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Volume 66 (2009): 7–20

Theology Today MARIE A. CONN

Plurality in Unity
The Ecclesiology of Leonardo Boff
In Honor of His 70th Birthday
(December 14, 2008)

Abstract: Leonardo Boff has served the people of God for decades, first as a
Franciscan priest and now as a lay theologian. His writings lay out a vision of
the church born in the Brazilian rain forests, nurtured by extensive study and
training in theology, and strengthened by ecclesiastical ordeal. This essay seeks
to honor Boff’s significant contributions to post–Vatican II theology by explor-
ing his ecclesiology, as well as its implications for the sacramental life of the
faithful and the role of the hierarchy.

Several years ago, in a small but important book, Leonardo Boff offered a clear
and concise explanation of Latin American liberation theology.1 The last portion
of the book described the polemical reaction to the publication of his Church:
Charism and Power, which forms the basis for much of what follows here.2
Despite the enormous pressure placed on him by his summons to the Vati-
can for questioning, Boff was able to see the experience in the light of hope
and to describe those involved as “brothers in faith with ourselves, persons
seeking to discharge their arduous task and mission of zealously preserving the
basic tenets of our faith and the mainstays of our hope.”3
In July 1992, the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) carried an article con-
taining Boff’s explanation of his decision to separate himself from the priest-
hood and from his beloved Franciscans. In a moving letter to his
“fellow-travelers,” Boff emphasized that he was leaving not the church but the

Marie A. Conn holds a PhD in theology from the University of Notre Dame and is a professor
of religious studies at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. She is currently chair of the depart-
ment of religious studies and philosophy and the graduate program in holistic spirituality.
1. L. Boff and C. Boff, Liberation Theology: From Confrontation to Dialogue (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1986).
2. L. Boff, Church: Charism and Power—Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church
(New York: Crossroad, 1986).
3. Peter Hebblethwaite, “Boff Explains,” National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1992, 12–13.

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8 Marie A. Conn Theology Today

ministry, not the battle but the trenches from which he fought. That battle has
cost him dearly. Boff likened his twenty years as an object of Vatican vigilance
and scrutiny to an “ever-tightening tourniquet,” making his work virtually
impossible.4 The final break came only after Boff’s Franciscan superiors
removed him as editor of the Brazilian magazine Vozes and advised him to
give up teaching (at the Petrópolis Institute of Theology) and writing.
Despite this apparent abandonment, Boff openly professed his love for the
church and promised to continue engaging in theological discourse. NCR
writer Peter Hebblethwaite observed that “Boff, the liberated layman, still has
a contribution to make to theology.”5 As the following essay demonstrates,
that contribution is rich indeed.

Introduction
Leonardo Boff was born in Concórdia, Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 1938.6 His
father was a teacher who identified himself with the cause of the poor, espe-
cially the blacks in Concórdia. Boff became a Franciscan priest and eventually
earned a doctorate in theology from the University of Munich, where he was
a research assistant for Karl Rahner.
Two shattering experiences led Boff to embrace liberation theology. The
first was his work as a priest in the slum of Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro,
where he came into contact with people who had to scavenge for food in
garbage dumps and yet were able to hope and draw a sense of self-worth from
their base communities. The second grew out of Boff’s frequent trips to the
diocese of Acre-Purus, in the heart of the Amazon jungle. It was there that he
began to perceive a new vision of the church. Church for the people of that
region was not a hierarchical institution but a daily struggle for survival. Faith
and life, God and suffering—all were one.
Boff has written three major works on the church. In 1972, his doctoral dis-
sertation, Die Kirche als Sakrament im Horizont der Welterfahrung, explored
the conclusions and consequences of the conciliar model of the church. Five
years later appeared Eclesiogênese: As Comunidades Eclesiales de Base Rein-
ventam a Igreja, which focused on the ecclesiological significance and rele-
vance of the Christian “base communities.” Then in 1981, Boff published

4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. See D. W. Ferm, Profiles in Liberation (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1988),
125–27.

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Theology Today Plurality in Unity 9

Igreja: Carisma e Poder, a collection of essays dealing with the relation

between theory and practice as applied to Latin American church situations,
Boff’s criticism of the institutional church as “power,” and his proposed new
ecclesiology.7 It was this book that led to Boff’s first summons to Rome.
J. P. Hogan, in his review of the English edition of Igreja, characterizes
Boff’s attempt to shed light on the institutional church as revealing and
rewarding but also threatening.8 After describing Boff’s challenge to the indi-
vidualistic and self-interested tendencies of a church that turns back from the
demands of Vatican II, Hogan notes several areas still in need of clarification
if Boff’s vision of church is to be allowed to have its fullest impact. Three of
those areas—the theological use of producer-consumer language, the function
of ecclesial structures, and the role of the hierarchy—will provide the frame-
work for this essay.

Producer-Consumer Language
Boff became convinced that to follow Christ in Latin America meant to work
to change the existing social, economic, and political structures. Like many
third-world theologians, Boff has been accused of Marxism, but he uses Marx-
ist categories only instrumentally. His primary tools are the Bible, tradition,
and the church’s social teaching. Boff uses Marxist language and analysis to
assess the hierarchical and sacramental structures of the church: one group
produces the symbolic goods and another consumes them. As R. Michiels
notes, Boff goes on to point up the need for conversion to an institution that
respects and promotes human rights within its own reality.9
In a provocative 1982 article, Enrique Dussel underscores the importance
of bread as the “symbol and reality of the product of human labour.”10 To make
his point clear, Dussel offers three diagrammatic schemes to illustrate the

7. These two Portuguese titles by Boff have been translated into English as Ecclesiogenesis:
The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), and Church: Charism
and Power (see note 2). See also R. Michiels, review of Church, Charism and Power, Louvain
Studies 13 (1988); Louvain Studies 13 (1988) 370–71.
8. J. P. Hogan, review of Church: Charism and Power by L. Boff, Theological Studies 47, no.
1 (1986): 155–57.
9. Michiels, review of Church, Charism and Power, Louvain Studies 13 (1988): 370–71.
10. E. Dussel, “The Bread of the Eucharistic Celebration as a Sign of Justice in the Commu-
nity,” in Can We Always Celebrate the Eucharist? ed. M. Collins and D. Power, Concilium 152
(New York: Seabury, 1982), 57. I have explored some of these themes in “Eucharist: Bread and
Justice,” Questions Liturgiques 72 (1991): 108–26, and “The Sacramental Theology of Leonardo
Boff,” Worship 64, no. 6 (1990): 523–32.

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10 Marie A. Conn Theology Today

“circle of production,” the “practical-productive circle,” and the “productive-

practical relationships of worship.”11
Earth is the material of work in the sense that, without work, there is the
earth and the cosmos but no material. Unlike cosmological materialism, this
productive materialism, says Dussel, is “irrefutable and sacramental: earth is
the material of work. Without earth and work there is no bread. Without bread,
there is no Eucharist.”12 Bread, then, is the fruit of work, which is the human
activity par excellence. Work objectifies human dignity. It is through work that
humans are rescued from a subjective state of emptiness and their hands filled
with bread for the sacrifice.
That being said, however, it is also true that bread is, first of all, food.
Hunger is the lack of food, and bread is produced to satisfy this lack. Monika
Hellwig writes, “The simple, central action of the Eucharist is the sharing of
food—not only eating but sharing. The simple, central human experience for
the understanding of this action is hunger.”13 Hunger is a multivalent reality,
which those born and raised in areas with high standards of living cannot fully
appreciate. Hunger is the supreme experience of dependence and insufficiency.
To be hungry is to know ourselves as creatures. Extreme hunger deprives peo-
ple of goals and horizons; all that is important is the obtaining of food. Human
vision, the freedom to transcend, the appreciation of the good and the beauti-
ful—all are impossible in the face of hunger.14 That is why “the bread of the
needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a murderer” (Sir
34:25). It is important to note here that the Bible sets up an ethical, person-to-
person relationship between the rich and the poor. In order for there to be poor,
some must be rich. But the rich, in this equation, are those who use the product
of others’ work as a means of domination over them. To be poor is to be alien-
ated from the product of one’s labor. Leaving the producer without the product
is murder.15
The implications of this understanding are enormous. Bread is the staple of
life; it is what human sweat earns. “But it is also the bread we deny to others,
as many people in this world starve for want of it,” says David Newman.16
Since the source of this bread is human labor, then Christ, in the eucharistic

11. Ibid., 57, 59, 61.

12. Ibid., 58.
13. M. Hellwig, The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), 10.
14. Ibid., 11–17.
15. Dussel, “Bread of the Eucharistic Celebration,” 59.
16. D. R. Newman, Worship as Praise and Empowerment (New York: Pilgrim, 1988), 149.

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Theology Today Plurality in Unity 11

bread, obligates us, in Rafael Avila’s words, “to evaluate our offering and the
human process that precedes and defines the offering—that is, the social rela-
tionships of production,” with a view to righting those relationships.17
In the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomic History, as well as in the prophets,
the power of the Lord is manifested in the ability to control food: to feed is to
bless and to confer life. Acceptance of the Lord’s power is symbolized by the
acceptance of the offered food; likewise, rejection of the Lord is symbolized by
seeking after forbidden food. Questions as to the extent of the Lord’s power are
framed as questions about the Lord’s ability to feed the people. In other words,
eating either joins people to the Lord or separates them from the Lord.18
Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, those who eat together establish a relation-
ship of mutual obligation. All of this is contained in Jesus’ choice of bread and
wine as the symbols of his abiding presence. At a very fundamental level, the
Last Supper is simply a sharing of food. As Joseph Grassi explains, “It is essen-
tial that both aspects of the broken bread be remembered: it is a symbol of spir-
itual nourishment, and it is a call for actual food for the hungry.”19
Christians today must recover that link between the Eucharist and food
sharing. Appreciating food as a fruit of human labor and a part of humanized
nature is critical. As both Dussel and Boff remind us, humanity in its entirety
is signified in the Eucharist. The bread and wine, writes Gustave Martelet, “are
an unpretentious summary of the earth’s cosmic and cultural Odyssey; in their
own way they are a diagrammatic representation of the human.”20 These
eucharistic symbols remind us that culture has no true value except by provid-
ing food to sustain life. Martelet continues: “As the bread and wine bring to
the table of Christ the symbolic loading of the world’s culture, so we must
accept that they evoke, too, the world’s distress; for the food and drink which
the Eucharist uses as though they were available to all as a matter of course
are still an unsolved problem for the majority of the world’s inhabitants.”21 We
cannot live without concern for others and claim to receive the blessing of
Christ in the Eucharist. “The celebration of the Lord’s Supper presupposes a
communion and solidarity with the poor in history,” writes Gustavo Gutiérrez.

17. R. Avila, Worship and Politics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981), 95.
18. T. C. Humphrey and L. T. Humphrey, “We Gather Together”: Food and Festival in Ameri-
can Life (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Institute, 1988), 72.
19. J. A. Grassi, Broken Bread and Broken Bodies: The Lord’s Supper and World Hunger
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), ix.
20. G. Martelet, The Risen Christ and the Eucharistic World (New York: Seabury, 1976), 35.
21. Ibid., 39.

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12 Marie A. Conn Theology Today

“Without this solidarity, it is impossible to comprehend the death and resurrec-

tion of the Servant of Yahweh.”22
Just as human labor produced the bread offered on our altars, so human
labor can make the bread of justice a reality in our world. C. Kiesling puts it
this way: “The eucharistic bread and wine refer to the world men and women
make, the world in which social justice ought to reign and must be continually
fought for.”23 The important thing is not the ritual itself but the power the
leaven has of making the bread of this world rise. X. Léon-Dufour writes,
“The Eucharist is by nature a challenge that sets a table at which the witnesses
to God’s love and to justice can nourish and sustain themselves.”24 Two kinds
of remembrance are required of Jesus’ disciples. One is a remembrance by
liturgical action, and this is symbolized by food. The other is remembrance by
service, and this is expressed in concrete action on behalf of the neighbor.
So the bread of the Eucharist is physical bread as well as sacramental sym-
bol. The Eucharist energizes us to work for a more human world, to proclaim
the radical liberation of Jesus Christ to all people, and to prolong our liturgi-
cal action by, as Léon-Dufour explains, “sharing bread, that is, promoting jus-
tice, fighting against hunger in the world, and delivering the oppressed from
every evil.”25

Function of Ecclesial Structures

“In Church: Charism and Power, Boff begins with the assertion that no ade-
quate understanding of church is possible without a corollary understanding of
the relationship between the three realities of Kingdom, world, and church,”
writes L. Johnson-Hill.26 The kingdom is God’s project in history and eternity.
The kingdom is present where there is justice, comradeship, forgiveness, and
the promotion of life. According to Boff, the kingdom finds a particular
expression in the church, insofar as it lives the gospel and builds itself up day
by day. Boff holds that Jesus’ intention was not to establish a new church but
to demonstrate the qualities necessary for kingdom living, the dominant qual-
ities of a fully human being.27

22. G. Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983), 16.
23. C. Kiesling, “Social Justice in the Eucharistic Liturgy,” Living Light, Spring 1980, 15.
24. X. Léon-Dufour, Sharing the Eucharistic Bread (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 301.
25. Ibid., 299.
26. L. Johnson-Hill, “The Vision of Church in the Theology of Leonardo Boff,” Lexington The-
ological Quarterly 23 (1988): 43.
27. L. Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978), 30.

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Theology Today Plurality in Unity 13

The situation in Latin America today has striking parallels with the sociopo-
litical situation of Jesus’ time; Palestine too was suffering from unjust struc-
tures. Jesus preached the kingdom of God as the start of a new age of liberation;
in doing so, he aligned himself with the oppressed. Jesus, the Son of God, took
on oppression in order to set us free. The kingdom is already made manifest in
Jesus’ actions, but he demands conversion, a change of convictions, and, above
all, a change of attitude. Jesus’ attitude led directly to confrontation with the
authorities and to the cross. The resurrection is the final triumph of life and
hope, the ultimate victory of God’s love, a victory that is as certain for the peo-
ple of Latin America today as it was for those to whom Jesus preached.
The Holy Spirit plays a key role in Boff’s vision of the church as the sacra-
ment of the kingdom on earth. The pre-Easter Jesus did not create the church;
it is a creation of the time of the Spirit:
Jesus did not select the Twelve as founders of future churches. Jesus
established the Twelve as a community: as messianic, eschatological
church. The apostles are not to be understood first and foremost as indi-
viduals, but precisely as the Twelve, as messianic community gathered
around Jesus and his Spirit. This community then broadened and gave rise
to other apostolic communities.28

Boff asserts that the evangelists saw a breach, a “rupture,” between Jesus and
the church, separated by the “failure” of Jesus crucified, the faithlessness of
the apostles, and the dissolution of the community. This breach was healed
only after Jesus’ resurrection.
For Boff, then, the church begins with the resurrection and with Pentecost.
It is an event of the Spirit; its organizing principle is not power but charism.
The church is “the encounter of the community of the faithful, an encounter
promoted by Christ and the Spirit to celebrate, deepen faith, and to discuss the
questions of the community in the light of the Gospel.” In this primitive sense,
the church is for Boff an event rather than an institution.29
There is an inherent logic in the way in which Boff links the beginning of the
church with the resurrection and Pentecost and with his christology. Boff con-
tends that it was the emphasis on the transcendent Christ, which overshadowed
for centuries any consideration of the human Jesus, that led necessarily and
exclusively to a vision of church as institution. One of Boff’s goals in his writ-
ing has been to delineate a christology for Latin America; such a christology

28. Boff, Ecclesiogenesis, 28.

29. Boff, Church: Charism and Power, 155.

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14 Marie A. Conn Theology Today

would emphasize Jesus’ humanity while maintaining the perpetual divinity of

Christ: “I follow the Franciscan school—the synoptic, Antiochene, and Scotist
tradition. I find Christ precisely in Jesus’ total, complete humanity.”30
Boff argues that while the institutional mode of the church—that is, the
Matthean pyramidal structure developed in the Catholic Epistles and enshrin-
ing the permanent functions of presbyters and bishops—dominated Western
thought for centuries, there has always existed a more circular model of church,
Pauline in character, and more communitarian and charismatic. The Pauline
model of a church based on charisms, or gifts of the Spirit, does not rule out
hierarchy, but hierarchy in this model is regarded as only one of the charisms.
In a church thus organized around charisms, the collegiality Vatican II lim-
ited to that existing among bishops and priests (although that in itself was a
welcome moderation of hierarchical power) is automatically extended to
include the laity. Every single member of the church has a decisive place in the
community: there is no noncharismatic member. That is why all “the members
may have the same care for one another” (1 Cor 12:25). In a statement prophetic
of his own treatment, Boff notes that some charism may be “uncomfortable for
someone in the hierarchy who prefers to expel those priests who do not preach
according to his own teaching, prohibiting theologians to speak at the slight-
est suspicion, . . . due to disdain for theological reflection that might accept the
challenge of the signs of the times.”31
Where diverse charisms are allowed to flourish, creativity abounds and the
action of the Spirit is obvious. People become more than parishioners; all are
true members of the church, placing their gifts completely at the service of
God and neighbor. Boff defines a charism as “a manifestation of the Spirit’s
presence in the members of the community, causing everything they are and
do to be done and ordered for the good of all.” While it may in fact be true that
there are more important charisms, according to the needs of the church, no
charism may repress or stifle the exercise of any other.32

Implications for the Sacraments

The consideration of charism as the organizing principle of church leads nat-
urally to questions about the place and character of the sacraments in the life
of the community so organized. The sacraments as they are traditionally

30. L. Boff, Passion of Christ, Passion of the World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987), xiii.
31. Boff, Church: Charism and Power, 157.
32. Ibid., 158.

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Theology Today Plurality in Unity 15

understood are priestly prerogatives, inseparably linked to a hierarchical, insti-

tutional church. If sacraments are to remain central to the life of the church, as
all Roman Catholic liberation theologians insist they must, then the roles in
sacramental celebrations must change.
This approach to the sacraments, combined with the shortage of priests in
many parts of Latin America, leads not to an abandoning of reverence for the
sacraments but to the need of redistributing sacral power and ecclesial func-
tions. The people of Latin America must daily face the concrete reality of the
lack of ordained ministers and, consequently, the lack of full eucharistic cele-
brations.33 This is real, and it is painful. But it does not cause the church to
cease to exist in this context; rather, this situation causes the members of the
church to ask questions, the answers to which may have profound effects on
the thinking and praxis of the wider church.
In discussing the place of the sacraments in the church as envisioned by
Boff, different meanings of the term “sacrament” must be considered. For Boff,
first of all, all of life and creation is sacrament. Everything is shot through with
God, and humans are capable of reading this message of the universe.34 There
is also the sacramental dimension of the popular theology of the members of
the base communities, who often use symbol and gesture to express their life
experiences. Boff describes one group who, during a course on the Apocalypse,
used a silhouette show of a dragon with seven heads confronting a wounded
lamb. Boff notes that those present had no qualms about giving names to the
dragon’s heads: multinationals, foreign debt, military dictatorship, and the
names of government officials who acted against the good of the people. Below
the lamb, someone wrote, “Jesus Christ, Liberator,” and a woman came for-
ward and added, “The people of the poor.” This folk theology proved to be
clear, prophetic, and critical, and for Boff surpassed “the pretensions of the
‘doctors of theology’ who can count every hair in the beast’s coat but never
look it in the face.”35
The sacramental structure centered in the seven sacraments is the concrete
shape of the universal church in the various situations of life. The sacraments,
whether understood as these seven or in a broader application, are primarily

33. See J. M. Vigil, “Leonardo Boff: Nicaragua/Solidarity,” Christianity and Crisis, September
26, 1987, 309; and F. Houtart, “The Roman Catholic Church and Social Change in Latin Amer-
ica,” in The Church and Social Change in Latin America, ed. H. A. Landsberger (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), 124–25.
34. Conn, “Sacramental Theology of Leonardo Boff,” 525.
35. Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff, Introducting Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1987), 16.

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16 Marie A. Conn Theology Today

human encounters that enable men and women to transcend their immediate
position and encounter God. The language of the sacraments is narrative, evoca-
tive, self-involving, and performance-oriented. As such, this language leads to
conversion and makes of the sacraments not the private property of the hierar-
chy, but basic constituents of human life. Sacraments change the world by com-
municating and sharing life.36 The seven sacraments are thus the ritual
expression of pivotal points of human life, points at which we most experience
ourselves as fragile, as part of a community, as creatures of a transcendent God.
Christ is the author of these sacraments, not in the sense that he invented them,
but because, through him, the vertical and horizontal dimensions of these events
cross and the relationship of these sacraments to the incarnate God is revealed.37
There is also in Boff the sense that the church, in its totality as the commu-
nity of the faithful and the history of its faith in Jesus, is the great sacrament of
grace and salvation in the world. Christ is the sacrament of the Father; the
church is the sacrament of Christ. “The church keeps ever alive the memory of
his life, death, and resurrection, and of his definitive significance for the destiny
of all human beings.”38 Christ is not confined to the church, but the church, with
its faith in the Lord and his presence—a faith that gives life to the creed and
finds expression in the liturgy—is a sacramental home for the people.
When Boff’s model of church as a creation of the time of the Spirit organ-
ized around the principle of charism is combined with his deeply sacramental
approach to life, and all this is in its turn measured against the appalling short-
age of ordained ministers in Latin America, the implications are both obvious
and challenging. Like the primitive church, which created or adapted functions
to respond to the evolving needs of the first Christian communities and its own
developing self-understanding, so too the church of today must be open to the
promptings of the Spirit and to the pressures of the present situation. This is
the whole impact of eclesiogênese, a word coined at an interchurch meeting of
the base communities in Brazil in 1981. It captures the spirit behind that meet-
ing, whose motto was Igreja Nasco de Povo pelo Espirito de Deus, “a church
born of the people through the Spirit of God.”39
How Boff’s vision will affect the church’s sacramental life and its restric-
tion of certain sacramental activities to “officially” ordained ministers remains

36. L. Boff, Sacraments of Life, Life of the Sacraments (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1987),
5, 7–12.
37. Ibid., 64.
38. Ibid., 52.
39. Boff, Ecclesiogenesis, 35.

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Theology Today Plurality in Unity 17

to be seen. Boff himself offers no preconceived, final solutions, although he

never shrinks from the obvious, and perhaps startling, implications of his
words. One thing he does not do, however, and in fact insists must not be done,
is in any way to advocate the end of the hierarchy or the total replacement of
the institutional church by structures like the base communities. Rather, Boff
envisions a church in which the institutional structure is balanced and con-
stantly challenged by the leaven of the prophetic dimension.

The Role of the Hierarchy

As Boff sees it, the two models of ecclesial organization—as institution and as
the event of community—are neither mutually exclusive nor, ideally, in com-
petition with each other. Instead, the communitarian model, more suited to
small groups, serves as a “ferment for renewal” within the broader institutional
model. It is, in fact, in the dialogue between these two ecclesiological models,
a dialogue that can occasionally be intense and confrontational, that the “con-
scientization” of the church as a whole occurs, especially with regard to the
poor of this world.40
The problems presented by the institutional model do not arise from its
essential nature; every community needs some degree of institutionalization.
The church is no exception. The institution, with its hierarchy, dogmas, rites,
and traditions, gives unity and identity to the community of the church.41 What
leads to difficulty is the corruption of the institution through a misuse or even
a misunderstanding of sacral power. The biggest problem today is the “institu-
tional sclerosis” caused by the misuse of power, a creeping paralysis that has
created a deep chasm between the people and the hierarchy, and between the
church that “thinks, speaks, and yet does not act” and the church “which does
not dare to think, cannot speak, and yet acts.”42
Boff’s delineation of the evolution of power in the post-Constantinian West-
ern church is scathing. Where unity in the “ghetto church” of the first three cen-
turies was guaranteed by a common faith, strengthened by the public witness of
the martyrs, and embodied in bishops whose authority came from their own
exemplary lifestyle, the church after the conversion of Constantine took on
great power, power that resembled successively the structure of the Roman
Empire, the divine right of medieval kings, the totalitarian dictatorships of the

40. Ibid., 8.
41. Ibid., 48.
42. Ibid., 49.

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18 Marie A. Conn Theology Today

twentieth century, and, today, the giant multinational corporations. Unity in

such an organization can only be understood as conformity.43
While Vatican II called for the reform of the church itself, this has not been,
for the most part, taken as a challenge to a re-formation of the church as insti-
tution but as a call to individual members of the church to live lives of justice
and holiness. This is not enough; it does not call into question the way power
is exercised. Boff even fears that this interpretation of the call of Vatican II to
reform may actually impede gospel conversion. He fears we will “end up with
extremely good-willed individuals with pure intentions but who are faithful,
loyal, and uncritical toward the institution, who through this institution cause
serious damage to people and to the Church.”44
While these are harsh words, they cannot be dismissed as empty polemic.
Liberation theologians are calling all Christians to a reexamination of the
place of the sacraments in the life of the church; such a reexamination neces-
sarily involves a concomitant evaluation of the community that celebrates
those sacraments. Cultic language makes sense only within the context of an
ecclesial community committed to the needs of others. In the early days of
Christianity, cultic terminology was used with reference not to the way Chris-
tians celebrated but to the way they lived.45
The church is obliged to transmit God’s message to the world as a commu-
nity; this community is obliged to determine the proper attitudes and conduct
for transmitting the message. The sacraments contribute to the creation of a
suitable community, but only if the commitment they presuppose is accepted
with the full burden of its visibility. God gave sacraments not because grace
needed rites, but because the community needed a conscious awareness of the
God-given creativity it is meant to inject into history. “A community gathered
together around a liberative paschal message needs signs which fashion it and
question it, which imbue it with a sense of responsibility and enable it to cre-
ate its own word about history.”46
Prior to Vatican II, the community was seen as the means, while the recep-
tion of the sacraments to ensure salvation was the end. Today the sacraments
are means that form and set in motion a community whose liberative influence

43. Ibid., 50–56.

44. Ibid., 56.
45. S. Lyonnet, “La nature du culte dans le Nouveau Testament,” in A liturgie après Vatican II,
ed. J. P. Jossua and Y. Congar (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1967), 368–79.
46. Boff, Ecclesiogenesis, 99.

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Theology Today Plurality in Unity 19

is the end. So the Christian Eucharist becomes the act of a transformed people
embodying a living cult in its common life.47
All of this must be understood before Boff’s treatment of the hierarchy in
his vision of the church can be appreciated. The power structure described
above caused the church in the Latin West to be seen juridically: power passed
from Christ to the Twelve to their successors, who are regarded as the sole
repositories of all responsibility and power and are thus actually in a position
of confrontation with the community, which is “divided between rulers and
governors, between celebrants and onlookers, between producers and con-
sumers of sacraments.”48
The basic problem with the hierarchy understood in this sense is that it sup-
presses the church as faith community and, as Boff goes on to point out, by
using the shepherds as the point of reference, “inverts the natural order: first
comes the flock, and then, for the sake of the flock, the shepherd.”49 That is
why, in a church organized around charism, while hierarchy is essential, it will
be understood as subsisting within the faith community and at its service.
The church here is pictured more from the “steeple down” than from the
“foundation up.” Everyone has a part to play, and the clergy move among
the people, not apart from them. Boff uses diagrammatic schemas similar to
the biblical symbols of Jacob’s ladder (institution) and Sarah’s circle (charism)
to illustrate the difference between the “foundation up” and the “steeple down”
models of church. In the first, the people are merely receivers in an organi-
zation concentrated on a bishop-priest axis and governed through the category
of power. Christ and the Spirit can be mediated only through the ordained
ministry, who thereby occupy the center of interest. The power in the second,
on the other hand, resides in the totality of the people of God, and organiza-
tion is secondary. Christ’s power is diversified according to specific functions,
and the laity become the actual creators of ecclesiological values. Christ and
the Spirit are immanent in the community in a continuing fashion, and the
sacramental function of the hierarchy is to serve that reality, not create it. The
charism of leadership in such a community arises from within and is not
imposed from without.50

47. M. F. Mannion, “Stipends and Eucharistic Praxis,” in Living Bread, Saving Cup, ed. R. K.
Seasoltz (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1987), 328.
48. Boff, Ecclesiogenesis, 24.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 26.

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20 Marie A. Conn Theology Today

In this second model, all ministries, even those that are instituted and sacra-
mental, are at the service of the community. The oneness of the church is the
unity of the local churches and their unity with the church universal. The min-
istries themselves are determined by the needs of the local community as it
struggles to make known in the world the presence of the risen Christ and his
Spirit.51 This approach to ministry will help eliminate the chasm between the
hierarchy who make the decisions and the laity who are affected by them. This
chasm is the natural result of the traditional church structure in which the
bishop does not deal with the people directly but only with his priests. Thus,
the laity are effectively excluded from any real influence in ecclesial decisions.
The axis must be changed: the laity must be understood as full participants
in the church. It is not that the bishop and priests lose their functions, but that
those functions are interpreted in a new way. The network of relationships
becomes triangular instead of linear, with all three—laity, priests, and bishop—
assuming responsibility for the entire reality of the church in a truly collegial
manner. This is one of the ways the base communities, who are already experi-
encing this shift of axis on the practical level, can be the “leaven of renewal”
of which Boff so often speaks: “Today’s basic communities hold a prophecy, a
promise that is slowly becoming historical reality. We shall have a new church,
a church born of the faith that nourishes God’s people.”52

51. Ibid., 29.

52. Ibid., 33.

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