Charting the Church’s Course

As 155 cardinals bowed in prayer Monday, a melody too tinny to be coming from the organ broke the silence in the Vatican’s Synod Hall. Heads wearing scarlet caps turned in distraction--until one of the cardinals reached inside his black cassock and switched off a ringing cell phone.

With that modern intrusion, the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals renewed the ancient practice of meeting to advise the pope, this time on the challenges facing their church in the new millennium.

Pope John Paul II convened the three-day session, known as an extraordinary consistory, and is presiding behind closed doors. The aim is to define what he calls a “new evangelizing mission” for his billion-member flock during the rest of his papacy and beyond.

“The meeting that starts this morning is as important as ever,” he told the cardinals, according to a text issued by the Vatican. “We will seek together the most suitable methods for being, still today, credible signs of God’s love for man.”

Then began nearly six hours of speeches that covered almost every major topic of debate in Catholicism today: the struggle between Vatican authority and local churches, the challenge of proclaiming Christ as the savior while fostering dialogue with other faiths, the church’s response to economic injustice, and the lack of obedience to Catholic teaching on sexual and moral issues.

Consensus will be hard, participants said, because the cardinals are so many, their meeting so short, the agenda so broad. It is the largest such gathering ever--so large that the “princes of the church,” members of what is sometimes called the world’s most exclusive men’s club, are wearing name tags.

The tone of Monday’s discussion was calm and respectful, one cardinal reported, but the content “was such a free-for-all. Everybody was speaking about something different.”

A theme running through some of the first three dozen speeches was the need for new approaches to spreading the church’s message--including a more imaginative use of mass media.

Mahony Calls for a Guide on Evangelizing

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, suggested that the Vatican produce a “directory on the new evangelization” to spell out and guide such efforts in the same way that a central reference book has aided the teaching of catechism around the world.

As his priests try to minister to 5 million believers in the largest Catholic archdiocese in the United States, Mahony told the meeting that “one reality we face is that so many are not fully and deeply evangelized and, in too many cases, are barely catechized. I fear that most do not have that daily encounter with Jesus Christ.”

Other cardinals addressed sharp conflicts that have divided Catholics during John Paul’s 22 1/2-year papacy.

Some argued that the church’s most urgent problem is a lack of collegiality, or internal democracy, while others proclaimed that secularization is a bigger threat and must be battled by rigorous moral teaching under uniform guidelines.

Briefing reporters, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls emphasized a remark by Cardinal Eugenio de Araujo Sales of Brazil that “fidelity to the pope is an integral part” of Catholicism.

Later, Sales was indirectly challenged by a fellow Brazilian, Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider, who said the Vatican bureaucracy has become increasingly deaf to the voices of bishops around the world, diminishing the authority they gained under the Second Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s.

Several cardinals called for more frequent meetings between the pope and his bishops so that the Vatican does not lose touch.

Extraordinary consistories are a rare chance for the College of Cardinals to influence papal policy. This is the sixth and most wide-ranging of John Paul’s reign, and the first since 1994.

The College of Cardinals, expanded by 94 papal appointments since then, now has 183 members. Twenty-eight are absent this week because of ill health.

Church Apologies Remain Controversial

One controversy from 1994 came up again Monday--how far the church’s self-criticism should go. Some cardinals insisted that the pope should focus on the challenges of the present rather than the mistakes of the past.

Ignoring such advice, the pope last year issued an unprecedented mea culpa for past sins of the Catholic Church. He made history again this month by apologizing in Greece, a stronghold of Orthodox Christianity, for Catholic sins against “our Orthodox brothers and sisters.”

Cardinal Ignace Moussa I Daoud, a Syrian who is prefect of the Vatican congregation for Latin Rite Catholics in Asia, rose at Monday’s meeting to warn the pope against one-sided efforts to heal Christianity’s rift.

John Paul, who turned 81 last week, is shaky with Parkinson’s disease. During the opening prayer, an aide pulled a chair up behind him and he slumped into it, only to realize he was the only one sitting. Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, the meeting’s 79-year-old moderator, steadied the pontiff as he struggled back to his feet.

Some Vatican watchers are calling this consistory a trial run for the conclave that the voting cardinals--those 80 and younger--will one day hold in the Sistine Chapel to choose John Paul’s successor from among their ranks.

The boardroom atmosphere of the modern Synod Hall afforded them a chance to listen to one another through simultaneous interpretation in five languages and judge one another’s qualifications for the papacy.

“A thought came to mind this morning: If this were a conclave, how would I know who’s who?” Lubomyr Husar, a new cardinal from Ukraine, told reporters Monday. “But then I had a second thought: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”