Church Leadership and
the Woodstock Methodology

By James L. Connor, S.J.

The Woodstock Theological Center has developed a unique approach to contemporary issues based on the theological method of Bernard Lonergan, S.J., and the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. The theology of Bernard Lonergan has its own terminology and approach which makes it difficult for the uninitiated to grasp. James L. Connor, director of the Woodstock Theological Center, has led the effort to make Lonergan and Ignatius more easily understood by non-scholars. Here is his explanation of how the Ignatius-Lonergan methodology would be applied to a program in church leadership that Woodstock is developing.

Question: Can you make Lonergan a little clearer? How, exactly, is the Ignatius-Lonergan method going to help people be better Church leaders?

1. Vatican II opened the windows to the "modern world" (which began centuries before).

2. The "modern world" is a kind of human consciousness that is personalistic and relational, historical, evolutionary, autonomously free and self-responsible, rooted in reason, individualistic, rational, democratic, process, etc., while the earlier consciousness which is called "classicist" prizes stability, absolutes, essences, natures, certainty, fixity, hierarchical structure, etc. The former is a like a motion picture, the latter a snapshot.

3. Classicism is not only a culture, but is considered by classicists to be the only possible genuine and authentic culture. In ancient days in Greece and, later, Rome those living this culture were civilized; the rest were children or barbarians. Modern consciousness realizes that there are many genuine cultures according to the customs, mores, values, meanings, languages, myths and religions of different communities (Japanese, Germans, Hutus or Tutsis, etc.)

4. The Church of pre-Vatican II was in the classicist mode of consciousness and culture. Modern consciousness and culture had been developing, of course, for centuries, but the Church kept it locked outside its doors and windows, regarding it as extremely dangerous to faith and orthodoxy, if not outright heretical. Copernicus and Galileo, Descartes and Kant were listed as our "adversaries" in Catholic seminary courses.

5. While future Church leaders were being trained in the classicist mode of consciousness and culture (enshrined in scholastic philosophy and theology), their lay peers were living their daily lives in the cultures of modernity (recall the contrasting features in #2 above). To thoughtful lay persons the Church began to look anachronistic and irrelevant. Church teaching didn't seem to be addressing the concrete issues they were facing. Or, at least, they were not addressing them in a way that shed satisfying and encouraging light, explanation, and meaning on "real life" situations. Seminarians and priests also began to have those same feelings, but they tended to smother them out of a sense of loyalty to the Church and official Church teaching.

6. It was the genius and holiness of Pope John XXIII that he opened the windows of the Church to the breezes of modernity. He wanted the Church to be in the modern world -- the English name of its most important document, Gaudium et Spes. Not only did Vatican II address the issues of the modern world, it did so in large part from a "modern world" mindset, vocabulary, and culture. For instance, it spoke of the Church not as a "perfect society" (scholastic language) but as the "People of God," a "Covenanted community." This language is not only biblical, but personalist, historical, and social. It stressed the dignity of the human person and the primacy of individual conscience. It called for collegiality and participation at every level of Church life. And so on. Not only did the Church enter into the modern world at Vatican II, the modern world entered into the Church.

7. Some Catholics and Church leaders (remember Archbishop Lefebvre?) condemned Vatican II as a disastrous mistake, if not heretical, and started to resist it at every turn (liturgical, ecclesial, pastoral, etc.). Others embraced it out of obedience and loyalty and did their best to adapt themselves and change their behavior. Still others were delighted with it and pushed it ahead as quickly as possible on every front. Among the latter, some were thoughtful and reflective, others thoughtless and irresponsible. They took Vatican II as authorization for adolescent rebellion. This in turn invited further condemnation of Vatican II by the classicists.

8. This conflict still goes on. If anything, the grounds of conflict have become deeper in the 1990s than they were in the 1960s at Vatican II. Now it is not simply a question of "Is this true or false?," it is a question of "Is anything true?" Can we affirm anything with objective certainty? And similarly on the moral plane, it is no longer simply a question of "Is this right or is it wrong?," but "Are there any common grounds for moral decisions at all?" -- or is it simply what you "feel" is right for you, and what I "feel" is right for me? We are threatened, in other words, with intellectual skepticism and moral relativism.

9. This skepticism and relativism is not simply in the world around us; it is a severe temptation within the Church itself. Church leaders are very concerned about it. The Pope is writing encyclicals to address it. Theologians take various views. Local pastors are often as confused as their congregations. Who can you turn to?

10. We have to really get down to basics in order to come to terms with these fundamental, very practical, questions. The deeper the crisis, the deeper we have to dig down to the roots of the crisis. To use an analogy: its not enough to study more about my WordPerfect program, I have to get right down to my operating system, i.e., to DOS. Or, it's not enough that I re-read the score of a Strauss waltz; I've got to get behind the notes to the theory of harmonic structure and pattern of chord progressions, if I am really to understand it and play it intelligently.

11. If a Church leader today is going to be able to understand and lead well in the modern Church in the modern world, he or she has to dig down into the dynamic operational structure of things like "community," "culture," "church," "faith," "doctrine," "morals," "organization," "leadership," "Gospel," "liturgy," and on and on. A more elaborate explanation of the old "snapshot" world of classicism simply will not do today. But in order to transpose the wonderful insights and values of the age-old tradition of the Church into a "new key" of modernity, we simply must understand and know how to "play" according to the dynamic, harmonic chord structure of today. But you can't make that transposition unless you get behind both classicism and modernity to understand the role and function of the human "operational structure" itself.

12. How, therefore, does the "human" (whether community or individual) "work?" That is the central question that Lonergan addresses. He calls it "method." And the deepest-level method he develops, he calls "transcendental" method, because it underlies all other methods (e.g., natural science, social science, humanities, theology, etc.). Lonergan is concerned to study the deepest-level operational structure or human method precisely because he wants to help the Church and Church leaders to live and serve as well as possible in the modern world.

13. As the starting point for understanding the operational structure of human "community," "church," "culture," modernity," and the rest, Lonergan says, "Start with yourself." You're human! You grow and develop. You have a dynamic operational structure or pattern or modus operandi (MO). How do you work? If you can find that out you might have a clue to how communities work, how culture works, how church works. In Method in Theology, Lonergan lays out for readers "what they can discover in themselves as the dynamic structure of their own cognitional and moral being." (p. xii)

14. Moreover, if you start with yourself and how you actually "work," you'll never have to take anybody's word for it. You're your own authority. If you "taste, and feel, and touch" your own working and come to understand it, you need not go any further to understand the human. That way your own experience of being human becomes the touchstone, the baseline, the plumb line, the criterion. And that knowledge will be so "real!" It will be constantly "alive" in you, and not just an abstract, dead concept on a page or in your head. You will always know what it is to be human because you are being human -- right then and there!!

15. OK, so how do we work? In order to help us learn, Lonergan leads us, in his books and articles, through a "praxis-reflection" process. He has us do "exercises," and then asks us to inquire of ourselves what we were doing, what was going on "inside" ourselves, what were the steps and movements? What were we thinking and feeling? Where did the thoughts and feelings come from? What got me started thinking? Did my thinking come to a conclusion or resolution? Did I learn anything in the process of thinking? Am I sure I learned something? How do I know I am sure? What is the difference between the thoughts I was thinking and the feelings I experienced, and how were they related to one another in the exercise I just did? Did my feelings make me think something, or did my thoughts make me feel something? Neither or both? Etc., etc., etc! And all the while we are jotting down what we are learning about ourselves acting: i.e., about the dynamic operational structure of being human..

16. We will come to notice that two things are always going on simultaneously when we humans are involved in knowing something or deciding to do something. Our attention is concentrated on the thing we are trying to know (e.g., the word for the crossword puzzle in front of us, or the face in the distance we are trying to recognize). Call it the object we are intending. But simultaneously we are conscious of ourselves as the see-er or the thinker or the decider. That doesn't mean I am thinking about myself as I look at the face in the distance. No, I am thinking about that face, and whose it is. But I am present to myself in a peculiarly (and wonderful) human way. And at a certain point I can advert to myself thinking or deciding. I can make my consciousness the object of my intending! And I can pay attention to what I am doing when I am thinking or deciding, sensing or feeling, or whatever it is I do. It is through "heightened consciousness" that I become aware of myself acting.

16. In a nutshell (and oversimplifying!), Lonergan invites us to recognize that there are four basic, unfolding, and interrelated operations that fit into a pattern that characterizes the human, namely, experience of data (hearing a screech in the night), the effort to understand it (e.g., is it a cat, a human, a car breaking?), the judgment after relating the hypotheses back to the evidence of data (e.g., it is a cat!!), and a decision, after discernment, about what to do about it (let the cat in for the night). Lonergan calls these four unfolding steps which are invariant in human experience "Transcendental Precepts:" Be attentive! (to the data), Be intelligent! (about explaining what the data mean), Be reasonable! (have sufficient reasons, adequate evidence, for the judgment of fact that you make), and Be responsible! (do the right thing about it). Lonergan helps us to elaborate in great detail and sophistication the source, the significance, the purposes, the implications and the ramifications of these four "bottom-line" operations. We are moved along the pathway of these four steps by the restlessness, thirst, and hunger at the very core of our human being. As Lonergan puts it, "the many levels of consciousness are just successive stages in the unfolding of a single thrust, the eros of the human spirit." (Method, page. 13)

17. Once we understand how we, individually, operate as human, we can transpose that dynamic operational structure into the basic, normative patterns of human community life. That transition is not too difficult because, as Lonergan helps us to discover and recognize, our individual "operations" are almost always "co-operations" with others. There is almost nothing we know or do that is independent of others in society. (P.S. You can imagine the rich implications for understanding and acting upon social justice and injustice!)

Community is not just an aggregate of individuals within a frontier, for that overlooks its formal constituent, which is common meaning. Such common meaning calls for a common field of experience [Be attentive!] and, when that is lacking, people get out of touch. It calls for common or complementary ways of understanding [Be intelligent!] and, when they are lacking, people begin to misunderstand, to distrust, to suspect, to fear, to resort to violence. It calls for common judgments [ Be reasonable!] and, when they are lacking, people reside in different worlds. It calls for common values, goals, policies [Be responsible!] and, when they are lacking, people operate at crosspurposes.  ( Lonergan, Method, p. 356-7)

18. Once we understand, through reflection on our praxis of knowing and deciding, how individual persons and human communities are constituted and behave, then we can bring this understanding to an appreciation of the community which is "Church in the modern world." And on that basis Church leaders can provide leadership with greater clarity, vision, confidence, joy, and enthusiasm. They will understand what kind or style of leadership is appropriate in the modern Church, how we should go about planning, how management and administration should be carried on, and how Church teaching can be understood, preached, and explained with relevance and persuasiveness.

19. This insight into the dynamic structure of human development not only assists the leader in an understanding of Church and its mission (Goal #1 of this program), and not only in an appreciation of the proper functions and responsibilities of contemporary Church leadership (Goal #2), but also provides the Church leader with a personal spirituality: a life of prayer and reflection which corresponds to, supports, nourishes and integrates his or her leadership role in the Church in the modern world (Goal #3). Even as the leader leads the Church community in attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility for its life of faith, community, witness and service, so too the leader exercises him or herself in these very same operations. Here is where the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are especially useful. They put into prayer forms for us the exercises or operational dynamics of authentic humanity that Lonergan helps us to discover in our experience and to be responsible for in our daily decisions. We shouldn't be surprised at the coincidence of Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises with Lonergan's "transcendental method." Lonergan is simply helping us discover what is profoundly true and good in us humans, and how thoroughly this humanity of ours is "of God": our beginning and end, alpha and omega, source and destiny. Moreover, as a Jesuit, Lonergan made the Spiritual Exercises annually and was saturated with their spirit.

20. Woodstock's challenge in our "Church Leadership Program" will be to lead the participants sensitively and accurately through exercises which will help them get in touch with their own experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding to do. Then we will have to ask them to reflect on what was going on in them as they did this -- both their ideas and feelings. And then lead them to see what that means for them and for the Church. So, it is an experiential pedagogy we will use, for all the reasons you can understand from the above. People change by getting new insights, new imagination or imaging of things, and by doing things differently in practice. Learning practical skills requires practice, repeated exercises are essential to practicing. So, the Woodstock team needs to design, in specific detail, the proper pedagogy for this program. It is a big job.

20. Appended are a few citations about Church from the final chapter of Lonergan's Method in Theology. They give a taste for the way in which one's discovery of the operational dynamic or structure of human, conscious intentionality are constitutive of Church today.

Readings from Lonergan on the Church

Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, "Chapter 14: Communications," (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994), pp. 356-357, 361-364.

1. Meaning and Ontology

In our third chapter we distinguished four functions of meaning: it is cognitive, constitutive, communicative, effective.

Such functions have their ontological aspect. In so far as meaning is cognitive, what is meant is real. In so far as it is constitutive, it constitutes part of the reality of the one that means: his horizon, his assimilative powers, his knowledge, his values, his character. In so far as it is communicative, it induces in the hearer some share in the cognitive, constitutive, or effective meaning of the speaker. In so far as it is effective, it persuades or commands others or it directs man's control over nature....

2. Common Meaning and Ontology

Community is not just an aggregate of individuals within a frontier, for that overlooks its formal constituent, which is common meaning. Such common meaning calls for a common field of experience and, when that is lacking, people get out of touch. It calls for common or complementary ways of understanding and, when they are lacking, people begin to misunderstand, to distrust, to suspect, to fear, to resort to violence. It calls for common judgments and, when they are lacking, people reside in different worlds. It calls for common values, goals, policies and, when they are lacking, people operate at crosspurposes.

Such common meaning is doubly constitutive. In each individual it is constitutive of the individual as a member of the community. In the group of individuals it is constitutive of the community.

The genesis of common meaning is an ongoing process of communication, of people coming to share the same cognitive, constitutive, and effective meanings. On the elementary level this process has been described as arising between the self and the other when, on the basis of already existing intersubjectivity, the self makes a gesture, the other makes an interpretative response, and the self discovers in the response the effective meaning of his gesture. So from intersubjectivity through gesture and interpretation there arises common understanding. On that spontaneous basis there can be built a common language, the transmission of acquired knowledge and of social patterns through education, the diffusion of information, and the common will to community that seeks to replace misunderstanding with mutual comprehension and to change occasions of disagreement into occasions of non­agreement and eventually of agreement.

As common meaning constitutes community, so divergent meaning divides it. Such division may amount to no more than a diversity of culture and the stratification of individuals into classes of higher and lower competence. The serious division is the one that arises from the presence and absence of intellectual, moral, or religious conversion. For a man is his true self inasmuch as he is self­transcending. Conversion is the way to self­transcendence. Inversely, man is alienated from his true self inasmuch as he refuses self­transcendence, and the basic form of ideology is the self­justification of alienated man. Needless to say, the unconverted and especially those that deliberately refused conversion will want to find some other root for alienation and ideology. Indeed, they will want to suggest, directly or indirectly, that self­transcendence is a case or the case of alienation and that ideology is at root the attempt to justify self­transcendence….

4. The Christian Church and its Contemporary Situation

The Christian church is the community that results from the outer communication of Christ's message and from the inner gift of God's love. Since God can be counted on to bestow his grace, practical theology is concerned with the effective communication of Christ's message.

The message announces what Christians are to believe, what they are to become, what they are to do. Its meaning, then, is at once cognitive, constitutive, effective. It is cognitive inasmuch as the message tells what is to be believed. It is constitutive inasmuch as it crystallizes the hidden inner gift of love into overt Christian fellowship. It is effective inasmuch as it directs Christian service to human society to bring about the kingdom of God.

To communicate the Christian message is to lead another to share in one's cognitive, constitutive, effective meaning. Those, then, that would communicate the cognitive meaning of the message, first of all, must know it. At their service, then, are the seven previous functional specialties. Next, those that would communicate the constitutive meaning of the Christian message, first of all, must live it. For without living the Christian message one does not possess its constitutive meaning; and one cannot lead another to share what one oneself does not possess. Finally, those that communicate the effective meaning of the Christian message, must practice it. For actions speak louder than words, while preaching what one does not practice recalls sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.

The Christian message is to be communicated to all nations. Such communication presupposes that preachers and teachers enlarge their horizons to include an accurate and intimate understanding of the culture and the language of the people they address. They must grasp the virtual resources of that culture and that language, and they must use those virtual resources creatively so that the Christian message becomes, not disruptive of the culture, not an alien patch superimposed upon it, but a fine of development within the culture.

Here the basic distinction is between preaching the gospel and, on the other hand, preaching the gospel as it has been developed within one's own culture. In so far as one preaches the gospel as it has been developed within one's own culture, one is preaching not only the gospel but also one's own culture. In so far as one is preaching one's own culture, one is asking others not only to accept the gospel but also renounce their own culture and accept one's own.

Now a classicist would feel it was perfectly legitimate for him to impose his culture on others. For he conceives culture normatively, and he conceives his own to be the norm. Accordingly, for him to preach both the gospel and his own culture, is for him to confer the double benefit of both the true religion and the true culture. In contrast, the pluralist acknowledges a multiplicity of cultural traditions. In any tradition he envisages the possibility of diverse differentiations of consciousness. But he does not consider it his task either to promote the differentiation of consciousness or to ask people to renounce their own culture. Rather he would proceed from within their culture and he would seek ways and means for making it into a vehicle for communicating the Christian message.

Through communication there is constituted community and, conversely, community constitutes and perfects itself through communication. Accordingly, the Christian church is a process of self­constitution, a Selbstvollzug. While there still is in use the medieval meaning of the term, society, so that the church may be named a society, still the modern meaning, generated by empirical social studies, leads one to speak of the church as a process of self­constitution occurring within worldwide human society. The substance of that process is the Christian message conjoined with the inner gift of God's love and resulting in Christian witness, Christian fellowship, and Christian service to mankind.

Further, the church is a structured process. As does human society, it trains personnel. It distinguishes roles and assigns to them tasks. It has developed already understood and accepted modes of cooperation. It promotes a good of order in which Christian needs are met regularly, sufficiently, efficiently. It facilitates the spiritual and cultural development of its members. It invites them to transform by Christian charity their personal and group relations. It rejoices in the terminal values that flow from their lives.

The church is an out­going process. It exists not just for itself but for mankind. Its aim is the realization of the kingdom of God not only within its own organization but in the whole of human society and not only in the after life but also in this life.

The church is a redemptive process. The Christian message, incarnate in Christ scourged and crucified, dead and risen, tells not only of God's love but also of man's sin. Sin is alienation from man's authentic being, which is self­transcendence, and sin justifies itself by ideology. As alienation and ideology are destructive of community, so the self­sacrificing love that is Christian charity reconciles alienated man to his true being, and undoes the mischief initiated by alienation and consolidated by ideology.

This redemptive process has to be exercised in the church and in human society generally. It will regard the church as a whole and, again, each of its parts. Similarly, it will regard human society as a whole and, again, its many parts. In each case ends have to be selected and priorities determined. Resources have to be surveyed and, when they are inadequate, plans for their increase have to be made. Conditions need to be investigated under which the resources will be deployed for the attainment of the ends. Plans have to be drawn up for the optimal deployment of resources under the existing conditions for the attainment of ends. Finally, the several plans in the several areas and in the church as a whole have to be coordinated….

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