HIERARCHY - Issues and Concern, Diocese of Marbel

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Hierarchy

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The general meaning of “hierarchy” is enormously misunderstood today by many people who think it is synonymous with “inequality.” In point of fact, however, hierarchy comes from two Greek words, hieros, which means sacred, and arche, meaning beginning or first or something that has priority. Hierarchy therefore means “sacred origin.” Hierarchy also means “sacred order,” from the Greek word archein, meaning to rule or to order. The order might involve elements that are equal or elements that are unequal, since hierarchy as such signifies neither equality nor inequality but refers simply to the order itself.

Hierarchy and the Trinity • Hierarchy as sacred order applies, in the first instance, to the Trinity. The Trinitarian God is three Persons ordered to one another by the mutually dependent and noninterchangeable relations of paternity (Father), filiation (Son), and passive spiration (Holy Spirit). This divine order is most clearly reflected in the fact that the Father is the first Person of the Trinity because he begets the Son, the Son is the second Person of the Trinity because he is begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity because he is spirated by the Father and the Son. At the same time, the sacred ordering of the Trinity is a hierarchy of equals, inasmuch as each of the Persons possesses the fullness of the divine substance.

The Trinity is also the “sacred origin” of creation, and the order invested by God in creation is therefore a sacred order because it has a sacred origin. Three levels of this order deserve our special attention. First, there is the unequal ordering of God – Man – World. The world is ordered to man, who is given dominion over it (cf. Gn 1:28). Man, however, is ordered to God as God’s image (Gn 1:27), and therefore God has dominion over man (Gn 2:16).

Second, there is that equal ordering of human beings created as male and female in the image of God (Gn 1:27) and called to become in marriage the relations of husband and wife (Gn 2:24). Here we clearly have a sacred order or hierarchy analogous to the ordering of the Trinitarian Persons to one another as dependent, noninterchangeable, yet equal relations. Sacred order at the human level is a sexually differentiated hierarchy that defines not only the order of creation but also the order of salvation in the marital union of Christ and the Church as the “great mystery” or “great sacrament” (Eph 5:31-33).

Hierarchy in the Church • Third, there is the hierarchy or sacred rule of the Church, manifested in the sacred order of Pope, bishops, priests, and deacons. Those in the hierarchy of the Church are not only ordered among themselves (bishops ordained into the fullness of sacramental priesthood, priests ordained into a share in that sacramental priesthood, deacons ordained not into priesthood but into a ministry of service to bishops and priests), they are also ordered to both Christ and the Church. The hierarchy of the Church provides our sacramental link to the Apostles and, through them, to Christ himself and those events by which he instituted the New Covenant (CCC 1120). Those in the Church hierarchy are therefore ordered to Christ, in whose threefold ministry as priest, prophet, and king they share and to whom they are accountable. The hierarchy of the Church accordingly has to do with the “holy origin” of our faith, inasmuch as it protects the integrity of that origin. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has pointed out: “Hierarchy . . . means not holy domination but holy origin. Hierarchical service and ministry is thus guarding an origin that is holy, and not making arbitrary dispositions and decisions” (Church, Ecumenism and Politics, p. 128).

At the same time, the clerical hierarchy, or ordained ministry, is ordered to serve those who make up the royal priesthood of the faithful (CCC 1120, 1547). This means that the hierarchy has the responsibility through preaching, teaching, and the sacraments to make present the grace and truth of Christ to all members of the Church. In this way, the hierarchy of the Church serves the holiness of the Church and all of her members.

The members in their turn are ordered to the holiness of the world. The laity are called to find “the means for permeating social, political, and economic realities with the demands of Christian doctrine and life” (CCC 899) and ultimately, as Vatican Council II teaches, to consecrate the world to God (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, 34; cf. CCC 901).

In sum, then, the Catholic faith recognizes the reality of a sacred order in God (the triune communion of three equal, noninterchangeable, mutually dependent Relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), a sacred order in creation that reflects God (the marital ordering of Adam and Eve as equal, noninterchangeable, mutually dependent relations of husband and wife), and a sacred order that links God and man in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and Christ to the Church in the relations of bridegroom and bride. The ordained hierarchy of the Church is therefore one manifestation among many of the hierarchical character or sacred ordering of God himself and of God’s mystery or plan, formulated before creation and set forth in Jesus Christ, to unite all things in heaven and earth to himself (Eph 1:9-10).

Many people today oppose hierarchy in the name of equality. But hierarchy as such has nothing to do with either equality or inequality. The opposite of hierarchy is not equality; its opposite is anarchy, the absence of law, rule, or order.

Scripture speaks of sin as the “mystery of lawlessness” and of Satan as the “lawless one” (2 Thes 2:7, 8). The opposite of hierarchy is therefore that sin, or disobedience, which refuses to accept the hierarchy or sacred order of God’s mystery or plan. Jesus Christ’s obedience to the Father – which is the “sacred origin” of all things, including, in a sense, the divine order of the Trinity – is the foundation upon which the hierarchy or sacred order of the “new creation” is made possible as a reaffirmation of the original hierarchy or sacred ordering of the whole of creation.

See: Bishop; Bride of Christ; Church, Nature, Origin, and Structure of; Deacon; Fatherhood of God; Holy Orders; Imago Dei; Priest; Sexuality, Human; Trinity; Women, Ecclesial and Social Roles of; Women, Ordination of.

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