U.S. Roman Catholics take stock of John Paul’s tough messages
The setting for the sermon on the Mall could hardly have been more dramatic. The preacher was Pope John Paul II, and his key topic was abortion. In the windswept Washington congregation of 175,000 sat Chief Justice Warren Burger, who concurred with the opinion that struck down all antiabortion laws. In the distance was the Capitol, where Congress had long been ensnarled in a nearly $500 billion budget impasse over abortion funding. Declared John Paul: “We will stand up every time that human life is threatened. When the sacredness of life before birth is attacked, we will stand up and proclaim that no one ever has the authority to destroy unborn life.”
The speech was an aptly symbolic ending to the Pope’s spectacular American tour. Throughout it he had propounded a vision of justice and unselfish dedication that rebuked the secular and self-indulgent elements in American culture. Toward the end of the journey, John Paul had turned increasingly to internal Roman Catholic Church issues. On these matters, too, his message was uncompromising. The theme was, in the words of one strategically placed Vatican official, “that all the test and trial after the Second Vatican Council is ended. He doesn’t care how much opposition he encounters.” Nowhere is that opposition likely to be stronger than in America. While most U.S. Roman Catholics last week basked in the afterglow of his visit, the church’s liberal wing was ready to end something of a moratorium on criticism of the new Pope.
In Philadelphia and Chicago, John Paul came down hard on the conservative side of issues that divide the American church: there should be, he said, no artificial birth control, no married priests, no women priests, no acceptance of divorce or of sex outside marriage, including homosexuality. At the Chicago meeting with the U.S. church hierarchy, he praised American bishops for their doctrinal unity with the papacy. But their unity was anything but total. Grumbled one bishop: “He was harkening back to an orthodoxy that I thought we had passed by years ago.” Said another: “I almost expected the bell to ring, telling us it was time to go to the next class.”
The clash between liberals and the Pontiff came out in the open at a service for 7,000 nuns at Washington’s National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. As millions watched on television, Sister Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, used her welcoming speech to inform the Pope of the “intense suffering and pain” of “half of humankind.” In the church, she declared, women must be admitted to “all ministries,” meaning the priesthood. The Pope was taken by surprise, but gazed impassively as most of the audience burst into prolonged applause.
John Paul elected not to reply and stuck to his prepared speech, an old-fashioned appeal for religious commitment by nuns. To him that is symbolized by the wearing of “a simple and suitable religious garb” as a “permanent” sign of their calling. As he spoke, about 50 nuns stood silently in protest of his policy on women priests; every one was clad in street clothes. Remarked Moral Theologian Charles Curran of nuns’ garb, “Most American women thought that issue had been settled years ago.”
No one had expected this Pope to renounce traditions like celibacy and the all-male priesthood on the trip. But, as an activist on the women’s issue noted, “we had hoped for a miracle —that he wouldn’t say anything.” The Pope chose to delve into these controversies, in part, because he was under heavy pressure from the majority of American bishops to lend his popularity and publicity to their attempt to back unpopular church teachings.
His words cheered millions of traditionally oriented Roman Catholics. But liberals claim that the Pope’s stand shows that he does not understand the U.S. and lacks exposure to grassroots’ thinking.
Church intellectuals with a longer-term view are watching John Paul’s approach to doctrine. They are upset over three developments begun under Pope Paul VI that have been continued by John Paul. One is this year’s formal Vatican condemnation of writings by French Theologian Jacques Pohier on grounds that among other “evident errors,” he denied the bodily resurrection of Christ. The Vatican is also quietly investigating iconoclastic Dutch Theologian Edward Schilebeeckx. The new “apostolic constitution” intended to reaffirm controls over faculties that grant degrees under Vatican authority, is also troubling. This last decree affects departments in only eight U.S. institutions, but could foreshadow church-wide rules in a forthcoming code of canon law. The document requires that the Vatican approve or disapprove the orthodoxy of tenured professors, and urges local bishops to take any doctrinal complaints to the Vatican if the schools themselves do not act.
At the end of the papal tour, before a gathering of Roman Catholic academics from around the nation, John Paul sought to soothe anxieties, offering a “special word of gratitude” to theologians. But then he proceeded to declare that “true” academic freedom must balance independence with responsibility to the magisterium (the church’s teaching office) in unity with the papacy. “It is the right of the faithful not to be troubled by theories and hypotheses that they are not expert in judging or that are easily simplified or manipulated by public opinion.”
This is the nub of John Paul’s contest with Roman Catholic liberals. He believes in a God who has revealed very specific teachings, known collectively as “the deposit of faith,” and that no Pope is in a position to change them. But what will be the results if no change occurs? Liberals fear that despite the enormous regard in which multitudes hold this remarkable new Pope, his hard line will drive more Roman Catholics out of the church and discourage men and women from entering the priesthood and the religious orders. The competing theory, heard increasingly in the Vatican, is that churches that cater to contemporary notions in order to maintain church membership do not prosper. The decline of many liberalizing American Protestant churches seems to bear out that view. The biblical example of Gideon, who chose to fight with an army of 300 dedicated men rather than 22,000 fainthearts, seems to apply as well. If a tough policy on celibacy and against freeing priests from their vows means fewer priests, says one Vatican source, then “they are likely to be better priests.”
The controversy over specific ecclesiastical policies may overshadow the overarching theme of John Paul’s pontificate thus far: the Christian belief in social justice, based on the absolute value of each human life, on which there is little dispute in the American church. Such a philosophy underlies not only the Pope’s stance on abortion but his attack, often in the same speeches, on racial discrimination, economic disparities, war, terrorism and “national security” as an excuse for oppression. Though a supposed contradiction between the “liberal” and “conservative” aspects of John Paul perplexed some observers last week, there is an organic connection between them. A man who has observed the survival of his church against heavy pressures in Poland is likely to believe that in the West, too, a disciplined and doctrinally unified church is best equipped to struggle with the evils of society. In America, at least, he may be about to test that judgment.
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