Can the Pope command his flock?

FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT IN VATICAN CITY

In his battle to win a largely agnostic and indifferent world back to the idea of belief in God, Pope John Paul wants a Catholic clergy staunch in the faith and imbued with a sense of spiritual purpose. The most important battlefield is the United States. Here is a report from the front.

This year seemed to start well for Pope John Paul in America. In January, after a hiatus lasting well over a century, the United States resumed full diplomatic relations with the Vatican. They were broken off in 1867 when congress heard that the Pope was going to forbid American Protestants to hold services within Rome's city walls. Now it is the administration of a Protestant, Mr. Ronald Reagan, that has decided to heal the breach. Another Protestant, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana—who, like Mr. Reagan, is a keen admirer of the present Pope—led the fight in congress to reverse the 1867 decision. Pope John Paul, the senator argued, deserved credit for transforming the Vatican into a "significant political force for decency in the world".

Yet although the Pope may bask in the approval of prominent American Protestants, his relations with some of his own flock in the United States are far from good. America's 52m Roman Catholics are, by Vatican standards, a wayward lot. Twenty years ago, 72% of them went regularly to mass; in 1979 only about 40% did. In large cities like New York, according to some reports, attendance is down to less than 30%. This means that fewer Catholics are seeking from the church the spiritual benefits it can provide in the sacraments. It also means less money for church causes, because most of that is collected in the form of Sunday and feastday offerings in the plate.

American Catholics, besides, are increasingly challenging their church's teaching on sexual morals. About 5m of them, or 10% of the total Catholic population, are probably living in marriages the church considers invalid. Divorce rates among Catholics are not so different from everybody else's: 445 out of every 1,000 marriages solemnised in the Catholic church now end in divorce. As many as three quarters of American Catholic women are believed to be using contraceptives in disregard of the church ban so often reiterated by the Pope.

Some American Catholics on the liberal wing of the church shrug these figures off as neither particularly significant nor worrying. If so many Catholics are ignoring the church's sexual teaching, they say, that simply confirms that the teaching is outmoded and needs to be changed. This is not what the Pope thinks. He has never departed from the line he took when he visited the United States in October, 1979, urging Catholics to stand up more resolutely for the official teaching on sexual matters. He reminded them that they must oppose sexual intercourse outside marriage, divorce, contraception and, last though not least, abortion.

But the Pope cannot do much by making appeals directly to the laity; he has to use the clergy as his agents. Here the sheer size and power of the American church ought to be to his advantage. Although Americans account for only 6.6% of the world's 780m or so Catholics, they make up 13% of the members of Catholic male religious orders and about 11% of the world's Roman Catholic nuns. America's 58,000 priests account for 14% of the world total. They are presided over by a hierarchy of 54 archbishops and 370 bishops.

The Catholic church in the United States is also rich. It provides financial support and manpower for the church in poorer lands, as well as for the Vatican's central institutions and projects. Many thousands of American priests, monks and nuns and some layfolk, too, are working in Central and South America, Asia and Africa as missionaries, teachers and social workers.

The American church, however, is not as dependable as it looks. To begin with, it will soon have a serious manpower problem. There are fewer than 12,000 seminarians studying for the priesthood now, compared with 48,000 in 1965. Of these, only some 60% are expected to take their final vows and become priests. According to some estimates, the Roman Catholic church in the United States will have only 28,000 priests by the year 2000, less than half the number it has now. Their average age, now 56, will be 73. This smaller priestly force will have to cope with a much larger flock because of the growth in the number of the country's Latino population (Mexican-Americans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and a large number of exiles from South and Central American countries). This growth is expected to increase the Catholic proportion of the total population of the United States from less than a quarter now to about a third by the end of the century.

More immediately worrying for the Pope than the lack of manpower, however, are the ideas that many American priests, nuns and bishops have got into their heads. The Pope had a taste of this during his 1979 visit when a prominent nun, Sister Mary Theresa Kane, stood up in her tailored brown suit and publicly criticised him for his refusal to allow Catholic women to be ordained as priests. The ordination of women is the most spectacular point of difference between the church in America and the Vatican; but there are many others.

It has been obvious for years that parish priests, and their bishops, tend to turn a blind eye to the laity's lapses over marriage and birth control. Many clergy on the liberal wing would rather leave such decisions to the laity. Some go farther, and see the decline in vocations as a welcome sign that the laity are getting involved in the ministry, and the more such involvement the better. Priests, they feel, could become more like laymen, by being allowed to get married and by getting more involved in earthly matters. A Jesuit has already sat in congress, and a nun has run the office of social services in Michigan.

Nor do controversial thoughts stop with the clergy at large. American bishops, for their part, are increasingly preoccupied with social, economic and political matters. The bishops themselves appear pleased by the worldwide publicity their pastoral letter on nuclear war was given last spring and the controversy it generated. (The letter concluded that nuclear war could not be justified under any circumstances, but skated round the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons.)

At the moment, a committee of bishops is working on a pastoral letter on the morality of capitalism which, it is thought, will be highly critical of various aspects of the free-market system. The letter will not be published until after the American presidential election in November but, without a doubt, there will be leaks aplenty before then.

What can a pontiff do when the clergy in one of the most powerful branches of the Church behave in this way? At first, Pope John Paul seemed nonplussed: for a time after his 1979 visit there were no open words between the Pope and Catholics in the United States. But last autumn the Pope went over to the offensive. He reminded a number of American Catholic bishops, in Rome for their obligatory five-yearly visit, that sex before marriage and homosexual relations were not part of "God's plan for human love". He urged them to proclaim "the unpopular truth that artificial birth control is against the law". And he demanded that they should withdraw "all support from individuals or groups who, in the name of progress, justice or compassion, or for any other alleged reason, promote the ordination of women to the priesthood."

Settling a church dispute?

Pope's move

The Pope has not stopped at exhortation. Last October he ordered an investigation into the ministry of a well-known liberal American Catholic prelate, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle. Three years ago the archbishop caused ripples when he announced that he was going to withhold half his federal income tax, his estimate of what would be spent on defence. But the Vatican investigation, which was carried out by another American prelate, Archbishop James Hickey of Washington, DC, was not directed at Mgr Hunthausen's views and actions on the defence issue, but at his stand on other matters. A number of Catholics in his archdiocese were unhappy, claiming that their chief pastor was not giving them enough support in the struggle against abortion. In September, there was a demonstration outside his cathedral where a special mass was being held, with his permission, for Dignity, an organisation which campaigns for a change in the Catholic teaching on homosexuality.

A similar investigation has been carried out into another church liberal, Bishop Walter Sullivan of Richmond, Virginia. And other, more general investigations are in progress: one into the functioning of seminaries where future Roman Catholic priests are trained, another into the work of religious orders in the United States.

The inquiry into the seminaries, first ordered by the Vatican in 1981, got under way last year under the direction of Bishop John Marshall of Burlington, Vermont. Mgr. Marshall has already conveyed to American bishops and seminary directors the Vatican directive that only priests can be spiritual directors of seminarians. This is important because during the past decade many nuns have moved into the formation programme of seminaries, often as spiritual directors.

The special commission on religious orders was set up last year, under the chairmanship of Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco, with the task of promoting renewal in religious orders for men and women. In a letter published last year, the Pope called for firm action where individuals or groups, for whatever reason, have departed from the indispensable norms of religious life, or have even, to the scandal of the faithful, adopted positions at variance with the church's teaching.

A Vatican document released simultaneously also had some points of particular relevance to religious orders in America. Members should "wear the religious garb of the institute, described in their proper law, as a sign of consecration and a witness of poverty". They "may not accept duties and offices outside their own institute without the permission of a lawful superior" and they could not accept, on any account, "public offices which involve the exercise of civil power".

The reaction from feminist groups among American nuns was, predictably, a raspberry. Sister Maureen Fiedler, a leader of a body that calls itself the Women's Ordination Conference, put it succinctly: "If the Pope wants nuns to be obedient, good little sisters the way they used to be, well, there's just no way."

Yet the Pope is not entirely without allies in the United States. A lot of nuns agreed with Sister Fiedler, but as many, or more, endorsed the line taken by Mother Teresa of Calcutta in her letter of last November addressed to American nuns: "The ambition to be equal to men in all things, even in the priesthood, has taken away that peace and joy of being one with Jesus and his church." Mother Teresa is, so to speak, a good card for the Pope to play in America: an activist nun if ever there was one, but a doctrinal conservative as well.

It is clear that not all American Catholics are happy with the way their church is going. One of the most forceful critics, a Jesuit and editor of the New York-based Homiletic and Pastoral Review, Father Kenneth Baker, speaks of a trend "towards an American church, a church separate and independent from Rome". Father Baker's magazine and other traditionalist publications complain that the Catholic church in America gives too much preference to the secular over the sacred. It cares a lot about nuclear arms, El Salvador, the third world and welfare programmes: too little about the widespread loss of faith, supernatural life, heaven and hell, the decline of reverence and the immortality of the soul.

The catalogue of complaints is long. They are regularly forwarded to the Pope's man in Washington, Archbishop Laghi, and to influential figures in the Vatican. On the ground in the United States, various grassroots organisations have sprung up to fight modernism and secularism and to press for a return to Catholic tradition.

These traditionalists are by no means a bunch of old fogies. They include Professor James Hitchcock, a lively polemicist who teaches history at St Louis University; Mgr. George Kelly, author of a controversial recent study called "The Crisis of Authority", who is director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Catholic Doctrine at St John's University; and a political commentator, Mr. Michael Novak. Mr. Novak, a well-known liberal figure in the 1960s, used to write of American society as "technicist, spiritless, corporatist and militaristic". No longer: his conversion to conservative thinking, both political and religious, has been complete. The title of his most recent book is "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism".

A few of the critics would like the Pope to be more forceful and to appoint, for example, a papal legate to run the church in America. But the Pope prefers to act through the bishops. The procedures of the second Vatican council require him to; and the bishops are, in any case, the most important group in the Pope's plans for America.

Twixt hammer and anvil

The bishops do not want a confrontation with the Pope. He does not want one either. On the other hand, the bishops are under pressure from the liberal wing of the church, notably the feminists supported by the vocal feminist lobby outside the church, to demand changes in sexual teaching and the ordination of women. They are caught between the papal hammer and the feminist anvil.

At their national plenary session in November, American Catholic bishops were told in no uncertain terms by Archbishop Laghi that papal warnings must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Nevertheless, some 100 bishops attended a conference in Washington, also in November, at which calls were heard from three women theologians for an end to the "structured sin of patriarchy" and for a reshaping of the church from a hierarchical body to a more democratic one. The bishops have just finished four years of talks with the advocates of women's ordination and have promised a pastoral letter on women in the church by 1986 or 1987.

And so it looks as if the present liberal leadership of the bishops' organisation, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, will try to ride out the crisis by putting the best face on things and pretending there are no real problems, only misunderstandings. There is only one drawback: they may not be allowed to.

The Pope has started appointing new American bishops who are likely to respond to his call for action. Two senior posts have recently fallen vacant; two more will come up soon. Cardinals Terence Cooke of New York and Humberto Medeiros of Boston died within a month of each other last autumn. Cardinal Timothy Manning of Los Angeles is due to retire in October and Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia next year.

On January 24th, Boston went to Mgr. Bernard Law, the bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Montana, a moderate on contentious issues and a good theologian deeply involved in ecumenical questions. On January 31st, New York, one of America's largest archdioceses, was given to Mgr. John O'Connor, who had been bishop of Scranton in Pennsylvania for only seven months. For 27 years before that he had been the American navy's chief of chaplains, with the rank of rear-admiral. On the five-strong committee of American bishops which was responsible for the drafting of last year's pastoral letter on nuclear war, he was the sole pro-deterrence figure, and managed to make his points effectively. Some American Catholics suspect that he may have persuaded the Pope to intervene in the debate by inviting the bishops to the Vatican for a chat with Cardinal Casaroli, the secretary of state, before the third and final draft was completed.

It is already clear that the new archbishop of New York can be expected, among other things, to provide a strong counterweight to the liberal Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago. Among the bishops, Cardinal Bernadin has become something of a media star, though his actual words are careful: his most recent call was for Catholics, laity and clergy alike, to become "pro-life" in every sense, opposing not only nuclear weapons but abortion and euthanasia as well. None the less, his very popularity marks him out as a man, perhaps the man, the Vatican needs to watch.

What will happen next cannot be predicted. The dilemma of the "progressive" bishops will not go away. The feminists will not speak any more softly. Political battles joined cannot be unjoined. One thing alone is certain: the Catholic church in America will, in the coming months and years, offer one of the best opportunities to judge the effectiveness on the ground of Pope John Paul's leadership of his church.