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Dan Leno as a pantomime "dame" in Jack and the Beanstalk (1899).Leno is shown in costume as the character Dame Trot in this pantomime, produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which opened in London at Christmas 1899. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
By Ray Lyons | United Kingdom
"He's behind you!" shouts the audience to the pantomime dame.
"It's behind you!" seems to be the silent but increasing shout from the vast majority of Catholics to the clergy and the institutional Church.
The Covid pandemic has exposed many failures in modern society. It has also graphically exposed the failures of the institutional Church in the 21st Century.
Online "live-streaming" of liturgies with just the priest trying to "celebrate" Mass in the absence of the community, exposes the incongruity of the medieval model of a Church trying to survive in a 21st century context.
The vested priest "on the stage" in an empty church building reveals himself as little more than the pantomime dame.
Far too many bishops, priests, and deacons continue to look behind them for a bygone age when the institutional Church flourished and they were the sole focus of attention and spiritual and temporal authority.
The clerical scourge must end.
Why are the titles Sister and Brother alone not sufficient? All ministry is based in our Baptismal dignity as sisters and brothers.
Over the past 100 years or more, numerous prophets have offered and argued for new models for the Catholic Church. But with the possible exception of the bishops of Vatican II, their voices have gone unheard and rejected by those who hold "Authority" in our dying medieval model.
In the UK, 80%+ of Catholics rarely, if ever, join the community assembly each Sunday. In many European countries it's even worse, with up to 98% totally absent.
The truth is that the medieval model the clergy are so desperate to maintain cannot survive in an increasingly democratized (western) world.
In many dioceses, bishops are increasingly unable even to recruit sufficient, if any, pantomime dames to keep the show on the road.
Importing priests is not the answer
So they have turned to smuggling them in though the stage door from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, in the delusion that whilst they keep the front of house doors open at least the matinee performance will keep the lights on.
If anything, the cultural and institutional void these imported priests reveal is accelerated. Covid is exposing the reality. The rest of the Church has moved on and it is only a matter of time before the theatre goes dark.
Pope Francis certainly recognizes that this broken model cannot survive and that a synodal model must replace it.
That may be the longer term answer, but in reality I believe the Holy Spirit is guiding us to a swifter and more urgent return to the original models of community we find in Acts.
Both in the Gospels and in Acts, we frequently read that the crowds, the disciples, even the apostles and the early Christians, did not understand or believe what they saw and heard. But still they belonged to the community of followers of Jesus. Why should it be any different today?
For most western Catholics, at least belonging to a faith community trumps believingwhat the institutional Church teaches as their primary motive.
If they no longer believe what the institutional Church proclaims on so many matters of "traditional" faith, and especially morals, they have either voted with their feet and left or are now finding new ways of belonging to their faith communities.
The Holy Spirit to the rescue
Instead of passive disciples sitting in the pews "praying and paying", watching a lone shepherd trying to coral the ever decreasing remnant in near empty churches, some in the scattered communities are gathering together to share and pray.
In parts of the world where bishops and priests have always been rarities, catechists, lectors, and acolytes have become the effective shepherds.
Eventually, "presbyters" (a better term than the unscriptural "priests"; cf. Hebrews 7-10) will emerge again to guide and nourish these sometimes smaller, but growing, communities. Passive disciples will become active and engaged apostles again.
The Institutional Church, in a dying effort to retain its outdated model of Church, refusesto provide the means and opportunities for the "source and summit" of the Church -- the Eucharist -- to most Catholic communities.
But the Holy Spirit seems to be increasingly providing manna for them.
Basic Communities, in communion with the local bishop, could well be the way the Church evolves here as in the southern hemisphere over the past 60/70 years.
A new superstructure will increasingly be required, and that can only emerge as an act of the Holy Spirit and a new general council of the Church.
A new era of the journey has only just begun.
In the meantime the sheep need to find new pastures without appointed shepherds and to forage for nourishment themselves.
Braver members among them must allow the Holy Spirit to guide and lead them until new shepherds emerge once again from their communities.
Ray Lyons is a presbyter in the Diocese of Portsmouth (England).
(This is a slightly edited version of an article that originally appeared in the September issue of RENEW, a quarterly published by British reform group "Catholics for a Changing Church".)
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