A Struggle to Keep the Faith

By Richard N. Ostling

American Catholics are torn between change and loyalty

Beneath the Vatican's stern and watchful gaze, the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. sometimes must seem like an unruly teenager. Rather like an adolescent, the U.S. church demands the right to experiment and to be "relevant." Like any prudent parent, Pope John Paul II is seeking to exercise a firm hand without alienating. Consider some of the family conflicts over the past few weeks:

In Chicago, 1,200 nuns and lay women from 37 states gathered to protest teachings that limit the role of women in the church. They announced the founding of a new women's Catholic movement, and celebrated a ritual meal with round loaves of bread and carafes of wine. Some wore buttons announcing I'M POPED OUT.

In Washington, D.C., one-third of the nation's 292 active Catholic bishops attended a meeting that was sponsored in part by groups advocating the ordination of women. Although the bishops remain loyal to the Pope's September directive to withdraw "all support" from those promoting the cause of female priests, they are becoming increasingly sympathetic to women's demands for justice within the church.

In Seattle, a special papal delegate has been examining Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, an outspoken antinuclear activist who has welcomed homosexual groups to his cathedral and allowed liturgical experimentation (see box). The Pope has directed other American bishops to investigate the 500 religious orders in the U.S. as well as the country's 300 seminaries, presumably to see whether candidates for the priesthood and their teachers have strayed from orthodoxy.

In short, John Paul would seem to have trouble on his hands with the U.S. church, the richest and fourth largest* national branch of Roman Catholicism. Many American Catholics resent what they see as the Vatican's continuing view of the U.S. as a mission church. Because of the Pope's Polish background, says Milwaukee's liberal Archbishop Rembert Weakland, he "probably doesn't quite understand the American approach to dialogue and pluralism."

The Vatican has been at great pains to deny that the Pope is out of touch, as indeed have many bishops. "John Paul knows America better than any Pope in history," insists one Vatican official. And Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, who is as close to the Pope as any U.S. prelate, insists that "it is wrong to say that the Pope considers the U.S. church worse off than the others. But he does see it as a very important link with the rest of the world. Whatever happens in the U.S., it's just a matter of time before it happens elsewhere." Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul summed up the situation in a baseball analogy: "If a .150 hitter goes into a slump, it doesn't make much difference to the team. But if a .350 hitter goes into a slump, the manager really gets worried."

On John Paul's mind is one disturbing fact about the U.S. church: it is losing some of its most dedicated workers. Over the past 17 years the ranks of U.S. nuns have declined by 61,000, to 121,000, and the number of priests has barely grown despite a 12% increase in the number of baptized Catholics. American nuns, in particular, are becoming increasingly alienated from the church's position on the dominance of men. Sensitive to this problem, the American bishops voted unanimously at their annual meeting in Washington last week to publish a pastoral letter on women's problems in the church. This question "is one of the most serious facing the church today," declared Cardinal Bernardin. "We cannot responsibly ignore it or deal with it superficially."

The bishops point out that the Pope himself has assailed discrimination against women as part of his strong advocacy of social justice and human rights. However, in routine meetings with American bishops, held in Rome throughout this year, he has made clear his conservative stance on some of the most troublesome issues confronting the U.S. church: divorce, birth control, sexual mores, freedom to dissent from church teachings and, of course, women priests. In addition, the Pope is demanding that the U.S. church abide by a new code of canon law, 24 years in the formulating, which goes into effect next week. Among its rules, which the Vatican expects to be obeyed: all members of religious orders, both men and women, must live in convents or in religious communities when possible, and they may not hold public office. In addition, the Pope wants nuns to wear some form of distinctive garb.

The Pope means business on all of these issues, says Bishop James Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, who last week was elected president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, succeeding Archbishop Roach. "He doesn't content himself with platitudes; he acts, and we're obliged to respond." But many U.S. Catholics have less enthusiasm for response. "I don't think the church can go back. It amazes me that they think they can do this," says Agnes Mansour, the Michigan state social services director who chose to resign as a nun earlier this year because she refused to comply with a Vatican directive that she state her opposition to publicly funded abortion.

Mansour's attitude is supported by the 2,000-member National Coalition of American Nuns, a radical group that is urging liberal nuns to consider severing their canonical ties with Rome. If some nuns do ignore the directives that are certain to follow the current scrutiny of religious orders, one Vatican official cautions that "there could be a real housecleaning." For many American nuns, however, this will not be an issue: the Chicago-based Institute on Religious Life, representing 25,000 traditionalist members of religious President Malone orders, has expressed "joy and gratitude" at the Pope's firm hand.

There is tension, too, among men's orders. The liberal Jesuits at the seminary in Berkeley, Calif., barely speak to their colleagues across the bay at the University of San Francisco. Father Joseph Fessio, a conservative priest at the university, protests, "We have priests saying Mass in sports shirts and some using French bread." Similar views are stated even more colorfully by the Wanderer, (circulation: 35,000), an extreme right-wing Catholic weekly published in St. Paul, which is said to be closely read in the Vatican. This month the paper thundered against "secularist sex education, dissident priests and theologians, politicized Catholic agencies and aberrant liturgies."

So far the three-year seminary investigation, supervised by Bishop John Marshall of Burlington, Vt., has produced little anxiety, and some seminaries have even found the meetings with visiting clergy to be enjoyable. But the visits have only just begun, and future tension is possible because of the Vatican's insistence that all theologians and biblical scholars must submit to the church's teaching authority, which is clearly not the case on some campuses. Not all schools are happy with the decree from Rome that only priests can serve as spiritual directors and that as a general rule nuns and lay people not be hired to train future priests.

The Pope can still depend on the loyalty of American bishops, particularly as the time nears for the naming of new leaders for four of the largest archdioceses in the U.S.: New York and Boston, where he must name successors to the late Terence Cardinal Cooke and Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, and Los Angeles and Philadelphia, whose Cardinal Archbishops are within two years of reaching 75, the age at which they must resign. Archbishop Roach last week warned his colleagues that they must do better in conveying "the experience and insights of the church in the U.S. to the Holy Father and those who collaborate with him in Rome."

Yet despite what Roach described as an era of "occasional misunderstandings, misperceptions and tensions," many theologians detect a new vitality and dynamism in the U.S. church, typified by the bishops' pastoral letter this year condemning the nuclear arms race. Asserts Father Carl Peter of Catholic University, a member of the Vatican's International Theological Commission: "The church in this country is healthy and reaching a new stage of maturity." He adds: "While remaining authentically Roman Catholic, we are becoming more and more distinctly American.''

--By Richard N. Ostling.

Reported by Jim Castelli/Washington and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago, with other bureaus

* With 52 million members, it ranks behind Brazil (111 million), Mexico (67 million) and Italy (56 million).

With reporting by Jim Castelli/Washington, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.