Bishop in the doghouse.

BISHOP IN THE DOGHOUSE

THE 1986 MEETING of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, at Washington's Capital Hilton Hotel, was scheduled to debate the bishops' controversial pastoral letter on the economy. But the pastoral was unexpectedly upstaged by what everyone was calling "the Hunthausen affair.' That affair brought the American bishops as close to an open break with Rome as they have ever come. Not very close, as it turned out, but close enough.

Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle has made national headlines before, but for different reasons. He is an inveterate pacifist and anti-nuclear protestor who has called a locally based nuclear-armed submarine the "Auschwitz of Puget Sound.' He withholds half his income tax in protest against this country's military stance. He condemns the American "lifestyle' of "outrageous wealth and power,' saying it invites nuclear war. To some he is a prophet, to others a kook.

But Catholics, in Seattle and Rome especially, know him best for other things. Under his administration, the Archdiocese of Seattle has become a liberal playground in matters of Catholic discipline. Annulments are easy, even by today's lax standards. Priests give "general absolution' to whole congregations, without individual "auricular' confession. Children receive First Communion without making a confession first. A Catholic hospital performs contraceptive sterilizations. Renegade priests and their wives hold jobs with the Archdiocese itself.

One of Hunthausen's most controversial acts was to permit a militant homosexual group, Dignity, to hold its own Mass in his cathedral. "They're Catholics too,' he explained. "They need a place to pray.' But according to Catholic teaching, the event can be fairly described as sacrilegious.

Local Catholics appealed to Rome, which appointed Archbishop James Hickey of Washington, D.C., to look into Hunthausen's administration. Hickey's findings moved the Vatican this year to appoint an auxiliary bishop, Donald Wuerl, to take over episcopal authority in the areas in question. The appointment was not announced publicly, and Hunthausen was not otherwise disciplined or censured.

Nevertheless, Hunthausen was deeply wounded by this unusual limitation on his authority. In September, two months before the NCCB meeting, he made it public and complained bitterly. The Vatican countered his version of the events by publishing its own chronology.

Hunthausen's announcement divided American Catholics from the top down. Some saw the Vatican action as long overdue. But theological and political liberals (pretty much the same people) denounced it. Milwaukee's Archbishop Rembert Weakland, one of the leading liberals among the American bishops, did what is Just Not Done: He publicly criticized the Vatican, not only for stripping Hunthausen of authority but fot its recent dismissal of Father Charles Curran, the liberal moral theologian at Catholic University.

The fat was in the fire. Archbishop Philip Hannan of New Orleans accused Weakland of "wildly exaggerating' in comparing the Vatican's action to "the Inquisition and the periodic witch hunts for heretics.' Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston also defended Rome. "Indeed,' he said, "not to have acted would have been irresponsible.'

And there it stood as the bishops convened in Washington on November 10. An executive session was scheduled for the second day to discuss the Hunthausen affair.

The NCCB meeting opened with a speech by outgoing president Bishop James Malone of Youngstown. He appealed for unity with Rome and with the Pope as "successor of Peter.' The papal representative, Archbishop Pio Laghi, read an unprecedented personal letter from John Paul II, pleading the Church's "unity and universality' under the "successor of Peter.' The pointed reiteration underscored how serious things had gotten.

On Tuesday morning, the second day, the hundred or so journalists followed the election of new officers with special interest, as clues to what might happen at the closed session later in the day. The bishops routinely elected the outgoing vice president, Archbishop John May of St. Louis, as their new president. But the vice presidential vote was more interesting. The top three candidates were Law, leading the pro-Vatican forces; Weakland, leading the liberals; and Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, a "moderate' but Weakland-leaning prelate.

The voting coalesced on the second ballot. Out of 279 votes, Law got 110; Pilarczyk, 75; and Weakland, 74. On the runoff, nearly all Weakland's votes went to Pilarczyk, who won easily. The preponderant sentiment appeared to be anti-Law. Before the meeting ended, he lost another minor election in a lopsided vote. If the bishops were opting for formal unity with Rome, most of them seemed angry with the man who was its most forthright advocate.

The closed session took the entire afternoon and still was not concluded. It was adjourned to Wednesday morning, and the press was disappointed when the post-session press conference had to be canceled. The big story was going untold.

That night, at a reception for the press, I asked one bishop if the session might be described as "stormy.' Cautiously, he replied, "I would say "pained.'' At the same reception, Congressman Bob Dornan, a conservative Republican from California, told a bishop how distressed pro-life Catholic congressmen had been by the doctrine of the "seamless garment'--the teaching of Chicago's Cardinal Bernardin that a "consistent pro-life ethic' requires support for liberal social programs along with opposition to abortion. That had undercut the loyal Catholic pro-lifers by allowing the Kennedy types to say, in effect, "We're as pro-life as you are.' The bishop listened sympathetically but, like most of the bishops that night, guardedly kept his own counsel.

Meanwhile, there was that economics pastoral. It was real Seamless Garment stuff. This was the third draft, and it deplored unemployment, made perfunctory references to incentives and property rights, and spoke of the "moral and social scandal' of poverty. Formally rejecting "collectivist and socialist' solutions, it practically approved them, in a piecemeal way.

A lay group led by former Treasury Secretary William Simon had issued a critical reply to the pastoral letter, stressing not only the productivity of free-market capitalism but such traditional Catholic themes as the virtue of diligence and the necessity of strong families. Weakland attacked the Simon paper at a press conference, calling it "libertarian' and saying the bishops preferred a more "communitarian' ethic. He is said to have told others that the Simon paper was "blasphemous' --a strong word in a milieu where "pastoral' and "collegial' have been the bywords.

In the end, the bishops approved their own letter by a vote of 225 to 9. That very margin showed how little thought they had really given it: Despite its inherently controversial content, in a field where certainty can never be dogmatic, the letter was simply rubber-stamped. A committee wrote it, the assembly blessed it.

Anyone who has read the letter, with its grey November prose, can only pity those charged with selecting its highlights. The New York Times picked these morsels: "Vigorous action should be undertaken to remove barriers to full and equal employment for women and minorities. . . . We urge that the principle of progressivity be a central guiding norm in any reforms of the tax system. . . . All of society should make a much stronger commitment to education for the poor. . . . A thorough reform of the nation's welfare and income-support programs should be undertaken.' No danger of blasphemy there, anyway. The bishops, with the aid of their holy ghostwriters, put themselves squarely on the side of the progressive angels.

At one of the countless press conferences, Archbishop May, as the newly elected president, took a casual whack at the "far Right' for criticizing the bishops' peace and economics pastorals. It was reassuring to know there are still limits to dissent, even in the "open' American Church, but after all, it wasn't the far Right that was threatening the Church with schism. For some reason, most of the bishops seem more tolerant of theological than political dissent.

On Wednesday morning, the executive session on Hunthausen reconvened, finished up, and issued two statements. One was Malone's, speaking for the NCCB. He spoke of the "pain' Hunthausen and Wuerl had suffered and the "abuse' directed at the Pope and the Holy See. Et cetera. Then he got down to brass tacks.

Bishops, he said, exercise their office in communion with the Pope and under his authority. And, on this occasion, "the bishops of the United States wish to affirm unreservedly their loyalty to and unity with the Holy Father.'

"The conference of bishops,' he went on, "has no authority to intervene in the internal affairs of a diocese or in the unique relationship between the Pope and individual bishops.' The conference, he said, could not "review, much less judge, a case involving a diocesan bishop and the Holy See.' Rome's decision was presumably reached "carefully and charitably,' and "deserves our respect and confidence.'

Later it transpired that the bishops had struck the words "just and reasonable' from the statement, for which the liberals claimed a victory of sorts. Maybe they had a point. But even a positive judgment like that would have sounded presumptuous, since the bishops had not, after all, made their own full inquiry into the affairs of the Seattle Archdiocese. Hunthausen had made a public bid for support and, aside from a few expressions of sympathy, had been left high and dry by his colleagues.

The bishops also released Hunthausen's statement. He complained that he had never been allowed to face his "accusers,' or to see the "allegations' against him. Rome's action had been "punitive,' no matter how the Vatican described it, and it just wasn't fair to Raymond Hunthausen. He had made a few errors of "pastoral judgment,' maybe, and here and there an "oversight,' but the guidelines hadn't been all that clear, and, besides, other bishops were doing the same things, and they weren't being punished. And so forth.

Some of Hunthausen's supporters demonstrated outside the hotel, and some in the Catholic press wore large red H's on their shirt fronts to show their solidarity with the Martyr of Seattle. He was, of course, innocent. He denied that he had ever rejected Catholic teaching (as on homosexuality) or intended to defy Rome.

What made Hunthausen's position hard to credit was that Rome had acted so slowly and, when it did act, discreetly. There are any number of dioceses where it might have taken similar action: That part was true, though it didn't exactly buttress Hunthausen's pleas of innocence. His archdiocese has been notorious for a long time, and these days, in the American Church, being notorious for lax pastoral practice is no mean feat.

The most casual observer might wonder, also, why so many of Hunthausen's supporters were precisely advocates of the heterodox practices he says he has eschewed. It's a little like the Hiss case: Why were all the Commies defending him against the charge of being a Communist?

Though the bishops did their best to paper it over, there is a great deal of deep dissension in the Catholic Church in America. Theologians who deny the divinity of Christ demand that they be regarded (and paid) as Catholic theologians in good standing. The sacraments are scandalously abused, and every secular fad from abortion to gay rights to Marxism has its faction in the Church. Nearly every major Catholic teaching is not only "questioned,' as the dissidents coyly put it, but denied. And the bishops are part of the problem.

Whenever Rome tries to supply the discipline the bishops won't provide themselves, the liberal press, both Catholic and secular, bristles with references to the Inquisition (sometimes deliberately confusing the Holy Office with the Spanish Inquisition, the better to alarm the public). So in Seattle, the Vatican took a quiet approach. Hunthausen wasn't burnt at the stake, removed from office, or even reprimanded, publicly or privately: He was given an assistant--so that the things that weren't being done, for some reason, would get done.

That's all that happened, but it irresistibly reminded Rembert Weakland of the Inquisition and the witch hunts, and it caused Hunthausen himself to make a scene. By speaking of his "accusers' and his rights, he did exactly what the Vatican had carefully avoided doing: He turned the whole affair into a trial. The point was no longer whether the Catholics of Seattle were getting the pastoral guidance they were entitled to; it was whether Raymond Hunthausen's rights were being violated. That was something a lot of people, including a lot of bishops, could relate to. Rome was persecuting again!

""Hunthausen'--isn't that German for "doghouse'?' a priest in the pressroom smiled. That took the issue out of the realm of martyrdom, where Hunthausen's self-absorbed view had put it, and brought it down to the level where it belonged. A bishop in the doghouse.

The other bishops knew well enough how many of them were eligible for similar embarrassment, and they did their best to cover up. Even New York City's stoutly orthodox Cardinal O'Connor denied, in response to a question from a journalist, that there is "widespread abuse' of general absolution.

Worse than the coverup, though, is the spectacle of Catholic bishops making demagogic appeals to prejudice against their own church. The day after the NCCB meeting ended, the Washington Post picked up the cue with a front-page story on Cardinal Ratzinger as "the Pope's enforcer' and inheritor of "the mantle of the grand inquisitor of the Middle Ages.' And the day after that, Post columnist Colman McCarthy called Hunthausen the victim of "inquisitional Romans.'

For the mass media, stories about the Catholic Church boil down to contests between progressive good guys and reactionary villains. This simple scenario, of course, suits the liberals' purposes just fine, and they readily cast their opponents in the role of Torquemada.

All the same, even the most liberal bishops realize what Malone reminded them of in his opening address: They are nothing without Rome, the source of their authority. An open break was always out of the question. However they might sympathize with Hunthausen, they had to make a formal affirmation of their unity with the Pope. But having done that, they could take out their anger on the men who had given the Pope the strongest support, such as Cardinal Law, and undercut the sort of discipline Rome wants to see in America, as they did by voting against reform of the practice of general absolution.

Within the constraints of its identity as a Roman Catholic organization, the NCCB functions to secularize and politicize the Church in America. While resisting religious unity with Rome, it seeks to create political--and, specifically, liberal--unity within the American Church.

Most of the American bishops still are products of the post-Vatican II frenzies, appointed on the recommendation of the liberal papal delegate of those years, Archbishop Jean Jadot. But Laghi is John Paul's man, and John Paul will be appointing the bishops for the next few years. The coloration of the NCCB will inevitably change--as it has begun to do already. In three years, one observer estimated, the bishops' conference will be dominated by papists. The liberals have peaked.

When Hunthausen flew home to Seattle, a crowd of three hundred supporters was waiting to greet him. They decked him with flowers and shouted, "We love you.' He talked bravely, telling a press conference he still didn't like the new arrangement and was going to do something or another about it--maybe go to Rome and talk to the Pope himself. He wasn't sure yet.

But he had already done something an anti-nuke prelate should never do. He'd bombed.