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Chairman of the Board. Not even the most far-out Catholic radical favors replacing the Pope with, say, a committee of theologians. On the other hand, there is widespread feeling in the church that the office of the papacy must be stripped of most of its monarchic pretensions and its right to govern all aspects of the church's life. Thomas Schick, 28, of Cincinnati, an ex-seminarian turned journalist, suggests that the Pope in the future should be regarded as a kind of board chairman—a primus inter pares who would be a symbol of faith rather in the manner of an Eastern Orthodox patriarch.
"Recent Popes have acted as if they were entitled to behave in an autocratic manner," says Leslie Dewart. "But it is an ancient tradition that the faith is the faith of a community." In his view, it is impossible today for the hierarchy to order what people should believe: "You can't teach people by telling them what's true." Callahan argues that the pronouncements of church authority do not exist outside and apart from the community. They are binding only insofar as the community accepts them as binding." He adds that "it used to be that if the authority said it was true, then it was true. It is legitimate to say today: 'The authority has spoken. Now is it true?' " In the church of the future, as envisioned by many reformers, authority would speak out only in consultation with all the faithful and only to articulate a dogmatic stance that was a felt need of the universal church.
Toying with Heresy. By issuing an encyclical that is simply not acceptable to a large segment of the Catholic community, Pope Paul has inadvertently raised the question of papal authority for open debate. He has done so, warns one Roman observer, at a time when the church was already suffering from an unhealthy polarization of its progressive and conservative wings. And there is a danger that both sides are overreacting to the crisis. Already, many Dutch Catholic thinkers are suggesting that their national church might have to become as autonomous as Anglicanism in order to preserve its soul. A creative renewal movement within the church is not likely to be encouraged by Roman efforts to silence dissident theologians like Dominican Father Edward Schillebeeckx (TIME, Oct. 4).
Perhaps because it involves so personal a question as birth control, the present dissension in the church has a disturbingly visceral quality. The Pope has been criticized in abusive bumper-sticker slogans, and Bishop Donohoe correctly notes that some comments on Humanae Vitae were expressed in a tone of dogmatic certainty that would have been too majestic for even an ex cathedra decree. "They seem to have infallibly decreed," he says, "that their views will not be put aside." Millions of Catholics, who never practiced birth control during their lives, would have found it hard to accept an encyclical decreeing that contraception was no longer a sin. For some, birth control is a symbol of the inerrancy of the church. If previous Popes have been wrong on this question, they could have been wrong on everything else. And where would the church be then?
Nothing for Everything. Serious questions are raised by the Protestant-like diversity suggested for the church by some reformers. A certain