Vatican Bid to Halt Dissent Hit : For 1st Time, a Leading U.S. Bishop Speaks Out

For the first time, a leading U.S. Roman Catholic bishop has publicly criticized the mounting Vatican effort to stifle dissent on religious matters.

Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee devoted two of his weekly columns in the archdiocesan newspaper this month to “The Price of Orthodoxy,” drawing on history to say that when the church has sought to enforce doctrinal conformity, it has led to “much cruelty,” “fear” and “suppression of theological creativity.”

Actions by Vatican

The archbishop did not refer to any recent events, but his columns came on the heels of Vatican action to sharply curtail the responsibilities of Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle and Father Charles Curran, moral theologian at Catholic University of America.

“There is a timeliness (to the essays) because of recent events,” said Gregory B. Bell, communications director for the Milwaukee archdiocese. Weakland was on retreat with priests this week and unavailable for elaboration, Bell said.

Weakland, 59, who headed the worldwide Benedictine order of monks before being appointed archbishop in 1977, has gained prominence in recent years as chairman of the American bishops’ pastoral letter on the U.S. economy. The much-debated document, subject to final approval in November, warns of the dangers of unregulated capitalism and urges greater priority for alleviating poverty.

One of the more liberal prelates in the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, Weakland openly supported in 1982 the then-fledgling sanctuary movement of churches harboring Central American refugees in defiance of federal immigration authorities. Weakland and Hunthausen were the first bishops of major dioceses to back the movement.

Though Weakland noted in his columns that all religions “have to deal with aberrations,” the archbishop maintained that the church has continued to grow by being open to new insights.

“The glory of the Catholic Church, as distinct from fundamentalism, has been its willingness (at times, it is true, with much hesitation, doubt and reluctance) to accept truth wherever it comes from and to integrate it with revealed truth, but only after a long struggle to work out apparent contradictions,” Weakland wrote.

Weakland ended his second column with a quotation from Pope John XXIII’s opening speech at the innovative Second Vatican Council (1962-65): “Often errors vanish as quickly as they rise, like fog before the sun. The church has always opposed these errors. Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays, however, the spouse of Christ (the Roman Catholic Church) prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of present day by demonstrating the validity of her teachings rather than by condemnation.”

Weakland asked in conclusion: “Was good Pope John naive? Many, I fear, think so.”

‘Purity and Integrity’

The archbishop wrote that the desire to maintain “purity and integrity of doctrine will always be with us.”

At the same time, he said, there is a need “to avoid the fanaticism and small-mindedness that has characterized so many periods of the church in its history--tendencies that lead to much cruelty, suppression of theological creativity and lack of growth.”

Weakland cited not only the Inquisition and the excommunication of astronomer Galileo but also the mid-20th Century church silencing of theologians Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar, Henri du Lubac and John Courtney Murray. Most of these “were rehabilitated and vindicated,” he said, by the Second Vatican Council.

“The problem of orthodoxy is difficult itself,” Weakland said, “but becomes even more complicated because the church always exists in a particular historical context and not in some abstract world. Civilization continues to raise new problems and challenges the church must be up to.”

Unfortunately, periods of philosophical struggle produced an inhibiting fear in addition to cruelty, he said.

“In such an atmosphere, amateurs--turned theologians--easily became headhunters and leaders were picked, not by their ability to work toward a synthesis of the new knowledge and the tradition, but by the rigidity of their orthodoxy, so that often second-rate and repressive minds, riding on the waves of fear, took over,” Weakland wrote.

‘Tolerates No Obstacle’

“Religion under such circumstances,” he continued, “then can become an ideology that tolerates no obstacle and that values ideas more than people.”

Restrictions placed on Hunthausen came amid a series of moves to tighten doctrinal controls taken by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Hunthausen confirmed Sept. 4 that he was ordered to turn over to Auxiliary Bishop Donald Wuerl certain sensitive pastoral duties--despite apparently being cleared in an earlier, Vatican-requested investigation of charges that he tolerated liberal practices in birth control, homosexuality and annulment.

However, Archbishop Pio Laghi, the Washington-based Vatican representative to the United States, said Monday that the action in Seattle “is not to be interpreted as a slap in the face.” While in Portland, Ore., for ceremonies installing the Most. Rev. William Levada as archbishop, Laghi said that the Seattle archdiocese “has done many things very well, but we have to contain all those energies in a straight line. We are not a uniform church, but we are one church.” Hunthausen and Wuerl have publicly pledged to cooperate.

Curran’s right to teach theology at Catholic University was removed this summer after the priest rebuffed Vatican efforts to alter his relatively permissive teachings in sexual ethics.

In another development this week, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a public rebuke of noted Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, saying that some of his opinions on the priesthood are “at variance with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.” A Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the action did not include any punishment but was intended as a warning to Catholic faithful that the Vatican found some of the theologian’s writings “erroneous.”