Bishops Under Attack

"When he opens his mouth," says the 1936 yearbook of La Salle Academy in Providence, R.I., "Bernie does it for the sake of saying something, not merely exercising his jaws." Last week "Bernie"--the Most Rev. Bernard M. Kelly, auxiliary bishop of Providence --said something pointed enough to be heard in Rome. In a letter sent to his bishop and all the priests of his diocese, Kelly announced that he had developed an "abiding sense of frustration" with the majority of his fellow bishops, who "are more concerned with Communion in the hand than the war in Viet Nam." He was therefore resigning from the active ministry in protest, he said, though technically he remains both priest and bishop until he requests formal laicization.

By his action, Kelly became the second U.S. bishop in recent years to resign in distress. The first was Bishop James P. Shannon (TIME cover, Feb. 23, 1970), auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, who resigned because he could not accept Pope Paul's teaching on contraception and because, as an articulate progressive, he had been largely isolated by powerful conservatives in the hierarchy.

Lost Hope. Like Shannon's story, Kelly's is one of a promising clerical career gradually frustrated by his growing awareness of pressing social questions and a foot-dragging episcopacy. A rawboned, amiable man with thinning white hair, Kelly lived modestly in St. Joseph's rectory in the racially mixed Fox-point section of Providence. He was a strong supporter of open housing, fasted in support of Cesar Chavez's grape boycott, and was impressed by the "tremendous witness for peace" made by Philip and Daniel Berrigan. During the South Vietnamese campaign in Laos last February, Kelly declared that it was "scandalous that churchmen are so concerned about abortion and yet have nothing to say about the destruction of human life in Laos." In March, at Newport, R.I., he and 200 others protested the war in Southeast Asia when President Nixon spoke at David Eisenhower's graduation from the Naval Officer Candidate School. The final blow, said Kelly, was the April meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Detroit (TIME, May 10), where conservatives dominated the deliberations.

In his letter, Kelly noted that the Second Vatican Council had found "new and richer dimensions" to replace the rigid church conceived by the Council of Trent--the 16th century ecclesiastical assembly that shored up Catholic walls against the Protestant Reformation. He described "the church in which we grew up" as almost completely withdrawn from the world. "It was a church in which discipline and order and conformity to the minutest rubric were paramount values, a church increasingly irrelevant and unintelligible to men." In Detroit, he said, he lost all hope for change: "Discussion is impossible."

Kelly left Providence to "go fishing." Reaction to his resignation ranged from the pro forma regrets of his conservative superior, Providence Bishop Russell J. McVinney, to the declaration of the 100-member Rhode Island Association of Laity that McVinney had "contributed" to the resignation by being "unresponsive to direct communication." In the Vatican, a high official described Kelly's move as the expectable act of an "extremely emotional" liberal impatient with a hierarchy of "instinctive conservatives." For 23 young priests in the diocese, however, the resignation was "an act of prophecy showing us that we as a church are out of tune with the needs of God's people." The housekeeper at St. Joseph's rectory, not a Catholic, put it in more personal terms. She said: "It's like there was a death."

The day after Kelly's resignation, U.S. bishops found themselves under attack from another source: the independent Association of Chicago Priests voted 144 to 126 to censure John Cardinal Cody and his five auxiliary bishops for failing to present and defend priestly concerns at the Detroit meeting. The resolution assailed the bishops for not even discussing in open meetings the results of a much-heralded consultation of clergy and laity held in the Chicago archdiocese last winter. The association also passed resolutions charging that the four episcopal delegates to next fall's Synod in Rome were "unwilling to represent the diversity of opinion" among U.S. priests and called for their resignations from the delegation.

One of the Chicago auxiliaries, Bishop Thomas J. Grady, expressed the "hurt and pain" that the bishops felt over the censure but pledged that there would be "no answering hurt for hurt." Other critics argued that the A.C.P. is not representative: the association includes only 900 of Chicago's 2,400 priests, to be sure, but many of the nonmembers are in religious orders that are not directly under Cody's authority. Some 300 priests showed up at the meeting last week to vote. Whatever the numbers involved, the action was nonetheless an audacious first of its kind in the history of U.S. Catholicism, a fact that did not escape a Vatican prelate who labeled it "incipient guerrilla warfare against the hierarchy."

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