Book Review:
Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads

reviewed by Fred Miller, Ottawa, ON

Power and Peril: The Catholic Church at the Crossroads,  by Michael Higgins and Douglas Letson. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002. 382 pp. $39.95.

The authors of this book, one (Higgins) the president, but both professors at St. Jerome University at the University of Waterloo, are eminently qualified to write about the Church. Together they have collaborated on five books  on Church subjects. Power and Peril ranges widely over Church life in many countries in areas of education, health care, the Church's teaching on sex and marriage, and the "curse" of clericalism as well as on the signs of hope as evidenced in the hunger for authentic spirituality.
Higgins and Letson have taken on an immense task in summarizing the state of the Church in the world in the areas of education and health care, areas in which the  Church has had a large historical presence, but whose presence in these areas has been greatly eroded. More and more, secular governments are assuming responsibility for the tasks historically embraced by religious orders of men and women. This situation has many implications, and poses challenges for the Church today.
The part of the book that held particular interest for me is the chapter entitled "The Curse of Clericalism". It quotes at some length a married priest, theologian, and historian at the University of Leeds, Adrian Hastings,  who says of the situation in his own diocese: "We are sitting on top of a bomb which is just exploding because the priests are all old, or there are very few young ones and there is no way of coping with the ordinary needs of a fairly static diocese where quite a few people actually go to church. There is a whole difference between the optimism of the Church thirty years ago and the complete depression which has now settled in with almost everyone....(T)he bishops are too frightened to speak out." This analysis can be applied to many countries outside the United Kingdom.
On the subject of women's ordination the authors write: "Indeed, when the Pope declares 'definitively' with respect to the question of women's ordination, he is closing one avenue  for increased cooperation, and by insisting that there is no longer anything to talk about with respect to this subject, he also alienates countless others who have valued the Church as an institution where faith and reason are in dialogue one with the other and who are eager to do their part. But if by fiat dialogue is defined as dissent, then one has to wonder what kind of Church defines the  human being as animale rationale, and refuses its members the right to reason, or what kind of Church defines language as a property of the human person and denies its members the right to speak. Or defines human dignity as the capacity to follow one's conscience where properly informed reason leads, but denies its members the right to make reasoned choices. In such a situation, demoralization or (perhaps more likely) defection, lack of interest, or disregard may well become widespread." This pungent paragraph neatly sums up the burden of the book and the problem with the government of the Church.
In spite of the frustration evidenced in the above quotations I had the feeling that even though John Paul II is stuck in a mindset that bespeaks a particular culture and time, intelligent voices are making themselves heard in the Church if not in the Vatican. This book teems with the voices of bishops bent on reform but who are systematically shut down when they attend Synods of Bishops. Canadian examples of this are Jean-Guy Hamelin, acting in his capacity as President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, George B. Flahiff, the Cardinal Archbishop of Winnipeg, Robert Lebel, Bishop of Valleyfield, and Louis-Albert Vachon, Archbishop of Quebec, among others, all of whom made strong interventions in Rome on behalf of women in the Church and in the priesthood. The authors comment, "Brave words...but falling mostly on deaf or defiant ears."
Power and Peril is an exciting tour de force, a voice of the faithful that shows the Church is far from monolithic, and that faithful, intelligent voices will not be stilled. It gives hope and sets us free to live in the Church we have known and loved, faithful to the one who came to set us all free.