U.S. Catholics Expect More Than ‘Pay, Pray,’ Pope Told

Vatican cardinals on Friday assailed threats to family life and morality in the United States, and an American bishop told the Pope that American Roman Catholics expect more from their religion than “paying and praying.”

Theological maneuverings behind them, three dozen American bishops and Vatican prelates got down to basics with Pope John Paul II, exploring the concerns of American Catholics over issues such as marriage, divorce, sex, pornography, abortion, feminism and the role of women in the church.

The Americans dueled with a cardinal from the Curia, the church’s highest administrative body, over the granting of annulments to divorced Catholics.

For the third straight day, the Pope was an avid listener, straining to catch the quickly spoken English of the Americans, and at times asking them to speak more slowly. On Thursday, a spokesman said, the pontiff had become so engrossed in the deliberations that he was half an hour late for dinner.

Friday’s discussions underlined again the basic cultural differences between American prelates trying to preach Catholicism in a way acceptable to their society and a Vatican Curia firmly sustaining traditional church principles.

After back-room jockeying that had continued all week, the Americans won agreement to make available to the press the full texts of American and curial presentations from the eight discussion sessions completed through Friday. Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro said the participants on both sides had agreed unanimously to make the texts public.

The bishops will concelebrate Mass with the Pope this morning at the tomb of St. Peter. Then there will be two final discussion sessions and a papal address to climax the extraordinary conference called to ease strains between the 53-million-member American church and Rome.

In a strongly worded address Friday, unusual in the specificity of its language and examples, Cardinal Edouard Gagnon, the Vatican’s ranking official concerned with families, criticized American Catholics who surrender to the loose morals of the society around them.

Gagnon denounced “the degrading of moral values vehicled by cinema and TV shows, which pretend to depict normal American life.” He cited the TV series “Dallas” as an example.

Reciting social evils often denounced by the Vatican, the 71-year-old French-Canadian cleric stressed their prevalence in American society today. He decried what he called an American contraceptive mentality and called for greater education for chastity. He called too for the promotion of women within the church but warned that “ideological feminism has a deleterious influence on the family.”

‘Promiscuity Encouraged’

“A new challenge is offered to the church by the efforts of Planned Parenthood to set up school-based clinics for abortion referral and contraception,” Gagnon complained. “Planned parenthood programs and sex education in no way resolve the problem of teen-age pregnancies, but rather increase it by encouraging promiscuity.”

The American speaker in the session on the family, San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn, acknowledged the many challenges to marriage and the family in the United States, including “the growing efforts to legalize ‘marriages’ between persons of the same sex.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “the church is making serious and effective efforts to confront these challenges and fulfill its mission of evangelization.”

Inveighing against the “prevalent divorce mentality” in the United States, Gagnon said church tribunals with authority to annul marriages had become overworked there.

“Women religious can be very helpful in dealing with marriage cases, but we have to be careful that their tender hearts do not play tricks on them,” he said.

‘Dating Services’

Some church ministries to divorced Catholics who are not free to remarry, he said, have “degenerated into dating services.”

Italian Cardinal Achille Silvestrini criticized the American church for granting too many annulments.

“One may deduce,” he said, “that various tribunals in the United States have introduced their own method, not fully in conformity with the Code of Canon Law in instructing marriage cases.”

In 1985, Silvestrini said, of 45,632 annulments granted by tribunals around the world, 36,180 were in the United States.

In response, Vatican briefers told reporters, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony noted that in Los Angeles last year, judges found no grounds to hear the overwhelming majority of about 13,000 annulment applications, and only about 1,000 were granted in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Archbishop Edward O’Meara of Indianapolis and Cardinal Edmund Szoka of Detroit also defended the probity of American tribunals, the briefers said, and Szoka invited the Vatican to send a delegation to examine them in action.

From the outset, the Americans have stressed the singularity of their culture and the difficulties of preaching spirituality in a fast-moving, materialistic society. Archbishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio returned to the democratic theme Friday in a discussion on the role of the laity as agents of evangelization.

The life of American Catholics as active participants in a democracy, Flores said, “is quite different from our hierarchical mode of life, which for a long time expected Catholics to limit their involvement to paying and praying only.”

Flores noted that American Catholics live side by side with other Christians, and added: “They see their non-Catholic brothers and sisters participating as preachers almost from the moment they are baptized. They also see them active in so many other ways.”

The very roots of American Catholicism complicate its attempts to grow while coping with societal changes, the Texas archbishop told the Pope and his cardinals.

“The Catholic experience in the U.S.,” he said, “was one of an immigrant church needing to protect itself against a society that was predominantly Anglo and Protestant. Because we have been more self-preserving than outward looking, we have struggled with the reaching out needed to be evangelizers.”

While acknowledging difficulties facing the American church, Vatican cardinals urged caution in the search for ways to confront them. In a session on liturgy and the sacraments, Curia Cardinal Eduardo Martinez Somalo lamented that Americans seemed to be losing their “sense of sin.”

He voiced reservations about experimental Masses, overzealous attempts to depersonalize liturgical texts, and also “the direct service of women at the altar.” An American attempt to win approval for altar girls is being studied by a Vatican commission.

Martinez Somalo also complained about the “over-utilization” of general absolution instead of individual confession. Archbishop Daniel V. Kucera of Dubuque replied, “General absolution has been used quite sparingly in the U.S. despite vocal but inaccurate claims to the contrary.”

Closing sessions today before the papal address will examine ecumenism and evangelization, and the use of the mass media for evangelization of non-churchgoers who have become known, in the jargon of American bishops, as “the unchurched.”