights of LGBTQ+ people, of people of color and immigrants, to Asians and Muslims. What was sick about the last few years was the legitimizing of open, explicit hatred and vilification by the country’s chief executive and a major political party. “Conservative values” cannot be used as an excuse for targeting, reviling, marginalizing so many. All this said, getting to the core of parish existence, to what is the heart of congregations, namely koinonia, community, is timely. That is essentially what the book’s about, an intersection of ecclesiology and sociology of religion, something Peter Berger encouraged me to do years ago.

AD: You mention how often "religion" is conceived of individualistically, and then the "communal core" of Christianity "eclipsed or forgotten" (p.3). What lies behind that--some of the factors leading to its diminishment into a private hobby?

MP: There are numerous sources of the eclipse of community, something that’s been studied and written about by Robert Putnam, the late Robert Bellah, Arlie Hochschild, and so many others. It almost has become an industry in social science. I doubt we have become significantly more individualist in the past decade or two. In North America, there has been a historical nostalgia about freedom, about rugged independence, with the cowboy riding off into the sunset, the notion that I am the master of my own destiny, that no one, either in church or government or the academy or science, can tell me what to do. This is myth. 

Likewise the notion that somehow various strains of Protestantism were hyper-individualist. When I hear Catholic or Orthodox blaming sola scriptura, the primacy of the Bible, or the loss of clerical hierarchy as the cause of individualism, I cringe. Some religious folk just listen to too much fake theology, inaccurate tales. And it’s not just Newsmax, OAN, and Fox News that manufacture their own news and facts. 

Everyone who’s ever belonged to a parish, whether as a child or an adult, knows how communal church is. I delight in writing about the liturgies, the prayer of making pyrohy, Easter breads, nut rolls, the second “communion” of the coffee hour and church suppers and post-funeral repasts. In the book I try to show that community is more than our warm feelings of friendship (as well as frustration and irritation) with each other in parishes. Baptism means incorporation into a people, the people of God. Eucharist requires communal sharing of bread and cup, concelebration by all the community, not just those ordained. And the weekday service of the neighborhood around is also a communal work of love.

AD: You show your debts early to Afanasiev, to whom my own work is also heavily indebted. Tell us a bit about his importance, especially for your work. 

MP: I have long thought Afanasiev’s work was wrongly overlooked and, in some cases, rejected. Anastacia Wooden’s recent dissertation and soon, I hope, book will show just how much Afansiev’s vision has been distorted by his critics, and how truly “back-to-the-sources” his work is. And it is not just Afanasiev as some “voice crying in the desert,” since it is a consensus of church historians and theologians that the church of the first several centuries was less constrained by law and clerical stratification that later on. Afanasiev emphasized what we find in the NT, namely that the church and the “local church” of the diocese and most especially the parish is intensely communal. He says, in the last chapter of The Church of the Holy Spirit, that the authentic power in the life of the people of God is that of love, not canon or clerical authority.

AD: One of the many valuable things about your work is how seriously you take the economic reasons for changing patterns of parish life. Tell us a bit more about their importance. In addition, I surmise from your wide and generously ecumenical survey of every Christian tradition that economic changes and factors do not care whether you're old-calendarist Greek Orthodox, gay-affirming Episcopalian, Latin-Mass-loving Roman Catholic, or anything else? In other words, nobody is immune to these changes?

MP: All the changes occurring to parishes are ecumenical, universal. It makes no difference whether East or West, nor the particular church tradition. Mostly this stems from the changes taking place or long ago having happened in the society, in politics and the economy and culture. Multi-generational families were the backbones of parishes. 

Now, mobility is the norm. Children grow up, go off to university, to marriage, family and careers and do not return home. Yes, of course here and there one finds exceptions, either due to ethic/language group or geographic location. But this intensified mobility is but one of the numerous variables at play in change in our lives. We no longer depend on a horse or wagon or our feet to get to church. Thus, many small towns, rural as well as urban parishes have become redundant. In Brooklyn NY, from a corner one could see perhaps half a dozen Lutheran church buildings, originally planted due to language/ethnic diversity. Now Mideast and Asian groups have replaced the Scandinavian and German communities. 

On a corner in Northeast Pennsylvania, the “coal region” from which my father’s family came, one could see a dozen church spires, half of them Eastern “onion domes” or cupolas, each established by an immigrant community from a different local in what is now Ukraine, the Slovak Republic or Poland. Then there is the transformation of the industrial revolution that drew so many to North America. In countless towns, the factories, mills and mines are long since closed, the industries totally changed or relocated. The cathedral-like parish church buildings remain, often down to 20 or 30 or fewer seniors. From sources like Pew Research, The Church Times, The Christian Century, US Congregational Life Survey, National Congregations Survey, Faith & Leadership, Alban Institute at Duke Divinity, Religion News Service, among others, I collected many examples, mini-case studies of congregations in transition. They represented most denominations here in the US and Canada. They tell of decline, shrinkage death…but also replanting, reinvention, repurposing of property--in short, resurrection.

AD: Your argument (p.34) that "A closer look at who’s gone, no longer in the pews, and why is a reminder that the decline of religion is no simple rejection of doctrine or ritual, and what is more, is not restricted to categories of age, education, political preference, or region" really complicates, if not destroys, simplistic nostrums that the way to hold, or attract, people is to offer, say, only "contemporary" liturgy or "traditional" teaching, "conservative" morality or "liberal" activism?  

MP: I listened to Kaya Oakes, David Gushee, Jon Pavlovitz, Andrew Root and others on why people are religious “nones” and “dones,” as well as the voices of those who departed communities of faith themselves. No church body can escape what they say drove people away—indifference to pain and need in the neighborhood, lack of compassion for the “other,” whether persons of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ folk, those struggling with emotional and physical challenges. The churches have, often enough, been their own worse enemies. A friend called their operating system “survival theology,” a desperate, and sometimes ruthless struggle to keep the heat and the roof on, at all costs. Or a retreat into an imagine past, or an escape into ritual or rules.

The most effective assessment of the sad state of institutional religion is to hold up the New Testament to the mix of introversion and obsessive thinking that passes for parish life. The riveting memoirs of Barbara Brown Taylor, Richard Holloway and Barbara Melosh, among others, force us to see the ugly humanity of congregations from pastors’ views. But what presents as unwelcoming, inhospitable, rigid clinging to the past need not be so. There are plenty of examples of parish communities taking the hand of consultants, pastors and each other to find a way to keep living forward, to keep living the Gospel rather than trying to merely stay open.

AD: Further complicating things, your section on location (pp.47ff) seems to suggest that merely because a city or region is growing does not mean that church growth automatically follows in those areas. What else has to happen for communities to experience new life? 

MP: Even in neighborhoods where unemployment, addiction, poverty, poor schools are the landscape, one often can find vibrant, life-giving congregations. This has historically been true for Anglican, Methodist, Catholic and other “inner mission” or urban mission movements. It used to be assumed that congregations that grew in the suburbs of the 1950s and 60s would simply continue that direction going forward. Now, formerly large, affluent suburban parishes are having to merge, to reinvent themselves, repurpose their buildings as the generations of parish youth moved away and more recent cohorts feel no pressure to join or even baptize their children. The “toolbox” of church is not in question. Baptism, eucharist, the scriptures, prayer, preaching and teaching and service. If there is something crucial, essential for communities to experience new life where they are, it is the Sprit’s prompting and their saying “yes.”

AD: As you move into your discussion about communities enjoying resurrection, but first having been "repurposed, reinvented, replanted," I'm wondering: was there one that stood out to you as the most unexpected or unusual reconfiguration that you least expected?

Several stand out, but one more than the rest. I will have an article in The Christian Century for September 8, 2021 about the story of Fr. Paisios, now Alexis Altschul, his late wife Thelma, St. Mary of Egypt Orthodox parish they founded, and Reconcilation Services (RS)--the amazing network of outreach ministries and service providers they gathered downstairs on Troost Street in Kansas City, MO. It made me think of the multiplication of the few loaves and fishes to feed thousand, this vision of a parish living out the Gospel. 

A former intern and colleague and friend, Fr. Justin Mathews is director of RS. A pay-what-you-can café is part of RS, Thelma’s Kitchen, remembering Presbytera Thelma’s feeding people out her backdoor. Employment counseling, therapeutic sessions, senior and well-baby clinics, are among the services offered. Even though the parish has now distanced itself from RS under a new rector, the reality is that RS has been born as a new kind of local church, a parish in which love of the neighbor dominates, much in the example of St. Mother Maria Skobtsova of Paris.

AD: I'm very glad you work in even a brief mention of "pastoral losses" (p.142-46) and the difficulties clergy face amidst so much uncertainty. I'm wondering if you know how well, if at all, such things are taught in seminaries? Are we training people to deal with the grief of loss of place, familiar location and routine, etc? And, in a related way, are Christians training ourselves to be less attached to buildings so that if we have to let them go, we can do so with more ease and less of a sense of loss? 

MP: I had to say things about the ordained ministry and the process of formation for this work in the book. But I was aware and explicitly warned that I could not do it justice—that will be for the next book. 

That said, despite institutional lethargy, uncertainly and fear, theological schools are beginning to experiment—while they too shrink, even close and realign with each other. In the UK half of all ordinands in training no longer go live at a theological school/seminary but do their training on site, in a parish, with a pastor-mentor. Coursework for the most part is remote learning, with summer sessions for encounter with fellow seminarians. 

Luther Seminary in St. Paul has adopted this model for a two-year M.Div. Others will appear. Bishop Andrew Doyle argues that the ministries we have—bishop, presbyter, deacon—need to be adapted to how we actually live and behave as church in our time. This means the formation process must change as well. Anyone who has dealt with the administrative apparatus of any church body, even now, knows just how resistant to adaptation and change these staffers and their culture are. But the ability of UMC pastor Dave Barnhart to develop a network of house churches, St. Junia’s parish, in the Birmingham AL area is a sign of hope and the possibility of change. 

AD: In ch.6 you write "I have changed my mind about small churches." Tell us what led to that change, and how you see small churches today. I'm assuming (given earlier rightly critical references) that by small churches, you are not advocating the kind of self-selecting faux-Benedict option communities certain reactionary and decadent bloggers advocate?

MP: Coming round to embrace small parishes for me has absolutely nothing to do with the Benedict XVI or Dreher/pseudo-St Benedict ideas of culling out the membership, waving goodbye and good riddance to the less than fervent church folk. Rather my view is one of realism: congregations for the most part will not be the sprawling post WWII, 1950s congregations bursting at the seams. The smaller, household size parishes will not be the “elect” the “select,” but those who can listen to the prompting of the Spirit and with courage find new ways of living out the Gospel. Also, “small is good” has nothing to do with the decidedly sectarian impulse one can now track among the Eastern Orthodox, some Anglicans and Catholics and others. Purging dissenting, perhaps too open, liberal people is not churchly, not godly.

AD: After so much change discussed in such fascinating detail, you quote Eugene Peterson's charming and hope-filled phrase at the very end of your book: "God...will continue to 'move into the neighborhood'.” That rather seems to me to be the pattern of the entire history of Christianity, yes? Knowing this wider history, it seems, is crucial for not succumbing either to despair or to wide-eyed romanticism about some magical solution for a better future. Churches of all traditions have risen and fallen--Augustine's Hippo in North Africa is no longer a major episcopal centre as it was in the fourth century, yet there are millions of Christians in other parts of Africa. Is this the pattern you see continuing as the century unfolds?

MP: History makes fools of us. Hippo is not the ecclesial centre it was in Augustine’s time. Diarmaid Macculloch teases, in his fine Christianity, the first 3000 Years, that Baghdad once was an ecclesial and theological centre perhaps superior to Alexandria or Jerusalem. Not so much now. There is something at once terrifying and exhilarating in seeing how much changed in one’s own brief life. I recall that, seeing some scenes of the HBO series This I Know Is True, in very small part filmed at my old parish. The emeritus rector was already there in the early 1980s in which the drama is set. I was also serving my first parish just a few miles away. But in the expanse of those year, how much has changed for both parishes, and for him and for me!

We really are fools if we think the church falls and rises with ourselves. I offer no recipes for parish resurrection in the book. I distrust church consultants generally. 

However, listening to those who found the energy to reinvent their parishes, to share their buildings with the surrounding neighborhood, thereby replanting and connecting to neighbors—this is the new life the Risen One constantly hold out to us. I have heard, a deanery meetings and the like, that one ought not drag Jesus or the Gospel into discussion. The presumption is that the bishop or the canons are more constitutive of the church and ministry. Seriously? Ever holy woman or man who sought to breath again the Spirit and live the Gospel knows better. We should listen more carefully to Mother Maria Skobtsova, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Nicholas Afanasiev, Alexander Schmemann, Sam Wells, Barbara Brown Taylor, among others.

 AD: Having finished the book, what are you at work on now? 

MP: As I already mentioned, I believe I have to look at ministry, and in particular, the ministry of the ordained. I sense that there is a vigorous rediscovery of the priesthood of all the baptized now, even if that language were not used. Maybe discipleship, or like Bishop William Barber often says, standing up for God’s justice. But there is way more institutional encrustation with the ordained, many more models in need of reform, renewal, a lot of baggage that has more to do with social status, culture and yes, politics. Cyril Hovorun’s books are essential for tracking all the political and cultural use and abuse of church. I would also like to contribute some of my own pastoral experience while I still am able to write about it.

Many thanks for having this exchange and I hope readers will find the book worthwhile.

Abuse and Lies in the Catholic Church

Does anyone have any patience left for yet another article, report, story, book about the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church? How many have we had in the last three months alone? The McCarrick Report (which "psychological disaster" I addressed here), the English-Welsh bishops' report, the attorney general's report on the Diocese of Buffalo, and at least two others I have seen. We've had such reports going back forty years and more at this point, and nothing has changed. Has anyone the slightest faith left that this will ever be seriously addressed? Does anyone for a moment remain so fatuous as to think bishops will ever really change? Who amongst us has been able to resist the thought that the entire episcopate is simply protecting their monopoly on power like a bunch of neighborhood gangsters? 

For those who have the stomach and the patience to read another book about the problem, Routledge has just come out with The Abuse of Minors in the Catholic Church: Dismantling the Culture of Cover Ups, eds., Anthony J. Blasi and Lluis Oviedo (Routledge, 2020), 288pp. We are offered the following description and table of contents (from which, I note without surprise, that once more any consideration of structural problems in the Church, which I alone seem to have taken seriously enough to write a book about, are absent): 

This book offers an academically rigorous examination of the biological, psychological, social and ecclesiastical processes that allowed sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to happen and then be covered up. The collected essays provide a means to better assess systemic wrongdoing in religious institutions, so that they can be more effectively held to account.

An international team of contributors apply a necessarily multi-disciplinary approach to this difficult subject. Chapters look closely at the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clerics, explaining the complexity of this issue, which cannot be reduced to simple misconduct, sexual deviation, or a management failure alone. The book will help the reader to better understand the social, organizational, and cultural processes in the Church over recent decades, as well as the intricate world of beliefs, moral rules, and behaviours. It concludes with some strategies for change at the individual and corporate levels that will better ensure safeguarding within the Catholic Church and its affiliate institutions. 　

This multifaceted study gives a nuanced analysis of this huge organizational failure and offers recommendations for effective ways of preventing it in the future. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Psychology, Psychiatry, Legal Studies, Ethics, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, and Theology.

Table of Contents: 

Introduction

1 Sexual Abuse of Young Boys in the RomanCatholic Church: An Insider Clinician’s Academic Perspective

Jay Feierman

2 For a Sociology of Pederasty in Catholic Clergy

Javier Elzo

3 Does Faulty Theology Play a Role in the Abuse Crisis?

Lluis Oviedo

4 The Role of Informal Networks in the Coverup of Clerical Sex Abuse

Anthony J. Pogorelc

5 From Causes toward Stratagems and Theological Considerations

Anthony J. Blasi

6 Has Canon Law Solved Any of the Challenges of the Sexual Abuse Crisis?

Patricia M. Dugan

7 Clergy Sex Abuse Litigation: Attribution of Responsibility to Religious Entities by Civil Courts

Nicolás Zambrana-Tévar

8 Sexual Abuse and Clerical Homosexuality: Notes on an Enigmatic Context

Dominikus Kraschl

9 Conclusion: Trying to Learn Some Lessons and Correct Past Mistakes

Anthony J. Blasi and Lluis Oviedo

Contributors

Ecclesiology

I just finished teaching my re-designed ecclesiology class this semester. We made good use of my 2019 book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power for one unit. Our major text was the Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology. 

Speaking of handbooks, I see that T&T Clark has one just released a few weeks ago: T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology, eds. Kimlyn J. Bender  and D. Stephen Long (2020, 504pp.). About this new book the publisher tells us this:

Divided into 3 parts, this handbook provides a wide-ranging survey and analysis of the Christian Church. The first section addresses the scriptural foundations of ecclesiology; the second section outlines the historical and confessional aspects of the topic; and the final part discusses a variety of contemporary and topical themes in ecclesiology.

Compiled and written by leading scholars in the field, the T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology covers a range of key topics in the context of their development and importance in each stream of historic Christianity and the confessional traditions. The contributors cover traditional matters such as creedal notes, but also tackle questions of ordination, orders of ministry, and sacraments. This handbook is extensive enough to provide a true overview of the field, but the essays are also concise enough to be read as reference selections.

I note that one of the major Orthodox contributors to this new handbook is my friend Will Cohen, whose own work in ecclesiology and ecumenism is an important contribution about which I interviewed him here. 

Sex Abuse and Episcopal and Papal Cover-Up: What to Do?

As a Canadian (as well, of course, as a man of heroic modesty and saintly humility) I am constitutionally averse to promoting my own work, but if there is any moment where it might be helpful to people, now is it. 

The McCarrick report came out of Rome this week. I have been interviewed about it already and asked to write about it. The first article came out this morning in the Catholic Herald. More will follow, there and likely elsewhere. 

The question I have already been asked by editors is this: what can be done about the catastrophically broken system of governance and episcopal appointment in the Church? 

My answers are the same as those I began giving more than a decade ago: the closed system of papal appointment and promotion must be destroyed. Not tinkered with, moderately reformed, mildly changed, slightly altered: destroyed. Blown up. Annihilated. Cremated, and its ashes fired out of a space cannon to the dark side of Saturn or Jupiter.  

That system, people must come to learn, is a total novelty anyway, scarcely a century old. The idea that it is some longstanding part of sacred and holy Tradition is a pernicious fantasy that must itself now die. Only with the 1917 code of canon law is the claim--the novel and wicked claim--made that the pope of Rome has the right to appoint all the world's bishops. That claim is so staggering, so modernist, so untraditional, so without theological justification, that the eminent historian Eamon Duffy has rightly called it a coup d'Eglise. 

What must also die is the even worse fantasy that the current system is somehow required by the claims of Vatican I (repeated verbatim at Vatican II) that "universal jurisdiction" of the pope of Rome requires him to appoint bishops universally. That is nonsense, and the easiest proof of that is the existence of the Eastern Catholic Churches, most of whose bishops are not in fact appointed by the pope but elected by their own synods. So the current system is neither required nor any longer defensible. Indeed, it is a millstone around the neck of the Church: either we kill it or it will continue to kill us all. 

What might or should replace it? Synodal election is the best system to my mind. I argued this out in some detail in my Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, published early last year. Have a look and let me know if you can think of a better way forward. 

OCA's 50th Anniversary of Autocephaly

I have long been an admirer of the Orthodox Church of America, not least for its structures set up at and after its grant of autocephaly in 1970. In honour of that half-century anniversary, a new collection has been published:  The Time Has Come, ed. Ionut-Alexandru Tudorie (SVS Press, 2020), 464pp.

About this collection the publisher tells us this:

This is a hardback commemorative volume, compiled in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). Edited by St Vladimir's Academic Dean, Ionut-Alexandru Tudorie, the volume contains a collection of debates over the OCA Autocephaly reflected in St Vladimir's Quarterly (now known as the St Vladimir's Theological Journal). The various articles were written in the years leading up to and following the Russian Orthodox Church granting the Tomos of Autocephaly to the OCA (then known as the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of America) in 1970.

Along with Alexander Schmemann, other voices found in The Time Has Come include Metropolitan Leonty (Turkevich), Protopresbyter John Meyendorff, Archbishop Peter L’Huillier, Elizabeth Prodromou, Archimandrite Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis), Alexander Bogolepov, and several others.

Ecclesiology in Practice

When I first began studying ecclesiology twenty years ago, it was common to read things like the 20th century was the "century of the Church." In other words, as many remarked, one looked in vain in the patristic, scholastic, and early modern periods for systematic treatises on "the Church" in almost all major thinkers East and West.

Instead, it was only with the advent of the 20th century, and the important concomitant of the ecumenical movement--widely thought to have started at the 1910 World Mission Conference in Edinburgh--that we realized we needed to reflect carefully not just on the Church in the abstract, but also in her concrete structures, not least if the hope for Christian unity was going to make progress.

Still, much of ecclesiology has tended towards the idealistic, and only much more recently has turned to considering such things as episcopal, patriarchal, and papal structures, as I did in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy. More recently still have we begun to look at even more local structures, including parishes and diocesan synods, as I did last year in my Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.

The ongoing attention to the concrete in ecclesiology, to a practice-informed theology, is well served in a new book by Clare Watkins, Disclosing Church: An Ecclesiology Learned from Conversations in Practice (Routledge, 2020), 282pp.

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

From 2006 to 2011 researchers at Heythrop College and the Oxford Centre for ecclesiology and Practical Theology (OxCEPT, Ripon College Cuddesdon) worked on a theological and action research project: "Action Research – Church and Society (ARCS). 2010 saw the publication of Talking About God in Practice: Theological Action research and Practical Theology (SCM), which presented in an accessible way the work of ARCS and its developing methodology. This turned out to be a landmark study in the praxis of Anglican and Catholic ecclesiology in the UK, showing how theology in these differing contexts interacted with the way in which clergy and congregations lived out their religious convictions. This book is a direct follow up to that significant work, authored by one of the original researchers, providing a systematic analysis of the impact of the "theological action research" methodology and its implications for a contemporary ecclesiology.

The book presents an ecclesiology generated from church practice, drawing on scholarship in the field as well as the results of the theological action research undertaken. It achieves this by including real scenarios alongside the academic discourse. This combination allows the author to tease out the complex relationship between the theory and the reality of church.

Addressing the need for a more developed theological and methodological account of the ARCS project, this is a book that will be of interest to scholars interested not only Western lived religion, but ecclesiology and theology more generally too.

Trauma in the Church (I)

I've previously mentioned the impending release of Gerald Arbuckle's book Abuse and Cover-up: Refounding the Catholic Church in Trauma (Orbis, 2019). My copy has now arrived. I will be discussing it extensively on here over the coming days, not least in dialogue with my own new book on the structural issues in the Church which have contributed to the crisis, and without changes to which nothing will improve: Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico, 2019).

The theme of the book is picked up immediately in the introduction: the trauma of the current crisis is actually long-standing, going back at least thirty, and closer to fifty years, during which time the conciliar promises of a more locally accountable and synodally governed Church were never materialized--were, indeed, rolled back. So the crisis of abuse has been but the latest in a long line of hierarchical betrayals leading, the author repeatedly says, to sadness, rage, and grief: all three are manifestations of trauma, as I discussed here.

Those betrayals were led by men who, Arbuckle rightly points out, feared "scandal" more than the truth--a point I also made in my discussion, here, of the uses and abuses of the whole notion of "scandal," a word which, in episcopal usage, means "what makes me as bishop look bad."

The author moves quickly into a discussion of cultural theory and the incredible resistance built into cultures, including ecclesial culture, to any serious efforts at change. He notes, rightly as many of us have been saying for some time, that this must be an all-hands-on-deck affair: not just "prayer and fasting" types of change, not just "new evangelization," and not just new structures: the reform required is a radical change in the way we think, pray, structure our life, and act together. One discipline that will help us see the far-reaching and comprehensive nature of the changes needed is cultural anthropology. Here Arbuckle references such key players as Clifford Geertz and, later on, Mary Douglas, whom I am reading with my students this semester.

I had forgotten what an exhilarating ride Douglas is in Natural Symbols as well as Purity and Danger and other works. But I also hadn't realized how merciless she is in the former book, too, which is so tightly written it's almost an act of warfare. She lobs one dense, high-powered sentence after another without warning, introduction, transition. She packs an incredible amount of high theory into a very short book and clearly takes no prisoners.

The author concludes his introduction by laying out the plan of the book. Chapter 1 will look at cultural dynamics in the Church leading to cover-up; 2 will ask what makes the Church uniquely prone to such cover-ups; 3 will focus on grief in the Church today; four will look at new leadership; 5 at new structures; and 6 at other assorted action plans going forward.

In the coming days we will proceed systematically through the book, first discovering what the author argues and then critically analyzing it.

Continues. 

The Poison of Papal Centralization

I can confess now to my earlier Schadenfreude when the news of Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s disgrace broke nearly twenty years ago now and he was found to have been paying off a gay lover from diocesan funds and then lying about the amounts and the sources. (He initially claimed that whatever he took from the diocese was more than offset by royalties from his writings, speaking fees, etc. This turned out to be widely off the mark by a considerable amount, and the lie merely compounded myriad offenses for which, were I running the Church, he would have immediately been put on trial by a regional or national synod of bishops, and deposed from office swiftly if found guilty, as he admits he was.) This was just an extraordinary twist to a much more familiar tale involving him and all his episcopal brothers: the moving around and covering up of sexual abusers in Weakland's diocese of Milwaukee. Both revelations allowed me, for years, smugly to feel that I had two impeccable reasons for writing off this aptly named creature, and I never gave him another thought. With a name and record like his, would one seriously reproach oneself for snickering sanctimoniously?

But my undergraduate readings in Emmanuel Levinas, on the dangers of abstraction and the reduction of unique human beings to a category, and the refusal to engage them face-to-face, have been haunting me a lot lately. So too am I haunted by not always doing what I am forever my haranguing my students to do: to "despoil the Egyptians" as the Fathers counselled, that is to discern where, even in lives of those who have done manifest and notorious, or hidden and banal evil (which is all of us), we might also find glimmers of goodness, even in small ways. Such discernment is necessary to prevent us from demonizing people and turning them into grotesques, as I certainly had done at an earlier point in my life whenever Weakland's name was in the headlines.

My conscience thus doubly pricked, I felt I owed Weakland a read when, early this summer, I found his A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop in the $1 bin at Hyde Brothers, the only truly outstanding used bookstore in Ft. Wayne. So I bought it, figuring that if it turned out to be maudlin self-justifying treacle, I wouldn't begrudge the loss of a mere dollar--not least because I could always recoup great emotional compensation by allowing my children to set the book on fire and roast marshmallows over it.

But I’m very glad I did buy it and read it. His was a fascinating life--growing up dirt poor in Pennsylvania, discovering sophisticated talents for both music and advanced scholarship on the same (he eventually finished his doctorate at Columbia in medieval musicology), and then getting pulled into all the major developments of the Church since the Second World War. He writes in a generally cogent fashion mostly free from excesses either of self-justification or self-abasement. The sketches he gives of many figures--perhaps most clearly Popes Paul VI and John Paul II--are highly revealing and often bemusing--when, that is, they do not make one cringe, weep, or both over their manifest flaws so visible to others if not themselves. (But then, as I long ago learned from Freud, we are all ambivalent half-blind creatures who disguise that by thinking ourselves steely-spined, fervent and zealous always for the truth, and transparently good--while everyone else, of course, is feckless, fickle, opaque, and wicked.)

Weakland spent no little time in official and semi-official Orthodox-Catholic dialogues and encounters, and has interesting things to say about trips to meet with the Ecumenical Patriarchs, especially Athenagoras. He also made a long-sought pilgrimage to Mt. Athos for an encounter between Western monks (Weakland was a professed Benedictine) and Eastern monastics. In this he put me in mind of Basil Pennington's charming book about such meetings, The Monks of Mount Athos: A Western Monks Extraordinary Spiritual Journey on Eastern Holy Ground. 

(Since both Weakland and Pennington's books have appeared there has been a small explosion of interest in the so-called holy mountain. I have noted some of those books on here over the years.)

But I appreciated the book not only for its biographical and historical and ecumenical detail, but above all for its ecclesiological insights of which I was unaware. For those of us who have been arguing for years now against a centralizing papacy. which arguments I first laid out in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, and more recently in my new book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, Weakland provides a great deal of evidence for why resisting a centralizing papacy and its curial micro-managers is important to the Church.

For those vanishingly few people today who still want to maintain, in the face of a relentless daily onslaught of evidence to the contrary, that only a strongly centralized papacy will "save us" from, say, the ostensibly wayward teaching of supposedly heterodox hierarchs, then let me dust off a question I've been asking for well over a decade: who, pray tell, appointed and promoted the bishops like--to pluck names at random--Bernard Law? Roger Mahoney? Theodore McCarrick? or Michael Bransfield? or George Pell? or Joseph Hart? or, for that matter, Rembert Weakland? It is, as Freud so clearly saw in his much-maligned and almost entirely misunderstood book Future of an Illusion, a peculiarly stubborn feature of certain minds in some religious traditions desperately to hang on to illusions precisely as a species of wish fulfillment. In this case, the wish is quite understandable, indeed commendable: it is to have bishops who are shepherds, not wolves. But imagining the papacy as the only, or best, route to finding such shepherds is now revealed to be perhaps the clearest species of illusion on offer anywhere today.

Weakland--whatever his sins, which I do not for a moment excuse, as I noted above--is useful to us as an important witness to the ongoing pathological and cancerous growth of a centralizing papacy in areas almost entirely ignored by everybody else. Weakland tells a small slice of history of which I was unaware: the pressure, from Pope Leo XIII onward, to turn the worldwide abbot-primate of the Benedictines (which role Weakland filled from 1967 until being made a bishop in 1977) into a micromanaging quasi-papal figure, and the international Benedictine Confederation into a highly centralized body trying to control Benedictine houses around the world. Many times he had to fight various figures in the Roman Curia (some of whom call to mind Congar's acid description of a certain Roman bureaucrat as "an imbecile, a sub-human...this wretched freak, this sub-mediocrity with no culture, no horizon, no humanity") who wanted Weakland to become some kind of hammer, pounding all the world's Benedictine houses into submission on almost invariably tedious points beloved by bureaucrats if for no other reason than to show their own power.

Weakland, to his credit, fought this trend as much as possible, noting that it was not just an attempt at centralization, but also at finding convenient scapegoats: "the Congregation for Religious wants a primate who will carry out their orders and take the blame if things go wrong," he writes. His refusal to go along with this was, he says, a manifestation of a Benedictine "spirit of independence" which some tried to suggest was just disguised "disobedience" to the pope. But Weakland saw through that, and apparently both he and Paul VI also realized that such curialists and their claims were trying covertly to manipulate even the pope to their own ends. (Weakland hints that Paul's character is very much like that revealed in Louis Bouyer's explosive memoirs, where Bouyer notes how often the liturgical reformers tried to claim certain things were desired or demanded by the pope, when the pope had done no such thing--but the climate of secrecy in which they were all operating, usually for no very good reason, allowed for such games to be played.)

Neither Weakland nor I, to be clear, are arguing against papal authority in certain respects. There is an equal if opposite danger afoot here, that of demonizing popes and the papacy, which has not been without its merits in certain extreme and emergency situations, and can still be useful in "calling everyone to dinner" as a colleague of mine once phrased it. But those extreme and emergency situations, largely creatures of revolutionary Europe in the very longue durée from c. 1789 to c. 1918, are completely gone, but the centralized and now paralyzed structures created in response to them, are, alas, with us still.

Today, in a very different era in which we are all finally coming to see how poisonous papal centralization is, and how cancerous its growth, and are finally, belatedly, starting to look for alternate models of local and synodal governance, which I have outlined in very short form here, in slighly longer form here, and in longer form still in the new book, we have people like the flawed Rembert Weakland to thank for fighting this battle avant la lettre even as he was losing other ones with the demons that variously attack all of us.

Khomiakov and the Mystery of Sobornost

The publisher recently let me know that in July they had released a study sure to be of interest to all students of ecclesiology, conciliar history, Russian theology and philosophy, and ecumenical relations: Alexei Khomiakov: The Mystery of Sobornost', eds., Artur Mrówczyński-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch, and Paweł Rojek (Pickwick, 2019), 260pp.

About this collection we are told:

Alexei Khomiakov (1804–1860), a great Russian thinker, one of the founders of the Slavophile school of thought, nowadays might be seen as one of the precursors of critical thought on the dangers of modern political ideas. The pathologies that Khomiakov attributes to Catholicism and Protestantism—authoritarianism, individualism, and fragmentation—are today the fundamental characteristics of modern states, of the societies in which we live, and to a large extent, of the alternatives that are brought forth in an attempt to counter them. Khomiakov’s works therefore might help us take on the challenge of rescuing Christian thought from modern colonization and offer a true alternative, a space for love and truth, the living experience of the church. This book serves as a step on the path toward recovering the church’s reflection on its own identity as sobornost’, as the community that is the living body of Christ, and can be the next step forward toward recovering the capacity for thought from within the church.

Ratzinger's Guilty Conscience

I thought I'd wait until the immediate rush of commentary on Ratzinger's latest letter had passed in order to see how those comments have shaped up. There has, of course, been the predictable fawning over his letter from the usual crowd, who find in it confirmation of all their devoutly held ideological nostrums about sex and the 60s. I have said over the years that for some liberal Catholics, including many in my native Canada, it's always 1968; but what I didn't realize until now is that Ratzinger the supposed "conservative" and "traditionalist" is himself un soixante-huitard of the most intransigent sort.

"1968" is clearly for him what Vamik Volkan calls a "chosen trauma" conveniently invoked to justify all sorts of things--bad liturgy, bad moral theology, bad priests abusing kids--but nary a word about bad bishops or popes who were themselves abusers or participated in a cover-up, and who bear sole responsibility for advancing to the episcopate the men now resigned in disgrace, deposed from office, or jailed. Ratzinger's silence in this regard is deafening.

But there has also been some interesting commentary "across the aisle" as it were--or, perhaps better, commentary which is not playing to type in some of the things it both criticizes and praises. One of the most interesting things I have noted in the Church in the past year or so is the turning upside down of a lot of the politics. Thus we find Ratzinger's letter being criticized by people often labelled "conservative" and those often considered "liberal" are seen criticizing him in different ways--while both sides end up agreeing with each other in certain limited and unexpected ways. In witness of this, see Carl Olson's editorial on Ratzinger's letter, and Massimo Faggioli's column in Commonweal. But do not fail to consider Justin Tse's fascinatingly original essay which surfaces many of Ratzinger's caricatures while also considering the problems raised by being too much in thrall to von Balthasar's aesthetics.

Apart from Christopher Altieri's column in the Catholic Herald, every word of which deserves careful re-reading, virtually nobody looked at the problems of power and structures in Ratzinger's letter, which fairly drips with sneering condescension at those issues, an astonishingly adolescent reversal from a nonagenarian who, more than almost any other major Catholic leader of the 20th century, had written more extensively and more intelligently on such reforms, and done so going back at least to 1970. For him, at this very late hour, to pour scorn on the very concept of structural and political reform in the Church today can only be taken an an attempt to buffer his conscience from the slings and arrows of his super-ego, which is plainly rebuking him for his failures in this regard, leading to the acute expressions of guilt we find in the text.

But before I criticize him, let me note and underscore that what follows is written by someone who, until this week, ceded nothing to anybody in his respect for the writings of Joseph Ratzinger. I have been reading them since at least 1997, the year I was received into the Catholic Church when my sponsor gave me a copy of Ratzinger's Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology as a gift to commemorate my reception. After that I quickly devoured other Ratzinger books: The Feast of Faith, Called to Communion, Principles of Catholic Theology, Milestones, and The Spirit of the Liturgy. This latter, along with Feast of Faith, are two books I have assigned to students for more than a decade in courses on liturgy.

If you read my first book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, you will see there my giving him credit for being a real pioneer in certain ecclesiological trajectories. I defended him publicly over the years from people--including those in Catholic theology faculties--who were content to slander him without ever having read a single book by him. (My book has one of my favourite pictures of him on the front cover.)

That picture conveys something of the very high hopes I had for his papacy. But my exuberance was misplaced for in the end his papacy did only two things of significance: the enormous good of Summorum Pontificum, liberating the liturgy for local communities to decide; and resigning his office, which as I said at the time and have ever after repeated was a wholly welcome burst of iconoclasm of the best sort: a smashing of the false image of the pope as some demiurge, some super-bishop, some sempiternal "father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world" (as the old coronation formula put it). Au contraire: if every other bishop in the world is expected to resign at 75 there is no theologically coherent reason for the bishop of Rome to be held to a different standard. Within all the absurd mewling in reaction to his resignation one found not a word of theology but only the emotional meltdown of an infantilized people.

The only way I can understand this letter is to see it as an attempted justification of his inaction from 2005 to 2013. He failed, as pope, to do many of the things he said should be done, above all in reforming the structures of the Church. For someone who had--starting at least as far back as 1971, and repeatedly in many places--written about the need for such reforms, the fact that he did nothing must be weighed against him. The closest he came to any action was in 2006 when he monkeyed about with the title "patriarch of the West" but then failed to follow up, leading to wholly unnecessary panic on the Orthodox side which I spent no little energy trying to tamp down in a number of articles and lectures--and again addressed in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy.

So he knew and plainly knows the need for structural reforms, and clearly has a guilty conscience in this regard. There is no other explanation for this new text's fatuous question, "Perhaps we should create another Church for things to work out? Well, that experiment has already been undertaken and has already failed." It is impossible to see this as anything other than a counsel of despair of the most cravenly self-justifying sort. Nobody is calling for the creation of another Church, and the desire to reform the one true Church given by Christ is not an "experiment," nor has it "failed": it has not yet been tried, but it must be, precisely to make her pure for Him who is her bridegroom.

Lest we miss the point, he later elaborates by using the standard tactic of people who inhabit a crypto-monophysite ecclesiological imaginary rather than a real Church. Thus he vaguely waves his hand fearfully in the direction of some supposedly sinister thing called "politics" by immediately trying to claim that calls for reform conceal some kind of "political" agenda:

Indeed, the Church today is widely regarded as just some kind of political apparatus. One speaks of it almost exclusively in political categories, and this applies even to bishops, who formulate their conception of the church of tomorrow almost exclusively in political terms.

Perhaps there are bishops who do this (can he name any of them, or cite their writings?). But serious proposals for reconceiving and reconfiguring the Church are not drawn from, say, German polities or American federalism, or the Westminster model of cabinet governance. (Even if they were, there's nothing wrong with such provenance necessarily. The Church has long despoiled the Egyptians in many ways. Does he not remember Dvornik's documenting how the very language and structures we still use--e.g., diocese, prefect, metropolia, province--are taken from the political structures of the Roman Empire?)

Rather, serious proposals for reform are drawn, as I do in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power from within the Church's tradition fully conceived and broadly understood. They are first and last theological proposals drawn from within, not "secular" or "political" solutions imposed from without. It's time to let go of this bogus binary.

Ratzinger's letter continues: "the crisis, caused by the many cases of clerical abuse, urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope."

This is another tedious bogeyman. Nobody who is serious, least of all me, regards the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, the "pillar and bulwark of the truth" (I Tim. 3:15), as unacceptable. And nobody is proposing to replace it with a "self-made Church"--whatever that is. This is silliness on stilts.

But it cannot be denied by anybody that the present structures in the Church are plainly and fully unacceptable for they have aided and abetted the present crisis, and are retarding any serious reforms. Such unjustified and unjustifiable structures must be taken up by us, using our hands and minds and brains and gifts, all given by God, to find new forms, new structures, to prevent such abuses--which are always and everywhere abuses of power and sex simultaneously--from ever occurring again. Absent such structural reforms, all the appeals in the world from Ratzinger for better liturgy, for overcoming "atheism," and for "spiritual" reform in the Church will be grossly incomplete and inadequate at best.

Is this "self-made"? As opposed to what? Given his once-brilliant intellect, surely he cannot fondly imagine, like the "Nestorians" in Waugh's uproarious Black Mischief, that the Church, untouched by human hands and fully formed in every respect by God alone, just fell down from heaven during one Good Friday luncheon some years back? Given his ecclesiological self-awareness, he knows the role of humans shaping and re-shaping the structures of the Church--dioceses, conclaves, episcopal elections, parish councils, etc. He himself called for human beings to do more of that re-shaping in his writings going back to at least 1970.

If being "self-made" is bad, why would he call, e.g., for removing many responsibilities out of Rome and back to the regions in the decentralization he advocated in, e.g., God and the World? If "self-made" reforms are bad, then surely Summorum Pontificum should be retracted for it was his very self that made such reforms possible, along with others--e.g., the Anglican ordinariates. Should we retract those arrangements and pitch out former Anglicans?

Surely these and other reforms proffered by him must be reprobated (by the logic of ecclesiological crypto-monophysites) as "self-made"--or is that only a problem when performed by anyone other than a pope?

Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Orthodox Blurbers

It was really in the summer of 2001, which I spent teaching in Ukraine, that I realized, I suppose, the theme of all my subsequent academic work--which I then decided to begin the following year by enrolling in the doctoral program at the Sheptytsky Institute, which was then in Ottawa. That theme--dare I call it a vocation?--was the promise and problem of papal authority in the eyes of the Orthodox East.

Those who read my dissertation, which was finished in 2008 and published in 2011 as Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, will know how much time I spent looking at structures of authority in the East and deriving therefrom important lessons for the Western Church, reforms to which I then proposed in light of Orthodox concerns about the modern papacy (which I date largely from Pius IX).

Those who pick up my new book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, will see a similar approach, albeit much more focused at the local and regional levels rather than the universal level which occupied most of my first book. To the extent the pope features here, it is not the structures of his office that I focus on, but the pathological personality cult surrounding him which I challenge sharply. (For some further thoughts on this, see here.)

In both books, there is an especial focus on the Armenian Apostolic Church, a singular body from which Catholics have a very great deal to learn. But other Orthodox Churches--the OCA, the Greek, and the Antiochian among them--also feature in the book. It is, then, very gratifying that senior and internationally respected and prominent Orthodox scholars have said such kind things about the new book. (For somewhat of an overview of the book's approach and rationale, see here; for some thoughts on Anglican 'blurbers' see here.)

Given the focus on the Armenian Church, I was very glad when Vigen Guroian, whom I have been reading and learning from for twenty years now, agreed to read the book and write a blurb for it, saying:

Adam DeVille begins his book with the jolting pronouncement that ‘everything hidden must be revealed’ regarding the present sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. But this is only the first step. Writing with exceptional passion, he turns next, in an unexpected (but welcome) way, to a serious consideration of Orthodox ecclesiology and existing Orthodox ecclesiastical arrangements in order to identify a path that might allow Roman Catholics to move past ‘the current papal-centric structure’ and toward a Church in which authority and decision-making power is more jointly shared by laity, clergy, and bishops. Orthodox may benefit from DeVille’s studied perspective on their own churches, which well illustrates how renewal and reform might be accomplished for them as well.” —VIGEN GUROIAN, Armenian Orthodox theologian, author of The Orthodox Reality: Culture, Theology, and Ethics in the Modern World.

The Orthodox Reality is his newest book. But I used one of his very early works--Incarnate Love --in a course on Eastern Christian ethics I designed more than a decade ago now.

More recently, in a course on biomedical ethics and the pastoral care of the dying, I especially appreciated being able to use his very insightful Life's Living toward Dying: A Theological and Medical-Ethical Study.

Guroian has also written some interesting books on gardening, which I praised in a long essay published elsewhere more than a decade ago. I did not expect to like the books as I have long been an avowed indoorsman, but Guroian forced me to reconsider this.

Apart from the Spanish Jesuit psychoanalyst Carlos Dominguez-Morano (discussed here, though I will be returning to him again in coming days), there is one other interlocutor to whom my book is most heavily indebted, a book edited by Michael Plekon, who says this of Everything Hidden:

In this provocative and serious book, Adam DeVille presents radical ways of transforming the Church through a return to synodal and conciliar structures rooted in the traditions of the ancient Church. If there is to be death and resurrection for the Church, a Paschal renewal, then this must be the return of the Church to what it is: the assembly, not just in principle but in practice, of the whole people of God. His is a strong, courageous challenge to an embattled and damaged Church. —THE V. REV. MICHAEL PLEKON, Professor Emeritus, City University of New York.

I have interviewed Plekon many times on here over the past decade. For the most recent such interview, go here and follow the links back to the others.

He has written many wonderful books, but the one I am most indebted to in Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed is the translation Plekon edited of Nicholas Afanasiev's Church of the Holy Spirit. That book is singular and rare in its clarity and boldness of vision, and its refusal to reduce the "laics" to a non-category of "lay" people, that is, people who lack something like ordination or professional standing. It was from Afanasiev (and both Armenian and Anglican experience) that I developed the argument of the necessity for the Catholic church to regard, in her counsels of governance, the laics, clerics, and hierarchs as three equal orders.

Finally I come to what Cyril Hovorun had to say about the book. His was perhaps the most overly generous blurb for the book, making me the most neurotic (but not ungrateful!):

Adam DeVille continues the line of great Catholic theologians who have asked uncomfortable questions and provided unconventional solutions to ecclesiological issues. DeVille takes the baton from the hands Congar, Rahner, Murray, and Küng, in serving the Church with both aggiornamento and ressourcement. But the true source of his inspiration is Eastern Christianity, in its Greek Catholic, Byzantine, and Oriental Orthodox forms, which provide serious challenges to the modern ways of exercising primacy and synodality in the Roman Catholic Church. Without this book, any serious ecumenical discussion between Westerners and Easterners on the church-dividing issues would be incomplete.” —ARCHIMANDRITE CYRIL HOVORUN, director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.

I interviewed Hovorun here about his Scaffolds of the Church, an invaluable book that belongs on the reading list of every course in ecclesiology--Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant. I drew on it very much as I was writing Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed. Indeed, parts of Hovorun's book gave me a shot in the arm to argue things more clearly and forcefully than I was once inclined to do. His is a very brave and important book. I also commend to you his newest, Political Orthodoxies, as well as his earlier book Meta-Ecclesiology.