The Man Behind the Curtain.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," huffed the Wizard of Oz near the end of the movie when he is exposed as a fraud. Perhaps something similar should be said about the man in the white cassock in Rome reverentially referred to in the media as the "Pontiff." Pontiff, of course, is the anglicization of the Latin Pontifex Maximus, the title adopted by the self-deified Roman emperors and subsequently appropriated by a long succession of leaders (popes, "Holy Fathers") of the Roman Catholic church to mean the "bridge between heaven and earth."

The points I wish to make in this connection are that the pope is the titular head of the world's largest religious body but represents only a minority of its members on many matters of great secular importance; that the Catholic church--at least in the United States and developed countries--has experienced a serious implosion during the last generation or so; and that the media and a great many non-Catholics have yet to grasp the first two points. Let me explain.

Over at least the last forty years, opinion polls have clearly shown that varying majorities of U.S. Catholics, as well as those in other developed countries, have come to disagree with their church leadership on such issues as divorce, remarriage after divorce, contraception, abortion, clerical celibacy, ordination of women, the importance of parochial education, and democracy within the church. That a seismic implosion has shaken the U.S. Catholic church is evidenced by the following facts:

* Weekly church attendance has fallen from a high level a couple of generations ago to less than 30 percent today.

* Giving to the Catholic church, once on a par with Protestant giving at a little over 2 percent, has dropped by at least half, and only about one-fifth of U.S. Catholics donate anything to their church. (At the same time, Catholic charities are generously funded from tax revenues.)

* Parochial school attendance has declined since 1965 from about 5.5 million students to about 2.5 million--from about 50 percent of Catholic children to under 25 percent.

* Catholics are divorced, use contraception, and have abortions at about the same rate as non-Catholics.

* Recruitment of priests and nuns has ebbed to a very low level, while the average age of priests and nuns is very high.

* Despite Republican stands for school vouchers and against abortion rights, Catholic voters preferred Bill Clinton over George Bush and Bob Dole in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.

There have been similar developments in the Catholic parts of Europe.

What accounts for this implosion? A number of factors. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, Catholics were looked down on and often discriminated against in the United States for a complex of reasons: lingering antagonism going back to Europe's religious wars, Protestant antipathy toward "popery," a cultural heritage of English dislike for the Irish, prejudice against non-English-speaking immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and perceptions that Catholics in the United States were somehow tied to objectionable policies and practices of the Vatican and the papal states.

But since the defeat of Al Smith for the U.S. presidency in 1928, things have changed. A Catholic president--John F. Kennedy--was elected in 1960. The Second Vatican Council and Pope John XXIII moved much of Roman Catholicism into the twentieth century. The U.S. Supreme Court's school-prayer rulings of the early 1960s--removing the last vestiges of nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant hegemony in the public schools--made parochial schools increasingly irrelevant to most Catholics. The general secularizing trend gradually dissolved many of the barriers to cooperation and friendship across religious lines. After World War II, average Catholic family income exceeded average white Protestant income. The country became more hospitable to religious and cultural differences.

Then in 1968, Pope Paul VI, against the counsel of his own advisers, issued his infamous encyclical, Humanae Vitae, condemning contraception. The encyclical triggered a massive revolt among Catholics--lay and clerical--and was viewed widely as an attempt to turn back the clock, to restore medieval authoritarianism. The twenty-year papacy of John Paul II has confirmed this perception, while his selection of conservative bishops and cardinals will surely continue this trend well into the future. Recent events highlight the disconnect between the Vatican's power structure on the one hand and most ordinary Catholic and non-Catholic opinion on the other.

The May 4, 1999, Washington Times reports that John Paul II "singled out and blessed former [Italian] Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti just two days after prosecutors demanded his conviction and life imprisonment in the murder of a journalist." In another trial, prosecutors are seeking Andreotti's conviction on mafia-related charges.

In the New York Times the same day, priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley notes that the Vatican has denounced the use of the "morning-after" pill by rape victims in Kosovo while apparently not denouncing Serbian rapes of Kosovar women. (This is in contrast to the Vatican's distribution of contraceptives to nuns in the Congo in the 1960s, which senior Vatican official Monsignor Ello Sgreccia called "a legitimate defense" against the possibility of rape, according to the Associated Press on April 13.) Greeley also questions John Paul's urging NATO to quit bombing Serbia.

Meanwhile, Catholics for a Free Choice has launched an effort to get United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to review the special Non-Member State Permanent Observer status that the Holy See--the headquarters of the Roman Catholic church--enjoys at the U.N. The Holy See, the only religious body so privileged, has used that status to exert pressure on the U.N. to down-play efforts to deal with the problem of overpopulation and the reproductive rights and health of women. In addition, while the Vatican and the official church have made contributions to social justice, church officialdom in the United States and elsewhere has impeded progress on women's rights and caused serious damage to the cause of democratic secular (that is, religiously neutral) public education.

It is extremely important that the media and non-Catholics, including those in elective office, recognize that the pope and the official Catholic church represent only a minority of Catholics on such key issues as reproductive rights and education policy. It is illustrative that, in a Senate debate several years ago, school vouchers were touted by Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, and Indiana Republican Dan Coats, a conservative Protestant. Leading the debate against vouchers were Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy and Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd, two Catholics. And it should be noted--especially by George W. Bush, Lamar Alexander, and other White House aspirants--that, according to my colleague Al Menendez's analyses of voucher referenda in Colorado and California, Catholic voters are as opposed to school vouchers as are other voters.

The evidence demands that, on women's, school policy, church-state, and other issues, it makes no sense to classify people in vertical religious columns. Rather, it is more accurate to recognize that toward one pole are gathered conservative, even reactionary, Catholics, evangelicals, and Jews, while toward the opposite pole are diverse groupings of moderate and progressive Catholics, Protestants, Jews, humanists, and others.

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association, executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty, and author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on church-state separation and First Amendment liberties. His most recent book is the 1999 Humanist Press release Vox Populi: Letters to the Editor.