THE CATHOLIC PARADOX

It is Saturday morning. a few parishioners of bustling and growing St. Joseph Catholic Church in suburban Baltimore, Maryland, gather in a member’s living room to discuss their Roman Catholic faith. The people from St. Joe’s, a parish of 10,000, speak reverentially about Pope John Paul II. He is a familiar figure to them, and at last they may be able to catch a glimpse of him in person. A long and rich history hovers in the background. Founded as a colonial refuge for English Catholics in 1634, Maryland later served as headquarters of the first diocese in the new U.S. in 1789. This week, after appearances in New Jersey and New York, John Paul will come to the Baltimore Archdiocese, the first visit by a Pope to the place where American Catholicism was born. Dan Wilson, 62, an insurance salesman, has tickets to a papal mass: “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And I personally admire the man and agree with him.”

A few of the parishioners, to be sure, express mild disagreement with positions that John Paul, hewing to church doctrine, has emphasized during his 17 years as Pontiff. The ban on women in the priesthood prompts a brief debate. Joseph Lewis, 64, a retired Westinghouse engineer and chair of the St. Joseph parish council, suggests that the omission of women from the ranks of the Apostles may have been historical rather than theological: “You’ve got to put yourself back to A.D. 25 to interpret the Jewish religion and the Roman Empire. Could you picture Christ choosing women Apostles? There’s a different frame of mind nowadays.”

Sally Capozzi, 63, a widow and a member of the parish council, isn’t buying this historical relativism: “Christ is God, and he knew what would happen in the future.” Kevin Coyle, 35, a student at nearby Towson State University, disagrees with Sally’s argument that women were not intended by Christ for the priesthood: “I look at other faiths and think, Why is the Roman Catholic Church different? I support women’s rights. If women can hold other jobs and are intelligent and capable, why hold them back?”

But the drift of the conversation tugs participants away from the shores of dispute and toward the flow of shared satisfactions in their Catholic faith. Jerry Trees, 56, a financial consultant and chair of the parish pro-life committee, says, “Rome presents the truth, the repository of faith with a history of 2,000 years, and puts things in perspective.” Francis Pugh, parish council vice chair and a counsel in the state attorney general’s office, offers with a laugh his view of salvation and eternal life: “I have this image that when we go to heaven we’ll be greeted with a roar of applause like Cal Ripken Jr. was, and we’ll do a lap around the bases, and He’ll know my name.”

Why are these Catholics so happy? Haven’t they heard that the church in America is in turmoil and disarray–scolded by John Paul for laissez-faire theology, racked by internal squabbles over moral issues (artificial means of birth control, abortion, pre- and extramarital sex, divorce, gay and lesbian rights) up and down the hierarchy and tainted as well by scandal? The spate of news accounts in recent years about priests accused of sexually molesting children is only the most disturbing sign that something must be seriously wrong within the U.S. church. There is another, with potential long-range consequences: the minuscule numbers of men entering the priesthood and women entering religious congregations, suggesting an inevitable course of institutional decline. Or, as Francis Pugh of St. Joe’s puts it, “we have a vocations crisis. Times have changed. We’re going to have to do something.”

Despite the reasons for gloom or discouragement, 85% of U.S. Catholics say their religion is very important or fairly important in their lives, according to a new TIME/CNN poll conducted last week (see box). A 1994 survey by the Los Angeles Times shows that priests and sisters are comparably satisfied. Skeptics might argue that Catholics who were not content have left the church, thus eluding the pollsters. But the ranks of those defectors have not been growing in recent years. Father Andrew M. Greeley is popularly known as the author of steamy best-selling novels, but he is also a sociologist who has spent more than 30 years analyzing his fellow American Catholics. He finds “practically no increase in those born Catholic who no longer identify as Catholic–the defection rate.” How does Greeley account for this phenomenon? “They like being Catholic.”

They also like, according to the TIME/CNN poll, to put the dictates of conscience ahead of Vatican doctrines, particularly in matters of sexual behavior. The paradox of U.S. Catholicism today rests precisely in this freethinking fractiousness among believers, who nonetheless continue to find common ground and fulfillment in the practice of their faith. Some of them advocate change; others resist it. But most have by now realized that change is inevitable in the U.S. church despite the best efforts of John Paul to hold it in check. Demographics, immigration, the allure of secular U.S. culture–all these forces and more are reshaping the church in America. And so are Catholics themselves.

“Why can’t we perform the sacramental functions that we no longer have enough priests for?” Thus Jesuit Thomas Rausch, a theologian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, summarizes a sentiment he hears often from master’s degree candidates in pastoral studies. “Most of them would be priests if they could,” Rausch says. “But they cannot be priests–because they’re married or because they’re women.”

Priests are inarguably in short supply now–by some estimates there are 2,000 parishes (out of a U.S. total of 19,723) without a resident priest–and the dearth, barring a miracle, will get worse. The number of U.S. Catholics has grown 15% over the past 10 years and stands at just over 60 million. Contributing to this number is the massive immigration of predominantly Catholic Hispanics. Today roughly one-third of the American Catholic population is Hispanic, and that portion will continue to grow. Some Los Angeles parishes in or near Hispanic sections must now schedule 12 or 14 Masses each Sunday to accommodate the crowds of worshippers. Who will celebrate all those Masses?

Fewer and fewer men, says Richard Schoenherr, a former priest, now married and a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Last year he coauthored a book called Full Pews and Empty Altars. By his projections, the number of active diocesan priests in the U.S., which stood at 35,000 in 1966, will have dropped 40%, to 21,000, 10 years from now. Schoenherr blames the shortage on mandatory celibacy, a long-standing discipline within church law that John Paul has refused to reconsider. After surveying male Catholic students in 1985, Dean Hoge, a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, concluded that there would be a fourfold increase in seminary applications if celibacy were no longer required.

Yet some doubt the celibacy rule is responsible for the decline in the priesthood. It was never an easy cross to bear, they point out. Why should it be harder now than it has been throughout much of the church’s 2,000-year history? “People say the sexual revolution has made sex more attractive for young men,” Greeley observes. “I say, Give me a break!”

An alternative theory currently gaining favor among observers is that the ascent of U.S. Catholic families into the middle class has given sons a wider range of career opportunities. Monsignor Paul Cook, 62, pastor of St. Joseph’s, remembers what happened after he sensed his calling to the priesthood: “When I told my parents about my interest when I was 13, they were thrilled. Today a young man is in college, and the parents are paying to have him prepare for engineering or law, and he says he wants to be a priest? More often than not, they say, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ “

Worldly options for young Catholic women have increased even more dramatically over the past several decades than they have for Catholic men. Again the reason often cited for the decline in the number of women entering religious orders–that they are barred from rising in the ranks to become priests–may be only part of a complex story. Father Richard John Neuhaus, 59, founder and publisher of the neoconservative interfaith monthly First Things, thinks women’s freedom not to enter the church out of necessity may be good for them and for the church: “One could argue that from the late 19th century on, American Catholicism was producing an unnatural and perhaps unhealthy number of female vocations. An awful lot of things were being done by women that did not require the base of a religious order.”

Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, 54, editor since 1988 of the liberal Catholic biweekly Commonweal, is less sanguine than Neuhaus about this phenomenon: “The fact that the Catholic Church is so rich in institutional life was due to women religious, and their disappearance has gone almost unlamented. They made an enormous contribution.”

Attracting more women into religious orders, given the present circumstances inside and outside the U.S. church, strikes most people as impossible. Some, however, suggest that more men can be drawn into the priesthood in spite of the celibacy rule. Archbishop William Levada, 59, who has headed the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon, for the past nine years, says an ambitious program of “evangelization” of young people has produced a 50% increase–from roughly 20 to more than 30–in local seminary enrollments. William Cardinal Keeler, 64, the Archbishop of Baltimore, John Paul’s host later this week, believes the church’s recruiting methods during the recent past were misguided: “Our vocation efforts were too general. We’d ask groups, ‘Have you thought about…?’ Jesus didn’t put out general invitations. He called his Apostles by name.”

At the Kenrick School of Theology in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, everyone knows everyone else’s name. Gathering for evening prayers, some 50 seminarians arrange themselves among pews that were built to hold 10 times that number. Last July the Vincentians handed the school over to the Archdiocese of St. Louis for the training of priests. Only 12 of the seminarians are first-year recruits.

But being one of a small cohort does not seem to bother them, since most report that their journeys here were made largely on their own. David Syverson, 29, a first-year seminarian baptized as a Lutheran in North Dakota, says of his decision, “This is really going against what society believes in. Mom and Dad were shocked, though they eventually accepted it.” John Stimler, 25, an entering seminarian from Decatur, Illinois, notes that the celibacy business puzzled his friends and acquaintances: “People, especially young people, have difficulty comprehending how you can live without sex. ‘Oh, boy! Strange bird here.'”

Hardly anyone expects enough men to flock to seminaries in the next few years to make up for the current and projected shortfall of priests. This problem, along with the lack of sisters, affects not only local parishes but also the extensive national network of Catholic schools and hospitals, many of which are now staffed overwhelmingly by lay workers.

“The church’s ministerial character is going to be primarily lay; that’s all there is to it,” says Father Rausch. “It means that the ordinary ministers of the church tomorrow are not going to be priests and nuns and religious brothers. This is very significant.”

If these predictions are correct, then the typical U.S. parish of the future may come to resemble a Protestant-style congregation, a virtual democracy directed and administered by members who also have considerable leeway in determining who will preach and conduct religious services. Those Catholics who now petition for a greater say in the running of their parishes may someday get even more than they asked for, if only by default.

Would such an independent, grass-roots operation still be recognizable–to outsiders or worshippers–as Catholic? Evangelical Protestant Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, thinks it may not: “A lot of us Protestants wish we had a stronger sense of the teaching and shepherding authority of the church, whereas Catholics are loosening up on that. There’s a kind of passing each other in opposing directions.” He adds, “Many of us on the Protestant side of things worry a little about the breakdown of authority in the Catholic Church. We simply don’t want to see them make all the mistakes we’ve made.”

Such a dissolution of Catholicism into the upwardly mobile, materialistic American mainstream is precisely what Pope John Paul II has been trying to reverse. He visits the U.S. this week not only as a charismatic and revered leader but as the living embodiment of central church authority, the person at the top of the age-old hierarchy. Many prayers will be said this week, by John Paul and by millions of devoted but independent-minded Catholics. The answers will take a while–and may not be to every supplicant’s liking.

–Reported by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles and Richard N. Ostling/Baltimore