A Sign of Fear in Rome?

Should the Roman Catholic Church have a constitution? It has existed without one for more than 19 centuries--unless one considers the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the commission to teach that Gospel a constitution. Of course the church has had rules and laws aplenty, an accumulating and confusing morass of canons that were not even codified until 1918. That code is now undergoing a massive revision, and a bloc within the Vatican is asking for a kind of preamble to it that would become a new "fundamental law" for the church--one to which all canon law would have o conform. This Lex Fundamentalis, as it is known in ecclesiastical circles, would define the church's nature, its mission, its structure and its place in the world. The proposal to create such a constitution, and in particular the latest draft to be produced, has opened yet another hot debate between Roman Catholic liberals and conservatives.

Coming on the heels of the Second Vatican Council, a constitution would be an anachronism. The council made its name by creating a fresh, vigorous image of a growing "pilgrim" church, a "People of God" joined in a community that was more mystery than institution. Much of the new image was not dissimilar to the vision of reformers inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church over the centuries: an invisible church of the spirit as opposed to a visible one of structure and hierarchy. Now that idea was part of Roman Catholic theology as well, and progressive theologians were quick to project it into a dynamic, evolving church. That apparently made Pope Paul VI a bit apprehensive and, even as the council closed in 1965, he suggested that the church needed a fundamental law to guide it. The assignment of drawing one up promptly went to the commission already at work revising the code of canon law, now under the eye of astute Conservative Pericle Cardinal Felici, 60.

Despite Felici's considerable influence in the Vatican (he is often mentioned as the top conservative candidate in the next papal elections), the project moved slowly. Finally, after the commission had produced three earlier versions, Felici sent a 9,000-word Latin draft of the law to the 3,386 bishops of the world last February, asking for their comments at summer's end.

Computer Attack. Meanwhile, a church historian, Dr. Giuseppe Alberigo, and a team of scholars at the Institute of Religious Sciences in Bologna, also examined the new document and promptly issued a 60-page attack on it. They used an unorthodox but ingenious tool to aid their analysis: a computer. The team fed into it terms from both the proposed Lex and Vatican II documents. The computer revealed distinct differences between them. "Although the Lex is filled with references to the council," Alberigo charged, "its faithfulness to it is much less real than a superficial reading would indicate." As examples, he cited some 180 references to church, most of which were used to mean "an authority different from and superior to the People of God." Of the 24 uses of supreme, only one applied the adjective to the greatest of virtues, charity. Mostly the word was linked to papal or ecclesiastical authority.

Alberigo cited other reasons why the draft was unacceptable. Canon 23 of the text states that no one's "good repute" can be injured "illegitimately," implying, Alberigo argued, that persons could be injured "legitimately." This, he said, could lead to a return of inquisitorial processes like the 1968 interrogation of Radical Educator Ivan Illich, then a monsignor, on such charges as "subversive interpretation" of church discipline. Canon 90 declares that the church "has the inherent right to acquire, conserve and administer those temporal goods needed to pursue its proper objectives," a statement, said Alberigo, that sounds like "a group of businessmen defending an international monopoly." In matters of belief, the Bologna professor asserted, the Lex reflects no "hierarchy of truth," placing all church teachings on the same level and demanding acceptance of them all without distinction. Theologically, he complained, the doctrine of the Eucharist, that of Jesus Christ's real presence in the bread and wine of Communion, is slighted. For Vatican II, the doctrine was the focal point of the church's existence.

Short Pants. Indeed, Alberigo would prefer to see no Lex Fundamental at all. "A committee of human beings cannot expect to sit down and design this divinely created organism. A design of the church when put into written words no longer is the church of God but the church of a Felici or a commission or a Pope." Though defenders of the concept have argued that any Lex would be amendable, Alberigo contended that the church moves so slowly that "the pants will always be too short." To attempt to construct a constitution at this point in history, he said, was "a return to siege mentality, a sign of fear in Rome."

The blast from Bologna may have been the harshest so far, but it was not the most influential. That came last month when Leo-Jozef Cardinal Suenens, primate of Belgium and outspoken leader of the "loyal opposition" within the church (TIME, Aug. 1, 1969), attacked the Lex Fundamentalis in an interview with Director Richard Guilderson of the National Catholic News Service. Though the cardinal left open the question of "whether or not a constitutional law of the church is at all possible," he assailed both the timing and the content of the present draft, borrowing liberally from Alberigo's study.

Conceived in Haste. To begin with, Suenens charged, the draft was conceived in haste and without any real consultation. It lacks "Biblical perspective," elevates the juridical above the "spiritual and charismatic elements of the church" and "runs the risk of completely blocking all future development" in the church. Moreover, noted the prelate, it is "an obstacle for ecumenism," and perhaps even for Catholicism itself. The current dissatisfaction with church institutions on the part of both priests and laity, he argued, would only be exacerbated by any fundamental law that they had no part in making.

The Suenens interview was clearly a lobbying campaign to rally progressive elements before Cardinal Felici could claim majority support for the document. Suenens already had many allies, including the Canon Law Society of America, which called the draft "regressive" and "triumphalistic" and predicted that it would cause further "tragic erosion of respect for authority in the church." A group of some 200 European theologians, including Karl Rahner, Hans Kueng and Johannes Metz, even charged that the new Lex subordinated the Gospels to the church. In Rome, an assembly of superiors of religious orders solidly rejected the document after hearing from their theological advisers. Negative responses have already come in from the bishops' conferences of France, Germany, Canada, South Africa and Rhodesia. Though U.S. bishops as a body have not yet replied, Detroit's John Cardinal Dearden, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, last week expressed "reservations similar to those of Cardinal Suenens," and urged further discussion of the law.

Pope Paul seems determined, however, that there will be some kind of basic law, and has turned the weapons of the Lex's attackers against them. In an audience this month he criticized a "new juridicism" that would bind the church to constant change. Already the Vatican is quietly putting together another subcommission to rewrite the Lex, although it may be years before any draft is adopted. As for the old version, Cardinal Felici now claims that he was only soliciting opinions from the world's bishops, not any sort of vote. The matter is certain to be a topic of great interest at this year's synod of bishops from round the world, which convenes in Rome next month.

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