Pope Francis has conservatives talking schism. Easier said than done. By David Gibson Religion News Service | November 5, 2014 Many conservative Catholics have long viewed Pope Francis with suspicion thanks to his effort to shift the Church’s focus away from a culture war agenda and toward a more welcoming approach and a greater emphasis on serving the poor. But last month’s controversial Vatican summit on the modern family, with the push by Francis and his allies to translate that inclusive view into concrete policies on gays and divorced and remarried Catholics, for example, seems to have marked a tipping point, with some on the right raising the specter of a schism — a formal split that is viewed as the “nuclear option” for dissenters. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a Catholic and a conservative, crystallized the peril in an Oct. 25 column (“The Pope and the Precipice“) warning the pope not to “break the church” to promote his goals, saying that if Francis continues to alienate conservative Catholics, it could lead to “a real schism.” Douthat had raised the possibility of “an outright schism” earlier this year, as well, and his warnings have been echoed by a number of other Church leaders and commentators. The anxiety on the right has also drawn increasing media speculation about the possibility of conservatives splintering off. So is a schism, with its echoes of medieval debates and heretics burning at the stake, a realistic possibility? And can an independent Catholic church be successful in the modern world? In today’s Church, the track record indicates that breaking away is much easier said than done. The Catholic Church is a hierarchical institution organized around a pope who consecrates bishops who ordain priests who celebrate the sacraments in parish churches. That’s a lot of infrastructure to create, and pay for; it’s not like a zealous Baptist who can start a new congregation with a Bible, a river, and maybe a tent. Then there is the psychological factor: “There is a huge priority on unity” in Roman Catholicism, said Julie Byrne, a religion professor at Hofstra University and author of “The Other Catholics,” a book due out next year that looks at groups that have split from Rome over the years. “To do something differently, you have to make a huge psychic jump to where independent Catholics are — saying that visible unity is not important and invisible unity is already there,” she said. Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, noted that to reach a critical mass, “you need ordinary people in the pews to get concerned and engaged.” Cummings doubted the issues being debated in Rome and among Catholic intellectuals would resonate with most parishioners. “There are a lot of people who disagree with the Church on a range of issues,” she said. “But leaving, actually severing the connection, is a different thing.” Yet over the years there have been a surprisingly large number of attempts to set up an independent Catholic church, with varying degrees of success: Byrne has counted as many as 250 independent Catholic bodies in the US — with at least one bishop and several priests — and between 500,000 and a million followers, a figure she said is a “very loose estimate.” Just trying to keep an accurate tally is hard, she said, because the vast majority of schismatics start and end as single congregations, renting space from another church or meeting in homes. They also go in and out of existence all the time, like fauna in the Amazon. If they last 50 years, Byrne said, that is “completely amazing.” Most breakaway Catholic churches tend to define themselves by standard Catholic characteristics: an apostolic succession — meaning a bishop as overseer — and priests and the sacraments. They also cling loyally to the word “Catholic.” Beyond that, there seem to be as many reasons for splitting as there are schisms, and they range across the spectrum from liberal groups that want women priests to Latin Mass traditionalists who want an old-style liturgy. (The actor Mel Gibson, a devotee of the old Latin rite, built his own church near his home in Malibu, Calif.) Back in 1946, for example, a former seminarian in Atlanta, George Hyde, was so upset that the Church denied Communion to gay Catholics that he set up a gay-friendly Catholic church. Racial and ethnic tensions have often been the source of schisms. In 1990, an African-American priest in Washington, the Rev. George Stallings, split with the archdiocese and set up his own church — the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation, which recently moved to the Maryland suburbs — to minister to black Catholics in particular. A century earlier, Polish immigrants started the Polish National Catholic Church because they were upset that there were so few Polish priests for their parishes and hardly any Polish bishops in a US hierarchy they saw as deaf to their needs. The PNCC continues to thrive; it has some 25,000 adherents in five dioceses and its parishes are reportedly in the black. The PNCC is affiliated with another, older independent denomination, the so-called “Old Catholics” who broke with Rome in the 19th century over issues of papal infallibility. Click here for the rest of the article: http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2014/...-schism-but-a-split-is-easier-said-than-done/
It is interesting to consider what shape a conservative schism could take in the Roman arena. They have placed reasonable stock in the Pontiffs incapacity to be absolutely wrong, and in many senses he is a absolute focus of unity for the Roman Communion. At the time of the great schism, (when autocephalous Churches went their own way) and the Church divided East from West the absolute status of the Patriarch 0f Rome had not been established as there were others who also held the Pallium. Part of the work of Vatican 1 was to shore up the Papacy in its role, and much of what happened in the 20th century (alongside a growing sense of celebrity in the wider population) was a growing public importance of the position of the Pontiff in Roman Catholic circles and in general. One suspects that schism is not in the DNA of a conservative catholic - it flies in the face of everything that have worked for. None the less one must note that despite all the good work done at Nicea and Constantinople, to ensure that we remained 'One Holy Catholic and Apostolic' we have through the centuries made a real mess of it. What we really need now (in the face of many challenges) is not a fracturing in any part of the Church but a shoring up of the unity in Christ of the whole Church. Part of how that happens in practice is working together for the tasks entrusted us by Christ, and there is no doubt that our ministry to the poor is very much part of that.
The papal influence has been made too strong methinks. Now it is interfering with their orthodoxy, perhaps? Or maybe not? People differ on how far this can go.