EXCELSIOR
by Ralph McInerny

A few years ago at a meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in Los Angeles I was listening with morose delectation to talk after talk detailing outrages taking place in the Church in the United States. It can be reassuring to hear others who can recognize an outrage when they see one yet still expect a reaction of surprise from their listeners. At some point or another, it occurred to me to wonder if there weren't any good news. But of course the answer to that question was all around me in the room. The speakers were not simply reporting on the anomalous. Almost without exception they were doing something about it. I realized that I was surrounded by some of the real heroes and heroines of the post-conciliar Church.

It is not a barrel of laughs to defend the Magisterium and come to the defense of bishops only to find that many bishops seem at ease only when confronted with hostility, dissent and the outright rejection of Church teaching. They were always available to be insulted and patronized by the enemies within the wall but elusive as Nicodemus with the faithful. The charitable interpretation would be that they were after lost sheep and neglected the flock in their effort to win them back. Other interpretations will occur to you.

For some decades now Catholics have been severely tested by widespread confusion in the Church. Theologians dissented with impunity, without even so much as a wrist slap, from fundamental Church teaching. Colleges and universities declared that they no longer had any formal relation to the Catholic Church, a declaration of independence that did not preclude their defining and redefining the Catholicism of which they disclaimed being the spokesman. Marriage preparation taught people how not to be married and seminaries Ñ well, the stories seemed scarcely credible.

All that and much else happened. Just when one thought the worst was over, a new nadir was reached. It was not until 1985, with the Ratzinger Report and the Second Extraordinary Synod, that there was the frank acknowledgment that an effort, largely successful, had been made to hijack Vatican II. From that point things started to get slowly better.

The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars was founded to provide a counterbalance to those academics who tripped over one another to deny, dismiss or pooh pooh the latest statement of the Magisterium. Were all professors heterodox? Many magazines were founded in order that sound doctrine might find the home it no longer had in the older magazines and reviews. In the circumstances, it was necessary to distinguish the truth from the many distortions that seemed to have authoritative sanction, since they were seldom officially countered or rejected. By and large, the Church bureaucracy did not welcome these efforts. Au contraire. Bishops and archbishops expressed gratitude to the National Catholic Reporter, which could make The Watch Tower look friendly, and curried the favor of dissenters. In what one hopes will be a final instance of this, Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb appeared before the Catholic Theological Society last summer and joked about such "Ultramontanes" as the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars who, he said, regarded his audience as made up of heretics. They loved it. The meeting he was addressing was in the process of calling into question the Church's right to decide against the ordination of women. It was defying the explicit judgment of the Magisterium, but Archbishop Lipscomb took the occasion to insult absent loyalists. Whose side is he on?

Such antics by prelates were once all too common, but now Cardinal Law and Archbishop Chaput and several other bishops have publicly wondered if the Catholic Theological Society of America has not outlived its usefulness. What kind of theological society is it that seems dedicated to attacking Catholic doctrine rather than understanding and explaining it?

Bishops are going to have to face up to the fact that the same kind of dissenters that control the CTSA are working in their diocesan offices and teaching in their seminaries. They are going to have to face up to the fact that 90% of the USCC bureaucracy might have outlived its usefulness too. It has been the boast of dissenters that they hold the levers of power, in chanceries, in universities, in seminaries, in the media. No wonder most of the aggiornamento is bubbling up from below.

The good news about the Church today, the great and wonderful things that are going on all around us, have rarely been initiated from the top.

To be a Catholic is to be guided by the Holy Father and the bishops in union with him. There is no genuine Catholicism apart from the hierarchy and the Magisterium. But we live in a time when bishops have to be prodded, assured that there is an army of faithful behind them and that the point of Church pronouncements is not to get a favorable mention in the secular media. Perhaps the bishops should locate their offices and bureaus away from Washington, say Pocatello or Denver. In Washington there is a tendency to mimic lobbyists and think tanks, feet begin to move to a Souza march rather than to the measured tempo of a divinely founded institution.

It would of course be insufferably condescending to say that there are good bishops. There are even some good theologians. But the Church in this country has to get back on its own agenda and stop being guided by secular priorities. Anyone who thinks that it is an urgent need to issue a letter to the parents of homosexuals assuring them that it is okay to love their kids needs a vacation. The plug of his computer should be pulled. In Pocatello or Denver there is clean air and a chance for clear thinking.

So much for these introductory remarks, written in a familiar lamentation mode, the better to pre