Essay

Can the Catholic Faith Be Negotiated?

After years of cooperation with the "learned societies," American bishops are finding it increasingly difficult to ignore that their favored academic groups are hostile to the teachings of the Church.

Churchgoers know that a marriage in which one party is notoriously unfaithful means a disturbed household and estranged family relations.

Who began the fight against Catholic teaching and discipline?

Was Archbishop Lipscomb not concerned that the opening address of this same convention condemned the very idea of a priest-centered Eucharist as "inadequate" and "defective?"

"What a wasteland is the professional Catholic theological community as represented by CTSA."

When Rome objected to American practices, the NCCB--at the behest of one learned society or another--usually sought dispensations from Rome's higher standards.

"The whole world groaned to find itself Arian."--Fifteen hundred years later, it is John Paul II who groans about dissenting Catholic elites and bishops who give them succor.

A wise priest-historian, who was better known fifty years ago for pastoral accomplishments than for written chronicles of bygone days, liked to tease his bishop friends with the observation that the recurring mistake of Mother Church was her penchant for making ill fated alliances with seemingly powerful political leaders. In those days, he had in mind Bourbon kings, Latin American presidents, and German chancellors--with or without their plebiscites. Long before Vatican II one of his favorite bon mots on the American scene was the following: "We send priests to Washington, DC to represent the Church to the nation's capital, only to see them end up representing the Washington culture to the Church, usually recommending ideas that the world has tried and found wanting."

Msgr John Patrick Monaghan died in 1961, before the Second Vatican Council, but had he lived another ten years to observe the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) in action, his one-liners would have become more legendary. He would have found it hilarious that a national bishops' conference would take authority away from diocesan bishops, at just about the same time that the American government was returning authority to the governors of the fifty states. He would also have been somewhat amused at the quasi-indissoluble wedding--forsaking all others--between the body of bishops and the post-conciliar creations commonly known as the "learned societies." Monaghan would have been among the first to notice that one of the parties entered this union with intentions "contra bonum magisterii." Even today, tribunal judges can find that the relationship between these parties from 1966 onward was marred by recurring actions against, or evasions of, authentic Catholic teaching and norms, perpetrated by leading members of the Catholic Theological Society, of America (CTSA), the Canon Law Society (CLS), and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU).

Msgr. John Monaghan, a prominent "labor priest" well ahead of his time, nonetheless knew the difference between the social teaching of the papal encyclicals and the faith-propositions of the Nicene Creed--the difference between theological speculation about circumincession or monogenesis and false doctrinal teaching about the Trinity and Original Sin, or the suggestions that Christ never planned for a Church or a pope, or that Catholics were free to use contraceptives or to receive Communion while living in mortal sin. He would dismiss such theories, as he once did, as "the wasteland of experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is he worth contradicting." Monaghan would not be amused, however, with the bold but scandalous theorizing going on in today's Church among Catholic teachers, nor with the multiple confessions of disbelief.

The contemporary schism within the Church is deeper than that reflected in the debates among different theological theorists or combative "learned societies." Pope John Paul II has remarked on this problem many times, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith only recently (January 29, 1997), pointed to its fundamental cause: "The true, deep root of dissent is the crisis of faith." Few Church leaders wish to confront this most serious threat to Catholic Christianity in modern times, or to admit the role of their bureaucracies in breaking the ties that bind baptized Catholics to their bishops. Churchgoers, however, are well aware that a marriage in which one party is notoriously unfaithful means a disturbed household and estranged family relations.

Only recently Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, recognizing a problem, traveled to Minneapolis to see what he could do to restore unity to the Church. His audience was a June 6 meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and his hope was that he could develop there a "common ground" between bishops and theologians in pursuit of the vital cause of unity. Traditionally that "common ground," at least in the United States, has been understood as comprising the Catholic faith as described by bishops united with the pope. Indeed immediately before the opening of Vatican II, in 1962, the reigning president of CTSA made it clear to a similar convention that the role of the theologian in the economy of the teaching Church was "auxiliary" and "subsidiary" to bishops. This had been the understanding of CTSA's founders in 1946.

By this time, however, Archbishop Lipscomb--sensing a radically different mood in his audience--approached his subject, as he confessed, with some "trepidation." Still he wanted CTSA to face up to the acrimonious polarization that has been occurring within the Catholic community over such "Word of God" questions as the nature of Christ and of the Church. The source of our present ecclesial difficulties, he told the theologians, was the modern tendency to attach "an aura of infallibility to all magisterial statements, or demanding intransigient allegiance to theological opinions of famous theologians"--after the manner of the Dominican/Jesuit fights in the post-Tridentine era over the relation of God's grace to man's eternal salvation.

Although Rome would likely disagree with this judgment, the Archbishop of Mobile also asserted that the present Catholic divisions are not due to religious orders, as they once were, but rather to rival professional organizations within the Church. And as if to epitomize the type of opposing forces that are causing the present Catholic difficulties, he cited "the 'heretics' of the CTSA vis-vis the ultra-montanist Fellowship of Catholic Scholars." At that point Archbishop Lipscomb, who had inherited the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's mantle as the leader of the Common Ground Initiative, paused and extended a hand as friendship to CTSA, praising the organization's members for their help in combating "the religious illiteracy that is present in our midst and at times nurtures misunderstanding and division."

Setting aside the question of whether the present divisions are due to "religious illiteracy" and "misunderstanding," or whether the battles between putative CTSA "heretics" and "ultra-montanist" Fellowship members are to blame for the present divisions, Archbishop Lipscomb's statement inspires other questions to which answers are long overdue from everyone who cares about the Church. Who began the fight against Catholic teaching and discipline? What have been the roles of the pope and the bishops in this development? What will be in the final resolution? And what is CTSA capable of doing to heal that breach, given the current orientation of its leadership?

Archbishop Lipscomb's 1997 presentation was not the first time an important US prelate, looking to assign blame for "the Catholic mess," had pointed in the wrong direction. Lipscomb's personal unhappiness with the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars is on the written record, but before him Archbishop John May, at a 1989 CTSA convention, also exculpated the CTSA membership of any responsibility. This late NCCB president assured his St. Louis audience that "you have the strong and grateful support of your bishops." Then, lashing out at critics of modern scholars as quasi-McCarthyites, who make sweeping and generalized accusations against theologians without appropriate evidence, May opined: "Very bluntly, I think the Church in the United States suffers from too many anxious warning voices that would divide bishops from theologians." In his original manuscript distributed at the CTSA meeting, the St. Louis archbishop named three scholars whom he considered irresponsible for creating "a cloud of fear that would poison the air in which we do our work." These were the philosopher Ralph McInerny of Notre Dame, the political scientist Father James Schall, SJ, of Georgetown, and the historian James Hitchcock of St. Louis University--all prominent members of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

The issue today, therefore, is not whether the NCCB likes the CTSA better than the Fellowship, nor even whether criticism of NCCB's prudential judgments is an offense on the same plane as challenging the truth of Rome's declarations of faith, but what teaching and what policies are bishops reinforcing when they claim affinity with CTSA (and CLA or ACCU) rather than with the Fellowship and other associated groups like the Catholic Social Scientists--or the American Public Philosophical Initiative or the Cardinal Newman Society? Or does marriage to one preclude liaisons with the others?

When Archbishop Lipscomb appeared last June at the CTSA convention in Minneapolis, a major CTSA address delivered at the same conference questioned whether John Paul II and the Catholic tradition are right in saying that the priesthood is reserved to men as a matter of divine law. Now this was no abstract theological disputation over grace, like the one which impelled Pope Clement VII (1592-1605) to tell Dominicans and Jesuits to be quiet. This 1997 CTSA paper was a direct challenge to the Church's doctrinal teaching on the nature of the priesthood. Was Lipscomb not concerned that the opening address of this same convention condemned the very idea of a priest-centered Eucharist as "inadequate" and "defective?" In that address Sister Mary Collins, OSB (a theology professor at the Catholic University of America), insisted that even calling the Mass "a sacrifice" reinforces the Church's mistaken notion that priestly action at the Eucharistic table is "cult-like," no matter which sex presides. Pius XII in Mediatro Dei (1947) was wrong, she averred, in saying that "the communion of the priest alone was essential to the integrity of the sacrament." In her view, the real minister of the Church's Eucharist is not the priest, but the baptized Catholic--a view which echoes Martin Luther's dictum: "We are all consecrated priests by baptism."

The CTSA has for two decades been agitating within the Church for the ordination of women. Its first favorable report on the subject appeared in 1978. Here is what one Jesuit theologian at Creighton University (Father John Sheets, who today is auxiliary bishop of Fort Wayne, Indiana) said then about that original study.

Archbishop Lipscomb surely was not unaware of this problem as he spoke to the conference of American theologians. Nor is it likely that he was unaware of what Archbishop May had said to CTSA in 1989--since he had been a priest in Mobile, and succeeded May as bishop there when the latter went to St. Louis in 1980. At the very convention at which May played the role of episcopal protector, the CTSA adopted three proposals: 1) it overwhelmingly supported Charles Curran in his contest with US bishops; 2) it called upon the Board to address the issues raised against the magisterium by Bernard Häring and 162 other German-speaking dissenters; and 3) its sitting president publicly expressed CTSA's anxiety over Rome's "profession of faith" for theologians.

By 1989 CTSA (and CLA and ACCU as well) had compiled a consistent track record of opposition to the pope and the bishops in union with him. In 1974 the CTSA president declared that the institutional Church was "out of phase with the demands of the times," adding later (in 1976) that Vatican II implicitly taught the legitimacy of dissent. CTSA published the book Human Sexuality, which was censured by the Holy See and US bishops. Its leading members have predictably opposed Rome's disciplining of dissenting theologians (even in the case of Hans Küng), and criticized ecclesiastical superior for firing a dissident nun from a major seminary. They have contributed many lectures, articles, books, and reviews to general audiences in support of dissent, and CTSA itself has conferred its highest annual award on a variety of virulent critics of Church teaching and of magisterium, such as, Bernard Cooke, Gregory Baum, and David Tracy.

One of the least remembered offenses by CTSA was its 1990 broadside against John Paul II's administration of the Church: a 4,400 word criticism of his policies. The declaration faulted the Holy See for not paying more attention to the will of episcopal conferences, for not recognizing the autonomous rights of theologians, and for narrow views on feminism and ecumenism. What distressed the CTSA was that the pope was acting as a primate, not as the head of one church within a "communion of churches." By then CTSA was pressing the US hierarchy to go beyond Roman norms and to move toward the limits of a "learning Church" agenda.

If that 1990 salvo against Rome evoked no serious rejoinder from the NCCB, CTSA's 1997 drumbeat for women priests did. In 1990 Lipscomb issued "unofficial" words of regret that episcopal decisions could not always follow CTSA's "abstract theological ideal" (if that is what it really was). But after John Paul II upped the ante on women priests, several bishops came out swinging against CTSA's 1997 barrage on the subject. Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston called the CTSA "an association of advocacy for theological dissent." He lashed out: "How pitiable it is to see the rich Catholic theological tradition put under the bushel-basket of politically-correct bromides. What a wasteland is the professional Catholic theological community as represented by CTSA." The mild-mannered new Archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, even wondered aloud whether or not CTSA's latest dissent "raises questions about the CTSA's continuing usefulness for the life of the Church."

Why did it take so long for the episcopal leadership to recognize the dangers to the Church of an extended misalliance between their conference and the leadership of the CTSA? The leadership of the Canon Law Society and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, whose influence on bishops-in-conference has been equally pernicious, are also overdue for comparable reevaluation.

Long before the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars appeared on the scene in 1977, the American hierarchy had ample warnings from Roman cardinals about misinterpretations and miscalculations by their Washington bureaucracies. The mistake of the Fellowship founders was their presumption that the Washington agencies were interested in such notices. Roman cardinals like Francis Seper, John Wright, Augustine Mayer, Jerome Hamer, Gabriel Garrone, and others rang alarms, but no one in the national Church headquarters of the US paid any heed. It was not Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the present head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but his predecessor in office, Cardinal Seper, who made this terrifying observation about bishops as early as 1972:

By the time Cardinal Seper was uttering these words, the American hierarchy was providing anti-Roman groups like the CTSA, CLA, and ACCU with favored standing within the Church. Their one-sided input and their often "abstract theological perspective" were already significant enough so that they should have have alerted the bishops who govern the Church. Much more serious, however, was the unfolding tendency of NCCB leaders to negotiate with "experts" from these groups over Roman definitions and the reach of Catholic law. One prominent bishop who sought to uphold traditional teaching reported that he was out voted 4-1 in a committee meeting with his peers, but the vote became 9-1 when the staff experts were in the room.

By the late 1960s, negotiating downward was an art form in secular society. Once the Protestant ethic began to show wear and tear, the architects of a new order--savants after the style of John Dewey--convinced opinion leaders that terms such as "the law of land," "the force of the law," and even "the law of logic" were relative terms, subject to constant reinterpretation. Visionaries and prophets once were wont to call would-be followers to a higher life, realizing that their demands would not appeal to everyone. Populists, on the other hand, looked to ease life's burdens on most people, or keep the peace by mollifying the potentially unruly; they called for more flexibility in governance and a deeper understanding of the people's pleasures and pains. The descent from Mount Sinai and the Mount of Olives was a sine qua non for these emerging populists, who thought little of the New Testament axiom "wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction" (Mt. 7:13), and were totally oblivious to the fact that civility in society requires moral virtue in the citizenry. Today few will argue that the trend of Western civilization by the late 1960s was downward toward the vulgar, the licentious, and the violent.

The Second Vatican Council never intended that the Church would follow this low road. But many Catholics have done so. A movement developed quickly in learned Catholic circles: a movement which sought to translate the princple of collegiality between pope and the bishops in governing the ancient Church into a principle of fraternity between bishops and academics in governing the post-conciliar Church. According to this understanding, it was inevitable that episcopal thinking about Catholicity would eventually converge with academic thinking. Is it not strange that Pope Pius X condemned this very idea 90 years ago? In an amazing catalogue of un-Catholic ideas called Lamentabile Sane Exitu (July 3, 1907), the last canonized pope found the following proposition repulsive: "The 'Church learning' and the 'Church teaching' collaborate in such a way that it only remains for the 'Church teaching' to sanction the opinions of the 'Church learning.'"

Unmindful of this warning, the chief organizers of the American episcopal conference turned to their established "learned societies" in 1966 for scholarly input to their post-conciliar decision-making process, and ended up following their lead. Once that first critical decision had been made, a middle-management bureaucracy grew up overnight, under the supervision of only a handful of bishops, gaining monopoly control of "Vatican II renewal." Bishops "in the field" often complained that they were excluded from having a significant impact at the beginning of decisions in process. (Similar complaints were also made by disenfranchised bishops in other countries.)

Also pushed to the fringes of the Church were those intellectuals, academics, and informed lay people who were never allowed to become Washington insiders, even if they coveted the role. Should the outsiders appeal to the NCCB president, they would be told to go through the learned societies, which by the late 1960s were rarely tuned in to Rome's wave-length. When occasionally they appealed to Rome in a formal way, they were informed that the NCCB was the proper conduit for their concerns.

The "closed shop" atmosphere which thus arose was only one aspect of a new Church problem. As soon as the learned elites discovered that consultation could easily be turned into negotiation, they insisted on trade-offs. When Church leaders showed any openness to discuss the terms under which restive groups would live cooperatively in the Catholic body, they thereby automatically transferred significant power over Catholic life to special interests--especially to those whose asocial or antisocial tendencies make them a law unto themselves.

Juridically, negotiation in any enterprise occurs between equal partners--usually over income distribution, respective areas of jurisdiction, or for the resolution of conflicts. Sovereign states negotiate with each other, or sometimes with criminals they have convicted, in order to obtain specific social benefits. On the other hand legislators of a given community--in the face of a social difficulty or crisis, and in order to secure community peace--conduct hearings with interested parties to discover facts about wrongdoing and to solicit remedies. But once a viable statute is proposed, legislators debate only with each other about the wisdom of the impending law. Unless they have been corrupted by special interests, they no longer negotiate with those who are about to be regulated.

Yet this is precisely what has happened since the American hierarchy was nationalized, and individual ordinaries became inhibited by Washington leadership. Evasions of law became widespread, experiments (which were not really experiments) proliferated throughout the Church, American norms replaced Roman norms. When Rome objected to American practices, the NCCB--at the behest of one learned society or another--usually sought dispensations from Rome's higher standards for worship and sacramental life, for the priesthood and marriage for morals and discipline. These concessions always favored freedom over obedience. (We now concede the full benefit of funeral rites to those whom their neighbors know had no faith or, in fact had despised the Church.)

The results have been lamentable. In 1960, with a 40 million Catholic population, about 28 million Catholics attended Sunday Mass regularly; by 2000, with 60 million counted as baptized Catholics, pastors will be fortunate to have 15 million regular Sunday worshippers.

Will high Church standards be continually negotiated downward? In May 1997, when Rome told the NCCB president to bring American standards for Catholic colleges up to the norms of Canon Law and of John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Bishop Anthony Pilla announced that he would renew dialogue with ACCU, even though dissent runs rampant on Catholic college and university campuses. And as if to reaffirm the established American approach to Roman restrictions, the new chairman of the USCC's Department of Education solicited forthwith "valued advice, support, and participation in local dialogues" from "CTSA, CTS ,CLSA, the Men's and Women's Conferences of Religious" about Ex Corde Ecclesiae. No other groups were invited to present their views.

We are dealing here with an old story of Church history. In the 5th century, when Arian bishops were fighting other Catholic bishops over Christ's divine Sonship, a pattern of response developed which has been repeated in many places over the centuries. Historian Philip Hughes recaps the Arian difficulty as follows:

Fifteen hundred years later, it is John Paul II who groans about dissenting Catholic elites and bishops who give them succor.

Not many months ago, the Jesuit Fathers Thomas J. Reese and Richard A. McCormick announced that their favored changes, even in doctrine, will never be ratified by John Paul II (whom they consider reactionary) nor by his successor (who may make the present pontiff look like a "liberal"). Yet collegiality, they believe--that is, the mitigating influence of episcopal conferences on the Vatican (and Jesuit influence on local bishops)--will in the long run institutionalize their idea of Vatican II renewal.

"Ultra-montanist" may no longer be the term of opprobrium that it was in the late 19th century, when loyalty to the pope might have simply meant an oath of allegiance to the Papal States, not a conviction that the Pope's teaching of Christ's Resurrection was true. Today, when John Paul II is accused by leaders of the "learned societies" of undoing Vatican II, or of publishing a serenely orthodox Catechism of the Catholic Church, or of expecting those engaged in the ecclesiastical disciplines to profess the Catholic faith, standing with him at the foot of his cross may well be the proper exercise of "the obedience of faith" (Rom. 1:5) normally expected of all believing Catholics. If a living martyrdom is the price of being Catholic, then so be it.

Msgr. George A. Kelly is president emeritus of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars