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The Dallas convention totally ignored the camel that paraded through the hall when Scott Appleby, the Notre Dame sociologist said that the bad faith of American bishops began in 1968. For it was in 1968 that Pope Paul VI announced his long-awaited decision about Catholic teaching on contraception, and surprised many by giving many reasons against the popular practice. Immediately, a host of theologians, clergy, and lay people publicly dissented. Then, more afraid of being called "conservative" than of being faithful to Catholic teaching, the bishops looked the other way. They refused to exercise their teaching authority. They allowed dissent (more exactly, rebellion) to grow unchecked. Dissent-as-rebellion spread from one aspect of the Church's sexual teaching to others. It grew and grew. Soon enough, homosexual rings were operating freely in several important seminaries. Over the years, scores of young, idealistic seminarians were seduced and corrupted. Those who resisted were forced to leave the seminary for being "too rigid" to be acceptable in the "new" priesthood. This is where the habit of "cover up" grew, and the bishops were thus made complicit with the seminary rectors they had appointed. Some favorite protégés among the diocesan clergy seem also to have been involved. Concerning dissent, a word of self-disclosure is in order. As early as 1961 I had begun questioning the existing Catholic teaching on contraception, submitting an article on it to theological journals in France, Britain, and the United States. None at the time accepted the article, but at least two published short discussions of the major points in order to get a public discussion started. As a mere graduate student being trained in the history and philosophy of religion, my aim was to reason within the Catholic tradition, and to contribute to a well-argued "development of doctrine," based upon new knowledge about human reproduction. When the questions were raised by many during Vatican II, the Vatican agreed to study the question. After Paul VI's decision was announced in 1968, I did not want to go into public rebellion and held back from the public protests. Still, my earlier public writings stood now contrary to the teaching freshly articulated by Paul VI. I recognized his authority to make that decision, but I thought it my obligation as a philosopher respectfully to write that, on this one matter, I was not convinced by the new argument. Some years later, when I was about to publish, in a book on the Athanasian Creed, a few paragraphs on this point, Cardinal Law — to whom I had sent an early draft — urged me to cut out those passages. He said they would harm the faith. I said I thought honesty compelled me to confess my one reservation at that point, as an example of how I had to face the line, "one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic." He repeated his request. I thought it over, and decided I had to go with what I had written, or falsify the confession I was making. But Cardinal Law's intensity stayed with me. Later, I was reflecting on Cardinal Wojtyla's writing on this subject, before he became pope, and noted that the argument he had made was, in the end, theological, and not merely philosophical, as mine had been. So I tried looking at the issue in that new context. Thus, almost a decade after the American edition, in the early 1990s, I took the opportunity to rewrite those paragraphs for the Czech edition of Confession of a Catholic. If one regards married sexuality within a theological context, then one can see how the Catholic teaching, while very hard, makes sense and has a certain rare beauty to it. Meanwhile, I had met couples who put it into practice with happy results in their mutual love. I say all this to be clear about the sympathy I feel for those Catholics who found the traditional Catholic teaching on contraception unconvincing — and who had no one, absolutely no one, who was speaking publicly in the pulpit, or writing in the most widely read Catholic journals, to show them any other way of thinking about married love. As bishops and priests dropped the subject to avoid controversy, and also to avoid being taken as "reactionaries," a cultural vacuum was created among the Catholic public. Into this vacuum rushed a secular way of looking at married sex. Now, then. If the laity were not being challenged to live differently from the neighbors, then why should priests accept traditional sexual teaching? Attacked from the flanks on contraception, Catholic sexual teaching collapsed along the whole front. Silence reigned. A few pious nods were made toward the tradition that no one now spelled out, explained, or defended. Instead, the onus was shifted to Rome. Rome was the problem. The pope! We had to get rid of the pope, until a new one came along, who "understood." Well, Paul VI soon enough died. John Paul I lived only a month. Shortly after John Paul II's entry into the papacy he dedicated his weekly homilies to an explanation of love and marriage. It was clear that he was now offering a deeper and richer justification of the tradition than any one had yet seen. Many "progressives" met this teaching of John Paul II with the same dissent-as-rebellion they had mastered against Paul VI, but now with a more desperate anger. For they were getting older. The long-awaited New Church that they had been predicting was being postponed year after long year. John Paul II kept marching on through one of the longest pontificates in church history. As Margaret Steinfels suggested to the bishops in Dallas, many "progressives" even among the bishops don't dare to tell the truth about their strong dissent-as-rebellion, at least not while they are in Rome. And so the "bad faith" continues. In Dallas, the bishops did not confront the dissent-as-rebellion that ripples through the American Church. Neither did they confront the accounts of smarmy homosexual sex in several major seminaries over the last 40 years. True, especially after 1992, some bishops began shoveling out those Augean Stables. The seminaries today are in better shape. But how can the bishops get the credit, if the dark smarmy secrets of the "Progressive Era" in the seminaries remains secret and unexamined? It is very hard to believe how bad it was. Published accounts and court records of seminary practices in several dioceses remind one of tales of Renaissance corruption in the papacy. Thus, the unnoticed camel in the room in Dallas was the rebellion whose nose first pushed under the tent in 1968: then his jowls, ears, head, neck, shoulders. Finally, the whole tent was lifted up and carried away by that camel. The elephant, as Mary Eberstadt points out in the June 17 Weekly Standard, is the complicity of many bishops with "the lavender takeover" of numerous seminaries. Several years ago, Fr. Andrew Greeley spoke in much stronger words: "clean out the pedophiles, break up the gay cliques, tighten up the seminary, and restore the good name of the priesthood." Seminaries come directly under the authority of the bishops. No one has more authority there than they do. They allowed elephants in, to stomp out true and orthodox vocations, to crush true faith, to despoil chastity, to create a desert. The really deep secret, then, of the last 40 years is the fear, timidity, and passivity of the American bishops. I believe it was Orwell who said that no one will ever know the crimes committed in our time through the fear of being thought conservative. Everything the bishops did in Dallas showed how fearful they still are of being thought conservative. That is why they refused even to touch the one issue that John Paul II had told them is central: fidelity to the whole of Catholic teaching on married love and sexuality. That would have meant antagonizing the secular, liberal press. That would have meant preaching Catholic doctrine straight. The bishops didn't want to touch that task. They refused by voice vote a motion to study the role of dissent in the present scandalous developments. They were afraid to probe that deep, neuralgic nerve. Even the choice of two liberals to speak for Catholic laywomen and men displayed the bishops' remarkable fear of being thought conservative. In that respect, the bishops still don't get it. The bishops need to understand that what we Catholics love and respect is the Catholic faith, not them. If they lack courage to speak up for the faith, what are they good for except to be thrown out and trodden upon, salt without savor? I don't know about you, but I hear more and more people saying that they should throw out the whole bench, and get a new team. A few exceptions aside, this one doesn't seem to be completely serious. But my advice is, give them a little more time. And pray that the one or two clear leaders among them will step forward, for the good of the Church. Enough of Avignon. It's time to take the Church back to Rome.
— Michael
Novak, the George F. Jewett scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute. Mr. Novak is the author, most recently, of On
Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. |
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could have been worse, that Dallas meeting of bishops. Bishop Wilton Gregory
came out with an enhanced reputation. But not the bishops as a whole.
