General Introduction

A man spent two or three years walking the roads of Galilee, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was at hand. He wore no priestly garment, served no temple, offered no sacrifice, and established no new law. He ate with those whom the religion of his time considered impure, declared the poor blessed, and set against the sanctity of the Temple the simplicity of a prayer addressed to a Father. Three centuries later, the institution that claimed his name possessed a hierarchical clergy, basilicas inherited from imperial power, a canon law in formation, a theology cast in the categories of Greek philosophy, and a bishop of Rome whose authority extended over a growing portion of Christendom. Between these two images, something happened. This report is devoted to the patient examination of that "something."

The distance between the Galilean preacher and the imperial Church is not a discovery. It is obvious to anyone who places the Gospels side by side with a handbook of ecclesiastical institutional history. But this distance lends itself to two opposing readings, and their confrontation structures the entire debate. For some, it represents a betrayal: the Church would have substituted the opposite of Jesus's message, trading the Kingdom for power, the freedom of children for the obedience of subjects. For others, it represents a legitimate development: the seed sown in Galilee necessarily had to give itself structures as it grew, just as every living thing gives itself a body. Between betrayal and organic growth, this report refuses to choose in advance. It seeks to establish, case by case, institution by institution, what belongs to one and what belongs to the other.

The Central Question

The question this report poses is simple to formulate and difficult to address: what, in the Catholic Church of today, is faithful to the message of Jesus of Nazareth, and what has departed from it?

Difficult, because it presupposes the resolution of two prior and formidable problems. The first: can one know the message of Jesus, fifteen or twenty centuries removed, through texts written by his disciples a generation after his death, in a language that was not his own? The second: assuming one can know it, by what right would one use it as a measure to judge what the Church has made of it? Can a living institution be required to resemble its origin, or is it in the very nature of a tradition to transform itself?

These two objections are serious, and we take them seriously. A great part of this report consists precisely in showing how one can, without naivety, respond to the first — modern historical exegesis allows one to reconstruct, with varying but real degrees of certainty, the broad outlines of Jesus's message within its Jewish context — and how one can, without arbitrariness, respond to the second — the Church itself recognizes itself as normatively bound to this message, and it is in its own name, not in the name of some external authority, that the question of fidelity can be raised.

This question was condensed by one man in 1902 into a formula that became famous. Alfred Loisy, a Catholic exegete whom Rome was about to excommunicate, wrote in L'Évangile et l'Église: "Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom, and it is the Church that came." The sentence is of calculated ambiguity. One can hear it as a bitter observation — we awaited the Kingdom of God, we received a human administration — or as a justification — the Church is the historical form the Kingdom took in time, its necessary extension rather than its contradiction. Loisy, who was responding to the Protestant critique of Adolf von Harnack, intended to defend the Church; but his formula, turned inside out, became the most effective weapon of his accusers. The entire tension of this report lies in the oscillation between these two readings. We will not resolve it by decree: we will work through it.

Three Levels of Reading

In order not to confuse what must remain distinct, this report operates on three explicitly separated levels. This is our principal methodological precaution, and it is important that the reader understand it before entering into the details, for it governs everything else.

The first level is historical. It poses a single question: what can one reasonably establish about the message and practice of Jesus? Here, we prohibit ourselves from any presupposition of faith as well as any presupposition of unbelief. We employ the ordinary tools of history — source criticism, analysis of traditions, comparison of testimonies, contextualization within Second Temple Judaism. This work never produces absolute certainty, and we say so frankly: it distinguishes what is solidly attested, what is probable, and what remains conjectural. When the sources are silent or contradictory, we note this rather than filling the void. Honesty at this level is the condition for everything that follows: a diagnosis of fidelity that rested on a Jesus fabricated for the purposes of the argument would be worthless.

The second level is that of trajectory. Once the point of departure has been reconstructed as far as possible, a new question arises: how are we to judge subsequent developments? For not everything is betrayal in what changes, and not everything is fidelity in what claims to be immutable. John Henry Newman saw this clearly: a living tradition is not preserved by mechanical repetition, but by deploying what it contained in germ. It remains to distinguish legitimate deployment — that which deepens and makes explicit the origin — from deviation — that which contradicts the origin while claiming to continue it. Yves Congar, in Vraie et fausse réforme dans l'Église, proposed criteria for making this distinction. We adopt them as our working framework. At this level, we do not only ask "is this consistent with the origins?" but "does this development extend the dynamic of the message, or reverse it?"

The third level is normative, and we declare it openly. To judge that a practice has "departed" from the message presupposes a norm — a point of view from which the departure is measured. Many authors conceal their norm beneath the appearance of objective history, passing off as an observation what is in fact a choice. We refuse this procedure. Our criteria are stated and assumed: the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it; the primacy of love and service over power; the structural inclusion of the excluded; the evangelical critique of all legalism and all sacralization of institutional authority. The reader who does not share these criteria may contest our conclusions; but they will know exactly in whose name we are judging, and will be able to distinguish what is established from what is interpreted. This is the only possible honesty: not to claim to have no norm, but to state which one, and where it comes from.

The strength of this approach lies in its transparency. The reader can ask, on every page: am I at the first level, where facts are established, the second, where coherence is assessed, or the third, where a value judgment is rendered? Confusing these registers is the source of most misunderstandings on these subjects. Keeping them separate is our first contribution.

A Journey in Seven Stages

This report is not read as a linear demonstration whose conclusion is known in advance. It is traversed like a path, which departs from one world — first-century Palestine — to arrive at another — the contemporary Church and its debates on reform. Seven stages mark the way.

The first part sets the scene: Second Temple Judaism, its currents, its institutions, its expectations. Nothing about Jesus can be understood if he is torn from this world. His proclamation of the Kingdom, his relationship to the Temple, to the Law, to the excluded, only make sense against this background, of which he is both heir and challenger.

The second part approaches as closely as possible the figure of Jesus himself, as historical research allows one to reconstruct him. What did he say? What did he do? What did he expect? It is here that the reference point is established, from which everything else will be measured.

The third part follows the birth of the early Church: the community of origins, the decisive turning point of Paul, the expansion to the nations, the first tensions between Jewish fidelity and universal openness. This is the moment when a trajectory takes shape.

The fourth part addresses the great transformation, that of the second, third and fourth centuries: the appearance of a priesthood, clericalization, the alliance with the Empire after Constantine, the overlaying of the Hebrew message by the categories of Greek philosophy. This is the heart of the problem, the place where the most debated departures accumulate.

The fifth part examines the attempts at reform that, from Francis of Assisi to Vatican II, passing through Luther, modernism and the nouvelle théologie, sought to reconnect with the sources. It interrogates their conditions of possibility, their successes and their failures — for it would be futile to propose today what has already failed yesterday, without understanding the reasons.

The sixth part examines the great contemporary reform attempts: Küng, the pontificate of Francis and synodality, the axes of reform — governance, inclusion, priesthood, the relationship to money and power.

The seventh part, finally, formulates concrete proposals: domestic liturgy, deconcentration of sacramental power, collegial governance and the question of the center (Rome or Jerusalem?), priestly celibacy, separation of Church and State, interreligious dialogue with Islam, Judaism and other traditions. A final chapter submits Benedictine monasticism to constructive critique — its successes in consultative governance, cultural transmission and hospitality, but also its limitations (spiritual elitism, abbatial authority without counterbalance, gender asymmetry) — in order to extract from it what can inspire an ordinary Church without requiring it to be a monastery. These proposals do not fall from the sky; they derive from the six preceding parts, and are only valid by virtue of this anchoring in the sources.

The Position of This Institute

It would be dishonest to present this work as an inquiry without presuppositions that happens to arrive at certain conclusions. Fontes is a reform institute, and this report is a committed report. But committed in a precise manner, which must be named clearly so that the reader knows what to expect.

Our reform is neither schismatic nor nostalgic. It does not call for leaving the Church in order to found another, purer one; ruptures of this type generally produce new institutions afflicted with the same ailments. Neither does it call for restoring a golden age that never existed; the early Church had its conflicts, its shadows and its compromises. Our position is that of a reform from within, conducted with the Church's own criteria. We do not measure the Church against a foreign norm imported from outside — political, sociological or ideological. We measure it against what it itself recognizes as its source and rule: the message of Jesus Christ, the testimony of the first disciples, and that living Tradition which Vatican II recalled is not the repetition of the past but its fruitful transmission. When we say that a practice has departed from the message, we are not speaking in the name of the age; we are speaking in the name of the Gospel that the Church itself proclaims.

This is why this report does not speak against the Church, nor in its place. It speaks with it, holding up a mirror. A mirror compels no one: it shows. The Church remains free to recognize itself in it or to turn away from it. But the mirror, to be useful, must be faithful — neither complacent nor distorting. It is to this faithfulness of reflection that we have worked, accepting in advance that certain results may complicate our own thesis rather than confirm it. A work that found only what it sought would not deserve to be read.

It remains, therefore, to begin at the beginning — not with Jesus, but with the world that preceded and formed him, that Judaism of the first century of which we have for too long forgotten that it was his only homeland.