MORE GOOD NEWS
by Gerry Bradley

Editor-in-chief Ralph McInerny asked if I wanted to do "good news." I thought he was kiddingÑliterally. I said to Ralph, "OK, but I want to do the bad news first." Ralph pressed his point. No, he said, the whole issue of Dossier is to be about the "good news" in the church. "Sure, Ralph, and next month you'll be running a knock-knock joke contest." McInerny eventually removed the scales from my eyes Ñ I agreed to write about something good going on in the American Church. I wanted to leave aside all the good things being done by McInerny, Helen Hitchcock or Father Fessio. They were likely contributing to the issue too, and I did not want to repeat. It took me a while to get going. For apart from their efforts and those of a few others, there is a lot of bad news these days. Catholic universities (sic) are a shambles (or, in reality, Episcopalian), and the American bishops have been slow to see, and react, to it. And just last month something called The Administrative Board of the NCCB issued a document called Always Our Children, a pastoral aimed, the document said, at parents of homosexual children. Always will, I fear, do virtually no good and a lot of harm to parents and their homosexual children. To mention just one of its many, many troubling features, this "pastoral" never states, implies, or gives reason to suspect the existence of the truth stated clearly in the Catechism, that homosexuality is an objective disorder. The authors of the document talk about disorder, but the problem as they see it is not homosexuality. The problem is people who think homosexuality is a problem. I guess that makes Saint Paul part of the problem rather than of the solution.

My assignment is the good news, and here it is: the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. I presume to write authoritatively about this august group. In a rash moment some time ago, its members made me President. The Fellowship is a group of several hundred scholars who have joined together to more effectively put each one's gifts at the service of the Church. Besides possessing the standard scholarly credentials, members of the Fellowship subscribe to a statement of purposes. Among those purposes is this: "We accept as the rule of our life and thought the entire faith of the Catholic Church."

And this: "[W]e wish to accept a responsibility which a Catholic scholar may not evade: to assist everyone, so far as we are able, to personal assent to the mystery of Christ as made manifest through the lived faith of the Church, His Body, and through the active charity without which the faith is dead." And, since one bishop recently saw fit to label the Fellowship "ultramontanist"Ñ literally, "over the mountains"; present usage: reactionary, to the right of schismatic Archbishop Lefebvre Ñ members affirm that they "wholeheartedly accept and support the renewal of the Church of Christ undertaken by Pope John XXIII, shaped by Vatican II, and carried on by succeeding pontiffs."

The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars has been especially active in the struggle to reclaim our once Catholic universities. Besides the individual efforts of the members, the group has published and sent to all the bishops various constructive proposals for implementing the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae. Two years ago the Fellowship devoted its entire annual conference to that theme. The Proceedings of that meeting were also sent to all the bishops. Most recently, some members have put together a proposal to implement Canon 812 (of the 1983 Code of Canon Law), which states that all persons teaching in the theological disciplines have authorization to do so from the competent ecclesiastical authority, basically, the local bishop. This requirement, which follows from the truth of the Faith that the bishops possess the teaching authority of the Apostles, is the heart of the whole conflict in Catholic higher education. The Fellowship stands here with the Faith, over against virtually the entire American Catholic college establishment. The most recent meeting of the Fellowship was devoted to the question, "Is a Culture of Life Still Possible in the United States? The answer was, I