Changing Times : Catholicism Beset With Uncertainty

American Catholics

Winds of Change

First of Two Parts

For most of their history in America, Roman Catholics have looked to the Old World for roots, to the Pope for unquestioned authority and to their priests to run the parishes.

Today, few of the faithful take it for granted that Father knows best.

Since the Second Vatican Council, which stretched from 1962 to 1965, American Catholicism has become a pluralistic church in a pluralistic society. Gone is the image of a church tethered to European immigrant communities.

But if the winds of change from Vatican II stirred Catholics to enter the mainstream of American society, they also blew in a gale of new challenges and a confusing cross-current: ambiguity about authority, and uncertainty over beliefs.

Change of Attitude

The slogan Roma locuta, causa finita (“Rome has spoken; that settles the matter”) has in the minds of many been relaxed to “Rome has spoken; now we’ll see what we think about the matter.”

“It is one church but there are many manifestations of it on the American continent,” says a new study of American Catholic parishes. “Sometimes the response to Vatican II is precisely what has given new life to a parish; sometimes it is the factor that has torn the parish asunder.”

By most accounts, the Roman Catholic Church in America is healthy. With 52.5 million members--nearly one of every four Americans--it is the largest and fastest-growing religious body in the country. This growth has been fueled by the fact that Latinos, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the nation, now account for nearly a third of the U.S. Catholic population--as many as 17 million, according to church and census officials.

But like other mainstream religions, the church is also facing a host of issues that raise questions about its ability to adapt to these changing times:

--Despite the growth of 5 million new members since the turn of the decade, one in four Catholics is non-practicing. Today, 40% of young people aged 15 to 29 stop going to Mass and drift away from church life.

--Although they provide quality education, Catholic schools, with an enrollment of 3.6 million, are declining in students and funds (but holding steady in total number).

--There are fewer and fewer priests, nuns and religious brothers, and the gap is expected to widen. “We are careening toward a fantastic shortage,” said Father Thomas P. O’Malley, a Catholic university president.

--Divorce rates among American Catholics now approximate the national average, and members accept their church’s teachings on sexual mores with qualifications--if at all.

“Christian history bulges with examples of Catholic leaders who flouted Catholic teaching before cheering crowds,” Father George William Rutler, a New York City pastor, has observed wryly, “but the modern situation is unique in its cases of individuals who parade devout obedience to a Catholicism of their own definition.”

More and More Alike

And for all their historical, theological, liturgical and social differences, Catholics and Protestants are looking more and more alike these days, according to the Notre Dame study of Catholic parish life, “The U.S. Parish 20 Years After Vatican II.”

The survey looked at church attendance, age, changes of denominations, marital patterns, family size and demographic location and found that stereotypes about Roman Catholics and Protestants often don’t fit.

“The people who participate in . . . the ministries of Catholic parishes are not too distinguishable from Protestant Americans--with all their strengths and weaknesses,” the study said. “For all the triumphs and tragedies that it signals, the profile of its peoples tells us that Roman Catholicism in the 1980s is another mainstream church.”

This “Protestantization” of the Catholic Church will continue, predicts historian David O’Brien. But it cuts both ways; he also sees the “Catholicization” of Protestantism: “Coalitions are forming, lines are blurring. . . .”

Beyond that, said the professor of history at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., “the geography of American Catholicism is now hard to map.”

Value in Diversity

There are values in diversity, and a richness to the mosaic of American Catholicism that appeals to many.

Actor Michael Moriarty said he likes the Catholic Church because it “has salt in it. . . . It has layers of contradictions. . . . The church is an image of humanity in its ugliness as well as beauty.”

Mary Durkin, a theologian and lecturer on marriage and family life, said she likes the church because of its “view of sexuality as a positive force in human experience.”

Yet, said the sister of sociologist-priest Andrew Greeley and the mother of seven, the church’s popular image is a cold shower on the subject of sex.

“Whenever the church is mentioned in relation to sex,” Durkin said, “we hear, ‘Don’t practice birth control.’ ‘Premarital sex is wrong.’ ‘Divorce is bad.’ I’m tired of it. We never hear any positive ideas on the critical issue in everyone’s life, that is, how do I live my sexuality?”

Indeed, nowhere in the life of the American Catholic Church is there more ferment--and public attention--than in the realm of sex and marriage:

From Pope Paul VI’s ill-received and largely ignored 1968 encyclical condemning artificial birth control methods, to increasing divorce and remarriage, to the current furor over whether the Vatican used overkill in demanding retractions from 24 nuns who signed a much-publicized statement saying that legitimate differences exist among loyal Catholics about the morality of abortion, standards of personal morality and family life are at issue.

A Dominant Theme

“The 1980s have been absolutely dominated by abortion,” said O’Malley, president of John Carroll University in Cleveland. Calling the Vatican fuss over the nuns’ apparent insubordination to church authority “much exaggerated,” he added:

“It’s using a blunderbuss to shoot a few ants. . . . I wish the whole thing would go away.”

Greeley, a prolific writer of steamy Catholic novels and popular theology, says that, correctly understood, the Catholic view of sex is “sacramental.” Pope John Paul II’s most important theme, according to Greeley, is “that sacramental view of sex--that in sexual passion we get a glimpse of God’s passion for us.”

By that, Greeley explained in an interview, he means God is like a lover and that people understand the passion and commitment of God through experiencing sex.

But, Greeley added, most Catholics today no longer feel themselves bound to the rules the church lays down for them about sex because they do not believe the church knows what it’s talking about.

Ineffective Rulings

Added Durkin, an author with a doctorate from the University of Chicago Divinity School: “The rules didn’t work. . . . Church statements on sexual morality are ineffective.”

Indeed, the church’s official ban on artificial birth control no longer seems to trouble the eight out of 10 regular Catholics who told National Opinion Research Center pollsters that they disregard it--nor the many priests who counsel parishioners who practice contraception that, after searching their consciences, they may take Communion, thus deliberately disobeying the papal directive.

“There is a contraceptive culture being promoted, and it’s a sad, sterile thing,” Father Joseph A. O’Hare wrote in a magazine column called “Gray Matter: Issues That Are Neither Black Nor White.”

“But why can’t we give this itchy little controversy a period of benign neglect?”

Meanwhile, more than 5 million divorced Catholics have remarried outside the church. They too, “on a case-by-case basis,” may receive the sacrament, according to the chaplain of the North American Conference of Separated and Divorced Catholics.

And the basis for obtaining an annulment--a determination by church judges that no valid marriage existed, thus allowing the partners to marry in the church--has been so loosened that about 60% of all divorced American Catholics now have grounds for annulment.

Debate over abortion and the U.S. bishops’ high profile in the anti-abortion movement have caused a heavy rain of fire on both the prelates and their critics. That issue reached white heat last summer during the height of the national election campaigns when several prominent bishops leveled pointed criticism at Catholic politicians who said they were personally opposed to abortion but refused to work for its legal prohibition.

In a statement last August that fueled religious politics, Bishop James W. Malone, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “With regard to many issues, of course, there is room for sincere disagreement by Catholics and others who share our moral convictions, over how moral principles should be applied to the current facts in the public policy debate.”

Exception Noted

Then he went on to make an exception: Catholics are not allowed to disagree with the position of the Catholic hierarchy that abortion is always morally wrong.

Surveys show that most Catholics still personally disapprove of abortion, as does a majority of Americans. But the polls also indicate that a growing majority of U.S. Catholics considers abortion morally acceptable under some circumstances, such as rape, incest or serious fetal defects.

“We cannot continue to be told that there is no complexity” to human life issues or that a matter like abortion “has a single history as an ethical issue,” says the Assn. for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, a small but influential group of liberal Catholic theologians and scholars.

Winning the hearts and imaginations of the faithful in the pews--while satisfying Rome--is no easy task for the hierarchy in an age of independent Catholic thinkers.

But while the laity is voicing its views in the church, the clergy is moving into the world.

Getting Into Politics

Bishops, in particular, are exercising their political muscle and doing things undreamed of 20 years ago. If they can’t successfully tell the faithful how to live their personal lives, then maybe at least the prelates can catch the ear of the Administration on how to run the government.

“Abortion, nuclear war, Central America, the domestic economy--these four issues are at the heart of national political debate. And you can’t deal with them without talking about the Roman Catholic Church,” Father J. Bryan Hehir, a staff member of the U.S. Catholic Conference, said to a group of journalists in Cambridge, Mass., last summer.

Indeed, in recent years American bishops have issued pastoral statements on racism, war and peace and the U.S. economy. They have testified before Congress on these and other social justice issues, such as U.S. involvement in Central America and the protection of the unborn. On the eve of the U.S. Senate vote last March on funding for the MX missile, the president of the U.S. Catholic Conference sent a letter to each member of Congress, urging a negative vote.

Met With Reagan

And last June, eight influential bishops were closeted with President Reagan for more than four hours while they told him they disagreed with him on domestic budget cuts, arms control and Central American policy, but hailed his pro-life support and tuition tax credits.

Malone, president of the U.S. bishops, defended his colleagues’ extensive penetration into public affairs before a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last month.

The issues nowadays are “filled with moral content” and can’t be settled for the well-being of humanity simply on technical grounds, Malone told the editors.

In other words, the swelling moral ramifications of modern technology from genetic surgery to nuclear winter, from in vitro fertilization to “Star Wars” defense planning, have moved the focus of religious intervention into the public arena.

Of course, not all Catholics are happy with these winds of change.

Criticism Expressed

In a recent talk at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in Los Angeles, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Long Beach) criticized the current draft of the bishops’ pastoral letter on the American economy. It projects “an over-reliance on the ability of government to solve our problems,” he said, adding that it also overemphasizes political particulars.

“We ought to be careful in recognizing that there are areas of specific moral teaching in which the church has a tremendous authority . . . but that is limited to those areas,” said Lungren, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown Law School.

But the very fact that Lungren was free to debate and criticize the church hierarchy in a forum sponsored by the Archdiocesan Peace and Justice Commission--and that his comments were published in the official diocesan newspaper--illustrate just how far diversity of opinion and lay dissent are tolerated these days.

J. Brian Benestad of the department of theology at the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania, thinks bishops would get much further if they would pursue justice by evangelizing, “by explaining and promoting virtue as well as through educating the faithful in Catholic social teaching.”

Pope, Vatican Council

Taking partisan policy positions is primarily the role of the laity, Benestad wrote in the conservative publication Catholicism in Crisis, citing the Pope and the Second Vatican Council as his authorities.

In fact, during the 1980s, John Paul II has cracked down on priests and nuns involved in political parties or holding government office, asking them to give up either their office or their religious title.

In this country, the papal edict meant that Jesuit Father Robert F. Drinan abruptly ended his campaign for a sixth term in the U.S. Congress in May, 1980; Father Robert H. Williams of Detroit was suspended after serving as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention last year but was reinstated after agreeing to give up politics; and two religious sisters, Arlene Violet, Rhode Island’s attorney general, and Agnes Mansour, secretary of social services in Michigan, resigned from their orders last year rather than submit.

But the Pope’s barring of priests and religious workers from political office doesn’t signal a retreat from Catholic social doctrine or the church’s political role, insists Richard P. McBrien, chairman of Notre Dame’s theology department.

‘A Matter of Prudence’

“It is a matter of prudence,” McBrien explained. “There is an inherent ambiguity. . . . Votes can be easily misunderstood. . . . When official religious people take a political role, more often than not you’ve got trouble. . . . They tend to speak about ‘proximity to the Divine’. . . . Nuns, priests, bishops and Popes are seen to have a more official image that is more obvious and representative than lay persons.’ ”

That argument notwithstanding, U.S. bishops are prone in the 1980s to speak their mind forcefully on political matters when they feel moral questions are at stake.

And what seems to upset a lot of people is that some bishops appear selectively outspoken, like John J. O’Connor, archbishop of New York, who was recently named to become a cardinal. Last summer, he tangled vociferously with Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo over their views on abortion.

O’Connor and Archbishop Bernard F. Law of Boston--also a cardinal-designate--seem typical of the “strong man” image of American prelate that John Paul has appeared to favor in recent U.S. appointments.

Different From Spellman

To be sure, O’Connor is not Cardinal Francis Spellman, whom National Catholic Reporter columnist Tim Unsworth described as ruling New York and the American church “with an iron crosier” from 1939 until his death in 1967.

But, Greeley maintained, “O’Connor demands and does not listen; he is a throwback to Spellman’s era.” O’Connor, the Navy’s former chief of chaplains and a retired rear admiral, doesn’t realize that “Manhattan Island is not a battleship,” Greeley quipped.

Nevertheless, Greeley contended that in the mid-1980s, a bishop “almost has to talk out of both sides of his mouth.” There is a “horrendous inconsistency,” Greeley said, because of the structure of the church--requiring loyalty to Rome on the one hand and to fellow bishops on the other.

That structure, the long shadow of the Second Vatican Council, encourages collegiality, the concept of church leaders consulting together in decision-making rather than relying on a single authority. That emphasis is still exerting powerful changes in the American Catholic Church today.

Leadership Style

The concept of collegiality embodies the difference in the leadership styles, for example, between Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, and how he runs the Archdiocese of Chicago, and the way his predecessor, Cardinal John Cody, ran it. Cody was considered by many veteran Catholic watchers as the last of the old-style autocrats; Bernardin is viewed as the epitome of the new collegial, democratic, “philosopher-prince.”

But even the well-liked Bernardin has to handle the question of national versus universal Catholicism gingerly.

As an example of his knack for diplomacy, Bernardin--chairman of the drafting committee of the U.S. bishops’ well-publicized 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace--skillfully answered Pope John Paul II’s pointed questions about the document and how it dovetailed with statements by other national hierarchies. At the same time, Bernardin held fast to the American bishops’ view that the morality of nuclear deterrence as a policy for peace is a matter of serious doubt.

Next: Fueled by an explosion of Latino faithful, the Catholic Church faces growing pains even as the number of priests, brothers and nuns continues to dwindle.