'WHAT I THINK ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH': Zacheus in the Sycamore:

...There is a Catholic on the throne of Peter, a Catholic in Congress, a Catholic on the White House staff, and a Catholic in jail-what is one to say...

...Consider, for example, that Lumen Gentium states: The body of the faithful as a whole, anointed as they are by the Holy One (cf...

...I, for instance, object to the yearly parish publication which lists (to the cent) who gave what in the annual Christmas collection...

...He has also pointed out that this "mighty document" was "hammered into shape on the anvil of vigorous controversy...

...But while in the intimacy of self-counsel I speak to myself as a Christian, what I think of the Roman Catholic Church is intimately connected to the reasons why I cannot walk those ten yards to Communion...

...My oath, my commitment, have value only as far as I have self-respect, and in a milieu of general moral relativism, my word is all I have left...

...Is Hans Kung on their MICHAEL A. BURR is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania...

...James Hitchcock may be interested in the "American Catholic Left," but I think the transition from John Murray to Philip Ber-rigan is significant only when one uses an historical microscope...

...Everyone suspects that the Pope really has control, but he is too frightened, too wary, or too wise to prove it...

...When the Berrigans go to jail, that is news, but when parish priests are ignorant of the arguments behind critical issues, or are unwilling to broach a subject with their parishioners, that is pernicious...

...I argued...

...As recently as three years ago I heard a priest before a congregation of farmers in southern Illinois informing his parishioners that the difference between them, the Roman Catholics, and the Protestants, was that if the fifty souls gathered in that building obeyed the rules, they were "guaranteed" a place in heaven...

...Convening the Council was a tacit admission that while we venerated our past, we were willing to put forth newer, simpler commandments in an imitation of Christ...

...Neither the Groppis nor the good Sisters who manufacture Communion wafers in Borden-town have a patent on piety...

...I was within two feet of the Body of Christ...

...The "radicals" do not ask questions, they know the answers, even if they cannot always make those answers clear to everyone...

...The intractable front of Protestantism was constructed in reaction to the arrogance of the Roman Catholic Church...

...I suspect those men and women who enter religious life are acutely aware of the leverage they have by virtue of their collars and habits...

...There was nothing mawkish in either of these moments...

...Invariably the description is reversed: here is a priest and here is a nun and they have done x. The media relys on the stereotypes of both Catholics and non-Catholics to bring this feature of the actions of some of our fellow citizens into high relief...

...side or mine...

...While everyone gets something (a noble document), no one really gets anything...

...Self-criticism within the Church is manifold, and the teeth into which that criticism is hurled are often set in jaws as firm as those of my anti-Catholic forefathers and my grandparents who were nourished on the corn-fed evangelism of the Bible Belt...

...I have read, but have never seen a Mass in Latin...

...Zacheus sees two organic anomalies that are difficult to account for...

...To this non-Catholic who hungers for communion, the Church is relatively but not generically catholic...

...Within the Church there are anomalies-incidental and organic...

...Women call for equal rights and the clergy from top to bottom orchestrate a piece on Mariology...

...If the controversy becomes a fight for power, then all is lost- all, but if you can learn to love your enemies, wash the feet of your disciples, and have your feet dried by the hair of a sinner, then you will win, not by conquest, but by example...

...Its success, its survival, depends on including rather than excluding...

...Do you mean the religion of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, or Eugenio Pacelli, or whom...

...The example of John XXIII was more influential than the sixteen documents...

...people obey like whipped sheep, but what point has been made except that the priest can act in a way Christ never did...

...Sometimes they wanted a strong sense of history to give brief life a greater context, sometimes they wanted a strong leader, sometimes they wanted an escape hatch from fear, because merely practicing the faith is very easy-one can schedule salvation...

...The Church at large has no real notion of where power lies, and until a confrontation arises, neither does the hierarchy of the Church...

...Therefore they need no approval of others, nor do they allow ah appeal to any other judgment...

...I object to priests who stop Mass to herd latecomers into empty pews...

...Avery Dulles has called Lumen Gentium, "the most imposing achievement of Vatican II...

...It was good for Paul and Silas, It was good for Paul and Silas, It was good for Paul and Silas, And it's good enough for me...

...Roman Catholicism can be an ennobling renewal of the life of Jesus Christ, or it can be a convenient way to program the time between this moment and death...

...while I am unreligious I am not irreligious...

...Either I am willing to accept the infallible pronouncements of the Pope (and the two that have been made seem of curious unimportance), or I join the fifth column, or I go back on my word...

...Most loyal commentators on the Church sense trouble...

...One typical non-Catholic (not anti-Catholic) joke was that if the pathway to heaven were a toll-road, Roman Catholicism would be the exact-change lane...

...Converts wanted that certainty...

...Why should Zacheus, for all his sins, open his home to a man who strains both logic and his sense of what is right...

...Most important is that all of my first-hand information about the Church was gathered after 1967...

...I can tell you what is remarkable...

...There are many incidental anomalies, but they are innocuous and depend on taste to a great extent...

...For all its reforms the Church seems more eager to define its political role (right or left), and more concerned with resisting or overcoming internal opposition than in becoming inclusive-catholic-accepting multitudes...

...Roman Catholicism can be the most sublime or the most parochial institution of mankind...

...But what often appears to be a weakness, may, in fact, be a redeeming strength...

...The Roman Catholic Church has the greatest potential for initiating genuine ecumenism and persuading and proselytizing...

...They had to worship statues every day and couldn't eat meat on Fridays, and so on, but they were awfully good basketball players, and it used to cause me considerable discomfort when they would cross themselves before each free-throw...

...Vatican I was ended by a pitiful war few people can recall...

...To what advantage does a man place himself under the rule of the Bishop of Rome...

...Joseph's had a rough life in many ways...

...Given the right time and place I imagine that the Presbyterians and the Catholics could have had Dick and me at one another's throats once we bolted into adulthood-we all know such things have happened...

...I had been instructed in the Catholic faith by American Jesuits who were studying in Frankfurt, and Father Houdek married the two of us within that venerable building in the first English Mass it had heard...

...Insofar as the Roman Catholic Church is ancient, it is simply old...

...The only question is whether love will prevail over law, whether the Church can beckon support where it once, long ago, demanded it...

...I object to singing "America" as an exit hymn, though I would challenge anyone who questioned my basic patriotism...

...The same document also maintains: Therefore his [the Roman Pontiff's] definitions, of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, are justly styled irreformable, for they are pronounced with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, an assistance promised to him in blessed Peter...

...The doctor was ready with a syringe of demerol, but Mother wanted the last rites first-while she was alert...

...Vatican II was finished and crippled by many words and much equivocation...

...A convert or so will show up, looking for something to combat entropy...

...Buried in my neo-cortex are the lines: Give me that old-time religion That old-time religion Give me that old-time religion It's good enough for me...

...There was the priest, the father, the daughter and the son-in-law...

...Hopefully you will take heart at the good things I see in the visible representation of that man who stopped many years ago and beckoned, even a publican, to come near...

...The "liberals" ask the same question but add, "should I stay...

...There are certain agonies or joys of change which I simply do not know...

...Just as the decade since Vatican II is insignificant in the history of the Church, so is the two thousand years since Christ insignificant in the history of man...

...Surely if the public at large were not used to thinking of American Catholics as political conservatives there would be little notice given to a man who was politically radical and also a priest...

...As a non-Catholic I find Lumen Gentium the most confusing achievement of Vatican II, and the very "anvil of vigorous controversy" rather than the sword or plowshare that was beat out upon it...

...But southern Illinois seems to be a ghetto where that old-time religion is practiced by all professing Christians...

...Exegetes of Lumen Gentium are notable mainly for their lack of accord, and from the outside, the exegesis looks less like a symphonic orchestra tuning their various instruments than like the neighborhood kids picking up sides...

...Celibacy and the official political role of the Church are questions the Pope and his bishops and their priests may all resolve some afternoon in the Coliseum...

...It cannot be given lightly...

...They also taught me that pagans were bad people...

...his life was a parable, not a definition...

...Priests demonstrate, priests defect, priests marry, and their actions are answered with homilies on obedience...

...Why should a man marry if he contemplates divorce, even theoretically...

...For the non-Catholic and, I suspect, for most Catholics, the central issues are not too complicated...

...The priest began the sacrament...

...2:20,27), cannot err in matters of belief...

...Everyone admitted that the students at St...

...I have heard the same sentiment (without the verse) voiced often in Catholic Churches, but "old-time" is a vague description...

...Where once the Catholic Church could look with righteous disdain on the schisms, and splinters, and slivers of the Protestants, those recalcitrants can now relish the self-doubt of their elder...

...Though the implications of that quip are unfair and irresponsible, they limn fairly how non-Catholics felt...

...At first I stood up for the Presbyterians...

...There I go, pontificating...

...while I am non-Catholic I am also non-Protestant...

...But Dick was much better catechized than I, and finally I ran home crying (the Presbyterians had told me all about Hell) to a mother who patted me, and soothed me in the only religious language a child can understand...

...We sneak our contribution in sometime around February when nobody is looking...

...There is little, if anything, that a don-Catholic can say that you have not already said to yourself...

...The word is not heard in weekly homilies, nor found in the pages of Commonweal, nor beat out upon the typewriter...

...Our attention is attracted by what happened, not how long ago it happened...

...Like jail-house lawyers, converts could be counted upon to follow the punctilios in lock step...

...Yet Christians of all persuasions seem to dally on the periphery of what is essential in this, or any other age...

...But who would join, or leave, or pay attention to a church over such matters...

...The Catholics, themselves, were formidable...

...Later Dad said that was the best Mass he'd ever been to...

...The last Mass he attended was said by a friend around our dining-room table...

...Why should a man join a congregation if he contemplates contention...

...Protestant Christians do not fall like angels...

...The doctor, impatient, said, "a lot of good that will do...

...Some years passed and one Saturday I did what was formerly unthinkable, I wedded a Roman Catholic...

...The tensions which grew in the last decade resulted from a misapprehension of what nearly everyone saw as the reason for change...

...and while I have envied communicants every Sunday and on every day of holy obligation for the past seven years, I have been unable to join them...

...Any six-month chunk of Commonweal describes the procession of "burning issues...

...We were married in an eight-hundred-year-old church which dominated the highest hill in the Hessian village of Oberursel...

...That knowledge may have been congruent with divine will, an ossified model of medieval politics, a rock of righteousness in an acid sea of unrighteousness, or mere parochialism-but that knowledge was certain...

...Whether they made the shot or missed I could never decide if God had voted for their side or mine...

...they are misled, or discouraged or worn down, like human beings...

...There will be defections...

...what should I do...

...The Roman Catholics I know are a fine group, and as a group they are no better or no worse than the English or the Irish, the Jews, management or labor, Mets' fans, or the citizens of Cleveland...

...When my wife's mother was dying of what specialists had agreed was terminal cancer, and on one difficult afternoon, we called both our priest and our doctor, we saw a drama that rescues the Church from all criticism...

...Everyone has his own private list of irritants and it may include a person, a place, a practice or a priest ("All we have to do to get straight with God is to get our head screwed on right," was the theme for one homily I heard...

...Still, what I object to, someone else probably enjoys-and I continue to insist that the Church must contain multitudes...

...The German parish priest had advised me not to "convert" simply to be Roman Catholic in name or form, and so I did not, and so I have not...

...But we in the sycamores wait for the word...

...What I think about the Roman Catholic Church' Third in a Series ZACHEUS IN THE SYCAMORE MICHAEL A. BURR When I was a boy, the Presbyterians taught me that the Catholics were pagans, or nearly so...

...I shall never forget the day Dick Panichi convinced me that I most certainly would go to Hell because I was not Roman Catholic...

...But change, in itself, is a mote in the eye of infinity...

...The Church no longer knows what it is...

...the single important issue is the spirit of change...

...But age, the times, the hormones, and the adolescent trauma of finding out that adults don't have all the answers all combined, and my faith became attenuated, and one day it was gone...

...Today the Church seems to have lost (for better or for worse) that venerable, irritating, compelling surety...

...The Church will lapse or last on the law of love.last on the law of love...

...Before I conclude I would like to remove my view of Roman Catholicism from the court of public opinion, from the arena of controversy, from the pages of Commonweal...

...They can see the Church in "crisis," in "decline," a "bare ruined choir," in need of "remaking," and so on...

...Insofar as it is new, it is fumbling for some sense of the future...

...The second anomaly is more complicated...

...The issues were simple: life, death and the immortal soul...

...As Zacheus, my only advantage is my sycamore...

...Yet what is most distressing is that most parish priests I have listened to seem unread in controversial matters, or they disagree and won't present the issues fairly, or they agree and either are afraid to speak up or contemptuous of the discernment of "the body of the faithful as a whole...

...Some Catholics think they are a bit better than others, but so thought the Jews of the Gentiles, and so think some Baptists...

...I do not deny that these quotations are lifted from context-indeed there is an abundance of context lubricating the transition from one statement to the other-but I do think that in a document that utters both statements without stammering, the context is meretricious...

...Before Vatican II In pre-Vatican II days the Roman Catholic Church knew what it was...

...I introduce my comments this way to make it clear that while I am outside the Roman Catholic Church, I am somewhat informed...

...The highest compliment I can pay the Roman Catholic Church is that while its individual members may engage in brush wars with one another, the Church taken as a whole is profoundly introspective...

...What non-Catholics saw in John XXIII was the rule of love rather than rule by law...

...Those Catholics who wish to dissociate themselves from the radicals have little ammunition but to say "stop," and depending on who they are, "or else...

...Within our experience death is the only mystery more mysterious than life...

...Non-Catholics were both angered and cowed by that certainty...

...I have no real desire to join the communion of saints, but I long for the communion of my fellows with our God...

...My Presbyterianism burgeoned and it would be hard to find a more devout professor of that conviction than I was at fifteen...

...The priest continued the rite without retort, but I realized that he could have eyed the syringe and answered, "A lot of good that will do...

...A certain number of Catholics will remain within the Church because they have been trained well...

...The first is that his little girl will never be an acolyte, and will never be ordained to consecrate the Host...

...The "conservatives" wonder to the extent of their capacity to wonder-"What is happening...

...A few months later my father-in-law, now a widower, was also in futile combat with cancer...