Cardinal George responds.

John Wilkins's article on the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) in the December 2, 2005, issue ("Lost in Translation") is partial and biased. Perhaps that is to be expected, since he was not present at the events he describes and therefore his account is, by definition, hearsay. Without addressing the entire article, I want only to state here what I myself said and what I heard.

What I said clearly at the June 1998 meeting was that ICEL could not afford to ignore its critics. Perhaps clarity was interpreted by some as "vehemence." In my experience of bishops' meetings, every bishop has the right and the duty to express what is on his mind. That's the basic meaning of collegiality in teaching and governing. I am a member of ICEL representing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and I had been instructed by the then-president of the conference, Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza, to do what was necessary to "get texts" from ICEL that the Holy See would canonically establish as liturgical texts of the Roman rite. I did not speak as a representative of Cardinal Medina, whom I had met only once, but as a U.S. bishop, from a conference that was of several minds over some issues of translation but wanted a response that would be, if possible, more representative of all our concerns as bishops. That remains my mandate.

What I heard, especially from Archbishop Denis Hurley, OMI, was that bishops are not to criticize the work of ICEL because the bishops had sat quietly at the feet of experts during the Second Vatican Council and should continue to do so now. He described the council as the longest ongoing formation session for bishops in the history of the church. I also heard him say twice, and with some vehemence of his own, that ICEL cannot change.

Archbishop Hurley's remarks need to be put in the context of his own pioneering work of creating ICEL and continuing to accompany its work through several decades. They should also, however, be set in the context of my own relationship with him, lest that relationship be permanently misrepresented by Wilkins's article. I had heard of Archbishop Hurley from my first days in the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and I began hearing more of him during the Oblate General Chapter in 1972 when I met Oblates from Natal, South Africa, for the first time. Once elected to membership in the General Council of the Congregation in 1974, I had the chance to meet him personally, both in South Africa and in Rome. He spoke his own mind clearly and well. He was a man of great moral courage. There were moments when we were not of one mind, but he knew that I admired him and did what I could to support him in his constant but judicious critique of South Africa's apartheid ideology. When the South African government finally brought charges against him, I was refused a visa to South Africa for his trial because I had several times complained to their embassy in Rome about South African policies and their treatment of him. In the midst of his difficulties, Archbishop Hurley was aware of the support he had.

In this context, his remarks to me during the June 1998 ICEL meeting took me by surprise. Seeing this, he was kind enough to write a note of apology the next morning, calling me "an esteemed and valued confrere." I still retain and treasure that handwritten note. He, of course, had no need to apologize to me. His life and work gave him every right to say exactly what he thought necessary to say. Our friendship continued and, after 1998, he was twice my houseguest for some days in Chicago when his travels brought him to this country. Only ideologues reduce people to their ideas.

Whatever might have been the experience of Vatican II, the documents of the council place primary responsibility for the liturgy of the church in the hands of the bishops of the church. Whether ICEL in 1998 could have changed more quickly to meet the challenges of its critics became a moot point, as the Holy See itself changed both ICEL's constitution and its charter for translating. While making good use of experts, ICEL's present modus operandi is thoroughly collegial, placing local bishops in positions of responsibility at every stage in the process of producing texts. The value of those texts will be decided in the eleven member conferences of ICEL bishops and, finally, by the dicastery that grants the canonical recognition establishing them as texts of the Roman rite. Without the lapse of too many more years, we will, I hope, have "gotten texts."

CARDINAL FRANCIS GEORGE, OMI

Chicago, III.

THE AUTHOR REPLIES:

As a professional journalist for ten years in the BBC in London and then for twenty-one years as editor of the Tablet, I do not present hearsay as fact. For my account of the Washington meeting of ICEL in 1998, I had the testimony of eyewitnesses, which in every case I was able to check and check again. I also gathered extensive documentation. I am confident that in this way I was able to present the true story of what happened to ICEL, which had not previously been told as a whole.

Included in the documentary material was a photocopy of Archbishop Denis Hurley's handwritten response to Cardinal George at that Washington meeting. Nowhere in it does Hurley say that "ICEL cannot change." On the contrary, he stresses that ICEL had "at all times" showed a "total openness" to the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship. Hence his shock that the congregation was now proceeding without any collegial consultation to overturn the principles on which ICEL's translation work had rested for nearly four decades.

For Hurley, as I reported in my article, the Vatican move indicated "a distressing departure from the spirit of collegiality in favor of authoritative imposition," and he found that departure confirmed, he said, in Cardinal George's way of expressing himself (described to me by two independent eyewitnesses as "brutal"). Cardinal George defines collegiality "in teaching and governing" as meaning that "every bishop has the right and the duty to express what is on his mind," and that is why he can say that ICEL is now "thoroughly collegial." But Hurley subscribed to the more comprehensive and ambitious understanding of collegiality enshrined in Vatican II's constitution Lumen gentium. As I reported in my article, Hurley pointed out in his response that he knew what he was talking about, having participated fully in the Vatican II debates on the subject.

The Vatican II constitution understands the faith that the bishops teach as rooted in the Spirit that informs the whole church. As teachers, therefore, bishops must always be in dialogue with those who are taught, as Hurley was. But I never heard anything that might suggest he interpreted this as meaning that bishops should "sit quietly at the feet of experts." He had a very strong sense of the priority of the bishop's office, which he had held for many years (he became a bishop at the age of thirty-one). This was the man, one must remember, who integrated his seminary in South Africa in defiance of apartheid against the counsel of his advisers and his fellow bishops. He did indeed often say that Vatican II was "the longest ongoing formation session for bishops in the history of the church," and that seems to me one very fair way of describing it.

The results of that clash in Washington in 1998 are still being worked out. This story is not about archaeology. The issues are fizzingly alive. In a recent interview with John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, Cardinal George said that a test of the new ICEL would be the acceptability of the texts it produced. Amen to that.

JOHN WILKINS