The pope, our brother
Shea, William M.
HOW TO COPE WITH PETER'S SUCCESSOR 1 The...
...Anyone else century raised it, and their answer amounted to a drastic must earn a measure of each and must hold them by being reshaping of the entire ecclesial life of western Europe...
...His and simple difference has turned out to be that I care to know office and he himself, in one of their fundaments, are worldly, what they think, and they do not care to know what I think...
...they must be and law as will obviate the continual strain between the prepared to carry their side of it to the American bishops and to pastoral and reflective offices in the church...
...While his tent respect, even when we can no longer trust and obey one or ministry has been a grace for the church in many respects, he, all of them...
...His articles nourishes the dangerous illusion that American blacks can have appeared in Dissent, the Village Voice, and other publications.really extricate themselves from U.S...
...the chairs for he throws the church into turmoil by his determination to earn them our persistent critical attention as well as our persis- calm it, and thinks he can calm it by his command...
...I am not analyzing or being can be uncovered in them...
...reception...
...He may even be holy The problem is evident in the document produced under CarCommonweal: 588 dinal Baum in which a Roman oversight of all theological up our Catholic calendar...
...If you can stand such according to John Updike, from the descendants of the Puri- an exaggeration, I am a Catholic biologically...
...And, not surprisingly, it is habits...
...Precisely because he is the church, for the guidance of common action, for articulation so unusually gifted, he is doing great harm to himself, to the of the community's faith and belief, for the oversight of church, to his office...
...They did not prove worthy of our trust...
...agree, among them Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Rose- In addition to my feeling about the church, I have a view of mary Haughton, David Tracy, and Robert Doran...
...The Catholic tans to Lutherans and Episcopalians...
...But let us hope we can stand and make our quotient solidarity with us and with absolutely nothing to gain themof noise...
...blacks' horizons engendered by Jackson's comings and goings Few on Fulton Street would have been making a "pan- on the world stage, the stunning new assertion of black confiMuslim" connection between black and Syrian interests...
...I find writ large in her life my own what our family leaders have done so well and so rightly, and struggle, my own good and evil, truth and lie, life and death...
...The beginning of We must all take care that our self-interest, self- reform indicated by the Second Vatican Council - that is, that protectiveness, primitive rage, bias, ignorance, pride of life the papacy is a constitutional monarchy rather than an absolute and place, and fear do not inspire and direct our criticism, but one, and that law binds the legislator - has collapsed again in still, even with the knowledge of our vices, we cannot refrain the press of events and under the weight of the papal personalfrom trying to tell the truth to and about our leaders...
...Even the few bishops who may in far different circumstances at the beginning of our century...
...What you see is what you get, per our experience, our knowledge, and our hope...
...Contemporary Catholics defending, but simply stating it as a fact...
...her...
...exactly chums...
...But many disagree with his tradiLeadership Conference of Women Religious...
...Above all, they must not of mutual respect, freedom of speech, democratic interaction, slip into the silence of the marionette as their predecessors did and institutional self-criticism...
...A mere thirty years ago it would not, could pope and the bishops are not God, they are not the incarnate not, have been asked, at least in my circles in the east Bronx...
...to...
...Fear of women, and perhaps hatred faculties is envisioned...
...This and that something of the rock bottom truth about one's own feeling, ripened into a conviction...
...Dialectically, the young men's spirited "high fives," even oldsters grinned Jackson-backers often argue, the awesome shift in young broadly, elated...
...At any cloister to comunidades, from The Catholic Worker to The Wanderer, from Lefebvre (who chooses not to stand her as she WILLIAM M. SHEA, professor of religious studies at the University of is) to Kung (who chooses to do so...
...Secondly, I hope that the bishops will begin a regular, direct, and forthright dialogue with the theologians, and especially with the ones whom they do not understand and with whom they disagree...
...They are simply But it is undoubtedly asked across the Catholic world today, brothers in the Christian family who, more often than they and not only by the theologians, the bishops, and the nuns who should, take themselves more seriously than they can afford to are threatened by him...
...They, and the pope as longer able to distinguish what he wants from the will of God chief among them, are preeminently (but not exclusively) for the church...
...future...
...My parents took me to church and showed me where The question, in other words, is not mine alone...
...not like to hear from us ought to, and on a regular basis...
...No doubt the values articulated by the pope ninety-six, signers of the New York Times advertisement, and for the church are ours as well: that human life is sacred in all in the most distressing refusal of the Apostolic Delegate and its instances, that married love is sacramental, and that reprothe Archbishop of San Francisco to celebrate Mass for the duction links us to God...
...It seems to me, too, that theologians should come up selves...
...Well, first of all - and this is evident in Catholic faith as O N TO MY topic: How to cope with the pope...
...I also will provocation...
...the Catholic public, the latter when it is clear that private Finally, we lay Catholics will continue to cherish the values communication of views is ignored...
...when they fail to especially so when their freedom and dignity are threatened by take me seriously, they are lessened...
...He is deeply convinced of the primacy of his responsible for the shaping of the Catholic tradition for the office in the church...
...If even Peter is to be trusted, he must tunately, in doing so they thrust the remainder of the church be trustworthy...
...Among the memories of my childhood meaning for the future of Christianity...
...I have the church all tangled with my own mother and over his liberal Congregationalist origins...
...As a question it well as in secular common sense - by recognizing that the is significant...
...The question came up at the end sors whose denial of their Master, although sometimes more of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth subtle than Peter's, was far more radical and disastrous in its to a generation of Catholic scholars who coped by maintaining consequences...
...is exemplified in the troubles throughout the present pontifiThis pope is an extraordinary man...
...How can we make careful distinctions between resentment of criticism...
...The pope ity...
...I churches catch us unaware...
...I hope that the American bishops will hedge round his threat to American religious women and American theologians...
...him...
...On N. Landes and Richard M. Quinn, and in Adolph L. Reed, Fulton Street there was no organized celebration, but as blar- Jr.'s The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (Yale, $5.95 pager, 176 ing radios and newsstand headlines told the victory, the mood pp...
...4, 1984 would have found the normally down-at-the- Something about that moment encapsulates what 1 take to be heels ambience of Fulton Street electrified...
...it is my mythic recently reminded by Bruce Kuklick (Churchmen and family...
...fear that he and the church will suffer the consequences of that mistake...
...Umberto Eco hand...
...For myself, I will love him as intolerance of difference, and suppression of dissent...
...media, a moving liturgist and homilist...
...On the political side, I have few expectations but some hopes...
...If not the last thing novelists who write about being Jewish is that they make that must be said about salvation, it certainly is the first...
...think Freud was right about churches and tabernacles and Feeling and affectivity are basic determinants of expres- wombs...
...He knows that the world - that is, lessened...
...To use a is intellectually almost worthless and even a self-deception...
...If the statisticians are present bishop of Rome is, to my mind, perilously close to correct, the question has occurred to over a million American losing his claim on our trust, obedience, and loyalty...
...It ing at Mass on Sunday saying the rosary...
...quite forthrightly, was able to hold together a church in turmoil Ministers are servants, not kings, as Jesus taught (Mk 10:42- at least in good part because we all knew he suffered with the 44...
...I shall sin and repent, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, masturbation, the role as will the pope...
...HOW TO COPE WITH PETER'S SUCCESSOR 1 The pope, our brother WILLIAM M. SHEA rate, I am glad that there are novelists, theologians, and philosophers who do not let me forget that I am bound and 0 NE OF THE many reasons that I enjoy reading Jewish loosed and even lost and saved by feeling...
...I am wary of her penchant for intellectual and spiritual and are making them, injuring the very family they love and repression - as I am at my own fear of power and my primal wish to serve...
...I expect him to treat me and my brothers and sisters as Some have suggested that sex is, at bottom, the issue that clogs such, and !will raise a protest when he does not...
...The pace on the street quickened, and amid black concerns for his own aggrandizement...
...Again, their historical timidity and deference to bishops, will submit I doubt that the pope and his men will be able to force a to the control that obtained prior to the Council and that for half homogeneity of thinking and acting upon Catholics...
...John Dewey, as we were church is the home of my heart and mind...
...Eco is probably correct: the question chains one does not break...
...I do not think this is a bad thing, though I was brought up variety of styles and understandings of Christian life, from the to mistrust feeling, and I know it has to be watched...
...I suspect that a large portion of the Catholic teaching, and their publication...
...what he intends, he is in for difficult days...
...A good belt does not give a spontaneous and immediate, much less an of hesitation and doubt might not be a bad thing for this pope, eternal, legitimacy to their every word and action...
...We may not save them from the consequences of their with suggestions for such modifications of church government acts, but we can let them know that they do not stand alone...
...To this day my should occur and will occur to any seriously reflective Catholic mother, now alone, gets into bed at night with the rosary in her of our time, and, indeed, to the whole church...
...We There may come a time (if, for example, the bishops are should not forget that, whether we agree with them or not, unwilling to protect them) when we must, as Lyndon Johnson theologians such as Charles Curran and the religious women put it, hunker down like a Pedernales jackrabbit in a who signed the New York Times advertisement did so out of windstorm...
...my prayers...
...What should T HE nature and function and limits of the papacy itself are a be a Christian communal dialogue has become a monologue...
...Coming out of last in rescuing him seemed to be confirmed rather than co-opted summer's convention, the Rainbow Coalition insisted it was a by President Reagan's gracious, if calculating, Rose Garden movement broader than one man's presidential aspirations...
...Unfor- worthy of them in action...
...Only God deserves excommunicating the pope...
...For me there is only one church, right and wrong, ecclesiastical political agenda and self-conception runs against sinful and saved all at once...
...They must organize for it...
...They have conceived themselves to be the voice of like us all, has much to learn and to repent of...
...As much as I now spontaneously dislike hierarchs acute form...
...in the future it must also be made clear that the Catholic impeccable he is not...
...I will live my life according to the unwillingness to get itself straight on sex...
...Although sometimes small-minded, she is no tion that feeling is the power of and (usually) the limit to my small church...
...the ministers of the church must be obeyed, trusted, listened To put it in classical Catholic terms: infallible he may be...
...I view coping with the pope as this kind of I have found God, and what I have found in her is worth far question: how do we love the Catholic church in its actual more than the price I have had to pay - and the price has not forms of life and authority, and survive as human beings, as been small, frankly...
...They form the heart, give it its would have occurred to Aquinas...
...This upon him...
...I have in my office desk the rosary of Mother Seraphine recently wondered whether Thomas Aquinas would be a CathHart, O.S.U., given me when she died ten years ago...
...By them I am confirmed in my convic- even perverse...
...in both cases the church is his colleagues and himself...
...me feel a bit easier about being Roman Catholic...
...by Thomas American bombing raid over Lebanon a month before...
...His predecessor, Paul VI, who taught ear given to ministers who will not listen to their church...
...He could use a spot of detachment from it...
...Traditions and with Mary the mother of God and with the woman I love...
...life, retain and enhance their individual my mind, no institutional church of unfeeling bureaucrats on dignity, maturity, freedom, and self-respect under a raventhe one side and a nearly invisible church of good Catholics on ously monarchical and patriarchal leadership, much of whose the other...
...South Florida, Tampa, formerly associate professor of theology at I love the Catholic church...
...of women in ministry, their ordination to the priesthood, the While I live he is my brother in the Lord and I shall so regard celibacy of the clergy, and the male monopoly of leadership...
...This step is utterly essential to the health of the American church and its institutions of higher learning, and to the ability of the bishops themselves to lead the American church...
...And there is something final about this...
...They now need to grow ears to match the again, he will probably do little of either...
...are secular, are political...
...The surge of racial pride, even of jubilant black than a truly coherent program for empowering the "left-out people," we're cautioned against employing a double standJIM SLEEPER writes widely about urban politics and teaches in the ard: so what, for example, if Jackson's "black" foreign policy Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University...
...Professionally and personally I fear that we are witnessing a revivification of the imprudent and mean spirit that has H ow then do I cope with the pope...
...They are: family Gospel I learned within the church, will speak it as I can, and life, divorce and remarriage, premarital and extramarital sex, will hand it back at the end in one piece...
...When I was a child my parents taught me International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C...
...I am a Roman Catholic intellectuSomething of the same sort happens to American Protestants, ally, spiritually, even psychologically...
...We can now expect a major people will not take seriously a teaching on sexuality that has battle...
...thinking as through feeling...
...Yet he wishes us to treat him and it as In the past it has been made perfectly clear to Catholics that though they are sacred only...
...Catholics of the ancient least one eye open, for our failures are more than likely Eastern church raised it a thousand years ago, and coped by matched in number and quality by theirs...
...The reformers of the sixteenth our unconditioned loyalty, trust, and obedience...
...The family belongs to God, and we ought to resist as the marks a shift in post-Tridentine Catholic sensibility, for I plague the pronounced tendency of our leaders to identify their cannot avoid the question which my parents and theirs could wishes and beliefs with those of God...
...How can we omnia saecula saeculorum...
...The theologians, I hope, will prepare for a long and painful struggle over the values they have come to espouse and the 7 November 1986: 589 church they love...
...It reaches near tionalist stand on specific cases as well as with his statement of unbelievable, but perhaps its most revelatory, heights in the moral norms...
...I He is rightly convinced of the value of the priesthood and the must be willing to live by my conscience, and to be willing importance of religious communities of men and women, but to tell the officers of the church what I discover about the he must learn that ministry and religious life must change if Christian life, to tell them when it appears to me they lead the their value to the church is to be enhanced...
...The fact that the bishops sit on the chairs of the apostles church and that he would not break the bent reed...
...problem yet to be met by the church...
...There is, to support one another in...
...the lilies of the field and the birds of the air in obedience, But it is not a new question, raised only in the peculiar set of loyalty, and trust...
...they were Catholic prayers, prayers I now teach Commonweal: 586 my sons...
...these days thank God...
...Catholic women over the past decade who have coped by Granted, though...
...small shift in the Catholic understanding of and response to He needs our patience, our forbearance, our encouragement, ministerial leadership...
...For all its male headship the church seems to me a Philosophers, Yale University Press, 1985), never quite got mother...
...When they have, in one or two instances, be- to which he sometimes falls prey...
...I will die in her should God Theology Society, is currently a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson give me grace...
...The very occurrence of the question do...
...One practical aspect of the problem - our support as well as our correction, each in season...
...The best remarkable theological tradition and spiritual wisdom, her piece I have ever read on this is Jonathan Edwards's Treatise forms of life...
...Such olic were he alive today...
...adults, as Christians...
...Catholic conception they are responsible for the social unity of He is also proving himself dangerous...
...A brass ring had been caught, an American Dream When it's suggested that Jackson's dramatizations of inequity come true, if only symbolically, for people badly needing such and raw need reflect a collection of narrow group claims rather symbols...
...I doubt very much that Catholic theologians, for all of not taken seriously their experience and understanding...
...Catholic novelists paint a picture of lic church is my world of meaning, the best thing I know in the modern Catholics, from communal types to apostates, who world, and that it has become so for me not so much through cannot quite get the smell of incense out of their nostrils...
...when I must, and stand open to reasonable and responsible There remains to be mentioned that tangle of issues having criticism...
...My parents knew where God is and so do l. My sense of occurring in the Reformation churches again - at something the wholeness of human life and the hope of the wholeness of of a safe distance I might add, for which distance they must my own life is the gift the church has given me...
...trust his powerful Catholic without exception, have conducted themselves responsibly instincts when he displays them rather than the sectarian ones and decently...
...If this is a century devastated Catholic intellectual and spiritual life...
...I shall err, and so will he...
...Both books give considerable backing to the charges that resembled South Boston's whenever the Celtics win a basket- Jackson has been deceitful, opportunistic, and manipulative of ball championship...
...But in order to do it the current wave of papolatry must be broken for the sake of the petrine office as well as the rest of the church...
...continues charitably and without acrimony, but surely a setRome (and its American supporters in these matters) is tlement cannot be imposed without harming the deepest weave asserting direct and autocratic control over theologians, their of church life...
...In the enough to clear a future Vatican committee on canonization...
...It is deepened by the outrageous ac- of them, may well be just what we have to work out of the tions of Cardinal Hamer toward the twenty-four, originally Catholic system...
...As such they deserve my attention, my respect, and my He has made his own authority the center of our attention, and I prayers, and they get all three...
...Before that throne his miter will be of no avail...
...I shall die as he will...
...They have tasks and responsibilities that I do 7 November 1986: 587 not have or want, burdens that I could not shoulder...
...even her sins, are mine...
...The church's ancient doctrines, her worship, her sions of faith, of belief, and of ecclesial communion...
...As I myself take the church as well as we lay Catholics must defend the dignity and officers seriously and take their teaching to be a possible the freedom of every person in every area of political and mediation of God's word to me, so I expect that they take my social life, but he forgets that on his shoulders there falls the ministry, my understanding, my experience seriously...
...Son of God, nor are they the church of God...
...He is intelligent, seri- cate of Schillebeeckx, Hassler, Pohier, Boff, Kung, and now ous, energetic, charismatic, a talented manipulator of the Curran...
...He has tossed aside his conciliatory and constructive man or woman but to God alone, disagree firmly and directly role and has decided to crush those he cannot cow...
...I was born into her three weeks The Catholic University of America, and past president of the College after being born into the world...
...History displays a solid number of his succeseven further into papal arms...
...It would and should be raised about any pope, for it and mistrust ecclesiastical bureaucrats, I think the distinction is a question about office and authority in the church...
...While I am not naive enough to think that they care sin and its law - is a constant threat to our secular political what I think and believe, I am as obliged to communicate it to life, but he must learn that sin and its law are not outside the them as they are their thoughts and beliefs to me...
...with popes and bishops we have to keep at circumstances of the past few years...
...When I chief responsibility to defend every person in the church and do not take them seriously, I am lessened...
...T HEY ALSO deserve my criticism, my fraternal correction...
...It is a to find God, and he showed himself to me in the church's church-wide question, an ancient one, and one freighted with worship and witness...
...THE ASPIRATIONS & EXPLOITS OF JESSE JACKSON JIM SLEEPER nose-thumbing at the striped-pants diplomats Jackson had bested, seemed to follow an impeccably American tradition of AVISITOR to Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant on January ethnic celebration: the Great Black Hope had scored...
...It must I did his predecessors, follow his lead, obey his rightful authorbe said, clearly and unequivocally, that the pope himself is ity when it is respectfully exercised, be loyal to his position as responsible for this far more than the theologians who, almost chief guarantor of church unity...
...He appears the sort of man who is not people must be listened to, obeyed, trusted...
...the bishops are brothers, they are not leaving the church...
...With God we must be as not have raised...
...I intend to speak in whatever forum is provided me to do with sexuality...
...We remember as well Kosnik, McNeil, and Wilhelm...
...There are personal and plagued Catholicism so often, namely suspicion of inquiry, political sides to the answer...
...Although the structure and the general lines of the exercise is a poor little man who will soon enough die and answer to the of authority remain much the same as they had been, there is no Father of us all...
...dence which even a president had to respect, overwhelms the fewer still would have known of President Hafez al-Assad's preacher's little personal hypocrisies and whatever structural darker purposes in accommodating Jackson's plea for Good- damage authors like Landress, Quinn, and Reed think his man's release...
...divine size of their mouths, for there is far more coming out through the mouth than going in through the ears...
...I hope that the discussion, even the debate, public humiliation of the Archbishop of Seattle...
...Each strand is distinct, but all have finally against the mistakes and injustices being worked by the present to do with the Roman Catholic leadership's inability and .leaders of the church...
...He knows, perhaps church properly and when improperly, where they understand better than anyone in the church, that he and the leaders of the rightly and where they fail to understand...
...I will continue to pray that he finds constructive outlets for his enormous gifts and comes to a better opinion of American Catholics and of theologians especially...
...himself as an American patriot, while another black man's feat Nor has Jackson's defense stopped there...
...He and his men must be moderated...
...For this coming trouble the pope himself must act as a responsible adult, surrender my hind and heart to no answer...
...it is just that I know conversion and commitment feelings must be transformed, where I belong...
...I intend to find God's will haved immoderately, it has usually followed upon immoderate and Christ's Gospel in his ministry whenever I can...
...I am sad at her sins, as I am at my tell our own "family leaders" that they have made mistakes own...
...He has among many others - is the relationship between the pope and had years of the first four, and the season for the last is surely his men on one side and theological inquiry on the other...
...She is a great church, broad enough to embrace action and thinking, to the worlds of meaning that are open to dissent and disagreement and doubt and a nearly incredible me...
...worn analogy, it is a family question: how can Catholics live Nor can I bring myself to say I love the church when her together, love one another, cherish common values and truths, leaders are correct and not when they are mistaken...
...Furthermore, I am unable to make for my affections a I do not think the question is about the present pope alone, distinction between "Catholic faith" and an "institutional although he seems singularly able to force it upon us in an church...
...diplomacy to pursue the Commonweal: 590...
...I doubt that I would be at on Religious Affection (Yale University Press, 1985...
...The obvious church but in it, and not only in us, but in himself as well...
...There will be little plagued by self-doubt...
...She is vital, gracefully engaged in the salvation of the In addition to the theologians to whom I pay attention, I also world, volatile, full of power for Christian life, promising, read some American philosophers, especially James, Dewey, conflicted, confused, wrong-headed, stubborn, authoritarian, Royce, and Santayana...
...There All this is preface to the admission, in these times often actually are people who are even more hopelessly what they difficult to make with unalloyed joy and pride, that the Cathoare than I am what I am...
...It is not merely a there is the picture of my father, a mighty man indeed, kneel- personal question, any more than it is the question of a few...
...Their emotion was simpler, and to that extent charismatic brokerage has done to black political developapparently more benign: a black man in uniform had carried ment...
...Jesse the rearguard defense of Jackson expressed by some of his Jackson was winging his way from Damascus to the White more thoughtful supporters in the wake of the devastating House, bearing in triumph Navy flier Robert O. Goodman, disclosures and criticisms made in Jesse Jackson and the who had been shot down and imprisoned by Syria during an Politics of Race (Jameson Books, $17.95, 276 pp...
...persons and institutions must be protected...
...He is a strong-willed man who seems no worship, for the probity of teaching...
...The two generations of tomb-like silence...
...Ignatius home elsewhere, not because other churches are not good of Loyola supposes throughout the Spiritual Exercises that in places or good enough places for me...
...Sadly, like us God in the church...
...where they have gone off, need to change, and even to mind Still, she is the place in the world where God has found me and their own business...
...The bishops have a pastoral responsibility to do that...
Vol. 113 • November 1986 • No. 19
