Question Everything

Here’s what I really like about Jesus: The way he questions authority—the Pharisees, the tax collectors, even the Romans—and dares to imagine that the world could be different than it’s always been.

His ragtag followers must have caught some of that fire as they tore across the Mediterranean world and turned social structures upside down. Male, female, slave, free, Jew, Greek—none of that mattered. There was work to be done and new ways of doing it. (Am I romanticizing the early Church? Maybe. But those early Christians couldn’t have accomplished much without that fearless creativity.) 

Somewhere along the way, though, as the centuries rolled by, inertia seemed to set in and the institutional Church got bogged down. So here’s what I really like—as a Catholic—about the Protestant Reformation: The way guys like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli questioned authority—the bishops, the pope, the dogmas—and dared to imagine a Church that was truer to the vision of its founders. (Maybe I’m romanticizing the reformers, too, but you have to give them credit—they were fearless and creative, too.)

Things went horribly wrong, of course, what with the drownings and burnings, the long wars, not to mention all the political machinations. It was enough to make anyone with sense give up on Christianity entirely.

The amazing thing, though, is that the Church, in fits and starts, kept trying.  I really like the fact that once the genie was out of the bottle, there was no forcing him back in. Once you questioned the vicar of Christ, after all, you might as well question everything. You might as well waylay the king of England on his way to London and demand that he reform the English church. You might as well form councils and consistories in Geneva and have a debate to figure out which religion your city ought to adopt.

When you tell people they need to base their faith on the Bible, you might as well teach them to read it—and when that happens, there’s no turning back.

When I think about it now, I can see ways that the Reformation seems to be playing out even today, even within the Catholic tradition. When Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois calls women’s ordination a matter of justice (and gets defrocked for it), is that an echo of Martin Luther’s “Here I stand?”

When a random cardinal launched an inquisition of American women’s religious orders, and the nuns took their show on the road, launched a public relations campaign, and shone a light on institutional misogyny, was that an echo of the Millenary Petition?

Probably the courage to question authority, and the creativity to imagine a new way of living out the Christian faith, would have happened without a Protestant Reformation. But I think the reformers helped shape the way it’s playing out today, especially in the tireless press of women for full inclusion in the Catholic Church.

After all, the Church has a long and storied history with a recurring motif: Question everything.