A healthy community needs to communicate.

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN CRITICISM of the news media for its lack of interest in religion. Several surveys of the movers and shakers in the media have shown that, to a large extent, the latter do not feel that religion is really important in American life.

In response to these revelations of their nakedness, there have been attempts to make amends by finding a sensationalist or, at least, controversial news peg on which to hang their religious stories. Witness the shameful exploitation by CNN and their copycat siblings of the totally unfounded charges against Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.

But those of us who work to spread the Good News should always keep in mind that worldly news is not always good news. We will sometimes be told things that we may not want to hear but are, nevertheless, true to a greater or lesser degree. A recent CBS opinion poll is a case in point.

This poll showed that substantial majorities of the U.S. Catholics questioned did not accept or were opposed to (I do not know how the questions were worded) the prevailing church rules on a number of important matters.

More than 90 percent of those polled, for example, "took their leave" from Catholic teaching in the matters of marriage, divorce, and remarriage. And more than 70 percent were not accepting of the teaching that artificial birth control is always immoral. It should not be surprising either that sizeable majorities also disagreed with the prohibition against ordaining women and married men to the priesthood.

In the first place, the accuracy of opinion polls can always be questioned, and the pollsters themselves indicate that there is a "margin of error." But it is difficult to gainsay majorities in the 90th percentile, 70th percentile, and even 60th percentile that were produced by a reputable polling organization as it was in this instance.

But, demurrers will answer, the church is not a democracy, and that is true. It would certainly be fatuous to argue that church teachings should be arrived at by some sort of plebiscite. The thought of voting to choose our three favorite Commandments or our favorite bishop is ludicrous in the extreme. And no one can seriously suggest that.

But if the church is not a democracy, what is it? Not, it is to be hoped, a monarchy or an oligarchy. An aristocracy? Perhaps, if there were a guarantee that the aristocratic elite would always be comprised of the best and the brightest. But the experience of centuries proves that we cannot expect that with any consistency.

What about a community? Isn't that an ideal worth striving for? We hope for community in our parish life, and while not all parishes achieve that, it is surely a universal goal. Each parish tries to be a worshiping community, and many parishes have responded to Vatican II's call that there be a parish council in every parish.

Obviously the church at large has not always been a community, although Pope John XXIII's opening the windows whenhe convoked the Second Vatican Council pointed eloquently in that direction. Theologians and bishops, sometimes whole conferences of bishops, took the pope's invitation to dialogue with high seriousness, and the council's sessions evoked not only an openness but also an exhilaration (now barely remembered) throughout the church.

When Pope Paul VI took the courageous and utterly unprecedented step of constituting a commission of bishops, priests, and married women and men to advise him on the matter of birth-control morality, the stuff of community was certainly there. But when this papal commission recommended that the traditional birth-control teaching be modified (not overthrown), this great and good man, in his belief (mistaken, many think) that modifying the birth-control teaching would careen the church down a slippery slope to approval of abortion and euthanasia, declined to accept the advice of his commission.

Predictably the fallout from Pope Paul's agonized decision could be described as extraordinary. But whether or not the conflicted judgments it produced led where eachof us hoped, discussion of them was vigorous and healthy. It spoke of a church not sterile, and ossified but one that was something of a community; a community where free and full discussion was welcomed in the conviction that the Holy Spirit blows where it will and that any insight might be informed by that blessed Spirit.