A People Adrift

The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America

Peter Steinfels

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781439128411
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In A People Adrift, a prominent Catholic thinker states bluntly that the Catholic Church in the United States must transform itself or suffer irreversible decline. Peter Steinfels shows how even before the recent revelations about sexual abuse by priests, the explosive combination of generational change and the thinning ranks of priests and nuns was creating a grave crisis of leadership and identity. This groundbreaking book offers an analysis not just of the church's immediate troubles but of less visible, more powerful forces working below the surface of an institution that provides a spiritual identity for 65 million Americans and spans the nation with its parishes, schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, clinics, and social service agencies.In A People Adrift, Steinfels warns that entrenched liberals and conservatives are trapped in a "theo-logical gridlock" that often ignores what in fact goes on in families, parishes, classrooms, voting booths, and Catholic organizations of all types. Above all, he insists, the altered Catholic landscape demands a new agenda for leadership, from the selection of bishops and the rethinking of the priesthood to the thorough preparation and genuine incorporation of a lay leadership that is already taking over key responsibilities in Catholic institutions. Catholicism exerts an enormous cultural and political presence in American life. No one interested in the nation's moral, intellectual, and political future can be indifferent to the fate of what has been one of the world's most vigorous churches -- a church now severely challenged.

Part One

Chapter One

The Battle for Common Ground

NOT everything surrounding Cardinal Bernardin’s funeral in November 1996 testified to the vitality of American Catholicism. The cardinal himself had become convinced that the future of Catholicism in the United States was seriously threatened by acrimony, polarization, and a paralysis of leadership. He had given much of his dying energy to addressing that threat. Yet his efforts had given rise to more discord. At one dramatic moment during his funeral, those divisions suddenly erupted into view.

Three months earlier, on August 12, 1996, with the backing of twenty-five prominent Catholics, including seven bishops, the cardinal had announced an initiative to restore constructive discussion between conservative and liberal factions in the Catholic Church in the United States. A little over two weeks later, he learned that the pancreatic cancer had returned and spread to his liver. Knowing he possibly had only a few months to a year to live, he remained determined, he told close associates, to make this project, known as the Catholic Common Ground Initiative, a final priority and part of his legacy. It was, in fact, the subject of his last major public address, on October 24, some three weeks before he died.

By that time, the Catholic Common Ground Initiative had generated wide attention in both the Catholic and secular press and stirred both enthusiasm and opposition. In announcing the effort, Cardinal Bernardin had released a three-thousand-word statement, “Called to Be Catholic: Church in a Time of Peril.” The statement was the product of three years of discussions among a group of laypeople and clergy. Bernardin offered it as an accurate description of the church’s situation and a guide to the Common Ground effort.

“Will the Catholic Church in the United States enter the new millennium as a church of promise, augmented by the faith of rising generations and able to be a leavening force in our culture?” the statement had asked. “Or will it become a church on the defensive, torn by dissension and weakened in its core structures?”

The outcome, the statement went on to say, depends on whether the church can reverse the polarization and overcome the ideological litmus tests that were inhibiting candid discussion. What kinds of problems were going unaddressed? The statement listed more than a dozen, without claiming to be exhaustive:

• the changing roles of women

• the organization and effectiveness of religious education

• the Eucharistic liturgy as most Catholics experience it

• the meaning of human sexuality, and the gap between church teachings and the convictions of many faithful in this and several other areas of morality

• the image and morale of priests, and the declining ratios of priests and vowed religious to people in the pews

• the succession of laypeople to positions of leadership formerly held by priests and sisters, and the provision of an adequate formation for ministers, both ordained and lay

• the ways in which the church is present in political life, its responsibility to the poor and defenseless, and its support for laypeople in their family life and daily callings

• the capacity of the church to embrace African-American, Latino, and Asian populations, their cultural heritages, and their social concerns

• the survival of Catholic school systems, colleges and universities, health care facilities and social services, and the articulation of a distinct and appropriate religious identity and mission for these institutions

• the dwindling financial support from parishioners

• the manner of decision making and consultation in church governance

• the responsibility of theology to authoritative church teachings

• the place of collegiality and subsidiarity in the relations between Rome and the American episcopacy

The list is interesting. It includes items typically of concern to liberals in the church (women’s roles, sensitivity to minority groups, consultation and relations between Rome and the American church), along with items typically of concern to conservatives (religious education, the survival of Catholic schools with a distinct religious identity, theological accountability to authoritative teachings). The list includes problems that both conservatives and liberals equally recognize—the declining number of priests, for example—although they might diagnose the causes quite differently and offer dramatically different solutions. Areas of controversy like the quality of liturgies or the church’s political role are indicated without suggesting a particularly liberal or conservative remedy. The statement points to the gap between church teachings and the convictions of many Catholics on human sexuality without taking sides on how it should be closed.

ONE DOESN’T HAVE to search far to find support for the statement’s claim that the Catholic Church in the United States is polarized and beset by acrimony and suspicion. It is not at all unusual for leading conservative figures to suggest that liberals are preaching heresy and promoting moral corruption, and for liberals to charge that conservatives are betraying the gospel and rebuffing the Holy Spirit.

Driving this polarization of American Catholicism is a dynamic born of Vatican II and its aftermath. The drama of the Council itself sensitized Catholics, as never before, to behind-the-scenes maneuvering and to subtle shifts in church policy. Since those who had opposed the conciliar decrees remained entrenched in the Vatican, they were suspected of stubbornly sabotaging, or at least contesting, each effort to implement the Council. And rather than clearly seize the lead of the postconciliar momentum, Pope Paul VI preferred to take two steps forward, one backward, always trying to moderate the pace of change and maintain unity by placating contending factions. It was not an unreasonable strategy. But the fear that the Council’s work was being undermined and might ultimately be reversed was never dissipated. Mounting distrust fed harsher, more radical criticism, and more radical criticism fed greater resistance. Stir in the highly political, questioning, confrontational mood of the 1960s and early 1970s. Soon every Vatican pronouncement, every new theological proposal or pastoral innovation, every critical observation from left or right was scrutinized through the lens of suspicion, interpreted as a shift toward one or another extreme.

Earlier in the year in which the Common Ground Initiative was announced and Cardinal Bernardin died, two popular novels exemplified the polarization tearing at American Catholicism. White Smoke was written by the Reverend Andrew M. Greeley, a distinguished sociologist of religion and prolific author of popular fiction and wide-ranging commentary. Windswept House was written by Malachi Martin, an Irish-born former Jesuit and Vatican official. Although he had left the priesthood in 1965, Martin’s novels and nonfiction dealing with religious and geopolitical conspiracies made him a darling of some conservative Catholics (he served for a while as religion editor of the conservative biweekly National Review). Both books could best be called papal potboilers. Greeley’s conjured up the conclave called to elect a successor to Pope John Paul II. Martin’s conjured up a plot in the Vatican to force John Paul to resign.

Appearing at virtually the same time, the two books were mirror images. The liberal heroes of White Smoke are advocates of pluralism in the church who want to decentralize papal power. The villains are members of a sinister “Corpus Christi Institute.” (No informed reader could fail to think of Opus Dei, the controversial Catholic movement that flourished in Franco Spain and has formed an international elite of conservative Catholic leaders with the blessing of John Paul II.) Rich, secretive, and ultrareactionary, in league with thugs and criminal bankers, the institute has infiltrated the Vatican. In Windswept House, it is the liberal enemies of papal authority who have infiltrated the Vatican and are conniving with mysterious forces of global finance. The ultraconservative heroes are but a faithful handful, sustained by a wealthy family and forced to operate clandestinely.

What is arresting, however, is not just the symmetry but the starkness of the depictions. There is not a saving grace, for instance, among Greeley’s conservatives. When they are not patent liars and vicious criminals, they are oafs or toadies. They are complicit with a kidnapping, attempted murder, and near gang rape. A woman-hating, psychotic antiabortion militant who tries to assassinate the new pope (for being insufficiently pro-life) is thrown in for good measure.

That turns out to be mild compared to Martin’s villains. The leadership of the Catholic Church in Windswept House is riddled with rings of homosexual pedophiles and, yes, satanic covens. The novel begins with a blasphemous ritual in which high papal officials enthrone Satan within the very precincts of the Vatican. This brood of vipers is sapping the Catholic faith of millions and systematically replacing it with a humanistic enthusiasm for a new world order run by secret Masonic lodges and other shadowy string pullers. If Greeley’s Corpus Christi Institute was intended to call to mind a real organization, some of Martin’s satanic characters were thinly disguised renditions of real church leaders.

To be sure, this is the stuff of thrillers, and no one expects thrillers, even Vatican thrillers—maybe especially Vatican thrillers—to be realistic. But both these authors were also writing with didactic purposes. They were playing with characters and plots, but they were quite serious about the underlying conflict. Did they believe the bad guys were really that bad? I asked them separately, and each said yes. Historians have often viewed popular literature as a window on what is churning, often irrationally, below the surface of a society or institution. Greeley and Martin provided a glimpse into the fierce emotions—the overheated id, if you will—of American Catholicism.

THE COMMON GROUND INITIATIVE was premised on a conviction that not only was this polarization destructive, it was also deceptive. Feeding on itself, it suppressed a silent middle, made up of moderate conservatives and moderate liberals. Despite intuitive reservations, they were regularly appealed to and spoken for by more militant voices in their own camps, roped into the dynamic of mutual distrust and worst-case interpretations. The dynamic was powerful because the silent middle was by no means of one mind; yet even though the moderates who constituted it had serious disagreements among themselves, they chafed at the polarization. The initiative was meant to articulate their reservations and give them a platform on which to engage their differences while resisting the pressure to extremes.

Cardinal Bernardin was widely perceived as a leader of the liberal wing of the Catholic hierarchy as well as a skillful mediator between entrenched blocs. Both traits explained why he had gone out of his way to ensure that conservatives were visibly represented along with liberals on the committee overseeing the initiative.

Its charter members included Mary Ann Glendon, the Harvard Law School professor who had been tapped by the pope to head the Vatican’s delegation to the 1995 World Conference on Women held in Beijing. The committee also included Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, an award-winning feminist theologian. Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, who had overseen the drafting of the bishops’ controversial 1986 pastoral letter on the American economy, was on the committee, along with Bernardin himself, who had done the same for the 1983 bishops’ letter on nuclear arms. But so was Michael Novak, author and theological defender of American capitalism, who had spearheaded the opposition of politically conservative laypeople to both those documents.

The other cardinal on the committee, Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, and several of the other bishops on it were viewed as distinctly more conservative in church matters than either Bernardin or Weakland. And still other committee members had national reputations as opponents of abortion: former Pennsylvania governor Robert P. Casey had been shut out of the 1992 Democratic convention for his antiabortion views; the legal scholar and historian John T. Noonan Jr. had written critiques of legalized abortion that explained, at least in part, why President Reagan named him to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The committee had its businessman, Barry Sullivan, a Chicago banker and later public official and utilities executive in New York, and its labor leader, John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. Some of its clergy members were best known for scholarship and spirituality, others for social activism.

What was missing from this committee was certainly the firebrands, but also just the regular standard-bearers of both left and right. This was a committee of moderate liberals and conservatives, men and women with strong disagreements who could be counted on to discuss rather than denounce. And with two cardinals, two archbishops, and three bishops on the committee, along with papal favorites like Glendon and Novak and certified right-to-lifers like Casey and Noonan, it was hardly a group to start endorsing heresy.

That is what made the immediate response from other high-ranking church leaders so startling. If there was any doubt that the American church was riddled by the kind of suspicion and conflict that the Common Ground Initiative set itself the task of healing, the reception given the initiative ironically provided more than ample proof. Although Cardinal Bernardin had included other bishops and another cardinal in the Common Ground Initiative, he had not wanted it to become an official episcopal project. The initiative was going to provide a forum for contending views, and to invest that with the episcopacy’s collective authority would either put the bishops in an untenable position or remove all flexibility from the initiative’s proceedings. Still, Bernardin, always the consummate diplomat, carefully informed Rome of his intentions, specifically the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Bernardin also gave Bishop Anthony Pilla of Cleveland, then the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and all the other active American cardinals advance notice of his plans, sending them copies of the “Called to Be Catholic” document and the names of those enlisted in the effort. Bernardin knew well two standard operating rules among the Catholic hierarchy: (1) Don’t take your fellow bishops by surprise. (2) Settle differences privately rather than mount public disagreement.

WITHIN HOURS OF Bernardin’s announcement of the Common Ground Initiative, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston publicly criticized it, denouncing in particular the “Called to Be Catholic” statement, which he termed “unfortunate” and showing “an ideological bias which it elsewhere decries in others.”

“The fundamental flaw in this document,” Cardinal Law stated, “is its appeal for ‘dialogue’ as a path to ‘common ground.’ ” Yet that “flaw” could hardly be tactfully limited to the document. It was central to Cardinal Bernardin’s entire initiative.

“The church already has ‘common ground,’ ” Cardinal Law continued. “It is found in sacred Scripture and tradition, and it is mediated to us through the authoritative and binding teaching” of the church. “Dissent from revealed truth or authoritative teaching of the church,” the cardinal said, “cannot be ‘dialogued’ away. Truth and dissent from truth are not equal partners. . . . Dialogue as a way to mediate between the truth and dissent is mutual deception.”

By the usual standards of episcopal protocol, Law’s response was more than blunt; it was brutal. His rejoinder was designed to strike and strike hard. The next day Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C., issued a statement repeating Cardinal Law’s charges even more emphatically: “True ‘common ground’ is found in Scripture and tradition as handed on through the teaching office of the Holy Father and the bishops.” Talk of dialogue only obscures these realities, he warned. “We cannot achieve church unity by accommodating those who dissent from church teaching.”

Like Cardinal Law, Hickey read into the Common Ground statement the danger of determining church teaching by opinion poll. His closing salvo targeted “compromise” of the gospel and “the church’s undiluted teaching,” a remarkable rebuke to the integrity of a fellow cardinal. On August 22, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia weighed in with a similar statement, and on August 23 so did Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit. Both statements appeared on the front pages of their archdiocesan newspapers.

Cardinal Bernardin felt compelled to reply. On August 29, he released a statement composed in question-and-answer form. He provided more detail about the genesis of the “Called to Be Catholic” statement in conversations held under the auspices of the National Pastoral Life Center. Founded and directed by a New York priest, Monsignor Philip J. Murnion, the center was devoted to the improvement of parish life through consultations, publications, and research. The cardinal noted the many favorable responses his initiative had received, including ones from Bishop Pilla and other bishops. He then candidly addressed the criticism that had issued from his fellow cardinals and defended dialogue against the charge that it was a way to erode or elude church teaching.

“The primacy of Scripture and tradition is fully recognized” in the Common Ground statement, he said, and quoted its rejection of any approach ignoring the authoritative teaching office “exercised by the bishops and the chair of Peter.” Cardinal Law had wound up his critique by complaining that the centrality of Jesus, the necessary beginning of any authentic church renewal, was not introduced into “Called to Be Catholic” until the eighteenth paragraph out of twenty-seven. Without naming Law or wondering how his Boston colleague could miss something in the first, not eighteenth, paragraph, Cardinal Bernardin noted that “the statement begins by asserting that the very first condition for addressing our differences constructively must be ‘a common ground centered on faith in Jesus.’ ” This question-and-answer statement was released, as it turned out, on the day after Bernardin had learned that his cancer had returned. He was already working on the announcement he would make to the press the next day: he was dying.

ONE WOULD HAVE to go back to the nineteenth century to find such a public challenge of a high-ranking American Catholic official by equally high-ranking colleagues. Naturally people began to doubt that this campaign was entirely spontaneous. If it had been orchestrated, by whom? And why?

Rome was one answer, and Pope John Paul II’s consistent worry about departures from unpopular church teachings. But Rome did not typically react so swiftly or with such imprecise scrutiny of a suspect document. Nor did Rome ordinarily countenance, let alone encourage, public disputes between cardinals. Sometime later, moreover, Cardinal Ratzinger was reported to have expressed puzzlement at the brouhaha to an American bishop, and the pope himself encouraged Cardinal Roger Mahony to participate in the project.

A simpler, if not mutually exclusive, explanation led not to Rome but to Cape Cod. Evidently, as Cardinal Bernardin sent out advance word of his initiative, three other cardinals—Hickey, Bevilacqua, and William Baum, Hickey’s predecessor in Washington, who had gone to work in the Vatican—were on the Cape vacationing with Cardinal Law. It seems likely that they had discussed the Common Ground proposal there and determined to oppose it.

That likelihood leaves unanswered the “Why?” of these cardinals’ rebuke, and particularly the “Why so public?” Was it sheer power politics—Cardinal Law wishing to assert his emerging preeminence among the American cardinals over against Cardinals Bernardin and Mahony? Was it offended amour propre—Cardinal Bernardin, following other precedents, had given them notice of his plans but without asking for their approval? Was it the tug-of-war that had gone on for years between Bernardin and Law over whether policies for the American church should be established through the deliberation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion: Finding a Future
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright