The first time I remember someone saying “that phrase,” the earthquake of 1980 had not yet happened. It was uttered by a certain Father Pimentel, stooped and neckless, in a sermon at Fonte do Bastardo, coming from Casa da Ribeira. The 1970s. This Father Pimentel always struck me as mysterious, as he was both conservative and progressive, criticizing the Council while vociferously opposing the Colonial War, and even had the PIDE (Portuguese secret police) on his trail. On that day and at that mass, Father Pimentel first attacked the Soviet Union: “Russia must be destroyed,” I remember him saying. Russia (he never said Soviet Union or USSR) was a communist dictatorship that spread atheism and evil throughout the world. Later in the sermon, in the same tone but on another subject, Pimentel criticized the post-conciliar invectives and the confusion generated within the Church, before an assembly that did not even know what Russia was or what the Council was, and then, solemnly, as if engraving a tombstone, he uttered the “phrase” I mentioned above: “The Church is not a democracy.” At ten years old or so, I didn’t give much importance to the phrase, because at that age, more than listening to the priest, what we wanted was for Mass to end. But I found it strange that, in that post-April 25th period, after having heard so many times that democracy was a good thing and dictatorship a bad thing, he would say that the Church was not a democracy. So, for Father Pimentel, was the Church, like the USSR, a dictatorship? This is what stuck in my mind almost 50 years ago, and I never liked, nor do I like, when someone says—and this is always suspicious—that the Church is not a democracy.

Everyone knows that the Church is not a democracy, just as everyone knows that the family is not a democracy, nor is the parish philharmonic, nor the Alto das Covas School. The term “democracy” applies, in politics, to states and forms of government, and the Church, despite having the Vatican to itself, does not have the people to form a democracy. But when we say that the Church is not a democracy, are we saying that it is a dictatorship, the only other alternative? So, please, anyone reading this article should not be confused, because when we say this, we generally mean to affirm the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as opposed to those who speak of the People of God and the participation of the baptized in the life of the Church.

The Church is constitutionally hierarchical, and this hierarchy was desired by Jesus. There are Amazonian rivers of books on this subject, and I am certainly not the best person to scrutinize ancient ecclesiologies. I only intend to take a brief look at the Gospels to understand what Jesus meant by “power.” And one reality immediately stands out: either power is service or it is the work of Evil. From “I came to serve and not to be served,” to “whoever humbles himself will be exalted,” “the first will be last,” “do not let yourselves be called teachers,” “blessed are the humble,” “do not wear two tunics,” “the first will be last and the last will be first,” “whoever wants to be great, let him be your servant,” to an endless series of words and deeds that culminate in one of Jesus’ most symbolic gestures before Gethsemane: “While they were eating supper, Jesus, knowing perfectly well that the Father had put everything in his hands, and that he had come from God and was returning to God, rose from the table, took off his cloak, took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet“ (Jn 13:3-5). Hierarchy is serving; it is washing feet. Perhaps no one has described hierarchy better than Pope Gregory the Great, who called himself the ”servant of the servants of God.”

There is, however, a reality that, at this point, is much more essential to the Church than its hierarchical constitution: the Church is, above all, koinonia, which, translated from Greek, means communion, participation, union, sharing. This can be seen in all its splendor in the early Church, where “the brothers were assiduous in the teaching of the Apostles, in fraternal communion, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42). Koinonia is therefore a concept so radical that it goes far beyond the very concept of democracy. It implies, in its essence, values such as faith, hope, and love, among other riches, which led the pagans to exclaim: “See how they love one another.”

Akoinonia, in the Bible, is the eschatological salvation offered by the Father, through the action of the Son, in the dynamism of the Spirit, which is realized in our history today. As such, koinonia implies a response of communion and participation on the part of Christians who accept the truth of Jesus. This attitude necessarily involves horizontal relationships between people, because, in the Church, more important than its constitutive hierarchy, we are all children of the same Father and, through Baptism, we are radically brothers and sisters. A clear example of biblical koinonia is found in the expression “one another,” which appears 16 times in the New Testament, especially in Jesus’ words, “love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). This “one another” has such a power of communion that it still needs to be studied in depth.

To contrast hierarchy with koinonia is therefore as serious an error as contrasting power and service in the Church.

I know that, in practice, it is often difficult to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. But I also know that, in the Church, there are still many signs of a power that is not to serve but to serve oneself, as well as aspects of a certain conception of hierarchy that remind us of that alternative to democracy.

Father José Lúslio Rocha is a priest in the Catholic Curch on Terceira Island, Azores, and a contributing writer for the newspaper Diário Insular, directed by José Lourenço.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers from the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).