New Peruvian cardinal, Italian bishop, Vatican official call for ‘post-clerical Church’
October 18, 2024
The Vatican newspaper has published a laudatory review, written by an Italian bishop, of Una Chiesa postclericale: Autorità e Vangelo [A Post-clerical Church: Authority and Gospel], a new book written by a Peruvian cardinal-designate and two other authors, with a foreword by a Vatican official.
The coauthors are Father Roberto Maier, who teaches theology and moral philosophy at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan; Cardinal-designate Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio of Lima, Peru; and Gemma Serrano, who teaches theology at the Faculty of Notre Dame (Collège des Bernardins, Paris). Serrano is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life’s Rescuing Fraternity Together project and is a collaborator with the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Father Sergio Massironi, who coordinates the theological program of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, wrote the foreword; he also wrote the afterword to Via Crucis of a Gay Boy, a book that was favorably reviewed in the Vatican newspaper earlier this year. Bishop Derio Olivero of Pinero, Italy, wrote the review of A Post-clerical Church for L’Osservatore Romano.
The book “nourishes and gives breath,” wrote Bishop Olivero. “It opens up perspectives. It moves within an ardent desire to renew the form of the Church.”
Quoting American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, Bishop Olivero wrote:
Every “sexual abuse is configured as an abuse of power. It is not primarily an expression of desire or sexual attraction. It is doubtful that pedophile priests or rapists in prisons are gay, whatever that may mean. Their crimes are, in reality, abuses committed by virtue of their position of power.”
Talking about abuse means, then, talking about power. Indeed, it means raising the question of how to manage power within the Church. It means searching for a new form of Church, capable of overcoming the separation between clergy and laity, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council with the category of “People of God.”
The separation leads to the creation of a “caste” that is apart, or rather that is above. A caste that “possesses” the Truth and imposes it. Without control, precisely because it is separated. A caste “almost outside the world,” incapable of perceiving its own secularity.
Quoting Father Maier, one of the book’s coauthors, Bishop Olivero called for “a religion that loudly declares that the Eternal, the Foundation, the truth of God, does not belong to it, does not depend on it, is not at its disposal. A fully secular Christianity would be a Christianity capable of announcing the truth of God, of the cosmos, of the intricate plot of human experience as something that cannot be produced and arranged by anyone.”
Bishop Olivero then quoted from Father Massironi’s “enlightening preface”:
The hierarchical functioning no longer speaks… In a democratic and pluralistic culture, for a type of intelligence that establishes horizontal connections and moves in a world of networks, the failure to participate in the election of whoever takes on roles of responsibility is also signified negatively on a spiritual level.
Discrimination against minorities, masculine reserve [editor’s note: presumably the reservation of Holy Orders to men], the irrelevance of women in decision-making processes, the merely consultative value of participative bodies make the strength of the Gospel ineffective. Here, it is not a question of imagining a desacralization of the ordained ministry, but of a different imagining of the sacred, more faithful to the New Testament than to the court or temple rites accused by the prophets. “Synodality” should therefore be thought of and developed within the paradigm shift that contemporaneity imposes both with respect to sovereignty and with respect to spirituality.
Bishop Olivero continued:
The contribution of Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio helps us to make an interesting journey in the texture of the Gospel to go and find in it, from the beginning, attention to not falling into clericalism. The author does so by masterfully commenting on the term oligopistos: people of little faith or believers in the faith of a few? The intent of the work is to avoid “an ever greater self-referential closure of the Church, justified, at times, by some distorted interpretations of the Gospel.”
“A truly precious and stimulating book,” Bishop Olivero concluded. “To read and meditate on, to return with hope for looking forward. So that the Church is no longer as it was before.”
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