Without doubt one of the major accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council was its “Declaration on Religious Freedom.” Its acknowledgement of the priority of conscience in religious matters was centuries late in coming, and meant the overturning of an entrenched defensive mentality epitomized by the Syllabus of Errors and the Oath against Modernism. It was a crucial step in the official church’s spiritual opening to the modern world.

            In the years since the council’s declaration, many people have availed themselves of their religious freedom to move away from the institution of the church. Obviously, we must not conclude: “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” -- alienated people in Western society, especially the young, did not need the church’s permission to act on their disillusionment with many of the teachings, attitudes, and actions of the church’s hierarchy and members.
But one might wonder: in the light of Vatican II, do Roman Catholics see the exercise of religious freedom as a problem -- or as a positive value, even when it results in a decline in religious practice? I think the answer will depend largely on whether we regard the church primarily as an institution whose success can be measured by numbers and prosperity, or as a communion of people committed to service of the world.

Pope Francis has frequently inveighed against “institutionalism” in the church and against the related error of using faith as an ideology. But the temptation to  institutionalism is a deep-seated one, and once adopted its habits are hard to break. Historian Arnold Toynbee commented:

In the Roman Catholic church, not only is the institution considered sacred, but the offices within it are traditionally held to be divinely founded. Bishops are thought of as “successors to the Apostles.” At the same time, bishops’ actual function is largely organizational, calling for financial and managerial skills that are more “worldly” than pastoral. Bishops are in fact executives of a large corporation. The same can apply, to a lesser extent, on the level of parish clergy.

This in itself poses difficulties. A church that is separated from secular society can be prone to a “worldliness” of a different kind from that of the Renaissance Popes and bishops. Pope Francis spoke of this phenomenon in his letter to the bishops of Latin America shortly after his election: “May the Lord deliver us,” he wrote, “from staining our episcopacy with the gilded trumpery of worldliness, money, and ‘marketplace clericalism.’” In the same letter he warned against a self-centeredness of the church that leads to “spiritual worldliness” and “refined clericalism.”

“Spiritual worldliness”! An apt phrase. When it becomes self-centered, the church implicitly adopts the standards of “the world,” even as it pretends to have an “otherworldly” justification.

We are happily far from the days when bishoprics were prizes awarded by kings and princes. But the naming of bishops throughout the world by an office of the Roman Curia also has its difficulties. It can lead to valuing loyalty to the “corporate culture” above intelligence, initiative, and vision. The Pope’s continual emphasis on restoring to the church a sense of “mission” to those on the peripheries has wide implications in this regard. Is the church – not merely the organization, but above all the people -- up to the challenge or recognizing that the church does not exist for itself, but for the service of others?