Rome: Hierarchy and Humility

I don’t like hierarchy, especially not in the church. I don’t know whether this is a Uniting Church thing or an Australian thing or an Avril thing, but the idea that some people are more important than others sets my teeth on edge. I know that true equality is impossible in this world, but I don’t want to accept inequality. I want our understanding of humanity to begin from the perspective that every single one of us is created in the image of God, and so no one human being is greater than another.

I had difficulty with the manifestations of hierarchy I saw in Rome. For me, “hierarchy” is not a positive thing, and I was surprised by the explanation of members of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the Unity of Christians that one of the things necessary for full communion between the Catholic Church and other churches is the “apostolically-related hierarchic ministry”. In the understanding of the Catholic Church, “having bishops is part of God’s understanding of the church”. The church needs hierarchy.

They would argue that the way they are using “hierarchy” is not the way I use it. I see it as a form of domination; they see it as a form of service. There needs to be some authority in the church to hold it together as a community, and so the church has been given the gift of personal episcopacy as the way in which that authority is to be exercised. The Pope himself is the “Servant of the Servants of God”, not a tyrant.

Yet it seemed to me that the hierarchy I saw in Rome did promote inequality within the Catholic Church. Priests are more important than the laity; bishops are more important than priests; cardinals are more important than bishops; and the Pope is more important than anyone else. And you can tell this because of the clothes that people wear, and by watching who bows to whom and whose ring is kissed.

(Given that the Catholic Church sees women’s ordination as something “introduced in recent decades by some Reformed churches”, this means that men are always more important than women.)

I first noticed this sense of hierachy in the thanks that our Catholic liaison person made on our behalf to the various people who spoke to us. It seemed very clear that the various cardinals and bishops who met with us were more important than us and that we should be very grateful that they had condescended to meet with us. It was not just a matter of them being busy people who had made time for us in busy schedules – they were intrinsically more important than us.

The second place that I noticed this was, of course, at the Papal Audience. The crowd screaming “Benedetto” and desperate to meet the Pope and shake his hand turned the “Servant of the Servants” into some sort of celebrity. And celebrities are by definition people who are more important than we run-of-the-mill types. There is no doubt that the Pope, in the role he plays in the world, is more important than most of us. But the church is the church of the least, where the last shall be first, and where we are not to lord it over each other. It’s hard to remember the radical equality that characterises the gospel of Jesus Christ at a Papal Audience.

I know that there is a hierarchy within the Uniting Church, and that it is possibly more insidious because we can’t tell who has got the power simply by looking at the clothes people wear. But the Uniting Church also opens its governance to all members, lay and ordained, women and men, through its various Councils; and seeks to ensure that everyone is heard within those councils by using consensus proceedures within them. I think that this is much more reflective of the nature of the church as Body of Christ than “hierarchic ministry”.

When we came home and reflected together on our time at Rome I was given another perspective. One of the African students spoke appreciatively of the great humility of the Pope. Despite the role the Pope plays in the world, he said, the Pope was humble enough to come and shake the hands of the common people at the Audience. He compared this favourably with the behaviour of leaders within his own (Pentecostal) church in Africa, who once in positions of power will not allow “ordinary people” to talk to them, and will definitely not shake hands with them.

It appears that the Catholic Church is more hierarchical than the Uniting Church in Australia, but less hierarchical than at least one pentecostal church in Africa!