Roman Catholics: The Cardinal as Critic

Leo-Jozef Cardinal Suenens, 65, is Primate of Belgium and Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, one of the largest Roman Catholic dioceses in the world. Lately he has taken on another role as well: outspoken critic of the Vatican. For years, Suenens has been known as an ecclesiastical progressive, but he argued his case for church renewal quietly —in books and behind the scenes at the Second Vatican Council. Last May the cardinal changed his tactics. He gave an interview to a French Catholic magazine, Informations Catholiques Internationales, which was quickly published in five other languages. It was perhaps the most encyclopedic indictment of outdated church practices by a ranking Roman Catholic cleric in modern times.

The objects of Suenens’ complaints ranged from the repressive measures employed against modern Catholic theologians to the church’s attitude toward women. But his prime target was Vatican bureaucracy. The Pope is indeed head of the universal church, Suenens affirmed, but he is also the prisoner of a curial system that makes him more an emperor than a successor of Peter. Most contemporary church problems, the cardinal suggested, stem from the legalistic mentality of the cardinals and other functionaries who surround the Pope—men who refuse to recognize that bishops, priests and laity must also participate in the governing of the church.

The Pope, Suenens insisted, ought to be elected by all the Catholic bishops of the world.

The Curia was quick to strike back. Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, 85, dean of the college of cardinals, wrote a letter to Suenens reportedly charging that his public statements were defamatory and slanderous. Tisserant demanded a retraction. Suenens answered that such an accusation was “unacceptable” and said he saw “no cause for retraction.”

Christian Duty. What has made Suenens sound such alarms so publicly? “He was convinced that he could not get a proper hearing for his ideas in Rome,” says a close friend. Moreover, “he was certain that the Bishops’ Synod in October would be too restricted to provide an adequate forum for such issues, and he considered it his duty as a Christian leader to speak out.” Says Suenens himself: “Perhaps if more church leaders had spoken out in the 15th century, Luther and the Protestants would not have had to break away.”

The son of a Brussels restaurant owner, Suenens was raised by his widowed mother, sponsored for the priesthood and sent to Rome to study at 17 by Belgium’s Desire Cardinal Mercier. The young Suenens chose the progressive cardinal as his spiritual director and carried on a close correspondence with him. A brilliant student at Rome’s Gregorian University, where he earned doctorates in theology and philosophy and a baccalaureate in canon law, Suenens returned to Belgium to become a professor of philosophy, at the age of 25, at Malines Seminary. A decade later he was named vice-rector of Belgium’s famed Louvain University, and in 1945, was consecrated a bishop.

By 1955, Suenens had formulated his views on churchly change in a book called The Gospel to Every Creature, in which he first described such ideas as co-responsibility of laity, priests and hierarchy in the church. In 1962, as a newly elevated cardinal, he counseled Pope John XXIII on the preparations for Vatican II, and later acted as one of the council’s four moderators. Pope John selected him as a special emissary to the U.N. to present the now famous papal peace encyclical, Pacem in Terns. After John died, Suenens worked closely with his good friend Paul VI, to whom he remains affectionately loyal even now. “It’s not the engineer that I am criticizing,” Suenens has said, “it’s the locomotive.”

Evolving World. Last year, shortly before Paul issued his birth-control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, Suenens was among the liberal European cardinals who flew to Rome to argue against an earlier, even more conservative version. Later he pleaded unsuccessfully against the issuance of Humanae Vitae as well. When Suenens went back earlier this year to oppose new powers for papal nuncios and press for urgent reforms in church administration, resentful conservatives fought back so bitterly that he left Rome in disgust.

Suenens maintains a careful orthodoxy of language and purpose. He has little patience with ultraliberal Catholics who challenge basic church doctrines. “If you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit or Resurrection or life after death,” Suenens explained to TIME’S Robert Kroon in Brussels, “you should leave the church. I don’t see the modern church as a sort of spiritual Red Cross organization.” But he also insists that something must be done, and soon, to stop “this hemorrhage of priests. The part-time priest, married or not, could be a first step. The world is evolving and the church must evolve with it.” Such suggestions infuriate the Curia, where Suenens is considered a Judas. Once many of his peers considered him a candidate for the throne of Peter. Now it is generally agreed that he has no chance of ever becoming Pope.

Held Back. Suenens’ enemies point out that the cardinal is more progressive in his pronouncements than in his own country; but for most of his tenure, Suenens has been somewhat held back by the six out of seven fellow Belgian bishops who are more conservative than he is. Today, however, many of the younger clergy are on his side, and laymen are responding enthusiastically to a new system of democratically elected parish councils that he has set up.

Suenens’ major influence ranges far beyond Belgium. Across Europe and North America, Catholic progressives look on his measured criticism as a vital necessity to church reform. At 65, Suenens considers himself too old to be Pope, but he has clearly developed a constituency and career of his own as leader of a loyal opposition within the church. “We haven’t heard the last from him,” says one of his few close friends in the Vatican. “He is only getting started.”