Column Salt of earth was in the audience
By TIM UNSWORTH
An early October, I betook myself to
Chicagos Loyola University to a Commonweal Forum, titled The Crisis
of Liberal Catholicism and sponsored by the Commonweal Foundation and
Loyola University.
This year Commonweal magazine celebrates its 75th
anniversary. According to the Forum program, it was founded by lay people in
1924 in an effort to bridge the gap between Catholicisms
19th-century animus against the modern world and the American Catholic
experience. Although described by the Chicago Tribune as
liberal, in recent years Commonweal, along with the Jesuit
weekly America, has drifted toward the center. At the forum itself, the
speakers jibes were aimed at the notoriously liberal and
pessimistic publication, the National Catholic Reporter, a view
that defines the crisis under discussion more than much of what the panelists
had to say.
NCRs Special Report Writer, Robert McClory, has
already provided a detailed report on the forum. My observations are akin to
those of the color commentator on an NFL game.
Although attendees had to drop $15 to hear about the crisis in
liberal Catholicism, the Rubloff Auditorium was packed. An overflow crowd had
to watch it on TV in an adjoining room -- all this in spite of the fact that it
was no sound byte. With one potty break, it lasted three-and-a-half hours.
There were enough leftover words to feed several forums. Minnesotas
Cro-Magnon governor, Jesse Ventura, would have been baffled by those
weak-minded people who would have reduced his one-dimensional mind
to rubble with just a few adjectives.
You could have paved the floor of heaven with the baldpates of
many of the attendees. The committee could have used Medicare cards as IDs. At
70 myself, I think I knew about half the crowd, many of whom were pushing
80.
I could have talked all night to this wonderful group, most of
whom were probably putting their kids through college during Vatican II. These
were the people who stood up at their parish forums, faculty meetings and union
halls to give some inspiration to their fellow Catholics on issues such as war
and peace, racism, labor issues, euthanasia, birth control, abortion (before it
became the only issue), health care, Catholic higher education and other topics
that were quickly adopted by the bishops so they could lead us.
I had to leave the minute it ended to grab another bus in order to
attend an affair being sponsored by Catholic Theological Union, which was
remembering the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and his Common Ground Project.
It was Bernardins last effort to bring Catholics together. But even
before he died, his fellow cardinals were watering the spark. Sadly, too many
of the bishops have reverted to the animus that Commonweal
and other publications hoped to end. The bishops now seek a church that wants
to make rules for parish parking lots. They proclaim schism or submission
without available reconciliation. We now hear endless moaning about exhausted,
perfidious, pernicious, parasitic, contaminating liberalism -- adjectives
applied by 19th-century popes toward anyone functioning above the peasant
level.
My friend Marty was there in the front row. Later he told me that
he was happy to hear an intellectual theological discussion for a change. These
days, one has to shop for them. Although Ex Corde Ecclesiae has yet to
be formally invoked, universities have virtually ceased any discussion that
might assault the ears of the local ordinary. If a Catholic institution of
higher learning were to award an honorary degree to a Charles Curran or a
Richard McBrien, its likely that the local ordinary would absent himself
and the diocesan paper would editorialize that the institution was caked with
dry rot.
The seminar provided a lot of grist for many minds. Its
likely that one will have to wait for a transcript because much of the rhetoric
was as dense as a reserved sin. Given their age, a lot of the audience
(including me) nodded off, especially during Cardinal Francis Georges and
Peter Steinfels talks, which were doused in enormous sentences with a
zillion subordinate clauses and were delivered at a pace generally reserved for
sportscasters.
Both men were carefully prepared. If only their points were
illustrated by concrete examples, their keynote speeches might not have stuck
to the bottom of my mental pan. But there were times when I was swimming
frantically just to stay above the wordy waters.
The commentators -- John Noonan Jr., a judge on the U.S. Court of
Appeals and an author; John McGreevey, an author and associate professor of
history at the University of Notre Dame; and E.J. Dionne, also an author and
syndicated columnist -- were able to clarify most of the keynoters
arguments. But with the official church contending that one could not play off
liberal thinking against objective truth, there wasnt much wiggle
room.
Liberal values, together with American Protestantism, have formed
the Catholic church in the United States. Take marriage alone. According to
Purdue sociologist, James D. Davidson, writing in the Sept. 10 issue of
Commonweal, fewer and fewer Catholics are entering valid Catholic
marriages, especially when one partner is a non-Catholic. (In 1970, the total
number of all-Catholic marriages was 405,066. By 1995, it was down
to 293,434. Presently, there are more interfaith marriages than
all-Catholic marriages.)
When Commonweal was young, liberals banded together and
spoke in groups. There were causes such as the Catholic Interracial Conference,
peace and labor groups, and the Christian Family Movement. Today, the more
radical liberal Catholics have left the church and the moderate liberals appear
to be more individualistic, picking their way through the few ecclesiastical
needles eyes that remain.
There was a rare young man sitting next to me. He informed that he
was 35 and knew Commonweal through his parents. (He left at halftime.)
Outside the room, hundreds of young Loyola students were passing through the
lobby utterly unaware of the words being spoken. Its a good guess that
they would not be remotely aware of what was happening.
In an unpublished article, my friend John Fahey wrote that
thoughtful Catholics face one another across an ideological divide. Some
are convinced that the constructive results of the Second Vatican Council have
been largely achieved in the revision of canon law and in the Catechism of the
Catholic Church, he wrote, while others are preoccupied with what
they consider the unfinished work of the council. This latter group,
perceived as liberals, call for more adaptability in teaching, more attention
to the needs of the local church, more responsibility and authority to the
laity. Now, Fahey believes, the differences between these two interpretations
have hardened. We seem to be reverting from Vatican II-inspired people of
God to church militant.
John Fahey believes that this dichotomy will resolve itself in the
course of time, but that the time will be measured not in decades and
lifetimes, but in centuries and epochs.
Sadly, the present crop of bishops, most of whom never attended
Vatican II, tends to view the council as a great disruption. They cling to
their thrones, trying to keep their balance, while Peters rock begins to
slide underneath them. While the church continues to lose members through
death, divorce, doubt and disenchantment, it continues to appoint ordinaries
who prefer canon law to common ground. (Presently, 89 percent of bishops have
been appointed by John Paul II.)
John Fahey, who holds a doctorate in theology and has given a
lifetime of service to the church, believes that absolute individualism can be
corrosive for the church. He calls for self-organization on the part of
decentralized individuals but rejects the notion that the church can be rescued
by an infusion of priests and religious. He seeks a radius of trust
at every level in the church but particularly involving the laity.
Fahey cites Francis Fukuyama, writing in The Atlantic
Monthly last May, to the effect that true orthodoxy is part of
the problem, not of the solution. Fukuyama reminds us that human beings crave
order in their lives because they need community to be more fully human. The
logical resulting need is people who trust their pastors and pastors who trust
their bishops. The thin threads that bond these groups are the medium of
religious authority in a free, informed society.
Now sadly, according to Fahey, the same forces that demanded
freedom for the human spirit and challenged the autocratic control of political
leaders in John Paul IIs Eastern Europe are at work in the Catholic
church, and the popes centrist administration is trying desperately to
repudiate them.
Tim Unsworth writes from Chicago where he feels great in spite
of the chemo regimen.
National Catholic Reporter, October 29,
1999
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