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The Supreme Shepherd of the Church:
A Catholic Bishop
by Msgr. George A. Kelly
If George Gallup walked down Madison Avenue asking strollers “Who runs the Catholic Church in New York?” he would likely learn that newly arrived Archbishop Edward Egan does. Or, at least, John Cardinal O’Connor, recently gone to God. At that level of people almost everyone understands that the boss of the Catholic Church is always a bishop. And John Paul II, or simply “the pope,” is chief throughout the Catholic world.
If the inquirer went further, searching for a more scholarly insight, he might find at least one literary source offering the opinion that bishops run the Church:
Bishops have a sacred right and duty before the Lord of legislating for and of passing judgment on their subjects, as well as of regulating everything that concerns the good order of divine worship and of the apostolate.
Imagine that: “Regulating everything!” Who would say that? The council fathers at Vatican II,
Lumen Gentium, no. 27.
Catholic bishops never really “ran” much, but very little that was Catholic ran against them; and that’s the reason the Church was seen as one of the best-managed institutions in the world. If this be the case, how come since Vatican II more Catholics pay less and less attention to bishops on matters of faith and morals? To say it another way: How is it that Catholics have run away from their pastors on important matters of Church teaching?
Perhaps even more important: How did bishops or popes allow those who teach under Church offices to lead the faithful astray? For more than thirty years, no less.
The Good Old Days
People like me — half way through the ninth decade of life and inching up to six full decades of priesthood, two in academe — remember the Church into which we were born. And no one can say, as Catholic columnists do today, that 40 percent of my generation abandoned the Church. Quite the contrary. When I entered the first grade in 1922, the parish school taught 2000 children, was governed by a 58-year-old priest in the 21st year of his pastorate, four curates aged 33, 31, 30, 28 years, conducting Sunday Masses on the hour and half-hour (lower church) filled to overflowing, four-week parish missions, 150 altar boys, a 100-member adult choir, upward mobility among the young even to college, one, two, or three priests saying their First Mass in Good Counsel every year from 1918 through 1945. And “Catholic” political power rising in their city year by year. The Cardinal’s residence was called “The Powerhouse.”
There was vital faith in the pews, then, to be sure. St. Paul’s “obedience of faith,” also (Rom. 1:5). A priest might stop a man on the street to ask, “Are you a Catholic?” and be told in return, “Yes, Father, but I’m not very good at it.” Hardly as happens today when public sinners do this answering: “What business is that of yours?” Cardinal Patrick Hayes, whose morning Mass on Madison Avenue I served as a teenager, was sure enough of his own role in Catholic and civic life to call New York’s mayor to his residence — for a “dressing down” over the latter’s scandalous behavior. And Jimmy Walker came.
Clearly there was a discipleship in those days. Discipleship, a fancier word, to be sure, than “discipline,” was one and the same thing, really. Christians were expected to show reverence to sacred persons, as to Christ. Obedience went with faith, and was often a hard-won gift to those who came later. Especially in a Catholic community which, by the time of its First Baltimore Council (1829), had a reputation for “priests who knew not how to obey” and “Catholic laity who lived by non-Catholic norms.” (At least according to Church historian Peter Güilday.) None of this disorder would be true a century later in 1929. Nor in 1949. And don’t let anyone tell you that there wasn’t freedom in the Church. For Christians, that is. American bishops might once have had a difficult time, with wandering priests especially, but by the 2Oth century “they had built the Church better than they knew,” as one bishop-writer put it. Archbishop George Pell, now Australia’s angel in Sydney, was surprised to learn that I never “fought” Francis Cardinal Spellman. On closer look, however, he decided that “reverence and obedience” to our bishops was an outstanding characteristic of priests in my generation. We were well-trained enough to talk “up” to our superiors, never “back” to them. In turn, bishop-decision-makers of substance, who could and did say no to us often enough, were also generous with their yesses. In any case, they were in final charge of our religious lives and those of the people we served.
Revolt Against Bishops
It is almost a waste of time anymore to figure out how the Church’s “new knowledge class” bullied its way into ultimate power over Catholic teaching, morals, and discipleship. And, in the process, undermined “bishop power” over Christ’s Church. The failure of bishops to “fire” Charles Curran in 1967 is as good a starting point as any. Especially since, nineteen years later (1986), they had no such difficulty when Rome demanded they give Curran the air. Surely, when the American courts agreed that the bishops had the right to do what they did.
During the fight over Curran, John Cardinal Krol said it right: “What is the use of being the Catholic University’s Board of Directors if we can’t fire an untenured professor?” Six years later (1973) Krol, in my rectory, discussed the shortcomings of papers on the priesthood that had been published a few years earlier by the Church’s Washington bureaucracy. At one point I interposed: “You’re going to have to do something with the
USCC now that you’re President of the NCCB.” To which Krol replied: “Oh, I have more to do as Archbishop of Philadelphia than to become a policeman for the
USCC.” This from someone who ran a tight ship in Philadelphia but would sit idly by as the
USCC drafted second-rate catechetical guidelines for parochial schools.
As such episcopal pacifism held sway, other Catholic strongholds were also being invaded. I am not easily scandalized by the occasional misconduct of priests, but I was shocked (1972) during the
International Congress of Catholic Universities in Rome. Convoked by Cardinal Gabriel Garrone, Paul VI’s Vicar for Catholic Education worldwide, this assembly was intended to lead American Catholic colleges toward a greater respect for Church laws. At one point during the debate, the president of Georgetown University rose to tell Garrone (and the assembly), with some emotion I might add, that if Rome was going to impose “norms” on
his university, he was going home to decertify Georgetown as Catholic. A little while later, Notre Dame’s president also stood up to inform Garrone that he too would leave the Congress immediately, and take the American delegates with him, if such “norms” were contemplated. The classy-looking French Cardinal seemed stunned at such boldness. I wonder now, as I did then, what might have been the response had the prelate sitting in that chair had been a Dennis Dougherty, a William O’Connell, a Francis J. Spellman or a John Mitty.
Almost twenty years would pass before American Universities did receive norms in
Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990). Even so, ten more years were needed before the U.S. bishops (with a second nudge from Rome) finalized the specifics. Only to have important bishops, during and after their November 2000 meeting, complain that they would not — or could not — enforce these norms. The excuses were silly: one or another didn’t want to denounce academics, or claimed that dissent might be tolerable since Aquinas had his fair share of errors, or admitted that bishops lacked the will or the power to do anything about errant presidents or professors, even to define errancy.
By then, secularist ideology had reached the upper regions of the Church. The academic profession, with its built-in skepticism, earlier had achieved political power over governors and presidents. The secularization of American Protestant universities (19th century) turned professors into important opinion-molders for the country. In religious matters, “scientific” criticism of the Bible, the Word of God once “handed on” by bishops, suddenly became the Word of Man uncovered and taught differently by scholars. By 1967 Catholic college presidents were demanding a similar autonomy from their pastors, who from the first challenge demonstrated timidity in dealing with such academic confrontation. Whereas Protestantism long ago had become a victim of its own ideology (e.g., private interpretation of Christianity) Catholicity now faced similar danger once Christ’s Vicars were made to look irrelevant to, and powerless over, the Church’s apostolate in higher education.
The Church’s Latest Problem
Institutionalizing the American model of a university system within the Church led to pervasive Catholic secularism among the opinion-molders. Secular ideologues on Catholic campuses, while denying bishops the right to witness there the Church’s faith in Christ, are unembarrassed to enforce on the faithful their secular prescriptions for a less doctrinal form of Catholicity. We have here another case of what St. Paul called “human precepts and doctrines” (Colossians) prevailing over God’s Word as taught by the Vicar of Christ. To make the situation worse, bishops created their own problem, when, to interpret
Ex Corde Ecclesiae, they turned for counsel exclusively to academic enemies of the encyclical. Not one institutional supporter of John Paul II was solicited. They also manifested blindness to the real world of the Church’s collegium. Refrains like “Goodbye to Catholic Ireland,” “Catholics do not know what the Church teaches” (Austria), “Why pick on me?” (Curran) never seemed to arouse official anxiety. Yet, Ralph Mclnerny, president emeritus of the
Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, had no trouble identifying what was happening today in many Catholic campuses: “Little Hitlers, engaging in their version of Kristalnacht, wiping out the orthodox, making the scene safe for dissent.”
Years ago my friend Msgr. John Tracy Ellis introduced me to a paragraph written by George Santayana. At the time (1971) he had already shared this Spanish-born Harvard professor with the U.S. hierarchy. Santayana, though a well-known unbeliever, remained fascinated by the Catholic Church into whose culture he was born. Writing first when turn-of-the-last-century Modernism, the source of today’s Secularism, was the university rage, Santayana saw “the sole hope of the Church” in its “otherworld” perspective on human life and on its priesthood. So he concluded:
Its sole dignity lies there. It will not convert the world; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying in the wilderness, but it will believe what it cries, and there will be some to listen to it, as there have been many in the past.
As to modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those concessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and double-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a mortal concession. It concedes that everything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.
In a scenario like this Christ simply becomes the symbol of mankind’s yearnings for a better life. Not the Savior. His Church becomes a community of searchers for meaning. Not the Body of Christ. And, in that search, her pastors are primarily servants of the people, not teachers, rulers, sanctifiers.
What To Do?
Catholics of faith are one with John Paul II in his assessment that the present challenge to the Church is radical. No longer over the number of sacraments. Certainly not really over women priests. Nor whether the altar should face East or West, but whether God exists. Whether the name “Christ” as Son of God has any truth to it, or any relevance to contemporary human life. Early in the 20th century the Christian world was appalled at the godlessness of communist states, collaboration with which was deemed “intrinsically evil.” Why do we not understand that present-day secularism is also godlessness? And that its belief system dominates American culture? And marginalizes orthodox Christianity? Whatever can be called “revealed religion,” indeed God, has been consigned — at least officially — to the corners of public society. A votary of abortion experiences neither shame nor guilt as he pursues the presidency of the United States, whereas he who allows himself to be dubbed “pro-life” may not say what this means in the concrete, lest he surely be denied high office by America’s abortion-minded majority.
Killing the unborn is only the starkest evidence of how far America has — in its public and government policies — drifted from Thomas Jefferson’s written expectations. At least from what he said in the Declaration of Independence — that American citizens aspire to that station among men “to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitles them.” In our time, the Ten Commandments are of little account in modern public discourse, certainly not among government officials or justices, as serious demands on citizens from God. Let us not deceive ourselves that we are engaged, therefore, in a simple ethnic or sectarian culture war. This is a war against Judeo-Christianity. The Orthodox Jew and Christian have their place, but on the fringe of this society, or in the middle — if they are quiet about their mythological creeds. Modern society has time and place only for whatever truth is verified by human experience or by measurable observations, Within this earthbound perspective, Christ is not taken seriously, American higher education, with its narrow faith in empiricism and its demand that the only worthwhile freedom is the pursuit of such knowledge, all other being unverifiable, has in the popular mind debunked the truths of revealed faith. Its practitioners train most of the executives who mold media and public opinion. Evangelical Christians have opposed the trend, but they are marginalized by media masters as extremists. The Catholic Church is recognized by most commentators as the only real counterforce that could threaten the hegemony of secularist overseers. But many Catholics themselves have found worldliness attractive.
It is ominous, therefore, for the Church that Catholic colleges and universities should now be permitted, if only by inaction among the Church’s chief guardians, to follow the de-Christianization policies of Horace Mann and John Dewey rather than those of John Paul II playing his role as Vicar of Christ. Who else but Catholic professors, their media skills and their well-formed students, keep God and his world alive, and salvation through Christ God’s expectation?
The die is cast.
Is the Catholic Church up to the challenge? Catholic higher education has declared itself to be a law unto itself. Is this acceptable Catholic behavior?
Will Church leaders change the policies, priorities and people who have brought the Catholic Faith and discipleship to the lowest point of religious practice in the United States since the 19th century? If the Church “believes what it cries,” must it not be structured accordingly? Not to resurrect pre-Vatican II formalities, but to forge a post-Vatican II Church fully Catholic in its belief and behavior, committed also to restoring revealed religion to its proper place in American culture. Any business school can provide manuals on how to manage enterprises according to plan. But, in the Catholic case, the only ones who can make Christ’s plan work is the Catholic hierarchy.
The prudential judgments involved in recovering what is now lost are many, internecine strife among Catholics being an understandable byproduct. The difficulty of bishops must be appreciated. But our condition is no worse than the fate of the United States facing a two-ocean war after Pearl Harbor. Is there the will and the genius in the Catholic community to take back the Church of Christ from dissenters? And following John Paul II, to keep Christ alive in the world? We shall see.
If bishops harness their resources, and the Church’s friends within marginalize their real enemies, and put their “day of infamy” behind, the renewal may be easier than they think. Certainly, the principles for take-charge decision-makers are not too difficult to understand:
1. Put the house in order. “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Mt. 2:30).
2. Protect the Church’s good name by effective public relations. “Let your light shine before men” (Mt. 5:16).
3. Walk in step with Peter ‘s successor. “Upon this rock I will build my Church” (Mt. 16:16).
The shepherd communicates with his flock the best he can. But even if they do not fully understand him, it is his role to see that they go where he decides they must. Once he has done his duty, God will take over. Maybe we need another Pius V with a new St. Ignatius Loyola at his side.
Msgr. George A. Kelly is author of numerous books, including
The Battle for the American Church. He is president emeritus of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.