Catholics in Crisis: An American Parish Fights for Its Soul.

By now the litany should be familiar to even the casual reader of this magazine. The U.S. Catholic church faces: a serious personnel shortage and low morale among the waning number of active priests; a mounting financial burden as clergy and women religious age and retire; a growing number of priest-less parishes; a generation of professionally educated lay ministers seeking adequate financial and professional support; dissent from its theologians and infighting among its pastoral leaders; indifference toward or ignorance of its teachings among young baptized Catholics; and widespread defiance of its sexual ethics among the 45 million Catholics who attend Mass at least once a month. The American Catholic church of the 1990s is a community in crisis.

So say the pollsters, pundits, and professors (with the singular exception of Andrew Greeley) who ponder national survey data and peruse one another's columns. For evidence of debilitating polarization they point to the Catholic culture wars waged by organizations like Call to Action, CORPUS, and the Women's Ordination Conference on the left, and Opus Dei, the Catholic League, and Catholics United for the Faith on the right. Shaped by their relatively narrow constituencies, these organizations and the movements they represent command attention because they sense and seize the opportunity for radical change afforded by a historical period in which everything Catholic seems to be up for grabs. They would shove the American church in the direction of complete fidelity to the magisterium or, conversely, toward ever greater degrees of separation from the Vatican.

But how does the crisis motif play in the parish? Whatever their opinion about the issues dividing the church, the vast majority of American Catholics tend to think of themselves as members of a parish rather than of a movement. How do the so-called Catholic culture wars influence the perceptions and experiences of the local faith community?

The books under consideration here take up this important question. Jim Naughton, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and a former reporter for the New York Times and the Washington Post, provides a case study of Holy Trinity Parish in Washington, D.C. - white, Jesuit-run, upper-middle class, fatuously progressive. Ivor Shapiro, a journalist who lives in Toronto, profiles Saint Paul's Church in Kenmore, New York - white, diocesan-run, working class, a "typical" post-Vatican II parish.

Both journalists include the word "crisis" in their titles, report on the period from 1992 to 1994 (with Shapiro focusing on the liturgical year of 1993), and include an epilogue on developments at the parish in question during 1995. Both specialize in narration, provide breezy summaries of the relevant historical and theological background, and offer analysis that is solid and insightful if not always penetrating. They do little more than confirm much of the conventional wisdom about the major events and trends of postconciliar American Catholicism - pointing, for example, to the unmistakably crucial role that the ill-fated reception of Humanae vitae played in creating a climate of popular dissent from "unreasonable" papal and episcopal teaching. But these studies enrich the literature by shifting the focus from the university, chancery, and seminary to the primary communal site for the People of God, the local parish.

Paul Wilkes, the author of several previous portraits of American religious life, does not use the word "crisis" in his title. But the format of his "guide for the perplexed" - part progressive catechism, part interpretive history, part New Ageish psychospiritual therapy - speaks volumes about the parlous state of Catholic truth-tellers and truth-seekers alike. Motivated by compassion for those gentle souls who would return or turn to the church were it not so hard-hearted, Wilkes sets himself up as a kind of friendly one-man magisterium, espousing his own personal solutions to complex, controverted questions, ignoring inconvenient historical or doctrinal claims against his assertions, and passing off tendentious readings of Vatican II as if they were matters of un-shakable consensus. (The fact that I agree with much of what he says does not make his method palatable.)

Apparently Wilkes has decided that the church needs a well-informed and pastorally sensitive layman like himself to step in and settle matters, the bishops having failed to develop popular and compelling interpretations of Scripture, moral theology, and canon law. Thus he simply substitutes his own, presumably wiser, sensibilities, convictions, and opinions for theirs. "No human law, no public or private sin - nothing can prevent you from receiving the Eucharist if you earnestly desire this communion with God," he assures those who might wonder whether they need to examine their conscience or believe anything particular about the Real Presence before receiving the sacrament. Don't bother: the "Good Enough Catholic" (a conceit taken from Bruno Bettleheim's The Good Enough Parent) need not attempt to become a spiritual paragon or saint; nor, apparently, need she follow the counsels of perfection, or even worry much about the scruples of a rightly formed conscience. Remember, Wilkes consoles, if you intend to be better, well, you already are better.

His guide to the perplexed and put-upon, peppered with quotes from the forty lay Catholics he interviewed (apparently meant to represent a contemporary sensus fidelium), seems predicated upon the assumption that, if one simply ignores the other side of the argument, those disagreeable folks will go away, and "good enough" liberals will proceed to realize the promise of Vatican II. In that imagined post-crisis Catholic world, for example, Catholics will understand sex outside of marriage to be "an act of human intimacy - a value in itself," but one requiting the use of some form of birth control, on both practical and moral terms. Voila! - no controversy!

Back in the messy, real, and contested world of bishops and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Naughton and Shapiro build their narratives around the lives of parishioners chosen, it seems, from central casting, '90s version: the tortured priest who finally accepts his sexual identity, takes a male lover, and leaves the priesthood and parish far behind; the lay champion of papal authority who appoints himself guardian of orthodoxy and alienates his less zealous colleagues (that is, all of them); the dedicated and talented RCIA or adult education director who grows frustrated with foot-dragging pastors, lay inquisitors, or her own personal doubts; the divorced Catholics who want to remarry in the church but find the annulment process insulting, nonsensical, or punitive; the young parents ambivalent about the church's moral stance but intent on raising their children on "the traditional stories."

Naughton, a member of Holy Trinity Parish during the unfolding of the events he recounts, opens his story in the spring of 1992 with a description of "The Standing," a protest against the church's refusal to ordain women. Layman Ray McGovern, a former C.I.A. official, recognized "the voice of the oppressor" in John Paul II's order to cease discussion of women's ordination; when a handful of sympathetic fellow parishioners joined McGovern in his practice of standing throughout the 9:15 Sunday Mass, "The Standing" became a cause celebre and eventually made the national news. Naughton situates the protest in the context of "a growing network of organizations [that] have sprung up to contest teachings that many Catholics believe are theologically suspect, psychologically harmful, and detrimental to the vitality of the church."

Holy Trinity is the high-profile home of members of the Women's Ordination Conference, CORPUS, and Call to Action, among other such progressive organizations. Boasting a full-time director of liturgy, a full-time director of music, several part-time choir directors, and a full-time liturgical aide, the parish has been, for many, a model of lay participation and leadership. Volunteer teams work with the worship committee to plan every Mass; lay people decorate the sanctuary, read from the Scriptures, give Communion, and occasionally preach. Since Vatican II the size of the parish has grown fivefold, to 4,400 households; parishioners come from as far away as forty-five miles. In 1992 there were 700 students enrolled in the Sunday morning CCD program, and burgeoning programs in adult education, Jesuit spirituality, and social outreach.

To many observers, Holy Trinity is the model of what a contemporary parish should be: theologically sophisticated, spiritually enriching, and liturgically vibrant. The affluent community's record of commitment to the preferential option for the poor is perhaps more ambiguous, given a highly publicized controversy over a former pastor's refusal to support a proposed center for the homeless, and lukewarm support for a sister church in El Salvador. Nonetheless, it has earned a reputation as a place where alienated Catholics take their first steps back into the church, and as a parish of last resort for those who find Catholic teaching on sex roles and sexual ethics oppressive.

For officials of the Archdiocese of Washington, however, Holy Trinity was a headache. "For at the core of its success lies a willingness to trust the spiritual integrity and moral judgment of its parishioners," Naughton writes. "And this, the archdiocese believes, is sometimes done at the expense of Catholic doctrine." Conservatives, perhaps envious of and frustrated by its success, branded the Holy Trinity approach "R. C. Lite."

The main character of Catholics in Crisis is Father Jim Maier, the pastor whose life and ministry Naughton portrays as a constant struggle to reconcile opposing forces - within himself and within his parish. Maier was beset not by critics from Opus Dei or CUF, but by proponents of two countervailing tendencies within progressive American Catholicism. The "confrontationalists," as Naughton describes them, wanted to challenge Roman authority and patriarchy, experiment with new liturgical forms, and create smaller new communities to replace or supplement traditional parishes. "Accommodationists," on the other hand, advocated a patient and discreet engagement with church authorities on a narrower range of issues, including birth control, divorce and remarriage, priestly celibacy and women's ordination. Despite their discomfort with particular teachings, accommodationists believe that the church needs gradual reform rather than radical restructuring.

"The Standing" threatened to disrupt the delicate balance between these factions by forcing the hand of Cardinal James Hickey. Father Maier, caught in the throes of a personal crisis and eagerly anticipating the approaching end of his pastorate at Holy Trinity, was deeply troubled by the thought of Hickey bringing in an authoritarian successor, perhaps not a Jesuit, who would stifle the spirit of the parish. Yet Maier could not bring himself to end the protest by pastoral fiat, for he rightly recognized "The Standing" to be an expression of principled dissent. And in 1968, Holy Trinity had claimed as its own the American Catholic legacy of principled dissent when its former pastor, Tom Gavigan, had publicly opposed Humanae vitae and been deprived of his right to hear confessions.

Thereafter, the Jesuits of Holy Trinity, like many pastors across the nation, effected what Naughton calls "the great accommodation" by continuing to minister to the faithful who disobeyed the church on birth control and other sexual matters. They did so by invoking the priority of conscience, a central but ambiguous tenet of the faith that can be interpreted, in the spirit of Wilkes's Good Enough Catholic, to justify a wide range of moral practices.

The maturing discipline of pastoral theology also came in handy for those who sought to reconcile hard teaching and soft practice, for it allowed a certain leeway - in the form of the pastor's prudential judgment - in the application of doctrinal and ethical norms to concrete situations. Originally, the rationale for priestly connivance - the practice of looking the other way when one knew that the couple was living together without benefit of marriage, or using artificial birth control - held that people were more likely to change their opinions and behaviors if they were not driven away but remained as members of a supportive faith community.

What God Allows suggests that nothing of the kind happened. Instead, lay Catholics extended their newfound independence of judgment beyond the realm of private sexual behavior to once taken-for-granted indices of Catholic loyalty like regular Mass attendance and support for the parochial school. For the working-class parishioners of Saint Paul's outside Buffalo, New York, the gulf between official Catholic teaching and the life of the Catholic parish has only widened in the years since Humanae vitae. Thus the "Crisis of Faith and Conscience" in Shapiro's subtitle refers to the increasing difficulty experienced by some laity, priests, and religious in espousing, much less enforcing, the doctrinal and moral positions handed down by Pope John Paul II.

For Judy Nice, director of adult sacraments at Saint Paul's, the last straw was a scathing note from a recalcitrant RCIA catechist, complaining that she was soft-pedaling the objective moral teaching of the church and feeding her spiritual lambs "a Women's Spirit/Women's Church / New Age / Feminist diet." Nice believes she was feeding them compassion, sensitivity, respect for all human beings, love of Jesus and the Scriptures, and a thirst for justice; but after finding her words repeatedly interpreted along ideological lines by the lay guardians of orthodoxy, and finding insufficient support from her already overburdened pastor, she resigned the job she loved.

Shapiro periodically interrupts his engaging account of the lived faith at Saint Paul's with pointed excerpts from Pope John Paul II's 1993 encyclical, Veritatis splendor, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, or some other recent official statement of the church's moral teaching. Dropped into the text like lead weights, these excerpts are a heavy-handed but effective device for contrasting the ambiguous, complex, plural, and shifting mores and experiences of the people with the unambiguous, univocal, tightly reasoned, stylistically aloof, and absolutist pronouncements of the Vatican. Rather than suggest connections or points of possible rapprochement between these two worlds, however, Shapiro is content, in a kind of postmoderny way, to let the disjunction have its benumbing or puzzling effect.

Benumbed and puzzled, one may nonetheless garner at least two impressions about the white American Catholic parish of the 1990s. If these books are any indication, it has nary a clue what to do with gifted lay women, who enjoy neither the status nor the protection of the ordained priesthood, but who are called upon increasingly to play the role of mediator between competing factions within the parish and to organize and lead whatever spiritual enrichment or social outreach programs the parish offers. Despite the predictable charges that they foment "radical feminism" and watered-down catechesis, the Judy Nices of the Catholic world seem its best hope for preserving continuity, at the parish level, with the historic Christian practices of hospitality, personal and communal prayer, theological education, and spiritual formation.

By the early 1990s there were more lay people in graduate theology programs than there were young men studying for the priesthood, and most of those lay students were women. Although these two sets of Catholic ministers will likely be working side by side in the coming years, the church has done little to introduce them to one another during their years of formal training, and even less to break open and reshape clerical culture in such a way as to make room for and welcome such collaboration with lay women as the will of God and a grace to the church.

That is a matter of regret shading into outrage, for a second lesson of these pulse-taking volumes is that there is no substitute for a vital institutional church at the local level, a communal presence of Christ that is identifiably Catholic in form and content. In telling the story of Catholics as they struggle individually and communally to reconcile their own moral perceptions with the teachings of their church, Naughton and Shapiro - and, in a different way, Wilkes - take note of the attrition, the absences after a season of uncooperation, the falling away of commitment as the search for common ground becomes merely a grind. In the absence of a vigorous and honest process of rethinking the relationship between different types of pastoral leaders, there can be little hope of providing guidance for ordinary Catholics in crisis. The pastoral reality will remain, as Naughton puts it, "a circumscribed combat in which each camp schemes to subdue the other while not unduly damaging the church in the process." Not Good Enough.

R. Scott Appleby is associate professor of history and director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.