A tale of two dioceses: from Lincoln to Saginaw.

Sexual innuendoes have added a nasty edge to the ideological struggles within the American Catholic church. Most noticeably, concerns over pedophilia and clerical sexuality have thrown the question of priestly celibacy into sharp relief. Is it true that in the modern era the celibacy requirement will draw only men "who haven't worked out their own sexual identities," as the University of Notre Dame's outspoken liberal theologian the Reverend Richard McBrien puts it? "You should visit Lincoln," McBrien told me during a recent interview, "then you'll see what's really going on." The very conservative diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, is famous for recruiting disproportionately large numbers of priests.

I was struck that Joseph Fessio, S.J., founder and director of the conservative Ignatius Press, gave me exactly the same instruction. "You should visit Lincoln," he said. "Then you'll see a church that works."

So I visited Lincoln.

Nebraska in winter is painted with a palette of gray and white. The sky is gray, presaging snow. In the fields that stretch off on every side, gray patches of soil peek through the snow, and the winter's corn stubble is a bleached-out gray and white and dun. It is very cold. Lincoln is the state capital, a prosperous university town in the southeastern corner of the state, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. Nebraska occasionally elects liberal politicians, like Bob Kerrey, the present senator and former governor, but like most of the agrarian Midwest, it is a natural home of bedrock conservatism. Geographically, the state is an irregular rectangle about 350 miles long, divided roughly in half in the long direction, east to west, by the Platte River. All of Nebraska south of the Platte is assigned to the diocese of Lincoln, so the diocese is shaped like an eel with its head in the east and an attenuating tail of little farm towns, many with only a few hundred souls, stretching all the way to Wyoming in the west. About 15 percent of the people in southern Nebraska are Catholic, rising to about 25 percent in Lincoln.

The Lincoln chancery office is a modest one-story building in the shadow of a surprisingly modernistic cathedral in one of the city's better residential neighborhoods. On an evening in December 1995, twenty-one of Lincoln's theology-level seminarians had assembled to get their religious teaching assignments for the Christmas vacation period. Altogether Lincoln had thirty-nine men in advanced stages of seminary training, a remarkable number for a small diocese. Too small to operate its own seminary, Lincoln farms its students out, mostly to Dunwoodie in New York, Saint Charles in Philadelphia, and Saint Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the big three of conservative theology. The session at the chancery took about an hour - mostly details about transportation, curricula, and dress code (black suits and ties or Roman collars) interrupted by chaffing about who was likely to oversleep or get lost. I was a fly on the wall, somewhat awkwardly introduced as a visiting writer. After the session almost all of us repaired to the Newman Center at the university for pizza and beer.

Altogether, I spent about four hours with the group. I didn't interview each one, but I was able to watch them interact with each other, I had some lengthy round-table discussions with shifting groups of four or five at a time, and I talked with a few individuals in some depth. They were, frankly, an impressive group of young men. They were not effeminate. They did not seem to be "unhealthy" or immature, or to have rigidly dependent personalities. The ones I talked to did not come from broken homes or problem families. Their theology was very orthodox, as all of Lincoln's theology is, but no one sounded fanatical. As in any group of twentysomethings, some were more gregarious and self-confident than others. Raymond Jansen could pass for an Ivy League swim team captain, but his shoulder span came from hauling bricks on construction sites, not from swimming. The presence and professional directness of Chris Kubat, the oldest at thirty-eight, was striking; but he is a board-certified urologist who jettisoned a thriving practice, an active social life, and a contemplated marriage because "the call became too strong." In my mind's eye, I put the whole group in suits and ties and envisioned them in a training program for Wall Street junior executives. They did fine. If a daughter brought one of them home, a father would be perfectly content. Any bishop would kill to get them.

The ratio of active priests to Catholics in Lincoln is about 1:700, more than half again higher than in the rest of the country. From the diocesan directory, I calculated the median age of active priests to be about forty-three, an astonishing twelve or thirteen years younger than the national median. About a third of the priests are under thirty-five. The diocesan chancellor, Monsignor Timothy Thorburn, is forty-two. After meeting so many older priests in my visits to other dioceses, the succession of recruitment-poster priests in their midthirties was almost disorienting. Lincoln's recruiting secrets offer real insights into the choices faced by the American church.

The Reverend Joseph Nemec (a Czech name, pronounced "Nemetz") is slender, with a boyish face, and at thirty-nine is young to be a pastor even in Lincoln. His church, Saint Teresa's, is in a strongly Catholic, middle-class section of the capital. Like many of Lincoln's priests, Nemec was raised on a farm, one of nine children in a staunchly Catholic family. Elementary school was in a one-room country schoolhouse, but all of the children attended a tuitioned Catholic high school. Nemec is a musician, like his father, and he went to the University of Nebraska as a music major. "I had never thought of being a priest," he said. "I wanted to get married, have a large family, and teach music." But he became involved with the Newman Center at the university and was recruited for the seminary from there.

Nemec insisted that he is orthodox, not conservative. "In Lincoln," he said, "we follow the pope. A whole string of popes have said that artificial birth control is seriously sinful, so that's what we tell people. We don't preach on it every week, because that could get counterproductive, but we do preach it consistently. Missing Mass is sinful, so that's what we tell people. The church teaches that there are mortal sins, and you go to Hell for them, so that's what we teach. It's all in the Catechism. Lincoln isn't inventing anything. We just teach the official doctrines." Saint Teresa's has three Masses a day, and the children in parochial school go every morning. There are confessions six days a week, with a full schedule on Saturdays. The tuition in the school is only $100 a year, and almost all Catholic children are enrolled.

We talked about recruitment, and problems in the seminaries, and I was struck that Nemec shared many of the same views as much more liberal priests I had interviewed across the country. "If you don't know what you're about, if it's simply 'Come one, come all,' then you're naturally going to have problems," Nemec said. But Lincoln has a clear idea of the men it is looking for: "Men who love the church, who are submissive and obedient, who are true servants of the Lord, who want to bring people to Jesus, who have a sense of the sacred." He continued, "The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the greatest prayer on,earth, it is the re-enactment of Calvary. And, yes, we expose and adore the Blessed Sacrament here." (Blessed Sacrament devotions have fallen into desuetude in many parishes.)

The "submissive and obedient" in the list of priestly virtues caught my attention, for Nemec is a very self-confident young man, with not a trace of eyes-cast-down monkishness. I asked about the lay role in the parish, and, in light of his very youthful appearance, about his relationship with his parishioners. "I'm their father," he said. I said, "You're thirty-nine and look even younger and you're their father?" He was not at all abashed. "Yes, I'm their father. That's what a pastor is." And he went on, "We're very participative here, but, as in any good Catholic family, parents love their children and still control them. They need to be told what's right and wrong with the love and care of a father." Nemec's "submissive and obedient" attitude, that is, flowed in a clear, straight line. Children honor and obey their parents. Parents honor and obey their pastor. Pastors honor and obey their bishop. And bishops honor and obey the pope, who speaks for Jesus Christ.

"Obedience" is not a virtue that is much prized in America. Among religious liberals, "orthodox" occasionally sounds like a code word for "neurotic." I met some Catholic conservatives who struck me as unusually rigid people, but the best ones - like Nemec, Joseph Fessio, or Ralph Martin, a Charismatic leader - are anything but lobotomized robots. They are conservative by intellectual conviction, not psychological compulsion. Fessio says, "Christ handed on his teaching authority to Saint Peter, and it descended through Peter to the popes. Vatican II confirmed very clearly that Catholics, and especially priests, owe religious assent to what the pope teaches."

The commitment to strict orthodoxy and to obedience comes bundled with a very exalted view of the priesthood. In Lincoln, priests are fathers, not parish coordinators, team leaders, or therapy directors. There are subtle touches in the liturgy that reinforce the priest's apartness. The solemnly paced consecration, the use of a bell, the priest's genuflection before the host and chalice, all underline the magical quality of the Mass. More than just father, the priest is also shaman and sacral figure. If he is submissive and obedient to his superiors, he expects the same from his flock, not because he is thirty-nine-year-old Joseph Nemec, but because he is the local spokesman of a vast salvific enterprise - of the one true church, the chosen vessel for an eternal deposit of faith bequeathed directly from the hand of Christ. Being a priest in Lincoln, in short, is a good job, and if only a fraction of 1 percent of well-balanced, college-capable, eligible-age-group Catholic males decide that the spiritual, emotional, and personal payoffs are worth the price of celibacy, Lincoln will continue to turn out plenty of trophy priests.

Lincoln is also one of the few dioceses that is successfully recruiting nuns. The diocese has its own two orders of teaching nuns; they are small, with just a couple of dozen women each, but are big enough to make an impact on the parochial school system. I drove out to one motherhouse on a Sunday afternoon and visited with Mother Joan Paul, who is about thirty-five - the order's median age is about thirty-two - and three of the other sisters. Their convent life is the traditional mix of prayer, study, and teaching, and they wear a full habit. If you're going to be a nun, they said, be a nun! Why join an order if you're going to look and act just like everybody else? They'd all been to secular universities before joining the order, they all held master's degrees from the University of Nebraska, and they were bright and funny young women - effectively, the female counterparts of the Lincoln seminarians and priests.

The orthodox character of the Lincoln diocese, and its single-minded commitment to vocational recruitment, are the legacy of Glennon Flavin, a strong-willed bishop who ruled Lincoln for twenty-five years until his retirement in 1992. His replacement, Fabian Bruskewitz, an archconservative with an extensive Roman background, is clearly not tampering with a successful formula. Bruskewitz made national headlines in early 1996 by threatening to excommunicate Catholics who joined a long list of proscribed organizations, like Planned Parenthood, or "Call to Action," a Catholic liberal organization.

But the real secret of Lincoln's recruiting success is Monsignor Leonard Kalin, who doubles as vocations director and director of the University of Nebraska Newman Center, the social and religious center for Catholic students on the Lincoln campus. Kalin is in his midsixties, with a gray crew-cut, one of three priest-brothers from a large Nebraska farm family. His strong presence and personality still showed clearly through a serious case of Parkinson's disease that has left him unsteady on his feet and able to speak only in a whisper. Kalin was assigned to the Newman Center in 1968. Flavin, who was a new bishop, was convinced that the center was a hotbed of liturgical experimentation and heterodoxy, so he ordered Kalin in to create an orthodox operation. Kalin carried out the mission, doubled the student membership, and has reigned ever since as a combination guru, social director, and aggressive recruiter of priests and nuns. Over the years, he has directed 435 University of Nebraska students into the convent or the seminary. Almost all the priests I met in Lincoln, almost all the teaching nuns, and the great majority of the seminarians were Kalinites, as the Reverend Robert Barnhill, the diocesan family life director, put it with a grin.

It is hard to overstate the advantages of the Kalin/Newman Center pipeline. The average Lincoln seminarian has spent two or three years at the University of Nebraska before entering the seminary. The Lincoln campus is at the top of the state system, so they are prima facie academically qualified. Since Kalin does nothing by halves, the center's social agenda is very active, and all the Kalinites have at least some dating experience. When I asked Kalin about homosexuality, he said, "I get to know a candidate pretty well before I recommend him to the seminary, and if I think someone is an active homosexual, I'll take him aside and well agree that the priesthood isn't for him. On the other hand, Bishop Flavin always said that he didn't care what someone's inclinations were, as long as he was sincerely committed to a chaste life." On pedophilia, he said there had been one case where parishioners complained about a priest's suspicious behavior; the man was reassigned and kept under observation, "but he was from New York."

Kalin's system reinforces itself in a virtuous feedback cycle. Kalin himself serves as a kind of personal glue to weld the priests and seminarians from the Newman Center into a cohesive, high-morale, mutually supportive body. The esprit facilitates recruitment, and the relatively large numbers prevent isolation, even in rural areas. "Notice the way we use titles," Kalin told me. "I've known Joe Nemec for twenty years, but I call him 'Father,' not 'Joe,' and he calls me 'Monsignor.' Bishop Flavin always insisted on that. You go around the rest of the country, and you see parishioners calling pastors by their first names. But if the priesthood isn't an elevated position, if you're just a spiritual coordinator and social director, why would you give up marriage, family, and all the rest?"

By any institutional measure, the Lincoln system is a smashing success - Fessio was clearly right. But I doubt that it is widely replicable. In the first place, Lincoln itself is a very small diocese in a very conservative setting. Mostly conservative Protestant pressure had prevented the opening of abortion clinics until just a few months before my visit. The parishioners I met at Saint Teresa's stressed how conservative they were. "This is a middle-class conservative parish," one of them told me. "It's kind of Catholic ghetto, but we like it that way." One of the teaching nuns mentioned that it was harder to maintain Saint Teresa's level of cohesiveness in more affluent neighborhoods. Most of the priests and nuns I talked to came from small-town farm families, and were natural social conservatives. When I asked Barnhill what his career goal was - Barnhill is a diocesan officer, he studied in Rome, and is much traveled - he said, "I want to be a country parish priest in the kind of town I grew up in. That's all, just a country parish priest." The Kalin recruiting pipeline is unique, and his powerful personality is clearly a factor in its success. Whether it can survive his retirement is questionable.

More important, Lincoln has maintained the high status of its priests partly by excluding women from the ministry. Flavin insisted that lectors and acolytes be formally "installed" according to canonical procedures that limit the eligible pool to men. Saint Teresa's was the first parish I'd been to in my travels where the liturgy was an all-male affair - the entry procession, ushers, readers, the acolyte, altar boys, eucharistic ministers. Flavin justified the policy, I was told, on recruiting grounds; many lectors and acolytes go on to the seminary. Bruskewitz has recently authorized women lectors and acolytes in cases of necessity, and, since the Vatican has now officially approved altar girls, some Lincoln parishes have begun using them. When I asked parishioners about the exclusion of women, they seemed a bit embarrassed, but assured me that it "was not a problem" in Lincoln. Mother Joan Paul told me women went along with Lincoln's male-oriented policies because they had been "properly educated." Nemec said, just as the Vatican says, that women and men simply have different roles in the church, and that in any event there is no higher status than motherhood. It would have been interesting to see him explain that to, say, the young women in Richard McBrien's theology seminar at Notre Dame. Even very conservative Catholic women in another diocese run on the Lincoln model, Arlington, Virginia, were infuriated when their daughters were told they couldn't serve on the altar.

The Lincoln system is precisely in line with the model of the church that many conservatives - and possibly the Vatican - appear to insist is the only permissible one. To place the conservative and liberal models of the church in sharper relief, I visited another parish, in another midwestern, fairly conservative city, but in Bishop Kenneth Untener's very liberal diocese of Saginaw.

Saginaw is in central Michigan, roughly at the cusp of the state's gradual metamorphosis from its industrial Rust Bowl southern half into the pristine wilderness to the north. With an economy based partly on small-farm agriculture and partly on heavy industry, it has a tatterdemalion, down-at-the-heels, red-brick look. The Catholic share of the population, at about a third, is higher than the national average, but typical for a Rust-Belt diocese. Saginaw's total Catholic population is about three times that of Lincoln's.

Sister Honora Remes (also Czech, pronounced "Remesh") is the "pastoral administrator" - the term of art for a nonordained person functioning as a parish pastor - of the cathedral parish of Saint Mary's in Saginaw. She is a tall, graceful woman in her late fifties, with short brown hair and an arc-light smile, whose working uniforms are dark, midcalf-length business suits. About two thousand American parishes, or about 10 percent of the total, are without priests, but most are small, and are served by priests from neighboring parishes. About three hundred parishes are run by pastoral administrators. Most of the pastoral administrators are women, and most of the women are nuns. The diocese of Seattle, for instance, has ten pastoral administrators, while Saginaw has eight. All of them are women, and nine of the ten in Seattle, and seven out of the eight in Saginaw, are nuns.

A pastoral administrator does everything a pastor does, except say Mass and administer the sacraments. She hires the staff, manages the finances and budget, provides counseling and advice to parishioners, oversees the liturgies, and supervises the religious, social, and educational programs. A few of the pastoral administrators in Seattle have resident curates on their staffs, but, more frequently, the Mass and sacraments are provided by visiting priests, known as "sacramental ministers." Canon law requires every parish to have a "canonical pastor" who is a priest; in Saginaw, Bishop Untener serves as the canonical pastor for the parishes run by administrators.

In the Masses I attended at Saint Mary's, the sacramental minister was the Reverend Bert Groh, a chancery priest in his forties. Remes preceded Groh in the entry processional, and, during the first part of the Mass, the two stood side by side in front of the altar and took turns leading the prayers. After Remes read the Gospel and preached the homily, she stepped down from the altar until it was time for Communion. She was the lead lay eucharistic minister, then returned to the altar for the final prayers and the exit procession. It all looked smooth and natural. At one Mass, I was sitting near some elderly ladies, and I leaned over and whispered, "I'm just visiting, who is she?" One of them answered, "She's the pastor - well I'm not sure what she's called - but she's in charge of everything, except that Father Groh comes in to say Mass." Another lady looked at me narrowly, as if I might be from the testosterone police and said, "And she's wonderful!" They all nodded their heads defiantly.

They were right. Remes's empathy, warmth, and energy lit up the church. When she came out and circulated among the congregation before the Mass, it was obvious that she knew everybody personally, and they returned her greetings with an affection and regard that were patent. A former college-level English teacher, she is a fine reader and homilist. She read the Gospel, a fairly long text, without looking at the book, and her preaching showed a nice flair for the dramatic.

The Reverend Philip Murnion of the National Pastoral Life Center in New York City speaks of the gradual "feminization" of pastoral ministries. There are about 20,000 paid lay ministers throughout the American church, an average of one per parish, and about 80 percent of them are women. Murnion speculates that the emergence of women as pastoral leaders is related to the changing role of the church in parishioners' lives. Old-line pastors were a combination of political leader, immigrant spokesman, and master builder. But modern Catholics are more likely to use their parish for small-group faith-support activities - marriage encounter, religious education, parenting support groups, social involvement activities - of a kind that in the secular world have long been the province of professional women. When I asked parishioners at Saint Cecilia's in Houston about women priests, Joan Powers, who was that Sunday's lector and is the mother of a priest, said simply, "We already run the church."

As one would expect, Remes operates a very participatory parish. One of her objectives, which she pushes hard from the altar, is to get every parishioner involved in some form of volunteer activity - even the elderly and homebound are asked to commit to a certain number of hours of prayer for parish causes. "Participatory" is not quite the same as democratic. A group discussion with lay volunteers and parish staff is perfectly open and Remes is a good listener, but her personality is so strong that she dominates almost without being aware of it. Other effective pastors I met operate the same way; strong and self-confident personalities exercise natural leadership without insisting on the trappings of office.

I asked Remes about the relationship with the sacramental minister. "Bert is wonderful to work with," she said, "but the arrangement is hard on both of us. It's hard on the pastoral administrator, and it's hard on the sacramental minister." Watching Remes and Groh together, however, my impression was that the priest is in the more anomalous position. Remes is so obviously the parish leader, and Saint Mary's is so obviously her territory, that Groh is inevitably cast as a special guest star, a visiting shaman who does his routine and is gone. The Reverend Jim Picton, who is responsible for pastoral planning in Seattle, said that only mature, well-established priests adapt easily to the sacramental minister role. The other side of the coin is that pastoral administrators must grow accustomed to tiny slights (like being left off the list for pastoral meetings), although both Saginaw and Seattle work hard to prevent such snubs. Diocesan priests in good standing are also guaranteed a job and a salary; when Remes's six-year term is up, she has to find another job on her own, possibly even in another diocese.

The fact that women grace Saginaw's altars, however, is merely a surface suggestion of the profound differences between a Saginaw and a Lincoln. The soul of the church, says Vatican II, is its liturgies. The form and text of a Saginaw liturgy, of course, are exactly the same as in Lincoln; but in the subtle whispers of body language, in the intonations and attitudes that are not captured in manuals, the liturgies are quite different. The interior of Remes's cathedral, for one thing, has been redecorated in a way that quite consciously reduces its awesomeness. A photograph of the old church shows a spangled ceiling of gilt and empyrean blue, while the rest is an Italianate riot of statuary and strong colors. The new interior is spare and uncluttered, with a carpeted floor. The top half of the church is a quiet cream, while the carpet and the accent color on the walls are a Williamsburg blue. Instead of pews, there are individual cushioned chairs and kneelers, arranged in a semicircle around the altar, which has been moved out toward the center of the church, with a minimal elevation. It is very attractive, but has a secular feel, like Mt. Vernon, or the renovated Washington, D.C., train station.

The differences were most marked in the liturgies surrounding the Eucharist. In Lincoln, the liturgical strategy is designed to distance the priest from the congregation, and stresses the sacral, rather than the communal, element of the consecration. Lincoln places great emphasis on the traditional Catholic ceremony of the exposition and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Since the consecrated host is the body of Jesus Christ, the ceremony expressly calls for praying to and worshiping the consecrated host.

In Saginaw, by contrast, Remes and Groh lead the Mass in a friendly, almost conversational, tone, and the music is modern and attractive, with the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Stephen Sondheim sound that characterizes much of the newer Catholic church music. At the consecration, Groh elevates the bread and wine only about eye-high and pronounces the "This is my body...This is my blood" formula in the same conversational tone as the rest of the Mass. There is no bell, and no genuflection. Instead of using the traditional round, white, paper-tasting host, Saint Mary's uses a kind of Syrian flatbread, an unusual touch, but canonically correct; indeed, it is much like the bread Jesus probably used at the Last Supper. The eucharistic ministers break stacks of the consecrated bread into little pieces for the Communion, which are carried on plates rather than in ciboria, the more usual chalicelike containers for the Communion hosts.

The whole effect, which is quite intentional, is to reduce the distance between priest and people, to downplay the magical, sacral elements of the Mass, to create the feeling of a community celebration by a priesthood of the "People of God." The use of workaday bread emphasizes the communal "meal" aspect of the Eucharist, but also seems to exclude Blessed Sacrament services. The traditional round, white host is so unlike normal bread that Catholics have associated it only with the Eucharist. Although Saginaw teaches the same Real Presence doctrine that Lincoln does, it would still seem a little silly to worship a chunk of Syrian flatbread.

The Saginaw liturgy is quite in keeping with Vatican II's liturgical instructions on the Eucharist:

[The Eucharist] is a...sign of unity, a bond of divine love, a special Easter meal....And so the church devotes careful efforts to prevent Christian believers from attending this mystery of faith as though they were outsiders or silent onlookers: rather...they should learn to offer themselves as they offer the immaculate victim - not just through the hands of the priest, but also they themselves making the offer together with him.

The liturgy at Saint Mary's, however, had a bit of the same feel as a Congregationalist communion service I attended a few weeks later. The minister repeated virtually the same Gospel words, and used the same chunks of bread, but, when the congregation came forward for their symbolic communal meal, it was clearly a meal of bread and wine, not of the body and blood of Christ. One of the primary worries of conservative theologians like Joseph Fessio is that thirty years of post-Vatican II progressive "communal meal" liturgies have undermined the Catholic belief in the Real Presence. Survey data suggest that they may be right. The majority of Catholic weekly church-attenders, the most faithful Catholics of all, believe that the consecrated host is only a symbolic representation of Christ, rather than Christ himself. (Avery Dulles, however, points out that the survey questions raise such a blur of complicated theological issues that the answers may be meaningless. In most Catholic parishes, including Saint Mary's, parishioners receive Communion quite reverentially.)

In the same vein, just as Lincoln underscores the hierarchical structure of the church by emphasizing titles, Saginaw demystifies by virtually eliminating them. Remes was on a first-name basis with most of her parishioners, and the prayer at Mass for the bishop is for "Bishop Ken." An important consequence of a leveling, nonauthoritarian approach to religion, however, is that priests and pastors have to earn their leadership. They can't fall back, as a Joseph Nemec can, on the claim that they have been appointed by Christ as their parishioners' father, like it or not (although Nemec, I think, would be effective in almost any setting). Remes can carry this off, as can many other effective Catholic pastors, but it is a Protestant approach to pastorship. Catholics don't yet elect their pastors as Protestants do, but the spread of Saginaw-style priest-laity relations, coupled with the recent Catholic trend toward parish-shopping, represents an important shift of power away from the institutional church.

When I mentioned to a nun in the Saginaw chancery office that Lincoln was the next stop on my itinerary, she said, "You're going to Lincoln!?" - and her body language suggested second thoughts about even talking to me. But when I was in Lincoln, I found myself lecturing several of the seminarians about their exaggerated impressions of Saginaw - they seem to have expected altar-top bacchanals. The Lincoln seminarians, however, had a right to feel bruised by liberals' cruel assumptions that they are "unhealthy," a code word for homosexual or sexually ambiguous. The styles of the dioceses are, in fact, quite different, but the differences tend to be caricatured - a caricature admittedly reinforced by Bishop Bruskewitz's recent threats against Catholics joining Call to Action and other "reform" groups.

How important are the differences? One test would be whether the two dioceses' religious approaches, and the much richer staffing levels in Lincoln, make a visible difference in lay practice. Surprisingly enough, it seems not. When Fessio directed me to Lincoln, he predicted I would see a church that "worked." With respect to the internal workings of the church, he was clearly right. The Lincoln diocese has high morale, a coherent vision of what it's about, and a remarkable corps of young priests and nuns. But Fessio also implied that Mass attendance would be much higher in Lincoln than elsewhere, and that does not appear to be the case.

The only weekly Mass attendance figures collected on a diocesan basis are the Notre Dame studies by Mark Chaves and his colleagues. (These data showed that actual weekly Mass attendance may be much lower than appears from the Gallup polls.) Chaves studied forty-eight dioceses; Lincoln, unfortunately, is not among them, but Saginaw is. Despite all its "liberalism," and Bishop Untener's distaste for threatening hellfire to enforce Mass attendance, Saginaw ranks in the top third in weekly Mass attendance, with a 31.5 percent weekly average, compared to a median of 26.7 percent. Although there are no comparable statistics for Lincoln, the envelope and collection count from Saint Teresa's allows a rough estimate. Saint Teresa's is a cohesive and family-oriented parish even by Lincoln standards, and one would expect high Mass attendance; but the collection suggests a weekly attendance of about a third, or about the same as in Saginaw.

Where Chaves's data do allow the pairing of "liberal" and "conservative" dioceses, there is no consistent relationship between theological outlook and lay church attachment. Milwaukee, for example, is arguably the most liberal urban diocese in the country, and the controversial tenure of Archbishop Rembert Weakland has long prompted strenuous complaints from conservative Catholics hoping for Vatican intervention. But Milwaukee ranks eighth out of forty-eight dioceses in Mass attendance, and along with Cincinnati, is the top-ranking big-city diocese in the sample. On the other hand, four theologically conservative dioceses - Newark, Denver, New York, and Portland, Oregon - all rank in the bottom third; but so does San Francisco, and the very liberal Seattle is close to the bottom of the list. The only semi-consistent result from Chaves's data is that rural dioceses have higher rates of Mass attendance, probably because rural parishes are smaller than average and generate a greater sense of family feeling.

The Reverend Ron Lewinski, a Chicago priest who has been studying effective parishes around the country, suggests that the lack of correlations simply demonstrates the limited influence a bishop has over the day-to-day workings of his parishes. But that would not seem to apply to Saginaw and Lincoln. Bishop Flavin in Lincoln was, and Bishop Untener in Saginaw still is, a model of the highly focused, unusually hands-on leader; over an extended period of time they both forged a pastorate very much in their own images. But it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference. Lincoln's Barnhill concedes that, although virtually all the diocesan priests have preached the sinfulness of contraception for years, Lincoln's Catholics use birth control at almost the same rate as everybody else. And despite the fact that Saginaw's Catholics are not being forced to go to the sacraments, their Mass attendance turns out to be higher than average.

But Saginaw has problems of its own. The participatory, nonauthoritarian model of the priesthood is a poor recruiting slogan. A much bigger diocese than Lincoln, Saginaw has many fewer priests and only five men in the pipeline. But the favored liberal recruitment solution, dropping the celibacy rule, involves much more than an incidental change in discipline. The celibate priesthood is deeply tied to a "high-tension" version of Catholicism, to something like the Lincoln model - the priest as man apart and above, the consecrated, sacred minister, the shamanistic mystic and worker of daily miracles, not the married priest who fights with his wife and has a credit-card balance at the local department store.

The risk of the "liberal" vision of the church is that Catholicism will go the way of mainstream Protestantism. Sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have suggested that only "high-tension" religions prosper in America. Once a religion assimilates to the culture, it almost invariably diminishes into a social center or kind of low-cost group therapy. There are now fewer Episcopalians in America than there are Catholics in Los Angeles.

Perhaps the Catholic church, with its longer history and hardier theological tradition, is different - or so I have heard liberals claim. The Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, a former Protestant minister, speaks of "ecclesial fundamentalists" who think that nothing can go wrong with the church. "I came from Lutheranism," he says, "and I lived through the collapse of mainstream Protestantism. It could happen here too."

But the conservative taste for papal absolutism - the penchant for parsing every nuance of the flood of new encyclicals, and the cult of personality that seems to be forming around John Paul II - fits uncomfortably with the American tradition. Conservatives say all the right things about participatory structures, just as the pope has said all the right things about the equality and dignity of women, but the content seems to fall short of the rhetoric. The traditionalists also underestimate the importance of America in world Catholicism. None of the so-called Catholic countries of Europe and Latin America can match the activism, wealth, and dynamism of the American church, with all its recent problems. The risk of the conservative vision is that the church will dwindle to a narrow sect of true believers, too small to sustain the world symbolism of the church - the papal tours, the global missionary reach, the doctrinal councils and synods, the traditional infrastructure.

The challenge, in short, is the same one that American bishops faced in the nineteenth century - how to create a church that is both American and Catholic, drawing from the best in both traditions. The initial solution, which worked splendidly through the first half of the twentieth century, was the creation of a separate Catholic subculture with a ministate religion of its own. But when that subculture broke down, the church has been left groping for a new accommodation. The process has been painful, public, and not very pretty; and it is still far from assured of success.

Charles R. Morris is the author of many books, including Time of Passion: America 1960-80. This essay is adapted from American Catholic, published this month. 1997 by Charles R. Morris. Reprinted by permission of Times Books.