The Anger of a Rebel

Inside many a modern Roman Catholic priest nowadays seethes a latter-day Luther crying to be born. One troubled cleric who has let the rebel inside him speak out is the Rev. James Kavanaugh, 37, a diocesan priest of Lansing, Mich., now serving as a counselor to a private mental health foundation in California. In a new book entitled A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church (Trident; $4.95), Kavanaugh unleashes a bitter, searing attack on the foibles and faults of Roman Catholicism, which he still professes to love and serve. Thanks in large measure to its shock value, as well as an aggressive publicity campaign on its behalf, his book is well on its way to becoming a profitable publishing success. It has sold more than 40,000 copies since its publication last month and is now entering a fifth printing.

Arrogant & Smug. The burden of Kavanaugh's polemic is that a church founded by Christ upon the primacy of God's love for man has degenerated into a sterile bureaucracy guided by abstract legalism. Echoing charges made by many other contemporary Catholic thinkers, Kavanaugh complains that his church's strictures against marriage for priests, birth control, and divorce have caused untold anguish and suffering to the faithful. Dominated by unBiblical superstition and decadent traditionalism in everything from its sermons to parochial schools, the church, in Kavanaugh's eyes, is pathetically outdated and corrupt. "It is an arrogant church," he declares, "a smug church that can keep a billion children waiting for its word."

As a result of the church's puritanical approach to moral issues, says Kavanaugh, "the Catholic is obsessed with sex"--and he, for one, seems to be. About three-fourths of his examples of church-imposed agony involve sex; most of the cases are described in prose that might seem a trifle fetid for a true-confession magazine. At Catholic girls' colleges, he says, "to French kiss or not to French kiss is usually the question. Keeping the teeth closed becomes the ancient badge of the martyrs who refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods of Rome. She firms her lips and guards her tongue with all the ardor of a convent under siege."

Restricted & Impoverished. Illustrating the problems created by the church's ban on divorce, he tells of the suffering Catholic whose wife flaunted her infidelity by coming home with other men. "He heard her laugh on the sofa downstairs, heard her moans of pleasure. Finally, he left her. He met another girl who made him know he was a man. He came to his priest and learned that one burst of semen had bound him to a whore."

Father Kavanaugh's major polemical weapon is the sweeping generalization. Ignoring the fact that great juridical decisions can rise to the level of philosophy, he boldly declares: "The legal mind is a restricted and impoverished mind which cannot move without a law to support each flicker of its brain." He describes the church's code of can on law, which is now being drastically revised, as "archaic" and "reeking of drawbridges and moats." Dismissing the intellectual achievements of Jesuits John Courtney Murray and Karl Rahner, Kavanaugh insists that "Catholic theology died somewhere between Thomas and Tarzan." He scarcely mentions the reforming legislation of the Second Vatican Council, except in pointed skepticism. "Are we persons now that the bishops have voted to share the medieval powers of our Pope?" he asks. "Nothing has really changed. We will continue to preserve the system that has paralyzed us."

Without question, much in postconciliar Catholicism still needs reforming --as even Pope Paul has admitted. Without question, too, archaic laws governing personal behavior still frustrate and hurt some of Catholicism's loyal sons and daughters--and few of Father Kavanaugh's readers will doubt that his concern for their human tragedies is both passionate and sincere. Nonetheless, many Catholics who hope and pray for renewal may have cause to suspect that Kavanaugh's angry and oversimplified criticism can only hurt rather than help the forces of change within the church.

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