Orphans

...As in the corporate world from which so many parishes now take their counseling and administrative cues, the vaunted diversity of the lay-controlled church may turn out to be a wholly fabricated pluralism, one that belies the promise of greater devotion and democracy that resides in the heart of the lay revolution...

...L est my example be dismissed as merely local, let me refer to two other communities: Washington, D.C.'s Holy Trinity Parish, chronicled recently by Jim Naughton in Catholics in Crisis (Addi son-Wesley), and the Saginaw, Michigan, diocese recently described by Charles Morris in American Catholic (Times Books...

...D Daniel Daly Orphans The guardian is asleep dogging the lacy upstairs rooms with his heavy, canine presence...

...It also suggests that horizontal modes of authority have their own forms of authoritarianism, ones that operate through interpersonal relationships rather than top-down dictation...

...Sister Honora Remes's leadership, in Morris's portrait, is the picture of the "nondirective" style now in vogue throughout corporate life: Aiming at a "participatory parish," Remes, a "good listener," leads discussions that are "perfectly open...

...Yet Naughton also enlightens us about the nature of that integrity and judgment...

...In Saint Mary's Church, Saginaw, pews have been replaced by "individual cushioned chairs and kneelers" around an altar at the center of the church...

...We see ourselves plastered in the back of the van to ice cream, our eves rolling our hair poking up straight, our mouths bleeding on the way with vanilla to nowhere north in particular...

...Yet as Morris observes, "'participatory' is not quite the same as democratic," noting further that Remes's strong personality leads her to dominate "almost without being aware of it...

...These last two criteria are eminently therapeutic: Psychological harm is a valid but also elastic criterion (would the Jesus who begged to be relieved of his cup have been excused on this ground...

...The problems now are not lay conformity, the curmudgeonly priest who rants about birth control, or the preconciliar specter of Mother Angelica...

...The problems are the choice and diversity whose insistent assertion is an unmistakable sign of their phoniness...

...Many of Holy Trinity's parishioners, he writes, contest certain church teachings because they are "theologically suspect, psychologically harmful, and detrimental to the vitality of the church...

...Remes's style suggests that the vertical authority of male priests will be supplemented if not supplanted by the horizontal authority of female laity as women come to effectively run the church in the twenty-first century...

...train station"-or like the offices and suites of corporate workplaces...

...and vitality, while certainly attractive and indispensable, is also empty in the absence of boundary and direction...

...If the lay revolution succeeds merely in reproducing the marketplace ethos and managerially orchestrated diversity of corporate America, it will only prove to have been one of history's more pyrrhic victories...

...Morris notes of his Lincoln, Nebraska, counterexample that its conservatism is not "widely replicable," and that in any case conservatives, too, now at least "say all the right things about participatory structures...

...We have been running the stairs, the closets and the storage areas, diving on dust in the basement accumulations of furniture, until we slip like fish into a tank (if ~tiAcr into that sleep, his sleep where dreams proved cloudy, rainy-day, misted dreams until one clears like tap water let stand...

...an exemplary record of racial liberalism...

...the evasion that hides behind the genuine truth of "the doubt inseparable from faith...

...Nothing objectionable in that: Indeed, one could say that a parish can't do anything else...

...Commonweal 2 5 September 12, 1997...

...Moreover, the "pastoral administrator" (Greeley's quarterback in the age of the priest shortage) runs the parish, if not with an iron hand, then certainly with velvet gloves...

...and, perhaps most significantly, a greater welcoming of women as full and equal partners with men in the work of salvation...

...His teeth drip like knives...

...The largely professional middle-class Holy Trinity, Naughton tells us, trusts "the spiritual integrity and moral judgment of its parishioners...

...Very attractive," Morris comments, but "with a secular feel, like Mount Vernon or the renovated Washington D.C...

...In its wake have come a host of changes that genuinely deserve the name of progress: forceful challenges to superstition, to spurious faith, and to clerical obscurantism and authoritarianism...

...the erosion among Catholics of a sense of history and tradition, both of which are essential for any vision beyond the glittering imperium of consumer culture...

...In Saginaw (whose small farms and heavy industry make it an even better example), the nonhierarchical, therapeutic hegemony of professionals is even more clear...

...For the triumph of the Church Mellow has not been an entirely unfortunate event...

...Yet the animating discourse of the Church Mellow-"the laity," "democracy in the church," "openness," etc.-has become a new species of cant, an ideological mist that obscures the new power relations in American Catholicism, just as surely as their kindred key words cover the lines of power in American society...