Holy Trinity, a notable Catholic church in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. in the 1990’s. During Mass, some members of the church stand, while others sit or kneel. They stand in protest over the settled doctrine of their church not to ordain women. They sense they might have the sympathy of their priest as they seek to unsettle and overturn that ancient doctrine. But in making their gesture, they are also signaling their desire to have the doctrines of the church altered by protests and by the staging of sentiments within the congregation. And yet, these good people could simply have walked several blocks and settled themselves in a church that gratified them on both counts: they would have readily found, in the neighborhood, a church that offers women as ministers, and permits doctrine to be established by the congregation itself. What apparently exceeded their imagination was that the people around them in the Mass at Trinity were also the bearers of rights, and the so-called dissenters were threatening now to remove those rights. Chief among them was the right to be part of a Church whose doctrines could not be manipulated or altered by the vote of a local majority. That sense of surety may be, even now, as critical and consoling for the parishioners as the confidence that they are at Church in America, where people are free to vote. But in the Church itself the majority has no sovereignty to assert. As Chesterton put it, the Church is “the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior.” For as John Paul II sought to explain, there were things that even he and the College of Cardinals were not free to change.
By Hadley Arkes who is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College.
