1986-87 Called Turning Point for Future of U.S. Catholics : Books: ‘Holy Siege,’ a work by religion specialist Kenneth A. Briggs, lists a series of Vatican actions at the time that tamed the American church.

Sometimes a past cluster of events casts its pattern on the present and raises signposts of the future. Religion specialist Kenneth A. Briggs points to 1986-87 as such a defining period that shapes U.S. Roman Catholicism today.

“Looking back on that period, it’s so predictive of what has come afterward,” he said. “It was a turning point in so many ways.”

In a book, “Holy Siege,” recently published by Harper and subtitled “The Year That Shook the Catholic Church,” Briggs holds an illuminating mirror to the period from August, 1986, through September, 1987.

“It set the pattern of what has happened since,” he said in an interview. “It’s an explanation of how things got the way they are right now. It’s how the Vatican tamed the American church.”

Briggs, who teaches contemporary Catholicism at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., and who for a decade was religion editor of the New York Times, said the period set the “agenda for American Catholicism.”

Since then, he said, Pope John Paul II and his Vatican cabinet have left Catholics with only two alternatives, “either to accept or reject” official church teachings--unconditionally and without exception.

“You see it in many ways,” Briggs said. “You could see it nationally dramatized in the level of utter futility reached by American bishops in their collapsed efforts to write a pastoral letter on women.”

Under pressure from the Vatican, the bishops could only “give it what it wants,” he said, or give up saying anything--all or nothing.

Consequently, they were left silent on a subject of keen modern concern--the role of women. After nine years of work and four increasingly restrictive revisions, the bishops last fall abandoned the project.

In rejecting the final draft, which had become stiffly traditionalist under Vatican nudges, the bishops for the first time failed to concur on a planned pastoral letter, their most authoritative form of teaching.

In addition to this obstacle, Briggs said, “a shadow also has been cast over the whole question of how scholars are to conduct their work or pursue lines of inquiry.”

Briggs, 51, of Easton, Pa., a Methodist with a divinity degree from Yale University, added: “It’s very safe to say there has been less theological exploration. The whole climate says that when in doubt, don’t do it. The effect is chilling.”

The pivotal period he examines with penetrating analysis and vivid detail was marked by a series of unusual Vatican crackdowns on activities in the U.S. church, including:

* Banning of the Rev. Charles E. Curran, a widely respected moral theologian at the Catholic University of America, from teaching Catholic theology because of his dissent to some church sexual teachings. He now teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

* The Vatican’s unprecedented stripping of an American bishop, Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle, of much of his authority, and naming of an auxiliary to take over various responsibilities. He eventually was restored as a result of efforts by a commission of U.S. bishops but retired in 1991.

* A 1986 Vatican document hardening the church’s stand against homosexuality, terming that orientation an “objective disorder” tending to moral evil. Another document banned reproductive technology.

* On the pope’s 1987 visit, he sternly admonished U.S. bishops at a meeting in Los Angeles against permitting dissent, indicating it is grounds for excommunication and incompatible with being a “good Catholic.”

* A previous 1968 statement by the bishops that the church upholds “freedom of thought and also general norms of licit dissent” was declared null and void.

Those and other related events were followed by subsequent, similar steps, Briggs writes, such as the 1989 decree that Catholic faculties must take a new “loyalty oath” covering nearly everything the church teaches, and a 1990 Vatican instruction that theologians have no “right to dissent.”

Summing up the impact of that weather vane 1986-87 period, Briggs said, “The pattern just keeps grinding on. It gets more and more grim.”

In his 600-page book, Briggs weaves into his account of official church actions the lives and reactions of ordinary Catholics--a suburban mother, an office worker, a college student, an aged nun and young married couple.

“In the long run, it looks as if lay people are going to start doing their own theology more and more,” Briggs said. “They won’t be able to look to the official church to be open to their own questions.”

At the “heart of the problem,” he said, is a tendency that can affect individuals as well as institutions--to repress concerns instead of confronting them. He said, “It’s not a healthy climate.”