By Walter Kish 

For the past several months, I have been following the developments in a nasty little dispute between a small group of aging parishioners in the northern Ontario town of Timmins and the Ukrainian Catholic Church hierarchy. The conflict came about because the Eparchy sold off the local church in Timmins together with other associated church assets. The parishioners claim the Eparchy did all this without consultation, involvement or approval from them and feel quite betrayed.

They have mounted a vocal protest campaign in the local press, one that has now reverberated into the wider national media.

The Eparchy has remained above the fray and declined to justify their actions or get involved in a dispute in the media over the issues, though it is not hard to speculate that the church authorities, seeing a long term decline in membership in that parish to the estimated current level of about 25, found it financially unfeasible to continue to maintain a separate parish. Obviously, from a practical business point of view, they wanted to convert the fixed asset value of the Timmins parish into more liquid form and put it to better use elsewhere.

Now I don’t know enough of the details of what transpired to support or condemn one side or the other, however, the case does highlight some underlying fundamental issues that the Church is currently being forced to face, particular those relating to it’s power and authority.

As the Pope was once reported to have said – "The Church is not a Democracy". The Catholic Church, particularly under the current papacy, is a very top-down hierarchical institution. This is not necessarily a bad thing. A strong argument can be made that matters of faith, morality and spiritual well-being are not well served by systems and structures based on compromise, broad democratic power sharing, situational management and local control.

One must take into account that the Catholic Church is a global institution that must take the long-term needs of the whole earthly flock into account in managing its wealth and assets. One should also realize that despite all the references to the supposedly large church bureaucracy, the Catholic Church is in fact a very lean operation administratively, satisfying the needs of a "customer" base numbering in the billions, with only four layers of management – priest, bishop, cardinal and pope. For it all to work efficiently, power and authority has to be well defined and concentrated.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church has been slow to realize that the nature of it’s "flock", particularly in the developed, western portion of the world has changed considerably over the past century. In contrast to most of the two thousand years of its existence, this "flock" is literate, educated, politically involved, and much more inclined to assess and judge all issues with a critical eye. It is no longer willing to uncritically accept the dictates of any authority figure. It wants a voice in both the formulation of policy as well as in the management of church affairs.

In recent decades, it has become obvious that the majority of practicing Catholics no longer support church doctrine on a wide slew of contemporary issues such as birth control, priest celibacy, female priests, papal infallibility and social policy. The educated Catholic of today knows full well that most of the existing church dogma has its origins not so much in the teachings of Jesus and the apostles, but in the politics of medieval churchmen and theological bureaucrats..

Respect for ecclesiastical authority has been further eroded by financial scandals as well as widely-publicized cases of child abuse by priests and brothers. The current pope, John Paul II, has managed to keep things under control through his tremendous strength of will, incredible energy and personal integrity. However, it is obvious that the whole structure and hierarchy of the Catholic Church is long overdue for some serious reformation.

I am not the first to suggest that the Church needs to engage in a new dialogue with its "flock", a dialogue that leads to a more participative relationship, one that better recognizes and reflects the needs of contemporary society. This does not necessarily imply that the Church must water down its essential beliefs and doctrines. But, it must start paying genuine attention to the views and opinions of it’s spiritual "customers, and it must take a hard look at its accumulated historical dogmatic baggage, and separate that which is fundamental to the true faith from what is just religious red tape and bureaucratic or political invention.