Holy Siege: The Year That Shook Catholic America.

HOLY SIEGE

The Year that Shook Catholic America

Kenneth A. Briggs

Harper San Francisco, $27,608 pp.

The "year" that shook Catholic America, in Kenneth Briggs's subtitle, ran from August 18, 1986, to September 19, 1987--thirteen months actually. It began the day the Vatican notified Father Charles Curran that he could no longer teach theology at The Catholic University, an action that led to protest from nine past presidents of the Catholic Theological Society and the College Theological Society, signed by 750 other theologians.

It terminated the day Pope John Paul II ended his second visit to the United States.

Two weeks after the Curran action Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen announced that the pope had stripped him of five areas of responsibility and given them to a newly appointed auxiliary, Bishop Donald Wuerl. This chastisement of the highly popular Hunthausen, which Briggs describes as uncharacteristically "awkward and amateurish," led to even 1ouder and more universal protests from Catholics both in the Seattle area and throughout the country.

A few weeks later the Vatican issued a statement on homosexuality that raised a storm among gay and lesbian groups, as might be expected, but also aroused criticism from some orthodox Catholics.

In February 1987, the Vatican defied orders from the Italian government for the arrest of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the American head of the Vatican Bank, for his involvement in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest. This defiance, together with the Vatican's archaic fiscal procedures, did not sit well with the U.S. public in general and in particular with the wealthy Catholics who were being asked by the pope to make up the Vatican's $53 million deficit.

In June, 1987, John Paul met with Kurt Waldheim, president of Austria and a man charged with collaborating with Hitler's massacre of the Jews. This meeting greatly embittered Jews in the U.S. and through-out the world.

At some point in 1986 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made the statement that individual bishops had teaching authority, but national conferences of bishops did not. This curious opinion was later dispatched to the U.S. Conference of Bishops, which rejected it by a vote of 205 to 59, which is reasonable, since the Vatican position seems to be based on a new kind of math by which one times one equals one, but 200 times one equals zero.

Apparently Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul, who clearly must have approved the opinion, were becoming uneasy with the modest signs of independent thinking displayed by the American bishops. Less modest was the standing ovation that the bishops gave Archbishop Hunthausen when he appealed for their support at their meeting in November 1986. The bishops did not, however, really support Hunthausen, who protested that the process by which his authority had been stripped from him bore no resemblance to the kind of due process to which U.S. citizens are entitled. The most his sympathetic colleagues felt able to do was to strike the word "just" in the resolution describing the process and say simply that it was "in accord with general principles of church law and procedures," leaving aside, as Briggs points out, "the question of whether those principles were themselves just." Perhaps it was the ovation and this minor change that moved the Vatican, six months later, to remove Bishop Wuerl and restore the archbishop's authority.

At the same November meeting, though obscured by the smoke and fire created by the Hunthausen affair, the bishops voted 225 to 9 to approve a pastoral letter that castigated the U.S. economy for producing a degree of poverty that was "a social and moral scandal." This pastoral greatly irritated the rich Catholics to whom the Vatican was appealing for financial aid, though these have now been profoundly pleased by John Paul's 1991 encyclical, Centesimus annus.

They must also have been pleased by the Vatican's notifying the University of Fribourg that it could not give an honorary degree to Rembert Weakland, the archbishop of Milwaukee, who headed up the committee of bishops that produced the offensive pastoral. Weakland, one of the most impressive, popular, and outspoken members of the U.S. hierarchy, thereby received chastisement that was so "awkward and amateurish" that a Vatican spokesman later--too much later--wrote that the whole thing had been a mistake and expressed "regret [for] the pain that you have suffered."

Kenneth Briggs, a Methodist himself and formerly an award-winning writer on religion for the New York Times, does not deal with this barbarity, but he does deal, month by month, with the items summarized above plus a host of other items and personalities of interest to American Catholics, plus vignettes about eleven Catholics with pseudonyms--including a bishop, a college president, and an aged nun--of whom we learn much more than we really want to know, for it's a long book already.

For a Methodist Times reporter Briggs is more evenhanded than I expected and in the fifty-odd pages he devotes to the pope's ten-day visit in September 1987, he treats John Paul very fairly and pays tribute to the pope's warmth and compassion for the poor, the sick (including AIDS victims), the old, and the young. He cannot, however, conceal his dislike of most of the positions, notably on sexual morality, taken by the pope, and especially that on homosexuality, which receives continual battering.

This is a bias that this writer does not share, having always felt that the church's and John Paul's defense of the sanctity, indissolubility, and exclusivity of heterosexual marriage was one of its, and his, most admirable features. This stems from the conviction that human nature is so tricky and so determined to do whatever it wants to do that it is essential for any kind of decent life and society that moral laws should be as absolute as possible. This means that those with a hopelessly homosexual orientation must feel that God is not treating them fairly, just as he does not seem to be treating fairly all those who for a host of other reasons do not find it possible to enjoy sexual fulfillment. Especially unfair, or course, if they do not believe in a future life where all these seeming unfairnesses are straightened out and compensated.

All that aside, one finishes Kenneth Briggs's year and his fascinating and important book in basic agreement with his conclusion that "the papal capital...[has] been pretty much depleted."

Whatever you may think of Archbishops Hunthausen and Weakland, whatever you may think of Father Charles Curran and the insistence of 110 out of 225 Catholic college presidents that the Vatican and/or the local bishop should have nothing to say about who teaches Catholic theology, another position with which I do not agree, nevertheless, the conclusion seems incontrovertible that Pope John Paul II and his current curia are living in the past, particularly with regard to "due process" and what kind of success can be expected from monarchical methods of persuasion, or coercion, in a world where democratic process and a more egalitarian jurisprudence have now swept all before them.

Christ did not found an entirely democratic church, granted, though the church of the Acts seems a good deal more democratic than anything dreamt of in the current Vatican's philosophy, but a Vicar of Christ, Pius XII, on Christmas Eve, 1944, told the world that democratic government "appears to many a postulate of nature imposed by reason itself." That is a statement to which Pope John Paul II, our many-ways admirable Holy Father, might well give some serious thought.

Perhaps it is time for Vatican Council III.

JOHN C. CORT is a Boston-area writer, author of Christian Socialism (Orbis), and contributor to the recently published John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation (Eerdmans).