The church is the baptised community

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

AIB ran into serious trouble with its customers last month. Managers at the bank made a decision to make 70 of its 170 branches cashless.

Within days of the bank’s decision rural Ireland rose up in arms and said they were not having it.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin on a visit to the Far East told the bank he wanted to see them on his return to Ireland. It wasn’t long before AIB bosses realised they were not going to get away with this one, at least not for the moment, and simply announced that it was abandoning its plans because of ‘customer and public unease’.

‘Customer and public unease’ might not always work. 

Slick PR companies try their best to massage public opinion but on this occasion AIB got it all so wrong and ended up having to scrape egg off their collective faces. It does show how managers can get things so wrong.

When I saw those four words ‘customer and public unease’ my mind wandered off into the world of the churches, specifically the Catholic Church. I am well aware that the Catholic Church hierarchy will say that it is guided by the Word of God. But even on that point I sometimes get confused. It often strikes me how can a church that gets so many things wrong in its dealings with people, know so much about the mind of God, but that’s a topic for another day.

I’m inclined to ask has the Catholic Church been hijacked by the bishops and hierarchy.

I’m not for a moment arguing that the church should be ruled by opinion polls. The Catholic Church says it takes its mandate from God through Jesus Christ, the Scriptures and the tradition of the ecclesial community down through the ages.

 

The word church means the people of God. Theologians use the term ‘sensus fidelium’, which means the sense of the faithful.

Last week I sat down and had a most interesting conversation with a young man in his late 20s. He was baptised into the Christian community and on his own admission stopped attending Mass while still in primary school. Today the Catholic Church is a foreign land for him. Why did that happen?

Has that man’s local bishop ever thought of sitting down and chatting with him? I doubt it. Indeed, I wonder has any of his parish clergy ever engaged him in serious conversation.

The church is the people of God. Of course the bishops and hierarchy are included in the sensus fidelium. It’s not one group pitted against another.

But there is a glaring lack of any sense of real Christian community in any wide meaning of that term. Yes, there are little bubbles of people attached to their priest or bishop but the church in its full functioning sense is something far wider, bigger and better than that. 

What are bishops really doing about the antipathy of so many of the Christian community? Do they look over their shoulders wondering what Rome is thinking or are they genuinely concerned about my 28-year-old friend? 

Is church bureaucracy strangling the Christian community? Far too often bureaucracy can so easily dismiss us. It could all be so different.