U.S. bishops vote to push social
teaching
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
Special Report Writer Pittsburgh
The nations Catholic bishops approved a 27-page document
opposing pornography, excessive violence and what they termed irresponsible use
of sex and violence in the media during their spring meeting here. They also
voted to have the best kept secret of the Catholic church -- its
social teaching -- incorporated into all Catholic educational programs and
institutions.
The two actions, along with a broad discussion of ways to
encourage greater use of the sacrament of reconciliation and a vote to submit
the lectionary to Rome for its confirmation and authorization, highlighted the
agenda for some 220 prelates during the June 18-20 meeting at the Hilton
Hotel.
Favoring a V-chip but not censorship, the bishops urged the media
to self- regulate, the government to more strictly enforce licensing rules for
broadcasters and parents to oversee their childrens use of the media.
The document also urged parishes and schools to push for
aggressive enforcement of existing pornography laws, to hold discussions about
the media and to analyze the moral messages transmitted over the air, in movies
and via cyberspace.
The prelates suggest that families forsake television, video
games, talk radio, the Internet and music videos one day each week and take
time to pray and to discuss how the media contributes to each family
members understanding of sex and violence.
Titled Renewing the Mind of the Media, the paper
acknowledges the medias culture-forming impact and its great
potential for good. The media has the power to shape human destiny,
Auxiliary Bishop Michael Cote of Portland, Maine, told NCR, but it
also has its dark side.
Cote, who headed a subcommittee of the bishops
Communications Committee that drafted the document, said he thought the central
message, pornography harms the human person who is made in Gods
image, would be well received.
The responsibility for parents, he said, is to become more
reactive to what their children see, read and listen to.
Although the bishops adopted the statement by a vote of 207-11,
several criticized its wordiness, bad writing and lack of documentation.
Urgently needed
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Brooklyn quoted sentences that
he felt were overwritten or lacked clarity. An example: Sexuality offers
the prospect of the most fulfilling experience of this drive toward social
communion.
If thats what the media thinks the bishops see as the sex
drive, then weve got nothing to worry about, Sullivan said
with a laugh.
Auxiliary Bishop Peter Rosazza of Hartford, Conn., also critical
of the documents composition, said that no document should be addressed
to the media before it had first met the standard of the finest articles
in the Catholic and secular press. But Baltimores Cardinal William
Keeler said that the statement was urgently needed, even in its current
form.
Citing the $6 billion U.S. pornography industry, Keeler said:
We know from parents whats happening in movies, TV and on the
Internet. The cardinal also said the National Council of Churches and the
National Association of Evangelicals are looking at the same issues and are
ready to approve similar statements. He added that Jewish and
Muslim leaders are willing to support our position taken here.
The bishops statement, which made no mention of guns nor of
the teaching of nonviolence, was adopted the day the Presbyterian Church (USA)
took a first step against violence by asking its members to remove guns from
their homes.
Asked by NCR whether he could foresee a day when the U.S.
bishops might confront the National Rifle Association, Cote said: They
are part of this reality.
At a news conference after the vote, Bishop Robert Lynch of St.
Petersburg, Fla., said the document was meant to include all violence from soft
porn to murder. He pointed to the Jonesboro, Ark., case in which two boys are
charged with killing four girls and a teacher at school this spring and asked:
Where did they learn that from?
Keeler said that support for the bishops suggestions exists
in both Hollywood and New York, where he and Archbishop John Foley have made
several visits to entertainment industry executives. Foley heads Romes
Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
A new effort to communicate the churchs more than 100-year
history of social teaching won the bishops support by a vote of 213-5.
The 17-page paper emerged from three years of work by the Domestic Policy,
Education and International Policy committees. The three committees convened a
30-member task force headed by former Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul and
Minneapolis.
The task force found that in too many classrooms the values,
principles and lessons of the churchs social teachings are vague
... unclear ... unlearned. The task force is promoting a new effort to
infuse the tradition from preschool through graduate school and to link service
and action, charity and justice.
Teaching falls short
In an interview with NCR, Roach said that sermons and
classroom teaching had fallen short and that priests and teachers had failed to
use the churchs resources to advance its social teachings. Many
instructors in Catholic institutions would fail, he said, were they to be
tested on church teaching on assisted suicide, the death penalty, a just wage
and working conditions or a just war.
They feel uncomfortable teaching a topic about which
they find themselves inadequately prepared, Roach said. Some are selective in
sharing only that part of church social teaching with which they agree, he
said.
But no one can treat this issue as if it were an
option, he added. With preparation, he said, any teacher should be able
to spell out the seven broad principles of Catholic social teaching as outlined
by the bishops:
- the life and dignity of the human person;
- the call to family, community and participation;
- the rights and responsibilities of persons;
- the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable;
- the dignity of work and rights of workers;
- the love of neighbor;
- the care for Gods creation.
Roach said that schools like the University of St. Thomas in St.
Paul, Minn., had programs in place for Catholic school instructors. Materials
from the bishops conference will be made available both in publications
and on the Internet, he said.
Pax Christi speaks out
When Pax Christi hosted a reception for the bishops on the subject
of nuclear deterrence and its place in Catholic teaching, only 10 bishops came,
including the Pax Christi USA president, Bishop Walter Sullivan of Richmond,
Va., and former president Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary of Detroit.
A number of nuns attended, as did some officials of the
bishops conference. Also attending were two protesters from upstate New
York who stood outside the hotel for two days to call attention to religious
and laity imprisoned for protesting the School of the Americas, which trains
Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning, Ga.
All had come to hear Douglas Roche, Canadas former
ambassador to the United Nations Disarmament Conference, who is adviser on
security issues to the Vaticans mission to the United Nations.
Roche lauded the 80 Pax Christi bishops who had signed the peace
movements statement condemning nuclear deterrence (NCR, June 19).
He said the strictly conditional moral acceptance of nuclear deterrence, which
the bishops allowed in their 1983 peace pastoral as an interim step to
progressive disarmament, has lost its legitimacy.
He urged the prelates to withdraw that acceptance, given the
recent presidential decision directive on nuclear policy, made public last
December. He said that under the directive, Washington will continue to rely on
nuclear arms as the cornerstone of national defense.
Roche said that the government has announced its Stockpile
Stewardship Program by which it will continue to develop, test and rely upon
nuclear deterrence well into the next century.
The bishops have had their 1983 letter thwarted, Roche
told NCR. They need to review their position in the light of the
nuclear states deliberate retention of such weapons in a post Cold War
era. ... The bishops are compromised if they stay silent in the face of this
new situation.
Pax Christis Sullivan said that the bishops would be heard.
To have had 80 bishops read and sign this in a few weeks is the greatest
sign-on weve ever had, he said.
The signers represent about 50 percent of the bishops who are
members of Pax Christi and a quarter of all the bishops. Gumbleton said:
A good number of bishops dont sign anything, and there are a good
number who wont work outside the conference. Sullivan and Gumbleton
said they hoped the deterrence issue might win more adherents before the
bishops meet again in November.
Roach said he was not trying to provoke an individual crisis of
conscience among the bishops but only to spotlight the enormous pastoral
concerns around this question. ... Were talking about the destruction of
Gods creation, he said.
Under the direction of Portland Archbishop John Vlazny, the
bishops broke into regional groups to try to come up with creative ideas for
iNCReasing the practice of confession. According to the reports
following those meetings, one bishop, who was not identified, suggested
improving examination of conscience. Within the context of communal
reconciliation services, most examinations were so general, the bishop said,
that a serial killer could slip through without feeling any
sorrow.
Others suggested opening confessionals in malls or in large public
places. Some wanted the church publicly to confess its sins of racism, sexism,
discrimination and anti-Semitism.
Many called for the extension of confession hours beyond the usual
30 to 60 minutes on Saturday. We give signals of our
non-availability by limiting times available for confession, said Vlazny,
a member of the Third Millennium Subcommittee, whose sacramental focus in 1999
is on reconciliation.
The bishops appeared to reconcile their differences with Rome by
voting 196 to 6 to submit Volume II of the Lectionary for Mass for confirmation
by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacrament.
Volume I of the lectionary, which contains the readings for
Sundays and Feast Days, was submitted last August and received Vatican approval
last October.
The presses are ready to roll; it should be in the churches
by Advent, Archbishop Jerome Hanus of Dubuque, Iowa, told NCR.
Hanus, who chairs the bishops Liturgy committee, said Volume
II, which is much larger and contains the daily readings as well as those for
rituals, will take longer to be approved, but is still expected in 1999.
However, some bishops contended that larger issues raised by the
lectionary approval process remain unresolved. After 10 years and thousands of
hours contributed by scripture scholars, translators and censors, the U.S.
bishops approved Volume I of the lectionary, only to have it rejected by Rome
over issues such as use of inclusive language. Protracted negotiations produced
a compromise version, which the bishops approved with a provision for review
after five years.
At the time, some bishops and liturgists suggested that the
Vaticans action was troubling, raising questions of why Rome rather than
the U.S. episcopacy should determine the best way of rendering texts into
English. Those concerns have been exacerbated by the Vaticans recent
decision to demand more than 400 changes in the lectionarys introduction,
and to ask that the imprimatur be lifted from a 1995 translation of the psalter
(NCR, June 19).
Bishop Sullivan of Brooklyn said he wondered whether Rome could
distinguish between mature collaboration and authority.
He called the Vatican action a matter of sheer incompetency that
undermines the enormous work and skill of this conference.
Sullivan said the veto offends the American sense of fairness.
Were not going to impose U.S. democracy on the church. Everybody
knows that. Yet there are guys here who think we have to defend the Holy See at
every turn.
Sullivan saw the Vaticans intervention in the process as an
affront to the U.S. episcopal conference and as undermining the role of
the local church.
For Auxiliary Bishop Emil Wcela of Rockville Centre, N.Y., the
critical issues preceding the 1998 meeting were the legitimacy of a
bishops conference to oversee a translation and its competency to approve
the translation. The fact that the U.S. bishops received no guidelines for the
translation of biblical text for use in the liturgy until some five years after
they had asked the Vatican to approve revised liturgical texts is
disappointing, he said.
Similar concerns were revealed in comments made about translations
during the recent Asian Bishops Synod, he told NCR. But Wcela, a
Biblical scholar who is a member of the bishops Committee on Liturgy and
on its Ad Hoc Committee on Review of Scripture Translations, said that most
bishops are eager to move on and get the new lectionary out.
It will not be everything we had hoped for, but a compromise
is better than what we had, Wcela said.
The new lectionary incorporates a revised translation of the New
Testament, available since 1986, and retains the 1970 New American Bible
translation of the Old Testament, including the psalms.
In cases where the original text was not gender specific, certain
words and phrases (such as whoever and anyone) were
used in previous translations approved by the bishops to achieve greater
inclusivity. But Rome insisted on more literal translations of scriptural texts
in preparing the revised edition of the lectionary.
While few bishops seemed delighted with the compromise and few
were willing to talk about what had gone on in their closed door meetings prior
to the June open session, most said they expected a new lectionary on their
altars by Nov. 29.
When presenters of the bishops paper on Catholic social
teaching announced that a Spanish version of the text would be available within
a few weeks, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati coyly posed what he
termed a friendly inquiry.
Do we have conference principles to follow when we translate
into Spanish?
The response came in loud laughter.
National Catholic Reporter, July 3,
1998
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