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_____Essay___________________________________________________________________
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The #2
Catholic Scandal
Downsizing the legitimate rights
and pastoral concerns of orthodox Catholic believers
By Msgr. George A. Kelly
The most important and enduring scandal in the Catholic Church of the United States is the established and continued existence of what Pope John Paul II has called a “counter-magisterium”—a rival teaching office that confutes, confounds, and contradicts what the Pope and the bishops in union with him set forth as the Gospel of Jesus Christ regarding human beings, their destiny in this life and the next.
The #2 scandal is the downgrading of orthodoxy as an essential standard norm of Catholic belief, and the consequent downsizing of “right belief” as normative for teachers and pastors. Among the societies within the Church that have been negatively affected by this disparagement have been the Consortium Perfectae Caritatis, Catholics United for the Faith, Adoremus, and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars—among many other groups.
The scandal consists in the harm done to faith in Christ’s Church by the continued and unopposed power exercised by these anti-magisterial forces, which use Catholic colleges and schools, religious societies, and so-called pastoral entities in opposition to the settled mind and law of the Church.
My own mother or father, kneeling before the altar on a Sunday morning, would never have wondered whether the priest was worthy to celebrate Mass, or unworthy to stand before the congregation in the place of Jesus Christ. Contemporary couples may also give this matter very little thought, for different reasons. But today’s media enjoy reporting priestly misbehavior—of which there seems to be no shortage.
A pastor of old who ran off with the parish secretary or denounced the Pope would have rocked the neighborhood for generations. Perhaps that is still true, but the immediate effect of such actions is certainly less dramatic.
In a typical American parish today, the chances are good that the laity could live without distress with a priest who could not pass a test designed by Pope John Paul II to test orthodox Catholicity. Some of the parishioners might even feel acute sympathy for a pastor who ran off with the principal, reasoning that the Church was at fault (if there was any fault) for asking him to be celibate. The errant priest himself might even return to the parish, to sit in the pew with his girlfriend at Sunday Mass, without remorse on his part and with little more than a raising of eyebrows among his former parishioners.
Do we live today in a dream world, where Catholics are no longer bound by the “obedience of faith?” Are priest no longer governed by the promises they made to their bishop at their ordination?
These questions must not be trivialized. The sacramental Church is already plagued from within by an ascendant body of new elites who, under Catholic auspices, believe and teach that since Vatican II the Church is now broad-minded in her creeds, and that the Church now grants freedom of choice to her people in their behavioral responses to her demands. The innovators who issue these decrees are determined to run a course parallel to that of the bishops, forging a counter-magisterium within the Church. And they are equally determined to punish and purge any orthodox Catholics who stand in their way.
Downsizing at work
Have you ever seen a grown
priest cry? He was my age at the time: a silver jubilarian and more, who had
been removed as a pastor by the bishop in a diocese where priests became pastors
at an early age. The firing was bad enough, but the impact became worse for him
when, after his appeal to Rome, the Vatican ordered him restored to his pastoral
duties, and the bishop refused.
Pastors were rarely dismissed outright in those days. Perhaps it would happen occasionally, when a priest was caught misusing parish funds, or engaging in sexual misconduct, or was otherwise judged unworthy of, or incompetent for, the pastor’s office. What is bizarre about this particular case, however, is that the pastor in question was not guilty of any such malfeasance. He was dismissed for criticizing the catechetical texts that had been mandated for his parish school by a diocesan office. He was dismissed, in other words, for objecting to textbooks that watered down or muted the teachings of the Catholic Church. That kind of punishment, meted out to a priest with an otherwise exemplary record, would have been unthinkable years ago.
The removal of that pastor was also—as Rome noted —a violation of his canonical rights. But during the 1970s the Code of Canon Law was treated as a matter of only minor significance in prominent clerical circles. Experimentation had become a new norm of proper ecclesial behavior, and novelty was now sternly enforced by those who made the changes—as, for instance, when they insisted on postponing children’s first Confession until after their First Communion.
The pattern of experimentation was most evident within religious congregations, and the schools and institutions they administered. And those responsible for the experiments were not deterred at all by the fact that their activity was contrary to the wishes of orthodox and obedient Catholics, or to the express directives of the Holy See.
At about the same time that my friend the pastor was enduring his painful exile, another priest, in a diocese across the country, was successfully retaining his parish, against the wishes of his bishop, with support from Rome. He is an amiable man, who was and is popular with his parishioners. Yet to this day, many years later, he remains in the doghouse with diocesan officials. He feels the isolation that has been imposed on him, and other priests in the diocese have seen how he is treated, and received the clear if unspoken message.
No one should underestimate the extent of the harassment of orthodox Catholics over the past 30 years. Many memories resurfaced recently when a Jesuit friend, a gentle soul of many years, was exiled from his university post to an insignificant non-academic position. His outspoken reverence for the directives of Pope John Paul II, and his personal disagreement with what has recently passed for wisdom in Jesuit circles, had annoyed his superiors.
Papal loyalists within religious communities seem frequently to pay a high price for their orthodoxy—more so than diocesan priests. Years ago I was startled, at a day of recollection, when several Franciscans loudly walked out when the discussion turned to the obedience that we as priests owed to Pope Paul VI. Father Benedict Groeschel, CFR, himself the founder of a new religious community, has made the observation [in Catholic World Report, April 2000] that religious congregations treat “unkindly” and violate the human rights of older religious who value their vows and their common life.
Why do we continue to tolerate such aberrations? What ecclesiastical leader has shown distress about the case of a priest-journalist who lost his diocesan newspaper column, and is now forbidden to write, because he criticized his fellow religious for the lack of reverence with which they wrote about the Eucharist? Who shed public tears when a noted theologian was deprived of his tenured professorship, and sent packing to another city, because he dared say publicly that his Washington superiors, when they talk about politics, do not speak for him (after they had claimed in public that they did)? Does anyone worry about the college president who was driven off the campus that he had helped to save a quarter-century earlier, because he was now seen as a “sign of contradiction” by the “new breed” who had taken command of his community?
Catholic journalists and editors, directors of catechetics, seminary rectors, religious superiors—all have been eased out of office, or sometimes summarily fired, because they were considered too conservative for work in the reformed Church. And no one in high office has come to their defense.
A nun who is a friend once turned to me for help (which I was unable to give her) because she could no longer stand the pressure from her liberated peers to give up her religious habit and her habit of attending daily Mass. A loving pastor called me to see what he could do to help three nuns, his own friends, who had fled convents in the ghetto because of the complete breakdown of their congregation’s common life and worship. Such sufferings are little known to the people in the pews.
These are anecdotes, I know; but if we could compile all the stories of the past 30 years we would have an encyclopedia of empirical data about the vast white martyrdom of Catholic apologists in this era of alleged Catholic renewal.
In the post-Vatican II effort to make peace with a godless world by adopting humanist causes as the Church’s own, innovators have often achieved peace by muting or denying the Church’s godliness. Books like The Reformed Jesuits, Sisters in Crisis, A Generation Betrayed, The Battle for the American Church, Does Catholicism Still Exist? and Ungodly Rage tell part of the story, of the suffering of faithful Catholics during this period of revolution. But these literary admissions are small consolation to the lay people who may not be ready to draw a connection between the anti-orthodox attitudes of some Church officials and the fact that their children are now absent from Sunday Mass, and even perhaps living in sin. As one mother of six children moaned to me, “They don’t think about the Church the way we did.” Another asked, more simply, “Why doesn’t somebody do something about this mess?”
No small problem
Long before the name “Ratzinger” became a synonym for orthodoxy in popular
rectory parlance, in 1972, a Vatican Secretary of State wondered aloud why local
bishops did not deal with the mischief in their dioceses. At around that time, a
group of Spanish Jesuits, distressed about the state of affairs in their
Society, had seriously suggested that Pope Paul VI should split the order into
sections: one following a strict observance of the traditional Ignatian
directives, another a loose observance. At that moment, however, Roman eyes were
focused on what the malcontents were doing to Church teaching, rather than on
the pain they were inflicting on the silent majority of Catholics who continued
faithfully about their daily activities. Learned men sometimes saw the betrayal
of reliable allies as an adaptation to new times, and decided that the suffering
of “the little ones” would be a small price to pay for progress. But others
suggested, even then, that the abandonment of orthodoxy as a norm for theology
would lead to the loss of faith itself.
Still more harmful to ecclesial health was the failure of bishops to protect orthodox and obedient priests and religious from the punishments inflicted by the innovators—who, by dealing out these punishments, gained legitimacy for themselves and for other troublesome academics. It was equally harmful when bishops acted as if orthodox and obedient Catholics had no business interfering with the concessions made to secularism by such prominent activists as Charles Curran, or the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, or the presidents of the Catholic universities who made up the Land o’ Lakes conference.
In 1977, one American bishop asserted that he did not want to be caught between warring theologians—as if he would be asked arbitrarily to take sides in a conflict between the theologians who dissented from the Church (like Charles Curran) and those who supported the magisterium (like John Ford, SJ). Once dissenters had co-opted the field of “renewal” as their own private “turf,” and successfully labeled traditional Catholics as obstacles to the Vatican II agenda, the latter soon found that many church doors were closed to them, even in places they had once called home.
(It is important to understand here that words such as “orthodox” and “obedient” have their own legitimate meaning: “right belief” in what the Church teaches, as voiced by the magisterium, and submission to the authentic rules of the Church or directives of legitimate superiors. In the Daily Prayer of the Church by Venerable Bede, we read: “The man who obeys God’s laws and who teaches so do to, will be great in the kingdom of heaven.” These words do not cover the schismatic movement included under the description “Lefebvrist,” nor the activity of those so-called “conservatives” who are also obstreperous, often anti-hierarchical, in their presentation of the issues—enough so as to be disruptive of Church order, along with the radical innovators. While polemicists on one side or the other complain about minds closed to reason or to faith, the fact remains that the words “orthodox” and “obedient” are rooted in the very meaning of Christian truth and right.)
I remember telling H. Lyman Stebbins in 1968, after his visit to New York’s Cardinal Terence Cooke on behalf of his newly created Catholics United for the Faith: “Don’t expect much public support from the archdiocese. We’ll make our own enemies. We don’t need yours.” Almost a decade later, the founders of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars were treated downright rudely by the chief officers of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, as if we had no business upsetting their intact system, in which the status quo already favored theological experimentation. (And we had come, we thought, to offer them help in a time of trouble!) If many faithful Catholics were by now uncomfortable with the necessity of shifting for themselves in their pews, many priests and religious were hurt by the lack of appreciation in high places for their orthodoxy and obedience, or by the disparagement of their “fundamentalist zeal” for the House of the Lord.
This is no small problem, we assert once again. Within the vision of the Church’s new favored thinkers, it was no longer considered certain that Christ rose from the dead corporally, or was born of a virgin, or gave Peter universal governing power, or conferred on Peter and his successors the gift of infallibility, or created a sacrament of Penance, or is really present in the Eucharist, or created the priesthood; it was no longer taken for granted that marriage was ordained for the gift of life, or that the faithful should go to Mass on Sunday, or that Catholics should not resort to contraception and abortion when they felt it necessary. This was the extent of the revolution in Catholic beliefs. Sic transit veritas ecclesiae.
Understanding the offense
The offense against orthodox
and obedient Catholics is not that they are treated with disrespect, or even
that they have been denied promotions here and there. Such crosses are part of
their path to redemption in Christ. No, the growing sense that orthodox belief
and moral behavior are no longer at the center of Catholic life, that the
orthodox are no longer “insiders” in the Church’s daily business, and that the
guardians of the faith demand something less than a full profession of faith
from Catholic workers—these are the new offenses. Consider, for example, the
disarray of Catholic moralists when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops
gave gratuitous approval in 1968 to “norms for licit theological dissent” from
Humanae Vitae.
Let us understand this offense properly. It is not simply that the Church’s lawmakers required orthodox and obedient Catholics to do things that they did not want to do. The offense that commands our attention here is that pious, law-abiding, and articulate defenders of the Pope and his teaching have frequently been ignored, embarrassed, set aside, ridiculed, and at times deprived of benefits for being fully believing and outspoken Catholics. And to compound the offense, this happened while those who would undermine the Catholic system, while working within it, were treated with respect. The Catholic loyalists have accepted the put-down in relative silence, even as vocal dissenters from Catholic teachings sought to have Church authorities muzzle their rivals.
Consider the question of the ecclesiastical doghouse. Every institution has its “doghouse,” reserved for those who fail to think along with boss, whoever he may be. Both monarchists and democrats take this state of affairs for granted, since there can be only one eagle on a rock. Few priests who are in the bishop’s doghouse today think that they need a psychiatrist, merely because their names are no longer on the “monsignor list.” However, after Vatican II, episcopal favors began to be showered upon groups such as the Catholic Theological Society of America, the Canon Law Society of America, and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious—all groups controlled by critics of Rome. At the same time, organizations like the Consortium Perfectae Caritatis and Catholics United for the Faith were kept carefully at arm’s length, because they were labeled “conservative.” In 1977 one official of the US bishops’ conference advised the leaders of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars to announce their creation through the offices of Cardinal Carberry in St. Louis, since an announcement in Washington, DC, would draw a much less friendly notice from the headquarters of the bishops’ conference. The scale of priorities within the Church appeared to have tilted lopsidedly in the wrong direction.
This tale would be better told, and the point would be more effectively made, if names could be named and short biographical sketches presented, to demonstrate how soft Catholic leadership has become toward disobedience. The publication of a long list of white martyrs to the faith in our time would give great satisfaction to many people. But it would also very likely be counterproductive, since any living people whose names appeared on that list would probably suffer further anguish after the disclosure.
John C. Ford, SJ, once a beacon of scholarly intelligence for Jesuit moralists, toward the end of his life was rudely boycotted by his young Jesuit confreres because of his involvement with Humanae Vitae. Two weeks before his death, the famous John Courtney Murray, SJ, confessed to this writer his own sadness at the breakdown of fidelity to the Church among his Jesuit peers, and by his own isolation from the leading Jesuit dissenters in the ranks.
This complaint here is not simply about hurt feelings. Such complaints are commonly used by cranks seeking to gain attention, or to achieve power that they cannot win on their own. This complaint involves far more serious considerations of pastoral practice, objective justice, and Catholic loyalty.
The “old” Church enjoyed a spirit of pleasure in being Catholic—a satisfaction about the deep convictions of faith that were evident everywhere, the remarkable patterns of worship, the enthusiasm among priests and religious, the mutual support between and among Catholics and their pastors (even if there were occasional brawls). The Church in America was awash in high morale in the early 1960s. It was a great time to be a Catholic.
Why was this so? It was because Catholics believed in God, in his son Jesus Christ, and in his Church. Everything that they believed to be true about Catholicity was reinforced: by the holy-water font over the baby’s crib, by St. Christopher dancing in the face of the driver of the family Ford, by the parents’ rush to get all the children to confession on Saturday so that on Sunday morning they might receive Christ in the Eucharist—worthily. Their faith was their life.
Between 1940 and 1960 American Catholics grew in number from 20 to 40 million; priests from 25,000 to 50,000; religious from 50,000 to 100,000. About 75 percent of these Catholics were at Mass on a given Sunday, and 80 percent were validly married. They had a high birth rate and a low crime rate. Upwardly mobile graduates of Catholic schools were rising to executive positions, forming a voting bloc in industrial centers, and molding public opinion through organizations like the Legion of Decency.
The emerging Catholic power in public life animated Paul Blanshard and his cohort to create the group that was first known as Protestants and Others United for Separation of Church and State as a bulwark against a feared Catholic takeover of American culture. Any large group which considered its religion to be true was seen by these people as a danger to the secularist leanings of the nation. And here is the rub: the enemy of this culture was really Christ, not the Pope.
To fall and rise again?
In days gone by—the 1950s—Protestants and Other Americans looked upon the
Catholic subculture, then emerging as an intellectual force in the country, as a
threat to the “American way of life.” Catholics were growing fast, in numbers
and in strength, and they enjoyed being Catholics. Their Church, they
confidently believed, was true. They believed in God, his image was on their
door, and they talked to him, even before football games. Christ came to them at
Mass and in Holy Communion, forgave their sins confessed to a priest, and came
again at the end of life in Extreme Unction. Catholic neighborhoods were strong,
their family life was a model for their neighbors, and they lived at peace with
their neighbors who were Protestants and Jews. Their best and brightest were
appearing everywhere in government, business, and labor. Priests and nuns were
visible everywhere, high and low. Hollywood could not get enough of Catholic
heroes and heroines. Pundits listened to what the bishops said.
Catholic bishops had triumphed over their 19th-century enemies. A Church whose priests once were described as men who “knew not how to obey,” and whose laity once “lived by non-Catholic norms,” had now become the largest religious body in the US. In the 1850s, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes called his flock “the off-scouring of the Irish nation.” Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota, attributed anti-Catholicism in America in part to the behavior of Irish immigrants. The Italians brought good food to the country, but religious illiteracy and poor religious practice as well. German Catholic immigrants annoyed bishops because they wanted to remain German. Yet out of this mélange the American bishops forged a discipline and morale, bringing together the disparate elements in a way that was unique in the history of modern Catholicity.
American Catholicism, by the early 20th century, formed a body with a common conviction about Christ and his Word; these were people who had pride in their bishops. The incomparable esprit de corps was evident both within the Church and against her enemies. The Catholic people were readily rallied by their pastors to action against bigots. The bishops were also capable of controlling their own in-house troublemakers. Catholic society was productive, orderly, and tranquil because American bishops enjoyed the ever-increasing flow of disciplined, dedicated priests and religious into Church and community service.
But when this remarkable cultural success of the Church came to be an embarrassment to certain elite groups, doubts were raised. These elites began to question whether distinctive Catholic doctrines were necessarily true, or truly necessary; they wondered whether the teachings of the Church might be reinterpreted in ways that would make them more acceptable to the modern mind. They asked whether we should muffle our conceit about the true faith, tone down our Catholic apologia, temper the fervor of the Catholic Evidence Guild, of Sheed and Ward, and restrain the likes of Pittsburgh’s Father Thomas Coakley, with his anxiety about “leakage from the Barque of Peter.”
By 1955, however, Catholic Church leaders had come under fire from groups like Protestants and Others United. The war over contraception was about to begin. Secular society talked about bringing people together—although actually the secular world was more and more regularly dividing people—by sex, by class, by place of birth or voting bloc. The nation was being re-fashioned to think of women as rivals for men, homemakers as rivals for working wives, children in conflict with their parents, babies as burdens on their mothers, the poor at odds with the rich, and so on. Once these little “warfares” gained notoriety, legionnaires for the secularist world view rushed into government buildings with statutes and executive orders, attempting forcefully to forge unity upon the disparities that they had created, while allowing the divisions to continue festering below the surface. There was no room in the political inn for Christ-bearers to deal with their own young people, who were now being taught by the media that sex was the important human need, for which marriage was not the only outlet, that spouses sometimes outlived their usefulness, that unplanned pregnancies were intolerable, that same-sex marriage was a democratic choice.
The Church in America today finds herself divided, at the street level, over Christ’s faith. The pastoral care and even sometimes the family life of the laity is often dominated by the quasi-believers and the disobedient among the Church’s ministers and teachers. The contemporary Catholic crisis is to be located here, in the daily experience of the faithful, with a demoralized people and a diminished public influence as the inevitable results. This virtual schism is grist for the already overpowering secularist mill, which is grinding God out of American life in spite of the rightful place that he has always had there, as acknowledged by our Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Founding Fathers of the United States did not establish the country to be a godless nation—quite the contrary—although it is now fast becoming so.
Strangely enough, today only the Catholic Church may be in a position to ensure that this trend of de-Christianization in America does not go all the way. Yet even if the Church is destined to restore the American nation to its Judeo-Christian roots, and thus make it easier for her to do her own work, there is a more important concern here.
The Church must always be what Christ instituted her to be: his Mystical Body on earth, his Father’s voice, the Spirit’s sacramental presence, with good shepherds everywhere. For those who claim the Catholic faith, or minister to her people of God, the precious virtue is “obedience of faith.” (Rom 1:5) “He who is not with me is against me.” (Mt 12:30) Autonomy from Christ or from his vicars is unthinkable for anyone professing the Catholic faith.
The Church, therefore, cannot be true to her mission, nor can she discharge her mission effectively:
• If the Church’s key apostolates are controlled by revolutionaries who are determined to redefine the offices of the Pope and the bishops, and the underpinning of Catholicity itself;
• If the Church’s best apologists are excluded from the main governing centers of Catholicity, lightly honored or mistreated by the very Church leaders who need their service.
In practice, the contemporary bishop must know—better than his predecessors knew—what is going on within Catholic institutions. The bishop must familiarize himself with the leading lights of his academic community, so that he is ready to promote or protect them as necessary.
Institutionalized misbehavior by
Church officials and Church employees is a major obstacle to an effective
Catholic ministry. As time goes by and the people grow accustomed to the
patterns of such misbehavior, Catholic practice becomes nominal, Catholicity
becomes meaningless. And the Church becomes best known through her funerals.
Msgr. George A. Kelly,
the president emeritus of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, is the author of
The Battle for the American Church.