AMONG CATHOLICS, IT'S CRISIS ALL OVERR

...Both specialize in narration, provide breezy summaries of the relevant historical and theological background, and offer anal-ysis that is solid and insightful if not al-ways penetrating...

...and widespread defiance of its sexual ethics among the 45 million Catholics who attend Mass at least once a month...

...the divorced Catholics who want to remar-ry in the church but find the annulment process insulting, nonsensical, or puni-tive...

...Father Maier, caught in the throes of a personal crisis and eagerly anticipating the approaching end of his pastorate at Holy Trinity, was deeply troubled by the thought of Hickey bring-ing in an authoritarian successor, per-haps not a Jesuit, who would stifle the spirit of the parish...

...mack in the messy, real, and contested world of bishops and Cardinal Joseph Ratz-inger, Naughton and Sha-piro build their narratives around the lives of parishioners chosen, it seems, from central casting, '90s version: the tor-tured priest who finally accepts his sex-ual identity, takes a male lover, and leaves the priesthood and parish far be-hind...

...In telling the story of Catholics as they struggle individually and communally to rec-oncile their own moral perceptions with the teachings of their church, Naugh-ton and Shapiro-and, in a different way, Wilkes-take note of the attrition, the absences after a season of uncoop-eration, the falling away of commit-ment as the search for common ground becomes merely a grind...

...Boasting a full-time director of liturgy, a full-time director of music, several part-time choir directors, and a full-time liturgical aide, the parish has been, for many, a model of lay partici-pation and leadership...

...Accommodationists," on the other hand, advocated a patient and discreet engagement with church authorities on a narrower range of issues, including birth control, divorce and re-marriage, priestly celibacy and women's ordination...

...For officials of the Archdiocese of Washington, however, Holy Trinity was a headache...

...Conservatives, per-haps envious of and frustrated by its suc-cess, branded the Holy Trinity approach "R...

...The main character of Cath-olics in Crisis is Father Jim Maier, the pastor whose life and ministry Naughton portrays as a constant struggle to rec-oncile opposing forces-within himself and within his parish...

...Although these two sets of Catholic ministers will likely be working side by side in the coming years, the church has done little to in-troduce them to one another during their years of formal training, and even less to break open and reshape clerical culture in such a way as to make room for and welcome such collaboration with lay women as the will of God and a grace to the church...

...The "confrontationalists," as Naughton describes them, wanted to challenge Roman authority and patri-archy, experiment with new liturgical forms, and create smaller new commu-nities to replace or supplement tradi-tional parishes...

...Yet Maier could not bring himself to end the protest by pas-toral fiat, for he rightly recognized "The Standing" to be an expression of prin-cipled dissent...

...Motivated by compassion for those gen-tle souls who would return or turn to the church were it not so hard-hearted, Wilkes sets himself up as a kind of friendly one-man magisterium, es-pousing his own personal solutions to complex, controverted questions, ig-noring inconvenient historical or doc-trinal claims against his assertions, and passing off tendentious readings of Vatican II as if they were matters of un-shakable consensus...

...Among Catholics, it's crisis all over R. Scott Appleby By now the litany should be familiar to even the casual reader of this magazine...

...Shaped by their relatively narrow constituencies, these organizations and the movements they represent command attention because they sense and seize the opportunity for radical change af-forded by a historical period in which ev-erything Catholic seems to be up for grabs...

...For evidence of debilitating polarization they point to the Catholic culture wars waged by organizations like Call to Action, CORPUS, and the Women's Ordination Conference on the left, and Opus Dei, the Catholic League, and Catholics United for the Faith on the right...

...Voila!-no controversy...

...Holy Trinity is the high-profile home of members of the Women's Ordination Conference, CORPUS, and Call to Action, among other such progressive organi-zations...

...Despite their discomfort with particular teachings, accommoda-tionists believe that the church needs gradual reform rather than radical re-structuring...

...The pastoral reality will remain, as Naughton puts it, "a circumscribed combat in which each camp schemes to subdue the other while not unduly damaging the church in the process...

...Since Vatican II the size of the parish has grown fivefold, to 4,400 households...

...a growing number of priest-less parishes...

...Nice believes she was feeding them compas-sion, sensitivity, respect for all human beings, love of Jesus and the Scriptures, and a thirst for justice...

...official, rec-ognized "the voice of the oppressor" in John Paul II's order to cease discussion of women's ordination...

...Remember, Wilkes consoles, if you intend to be better, well, you al-ready are better...

...The books under consideration here take up this important question...

...a generation of profes-sionally educated lay ministers seeking adequate financial and professional sup-port...

...Don't bother: the "Good Enough Catholic" (a conceit taken from Bruno Bettleheim's The Good Enough Parent) need not attempt to be-come a spiritual paragon or saint...

...Thus he simply substitutes his own, presumably wiser, sensibilities, convictions, and opinions for theirs...

...And in 1968, Holy Trinity had claimed as its own the American Catholic legacy of principled dissent when its former pastor, Tom Gavigan, had publicly opposed Humanae vitae and been deprived of his right to hear confessions...

...For Judy Nice, director of adult sacra-ments at Saint Paul's, the last straw was a scathing note from a recalcitrant RCIA catechist, complaining that she was soft-pedaling the objective moral teaching of the church and feeding her spiritual lambs "a Women's Spirit/Women's Church/New Age/Feminist diet...

...the young parents ambivalent about the church's moral stance but intent on raising their children on "the tradition-al stories...

...parishioners come from as far away as forty-five miles...

...In 1992 there were 700 students enrolled in the Sunday morn-ing CCD program, and burgeoning programs in adult education, Jesuit spirit-uality, and social outreach...

...What God Allows suggests that noth-ing of the kind happened...

...So say the pollsters, pundits, and pro-fessors (with the singular exception of Andrew Greeley) who ponder national survey data and peruse one another's columns...

...In the absence of a vigorous and honest process of re-thinking the relationship between dif-ferent types of pastoral leaders, there can be little hope of providing guidance for ordinary Catholics in crisis...

...They do little more than confirm much of the conventional wisdom about the major events and trends of postconciliar American Catholi-cism-pointing, for example, to the un-mistakably crucial role that the ill-fated reception of Humanae vitae played in creating a climate of popular dissent from "unreasonable" papal and epis-copal teaching...

...lay people decorate the sanctuary, read from the Scriptures, give Communion, and occasionally preach...

...Shapiro periodically interrupts his engaging account of the lived faith at Saint Paul's with pointed excerpts from Pope John Paul II's 1993 encyclical, Veri-tatis splendor, The Catechism of the Cath-olic Church, or some other recent official statement of the church's moral teach-ing...

...To many observers, Holy Trinity is the model of what a contemporary parish should be: theologically sophisticated, spiritually enriching, and liturgically vi-brant...

...dissent from its theologians and in-fighting among its pastoral leaders...

...Instead, lay Catholics extended their newfound in-dependence of judgment beyond the realm of private sexual behavior to once taken-for-granted indices of Catholic loyalty like regular Mass attendance and support for the parochial school...

...Naughton situates the protest in the con-text of "a growing network of organ-izations [that] have sprung up to contest teachings that many Catholics believe are theologically suspect, psychologically harmful, and detrimental to the vitality of the church...

...Whatever their opinion about the issues dividing the church, the vast majority of American Catholics tend to think of themselves as members of a parish rather than of a movement...

...Apparently Wilkes has decided that the church needs a well-informed and pastorally sensitive layman like himself to step in and settle matters, the bish-ops having failed to develop popular and compelling interpretations of Scripture, moral theology, and canon law...

...Jim Naughton, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and a former report-er for the New York Times and the Wash-ington Post, provides a case study of Holy Trinity Parish in Washington, D.C.- white, Jesuit-run, upper-middle class, famously progressive...

...Layman Ray McGovern, a former C.I.A...

...The fact that I agree with much of what he says does not make his method palatable...

...And this, the archdiocese believes, is sometimes done at the expense of Catholic doctrine...

...Naughton, a member of Holy Trinity Parish during the unfolding of the events he recounts, opens his story in the spring of 1992 with a description of "The Stand-ing," a protest against the church's re-fusal to ordain women...

...Benumbed and puzzled, one may nonetheless garner at least two impressions about the white American Catho-lic parish of the 1990s...

...Not Good Enough...

...They did so by invoking the priority of conscience, a central but am-biguous tenet of the faith that can be in-terpreted, in the spirit of Wilkes's Good Enough Catholic, to justify a wide range of moral practices...

...a mounting financial bur-den as clergy and women religious age and retire...

...Thus the "Crisis of Faith and Con-science" in Shapiro's subtitle refers to the increasing difficulty experienced by some laity, priests, and religious in es-pousing, much less enforcing, the doc-trinal and moral positions handed down by Pope John Paul II...

...In that imagined post-crisis Catholic world, for example, Catholics will understand sex outside of marriage to be "an act of human intimacy-a value in itself," but one requiring the use of some form of birth control, on both practical and moral terms...

...when a handful of sympathetic fellow parishioners joined McGovern in his practice of standing throughout the 9:15 Sunday Mass, "The Standing" became a cause celebre and eventually made the national news...

...indifference toward or ignorance of its teachings among young baptized Cath-olics...

...Despite the predictable charges that they foment "radical feminism" and watered-down catechesis, the Judy Nices of the Catholic world seem its best hope for preserving continuity, at the parish level, with the historic Chris-tian practices of hospitality, personal and communal prayer, theological ed-ucation, and spiritual formation...

...Both journalists include the word "cri-sis" in their titles, report on the period from 1992 to 1994 (with Shapiro focus-ing on the liturgical year of 1993), and include an epilogue on developments at the parish in question during 1995...

...For at the core of its suc-cess lies a willingness to trust the spir-itual integrity and moral judgment of its parishioners," Naughton writes...

...the dedicated and talented RCIA or adult education director who grows frustrated with foot-dragging pastors, lay inquis-itors, or her own personal doubts...

...Dropped into the text like lead weights, these excerpts are a heavy-handed but effective device for con-trasting the ambiguous, complex, plural, and shifting mores and experiences of the people with the unambiguous, uni-vocal, tightly reasoned, stylistically aloof, and absolutist pronouncements of the Vatican...

...the lay champion of papal au-thority who appoints himself guardian of orthodoxy and alienates his less zeal-ous colleagues (that is, all of them...

...Thereafter, the Jesuits of Holy Trinity, like many pastors across the nation, ef-fected what Naughton calls "the great accommodation" by continuing to min-ister to the faithful who disobeyed the church on birth control and other sexu-al matters...

...But the format of his "guide for the perplexed"-part progressive catechism, part interpretive history, part New Age-ish psychospiritual therapy-speaks volumes about the parlous state of Cath-olic truth-tellers and truth-seekers alike...

...Maier was beset not by critics from Opus Dei or CUF, but by proponents of two countervailing tendencies within progressive American Catholicism...

...But how does the crisis motif play in the parish...

...How do the so-called Catholic culture wars influence the perceptions and experi-ences of the local faith community...

...Nonetheless, it has earned a reputation as a place where alienated Catholics take their first steps back into the church, and as a parish of last resort for those who find Catholic teaching on sex roles and sex-ual ethics oppressive...

...Volunteer teams work with the worship committee to plan every Mass...

...No human law, no public or private sin-nothing can pre-vent you from receiving the Eucharist if you earnestly desire this communion with God," he assures those who might wonder whether they need to examine their conscience or believe anything par-ticular about the Real Presence before receiving the sacrament...

...The maturing discipline of pastoral theology also came in handy for those who sought to reconcile hard teaching and soft practice, for it allowed a certain leeway-in the form of the pastor's pru-dential judgment-in the application of doctrinal and ethical norms to concrete situations...

...The affluent community's record of commitment to the preferential option for the poor is perhaps more ambig-uous, given a highly publicized con-troversy over a former pastor's refusal to support a proposed center for the homeless, and lukewarm support for a sister church in El Salvador...

...By the early 1990s there were more lay people in graduate theology programs than there were young men studying for the priesthood, and most of those lay stu-dents were women...

...That is a matter of regret shading into outrage, for a second lesson of these pulse-taking volumes is that there is no substitute for a vital institutional church at the local level, a communal presence of Christ that is identifiably Catholic in form and content...

...But these studies enrich the literature by shifting the focus from the university, chancery, and seminary to the primary communal site for the People of God, the local parish...

...Rather than suggest connections or points of possible rapprochement be-tween these two worlds, however, Sha-piro is content, in a kind of postmoderny way, to let the disjunction have its be-numbing or puzzling effect...

...The Standing" threatened to disrupt the delicate balance between these fac-tions by forcing the hand of Cardinal James Hickey...

...Paul Wilkes, the author of several previous portraits of American religious life, does not use the word "crisis" in his title...

...For the working-class parishioners of Saint Paul's outside Buffalo, New York, the gulf between official Catholic teaching and the life of the Catholic parish has only widened in the years since Humanae vitae...

...C. Lite...

...Originally, the rationale for priestly connivance-the practice of looking the other way when one knew that the couple was living together with-out benefit of marriage, or using artifi-cial birth control-held that people were more likely to change their opinions and behaviors if they were not driven away but remained as members of a sup-portive faith community...

...The American Catholic church of the 1990s is a community in crisis...

...His guide to the perplexed and put-upon, peppered with quotes from the forty lay Catholics he interviewed (ap-parently meant to represent a contem-porary sensusfidelium), seems predicated upon the assumption that, if one simply ignores the other side of the argument, those disagreeable folks will go away, and "good enough" liberals will proceed to realize the promise of Vatican II...

...Ivor Shapiro, a journalist who lives in Toronto, profiles Saint Paul's Church in Kenmore, New York-white, diocesan-run, working class, a "typical" post-Vatican II parish...

...The U. S. Catholic church faces: a serious personnel shortage and low morale among the waning number of ac-tive priests...

...If these books are any indication, it has nary a clue what to do with gifted lay women, who enjoy neither the status nor the protection of the ordained priesthood, but who are called upon increasingly to play the role of mediator between competing factions within the parish and to organize and lead whatever spiritual enrichment or social outreach programs the parish offers...

...but after finding her words repeatedly interpreted along ideological lines by the lay guardians of orthodoxy, and finding insufficient support from her already overburdened pastor, she resigned the job she loved...

...nor, apparently, need she follow the coun-sels of perfection, or even worry much about the scruples of a rightly formed conscience...

...They would shove the American church in the direction of complete fidel-ity to the magisterium or, conversely, to-ward ever greater degrees of separation from the Vatican...