Power and Authority in the Catholic Church
Schiltz, Michael E.
POWER AND AUTHORITY IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH CARDINAL CODY IN CHICAGO Charles W. Dahm with Robert Ghelardi Notre Dame, $18.95, 288 pp. Michael E. Schiltz THE MOST generous appraisal of this book...
...But there is more than a remote possibility that John Patrick Cody also loved and respected the institution that he had chosen to serve...
...and that, like many of his conservative counterparts, he deeply feared the uncharted waters into which the Vatican Council had cast his world...
...The inevitable victims of this arrogant exercise of pseudo-scholarship are the real life actors themselves, whose human frailties are shorn of their larger contexts and thus grossly exaggerated...
...In Chicago, the appointment of a conservative and insecure Archbishop to the most richly liberal archdiocese in America only exacerbated the inexorable tension of worlds in collision...
...One could ignore the prurient insen-sitivity - even the juvenile chapter titles ("Gulliver and the Lilliputians"), if the book had redeeming theoretical or narrative qualities...
...The authors bring no clear insights to bear...
...of shared power, one is convinced from the evidence of the author's own observations that it cannot come suddenly...
...Terms like "power," "authority," "monarchy," "democracy," and "participation" are neither defined nor consistently used...
...Michael E. Schiltz THE MOST generous appraisal of this book is that its authors had the misfortune to study the wrong place at the wrong time...
...It is replete with factual errors at those points where established and adequate documentation exists...
...Such is not the landscape on which to study the appropriate limits of the exercise of human power in a divine institution...
...The Vatican Council unleashed a generation of anguish - not yet over - in which men and women struggle, at great and sometimes fatal risk of spirit, to make order in the church of twenty centuries that they loved and thought they knew...
...Although the authors clearly and uncompromisingly side with the Chicago priests at every turn, the priests emerge as squabbling, ineffective, timid, selfish, and obsessively concerned with status and security...
...The theoretical vignettes that begin or end most chapters are often in unintelligible jargon and, when translated, largely irrelevant...
...The book would make of Cody an archetype - an almost inevitable product, of the evils of the "monarchical" authoritarianism against which the authors so tirelessly inveigh...
...The authors seem aware at only the most superficial and anecdotal level of the rich history that shaped the aspirations and expectations of the Chicago priests...
...If the church is to proceed into an era...
...The book focuses on the twenty years of conflict and hostility between the Association of Chicago Priests and John Cardinal Cody, Archbishop of Chicago...
...To make matters worse, the authors bring to their analysis a simplistic and inflexible view of democracy in the church that obscures any real understanding of the underlying issues...
...The impression is one of a collection of rumors, gossip, and half-truths, collected from participants in tense and sometimes hysterical situations, sifted and organized only to dramatize the authors' assumption that change is needed...
...Cardinal Cody emerges as ambitious, arrogant, evasive, deceitful, and ruthless...
...It becomes difficult in that context to explain the remarkable men that Chicago gave to the episcopacy presumably with Cody's blessing: May, McManus, O'Donnell, Wycislo...
...Perhaps at times he was one or more or all of these - they are flaws latent in all of us...
...Neither the lessons of eight centuries of Anglo-Saxon political history nor the governance experience of the Protestant churches are brought to bear...
...and that those, like Cody, who resist cataclysmic revolution, may after all be the ultimate heroes...
...Like Cody, they were wholly unprepared for the place into which history had thrust them...
...If theory is wanting, so is narrative...
...But they managed, with Cody's tacit consent, to preserve for Chicago what is, in 1982, quite certainly still the most vital church in the United States...
...The result is a brutally insensitive caricature of a passing order not fully appreciated and a new order not yet fully understood...
...The problem is where to go and how to make the transition...
...even more difficult to explain Roncalli or the Vatican Council...
...The closed, authoritarian pre-Vatican structure of the Roman Church is ill-suited to much of Western society...
...These various modes have been successful to the degree that they were compatible with the civil spirit of the age...
...It has neither...
...Maybe so...
...Often vivid and colorful, the narrative lacks even the journalist's standard of two independent sources and, on many of the more outrageous incidents, appears to be based on only one improbable witness or none at all...
...no one challenges this...
...The central issue of power in church governance is a complex one...
...Careful scholarship seems not to be an attribute of the work...
...and there is no evidence that the authors are aware of what those lessons might be...
...Obvious central difficulties like the tyranny of the mob and the difference between majority and consensus are given no useful exploration...
...What happened between priest and bishop, even in this most difficult and unrepresentative of times, might offer insights in the hands of careful and balanced scholars...
...The majority of the narrative is taken up with the reconstruction of events in the conflict between Cody and the Association of Chicago Priests...
...If not, then in a world already at arms against a sea of troubles, of what use is it...
...The author of the preface proudly admits that the book "is not clinically objective...
...Through its twenty centuries the church has realized consensus in a variety of ways - democracy, "monarchy," and, if we are to believe Acts, a flip of the coin...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 10
