From Gaudium et Spes to Lumen Gentium?
Since the USCCB has its headquarters in Washington, DC, the usual site of the hierarchy's fall general assemblies is a pricey, dismal hotel at the foot of Capitol Hill. The Baltimore convocation will be a one-time special event celebrating the renovation and reopening of the city's Basilica of the Assumption. Completed in 1818, it's the work of British-born architect Benjamin Latrobe, who also designed the US Capitol and other notable buildings.
This will be a time of ritual and rhetoric. There may be self-celebrating talk about the achievements of the American hierarchy. And in fact the bishops may need some such shoring up to see them through the business portions of their November 13-16 meeting, when the principal agenda item will be the unavoidably distressing process of shrinking the bishops' conference in program, budget, and staff.
By a notable coincidence of timing, the shrinking coincides exactly with the tenth anniversary of the death of the man who more than anyone shaped the episcopal conference in its now indisputably overextended form — Joseph Cardinal Bernardin.
Born in 1928 in Columbia, South Carolina, to Italian immigrant parents, Joseph Bernardin was a 40-year-old auxiliary bishop of Atlanta in 1968 when he was selected as general secretary of the new National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference (the NCCB/ USCC became today's USCCB more than a decade ago).
He held the position until 1972, then became archbishop of Cincinnati. From 1982 until his death from pancreatic cancer on November 14, 1996, he was archbishop of Chicago.
At various times he also served as president of the bishops' organization and chairman of some of its most important committees. A man with a genius for consensus, he combined collegial manner with political shrewdness to dominate the NCCB/USCC in the years after the Second Vatican Council, molding it into a high-profile, frequently controversial body.
Predictably, though, the structure Cardinal Bernardin built eventually started showing signs of age. Lately the bishops' conference has been battered by fallout from the crisis of clergy sex abuse. Growing financial problems make it clear that something will have to give.
Speaking last December at the American seminary attached to the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, Bishop William S. Skylstad, the organization's current president, said the hierarchy was in “a period of assessing how best the conference structure can be of assistance to the bishops and the local churches.” Then Bishop Skylstad, whose diocese of Spokane, Washington, is in bankruptcy due to the cost of sex-abuse claims, got down to cases. “Such an assessment is a sobering experience,” he confessed, “because it reminds us both that our resources are limited...and that the needs we have responsibility for are...seemingly capable of stretching us well beyond our capacity.” There are two options in such situations: Increase resources or take another look at needs to determine which are really needed and which aren't. Recognizing the truth of that, the bishops several years ago set in motion the restructuring scheduled to come to a head in Baltimore.
There's a lot more at stake here than a routine shuffling of boxes on an organization chart. Whether the process does or doesn't breathe fresh life into this now visibly weary episcopal conference — which in recent years has often appeared to be going through the motions, with no zest and no new ideas — will have consequences for American Catholicism for years to come.
“It's a shift from a Gaudium et Spes conference to a Lumen Gentium conference,” a veteran member of the staff explained, using insider jargon to express certain large-scale changes also occurring elsewhere in the Church. Gaudium et Spes was Vatican II's pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world; Lumen Gentium was its dogmatic constitution on the Church. Thus the formula signifies a move away from the priorities of the bishops' conference in the Bernardin years, when the hierarchy was free with its advice on social and political issues, to a serious engagement with the many problems from within that now face the Church.
In the last years of his life, 1992 to 1996, Cardinal Bernardin himself chaired a bishops' committee on restructuring, but the results were trivial compared with what's envisaged now. To appreciate the significance of the blueprint the bishops will be looking at in Baltimore, it's necessary to know something about the history of their organization in the last 40 years — a history best organized by three key dates: January 22, 1973; May 3, 1983; and June 15, 2002.
The Impact of Roe v. Wade
As every pro-lifer knows, January 22, 1973, was the day the Supreme Court handed down its disastrous decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, companion cases that dissolved legal restrictions on terminating pregnancy and opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of abortions that is still underway.
Although bishops had fought efforts to “liberalize” abortion laws in a number of states for years, the Supreme Court ruling caught the NCCB/USCC asleep at the switch. It was a failure of legal intelligence that stands as a permanent blot on the organization's record.
The bishops acted quickly to recoup, establishing an effective advocacy program that ran through the conference's new pro-life office. In the years immediately after Roe v. Wade — a crucial period when Protestant evangelicals hadn't yet joined the fight — the pro-life movement in the United States was largely a creature of the Catholic bishops and their national organization. It would be hard to think of anything the bishops have devoted more time, energy, and resources to ever since.
Still, critics on the Catholic Right claim that the bishops' conference hasn't done enough. In a way, they have a point.
In 1983 Cardinal Bernardin unveiled his consistent ethic of life (the “seamless garment”), intended as an umbrella for a broad coalition in defense of life. Instead, social activists cool to the anti-abortion cause and pro-choice Catholic politicians exploited the new rationale as an excuse for moral equivalency. Quadrennial statements published by the bishops' conference before national elections as guides to Catholic voters have lent support to this unhealthy development by declining to set moral priorities among the many issues identified as being of concern to the Church.
The Challenge of Peace
The second landmark date is May 3, 1983. Gathered in a special assembly in Chicago, the bishops adopted the famous pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace. The vote was 238 to 9. Not many people read The Challenge of Peace now, but in the early 1980s it was intensely debated, not only among Catholics but also in the secular world.
The timing was exactly right. The United States and the Soviet Union were well into a threatening new round in their seemingly endless nuclear competition. With its strong condemnation of the arms race, its opposition to America's first use of nukes, and its grudging acceptance of deterrence (as long as progress toward nuclear disarmament was taking place), the peace pastoral evoked heated reactions.
The process of putting the document together capitalized brilliantly on this excitement, involving as it did high visibility public hearings by the drafting committee at which representatives for various points of view, including officials of the Reagan administration, dialogued with bishops. The drafting committee itself was a journalist's dream. Members included the US hierarchy's best-known hawk, John Cardinal O'Connor of New York — a rear admiral and former navy chief of chaplains — and best-known dove, Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit. Presiding over this extravaganza was — who else? — Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago. His efforts landed him on the cover of Time. By the measure of public exposure, The Challenge of Peace was far and away the high-water mark for the NCCB/USCC.
It was downhill after that. The collective pastoral letter Economic Justice for All, prepared by a committee headed by now-retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland, O.S.B., of Milwaukee, got respectful attention when it came out in 1986 but made nowhere near the splash of its predecessor. The decline accelerated dramatically in 1992, when the bishops' conference abandoned a nine-year struggle to write a pastoral on women's concerns. The fiasco showed that on certain sensitive topics, women and the Church among them, it isn't possible for bishops to say something useful that will make nearly everybody happy and nobody very mad.
The collapse of the women's pastoral also signaled something else. The age of the dinosaurs — overstuffed, staff-written bishops' documents that attempted to cover the waterfront — was over. For the Church in the United States, something new was already slouching toward center stage: the clergy sex-abuse scandal had arrived.
Part two of this article will appear tomorrow.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, DC, and was information director of the NCCB/USCCB from 1969-1987. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
(This article originally appeared in Crisis Magazine and is used by permission.)
From Gaudium et Spes to Lumen Gentium?