THIS is going to be preachy but it’s addressed to preachers anyway.
It was welcome news that the clergy of the Archdiocese of Cebu and of its suffragan dioceses gathered this week to draw up a code of conduct to guide them in meeting the challenges of today’s social reality. This is a great move, updating their current code and making it more relevant to the needs of changing times.
If, however, the news report said it all and no layman participated or was consulted, then the meeting had a fundamental flaw that could lead to its ineffectiveness.
Servants are supposed to ask masters how the latter want to be served. Servants do not tell masters this is how we will serve you. It is the other way around, the masters telling servants this is how we want or need you to serve us.
In the Catholic Church the clergy are the servants of the faithful, the people of God. In the seminary it is drilled into their subconscious that a priest is an “alter Christus” or another Christ. And Christ was very clear to the disciples that they are to serve God’s people as he did, saving them also from physical hunger, thirst, disease, etc. He was then and should still be good news to the marginalized of the day.
In Mark 10:42-45, Christ said, “You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and their officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be a servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For, even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom to many.”
Being servant-leaders of God’s people priests must ask the people how they want to be served today when civil authorities still “lord it over their people ... and flaunt their authority over them,” imposing their incompetent and corrupt practices on them.
The laity, therefore, should have been represented in the meeting not so much for their meager knowledge of eternal truths as for their existential interpretation of present day social reality.
One moral revolution the Catholic clergy should lead is the transformation of the authoritarian leadership of civil officials by modeling the servant leadership that Christ instructed them to follow. We will know, therefore, that such a moral revolution has started only when the clergy stops lording it over the faithful and starts asking the hungry, the sick, the trafficked, the prisoner, etc. how they need to be served.
If no lay person attended the meeting, the resulting code of conduct runs the danger of being picked from proverbial cloud nine. I hope I heard wrong and lay persons were at the meeting.