Leniency for Disciplined Cleric Urged

Fearing further disciplinary action against embattled Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, a group of priests, nuns and lay people is calling for full restoration of the powers the Vatican removed from him because of his alleged doctrinal laxity.

“There is a feeling of urgency. We’ve got to speak out. This is the first time as a body that we have made a public statement,” Father Jerry McCloskey of St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Seattle said Tuesday.

McCloskey said in a telephone interview that 88 priests in the archdiocese had jointly issued a statement protesting the Vatican’s shifting of Hunthausen’s authority in five major areas and assigning them to a Vatican-trained auxiliary, Bishop Donald Wuerl.

Hunthausen announced last September that the Vatican had given Wuerl control over marriage annulments, liturgy and worship, moral issues, clergy training, and men leaving the priesthood.

The archbishop has denied deviating from official church teaching and said division of pastoral authority with Wuerl was “unworkable.”

McCloskey said concern about the Hunthausen case had been building since a story appeared last week in the National Catholic Register, a Catholic newspaper published in Los Angeles. Quoting unnamed “highly placed sources,” the article suggested that the Vatican had struck a “deal” to force Hunthausen into early retirement, and that a new bishop would be “phased in” to take his place.

Subsequently, Father Michael G. Ryan, vicar general and chancellor of the Seattle Archdiocese, said the Catholic Register story was “incorrect” and based on “uninformed” and “irresponsible . . . speculation.”

But McCloskey said Tuesday: “We have reason enough to believe there is some truth in that article . . . (and) anything less than the full restoration of (Hunthausen’s) faculties is not acceptable to us.”

In their statement, the priests said Hunthausen, 65, was “a faithful and orthodox teacher of the Catholic faith” and a “compassionate, appropriately firm . . . and competent” church leader.

“We believe that our archbishop has been evaluated improperly, inadequately and unjustly according to procedures that have been called into serious question by the professional association of canon (church) lawyers of this country,” the statement said.

The two-page statement was mailed to 250 area priests, McCloskey said, and 70 signed it at a meeting held on Monday. Another 18 have since added their signatures, he said.

McCloskey added that the statement has also been sent to members of the ad hoc commission appointed by Pope John Paul II to look into the Hunthausen situation. The Pope’s action followed strong concern about the unusual discipline of Hunthausen voiced by the U.S. conference of Catholic bishops at their annual meeting last November.

Russell Scearce, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Seattle, said neither Hunthausen nor the commission members--Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco and Cardinals John O’Connor of New York and Joseph Bernardin of Chicago--would make any further comment on the issue until the commission finishes its work.