Carping Over The Catechism

By Richard N. Ostling

Not since 1566 has the Roman Catholic hierarchy attempted such a project: the summarizing of the church's central teachings on faith and morals in a single document. Four years in the making, a secret 434-page draft of the new Catechism for the Universal Church was sent last December to the world's 4,000 bishops. The prelates were instructed to dispatch their comments on the text to the Vatican by May 31, after which work will begin on the final version. Since then there has been widespread grumbling over both the document's old- fashioned conservatism and the rush-rush deadline for responding to it. Last week leaders of the U.S. bishops escalated the debate, sending the Vatican a sweeping and surprisingly blunt 51-page critique of the Catechism. They also pleaded for more time to consult with theologians and educators over what they called the "most significant" project of the church's magisterium, or teaching office, since the Second Vatican Council.

The bishops' critique was the work of a six-member committee headed by Alabama's Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb, 58, the chairman of the bishops' doctrinal committee. (Individual U.S. bishops, like those elsewhere, will also be sending separate responses to the Vatican.) The Lipscomb panel's chief objection is that the Catechism has not clearly distinguished a "hierarchy of truths" treating concepts like the meaning of Christ's crucifixion as more important than, say, teaching about angels.

The report chides Rome for ignoring a generation of progressive Bible scholarship. The Roman draft, the Americans say, seems to presume that "New Testament texts are the product of direct historical reporting" and resorts to "proof-texting," quoting Scripture out of context to prove a doctrinal point. In addition, the Americans feel that science has been slighted in favor of an almost Fundamentalist approach to creation.

Another U.S. complaint is that the English version of the Catechism seems to back away from some of the key ecumenical language adopted by the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council. While Vatican II declared that the true church of Christ "subsists" in the Roman Catholic Church, implying that there is a place for other Christians, the Catechism uses an exclusionary phrase, "has its existence in."

Reflecting the influence of feminism, the report sharply criticizes Rome's relentless use of non-inclusive nouns and pronouns (for instance, in referring to believers as "men" or "sons"), which the American bishops have been trying to banish from their own documents. One problematic passage in the Catechism, though it was not specifically cited by Lipscomb's panel, introduces a list of heroic women in the Bible by terming them "weak and feeble." The U.S. bishops did not dispute the text's predictable conservatism on controversial moral issues like birth control, but they did urge that such subjects get a "more positive" treatment rather than an inflexible listing of dos and don'ts.

In spite of the panel's numerous reservations about the Catechism, Archbishop Lipscomb maintains that "basically, we have given a positive response." The same could not be said, however, for the 15 Catholic scholars who gathered at Georgetown University last January to discuss the Vatican document. Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, who organized the Georgetown meeting, branded the draft as "fatally flawed." Father William Spohn of California's Jesuit School of Theology characterized Vatican drafters as religious Rip Van Winkles who have slept through a generation of progress in moral theology. Underlying such attacks from liberals is a not-so-hidden fear: that a hard- line Catechism will one day be used as a criterion for disciplining theologians and educators.

With reporting by Michael P. Harris/New York