Another way of being the Church

Leonardo Boff

31/07/2010

Opinión

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Those who read my last article –Where is the Real Crisis of the Church– must have been disheartened. There I analyzed the power structure of the Church, centralized, pyramidal, absolutist and monarchical. This type of power favors neither the evangelical ideals of equality and fraternity, nor the participation of the faithful. It actually closes the doors on participation and love. That is because this type of power, by its nature, needs to be strong and cold. Yet this model of Church-power considers itself "The" Church. The Church.Period. What makes it even worse is that this is just her way of animation and direction, since it turned out historically that "The Church" is less than 0.1% of all the faithful. As Christ willed, and as we have shown, "The Church" is not the whole Church, but only a miniscule part of it.

The Church-community as a religious phenomenon and a movement of Jesus is much more than the institution. The Church-community finds other ways of organizing, much closer to the dream of her Founder and His early followers. The Brazilian bishops, in their annual gathering, celebrated in Brazilia from January the 4th to the 13th of this year, wisely confessed: «only a Church with 'different forms' of living the same faith will be capable of significantly dialoguing with contemporary society.» With that statement the bishops destroyed the claim that there is only one way of being: the way of the Tradition of power. Undeniably, there are many other ways: that of the Liberation Church, of the Charismatic, of the religious men and women, the way of the Catholic Action, even the way of the Opus Dei, of the Communion and Liberation and of the New Song, to mention only the better known.

But there is a very special and promising form, born in the 1950s in Brazil, which has acquired world relevance, because it has been assimilated in many countries: the Comunidades Eclesiales de Bases, CEBs, (Ecclesiastical Base Communities.) The Bishops dedicated to them the «Message to the People of God on the CEBs.» Curiously, the Ecclesiastical Base Communities arose at the moment when a new historical consciousness had sprouted in Brazil. In society: the popular desire for more political participation, and in the Church: the ecclesiastic desire, also for more participation and ecclesiastic co-responsibility. The CEBs constitute another mode of being for the Church, whose principal, if not exclusive, subject is the poor. Its style is communitary, participative, imbedded in the local culture. The services are revolving and the election, democratic. They continuously articulate faith and life, are active in the religious arena, creating new services and rites, and active also in socio-political life, in the unions, the social movements such as the Movimiento de los Trabajadores sin Tierra, MST, (Movement of the Landless Workers) or the popular political parties.

We do not know exactly how many are they, but it is calculated that some one hundred thousand base communities exist in Brazil, involving several million Christians. The bishops see their highly innovative and non-systemic value. The market eliminated cooperative and solidarian relationships, while in the CEBs, relationships are founded on gratuity, on the logic of offering-receiving-retribution. The CEBs have taken up the ecological cause, and because of that they are also known as CEBs=comunidades ecológicas de base, Ecological Base Communities. The CEBs have developed a strong spirituality of caring for life and Mother Earth. The result of all this has been more respect, veneration and cooperation with everything that exists and is alive. The CEBs show how the sacred memory of Jesus can incorporate another social configuration, centered in communion, in fraternal love and in the happiness of the testimony of the victory of life against oppression. That is the existential meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, as an insurrection against the present world.

Humbly, the bishops declare that the CEBs help the Church to be more comprometida, committed to life and to the suffering of the poor. Even more, the bishops implore the whole Church, calling her to conversion, to the commitment for the transformation of the world into a world of brothers and sisters.

This way of being the Church can serve as a model for incorporation into contemporary, urban and globalized culture. If it were taken as the inspiration for the project of Pope Benedict XVI to «re-conquer» Europe, it surely would have some success. One would be able to see communities of Christian, intellectuals, laborers, women, youth, living their faith in response to the challenges of their existential situations. They would not pretend to have a monopoly on the true path, but would associate themselves with everyone who seriously seeks a new religious language and a new horizon of hope for humanity.

- Leonardo Boff, Theologian and Earthcharter Commission

Free translation from the Spanish sent by Melina Alfaro, done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/143154