Roman Catholics: A Question of Freedom

The Roman Catholic clergy has certain military parallels. A priest, having taken the vow of obedience, can be moved from place to place at his superior’s will. For many, such shifting around means only a creative variety of duty. But for others, just as for some soldiers, transfer implies punishment, or at least temporary removal of an inconvenience. Giving no reasons, bishops or religious superiors can move a priest or fire a professor who has done nothing more than exercise what others would call his constitutional right of free speech.

That is what has happened to the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, who helped organize an interdenominational protest committee called “Clergy Concerned about Viet Nam.” Last month Berrigan’s superiors ordered him to quit the committee and sent him off on a ten-week tour of Latin America. The Jesuits insist that the assignment was “routine.” Berrigan’s friends believe that his exile was forced upon the Jesuits by the Most Rev. John Maguire, who was acting head of the New York Archdiocese while Francis Cardinal Spellman was in Rome for the Vatican Council. Archdiocesan officials say that they were “not involved with the reassignment.” Berrigan, now staying in Cuernavaca, Mexico, says that he is delighted with the chance to visit Latin America, but that his trip “was arranged mainly to remove me from the movement of protest against the war in Viet Nam.”

Preaching & Picketing. Berrigan, who was born in Two Harbors, Minn., and raised in Syracuse, has a considerable reputation as a skillful lyric poet. He taught English and Latin at Brooklyn Prep and theology at the Jesuits’ Le Moyne College in Syracuse, where one of his students in 1963 was David Miller, the arrested draft-card burner. Since 1964 he has been an associate editor of Jesuit Missions magazine, a pleasant job that gives him plenty of time to travel and write.

Within the society, Berrigan has always been considered something of a radical. He has preached and picketed on behalf of civil rights. Earlier this year his Jesuit superiors reprimanded him for reciting more of the Mass in English than the council’s liturgical reforms currently permit. A pacifist, he is a sponsor of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Last October he joined Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, the leading theologian of Conservative Judaism, and Lutheran Pastor Richard John Neuhaus of Brooklyn, as a co-chairman of Clergy Concerned, whose aim is to question the morality of U.S. action in the Viet Nam war. He is not alone in suffering curbs from the head of the Jesuits’ New York Province. Two other members of the society—Fathers Francis Keating and Daniel Kilfoyle of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City—were told to quitClergy Concerned. Josephite Father Philip Berrigan, Daniel’s younger brother, was shifted from the faculty of his society’s seminary in Newburgh, N.Y., to a largely Negro parish in Baltimore for speaking out against the war.

“St. Paul Was a Rebel.” Nor is Viet Nam the only issue that can bring churchly censure down on a priest. Last summer Archbishop Thomas Toolen of Mobile-Birmingham ordered the Edmundite Fathers to transfer Father Maurice Ouellet from a Negro parish in Selma because he had let his rectory serve as a headquarters for the Selma marchers. At the request of Albany’s Bishop William Scully, the Franciscans ordered Father Bonaventure O’Brien of St. Bernardine of Siena College to curtail his civil rights work. And last week the Very Rev. Joseph T. Cahill, president of St. John’s University on Long Island, fired 28 faculty members, including three priests,* for protesting the school’s policy on academic freedom, tenure and curriculum policy. Ten of the ousted teachers had publicly expressed their sympathy for Berrigan. “Neither the reasons for the action nor the identities of the persons involved will be discussed publicly,” said Cahill.

Before the Vatican Council, bishops could have censured an outspoken priest without hearing a word of public complaint. But shortly after Berrigan’s departure, a group of students from Fordham picketed New York’s chancery headquarters on Madison Avenue, bearing signs that read “Honesty in the Church” and “St. Paul Was a Rebel.” More than 1,000 Catholics—including a number of nuns and Jesuit priests—signed an “open letter” to the chancery and to Berrigan’s superiors that appeared as an advertisement in the New York Times. The co-signers did not impugn the motives of those responsible for Berrigan’s removal, nor did they necessarily agree with his pacifist views. But, they said, as a symbolic affirmation of freedom, Berrigan should be allowed to return to his work in New York.

Is the Message Credible? For Protestantism, this is an era of unfettered clerics. Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike could not astonish anyone now, no matter what he says, and Baptist Minister Martin Luther King has inspired many clergymen to think that their natural habitat is the civil rights demonstration. But there is no comparable liberty within Catholicism. Thus the Berrigan case raises the question, unanswered by the Vatican Council, of the limits of clerical obedience, and the deeper issue once posed by Swiss Theologian Hans Küng: “How is the church’s message of freedom to be regarded as credible by men if she herself does not show herself as a place of freedom?” No Catholic questions that authority is essential in the church, or that bishops and superiors have the right to expect obedience from their priests—and from laymen as well. But many also feel that canon law and the vow of obedience give superiors too much control over their subjects on nonspiritual matters that could and should be left to the individual priest, provided his actions do not embarrass or compromise the church, or violate moral teaching. Says Dr. Eugene Fontinell, a philosophy teacher at Queens College and co-founder of the committee that drew up the letter: “The question is: How do you maintain a healthy balance between freedom and authority? There have been many brilliant theoretical statements made about freedom, but this must be built into the life of the church.”

The fact that many priests felt free to sign the Berrigan letter is evidence that some liberty already exists. In Rome, a pontifical commission is at work revising the church’s code of canon law, and will almost certainly loosen some of the restrictive bonds that superiors can impose on clerics under them. A number of prelates already recognize that their clerics are citizens too, and should have the right to support a cause when conscience dictates. Chicago’s new archbishop, the Most Rev. John Cody, has publicly declared that “priests are citizens of this country and have a right to participate in things they feel will help the public or certain segments of the public.”

* One of them is Monsignor John J. Clancy, secretary to Paul VI at the time when they both worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State, and author of a biography of the Pope.