In 1789, the United States Constitution is ratified, George Washington is
inaugurated, John Carroll becomes the first United States bishop and Georgetown
is established by Carroll as the first Catholic institution of higher
learning.
Carroll allows English in the Liturgy and he supports a strong voice for the
laity in the American trustee system. There are three characteristics of this
trustee system:
the laity nominates candidates as pastor and the bishop
appoints
the bishop has limited rights to dismiss a pastor
disputes are settled in an arbitration committee, half of whose members are
lay
Carroll, furthermore, promotes open discussion and allows the dissent which
accompanies it. He observes that “…a free circulation to fair
argument is the most effectual method to bring…Christians
to…unity…” Notice the words: the best method is open
discussion; this discussion does not promote division but unity. It sounds
counter-intuitive to Europe; Americans know it works.
As we take our leave of Carroll, we note that a number of initiatives are in
place:
1. a substantial voice for the laity
2. the right of clergy to choose their bishop
3. a sense that democracy is good for the Church
4. a written constitution for the clergy with a clear definition of authority
and its limits
5. a preference for public debate and dialogue on Church issues
6. ecumenism
7. a warning that foreign and papal interference will diminish the
credibility of Church leaders
John England
In 1823, thirty-four years after Carroll’s ordination as Bishop of
Baltimore, John England of Charleston, South Carolina, issues a
“Constitution of the Roman Catholic Church of South Carolina.”
John England researched the document thoroughly going back to the theology of
conciliarism in the 1415 Council of Constance. That Council forced three popes
to resign and declared ecumenical councils superior to papal authority.
This Church Constitution of South Carolina notes that the bishop is not the
“deputy of the Pope” any more than the governor of an American State
is a deputy of the President of the United States. As each American State can
have its own laws, in general agreement with the Constitution of the United
States, so each diocese can formulate its own laws and culture, in general
agreement with the universal Church. The Constitution adds that “We are
not required by our Faith to believe the Pope is infallible.”
The Constitution calls for a vestry of laity to supervise the finances of
each parish. The vestry settles salary for clergy and pays them directly. It
selects all lay ministers and personnel for the parish; no lay person can be
removed from office except by decision of the vestry. If the vestry has a
problem with its priest, it meets without him and sends its report directly to
the bishop for resolution.
On the diocesan level, a board of “General Trustees” is in charge
of all diocesan funds. This board consists of five clergy (the bishop, a vicar
and three clergy chosen by the clergy) and six laity, chosen by the laity.
The “Constitution” continues and advances characteristics of John
Carroll’s approach:
1. a substantial voice for the laity and the right to elect
trustees
2. a written constitution
3. a preference for public debate and dialogue
A special feature of this “Constitution” is an annual convention
of clergy and laity. This convention takes place every year from 1823 until John
England’s death, some twenty years later, in 1842.
The annual meeting of the convention has a house of clergy and a house of
laity. The lay house selects its members, elects its president and meets on its
own. No act of the convention is valid unless a majority of clergy, a majority
of laity and the consent of the bishop are in harmony. If a majority of both
houses disagree with the bishop, delegates can appeal to Rome to have the bishop
do what they wish.
For some twenty years, John England is, perhaps, the most powerful voice in
the American Catholic hierarchy. A sign of his influence is the two-hour address
he is invited to deliver before the United States Congress. He will be a leader
in assembling the plenary councils of bishops in Baltimore, as we shall see in a
moment. These councils are the most successful example of collegiality in the
universal Church of the nineteenth century:
There are final vestiges of this thoroughly American and yet Roman, free and
yet traditional style in three surprising developments in the late nineteenth
century:
1. nation-wide meetings of the entire American episcopate,
plenary sessions at Baltimore, convene in 1855, 1866, and 1884; they are
consciously collegial in their approach as we have noted; they anticipate the
regular national conferences of bishops called for in Vatican II
2. the American bishops arrive at Vatican I opposed to a definition of papal
infallibility; they believe it will inflame American and Protestant fears of
foreign interference, idolatry, and papal control of free speech; indeed, almost
half of the American bishops (22) leave the Council as approval of infallibility
becomes inevitable
3. the first Parliament of World Religions takes place in Chicago in 1893 at
a time when Catholics and Protestants do not dialogue with one another freely;
three episcopal leaders of the American Church participate, on an equal footing
with major world religious leaders, much to the subsequent anger of Rome: James
Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore (from the North); John Keane of Richmond,
Virginia, first rector of Catholic University (from the South); John Ireland of
St. Paul, Minnesota (from the Midwest)
In these late nineteenth-century developments we see a stress on
collegiality, concern for free speech in the Church and a sensitivity to
ecumenical and even interreligious dialogue. We find the roots of this in John
Carroll’s and John England’s ecclesiology.
So what went wrong?
There are two possible explanations. The first is suggested by Alexis de
Tocqueville, the most astute observer of American culture in history. In 1831,
in the latter years of the American Phase, he notes that American Catholics are
“the most democratic class in the United States…very sincere”
but also “very submissive.”
This submissiveness will end the American influence on the Catholic Church
when Rome turns harshly against it. Submissiveness and Roman censure terminate
the American Phase and bring us to the Roman Phase of the American Catholic
Church.
The Roman Phase 1850-1960
The Roman reaction against American inculturation is swift and harsh.
John Carroll is informed that he will not be consulted on the choice of
future American bishops and that there will be no further clergy elections of
their bishop. Some twenty years after John Carroll’s brave experiment on
election of bishops, four new dioceses are created and bishops appointed in
Bardstown, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, without consultation with Carroll
or with clergy. The trustee system is ended and the ownership of all parish
property is transferred to the bishop.
Pope Leo XIII directs two negative encyclical letters against the American
Church.
The first of these, Longinqua Oceani (1895) rejects the American
separation of Church and State and makes it clear that this is a “very
erroneous” arrangement even for the United States. The encyclical notes
with horror that “State and Church…in America” are
“dissevered and divorced.” Rome will at best tolerate this
experiment in America but only until Catholics are a majority. At that point,
American Catholics must press for a union of Church and State and for the
marginalization of all Protestant Churches. The encyclical calls for a
“submissive spirit” from the clergy and for “obedience from
the laity.”
The second letter, Testem Benevolentiae (1899) took direct aim at
American Catholic culture. It found American Catholics:
1. too eager to accommodate doctrine to modernity (change)
2. too willing to think and say whatever they wish and indeed to express
these thoughts too readily in print (free speech)
3. too individualistic and too willing to rely on the direct influence of the
Spirit in their spiritual lives rather than following the “well-known
path” laid out by the Church (conscience)
4. too enamored of active and practical virtues, to the neglect of passive
and contemplative values (pragmatism)
5. too dismissive of vows and formal religious life (initiative)
The encyclical condemns these characteristics as “Americanism,” a
general tendency to suppose that the “Church in America” can be
“different from” the rest of the world.
Cardinal James Gibbons objects to the encyclical in a sharp letter to the
Pope on March 17, 1899.
If one looks carefully at the encyclical letter Testem Benevolentiae,
the five criticisms of Leo XIII go to the heart of American culture. He
dislikes, as we have noted: change, free speech, conscience, pragmatism and
initiative.
The submissiveness De Tocqueville observed and the Roman critique of America
advanced even further because of the massive influx of immigrants. The
immigrants were less adept with the American system. They did not, for the most
part, have English as a native language; as Catholics, they cared less about an
active voice in governing their Church than in surviving. A ready group of
bishops moved in a sternly conservative direction, with Roman support.
The Roman Phase stresses submissiveness, the papal critique of America and
service to the immigrant community. In fairness, it must be noted that many
conservative and even repressive bishops organized assistance for Catholic
immigrants that was often healing and life-saving. A great deal of social
justice work was expended on behalf of vulnerable and frightened immigrants. But
these bishops, in turn, and many priests, insisted on absolute power and total
obedience. They were brilliant organizers but also men of narrow theological
vision. They tended to be belligerent, more impressive in conflict than in their
capacity to reconcile.
John Hughes, Archbishop of New York, is typical. He dismantles the trustee
system in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, boasting, “I made war on the
whole system.” He added that “Catholics did their duty when they
obeyed their bishop.” Even more ominously, he warns: “I will suffer
no man in my diocese that I cannot control.”
Rome kept up the pressure. In Vehementer Nos , Pius X writes:
“…the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led
and, like a docile flock, to follow their pastors…”
This Roman Phase was strongly hierarchical. It instilled a sacramental
reverence for Church authority, a sense that Christ was present in every
official decision. The laity were to receive authority the way they would
receive sacraments. Obedience became a central, defining virtue, a mark of
holiness, an indispensable condition for approval and promotion. Dissent was
treasonous, diagnosed as a pathology. Initiative withered. This Church gave
safety to its compliant members but if filled them with a sense of paranoia and
suspicion of everything that was not Catholic. It seemed a very long time ago
indeed when democracy and open discussion were promoted in Catholic Church
circles.
Nonetheless, immigrant Catholics found a harbor of safety in the ghetto they
built with their language, culture and Catholicism. Within these enclaves, three
objectives were of paramount importance.
The first of these was education and the construction of a massive and
expensive private school system. There was a general fear of American culture
and public life, a distrust of American universities, the New York Times,
non-Catholic writers, and Protestant crusades such as the abolition of slavery,
the women’s suffragette movement, prohibition of alcohol, birth control,
socialism. To many Protestants, Catholics seemed immoral, favoring slavery and
alcohol and gambling, resisting a woman’s right to vote and social
reforms, using language against Margaret Sanger and birth control that was as
incendiary as the language now used against legal abortion.
In fairness, it is important to observe that the Protestant majority did not
always make things easy for Catholics. It could be discriminatory, even savage.
In 1834, a Catholic convent was burned to the ground in Charleston,
Massachusetts; in 1850, the Know Nothing Party was founded with a virulent
anti-Catholic agenda.
Protestants were terrified of the papacy, now claiming infallibility for
itself, and of the escalating number of obedient Catholic immigrants flooding
the country. American bishops were trained in Rome and regularly traveled there
for consultations with the Pope. Catholics fed these fears with huge parades
like St. Patrick’s Day and Holy Name extravaganzas. These were Eucharistic
Congresses which brought Vatican and foreign Church dignitaries in flamboyant
dress and with aristocratic titles
The Catholic school system never became as large as the hierarchy wanted.
There never was a school for every parish. The American bishops meeting in the
Baltimore Councils threatened Catholic parents with the denial of sacraments if
they did not send their children to Catholic schools. Nonetheless, most Catholic
children went to public schools. Even so, the Catholic school system became the
largest private educational enterprise in the history of the world. It trained
five million elementary students at its height. This system was complemented
with thousands of high schools and hundreds of colleges and universities.
The Catholic school system did a great deal of good, certainly, but it was
under the strict control of the pastor and this frightened non-Catholics. It
pulled thousands of Catholic teachers out of the public school system where they
would have had to contend with greater diversity. It paid its lay teachers
one-third the salary of their public school counterparts and it gave multitudes
of women religious virtually no pay at all. The system both inspired and
exploited women; it gave lay teachers a noble calling but it allowed them no
rights.
I stated a moment ago that there were three paramount objectives of this
Roman Phase. The first of these was education; the second was the development of
a piety that was sentimental, at times superstitious, and always submissive.
Once again, here also, not everything about this was bad.
The life of Catholic immigrants was harsh, even cruel. People of enormous
courage came to these shores, leaving their families and countries of origin
often forever, struggling with language and culture, with menial jobs and unfair
class and religious discrimination.
Sentimental piety brought comfort to many; quasi-superstitious practices, a
relic or a scapular, gave a measure of control or protection; submissiveness
seemed fitting (give us a church and a school, a network of friends, a sense God
cares for us and we will obey in any way you wish).
This piety, nonetheless, fed, consciously or not, into the ecclesial politics
of the hierarchy. It kept Catholics from organizing national lay congresses; it
eliminated the last vestiges of the trustee system; it took away the will and
the desire for democracy in the Church; and, it crushed dissent. It gave the
hierarchy legions of docile voters who could be marshaled against political
adversaries. It provided enormous economic clout to church officials who could
boycott and censure films and books they did not favor. It garnered massive sums
of money that bishops could use as they saw fit, with no meaningful
accountability. The truth became a casualty through all of this. Cardinal John
Henry Newman once observed that “piety and power make life difficult for
truth.”
The third paramount objective was recruitment for formal ministry. At its
height, in the 1960’s, the American Catholic Church had some 300,000 women
religious, priests and seminarians. That number is currently some two-thirds
less, with a much larger Catholic population and a much older corps of canonical
ministers.
During the Roman Phase, the crowning achievement of the Catholic Church in
this country was tied up with ministerial vows and ordination. Priests were
called “other Christs” and nuns were described as angelic and
saintly.
Marriage was considered an inferior vocation; lay life was a second-rate way
to be a Christian. The juggernaut of a Catholic educational system, a submissive
piety, and a denigration of marriage left Catholic laity with a diminished sense
of their value and worth and with the conviction that the Church belonged to the
bishops and pope.
Let me add, however, that the success of institutional Catholicism was
stunning; no other national Church in the modern world equalled the power,
wealth and organization of the American Catholic Church. It also did an enormous
amount of good. Its schools and hospitals, its rituals of healing and its
parishes with their sense of belonging, its willingness to demand better working
conditions and its insistence that Catholics must be American and must not press
for the union of Church and State, all this was admirable. All this gave people
meaning at times and it strengthened the life of this nation. Such a Church gave
us Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton although, we must add, it resisted the former
and silenced the latter.
There were costs, however, and as Catholics became educated and autonomous,
they were no longer willing to pay them. It was a remarkable system but it
favored an aristocratic few and it eventually destroyed the freedom and dignity
of people to an extent that assured its demise.
The Catholic Phase 1960-Present
The American Catholic Church works best with revolutions. Two key revolutions
define where the American Catholic Church is today.
We have seen how the American Revolution itself shaped Catholicism in this
country. I suggest it would have given this nation and the world a brilliant
model of creative theology for the modern era had it not been crushed.
The second revolution came in our time and we are its heirs and witnesses.
This was, of course, Vatican II. It has shaped the American Catholic Church
perhaps more profoundly than any other national Church. Indeed, it has both
moved us forward and brought us back to our revolutionary roots.
Vatican II changed Rome itself and moved Rome closer to American Catholicism
than anyone might have expected. Rome is now more defined by the American
Declaration of Independence than it is by the papal Syllabus of Errors; it is
more powerfully influenced by the Declaration on Religious Freedom, a Vatican II
document Americans crafted, than it is by its own condemnation of Modernism; its
present Code of Canon Law resonates with the language of the Bill of Rights and
affirms equality, free speech, due process, freedom of association, freedom of
inquiry and the right of privacy (this is very different from Pius X’s
insistence that the laity must be “led…like a docile flock, to
follow their pastor”). Rome realizes that the ideas and the language of
American culture create a far more credible vocabulary for modern discourse than
its own monarchical system.
Rome, I suggest, has no choice now except to move in an American direction. A
revolution begins by rejecting the language of oppression and then compels the
oppressor to change the system. The revolution has begun and it will carry the
Catholic Church to reform and renewal.
Vatican II unmasked the liabilities of Vatican I. Vatican I gave the Church
to the Pope; Vatican II made clear that the Pope cannot manage the Church.
The papal mishandling of the Church between Vatican I and Vatican II is
breath-taking in its scope. The popes have been wrong on issues Vatican II
reversed: political democracy and ecumenism, biblical studies and liturgy,
religious liberty and world religions, Judaism and the Holocaust, the definition
of marriage and the acceptance of married clerics, theological freedom and the
overwhelming vote of the papal commission to approve birth control as a moral
option in marriage (52-4). The architects of Vatican II were the theologians in
the generation before it who were silenced by the popes for proposing the very
doctrines which were now declared official teaching.
The last effort to maintain a Vatican I Church is the pontificate of John
Paul II. He has made his own theology and piety the norm for approval.
Theologians have been intimidated and excommunicated, books suppressed, male
celibate priesthood proclaimed as ontologically superior to all the baptized,
debate prohibited, women defined without their concurrence or consent, and
servile bishops appointed in extraordinary numbers to tasks which exceed their
intelligence, their competence, and their pastoral skills. The sexual abuse of
clergy is criticized in gentler terms than the condemnation of condoms to
prevent AIDS or irresponsible pregnancies. Catholic political leaders are
censured for their views on abortion but not for their support of the death
penalty and their approval of war. The notion that the Pope is the Church and
that the Church is a monarchy has been revived under John Paul II but this time
there is a Council, Vatican II, and a world-wide consensus which offer
resistance.
In June of 1995, twelve American bishops (with the support of forty other
bishops who endorsed but did not sign the document) listed fifteen pastorally
urgent issues which the episcopal conference is frightened to discuss because of
Vatican intimidation:
1. presenting the minority position of Vatican II as
though it were the majority
2. ecumenical issues
3. marital annulments
4. appointment of bishops
5. the relationship of episcopal conferences and Rome
6. collegiality in the Church
7. the role of women and their ordination
8. the shortage of priests
9. the morale of priests
10. the ordination of married men
11. sexual ethics
12. contraception
13. homosexuality
14. abortion
15. pedophilia
We must not, of course, overlook the good this papacy accomplished with its
millennial plea for forgiveness for catastrophes and scandals caused by
Catholics over the centuries. The social justice teaching which is a complement
to the plea for forgiveness has been impressive. There have been prayers with
world religious leaders and support by the Vatican for separating Church and
State, even in Italy. John Paul II has prayed in mosques and synagogues, in
Protestant Churches commemorating Martin Luther and at Gandhi’s tomb.
There is the beginnings of a Catholic bill of rights in the 1983 Code of Canon
Law and a changed policy on married Latin-Rite Catholic priests if they are
former Protestant pastors.
Nonetheless, these changes have been made monarchically, not collegially.
They are admirable decisions but they do not alter the underlying abusive
system.
This papacy has destroyed the effectiveness of the International Synod of
Bishops, the most impressive collegial structure set up by Vatican II. It has
taken direct aim at freedom of speech and inquiry with its mandatum of
episcopal approval for Catholic theologians and threatened them thereby with
dismissal and loss of livelihood if they are not compliant. The world at large
does not see the Catholic Church as a champion of freedom or human rights. It is
not friendly to women or eager for Christian unity. It has not been sensitive to
the pastoral care people deserve if that care requires an inclusive priesthood
or an acceptance of faithful homosexuals or remarried Catholics or a trust in
the work of the Spirit as manifested in the sensus fidelium. At its best, it has
been benignly patriarchical. In its worst moments, it has terrified God’s
People and tyrannized them in a shameful and deeply hurtful manner. This is not
a papacy which people turn to for healing; indeed it has left in its wake
countless wounded Catholics, the collateral damage it inflicted as it imposed on
the Church an abusive system of authority and control.
Since secularity and modernity have often been denounced by Church leaders,
sometimes correctly, but often as a way of shifting blame and attention, it may
be useful to reflect on the immediate past and to determine whether the world at
large or Americans in particular are untrustworthy. The twentieth century was
not only a century of unimaginable human suffering but a century of revolution
and freedom. We must not indict the crimes without citing the miracles. Nor must
we be embarrassed if the miracles were frequently the work of American influence
and democracy.
Three of these miracles are especially impressive:
1. the creation of the United Nations, an American idea, in
1945; it has lasted now some sixty years and emerged as the conscience of the
world, sometimes witnessing against American arrogance; minorities and women
found a voice at the United Nations never given them in the Catholic Church
2. the creation of the European Union, begun with the Marshall Plan in 1946,
supported by Americans wholeheartedly and now autonomous of American dominance;
the European Union has given diversity, reproductive rights and civil liberties
a hearing they never received at the Vatican
3. the creation of democracy in Russia with the breath-taking collapse of
Eastern European colonies (1989), the Berlin Wall (1990), and the Soviet Union
(1991), all in a two-year period and all without violence
The fact that Americans cannot bring democracy or these miracles to the
Catholic Church at large is the single greatest failure of American Catholicism.
The fact that American bishops repeat mindlessly that the Church must not be a
democracy is anti-American and anti-Christian. All the other Christian Churches
are collegial. Loyalty to Christ, after all, is not essentially connected with
monarchy and ecclesial feudalism.
Democracy is not only the key to all ecclesial reform but the essential
ingredient in global social justice.
No less a figure than Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics,
insists on two observations of paramount importance.
In Democracy as Freedom (1989), he writes:
“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a
functioning democracy.”
Sen argues that the openness of a democracy, its accountability and its
freedom of the press make it impossible for governments to tolerate famines.
Famines are the legacy of monarchical systems.
Indeed, we know that free markets are also crucial. It is impossible to have
free markets and not to have a democracy. Once the economic sphere is removed
from government control, the government is not strong enough to maintain
totalitarianism. A Church that is proud it is not a democracy is a model for
totalitarianism systems.
Sen argues, at a later date, that no multi-partied democracy has ever waged
war on another democracy.
If Sen is right and if democracy restricts famine and war, then a democratic
world will be one in which social justice and peace may be possible on a scale
greater than we have heretofore imagined. This is not a time for the Church to
boast that it will never be a democracy.
American democracy has brought this nation enormous benefits. It may also
change the word in a way that fits the Gospel better than any other governance
structure we have known. This is an urgent hour for dialogue and democracy; it
is not a time for pontifical wisdom and infallibility.
It is time for democracy to revolutionize the Church and restore it to its
original New Testament charter of freedom, collegiality and community. We need
to decide now which tradition works better for our Church and serves its life;
the imperial, feudal and monarchical system of John Paul II or the New
Testament, modern, Post-Reformation, Enlightenment, American model of
government.
Democracy is the only way to bring back from the margins of the Church the
massive numbers who choose to be Catholics but not serfs, who hear Christ but
will not listen to Caesar.
American Catholics will not allow this papacy to prevail. Some will openly
resist; other clandestinely subvert; most will simply not comply.
The levels of dysfunctionality in priestly ministry in this country is a sign
of the resistance. The shortage comes from non-compliance. The lack of morale
comes from hopelessness. Nothing else in American Church history has shaken it
to its foundations as destructively as has the sexual abuse scandal. This
scandal is not limited to the horror of pedophilia; it extends to abuse of adult
women and adult men. In this scandal and its cover-up we see the end of the
celibate male, clerical culture which is directly responsible for it and the
beginning of the end of the monarchical system which thrives in an enforced,
celibate, clerical culture.
We have traveled a long road from the Roman Phase of movies like “Going
My Way,” “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and
“Boystown” to the cinema of “Thorn Birds,”
“Priest,” “The Power and the Glory” and “Nothing
Sacred.”
We behold in the burgeoning of this new revolution on our shores the ghosts
and memories of John Carroll and John England, of Courtney Murray and Dorothy
Day. We see the inclusiveness of the first native-born American saint, Elizabeth
Seton, who was Catholic and Protestant, wife, mother, widow and celibate. We
trace the journey to freedom as the Ark and the Dove drop anchor
in 1634 and as Charles Carroll signs the Declaration of Independence. We note
the Catholic connection with America at its imaginative best in Benjamin
Franklin’s nomination of John Carroll and in John Kennedy’s
inauguration as an American president who happens to be Catholic. We cannot
forget the thousands of priests and women religious and laity who followed an
African-American Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King, an American Gandhi all the
way up the mountain of freedom. In such a march, we experience the rejection of
ecclesiological servitude.
There is no turning back now, no way to stop all this. There will never again
be a Roman Phase to the American Church. We have come too far, seen too
much.
We are Catholic now in a way we have never before known. And we are American
again as Alexis de Tocqueville saw us in 1831, the most democratic class in the
new nation. We will not let ourselves be led without representation.
We have come thus far with broken hearts and bruised spirits, betrayed again
and again by shepherds who became predators and preyed on our trust. But no
more. We ourselves were not always sinless. But the crimes of democracy are
always less than those of tyranny. We are free of that now.
We have a mission and a mandate, in independence and baptism, that will not
allow slavery again in this nation, this time under the guise of religious
tyranny. For we have been called to freedom by something even more awesome than
our Declaration of Independence. We have been called to freedom by Christ.
