Equality in Catholic Church Thinking

What is it about?

Traditionally, Catholicism has ignored equality as a religious principle. This is now an outdated position and it needs to evolve its preaching to take account of this. The development of new social awareness is a spur to creative religious understanding. As the Roman Catholic Church aspires ‘to embrace a synodal way’, some old questions about its ecclesial vision return. One such question is the equality of all the baptised within the church. This question is particularly fraught because of the church’s long history of viewing the itself as a society of unequals, its hierarchical structures, and its culture of top-down authority modelled on pre-modern monarchical conceptions of society. This paper argues that not only must the church face the implications of accepting the equality of the baptised as a basis of its praxis, but also that it should embrace that equality as part of its witness and service to the world. Thus, it must not simply take equality to heart and express it in its rituals, but must create a ‘theology of human equality’ which then becomes part of its preaching.

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Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Current interest in a variety of issues make reflection on EQUALItY important: (1) the current interest in synodality in the church (2) the Black Lives Matter movement (3) post-colonial awareness (4) the assault on democracy in so many countries

Perspectives