COMMENTARY : U.S. Bishops Should Look Inward to Write Pastoral Letter on Men : Catholicism: As males, they would be better off dealing with their own sex and abandoning their missive on women.

This is obviously the year and the season for America’s Catholic bishops to do at least two sensible things that amount to one.

First, they should abandon their pastoral letter on women, a package that, despite several well-intentioned downsizings and endless re-wrapping, will never fit through the door of the Roman Curia. Secondly, they should write a letter on men instead.

The bishops are not getting far with their reflections on women, and won’t, of course, as long as Roman authorities insist, with a bureaucratic style worn as smooth by history as the apostle Peter’s statued foot, that they control the text. All that has come of their efforts to negotiate an acceptable document with obsessive Vatican officials is frustration for the American prelates and great disappointment for the country’s Catholic women.

A pastoral letter on men, however, could not be more timely. For weeks, the bestseller lists have included books on men and their struggles for identity, “Iron John” by Robert Bly and “Fire in the Belly” by Sam Keen. Numerous articles have described the pilgrimages of groups of men into the woods on weekends to participate in colorful rituals through which they hope to lay claim to an earlier, nobler, and more masculine sense of themselves.

Men by the hundreds have abandoned their easy chairs, their illusory beer-drinking camaraderie, and even the National Football League in pursuit of knowledge that is far more pressing for them. They are not satisfied with the images of manhood fashioned for them by the advertising-public relations complex. Somewhere out there, in that territory where Hemingway once painfully hunted for the same thing, they are trying to make contact with their fathers and to better grasp the mystery of being masculine.

This wounded machismo may seem silly to some observers, but its very awkwardness--its combination of Boy Scout Jamboree, lodge meeting and fraternity initiation--is a touching symbol of the disquiet in men’s souls. There is a fragmented sacramentality to these present-day quests. The shattered and groping character of these searches tells us that the root problem for American men is spiritual. As such, it merits pastoral respect and response from the Catholic bishops.

This is an ideal challenge for them on several grounds. First of all, they are men and, without the subtle condescension that may infiltrate their writing about women, they should be able to reflect on and write about their own male experience, including that of sexuality. If they make a sincere effort to accomplish this about masculinity, their difficulties will be counted the honest price of their struggle to be understanding, the first characteristic of a pastoral response.

Even if they fail, barely writing the first, much less the last, word on men’s problems, their sympathetic identification with American men would reveal them as true shepherds of their flock. There might, therefore, be a kind of death in this for America’s bishops, who are ordinarily as wary as dictionary makers of using the wrong word in public. What a remarkable religious experience this would be, for them and for American Catholics, for the death they might suffer in composing such a pastoral letter would almost guarantee that it would lead to resurrection for themselves and their people as well.

The church’s notions about men, we must remember, constitute part of the bishops’ difficulties in writing about women. The male has always been at the privileged center of church affairs. Indeed, the basic canonical qualification for ordination to the priesthood is that the candidate be “a baptized male.” Christ, it has been argued by male church officials, was a man, and chose only men as his apostles. Thus a rationalization has been fashioned, but not profoundly examined, that excludes women from the priesthood.

At its center one glimpses this state of maleness, so vital yet so unsurely grasped at the present time by many who inhabit it. The church and its bishops, who insist on the centrality of this mystery of being masculine to the essence of sacred orders and ecclesiastical structure, surely have the power to illuminate it by their meditations.

Although celibate, the bishops remain sexual beings who teach a demanding ethic of conduct for others. They are quite capable of infusing their reflections with some concrete sense of what it means to be a man and not an angel at this moment in history. Our Catholic bishops would have an unparalleled opportunity to reveal what one senses in knowing them individually--that they understand and sympathize with the human condition from which as a group they can at times seem to stand aloof.

Indeed, the bishops’ authorship of a pastoral letter that focused only on celibate male sexuality would, whatever its limitations, be an extraordinary and healthy opportunity for them to explore the problems of the Catholic clergy who have, in such great numbers, been accused of pedophilia in recent years. The bishops have, in fact, never discussed this problem with their people, expecting their understanding while they follow the advice of lawyers and insurers on how to handle it as a legal and liability exposure. This is to follow the institutional model of Union Carbide after Bhopal rather than that of a church whose pastors are first concerned to understand and respond to these tragic realities humanly and pastorally.

So let the American bishops put aside their pastoral on women, which has been so compromised along the way, and begin one on men and their problems, that is to say, their own problems. Nothing would refurbish their authority better than joining their strengths to those of American men in trying to understand better the mystery of being male, which is presently so compelling and vexing at the same time.