A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Every once in a while, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) lands on the front pages of the nation's newspapers. It happened again this past fall when the bishops decided to abandon their long awaited pastoral letter on the role of women in the church and society. Reporters descended on the bishops' annual meeting and tried to make sense of the NCCB's procedures and of the reasons for the letter's demise. As often happens in such cases, accounts of the bishops' actions raised as many questions as they answered.

What exactly is the National Conference of Catholic Bishops? Does it speak "authoritatively" for the American Catholic church? What is the relationship between the conference and the Vatican? Who are the major powers in the American hierarchy? Do the bishops direct their own conference or are they manipulated by backroom staffers? With the publication of Thomas J. Reese's A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, questions such as these should be a thing of the past. The next time a reporter wants to understand what the NCCB is and how it operates, all that reporter has to do is read Reese's exhaustive examination.

It is all here in vivid, human detail. The process through which bishops are selected; the origins and development of the national conference; the backgrounds and styles of the conference's various leaders; the structure and governing principles of the conference itself; the role and influence of the bishops' national staff; the bishops' participation in national secular politics; the complex relationship between the NCCB and the pope; and, last but certainly not least, the conference's finances. Just as a skilled biographer brings a human subject to life, Reese has breathed life into the bishops' conference through his remarkable attention to detail and his eye for the role that personality and human interaction play in the life of the church.

A couple of sections of the book are particularly illuminating. In one chapter, Reese discusses the complex and often misunderstood relationship between individual bishops and the national conference. He captures the flavor of that relationship by emphasizing the preeminence of the local bishop in an individual diocese while at the same time reproducing 4 list of fifty-three canons, or church laws, that either cite the role of, or grant authority to, national episcopal conferences. Reese also devotes an appropriate amount of attention to the role the Vatican plays in shaping the style and direction of the American hierarchy. "The bishops are very reluctant to appear in conflict with Rome," he points out in an understatement. The American bishops simply cannot be understood without reference to their fundamental loyalty to "the bishop of Rome."

Sometimes Reese emphasizes factual detail at the expense of analysis and argument. He devotes about the same amount of attention, for example, to the fact that leadership positions within the American hierarchy tend to be held by bishops from the Midwest as he does to the crucial international debate over the worth and ecclesiastical significance of national episcopal conferences. And for my tastes, at least, some of the conflicts and divisions within the conference, divisions out of which many of the bishops' most controversial actions have been derived, could have been treated more critically. Reese discusses these conflicts, but he does not always lay out their consequences. Reese's interests are fundamentally organizational, and I suspect he is content to leave some of these matters of theological and political dispute to others.

These reservations, however, do not detract from the book's tremendous value for anyone interested in the American Catholic church. There is no other book on the American hierarchy like A Flock of shepherds. In the style of his earlier work on American archbishops, this is a definitive account of what the bishops' conference is and how it operates.