U.S. Bishops Side With the Vatican--or Do They?

Dissent versus authority, liberals versus conservatives, the Vatican versus Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle and Father Charles E. Curran of Catholic University, even Pope John Paul II versus the American Catholic Church. For months the media have been chronicling conflicts in the Catholic Church in terms of dramatic dichotomies. Everything was supposed to come to a head at the meeting of U.S. Catholic bishops last week in Washington.

Such neat, paired-off terms are, at one and the same time, virtually unavoidable and highly unsatisfactory. Unavoidable, because there are genuine conflicts among Catholics about how they understand their church. Unsatisfactory, because scholarly dissenters like Curran do not deny the need for church authority; because bishops who are conservatives on some issues may be liberals on others, and because Rome’s disciplinary measures are not simple cases of good guys versus bad.

But if the task of sorting through these events is difficult to begin with, the bishops have added to the confusion. Confronted by questions agonizing many Catholics, the bishops’ meeting sent two different, almost contradictory messages.

Message One was conveyed by vote and gesture as much as by word. On no less than eight occasions, for example, Cardinal Bernard Law, the U.S. Catholic churchman most closely identified with the Vatican’s recent “crackdown,” was a top contender for an elected position. All eight times, he was defeated. The newly elected president and vice president of the bishops’ conference, Archbishops John L. May of St. Louis and Daniel P. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, are likely to maintain the continuity of the bishops’ national policies. In a vote that defied ordinary protocol, the bishops chose an auxiliary bishop from Brooklyn, Joseph M. Sullivan, rather than Los Angeles’ Archbishop Roger Mahony, to head a major committee. A number of bishops said this reflected a distrust of Mahony, who has sided with Law and other critics of the U.S. church on questions of internal church discipline.

Message One was also expressed in the bishops’ unprecedented discussion, in closed session, of the Vatican’s stripping of key powers from Hunthausen. A number of important bishops did not even want that discussion on the agenda. They lost. Hunthausen’s telling replies to the charges were distributed to the bishops and released to the press. The discussion itself was frank, sometimes emotional, and all in the presence of Archbishop Pio Laghi, the papal representative.

Message One was further expressed in numerous small ways, above all by the warm personal support that Hunthausen encountered on every side. It was expressed in the opening address of the conference president, Bishop James W. Malone, when he acknowledged the danger of a growing “disaffection” among Catholics from Vatican leadership, and when he insisted that serious questioning is a sign of life in the church.

But what was the content of Message One? In diverse ways, the vast majority of bishops were affirming what Malone reported to the extraordinary synod last year in Rome: The American church is “basically sound.” It faces problems, serious ones, but the direction it has been moving is correct. No dramatic change in leadership or leashing of its national conference is called for. In circumstances where pastoral sensitivity comes into conflict with strict legality, the bishops want to be able to reach out to those suffering or excluded, even if this sometimes risks a blurring of church teaching. At the very least, the bishops want to be able to make “judgment calls” on the spot, without second-guessing by Rome.

In some respects, Message One was limited. Hunthausen’s case turned on issues of pastoral judgment, not theological doctrine. But here Message One seemed clear: We have something less than confidence in Rome’s understanding of America. Vatican interventions of the Seattle variety are costly.

What the bishops said to Rome stood in marked contrast, if not exactly contradiction, to what they said to the American public. That was Message Two, and it was conveyed in Malone’s “personal statement”--made with conference approval--about the Hunthausen case.

Malone’s statement led by affirming “unreservedly” the bishops’ loyalty to the Pope. While declaring that the bishops’ conference had “no authority . . . to review, much less judge,” a case involving a diocesan bishop and the Holy See,” it went on to emphasize how “carefully and charitably” the Vatican proceeds in matters like these. The established procedure was carried out. The decision “deserves our respect and confidence.”

Careful readers of the bishop’s statement would have detected that it was something less than unqualified siding with Rome. To emphasize loyalty with the Holy Father doesn’t automatically mean agreement with the Vatican’s every action. To say that the procedures were carried out “in accord with general principles of Church law” doesn’t quite add up to saying that those procedures are fair.

There was even better evidence of the bishops’ desire not to take sides in the Hunthausen case. An earlier draft of the Malone statement had included two precise references to the justice of the Holy See’s proceedings and decision. These were deleted after strong objections from bishops who believed Hunthausen had been wronged. The same bishops put much store into another alteration: A sentence was added offering the conference’s good offices for resolving the Seattle dispute.

Meanwhile, it is important to ask why the disparity between Message One to Rome and Message Two to the public.

“The best we could do” was the explanation numerous bishops gave of Message Two. In part, the phrase simply acknowledges a reality: The American hierarchy is divided. Any expectation of out-and-out backing for Hunthausen was never in the cards. Nonetheless, Message One had approximately two-thirds support. Behind “the best we could do,” it turns out, is an instinctive assumption that the bishops’ first priority in any controversy involving Rome must be to assure the Pope of their loyalty. Among themselves, the bishops can express fraternal solidarity. Between themselves and Rome, they can signal points of difference. But before the public, they must speak through a filter of loyalty oaths. The blunt acknowledgements of Vatican shortcomings heard in private are publicly buried under ritual protestations of unity with Rome.

The consequence is a kind of double language, which to some some segments of the church carries a whiff of Iron Curtain doublespeak. Is this necessary? Is it healthy?

Some bishops, of course may feel that the effectiveness of Message One depends on the submissiveness of Message Two. But it would be a terrible mistake to think that the bishops hew to this line out of calculation or cynicism. Ultimately, their attitude goes much deeper.

The bishops’ attitude toward Rome resembles the attitude that American Catholics in general used to have toward the United States. They felt an overwhelming need always to prove their loyalty to their nation and culture. It is a sign of vitality, Malone said in his opening address, that American Catholics have “grown beyond” that need and “have moved into a new willingness to criticize our culture.”

It will be a similar sign of vitality when the American bishops no longer feel the parallel need to prove their loyalty to the papacy at every turn and can confidently offer mature criticism of the Vatican.