Trivial pursuits.

The reporter who filed the November 1997 Associated Press story on the Synod of Roman Catholic Bishops from North and South America seemed greatly impressed by the bishops' costume. Meeting in Rome, the church's grandees were decked out in gold vestments and twin-peaked hats for the pope's opening address. While it is customary for the frivolous rich to don extravagant gear for big occasions, it's a touch strange for the followers of a Nazarene carpenter to follow suit. We had been led to believe that the Roman gathering was serious business; the bishops were there to discuss weighty issues. However, it turns out that gold vestments were in keeping after all, as the bishops had taken everything of importance off the agenda.

Issues of distributive justice were shelved. Poverty, international economic relations, and the environmental wasteland being created in the Amazon basin were all displaced in favor of theological hocus-pocus. Evangelization was to be the theme. The pope, in his welcoming address, noted that this was the first synod of the Americas since Columbus "opened the way for legions of missionaries on both continents" -- a feat the pope called admirable. No mention was made of the darker side of Senor Columbus' arrival in the New World, of which historian Howard Zinn has written:

Bartoleme de las Casas, an

eye-witness, described in detail the

horrifying atrocities committed

by Columbus and his compatriots

against the Indians -- which

resulted in the native population of

Hispaniola being wiped

out -- genocide is an appropriate term.

So what does 'this latest burst of evangelizing fervor add up to? The bishops speak of "guiding the consciences of all men and women of good will toward an encounter with Christ, helping them experience the full depth of the mystery of redemption achieved once and for all in the Son of God." Golly. At last, a radical agenda to gladden the hearts of all those disposable street children in Sao Paulo, or the men, women, and children toiling in squalid, unregulated sweat-shop along the Mexican border. Looking to the bishop to provide courageous moral leadership in an increasingly fragile world is fast becoming a waste of time. Their game is trivial pursuits.

Take, for instance, this obsession with costume protocols. Vestments symbolize for these conservative Catholic prelates the species difference between themselves -- the ordained caste -- and unordained lay folk. Sartorial privileges are jealously guarded, and contamination of any part of the sacred wardrobe is strenuously avoided. Recently, a friend o( mine wanted her three grandchildren to wear family baptismal stoles at their baptisms. No stoles, said the priest; the only stole at the sacrament would be around the ordained neck. One begins to sense how rigid and insecure orthodoxy has become when it fears competition from babes -- children entering the priesthood of all believers, to boot!

Vital, spirit-led faith should have a confident moral center that expresses itself as a longing for the just society. But when religion and its guardians become consumed with getting the magic right and tinkering with legal codification you know the rot has set in. With so much in contemporary American life that is morbidly disordered and crying. out for attention, the U.S. bishops' latest wheeze is a proposal for the return of the meatless Friday. To what purpose, you might ask? Apparently to stiffen the resolve of Roman Catholics in their stand against abortion and euthanasia. Naturally, if these fellows lived in the real world, they would know that there is nothing in the least penitential about the meatless Friday. Indeed, there are people for whom the consumption of one of Ronald McDonald's beef patties would itself qualify as penance -- or even an act of self-abuse.

If these guys think they are going to close abortion clinics by having Catholics switch from beef Wellington to grilled tuna one day a week, they are in urgent need of a reality check. Cardinal Law of Boston, who appears to be the chief agitator for this idea, surely could have come up with more effective ways to reduce the abortion numbers. Why didn't he gather a posse of young mothers from the Roxbury area of his archdiocese who had been threatened with the loss of their welfare support, and take them to Washington, D.C., to confront the enemy in the halls of Congress? After that, he could have tried a real penitential fast on Capitol Hill. The sight of a starving cardinal might just help restore benefits to poor women who might well prefer to have their babies -- if they had the financial means.

The bishop of Camden, New Jersey, James T. McHugh, is another representative of the preening episcopal class now making waves. McHugh is currently on a crusade of sorts to quash any serious discussion of the global population problem. From his chancery armchair, he asserts with chilling certainty that there is no such thing as overpopulation. It is clear that he has not done his homework; he also specializes in dogmatic simplisms. Breed, and to hell with those neo-Malthusian Johnnies, is roughly his shtick. His most recent target is William Hollingsworth's book, Ending the Explosion: Population Policies and Ethics for a Humane Future. McHugh follows the mendacious tactic of associating concern about the exploding number of births with the promotion of abortion as a means of reducing fertility. In a letter to the National Catholic Reporter, the patient, civilized Hollingsworth writes:

In fact, I do no such thing in my

book or anywhere else.... The

truth is that the book staunchly

failed to take sides in the abortion

debate, thereby displeasing both

camps.... My refusal to fight in

that bitter war stems from my

hope of finding some badly

needed common ground.... I believe

that appropriate family planning

programs offer that common

ground.

Uninterested in family planning, no matter how handled, the wily prelate plays his trump card: we don't need to reduce population growth; just redistribute resources. Coming from the bishop, this is pure chutzpah. The truth is that neither Bishop McHugh nor any of his ideological clones have been known to campaign for a politics that would address the redistribution of resources, nationally or globally. Ten years or so ago, before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had been packed with papal toadies, it issued an important pastoral letter dealing with the economics of inequality. It took but a nano-second for Republican Catholics to move in for the kill. Men like William Simon, a Knight of Malta (an elite Catholic business organization) and a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, together with Michael Novak, a permanent fixture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and supply-sider extraordinaire, mustered a capitalist rearguard action to make the bishops look like a bunch of socialist Pollyannas. They had the pope's ear, so the pastoral withered on the vine; in time, new papal appointees made sure the conference would not chance its arm in such a way again.

The history of that pastoral letter exposes McHugh's resource distribution defense as the nasty little exercise in duplicity that it is. The guy does not believe a word he is saying and only says what he does in order to shift the focus from family planning. After I had expatiated on the bishop's behavior t my spouse -- who knows a thing or two about the economics of population growth, especially on the African continent -- he growled something about "packing the clown off for a decade to serve in a Lagos slum in Nigeria." Nigeria has a population of approximately 110 million, which by the year 2050 will have grown to 500 million.

In the end, the answer to these episcopal autocrats is abolition. Like the unelected hereditary lords who inhabit the upper chamber of the British Parliament, they are an anachronism. Privilege and rank make them natural reactionaries. In the bishops' case, they have strayed from (betrayed would be more accurate) their original role. In the very early church, they did pastor and encourage the flock (admittedly, never a happy metaphor) when those egalitarian, fledgling communities were being harassed by the dominant culture. The modern, bureaucratic, authoritarian bishop is a far cry from the New Testament model. The Christian leads only by service, says Jesus in Mark's gospel. And as a man who believed in owning only one coat, he would doubtlessly treat those gold vestments and silly hats with a certain asperity.

Ann Pettifer is the publisher of Common Sense, the alternative newspaper at the University of Notre Dame.