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Is Church Social Action Too "Churchy"?
By Msgr. George Higgins
April 13, 1998
I recently spent several hours meeting informally on current labor issues with 40 priests from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. I was asked to open the meeting with a formal speech, but I declined, saying that I would prefer a two-way give-and-take conversation.The assembled priests seconded this proposal and agreed to start the conversation with a series of questions from the floor.
The first question, somewhat to my surprise, was not directly related to labor issues as such. The question, in summary, went as follows:
In the aftermath of Vatican Council II, has there been a falling off in our efforts to encourage Catholic workers to play an active role in their unions and in the field of labor-management relations?
To start the ball rolling, I said that I would tentatively argue that the justice and peace work of the church in the United States after Vatican II has tended to be a bit too clerical, too institutional or, if you will, too "churchy," for lack of a better word.
By the same token, it has yet to find an adequate method of developing independent lay leadership in the secular world -- for example in the field of labor-management relations.
Before the council, paradoxically, the Catholic social action movement in the United States, though somewhat limited in scope and burdened with an inadequate top-down type of ecclesiology, tended to emphasize more than we do today the layman's independent role, as a citizen and a member of secular organizations, in helping to solve social and economic problems.
Since the council -- or so it seems to me -- there has been more of a tendency, despite our greater theological awareness of the church as the people of God, to emphasize the role of the church as an institution and, more specifically, the role of the hierarchy and church professionals in promoting justice and defending human rights.
Both approaches, of course, are valid and are usually intertwined or interrelated.
I raised the question of "churchy" vs. secular social action because I think it has a bearing on the future of the church's involvement in the labor field. For the sake of clarity I posed the question as follows:
"Is it or should it be the primary (though not exclusive) function of church-related social action organizations to prepare their members to engage in peace and justice work on their own initiative in the secular area, or, conversely, should it be their primary (though not exclusive) function to make sure that the institutional church, and, more specifically, church professionals, are publicly committed to the cause of social justice?
I think it would be a mistake, of course, for the church to get bogged down at this time in a theoretical debate about the respective roles of the laity and of church professionals in promoting social justice. Theologians can, should, and undoubtedly will continue to grapple with this question at their leisure.
It would probably be an even greater mistake to draw too sharp a distinction at the practical level between the role of the laity and the role of the clergy in promoting justice and defending human rights.
However, there is a need, I think, to review our justice and peace policies and programs at every level to prevent them from becoming top-heavy with church professionals.
In more positive terms, we should make sure that our policies and programs are adequately oriented toward the formation of authentic independent lay leaders who exercise their ministry, not exclusively in and through church organizations, but in their secular occupations.