11.        PASSIVITY
	The church’s culture of passivity contrasts sharply with the proactive nature of its founder, Jesus of Nazareth.
	Stephen Covey (Note11.1) argues that the most important habit of highly effective people is Be Proactive. This principle can be applied as a yardstick to the founder of Christianity. One of the major reasons the apostles followed Jesus was that he was proactive; he spoke with authority. Most successful entrepreneurs would agree that being proactive is essential for leadership and progress. People content to hide in organizations in tall weeds might not agree. Bias Against Action.  For almost 20 years, I was a member of a great charismatic prayer group in Rockville, Maryland, that met every Wednesday evening in the basement of St. Jude’s school. An adjunct to the main group was a Saturday morning men’s gathering that discussed religious topics (more God than church) after Mass. In later years the Saturday morning group, to our detriment, concentrated more on politics—church, national, and international. The group and the Saturday morning men's gathering have staying power. On October 12, 2003, the Community of Light celebrated its 32nd anniversary. I learned many valuable lessons on Wednesday evenings, on Saturday mornings, and on the “service team,” the leadership organ of the group, on which I served from time to time. Among the most significant lessons: •        Need for, and the centrality, of love •        Power of scripture •        Importance of regular prayer and praise •        Need for, and the power of, community •        Importance of mature Catholic Christians in the maturation of other Catholic Christians •        Strength gained from sharing faith experiences •        Service and teamwork—as opposed to a single authority—produce an effective leadership paradigm. I also learned that some of the group had almost a complete reliance on prayer and little to no interest in action. I think this attitude is prevalent in all levels of the Catholic community: pope, bishops, clergy, and laity. The tension between those who only pray and those who only do is as old as the church. Of course, we need both prayer and action. Franciscan Father Richard Rohr would agree. Rohr saw the need for a training/formation center that would serve as a place of discernment and growth for activists and those interested in social service ministries. In 1987, he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation (Note 11.2) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I like the name “Action and Contemplation.” Rohr stresses both, but purposely places the word action ahead of contemplation in his ministry's name. Closely aligned with the pray-only mindset is magical thinking: if I pray hard enough or stick my head in the sand, the problem will go away. The example of Jesus and the common sense of the gospels tell us that we can’ t wait around for the Holy Spirit to do something. Someone, I think it was Robert Schuller, formulated one of most powerful sentences in the English language consisting of words of two letters: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” The Nike commercial's “Do it,” is a good one, too. The saying: "Pray as if everything depended on God, and act as if everything depended on you," also contains a lot of wisdom. Mañana. Closely related to this bias against action is a perpetual lack of a sense of urgency. It’s the attitude of never ending mañana. I live in Tucson, in southern Arizona, where some say mañana doesn’t mean tomorrow, it means not today. In times of crisis if you agree with that line from the song that says "mañana is good enough for me" you're in big trouble. Our Lady of Perpetual Mañana, the patron saint of inaction, is really the grim reaper in drag. (Mary, ask Jesus to forgive me; I couldn't resist). Times of crisis require a sense of urgency: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! (Matthew 3.2, NKJV).     Passivity and Selective Proactivity of the Pope.  As indicated in Root Cause Number 2, Authoritarianism, the pope has been a strong voice against abortion, capital punishment, and women priests. But he has been passive, i.e., he hasn't taken action, and has been relatively slow to speak out against the ongoing worldwide sex abuse of minors by clergy. He has been silent on the cover-up by bishops.  On the BishopsWatch Website (Note11.3), in An Unholy Conspiracy: The Vatican and Clergy Sexual Abuse, canon lawyer Sara E. Morello writes, “…the lack of action to protect children is patently obvious.” The pope has said that sex abuse by priests is wrong, that there is no place in the priesthood for priests who abuse children. However, more important, the pope has never said he was going to hold bishops accountable or make disciplinary responses transparent. He has done almost nothing. You will know them by what they do. And don’t do. Make no mistake; the pope can act quickly when he wants to and can go slowly when he wants to. Recent events in Phoenix and Boston are cases in point. In Phoenix, the pope stood by Bishop O’Brien when he copped a plea with the county prosecutor for endangering children by moving predator priests around the diocese without notice to the parishes to which they were assigned. But the front-page publicity of Bishop O’ Brien leaving a dead man in the street after hitting him with the car he was driving was too much for even the tolerance of the Vatican. Contrast this quick action against Bishop O’Brien in Phoenix with the inaction toward Cardinal Law in Boston. The pope didn’t remove Cardinal Law. The cardinal resigned after a no-confidence vote by the priests under him. An interesting footnote: the new Boston Archbishop, Sean O’Malley, who did more in 2 months to respond to sex abuse survivors than Cardinal Law did in 18 years, was not among the 30 recently chosen for the cardinal's red hat that signifies the office of prince (clericalism again) of the church. Thus, Cardinal Law, who is often seen in Rome these days, will vote in the next papal conclave, but Archbishop O’ Malley won’t. Passivity and Selective Proactivity of the Bishops.  The bishops’ capacity for passivity, inaction, and making bonehead decisions seems limitless. In the early 1970s, they ignored a study warning about the sexual immaturity of priests. In 1985, the U.S. bishops reviewed an in-depth report on the growing sex abuse scandal co-authored by Father Thomas Doyle., O.P., a canon lawyer who was working for the Vatican Embassy. They chose to ignore it. In 1997, the National Catholic Reporter stated (Note 2.4), “Doyle, told a group of canon lawyers that the sex abuse crisis ‘is the most serious problem the church has faced in centuries.’ He has since been marginalized, his career sent way off the track. He was correct then, and the truth hasn't changed since.”   It took Cardinal Law, Father John Geoghan, and the Boston Globe to move the bishops to action.   The American bishops did next to nothing until the Firestorm in Boston.  Father Tom Doyle (Note 11.4) tells it like it is:
		There still would be almost no recognition [of the enormity of the scandal and cover-up] were it not for the secular media who put [a] shotgun on one side of the head, and the attorneys with their lawsuits who put [another] shotgun on the other side that said, 'Fellas, wake up and smell the coffee. We're here.'
	I am an unabashed fan of Father Tom Doyle.  I’m forming a Father Tom Doyle for pope committee. He’s the second candidate I can back.    Some hold out great promise for the bishops’ well publicized National Review Board. However, as R. Scott Appleby, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, reminds us:
		This board works for the bishops, it's in the employ of the bishops, and to some degree beholden to the bishops.  The only recourse it has to influence the bishops who don't choose to comply is to go to the media, in effect to go to the Catholic laity and report who is not complying….In the history of the Catholic Church, never before has a group of bishops subjected their operations to lay oversight.   That's unprecedented, and they're doing so, frankly, not out of some theology of an empowered laity, but because they're under political, legal, and financial pressure.
	At the top of the bishops' list of concerns is the study the board has commissioned to determine the extent of sexual abuse in the church. The bishops asked for such a study when they passed their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People at their June 2002, meeting in Dallas. Some bishops said they expected that the results could be used to prove that the problem was no greater for the church than for “society at large.” What a standard to emulate! This is Christian leadership? It sounds to me more like the under- siege White Houses of Presidents Nixon and Clinton.       Passivity and Selective Proactivity of the Laity.  David Gibson tells us in The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism (Note 11.5) that educated lay people, mainly women, are taking on increasingly significant roles in growing numbers in the church. That positive trend contrasts with the fact that the vast majority of the laity is by nurture and culture apathetic, passive, and without real power. What can a lay person do when the bishop controls the money, property, and power? When a bishop is blatantly immoral or incompetent, the laity doesn’t have the option of saying, “throw the bum out” or even of voting who the next "bum" will be. But as we shall see later, the democracy-in-the-church movement is alive and well and gathering steam. The laity does, however, have the power of the purse, and revenues have are shrinking in some dioceses. The stereotype of the Catholic laity (the flock) is the image of sheep: dumb, dirty, in need of a shepherd. The laity’s historical role has been to “pray, pay, and obey.” This role has its roots in feudalism and in an immigrant American church in which the priest was the most educated person in the parish. Today, that’s no longer true. Catholic lay people, due in great part to the American Catholic education system, are in positions of power in all parts of American life. Many are leaders during the week, but on Sundays some of these same leaders revert to childhood: “Whatever Father [the bishop, the pope] says, we have to go by it, we have to believe.” But times are changing. As Father Tom Doyle says:
		… people are learning; they're becoming adults and realizing they don't have to filter their communication with the Almighty, with a higher power, through a bunch of men. What it's done to a lot of people, what it did to me early on, is it forced me to mature, to grow up….People are making the distinction between their belief and trust in a higher power and their trust in a church system. They're saying, ‘We don't believe in bishops or pope at all -- we don't need to. We communicate and believe in a higher power. We don't need them to believe in God.’ ….The laypeople are responding by cutting back their donations, by not going to church, by just voicing their anger, their questions, their fear.
	I recall the interim bishop of Phoenix, who is acting in place of Bishop O’Brien, telling his new flock (there's that word again!): Don’t put your faith in priests or bishops; put your faith in God.  Good advice!
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