Catholicism in Crisis
Bethell, Tom
In 1949, Evelyn Waugh wrote an article for Life magazine entitled "The American Epoch in the Catholic Church:' Catholicism was an "essential part" of the American spirit, he wrote, and America was...
...In November I went to Indiana to see Ralph Mclnerny at Notre Dame...
...With a growing family in the 1950s, he learned how to write in order to augment his salary...
...The media," broadly construed, have taken over many aspects of the "information flow...
...When I asked him what he made of the prolonged turmoil in the Church, he said: "I don't think we can understand—maybe we are not meant to understand—the real providential meaning of these last thirty-five or forty years...
...But he had kind words for Theodore Hesburgh, the emeritus president, who over many years contributed greatly to Notre Dame's material success...
...Many of them are mysteries, some set at Notre Dame...
...In Illinois, priests put themselves in jeopardy by signing letters of complaint sent to the nuncio in Washington...
...Mclnery said he was no historian, but he doubted that the old cliché was correct: "The Council at Lyon in 1274—to which Thomas Aquinas was traveling when he died—left no mess in its wake that I know of...
...And for us bishops the nuncio has been a great support and source of brotherly care:' Here was solidarity between bishop and bishop...
...In the nineteenth century all the foes of the faith were outside the church, arrayed against it...
...He would read Writer's Digest and contributed to magazines like Red-book and McCall's...
...In the days of sail, when messages took weeks to deliver, they exercised real power...
...When we left, Hesburgh asked us to pray for him...
...One can see why...
...Is...
...They don't want to hear bad news from subordinates orto pass it on to superiors...
...That may be true, or part of the truth...
...of a remarkable book, just out, called The Great Facade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church...
...They filled him with dread...
...It's certainly worse than the Reformation, when people knew when they had ceased to be Catholic,and acknowledged it...
...As the scandals of 2002 unfolded, I found myself wondering how Waugh would have reacted...
...Mclnerny expressed some frustration that the dissenting theologian Richard McBrien had almost become the public voice of Notre Dame: forever on TV, clerically garbed for the cameras...
...It seems that there was no significant, ongoing reporting, through the Vatican embassy here in Washington, to the appropriate authorities in the Holy See," Weigel said...
...The information wasn't reaching the top...
...It was a "constant struggle, swimming upstream all the way:' Mclnerny said he was grateful to Hesburgh for saving him from faculty enemies...
...Councils have been called because there was a mess...
...Ambitious church functionaries are eager for these diplomatic posts, especially in Washington, where ruffles and flourishes maintain the illusion of worldly power...
...Both the U.S...
...He looks a bit like Kirk Douglas...
...Today I regard him as the number-one Catholic writer in America...
...One can almost hear the nuncio musing: "They send so much money to Rome . . . Let them do it their way...
...I really do think that...
...He also hired McBrien...
...Well, I have often thought that we have the worst of both worlds...
...In remarks at the Faith and Reason Institute, the papal biographer George Weigel said that when he was in Rome last April, "high officials" there had no idea that a serious crisis was brewing...
...This is what they are saying about you and here are their names:') No scandal would erupt on his watch...
...In all the massive coverage of the church scandals, little attention has been paid to the role of the papal nuncio—the pope's ambassador in Washington, currently Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo...
...Harry Crocker, the author of Triumph, an excellent one-volume history of the Catholic Church, says that "the First Vatican Council [1869- 70] did not lead to any comparable turmoil, nor did the Council of Trent [1545-63]:' I put the same question to Chris Ferrara, the author (with Thomas E. Woods, Jr...
...He told me that for his office he had wanted floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a view of the campus...
...But he is going blind now and can no longer read the books...
...he doesn't mind having around him people he disagrees with...
...Technology has changed all that...
...The "information flow" was not in fact flowing...
...A professor of philosophy, he has taught at the university since 1955 and is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center...
...Now eighty-six, he sat like an old bulldog behind his desk, wearing black clericals and a woolen cardigan...
...They have it backwards," Ferrara said...
...One wonders whether the nuncio will get his red hat this time...
...All these declined after Vatican II and have not ceased doing so...
...That was Montalvo's predecessor, Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan...
...Mclnerny's comment on the post-Vatican II decades may seem extreme (it may also be correct), but it is widely accepted that 2002 was the worst time ever for the church in America...
...Perhaps the unpleasant facts that have emerged, and of which he had earlier been warned, stood in too great a contrast with the optimism about the world that seems to have been the guiding spirit both of the Second Vatican Council and of John Paul II's papacy...
...There has been nothing but decline since...
...ambassador to the Vatican, Jim Nicholson, and Archbishop Montalvo were present at the John Carroll Society's Epiphany Mass, with brunch to follow at the Grand Hyatt in Washington...
...So he distances himself from all controversy...
...Therefore they were unprepared for these revelations of malfeasance and misgovernance...
...Montalvo, Nicholson, and the Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, sat at the same table...
...All the trouble came afterward...
...In the Middle Ages you had foes within the church—heretics who claimed to be Catholics...
...Apparently he can write a book in two or three months...
...There was a huge television set and a white circular carpet, emblazoned with university insignia...
...Having lost secular power, the Vatican hangs on to its world-wide web of diplomats...
...The problem is that ambassadors today are vestigial organs of the body politic...
...It is often said that a comparable disarray followed earlier councils...
...Subdued mirth from the audience of 300...
...Enemies within and enemies without...
...Hesburgh is a "liberal who means it...
...He has an office on the top floor of the library that is named after him...
...Father Murphy is their candidate for bishop...
...Montalvo, bespectacled and seventy-three, preserved diplomatic inscrutability...
...Vatican II, on the other hand, was called "for no good reason, since by all contemporaneous accounts the church was in fine fettle in 1962:' Pope John XXIII said in summoning the council that the church was witnessing "the rise and growth of the immense energies and of the apostolate of prayer, of action in all fields!' Conversions, baptisms, and vocations were all rising...
...Earlier councils were called to address disciplinary or doctrinal crises that had already arisen...
...I know of three cases where priests in the United States, or secular groups, tried to do something about a local bishop who was engaging in homosexual activity...
...Amazon listed 115 when he last looked...
...The information came flooding in, not from the nuncio, but from the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and a hundred other sources...
...His response was to send the material straight back to the bishop...
...McCarrick leaped to the podium and said a few kind words about the nuncio, "an extraordinary diplomat...
...And he maintains good relations with the natives—which is to say, the Church's American hierarchy...
...Eventually the official channels were bypassed and the information was sent directly to allies in Rome...
...Cardinal Newman in The Idea of the University has a section on the 'Infidelity of the Day' He contrasts the nineteenth century and the Middle Ages...
...They gave him that...
...He could hardly have known that 1949 would prove to be a high point for the church in America...
...And no doubt Montalvo had indeed been a "great support:' in stanching the information flow, for a while at least...
...I think it is fair to say that the senior officials of the Catholic Church had too positive a view of the church in the United States," George Weigel said in his talk in Washington...
...But it is clearly the worst time that the church has ever gone through...
...Belgrade had been an earlier posting, so "he gets the spots that are . . . interesting," McCarrick said, pausing artfully...
...That can be arranged...
...Mclnerny took me to see Hesburgh the next day...
...He felt he was in a time warp...
...That it might not be Catholic enough," he quickly replied...
...Ever...
...So, the church is not in good shape, and the pope didn't know the half of it...
...Waugh died in 1966, so he lived long enough to see the penumbras and emanations from the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965: the spirit of renewal, the opening to the modern world, the fantasies of ecumenism...
...A senior member of the diplomatic corps, with a mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, he is said to be unreachable by telephone...
...But the pope surely could have found out what was going on, if he had really wanted to...
...I asked Father Hesburgh what was his major concern about the future of Notre Dame...
...Because these have been tough times for the Church:' McCarrick continued...
...The nuncio in Washington is customarily in his final post before returning to Rome, where he may expect to be rewarded with a cardinal's hat...
...More recently, a group of priests tried to inform the current nuncio about a corrupt bishop in New Jersey...
...Hesburgh said that such disagreements are central to the mission of a university...
...But I think he didn't...
...He has written "over a hundred" books, but is not sure of the exact number...
...Decisions were sometimes needed without waiting for instructions from the sovereign...
...What had happened after previous councils...
...In 1949, Evelyn Waugh wrote an article for Life magazine entitled "The American Epoch in the Catholic Church:' Catholicism was an "essential part" of the American spirit, he wrote, and America was where the church would flourish...
...After years in Rome working on John Paul II's biography, Weigel saw that "the senior leadership" had formed the view "that things were in rather good shape here...
...Vatican II was called because there wasn't one, as John XXIII more or less said in his opening remarks...
...Cacciavillan is now a cardinal...
...They could never get Montalvo on the phone...
...He knew that if we told him in person he would have to do something about it," one of the priests told me...
...Absent force, everything must be negotiated...
...Meanwhile, they retain the incentives of bureaucrats everywhere...
...In his speech, Nicholson extolled the industrious pope and the Holy See's 174 diplomatic missions, pros in their field, who concentrate on "classic diplomacy...
...The decline of the church since the council seems to be a case of propter hoc, not merely post hoc...
...But in 2002 new channels of communication were opened...
...I have my doubts...
Vol. 36 • January 2003 • No. 1
