To feel at home” “

Ever more multi-ethnic, this is the only “certain prediction” that can be advanced on the future of the Church, even if “the Bible affirms that she will last until the end of time”. For various reasons, the people who feel “at home in the Church” are few, and most of the faithful “prefer to believe without belonging”. “Yes” to God and “no” to the Church, is one way of summing up a tendency which, according to TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE, for nine years master general of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), raises serious questions, because “it is precisely in the communion and in belonging to the Body of Christ that our faith is realised”. Thus, concerning oneself with the future of the Church – according to the religious writing on the pages of the August number of “Priests & People” (distributed in September) – “means seeking out ways in which the faithful can feel at home in the Church”. A SPACE FOR DIFFERENCES. The Church does not exist as an end unto itself, but “to be the sign and sacrament of the unity of all men and women in the Kingdom. With the coming of the Kingdom, the Church will have no more reason to exist”, says Fr. Radcliffe recalling Lumen Gentium. According to the Dominican, the future of the Church “will depend partly on the character of the next Pope” but “even more so on our capacity to face current difficulties without becoming disillusioned”. “If we concentrate too much on ecclesial questions and policies”, he notes, “the renewal of the Church will be slower. If, on the other hand, we keep alive our passion for the Gospel and for the mystery of God’s love, we will help to reinvigorate the Church”. There are various current difficulties. First of all, “the dangerous and non-Catholic polarisation” between ultra-conservative and liberal groups. Divisions and differences were part of Church history from the earliest times, Radcliffe observes, but “today we are more inclined to speak about the opposition than to enter into dialogue with it”. “Thus we need to create spaces in the life of the Church in order to favour a shared search for truth, listening to the objections of those who disagree with us and giving them serious consideration” BELONGING TO THE BODY OF CHRIST. According to the Dominican religious, the crisis of belonging to, of being rooted in, the Church is also linked to the loosening of ties with the parish. The parish was “once a geographical community and the natural ‘home’ of the faithful”; now it is the fruit of a “consumer” choice made on the basis of “the ‘services’ it can offer”. The average age of priests (over 65 in some British parishes), and the progressive drop in their numbers are certainly not elements that favour a renewal of parishes. To this must be added “the institutional nature of the Church herself: a male hierarchy that influences her forms and aims” and that is perceived by “many women as a structure that marginalises them and considers them second-class citizens”. “Yes”, then, to God and “no” to the Church, “but our faith”, Fr. Radcliffe insists, “is not a philosophy or a theory of self-realisation. Our faith is to become part of the Body of Christ – this is the new alliance. To belong is intrinsic to the Christian religion” which, in the etymology of the word religio, “contains the idea of a bond with God and with man”. THE “PRIESTHOOD” OF THE LAITY. How, then, can the Church be renewed? In a world that has become “a global village”, in which everything is now considered in terms of “networks”, Fr. Radcliffe feels we must “evaluate the richness of the various movements and associations present within the Church”. They represent a true “network” and present the image of “a Church nourished by many institutions, each of which constitutes a way to belong and gives voice to the wisdom and authority of the baptised”; as happened in the Middle Ages with “the religious orders, the military orders, the lay fraternities, and the universities. The Church’s ‘genius’ has always shown itself in finding new ways to belong: from the domestic Churches founded by Paul in Greece to the movements of the twentieth century. The task facing the hierarchy (bishops, priests and deacons) is not to be ‘the’ Church”, Fr. Radcliffe explains, “but to seek to keep all these different realities together, so that they interact with one another within the Church” Room must be made, then, for the laity because, according to the religious, “the most important priesthood is that of the laity, and ordained priests must put themselves at the service of the laity”. In this way the Church “may go back to being a complex and dynamic society, offering various ways of ‘feeling at home'”, from “bible and prayer schools to networks that keep the passion for justice alive, from places of theological debate to those of friendship and sharing”. Not an inflexible Church “that asks everyone to go down the same road”, but a “sign that in Christ God said an eternal ‘yes’ to humanity, just as humanity did to God”.