Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church.

Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church Donald Cozzens Liturgical Press, $19.95, 208 pp.

Donald Cozzens's deservedly well-received The Changing Face of the Priesthood (2000) appeared just as the sexual-abuse crisis flooded the airwaves and newspapers. His new book, an impassioned plea for openness in the church, takes that scandal into account. Like many books to which we assign the adjective "impassioned," this work is somewhat overheated, highly rhetorical, and not a little irascible. Cozzens also has a tendency to make his case by citing equally overheated authors. For example, he relies on highly suspect gay activists like Mark Jordan and Ellis Hanson in his discussion of homosexuals in the priesthood.

While reading this book I could only think of Hans Kung's Truthfulness, which made such a stir in the midst of the Second Vatican Council. To criticize Cozzens's tone is not the same thing as objecting to the substance of the case he makes. Anyone who is deeply concerned with the life of the church cannot but be angry at the ecclesiastical stonewalling at the highest levels of the hierarchy. Think of the near-farcical episcopal synods in Rome, where the results of the meetings are predetermined and, predictably, fall into a well of oblivion. And who hasn't encountered the simple terror of bishops or wannabe bishops when confronted with fundamental issues about which everyone is aware, like the priest shortage, but which nobody dares to discuss.

Cozzens discusses these topics relying, for the most part, on reports in the mass media, his own experience, and data gathered hither and yon. In that sense, at least, he is telling a well-worn story and perhaps racing back into print too quickly. He could have spent more time thinking through the theological issues implicit in the problems he analyzes. Take the shortage of priests. The demographics are discouraging to all but the more obtuse. The way to assess this dilemma, in my estimation, is not through the prism of social science but in light of a fundamental theological truth: If the Eucharist is not available, there is no Catholic Church. So the question then becomes: Do we want the church to be present in a given area? If we do, how do we see that it happens? Finally: Can the bishop(s) evade responsibility if the church disappears in this town or that village? The issue framed in this fashion makes the question of celibacy subservient to the more fundamental issue of mission and ecclesiology.

Or take the precipitous loss of religious sisters in this country. Cozzens relies on Sandra Schneiders's exemplary work on this question, but he could have done more. For example, 90 percent of all active religious orders of women in the United States were founded after the Enlightenment. This was one of the great success stories of the modern church. It may be that, with the rise of equal rights for women, this style of religious life would inevitably diminish. If that is the case, shouldn't we ask what will take its place? If church history is any guide, new expressions of religious life will come from the bottom up. After all, Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman, not Innocent III, energized the mendicant movement that swept Europe in the thirteenth century.