Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed: A Review
Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed: By Adam A. J. DeVille
The word “controversial” is overused. Often, the term is used for shock-jocks of writing, who create controversy simply by shouting something that sounds edgy. Then there is the type of controversial work that looks at the conventional wisdom of the day, analyzes the evidence, and asks “why on earth would anyone believe this, if you weren’t indoctrinated into believing it?” For the latter type of work, enter Dr. DeVille’s “Everything Hidden Shall be Revealed”, a work designed to provoke anger from Catholics but in drawing that anger out, asking us questions that are actually pretty important. That which is hidden might involve us, not the Bishops.
For DeVille, this moment of possible revelation came about in November of 2018, at the meeting of the United States Episcopal Conference to discuss what reforms will be put in place to deal with a crisis that is very quickly engulfing the American Church and the Church worldwide. In that meeting, even modest reforms were cancelled at the last second because the Pope said that a global response was needed, after he and his top allies for months had been saying this was just a Western problem. The US Bishops also defeated the proposal of Bishop Earl Boyea for greater transparency about the criminality of the now dismissed Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. It was a humiliating display of feckless bishops in service of a feckless autocrat, and within a month of the meeting, diocese after diocese found itself being investigated by state and federal governments. It was almost as if the state was waiting to see if the Bishops had the courage to fix their own problems, and once the pope made clear they weren’t allowed, they took matters into their own hands.
This moment is clearly important for DeVille, as he references it four times in 120 pages. Yet I believe it wasn’t important for what it told us about the pope and bishops (the evidence they were feckless at best in combating abuse, complicit in evil at worst was already in abundance), but what it reveals about the office of the laics. The laics are a name for what we could commonly call the laity, or lay faithful. DeVille objects to this name because it implies that the laity are just something average, nothing to get excited about. DeVille reminds us that in baptism, we are made priest, prophet, and most importantly King. By virtue of our baptism, we have a role to play in the governance of the Church, and we must reclaim that role, especially in the Latin Church.
DeVille does not hide his biases. A Ukrainian Greek Catholic, he does not apologize for saying that the Roman Rite needs to look east when incorporating their own solutions. Yet while an outsider, he is still a part of the Roman tradition, given his role as a professor at a Roman Catholic university. This allows him to take some conventional arguments, and incorporate the fullness of the Roman tradition in making them, in ways that may appeal to traditionalists, progressives, and everyone in between.
Did you know that laity played a crucial role in helping to implement the Council of Trent, via diocesan synods that almost certainly included influential laics? Did you know the laics have at times had a role in electing the pope, and some of those popes went on to do some pretty great things? You will when you read this book. He wants us to remember that the laics assuming key responsibilities of governance (but not of every kind) is not betraying the tradition of the Roman Rite with its high view of the Bishop of Rome and monarchical episcopate, it is recovering the best of that tradition.
The first step to recovering those traditions is to realize that in many cases, we have replaced them with something else. This is the second contribution of DeVille’s book that is invaluable. He does not sugar coat the problem: the Roman Rite (and the Church as a whole) has adapted an assessment of bishops and especially popes that is unwarranted in tradition, and worse, helps perpetuate the continual crises the Church is rocked with. When we transform the pope into a rock star (with our embarrassing pilgrimages to hear him speak what are honestly simple homilies, or our hanging on to his every word as if it is earth shattering news in the latest papal plane interview), we expect the pope to have an idea on everything. We then expect his ideas to be the best on everything. After awhile, we expect only him to have an idea on how to solve whatever crisis besets us. Then we reach the apex of this thought: we are only in a crisis if he tells us we are in a crisis. Hence the embarrassing shift of so many who reacted to the news of McCarrick with “what, me worry” to “this crisis required sweeping and courageous action, which Pope Francis provided in Vos Estis.” In painstaking detail he outlines the root of this problem, what he believes is a flawed conception of fatherhood in the minds of contemporary Catholicism. Only by understanding these problems can we properly put them to pasture.
Once we’ve gotten past these problems, the laics can begin to resume their eminently traditional and eminently Roman role in assisting the Church in governance. It is here that we Catholics run into a lot of problems. Any time it is suggested the laics engage in helping to govern the Church, we instantly think of pure unadulterated democracy over every aspect of the faith. We think of heretics electing fellow heretics as priests or bishops to prevent any reform from actually happening. While that fear is overblown (really, has the entirely centralized approach Rome currently advocates fixed anything?), nobody is actually advocating pure democratic rule.
While analogies to earthly systems are always inexact, the Church is monarchical in its rule. Yet the big error in modern society is to believe that monarchical translates to aboslutism or personal rule, where the Church is governed entirely by the person of the Roman Pontiff, and only by his will. As John Allen once stated, in the Church led by Pope Francis, there is no Vatican governing the Church, there is only Francis. That’s not a monarchy, that’s despotism. Monarchies can and have relied on various forms of power sharing throughout the centuries, and rather than being the one who constantly wields the power, the monarch is the power that backs up those various arrangements. While not mentioned by DeVille, of particular help for me in understanding this point was the historian Anthony Kaldellis, whose work The Byzantine Republic showed how the so-called “Byzantine Empire”, far from some absolute theocracy, was actually a complex system of governance of checks and balances, well aware of the dangers of one man having too much power, even if that man be the Basileus, Emperor by the Grace of Christ.
After reading Dr. Deville’s book, a similar re-conceptualizing of monarchy is required in the minds of Catholics today. There is no reason the Pope cannot wield absolute power on matters requiring a final appeal or sacramental jurisdiction, yet on other matters defer to regional and diocesan synods, with experts from the laics playing a prominent role. What holds for the Pope holds for the bishop: there is no theological reason that parishes cannot be involved in the selection of their pastor, leaving the ultimate choice to the bishop, and the priest requiring the bishop for legitimacy. Finally, we come down to the priestly level: there is no reason the laics cannot involve themselves in even greater manner in the running of a parish, giving the priest the right to set his agenda, but also requiring the priest to work in conjunction with the parish and its money, not in opposition to it. At every level, the laics can be included. Their involvement will improve transparency, and most importantly help provide the moral legitimacy the Church sorely lacks. (This is opposed to judicial legitimacy, which she received from Christ. Moral legitimacy is those actions being accepted by the wider populace.)
He concludes his book with asking the Church to reconsider mandatory celibacy. In DeVille’s mind, this would be beneficial, but not for the reasons one normally thinks. Instead, the option of ordaining proven men (men with children grown up and past a certain age and stature in life) will help the shepherd smell more like the sheep. Far too many times in the Church bishops and priests have acted with utter disregard towards those they purport to rule over. Maybe they do so because they live a life in which they are utterly foreign. He is well aware this is not a major problem, and its also a problem in which the fix might be more disruptive than the problem. For what its worth, many of the benefits he thinks removing mandatory celibacy would bring can be brought about other ways. Eliminate most staff serving the bishop, or even the priest. No cleric needs a cook. Almost no bishop requires a chauffeur. They do not require mansions. These are perks. To the extent they were ever justified, how can one say with a straight face the current crop of leaders deserve these perks? Strip these perks from clerics, force them to live a life that is somewhat, I don’t know, normal.
These changes are sweeping, and DeVille does not hide that. They would require changes in canon law. They also are not a panacea. They are not going to fix the Church with ONE SIMPLE TRICK. Instead, its a challenge for the laics to reclaim what was once theirs, and an appeal to priests, bishops, and indeed Rome itself that the best chance for getting out of this mess is when every baptized individual has a role to play.
