A Pope Visits the Conflict Facing U.S. Catholics

Pope John Paul II, due in Los Angeles in two weeks, has already journeyed through the modern religious sensibility like the protagonist of a picaresque novel, a brave if not always popular conscience pitted against the cultural windmills of the age.

John Paul’s intellectual gifts surpass most papal predecessors. Since 1948, he has published 200 articles, several books, poems, even a play (soon to be a film), “The Jeweler’s Shop,” which explores the effect of time on the love between men and women. Few celibates take such literary risks. Yet scholarly achievements only add to larger complexities of character.

Here is a Pope who skis, hikes and swims; his physique and sturdy features convey an appetite for life not usually associated with the ascetic imagery of the office. Here is a Pope who was shot by a fanatical Turk and now travels in a car with bulletproof bubble, itself a sad, poignant symbol of his time.

Many theologians and lay Catholics view the Pope’s conservative doctrinal positions with audible dismay. The pontiff who speaks eloquently about human dignity to politically oppressed Poles and Chileans stands firm on the ecclesiastical ban of birth control devices--while millions of Catholics practice otherwise and Third World leaders worry more about soaring birth rates and hungry lives.

Here is a Pope who has condemned the deadly technology of nuclear destruction and also condemned a life-giving technology of artificial insemination. Is John Paul’s ethos of freedom irreconcilably split between political liberty and private obedience?

Father Anthony Kosnick, a Detroit theologian who speaks Polish, has an insight. In 1976 Kosnick was a guest in Krakow of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla before his elevation to the papacy. The occasion: Poland’s theological congress, held every five years.

“I expected 50 people,” Kosnick recalled. “When I arrived, there were 800 priests from all church disciplines. Cardinal Wojtyla offered Mass each morning. Two-thirds of the Polish hierarchy was there. All questions were submitted in writing. (Wojtyla) was clearly in charge. He was also chief of dialogue with the Communist Party.”

This uniformity of discipline--so different from the sprawling heterogeneity and familial squabbles of the U.S. church--partially accounts for John Paul’s conservatism. According to Kosnick, “Poland is a success story when you look at how they have endured under communism. The Polish church didn’t change much after Vatican II. Under opposition from the government, they couldn’t afford to tolerate the diversity.

“John Paul’s greatest concern is the confusion people have about faith,” Kosnick said. “It’s his conviction that he was chosen by God to bring unity to the church and to restore certainty of faith.”

As defender of the faith, John Paul has taken an approach to the 1968 birth control encyclical at odds with his immediate predecessor. In a month-long papacy, John Paul I had questioned prior doctrine in a manner that church historians widely agree had cracked the great wall of moral theology. In reference to the pill’s regulation of a woman’s ovulation cycle, John Paul I said: “A regular cycle means four days of fertility and 24 days of infertility. How on earth can it be a sin to say instead of 24 days, 28 days?”

Kosnick and others had wrestled with such questions as early as 1977. Then dean of a seminary outside Detroit, Kosnick edited “Human Sexuality,” a revisionist study of moral teaching sponsored by the Catholic Theological Society of America. In suggesting more flexible attitudes, the book stirred a controversy, as yet unresolved, by citing new scientific findings to contrast with theological positions that had been unchanged for centuries.

Today Kosnick teaches at Mary Grove, a commuter college in a black neighborhood. He assessed Vatican reaction to his book: “It’s had no impact on official teaching. If anything, it stirred Rome to react more strongly. It’s evidence to them of the corruption in America.”

That perception of “corruption” extends to the selective faith many Catholics practice in ignoring the birth control and artificial insemination documents. It may also color the Vatican’s increasing hard line on homosexuality--the orientation itself deemed “ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.”

The underlying tension is political, a long-building conflict between the monarchal tradition of Roman rule and the critical spirit of American inquiry. In matters of moral teaching, rifts between the American church and Roman curia expose deep fault lines in church governance. The Vatican’s campaign of renascent orthodoxy--Father Charles Curran’s dismissal from a tenured position in theology at Catholic University, the sanctions taken against Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen--failed to strengthen doctrinal uniformity. The Hunthausen affair provoked widespread discontent among Seattle laity.

The resolution of that crisis revealed a more pragmatic John Paul II. In spring, San Francisco Archbishop James R. Quinn, Chicago Cardinal Joseph J. Bernadin and New York Cardinal John J. O’Connor--assigned by the Vatican to mediate--met with the Pope, recommending restoration of Hunthausen’s powers, with a coadjutor archbishop, Thomas J. Murphy of Montana, to serve with Hunthausen and succeed him upon retirement. The National Catholic Reporter quoted the Pope’s response: “If this is the way you want to do it, then this is the way we will do it.”

Archbishop Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles occupies an interesting position in the unfolding drama of ecclesiastical governing. Of the nine dioceses John Paul II will visit, Los Angeles is the biggest and most diverse. With a growing Latino population, large defense industry and restive gay population, Los Angeles is the U.S. church writ large. Mahony’s positions cast him in the role of a church centrist--a prelate reflecting John Paul’s peculiar blend of political liberalism and moral conservatism.

To be conservative is not to be insensitive. In a series of 56 talks from 1979 to 1981 on the subject of sexuality and the human body, the Pope cited eloquent imagery in “The Song of Songs” and went on to discuss the genders as two “incarnations” of the same “image of God.”

In a generally sympathetic study of those lectures, theologian Mary G. Durkin noted: “Because organized religion has for so long been associated with a ‘rules’ approach to sexuality, it will be difficult for both church leaders and the general faithful to change their expectations of religion and sexuality. In the final analysis, a spirituality of sexuality,” she wrote, will prove more helpful “than the previous ‘rules’ approach.”

The majesty of a papal visit, so finely tuned to the microscopic eye of television, is an orchestrated pilgrimage designed to strengthen the faith. San Francisco gay groups, having already announced strident opposition to the papal visit, dramatize the painful chasm between a Scripture-based sexual morality and contemporary behavioral practice.

The unwritten chapter of John Paul’s papacy is the degree, if any, to which the U.S. church--so conversant in critical traditions of democratic thought--can breach that chasm.