Capitol Ideas/Priests and Conservatives
Bethell, Tom
Priests and Conservatives by Tom Bethell G nosticism is an ancient Christian heresy whose spirit has animated American liberalism for two decades or more. Ecclesiastical feminism is perhaps the...
...Robert McKuen, thinks there is a "fear of commitment...
...Joseph Fessio of the Ignatius Press in San Francisco, and subsequently Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome, intervened...
...James Hitchcock, one of the leading Catholic writers in the country, recently published a disturbing article, also in Catholic World Report, called "Conservative Bishops, Liberal Results...
...is one of the few appointments to amajor see who has not been a disappointment to the orthodox...
...before anyone could see that even the most tolerant and accommodationist corner of the hierarchy was not immune from assault...
...Sometimes they don't even pay lip service to orthodoxy...
...So the heretics can set up a loud wail if they are "disempowered" or threatened with joblessness...
...so embarrassingly old fashioned...
...1 The American Spectator December 1995 21...
...Joseph's seminary, in Yonkers, New York, to write about the shrinking priesthood...
...They rarely complain anyway...
...Almost everywhere, the advocates of women priests and opponents of the church's "position" on birth control and abortion patrol the sacristies...
...But since his appointment to Pittsburgh, Wuerl has run a very liberal ship himself...
...only ten...
...One replied that the matter had been settled by the Pope...
...In the 1940s, fifty or so priests a year were ordained by St...
...The moral law is thought of as something that can be changed at the stroke of a pen...
...Hitchcock describedcases in which young men had applied to study for the priesthood and were met by diocesan screening committees wanting to know their "feelings" about the ordination of women...
...After a barrage of exposés that lasted for about a year, Quinn's early retirement was announced in August...
...Within the U.S., he wrote, "somehow, the promised counter-reformation is not taking place," even where allegedly conservative bishops have been appointed by John Paul II...
...The leftist National Catholic Reporter reassured its readers recently that they had been unable to detect much in the way of change since Rigali's installation...
...We heard from them again at the time of the Pope's visit, when the advocates of women's ordination and married priests were given plenty of opportunity to proselytize for their cause...
...One safe prediction is that he can either make changes, or lead a quiet life, but not both...
...His replacement, Archbishop William Levada of Portland, was immediately and insistently identified as a conservative by the San Francisco papers...
...Louis, Justin Rigali was a career Vatican 20 The American Spectator December 1995 official and said to be the Pope's man...
...He had a reputation as an orthodox figure, and a few years ago was sent by the Vatican to look into the mass created in Seattle by the rebellious prelate, Raymond Hunthausen...
...Michael Flach, editor of the Arlington Catholic Herald, told me that in general the bishops who have preserved the old traditions attract the largest numbers of seminarians...
...Both critics and supporters of the Cardinal have noted a mellowing in his public temperament," she wrote...
...The driving force behind it is rebellion against God's creation...
...In the smaller dioceses the bishop is more likely to be directly involved...
...The diocesan press they mostly control outright...
...The upshot is an inequality of public pressure...
...Not that it does much good...
...n a centrally directed organization the size of the Catholic Church (900 million), there is bound to be a tremendous information problem...
...Welfare is judged by its intentions, not by its effects...
...Even though he was one of the most liberal members of the hierarchy, Quinn still attracted hostile attention from the press, and real abuses were uncovered (pederasty in the clergy, serious financialirregularities...
...As archbishop, however, he "has made very few changes," according to a well-informed observer...
...Women, of course, were also ineligible in the 1940s, so what has changed...
...This contrasts sharply with the propaganda that young men today can hardly be expected to practice anything so outdated as celibacy...
...If the Pope would only wake up and ordain women, we were reminded, the shortage of priests would become an abundance...
...Why this should be so is something of a mystery, but one gets the impression that the Pope has been told that conservatives are people who repudiate Vatican II and perhaps even want to restore the Habsburgs...
...Some of the smaller dioceses do now have outstanding bishops...
...In some of the larger jurisdictions, Michael Flach suspects, the bishops themselves may not know about the screening activities of their own "discernment committees," and never see the young traditionalists who are turned away...
...The progressive opinions that shield them from the dreaded conservative label ill comport with the traditional Catholic belief (so regressive...
...And the Pope, if only he would join the modern world, is the one who could do it...
...and the orthodox may not notice...
...In San Francisco, homosexual activists painted slogans and accusations on cathedral property from time to time...
...Perhaps we can think of him as the Clarence Thomas of the American hierarchy...
...As today's Democratic Party shows, the number of people who do simultaneously retain in their minds a belief in New Deal liberalism and the traditional moral standards of the Church—opposition to abortion and homosexual behavior in particular—is small and shrinking rapidly...
...Everything, including human nature, is subject to the solvent of "change," or can be altered by fiat...
...A couple of years ago Law was at great pains to push through a feminist English translation of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church...
...He takes no interest in administration, and the finances of the archdiocese are said to be in poor shape...
...Elsewhere, I hasten to add, "good" bishops are to be found in a number of dioceses, including Omaha, Peoria, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City...
...This was duly construed as an accusation, and after a few days of such harassment by label, Levada gratified his critics by denying the charge...
...Her story soon turned into a platform for a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin called Richard Schoenherr, the author of Full Pews and Empty Altars...
...Louis...
...Conference of Catholic Bishops...
...Why should that be...
...They are in rebellion against all authority, after all, and above all they hate nature—the structure and logic of creation...
...The New York archdiocese has 2.3 million Catholics, Arlington 275,000...
...In the diocese of Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac from the District of Columbia, ten men also were ordained for the priesthood this year...
...But for the Americans, I suspect, it is not so simple...
...The bishops themselves often rely on their feminized (not necessarily female) assistants in the chancery...
...He has gone head to head with secular politicians but adopts a laissez-faire approach toward liturgical and doctrinal non-conformity...
...this year, Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...t seems that conservatives in the political sense of the word are simply not promoted within the American hierarchy—certainly not to large sees...
...If liturgical adjustments are quietly made, and the most controversial doctrines (such as the sinfulness of extramarital sex, not to mention abortion) are tactfully skirted, the heterodox will be satisfied (won't they...
...Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C...
...We want to know how you feel about it," he was told by a high-ranking diocesan official...
...Or perhaps they do know it, and that is what they seek...
...Ecclesiastical feminism is perhaps the chief manifestation of the gnostic world view today...
...But at a subsequent meeting of the American bishops, it was he who held the line against one more attempt to water down the liturgy...
...The Washington Post's Laurie Goodstein traveled to St...
...The candidate was later told that the committee had found him unsuited for the priesthood...
...The Catholic Church is becoming a Protestant church," he thought...
...Two people I spoke to, who do not want to be identified, mentioned three names in particular: Fabian Bruskowitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, James Sullivan of Fargo, North Dakota, and Charles Chaput of Rapid City, South Dakota...
...Those who are terrified by the prospect of public controversy will be inclined to offer up one more slice of the tradition in return for a cessation of hostilities...
...Donald Wuerl, Bishop of Pittsburgh, might be described as the David Souter of American Catholicism...
...So it is one-ninth the size of New York, and has the same number of ordinations...
...This papacy is more or less the last hurrah for an outmoded, outdated form of Catholicism...
...H itchcock provided several such vignettes, each within the jurisdiction of a bishop called conservative when appointed by John Paul II...
...Arlington is one of only two dioceses in the U.S...
...With only 82,000 registered Catholics," the Catholic World Report noted in May, "that diocese has 44 seminarians in formation...
...They can be silenced with the reminder that their role is to obey the hierarchy, not question it...
...It seems possible, then, that the shortage of priests is in part being created by the very people who propose themselves as its solution...
...For some reason they have not been excommunicated, even though they carried out a boycott (unsuccessful) against the bishop's annual fundraising campaign...
...The idea that it morally undermines its recipients, who do not have to earn their way in life and so are free to behave without personal responsibility, is not accepted by the U.S...
...The advocates of orthodoxy meanwhile worry that O'Connor pays more attention to political display than to parochial concerns...
...Affirmative action has taken precedence over orthodoxy as a guide to promotion...
...Many of the bishops are fearful of the feminists' capacity to make trouble...
...Newt Gingrich apparently is thought to pose a greater moral threat than welfare's open encouragement of illegitimacy...
...The Pope himself is unlikely to know much more about the church in America than he hears from the bishops...
...that has maintained the old rule of male altar servers...
...In San Francisco they have been known to drive to work sporting pro-abortion bumper-stickers...
...Other jurisdictions where liberal policies endure despite new appointments are Detroit (under Cardinal Adam Maida), Pittsburgh, and St...
...that women are not qualified to be priests...
...There are no essences...
...As it happens, the bishop of Arlington, John R. Keating, is under attack by a national organization of heretical Catholics, Call to Action...
...Many rose through the ranks of (government-supported) Catholic Charities...
...He was pronounced "too rigid...
...In St...
...Joseph's...
...Rather than return the fire by summoning the local TV crews, the response of Archbishop John Quinn and his entourage was to apply the whitewash before the paint was dry...
...All or virtually all senior incumbents are, in political terms, liberal Democrats who believe in income redistribution and do not believe that foreign aid or income transfers should be reduced...
...Cardinal Bernard Law has surrounded himself with assistants more concerned with placating the gnostic dissenters in their midst than with upholding orthodoxy...
...The seminary's director of vocations, the Rev...
...Some of his old nemeses" were now openly admiring "his liberal positions on labor, education, welfare and the care of those with AIDS...
...As for Cardinal O'Connor of New York, it was disquieting to see Elisabeth Bumiller's "strange new respect" article about him in the New York Times at the time of the Pope's visit...
...The other is Lincoln, Nebraska, and it, too, has many priestly vocations...
...The liberal establishment is still in charge...
...The scheme was only stopped at the last minute when the redoubtable Fr...
...The Pope himself can combine doctrinal orthodoxy with a vague political progressivism, and can even navigate the mysterious fog banks of phenomenology without getting lost...
...The promoters of dissent are everywhere well connected to the secular press...
...The idea that a pope who repudiated his predecessors would also undermine his own authority is too complex a thought for these people...
...Interestingly, Chaput is part Native-American and was apparently appointed for that reason...
...Next year there will be twelve, and forty-two seminarians are in formation...
...Permanent guerrilla warfare is opposed by tactical silence and diplomacy...
...He did not identify any of the cities with such prelates, but I am told that Boston is one...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
