OSV STORY FOR JUNE 16

ANALYSIS

'We Are Church' and its challenge to 'the' Church

How seriously should the new petition drive to change basic Church teachings be taken? It depends

By Russell Shaw

If a "virtual civil war" is raging between "conservative" and "modernist" Catholics in the United States, as a writer in the British Catholic weekly The Tablet recently suggested, it would be fair to say the modernists launched an offensive last month. Calling themselves "We Are Church," roughly 20 groups on the far left of the Catholic ideological spectrum began a drive to obtain 1 million signatures over the next year on a petition calling for radical change in Catholic teaching and practice.

Items on the wish list comprise a familiar litany of leftist causes: women priests, relaxed standards of sexual morality, an end to clerical celibacy and the democratization of the Church.

Among the organizations involved are the Women's Ordination Conference; Dignity-USA, a gay Catholics' group; CORPUS, an organization of former priests; Catholics for a Free Choice, the pro-abortion group; and Call To Action, lately embroiled in controversy in Lincoln, Neb., where Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz has said members face excommunication.

Dissent growing

The coordinator of the new effort is Sister Maureen Fiedler, long involved in such causes. The U.S. campaign is modeled on similar petition campaigns carried out in the last year in Austria, Germany and other Western European countries. The German effort was said to have netted 1.4 million signatures, while half-a-million signed in Austria.

It is by no means clear whether the U.S. campaign will do that well. None of the groups involved has more than a few thousand members, and the likelihood that most dioceses and parishes will cooperate is nil.

That raises an obvious question: Should We Are Church and its petition drive be taken seriously? It depends.

We Are Church may not get its million signatures in the year ahead, but as an expression of radical dissent on the left it obviously can count on plenty of friendly attention from compliant religious and secular journalists glad to give Catholic dissent a boost.

There are, however, better reasons than such predictable media support for thinking the new effort can not be shrugged off.

That apparently was why the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Anthony M. Pilla of Cleveland, responded to the We Are Church announcement with a surprisingly detailed statement.

One reason for anxiety about this undertaking of the left, Bishop Pilla suggested, is that it could provoke a "counter-referendum" by the Catholic right. He expressed concern over prospects for "new divisions in our . . . ecclesial family."

It also bears noting that, even though the We Are Church groups are small in membership, some have access to the mid-level infrastructure of ecclesiastical institutions peopled by more or less disaffected laity, clergy and Religious.

The Chicago-based Call To Action group, for instance, claims that a third of its 16,000 members are priests and nuns and another third are lay people employed by the Church. A few bishops also belong.

But perhaps the most important reason for taking We Are Church seriously is that although the groups making up the coalition are on the fringe, that is no longer true of at least some of the positions they advocate, including views that directly contradict Catholic doctrine.

On the contrary, for many years now opinion polls as well as other, impressionistic sources have underlined the rise in the United States -- as well as in other countries -- of what is sometimes called "cafeteria Catholicism."

The term refers to an attitude and a pattern of behavior leading individual Catholics to pick and choose among Church doctrines and practices, accepting those they like and discarding the rest.

Last year, for example, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights published results of a survey carried out for it by the Fabrizio, McLaughlin polling organization. Since neither the Catholic League nor Fabrizio, McLaughlin can be accused of having a liberal bias, the results were more striking than some poll data periodically generated by Catholic groups on the left.

On the one hand, the Catholic League poll included some more or less encouraging findings. Nearly 52 percent of the adult Catholics surveyed said they attend Mass weekly or more often -- a figure substantially higher than some other sources report.

About 43 percent said the Church had made "just about the right amount of changes" since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), as opposed to 18 percent who said the Church had changed too much and 33 percent who said it hadn't changed enough.

But the poll also produced results of another sort. For example: 55 percent of the Catholics questioned said the Church should ordain women as priests, two-thirds favored ordaining married men as priests, and more than 58 percent held that the Church should "abandon its opposition to artificial birth control."

Inevitably, findings like these confirm the impression that, although the combined membership of the We Are Church coalition is minuscule in relation to a nominal U.S. Catholic population of 60 million, a significant segment of those 60 million share many dissenting views of the activists on the left.

The next pope

Regardless of the results of polls and petition campaigns, the pope and bishops will hardly abandon Church doctrines or change Church laws to accommodate dissent.

In his statement, Bishop Pilla called on the petition sponsors to "admit that they are, in some instances, challenging Church teachings." He added: "A vague appeal to 'reform' is insufficient reason to challenge either Church teaching or practice. . . . To be a Catholic, by definition, means sharing a common religious heritage and moral vision. It is not something purely subjective, radically private and self-constructed." As for Pope John Paul II, ever since his election in 1978, he repeatedly has reaffirmed Church teaching and discipline on the neuralgic issues challenged by We Are Church -- sexual morality, women's ordination, clerical celibacy. For his pains, he is roundly despised by the Catholic left.

But that only points to an important part of the rationale for efforts such as the We Are Church campaign. The aim is to bring pressure to bear on the next papal election conclave, whenever that takes place, in hopes that the cardinals will choose a successor to Pope John Paul who is more friendly to the dissenters' way of thinking. Anthony Padovano, a theologian who quit the priesthood 20 years ago and now heads CORPUS, put it bluntly in a May 30 National Public Radio interview on the petition campaign.

Asked whether Pope John Paul would be favorable to the petition, Padovano replied with notable understatement, "We're fairly certain he won't."

But that hardly matters, he added. "This papacy is coming to an end, and there are a number of cardinals and bishops who want a new Church, and our hope is that by giving some visible demonstration to how deep and wide this feeling is, that it might in some way act as a catalyst at the next election for the pope to move us toward a moderate pope -- maybe even a liberal pope."

The NPR interviewer then asked, "Are you trying to influence the papal election?" Padovano responded, "Well, we would hope we would." That is what one side in a civil war in the Church looks like.

Shaw is Our Sunday Visitor's Washington correspondent and director of public information for the Knights of Columbus

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor 1996; from the 6-16-96 edition

HEADLINES FOR JUNE 16

Petitioning for change (editorial)

Fear not, little flock

Putting people before profits

Michael O'Brien's 'visual Gospel'

Were the Pope a politician. . .

Changing battle lines over euthanasia in England