Robert van Mourik
Co-dependency occurs when one places an excessive reliance on another at the expense of their own mature development. For example, some Christians rely on being told by their church what to think. The difficulty with co-dependent relationships is that they are not apparent. In the context of church and religion, co-dependent relationships can be unwittingly accepted as normal, but this is unhealthy.
Co-dependency exists and has been fostered by the church. It denies the inherent wisdom each of us has and impacts our spiritual growth. If we are to develop an enriched adult faith, we need to move away from co-dependency to personal responsibility for our faith development. Yet we may be unaware that we might be in a co-dependent relationship.
Ilia Delio describes a co-dependent relationship with God as a co-dependency that is problematic. We have imagined and created a powerful divine Being, whose name is “God,” who lives in heaven and watches over us. We built churches and composed prayers to a God who reigns almighty, from above, a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, a God who protects the faithful and judges the fallen. The quicker we can dispel this mythic God, the greater the chance of discovering the real God.
Diarmuid O’Murchu describes adult faith as coming of age. He writes that the inherited distinction between the humanity and divinity of Jesus is overloaded with cultural and ideological baggage, no longer capable of delivering this maturity. If we are to develop an adult faith, we must understand church history and how these co-dependent relationships have evolved.
In the early years there were many Christianities e.g., wisdom, healing and matriarchal. This diversity of thought was lost in the drive to organisational control, codification as canon and the elimination of heresies. Unity and diversity lost out in the drive to uniformity.
Nevertheless, historical research highlights the fact that a spirituality of paradise on earth, rather than a life hereafter, prevailed right into the eleventh century. An empowering faith in the Risen Christ, rather than a devotion of atonement, seems to have dominated the first Christian millennium. This complex foundational picture marked a spiritual coming of age which subsequent Christian history has poorly understood.
The reformation by Protestant churches provoked a defensive institutional response, a counter-reformation. Clerical power became a major issue at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) which put in place a robust structure to safeguard the one and only truth, which the Catholic Church alone could deliver. To that end it created a superior person in charge, best described by four key words - Male, White, Celibate, Cleric - a clerical elite.
These clerics enforced their power chiefly by perpetuating a form of devotionalism that kept people feeling unworthy, obedient, and passive. Almost inevitably, people began to internalise a tyrannical, demanding God that could never be satisfied, a God that would never give the graces necessary for salvation unless we bombarded him day and night. This required repetitive prayers, rituals, exaggerated use of statues and holy pictures, and frequent attendance at church services. In this way, people were kept in perpetual childish immaturity, embracing a faith with little or no sense of adult growth and development.
The early Christians, like Jesus, were radically counter-cultural and not what the church became. Its early impetus was lost to alignment with state power and the growth of church bureaucracies. These structures sought their own power, creating divisions and excluding the other - such as women and minorities - contrary to the very message Jesus sought to promote, namely an inclusive society embracing mercy, compassion, and justice.
It can be argued that the church has trained people to be co-dependent, reflected in a model of church known as “pay, pray and obey” and congregations whose own wisdom is diminished. The growth of clericalism and questionable doctrines such as original sin and penitential atonement theory, for example, have created for clergy a business of sin management, as described by Richard Rohr. It has also resulted in many living their lives in fear of eternal damnation, in part due to a failure to “obey the rules”.
A maturing adult faith implies spiritual growth just as there are differing stages of physical or emotional development. Richard Rohr describes the early stages as having relative importance as scaffolding, but they are not the building itself. We don’t need to continue protecting the scaffolding once it’s served its purpose. But we still honour and respect it. In the first half of life, our task is to build a container. Eventually we realise that life isn’t primarily about the container but the contents. As we grow through the stages, we transcend early stages and include them in our expanding worldview.
The Instrumentum Laboris, issued by the Vatican in June 2023, sets out an operating model for a synodal church, potentially the most significant initiative by the church since Vatican II. It represents entirely new ways of thinking about how things are done throughout all levels of the church from its cardinals through to parishes. It uses language entirely removed from the development of the church after the Council of Trent. Implementing this process could result in an entirely new church in which the non-ordained laity can have an important role. It would give new meaning to the sense of the faithful.
The Christian story can be reframed and aligned with Jesus’s vision for the kingdom of God, a society offering mercy, compassion and justice for all and the fullest realisation of human potential. Pursuing this vision is the mission of the church. Our growth in knowledge of many fields, such as psychology and quantum physics, helps us conceive new ways in which we can imagine “God” at work. This knowledge and our growth spiritually invite us to reconsider our views on our responsibility for the environment, distribution of wealth, the merits of unbridled capitalism and other beliefs we now take for granted.
It is our responsibility, we who are not clerics, to step up and be proactive, to pursue our own spiritual growth and contribute to the church’s mission.
November 2023
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