Beyond Priests: The Future of Ministry in the Catholic Church by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins [Collins, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Catholic, Christian Ministry, Pastoral Resources, Sexuality & Gender Studies
ISBN: 9798881802615
Google: BwEQEQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2025-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Paul then develops the image of the body of Christ with “many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body . . . For in the one Spirit, we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free” (12:12–13).

Within this context, John Collins refers to the work of Ernest Käsemann that we’ve already seen on early Catholicism. Collins comments, “What happened in this historical development was that ‘elect individuals’ hijacked the broad charisma that graced the body of the church . . . because they recognized the threat to their office that the Pauline concept of charismata embodied.”5 They didn’t do this deliberately or maliciously. It simply reflects the natural and inevitable evolution of a group centered on a dynamic and inspiring figure like Jesus into an institution with established leadership.

There is a real sense in which an institution is needed to save the message of the inspirational leader. But in another sense, it can also smother it. Every institution has leaders, and their constant temptation is to aggregate power and control to themselves. To put it bluntly in church terms: from about the AD 230s onward, the clergy increasingly monopolized all the gifts to protect their own position and authority by excluding the laity from any effective role in the governance and ministry of the church. In contrast to the tendency toward institutionalization, Käsemann says that for Paul, only when the whole church community is acting out through their Spirit-endowed gifts is Jesus truly present. As Collins shows, the Catholic Church is still a long way from accepting Käsemann’s interpretation of Paul. Although recognizing the lay call to participate in the mission of the church, even after Vatican Council II the official church is still geared to protecting a ministry rooted in the sacrament of orders.

But centralizing authority was also part of church leadership’s reaction to heresy and the kind of unbridled, “ratbag” religiosity that inevitably emerges in all religious movements. Ronald Knox has correctly called this phenomenon “enthusiasm,” by which he refers to the tendency of some people to think that they have direct access to God and know exactly what God intends and who decry human reason, church doctrine, and tradition.6 Early church enthusiasts were convinced that Christ would come in judgment soon and that their ecstasies, trances, and apparent speaking in unknown tongues are signs of this. The early church had to deal with a plethora of offshoot religious movements such as these—which they called “heresies”—that ranged from the pious and deluded to the mad and fanatical, from the Gnostics to Montanists such as Tertullian.

The word diakonia, of course, reminds us of the role of deacons in the modern church. But, as I said earlier, all the words describing early church offices—deacons, presbyters, bishops—seem to have different meanings in different places and contexts, and only gradually did they take on a specific form and function. Also, using the passage quoted above from the Letter to the Ephesians (4:11–12), Collins

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