The Bishops and Reform Delayed

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

“Some turning point!” snorted a friend who keeps a gimlet eye on matters episcopal. He was referring to my little essay on promising developments in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) following their June meeting in Colorado. I titled it “Bishops at a Turning Point” (see FT October 2004). After last November’s meeting in Washington, I can only say in my defense that I did caution that, like a big oil tanker, institutions sometimes turn very slowly, almost imperceptibly. “Oh, the turn was perceptible enough,” retorted the aforementioned friend. “They turned back.”

My friend is hardly alone in his dour assessment. “Our bishops, it seems, want a time-out,” opined the editors of the leftward National Catholic Reporter. Voices from center to right were not so sanguine. There was, for instance, the election of Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Washington, as president of the conference. With a slate of ten nominees, he won, albeit narrowly, on the first ballot. Skylstad, it is generally agreed, is a company man. He had been vice president of the Conference for the last three years under Bishop Wilton Gregory, and it has always been the custom that vice presidents succeed to the presidency. But these are not customary times, and, while company men have a necessary part to play, it was thought by many bishops—but obviously not by enough—that the conference needed bolder leadership.

While bishops, needless to say, are immune to the lures of ambition, the general rule for getting ahead is not to blot one’s copybook, and Skylstad had been less than a success even on that score. Spokane is, for instance, racked with priestly sex abuse scandals and the consequent lawsuits and financial settlements. There are published reports of nefarious doings of which one has to think the bishop had to know, but he, in his innocence, apparently noticed nothing out of the way. During the past year, he took a pass on the question of pro-abortion Catholic politicians, but not before firing a shot at bishops “who use the Eucharist as a weapon.” Shortly before the November meeting, it was announced that Spokane was filing for bankruptcy, with unforeseen consequences for compromising the governance of the diocese. But Skylstad had been the vice president, and so he was elected president. It is the way things have always been done.

A Controverted Track Record

At the same time, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago, frequently described as the most respected member of the conference, was elected vice president. That almost certainly means that, if he agrees, he will be president in three years. (If George declines, the speculation is that Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh will be the next president.) According to that intrepid Rome reporter John Allen, in the Holy See, where George is held in highest esteem, there is great satisfaction with his election. It is said that, while Skylstad will be “the public face” of the conference, George will supply the “gravitas” that is not always in abundant supply, even among bishops. As much, if not more, discussed in the news from the November meeting was the election of Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pennsylvania, as head of the liturgy committee. Although it is not clear that the rules required it, Cardinal George resigned as liturgy chairman in order to accept the vice presidency, thus leaving the liturgy position vacant.

Trautman has a long and much controverted track record on matters liturgical. He was head of the same committee for a term in the 1990s. I have had occasion to offer some deferentially skeptical observations on Trautman’s very progressive views of Catholic worship (see FT October 1997). The election of Trautman was, one archbishop tells me, “a direct slap in the face of Arinze.” That is Francis Cardinal Arinze, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, who has upset what is commonly described as the network of liturgical terrorists that is responsible for the banalization of Catholic worship over the last several decades.

Talk with anyone who follows these disputes and you will hear a lot about “ICEL.” That is the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, not to be confused with another ICEL, the International Consortium for Experiential Learning, although there are similarities. Cardinal Arinze and others in Rome are concerned that liturgical reforms have gotten out of hand. He thinks, for instance, that English texts should be accurate translations of the Latin, and that the experiential and experimental should be tempered by the awareness that the Mass and other rites are universal, as in Catholic. Trautman is a great champion of ICEL, of “gender-inclusive” language, and of liturgical license in general. In recent years he has crisscrossed the country making speeches against “interference” by Roman reactionaries who, he says, are bent upon extinguishing the light of liturgical renewal. Trautman’s enthusiasm for gender-inclusive language has prompted some to refer to him, affectionately no doubt, as Bishop Trautperson. He is said to think that is not funny, and who can blame him?

Trautman’s nomination and election came as a surprise to most of the bishops, but obviously not to all. The two nominees for the liturgy post were Justin Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia and Bishop Allen Vigneron of Oakland, California. Then, quite out of the blue but employing a rarely used rule, Bishop Trautman was nominated from the floor, with the five necessary seconders already neatly lined up. The move was obviously well organized. After the voting, bishops who were unhappy with the result said it may have been a mistake to have two initial nominees who were perceived as being, in the words of one bishop, “too sympathetic to Rome.” The liturgy committee, like most committees of the conference, has little real power, but Trautman’s election signals a direction, and the committee can obstruct and delay Roman reforms. Between those who in public prayer prefer the formal “We humbly beseech you, Almighty God” and those who prefer the ever-so-spontaneous “Lord, we’re just here to tell you,” and between those who think the Mass is about the Real Presence of Christ and those who accent deeply meaningful interactions among his Really Awesome People, the bishops wanted to find a middle ground. So they went with the spontaneously klutzy and deeply meaningful.

There were other developments. The very astute Archbishop John Myers of Newark, New Jersey, was elected chairman of canon law, but just barely. The bishops agreed to work over the next couple of years on a pastoral letter on the family. Auxiliary Bishop Richard Sklba of Milwaukee is the new head of ecumenism. His ecumenical disposition tends toward the latitudinarian, although he has clarified that he does think there may still be church-dividing differences between Catholics and Lutherans (see FT February 2004). The bishops approved membership in a new project called “Christian Churches Together” (CCT). This was after they were given firm assurances that the commitment is to little more than friendly meetings among Christian leaders on a regular basis. CCT would not, they were promised, be able to issue statements on behalf of the bishops without their permission. Of course, CCT could issue statements on behalf of the other “four families” in its membership, in which case the headlines would read, “Catholics Oppose National Christian Leaders.” But the general feeling was that there was not much risk in CCT and maybe some good would come of it, so the bishops went along. The five families of CCT are Evangelical/Pentecostal, Historic Protestant, Orthodox, Racial/Ethnic (meaning mainly black), and Catholic. “Talk about the five families sounds like a novel by Mario Puzo,” said one archbishop.

The discussion of new forms for episcopal collegiality and accountability, such as a plenary council or a special synod of bishops, was put off. It is scheduled to be taken up in the meeting of June 2006. The charter and statutes adopted at Dallas 2002 for dealing with priestly sex abuse, including “zero tolerance” and “one strike and you’re out,” are being reexamined by Rome and will be revisited by the bishops next June. The worry that the conference is staff-dominated and committee-driven was addressed in a report that proposed that the bishops should “prioritize” their many concerns. (The use of “prioritize” does sound like it came from another committee, which it did.) Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, a keeper of the flame from the old Cardinal Bernardin days of the conference, said the report was very nice but was “blue-skying it,” meaning that such changes were not going to happen. As another bishop told me, “Conference business has been bureaucratic Jabberwocky from the beginning, and will be Jabberwocky until the end.”

In any event, the sense at the meeting was that the bishops need to focus on putting the Catholic house in order, concentrating on evangelization, catechesis, the Eucharist, and the priesthood. The last means increasing priestly vocations, of course, but also attending to the morale of the priesthood, which has been seriously damaged by the sex abuse scandals and the propensity of bishops to throw priests overboard in order to save money, to save face, and to save their own skins. The priorities set, however, do reflect the observation of Archbishop Timothy Dolan of Milwaukee in his 2004 Erasmus Lecture that the bishops will increasingly attend to internal (ad intra) problems rather than lobbying on public policy (ad extra).

Then there was Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington DC, and his task force on what to do about Catholic politicians who publicly and persistently defy the Church’s teaching. It may be recalled from my commentary on the June 2004 meeting that the Cardinal’s position is that the bishops should not do very much, if anything at all, about it. I had written that McCarrick had been less than straightforward with his colleagues in representing a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the subject. A number of bishops have said that I greatly understated what McCarrick did, but I’ll stay with my formulation that he was “less than straightforward.” At the November meeting, McCarrick was to make a report on behalf of his task force but, despite the fact that the agenda was finished early and the meeting was reduced to three from its scheduled four days, the Cardinal “in the interest of time” simply put a two-and-a-half-page report on the chairs. That precluded debate and awkward questions. Not that the bishops were eager for debate or inclined to ask awkward questions.

Competing Causes

According to Cardinal McCarrick’s report, everything was handled just right. “Bishops, pastors, and parishioners across the country have been wrestling with how our faith should shape our decisions in public life. This has been a very good thing.” Yes, there were problems. “The media or partisan forces sometimes tried to pit one bishop against another.” Oh dear, the media and partisan forces are at it again. Especially those partisan forces that are obsessed by the “one issue politics” of abortion. Never mind that some bishops very publicly stated that support for abortion and embryonic stem-cell research gravely compromised a politician’s communio with the Church, while others just as publicly said they saw no problem and happily invited such politicians to receive Communion. “We do not believe,” says the McCarrick report, “that our commitment to human life and dignity and our pursuit of justice and peace are competing causes.” But nobody said they were competing causes, except possibly Cardinal McCarrick and other bishops who seem to think the Democratic Party has a monopoly on the pursuit of justice and peace. At the November meeting, there was neither opportunity nor stomach for discussing McCarrick’s report. Which may be just as well. The bishops were simply grateful that they had escaped the prospect of having a radically pro-abortion Catholic in the White House. Except, of course, for those bishops committed to the pursuit of justice and peace.

So what happened to the “turning point”? I asked several of those who are commonly called John Paul II bishops. They are called that because they see John Paul II as an exemplar to emulate rather than an aberration to be endured. They see this pontificate as the source of authentic renewal and reform rather than as an authoritarian imposition to be resisted. The answers to my question were various: “We play by the rules and they don’t.” “The old Bernardin machine still has more gas than we thought.” “I refuse to play the debasing game of conference politics.” “Some find their satisfaction in being a conference player. My satisfaction is in being a bishop.” “The conference is finally irrelevant. In no important way does it affect what I have to do in my diocese. Why waste time on it?” And so forth.

And then there was this: “You were right in the first place, the June meeting was a turning point. The Old Guard knows that, and in the [November] meeting they fought back. Time and the age of the newer bishops are not on their side. Give us a few more years. The springtime of reform that the Holy Father talks about may not come until after his death, but it will come.” Oremus. Meantime, hold your Calloohs and Callays. The Jabberwock lives.