SPECIAL FEATURE

ACADEMICS HAVE CROSSED
THE CHURCH'S RUBICON:

DO THEY CONTEMPLATE THE FALL OF ROME?

by Monsignor George A. Kelly

The following article by Monsignor George Kelly is not on the theme of this issue. Its importance explains our decision to include it as a special feature.

When Julius Caesar left Gaul with his armies in 49 B.C. to cross the seemingly insignificant Rubicon River in Northern Italy, he was announcing to Pompey in Rome that he was coming to make war. Caesar's ostensible object was to make the Republic of Rome a great Empire, but really he wanted to become its dictator. Pompey ran for cover, Julius became the dictator, and in the process laid the groundwork for the eventual dissolution of the greatness that once was Rome.

In 1967 Catholic academics, religious superiors, especially Jesuits, and college presidents, sortied out of their provinces within the Church to test the will of diocesan pastors, and of the Church's Supreme Pontiff in Rome. Would the bishops uphold and defend their final authority over what is authentically Catholic about theology, about religious life, about a Catholic college, or even about the content of the Church's faith? At the time few veterans of the Catholic experience imagined that they would intimidate the hierarchy so completely or do such damage to the faith and piety of the Church in the United States, by then a model for the rest of the Catholic world. But this they have done. From their Provincial seats in religious houses and faculty meeting halls on campus, they marched their "armies" into the Church's holy of holies, called magisterium, seeking thereby to refashion, if they could, the Catholic community into their own image and likeness, no matter what the Church's High Priests had to say. They have not overthrown the magisterium, which alone guarantees the authenticity of that faith which has been handed down from Christ, but they have seriously weakened its influence over the consciences of the Church's membership. There need be no argument over this, because it is the common opinion of everyone on all sides of the post-Vatican II controversies.

More than ten years ago Cardinal Ratzinger characterized the Catholic crisis that had overtaken the Church's magisterium: "My impression is that the authentically Catholic meaning of the reality 'Church' is tacitly disappearing, without being explicitly rejected. Many no longer believe that what is at issue is a reality willed by the Lord himself."1

Other commentators, drawing on Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes, would say that, at lower levels, the Catholic dubium had become the revelation associated with the Lord himself. In a world of science and democracy, it was being said that the only perspective on human life, or on religion, that has any validity anymore is the human perspective, reflected best in "the voice of the people." The voice of Christ (or of a pope) continues to be a voice, but it is no longer controlling on the consciences of free men, even it they be declared Christians. In the City of God, as in the modern City of Man, there is no juridical authority unless it is freely bestowed by the Christian people. It is the movement of this mind-set into the thinking of Catholic opinion-molders which has lowered their esteem for Church authority and for its centrality in the definition of Catholicity.

Both Paul VI and John Paul II have complained many times that this approach to Catholicity destroys the entire meaning of divine revelation, which takes its credibility from the authoritative witness of Christ and after him derives its reliability from the teaching and discipline of the hierarchy.2 But more than popes must reckon with the effect on the Church of the anti-establishmentarianism of the present culture. Three years before Karol Wojtyla left Poland for good, a Columbia University professor Robert Nisbet wrote The Twilight of Authority (Oxford) which described how "authority" has been undermined in modern times and, subsequently with it the content of the value system on which it is exercised. (Nisbet also associated "the twilight of authority' with what he called "the new despotism.")

If anyone knows the doctrinal consequences for the Church of a beleaguered papal/episcopal office it is Germain Grisez, who recently summarized them: "Conditions in Catholicism worldwide are very bad, with a kind of artificial unity masking confusion and dissent - not only on moral questions but on fundamental dogmas like Jesus' bodily Resurrection and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The problem extends not just to the simple faithful but to people in authority."3

The Aftermath of a Council

The downfall of hierarchy as a vital element in determining Catholic identity, and with it the binding content of the Catholic Faith, is attributable to what went on during the years of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and to the rhetoric which dominated the decisions of bishops thereafter. Somehow the street wisdom of the "knowledge class," to wit, that hierarchy no longer should legislate Catholic identity any more than they can morality,4 came to set the tone for the managers of church infrastructures. (Secular states enforce both all the time.) Fidelity to the institutional Church, was reinterpreted as conformity, and allegedly was inconsistent with the liberation John XXIII had initiated.

In the best Catholic circles, Vatican II came to be looked upon as an inspiration from heaven, with John XXIII its archangel. Not quite. Pius XII discussed the possibility of an ecumenical council with Archbishop Spellman as early as 1939, again in 1945 and 1956. When he died in 1958 a 200 page schema was found in the papal quarters. A year later his successor announced the Council, opened it three years later and, not knowing he would be dead, wanted it closed down by 1963, according to Westminster's John Cardinal Heenan. (Cardinal John O'Connor recently resurrected an old tale from the Roman grapevine to the effect that the Jolly Pope at one point even ordered Cardinal Ottavani to make sure the Council did not go "too far.")5

Paul VI who, as Archbishop of Milan, recognized that more preparation was needed, nonetheless saw to it that the final documents of Vatican II were solidly Catholic. But, by 1965 "the rhetoric" about the Council's putative intentions had taken command of the thinking of many bishops, as much as it did of the media. Implementation of the documents, at the national level, often followed the alleged "spirit" more than "the letter" of both the Conciliar Constitutions and Decrees. Before the faithful knew what to expect, or the average pastor either, "the experts," with the acquiescence of local episcopal leadership, dominated the "reforms" which almost overnight filtered into religious houses, seminaries, even diocesan Offices of Education. Anyone, even the smartest pastor, who questioned the judgments of the experts (bookmen mostly, not pastors) were slandered as enemies of Vatican II. Whatever can be said about "reform" elsewhere, the results, especially in the United States, have been "deform." Cardinal Ratzinger, more than ten years ago, explained how the process of deformation began at the level of "the experts."

"I wonder at the adroitness of theologians who manage to represent the exact opposite of what is written in clear documents of magisterium, in order afterward to set forth this inversion with skilled dialectical devices in the true meaning of the documents in question." 6 When the Conference bureaucracies adopted "leads" provided by "the knowledge class," the debilitation of hierarchy was set in motion. Pastors were no longer to be acknowledged as "men of authority," but as negotiators with members of their flock over what these latter need accept as the price of membership in the Church.

The breakdown of Church discipline is evident in the way NCCB has dealt with Richard McBrien and the faulty teaching in his book Catholicism, first in 1980, revisited with its new edition in 1995. Although requested to make changes the first time and to meet with bishops the second time, McBrien said "no" twice. In spite of the rebuffs, the NCCB staff in its final report went out of its way to indicate that the hierarchy now deals with his challenge to the Faith almost apologetically, not judgmentally. Certainly not hierarchically. The staff also revealed the new way of supervising a dissident theologian who agrees to meet with hierarchy only on his terms. Not only did hierarchy accept McBrien's rejection of their authority as a fact of life, but its Committee on Doctrine summarized the enlightened approach it adopted to dissidence: "[The Committee] would not engage the authority of the Committee on Doctrine, nor that of the NCCB. It was not a call for any punitive measure, nor was it to call into question Fr. McBrien's personal competence as a theologian, nor his standing as a priest. It [the NCCB report] was to be a book review of a published book and of the book alone." 7

If Richard McBrien, as a dissident and querulous theologian, was not confronted, neither is the widespread state of the Church on the Catholic college campus, viz., the denial that theologians are answerable to the Vicar of Christ and the College of Bishops, as they would be to Christ. The Catholic Theological Society of America has doubts whether John Paul II can reserve the priesthood to men.8

This is only the tip of an ecclesiastical iceberg. If one wishes to know, one can search the local press to find out what goes on within a Catholic college:

A professor in the field of American literature who "writes books that take a rather dim view of Christianity." Weekend workshops for gay and lesbian couples, who are said to make significant contributions to the college. A theology professor who does not think the certainties on moral issues (in Veritatis Splendor) are certainties at all. Another who claims: "Honoring Sophia as feminine God is no more arbitrary than the sex change operations within the orthodox Catholic tradition that transformed Sophia into a male spirit." A professor who favored embryo research during the first two weeks after conception. A required textbook which rejects Catholic teaching on sexuality.

What does one expect of small Catholic colleges when William Byron, S.J., former president of The Catholic University of America, says in Rome of all places: "The role of the teacher of theology is not to proclaim, but to explain the faith, hoping for a response not of faith, but of understanding."9 This determination was simply a gentler denial than the one he made three years earlier when, responding to a statement that a Catholic college should be a source of pure Catholic teaching, he retorted "Baloney!" Disrespect for Church authority now pervades the entire system. In 1972 one heard the president of Georgetown University tell the Cardinal Prefect of Catholic Education, in the sight of St. Peter's, that if Rome established norms for the governance of his university, he would return home to decertify that institution as Catholic. The president of Notre Dame University, using different words, also threatened the Pope's chief educator.

Almost a quarter century later, John Paul II is still trying to restore Catholic balance to the Church's higher education with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, a case for which was stated earlier and in some respects more bluntly, to Jesuits no less, by his predecessor Paul VI: "Some Catholic universities in recent years have thought that they can respond to the questions of man and the world by weakening their Catholic character. And the consequences? They have helped in the weakening of Christian values by putting in their place a humanism that transforms itself into a true and real secularization. They have helped in the lowering of standards of behavior in the sphere of the university campus by letting the fascination of many virtues drop out of the students' sight."10

This was an early period when Paul VI was especially alarmed by the Jesuits, who were the real leaders of the Land O' Lakes autonomy drive, asking them at their 32nd General Assembly, "Why do you doubt?"11 Within a week he took his warning to the entire Catholic world about:

The ferments of infidelity to the Holy Spirit, existing here and there in the Church today, and unfortunately attempting to undermine her from within ... [The promoters] set themselves up in opposition to the hierarchy as though every act of that opposition were a constitutive aspect of the truth of the Church that has to be rediscovered as Christ instituted her. They question the duty of obedience to the authority willed by Christ; they put on trial pastors of the Church, not so much for what they do or how they do it, but simply because, so it is claimed, they are the custodians of an ecclesiastical structure that competes with what was instituted by Christ."12

Why is this revolution, well-diagnosed in 1975 (indeed by the First Roman Synod in 1967), still a matter of talk? Nations know that, in the world of realpolitik, revolutions are not overcome or channeled in peaceful directions by talk. The Cold War did not end because of conversations between American Presidents and Russian Premiers, from Stalin to Gorbachev. Whenever the balance of power favors revolutionaries over constituted authorities, the antagonists end up the winners.

Much has been written since 1966 about how the winds of change have been tilted towards the goals of the Church's anti-establishment forces, much the same as they have against civic leaders in secular society. The American Episcopal Body, in response, short-circuited its own authority in 1989 with what might be called "An Enforceable Code of Righteous Episcopal Conduct Toward Errant Theologians," effectively limiting the freedom of an individual bishop to sanction a teacher engaged in scandalous teaching of the young. While felicitously entitled "Bishops and Theologians: Promoting Cooperation, Resolving Misunderstanding," it had the air of a Catholic Miranda formula, with academics conceded freedom to ask bishops whether they know the rights of professors, instructing bishops not to do or say anything on their own that might be used against them, and to follow a national quasi-juridical due process procedure which protected the theologian more than the Faith of the Church. Rome had three fundamental objections to that document: (1) it placed bishops and theologians on an equal footing as teaching authorities within the Church; (2) it gave larger emphasis to a teacher's subjective claims than to the objective content of Church teaching; (3) it created unnecessary legalistic entanglements in the way of a bishop, who has the unique and ultimate responsibility to make his own judgments in doctrinal controversies. After certain verbal accommodations, Rome stepped aside and permitted the NCCB to do what it wanted. There is no record of this document ever being used, nor of any errant academic being effectively corrected either. A continued standoff between the magisterium of bishops vs. professors' subjective rights vindicates the estimate of many that the existential Church is in contradiction to its own credal system.

The ramifications for Church governance of this standoff should be evident by now, but is not apparently clear to some. If hiring and firing in a college that is institutionally committed to Christ and the Church, is dominated by rules invented to protect the agnosticism of colleges that choose to be free of all religious connection, then a Catholic college, or Catholic anything, cannot exist. The most recent example of this is the action of a committee of the American Association of University Professors, which as late as 1996, decided that neither a Rector of St. Meinrad's School of Theology, nor the Archbishop of Indianapolis, had the right to fire or have fired, from a seminary no less, a Mercy nun who had publicly proclaimed her opposition to John Paul II's negative declaration on the ordination of women.13 Her right of academic freedom to say what she wanted had been violated, it was alleged, as if this was the only right involved. (The nun herself, and the Sisters of Mercy of Ireland, in a Federal law suit, also claimed sexual discrimination.)

The 1989 episcopal decision to introduce "American" due process procedures into the administration of Catholic infrastructures all but renders a profession of faith, or of vows, meaningless in the public forum. Secularization cannot be blamed for the spread of unbelief or for tepid faith in Catholic circles if rules, based on the secular reasoning that nothing of religious truth has been revealed, govern the thinking and practice of Catholic institutions. Even when Church authority wins a particular "legal" battle, usually years after it was begun, dissent retains its tenure on Catholic campuses, because mind-set and mores of the secular world, not the Faith and morals of the Church, remain controlling.14

Ecclesiastical folklore believes that the American bishops will approve a by-pass of Canons 807-814 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the requirements of Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), for American Catholic higher education, with a nihil obstat (presumed) from the Congregation for Catholic Education in Rome. The proposed "application" of these universal laws to the United States exacts from the Catholic academe here no more than a promise to affirm in writing its identity as Catholic, to offer courses in Catholic theology taught "in accord with the best scholarship and the authentic teaching authority of the Church," and to continue dialoguing with bishops in trust about what Catholicity and Catholic theology means in the concrete. In their turn, bishops are given the responsibility of promoting Catholic higher education, of acknowledging the Catholic identity of their colleges, if this is "unjustifiably" challenged in the public forum, and of guaranteeing that a local bishop, if he be the challenger, act only in accord with the legal procedures set down in the documentary process established in 1989 for the entire American hierarchy.

Apart from the fact that bishops have engaged in long-standing dialogue exclusively with those forces in Catholic college life which have a vested interest in episcopal non-intervention - to the neglect of a large body of educated opinion which sees major violations on campus of Catholic identity, faith, and morals - the 1996 endorsement of what is called "The Application" bequeaths to the hierarchy of the 21st century the following dysfunctions:

(1) It trivializes the role of hierarchy within the Church, equivalently denying what Vatican II affirmed (Lumen Gentium No. 27), viz., "the sacred right and duty before the Lord of legislating for and passing judgment on their subjects, as well as of regulating everything that concerns the good order of divine worship and of the apostolate";

(2) It considers of lesser account all that Popes Paul VI and John Paul II said on this subject from 1968 onward, especially in the 1993 Veritatis Splendor's criticism (No. 4) of disharmony in seminaries and theology schools "with regard to questions of greatest importance for the Church and life of faith";

(3) It interferes with the freedom of a local bishop to deal with a diocesan problem on terms better suited to his exercise of responsibility for the "curia animarum" of his people;

(4) It suggests that a bishop defend the Catholic identity of a college, which Catholics in the pews from personal experience know does not deserve the name;

(5) It tarnishes the name and role of "pastor" and "father" in the Church, making it seem as if a parochus (or a sacerdos) is at best a negotiator or moderator in today's ecclesia;

(6) Furthermore, it leaves the impression that, by directly endorsing the present status quo on Catholic campuses, the hierarchy indirectly (voluntarium in causa) sanctions the disharmony of theological faculties with magisterium, to which John Paul II took such serious objection;

(7) Worst of all over time, given the ingrained dissent on Catholic campuses, the high standards characteristic of American Catholicity will be debased.

A bad habit has developed among Catholic commentators, including some bishops, who define the present intramural Church controversies in "left" and "right" terms, as if the ongoing squabbles are simply political. On the contrary, the substantive Catholic quarrels are over the contents of Christ's revelation. Any Catholic is entitled to question the hierarchy's prudential judgments about anything, as long as it is done in good faith and good taste. What is at stake here, however, is the Faith of the Church as witnessed by the hierarchy. The real categories of controversies, about which leaders of the Catholic press rarely hear, are "assent" vs. "dissent," "obedience" vs. "disobedience," "great faith," "little faith," or "no faith." Not even superior intelligence or good taste exonerates those who lead Catholics astray about the genuine doctrinal matters which preoccupy Popes as they would Christ. It is these would-be "censors of magisterium" which the hierarchy, in self-defense of the Church and the faith of Churchgoers, must hold to account for their stewardship of that faith system.

The Importance of the Pope and Bishops

The credibility of what Christians call "the revealed Word of God" depends on the authority of Christ first, then on the authority of the Apostles with Peter, and on that of their successors till the end of time. Believability in "The Word," if this is meant to include internalized convictions among the body of faithful, depends on how convinced bishops themselves appear about what they preach, and how they reinforce their credibility by what they do. This was an argument which Christ employed effectively (John 10:38), one that was also used by St. Augustine, who explained his change of heart by his change of mind: "I would not believe in the gospel had not the authority of the Catholic Church moved me."15 The Second Vatican Council had the same idea when it obligated bishops to regulate everything that concerns the good order of divine worship and of the apostolate."16

If "assent" and "obedience" are the underpinnings of the Catholic commitments, "autonomy" is the watchword of the secularist. If the Christian says, "I believe," the secularist says, "No one tells me what to believe." If the Catholic says, "The Vicar of Christ runs the Church," the secularist says, "Society is governed by the will of the people." Andrew Greeley once applied secularist theory to Catholic faith and government structures with the advice to those who wished to be selective about their "assent" and "obedience": Make the bishop dialogue with you, because you have as much a hand on God as the magisterium.17

Episcopal authority, defined canonically as threefold, can also be looked upon as an altar supported by four pillars: the right and responsibility of a bishop (1) to govern Catholic worship, (2) to determine what Christ's message was, (3) to create or approve instruments for its authentic transmission, (4) to define the priesthood and religious life, whose personnel serve as vicars of bishops in parish and diocesan institutions. In short, worship and service to God by the Church cannot truly proceed if the hierarchy, in union with the pope, do not have the final word on what it means to be a priest or religious, does not set the parameters of authentic Catholic theology, and the definition of a Catholic school, where young people go, or are sent, for formation in the faith, whatever else may be its function. Without such authority acknowledged, in practice as well as in theory, a Church can hardly be classified as legitimately Catholic.

Within one generation, from Vatican II onward, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has weakened the props under ecclesiastical authority - that of the pope in Rome, and the local pastor too - by three incautious decisions, all coalescing strangely in 1967.

First, by deciding that it was un-American to terminate Charles Curran from his teaching post at the Catholic University of America. Nineteen years would pass before Rome declared him unfit to teach Catholic theology, and forced his firing. But by 1968 'little Currans' had multiplied all over the Catholic landscape, sometimes as religious superiors, even as columnists in diocesan newspapers. Humanae Vitae, the Church's teaching on sexuality and matrimony, too, were the prominent casualties of widespread dissent.

Secondly, in the same year, by virtue of its own authorized studies of the priesthood (all faulty), and for five years thereafter, by intervening in the contest of wills between the Sacred Congregation for Religious over the essentials of religious life, bishops rendered dead on arrival two papal letters defining these essentials - Ecclesiae Sanctae (1966) and Evangelica Testificatio (1971). As a result, the fertile field of religious vocations suddenly became barren, and the splendid Catholic school system, a century in the making, was depopulated by half. Although many solid voices were raised against these compromises, they were excused by others as the result of uncertainty about the meaning of Vatican II documents.

It is hard to understand, therefore, thirty years later, why bishops would permit Catholic colleges to remain unresponsive either to their founders or to the law of the Church - autonomous and beyond oversight by her highest authorities. By permitting this to occur, the Episcopal Conference, fully conscious of the negative consequences, has weakened support for its special authority. An imprimatur of this kind confers legitimacy to a rival teaching office on faith and morals within the Catholic household. If an academic can be autonomous of his bishop, then any Catholic can.

This is not a situation into which bishops have drifted perchance. Leading members of the new NCCB (1966) entered into a peace pact with protagonists of the Land O' Lakes' Declaration of Independence from its publication in 1967. Not only that, they have also obstructed the efforts of two popes to keep Catholic colleges within the fold. In bygone days, European Churches became spiritually and pastorally bankrupt after their leaders dealt incompetently with a powerful opposing ideology. Today's secular dogma insists that there are no demonstrable revealed certainties and that no higher education, worthy of the name, claims that there are.18 American bishops did well against anti-Catholic forces in the 19th century, but how effectively they cope with 20th century secularism remains to be seen, when many zealots, in command of Catholic infrastructures, are certain only that many teachings of the Church are uncertain.

Back to the Drawing Board

A church body - college included - if credible to anyone, must first of all be credible to its own people. And defensive of its own integrity, when circumstances make that necessary. Whether the American public generally considers a religious institution respectable has, until recently, depended on how well it served the worldly public. Its religious claims were not so important as its competence in exercising civic virtue. Whether that institution performed public service for a religious reason, or intermingled its religion with its secularity, was irrelevant to most Americans and to politicians. When the G. I. Bill of Rights was enacted in 1944 by a more-or-less Protestant America, in order that homecoming veterans could use federal money for education, where they spent it was immaterial. Once secularism rose to become the country's ideological mainstream, however, its overlords, clerks, and judicial overseers, took a dimmer view of taxpayers' money supporting a citizen's choice of religious over secular education. Many Catholic college presidents, without adequate episcopal oversight,19 suddenly began to mute their supposedly deeply-held convictions about the truth of what the Church teaches. In their quest of the blessings of a secularist society, they prized the public charter more than the baptismal record, looked upon the secular magisterium as their guide, more than the papal. The time for reviewing that change of direction is at hand, especially in the light of Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

The process of return to the Catholic birthright can only begin with a college president with saint-like faith and the courage of a martyr. And a bishop of similar quality. Since the Catholic campus is a major artery of the Church, especially to its future leadership, what goes on there interacts with the entire pastoral lifeline of the Church. Catholics are not wanting who are content to abandon "the explicit profession of Catholicity," and to weaken their "institutional commitment to the Word of God as proclaimed by the Catholic Church," words used by John Paul II to American academics in 1987.20 Still, faith in full restoration of Catholic colleges to the fold must not seem as hopeless, no matter how many Land O' Lakes' devotees say so. Only 8 presidents led the Church's large system away from its ecclesiastical origins, many more than 8 are unhappy with the Land O' Lakes' results. Only two bishops were partners in that perilous Catholic undertaking, while dozens of prelates are already on record in favor of restoration of full Catholicity to the Church's higher education.

It is hard to understand why so many American clerics would bequeath to the future the bankrupt estate of secularized colleges, where dissenting religious and theology professors, by that time, will be so entrenched as to claim their right to be called the Church's "second magisterium." It is equally unthinkable to many, considering its thirty-year track record, why the Holy See would accept a non-juridical answer to what its officers have always thought was a critical juridical challenge to Catholicity. A non-decision at a high level on a matter of such importance does little to enhance the Church's pastorate at all levels, and in fact reduces it to mere caretaking of nominal Christianity.

To restore the American Catholic system in full to its pristine religious fervor may be unlikely. Permit that to be an option bishops may choose. Some presidents will choose open secularity, and some others may be forced by their peers to go that route. Let no one be deceived, however, that the present conflict between academics and ecclesiastics is not a contest of contradictory power centers. The victors in this struggle will be the side which institutionalizes within the Church its answers to questions as old as Christianity. Who defines Christ and Catholicity? Who dictates to whom about how the Church should be run? Who is the teacher, who is the learner? Who must be re-taught? So far since Vatican II, the academics have won most of the battles. They have demanded unconditional surrender and remain undefeated. The scales of justice to Catholic Faith remain tipped in that direction. Still, bishops are not without allies. Some college presidents have vowed never to submit to Rome, but within their private world individual intellectuals are already pressing for a return to full Catholicity. Bishops, who have long underestimated the animus against hierarchical oversight among those with whom they have been dealing in friendly fashion for thirty years, must decide how badly Catholic a college must become before they see fit to decertify it as Catholic.

College presidents have made "free choice" the operative concept in this power-struggle. Bishops may well be impelled to make choices of their own. As difficult as it is in a body of 300, to find unity under disagreeable circumstances bishops must face the fact that they are dealing with a general strike against their very authority. Bishops would be the first ones to condemn as immoral a general strike against the common good of the nation if the issue was economic. (Harry Truman once threatened railroad workers in a national strike with military conscription if they did not return to work immediately. They did!)

If, therefore, bishops come to realize that the existing Catholic college situation threatens the future of a pious Church at the parish level, and of a vibrant priesthood in the next century, they must go beyond the unprincipled dialogue, which appeases or agitates the discontented, more than it settles an urgent Catholic problem of faith, morals or discipline. Cardinal Bernard Law saw the real issue at stake, when he contested Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's August 1996 search for the restoration of Catholic unity through national dialogue between "the so-called left" and the "so-called right" of the Church. Law denied that the "pastoral crisis" can be resolved when "truth and dissent from truth [are] equal partners in ecclesial dialogue." He issued a clarion "call to conversion" instead. But, even the conversion of some dissenters would not solve the crisis. As Bernardin's The New World makes clear (August 9, 1996), those who want equality with bishops before they dialogue, those who think the pope and bishops in union with him are "extremists," those who intend to continue as a "church within a church," unless they get their way, are impervious to productive dialogue. This kind of impasse explains why states have presidents and the Church a hierarchy - to settle seeming insoluble disputes.

A detailed blueprint of recovery cannot be drawn at this time, but a broad sketch of choices are readily available for careful but not timid implementation.

1. Bishops should denationalize the college problem. Strictly speaking, the Catholicity of a college lies within the pastoral jurisdiction of a diocesan bishop. The faithful have a vested interest in knowing what he, above anyone else, is doing to protect their baptismal right to authentic Catholic faith and worship. A national body of bishops can no more guarantee the Catholicity of Walsh College in Youngstown, Ohio with its 1,500 students, than the FBI can guarantee the safety of the residents of New York's South Bronx. The American Church does not have a central government, and even if it did, it could not protect the Catholicity of Walsh College. Rome can only look to the local bishop to do that - if he can. The Land O' Lakes group seized the initiative from Rome and from the local bishop, when they found other bishops willing to deal with their unilateral demands only through the National Catholic Educational Association first, and later through its birth child, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. During this process, several hundred little colleges were swallowed up in an eddy created by a handful of large colleges. The present confrontation was magnified as a result.

Diocesan bishops may not care to assume such a responsibility at this late date, especially those who are inexperienced with the task. But the authenticity of the Church is best tested in the local diocese, not in the offices of the United States Catholic Conference.

2. The policy of the NCCB should require that the Code of Canon Law and Ex Corde Ecclesiae are in force, as of a given date, for all colleges which wish official recognition as Catholic. Institutional commitment to the teaching authority of the Church, declared publicly in a mission statement of some kind, the requirement that teachers of theology are to be faithful to magisterium, and need a license from competent ecclesial authority to teach theology, and that Catholic teachers must form a majority of the faculty, are the essential elements of the understanding.

3. College presidents should be advised to undertake an internal review of the composition of the board, faculty contracts, hiring and termination procedures, promotions, faculty and student associations, and numerous other housekeeping details, which reflect or detract from the Catholic commitment. Yeshiva University, Howard University, Evangelical, Harvard, Yale and Princeton possess infrastructures which protect their ethnic, racial, religious, or secular identity. This necessarily may be an enormous burden on presidents of the larger schools, but certainly on anyone whose institution has become more secular than Catholic. Some presidents may opt out of the Catholic system over these complexities. This is a small price to pay in a Church that cannot continue to be ambiguous about its purpose and nature, no matter how religious clarity is resented in a secularized world. And no matter how ambiguous Catholics individually are in their personal lives.

4. A Vicar for Education is to a bishop what a Commissioner of Education is to the Governor of a State. He oversees the application of public law to the institutions covered by appropriate statutes. Relations with college presidents are professional, standard operational procedures are taken for granted, and mutual interests are served. In the Church situation, the concept of a Vicar formalizes what once was carried on by a bishop informally; a recognition, too, that in recent years Church authorities have neglected to oversee the ecelesial stake in Catholic higher education at the very moment it became necessary. During the post-Vatican II period bishops often were forced to take an active interest in the day-to-day problems of their diocesan educational system, rarely reflecting that their difficulties at that level originated on a college campus somewhere, not in a local religious house.

With errant and erroneous teaching on Catholic college campuses in mind, Paul VI instructed Apostolic Delegate Jean Jadot in 1975 to advise American bishops to appoint a Vicar for Doctrine, if they could not deal with this important matter personally. No bishop in attendance paid attention to the request. Nonetheless, that ignored recommendation has relevancy to any effort to restore full Catholicity to the Church's college system. College presidents, out of habit, will object to such vigilance, especially those whose faculties are in the forefront of political movements to pressure secular governments to correct social evils of one kind or another. A good president, in the face of a factual report which raises questions about the Catholicity of his college, hopefully will be as distressed as the bishop, to no less degree than after a State Commissioner told him his college library was inferior. A president who is hostile to the very idea of such oversight from the bishop's office demonstrates, better than a report, that restoration of an authentic "sensus fidei" on every accredited Catholic campus is a necessitas, not a desideratum.

In the United States two words have been out of fashion since 1919 at least - "laissez-faire" and "gradualism." The first, because it justified entrepreneurs doing whatever they wanted to do with their property, public be damned. The other, because it was an hypocritical device used by capitalists, labor barons, and racists to assure government overseers that, on their own and over time, they would undo the evils they perpetrated against their fellow citizens and their country. Pius XI buried both evasions of responsibility in Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and every NCCB pastoral since 1966 has called for action by secular government to set right civil and social wrongs traceable to society's evil structures. Every contemporary recovery program rejects "Let me do what I want" and "Let me recover in stages" as a first or last step in dealing effectively with addictive or antisocial behavior. Yet this is what Jesuit and other college presidents expect Rome and national hierarchies to allow.

Good Governance is Divine Worship

The opening lines of Vatican II's first constitution declares that the work of our redemption is accomplished through the liturgy. The Council Fathers had the Eucharist in mind. But the word "liturgy" really means "public work," making the good governance of the Church by bishops also vital to our redemption. This means, in practice, that the gap between what bishops teach and how their household lives should properly be narrow. Paul VI, who brought the Council to its conclusion, saw the connection of faith and morals to worship. He called his Credo of the People of God an act of "solemn worship." He proclaimed that the teaching in Humanae Vitae was based on the Church's worship of God. Why should the good governance of the Church be anything but worship due to Jesus Christ? Who knows better than bishops that the great sin for the Christian, as it is for the Jew, is idolatry. In Moses' time the idol was a Golden Calf. In John Paul II's time it is Humanity. As the new Catechism says: "Idolatry, a constant temptation to faith ... rejects the unique Lordship of God."

Pagans worship an idol as God because they do not understand the mysteries of life; modern idolaters believe there is no need of God because there are no mysteries which man cannot unravel by himself. Unbelievers of old sang and danced around images of the sun and moon, or before the tombs of their ancestors, sometimes sacrificing their children in the hope of gaining relief or a better life; unabashed secularists, certain that there is no other life than this, only pay homage to the want and wishes of the people, at least to the voices of those who here and now are their heralds or their lords.

False worship becomes a spectacle in the Church when choristers chant more about Christ the Man than about Christ the Son of God, or more of a Church as a Community of People than as a House of God, more of this life than the next. Worship is surely false when bishops are nominated to be learners of God's Word, and savants to be their primary teachers, when also the new sacraments are said to be personal conscience, human experience, and self-fulfillment. False worship is surely entrenched, when multitudes are uncertain about where to find truth in Catholicity, and when fundamental questions of discipline, adoration, and doctrine are given contradictory answers within the Church, where the young are taught that they belong to a Church, not necessarily to "The Church of Christ," when a young man, having rejected Sunday Mass after high school, can write: "I don't see any purpose for having a Church anyway. Since we are all saved anyway, how important could it be?"21

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, sent down by God who looked upon his people as stiff-necked and depraved, he found his brother Aaron, the priest, leading a dance around the Golden Calf, and the mob chanting: "This is your God, O Israel!" Moses was filled with wrath at Aaron who had allowed the people to run wild: "What did this people ever do to you that you should lead them into so grave a sin?" Then Moses went to the gate of the camp and cried out: "Whoever is for the Lord, let him come to me." And as the Book of Exodus reports (Ch. 32): "All the Levites then rallied to him, and he told them: 'THUS SAYS THE LORD."'

In recent years bishops have spent a great deal of time trying to pacify the Church's idolaters, while the faithful were led into false worship and its consequences - loss of faith and sinful lives.22 Whenever the Church is worshipping God correctly, the unity of the faithful around the doctrinal teaching of the bishops is the reason. Once their people think solely in humanist terms, as Peter was chided by Christ for doing (Mt. 16:23), Catholic bishops also have the option the Lord gave to Moses:"Go to the people, proclaim God's disfavor, and cry out: 'WHOEVER IS FOR THE LORD, LET THEM COME TO US!'"

If Church authority needs convincing that college presidents have seized the higher ground above bishops in determining what is acceptably Catholic, to the deconstruction of the Church's nature, the following anecdote may help clarify its thinking: A chief officer at a major Catholic university, alarmed at the possibility of episcopal intervention in the internal affairs of his institution, vented his fears to the President, who happened to be a major Land O' Lakes zealot. The executive later reported to other peers publicly the comforting words of the President: "What is the worst that can happen? The Pope will tell the world that we are not a Catholic University. No one will believe him."

Till the End of Time

The allusion at the beginning of this essay to Julius Caesar and the Fall of Rome limps when applied to John Paul II and the governance of the Holy See. The Pope does not aspire to be a dictator and the Church has no armies to patrol the borders of Catholic faith and morals, but over time manage to prevail. There is, however, much truth in the comparison: Whenever the head of Church or State finds revolutionaries invading the deep interior of his sanctuary, or his territory, he must accept the prospect of being overthrown, neutralized, or being rendered irrelevant, unless he knows how to defend effectively his faith or his people, or both.

In the Church's case, from time immemorial, from the days of Marcion and Montanus to Alfred Loisy and Hans Kung, the onset of heresies and schisms appeared first in disrespect for the jurisdiction and/or competence of pope and bishops. When hierarchy misjudged the depth of that disrespect, it lost ground to the forces of unbelief. Unbelievers do not create the faithlessness among believing Christians, as much as religionists, who do not recognize unbelief when they see it, or fail to judge properly the intentions of those arrayed against magisterium. Regardless of what has gone on over centuries in Europe, we are in the process of institutionalizing for the first time nominal Catholicity in the United States, ways of knowing which preclude learning from on high, religion as feeling more than truth, thinking of this world, not the next, no law that cannot be broken, pluralism in everything, including faith, Lord, and Church - these are the concepts prevalent in Catholic parishes, but early on developed in the 19th century at the pious Protestant Universities of Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. The mainline Protestant Churches which followed their lead are now empty on Sunday morning, save at concert time. Pompey and the Roman Senate were happy to have Julius Caesar out in the Provinces of Spain, Britain, and Gaul. One is entitled to wonder what the story of Rome might have become if they were wise enough, and prepared, to meet him at the Rubicon.

Monsignor George A. Kelly, one of the great churchmen of the United States, is author of The Battle for the American Church and a series of subsequent books available from Ignatius Press. Monsignor Kelly is the founder and the continuing guardian angel of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

Endnotes

2 John Paul II in an address to the cardinals the day after his election (October 17, 1978).

3 Catholic World Report, March 1996, p. 52.

4 One hears this rhetoric everywhere, even in the smallest places. Accent Magazine of Neumann College, Pennsylvania (1,300 students, 40 teachers) gave attention to it in their Summer 1996 issue.

5 Catholic New York, July 21, 1996, p. 5.

6 The Ratzinger Report, p. 26.

7 Origins, August 1, 1996.

8 Origins, June 27, 1996.

9 Origins, March 15, 1990.

10 Paul VI's address to Jesuit University Rectors, 1975.

11 Origins, December 26, 1974.

12 Origins, January 9, 1975.

13 In the real world, dissent involves more than a single proposition, but a complex of Catholic doctrines. For example, the opening paragraphs of a Catholic News Service story (August 10, 1996) highlighted AAUP's case against St. Meinrad's. A reader had to read down the story to find the Rector's (and the Archbishop's) case against the nun.

14 When the conduct of St. John's University (1965) against the United Federation of Teachers was upheld by the American Arbitration Association, and the firing of Charles Curran by the Catholic University of America (1986) by a Federal Court - three years after the original confrontations - dissent in their theology departments continued in both places.

15 See Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 119.

16 Lumen Gentium, no. 27.

17 America, April 30, 1988.

18 See a summary of this viewpoint in Origins, May 23, 1996.

19 Twenty Catholic colleges in New York after 1970, one excepted, declared themselves "non-denominational" in order to receive State money, without a protest from a single bishop.

20 See John Paul II in America, St. Paul Books, 1987.

21 National Catholic Register, July 9, 1995.

22 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IiaIIae, q. 153, article 5, on the relationship between sin and the loss of faith. See as well 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 on the relationship between sin and damnation.