Americans would reassure Roman anxieties by making their acceptance of the doctrinal tradition in the Catechism more explicit. This does not have to mean a slavish or uncritical assent to every jot and tittle, but rather an unabashed acceptance of the broad parameters for debate marked out by orthodoxy. Voice of the Faithful’s motto is “Keep the Faith, Change the Church." Such slogans would seem more credible if their proponents talked as much about the faith to keep as the Church to change. The Holy See, meanwhile, would help the healing process in the United States by more clearly recognizing that there is no clerical monopoly on truth and that the experience of the lay faithful has much to contribute in terms of practical wisdom on issues such as finance, administration, and personnel. One positive step would be a public signal from the Pope that he intends the already-existing instruments of consultation, such as parish councils and finance councils, to be taken seriously. If the Pope were to receive a delegation of American laity to discuss the crisis, perhaps alongside the executive officers of the U.S. bishops’ conference to demonstrate that this is not an either/or proposition, that too would be powerful symbolism.
Role of the Bishop
Both the American street and the Holy See agree that at the heart of the American crisis is the bishop. For Americans, the negligence of certain bishops in not stopping abuser priests when they should have known better is the single most galling aspect of the crisis. A core concern for the Holy See, meanwhile, has been a kind of gradual chipping away at episcopal authority that could end up with the bishop as a sort of facilitator rather than the teacher, sanctifier, and governor of his flock. Thus Vatican officials worried about the National Review Board, to the extent that it could exercise an ill-defined supervisory role over the bishops. They worried when Bishop Thomas O’Brien in Phoenix bargained away portions of his canonical authority in order to avoid criminal prosecution by Maricopa County. They have been concerned by mandatory reporter policies that obligate bishops to report accusations against priests to the civil authorities. All seem fraught with the potential to reduce the discretion and authority of the bishop, undercutting his role in canon law as the final authority in the local church.
Both the American and the Roman response, it should be noted, build on longstanding concerns that predate the sexual abuse crisis. Many Americans have long complained about imperious and arrogant bishops who did not perceive themselves to be answerable to their own communities. In fact, the response of the American Catholic community to the crisis of 2002 cannot be understood without appreciating that it provided a focus for a great tide of anger that had its origins elsewhere, in resentments that had been gathering for decades. The Holy See, on the other hand, has long been alarmed by various forces it sees undercutting the authority of the local bishop, rooted in the theological conviction that a bishop by virtue of ordination is personally responsible for his diocese and should live up to that obligation. The 1998 document Apostolos Suos, which many commentators took as an attack on the authority of bishops’ conferences, was from the Holy See’s point of view intended to emancipate individual bishops from domination by ecclesiastical bureaucracies.
What both sides share, beneath their various ways of expressing the point, is a profound conviction that bishops matter. The quality of life in a local church depends on little else like it rests on the quality of episcopal leadership. This realization clears a space for fruitful discussion between the Vatican and American Catholics about how bishops might best be selected, how they might be trained and formed, and how they might best be supported in their ministry by the collaboration of the Catholic laity. Psychologically, American bishops and their colleagues in Rome are probably more ready to have this conversation in a serious way, after the shock of the crisis, than at any time since the Second Vatican Council. Such a discussion, if it could succeed in avoiding adversarial dynamics, might find surprising areas of common ground.
Reform
Both the Holy See and the American Catholic street regard reform as essential to healing the crisis of sexual abuse, and both sometimes charge the other with stifling that reform. Voice of the Faithful has proposed reforms such as financial transparency and greater lay participation. While the group would assign primary responsibility for the failure to implement these reforms to the American bishops, many also point to a culture of closure and defensiveness from Rome as another key to the problem. The Holy See certainly could insist that American bishops adopt the Voice of the Faithful program. By failing to do so, critics argue, the Vatican at least passively endorses business as usual.
But governance and consultation hardly exhaust the areas of reform floated by various forces in the American Church. Some Catholics from the left would like to see clerical celibacy made optional, power decentralized from Rome to the local churches, bishops elected rather than appointed by the Holy Father, and perhaps even the ordination of women as priests. Catholics from the right would prefer a campaign of weeding dissenting theologians out of Catholic colleges and seminaries, eliminating homosexual candidates from programs of priestly formation, jettisoning ecclesiastical bureaucracies that have caved into the magisterium of the so-called experts, and boldly proclaiming Catholic doctrine in season and out. Both sides often blame Rome for its failure to approve, and insist upon, these proposed reforms.
Meanwhile, the Holy See believes in a program of reform too, but in the classically Catholic sense of the term—a movement that is primarily spiritual rather than ideological, doctrinal, or managerial. This is the sense in which one refers to the Cistercian reform of the Benedictines, for example, or the Capuchin reform of the Franciscans. Such reform begins with a desire to live the gospel and the tradition more fully. As the French Dominican Yves Congar wrote in True and False Reform in the Church, “The great law of a Catholic reformism will be to begin with a return to the principles of Catholicism." Any reform that does not feature immersion in the sacraments and in prayer will be suspect. Authentic reform always stresses the need to sentire cum ecclesia— “to think with the Church." It is a project to be carried out in cooperation with the pastors of the Church, never in struggle against them.
Cardinal Avery Dulles, in an August/September 2003 essay in the journal First Things, has offered eight principles for assessing reform proposals:
Genuine reform is always a return to Sacred Scripture and tradition.
Any reform conducted in the Catholic spirit will respect the Church’s styles of worship and pastoral life. It will be content to operate within the Church’s spiritual and devotional heritage, with due regard for her Marian piety, her devotion to the saints, her high regard for the monastic life and the vows of religion, her penitential practices, and her eucharistic worship.
A genuinely Catholic reform will adhere to the fullness of Catholic doctrine, including not only the dogmatic definitions of Popes and councils, but doctrines constantly and universally held as matters pertaining to the faith.
True reform will respect the divinely given structures of the Church.
A reform that is Catholic in spirit will seek to maintain communion with the whole body of the Church, and will avoid anything savoring of schism or factionalism. . . . To be Catholic is precisely to see oneself as part of a larger whole, to be inserted in the Church universal.
Reformers will have to exercise the virtue of patience, often accepting delays.
A valid reform must not yield to the tendencies of our fallen nature, but must rather resist them.
We must be on guard against purported reforms that are aligned with the prevailing tendencies in secular society. . . . We must energetically oppose reformers who contend that the Church must abandon her claims to absolute truth, must allow dissent from her own doctrines, and must be governed according to the principles of liberal democracy.
I suspect both sides in this conversation would feel more at ease if they could somehow assuage the worries of the other. Americans often suspect that when Rome talks about reform, they spirit
ualize the concept in order to avoid any substantive changes in structures. In truth, the Holy See, at least in the person of John Paul II and the best and brightest around him, were not closed to the possibility of structural changes in the Church. The point of the Pope’s 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint was to invite the Church’s ecumenical partners into a “patient dialogue" about precisely such reforms of the papacy that might be needed to further the cause of Christian unity. If that conversation is still proceeding slowly, it is at least proceeding. Perhaps what is called for in this historical moment is a similar papal invitation directed to Catholics themselves, calling them to a similar “patient dialogue" on renewal of the Church and laying out some parameters for that discussion. What Roman Catholicism may need, in other words, is an Ut Unum Sint addressed to Catholics, a charter document from the Pope focused on dialogue inside the Catholic Church, on how to foster communion without papering over differences or ducking problems. The document could build upon Paul VI’s 1965 encyclical Ecclesiam Suam , in which the Pope called for a dialogue within the Church that would be “open and responsive to all truth, every virtue, every spiritual value." Such a gesture from the Holy Father, followed by efforts to foster the dialogue it describes, would help to reassure the vast majority of reasonable Roman Catholics in the United States of the goodwill of Rome.
In the Vatican, meanwhile, the suspicion is often that Americans know only the language of political power, and their reform agenda is more akin to a putsch than a purification. American Catholics would reduce anxiety levels in Rome if they would learn to speak in a more spiritual argot. For example, since forgiveness and healing are essential elements of resolution to the sex abuse crisis, perhaps the various groups and movements in the United States could promote a nationwide return to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. If the Vatican were to see churches across the United States filled with Catholics desiring to make confessions, imploring God’s grace on themselves and this wounded church, it would speak volumes about the underlying ecclesiology of the reform movement. Further, it would help to avoid phrasing public activism in antagonistic terms, as if it’s “the laity versus the clergy," or “the left versus the right." Obviously, no one is pretending that pious exercises by themselves can solve the sexual abuse crisis; it will take more than prayer to address the underlying political, legal, and cultural problems. It may also seem perverse to suggest that American Catholics seek reconciliation, when those who are principally in need of confession are the priests who abused children and the bishops who failed to stop them. Yet the whole Church in the United States has been hurt, not just by the crisis, but by the anger and division it has generated. To heal, an examination of conscience by all parties is essential. Prayers for forgiveness and grace are never wasted. The more the reform movement can be visibly rooted in committed, faithful Catholicism, the better.
In the end, the Vatican and the American street will continue to clash on many issues, and that tension can be healthy. One of the factors that has given Catholicism a kind of sane, moderate balance over the centuries is that no one faction in the Church, including Rome, ever dominates for very long. History always steps in and restores equilibrium, one sign that the Holy Spirit is faithful to Christ’s promise never to desert the Church. Still, exchanges between Rome and America would be more constructive if both sides were to drop the pretense that they know the real motives of the other, and consider instead their actual aims and fears. Each has much to learn, and this mutual exchange could foster the communion that is at the heart of what it means to be a Catholic Church.
7
THE VATICAN AND THE WAR IN IRAQ
Although President George Bush declared from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were finished in Iraq, the war of words between Washington and the Holy See over the moral legitimacy of the conflict did not let up. For example, a lead editorial in the May 17, 2003, issue of the Jesuit-edited journal Civiltà Cattolica , reviewed by the Secretariat of State prior to publication, asserted that “the United States has put international law in crisis." The editorial said the U.S.-declared war on terrorism had generated strong anti-American sentiment in Europe. Especially repugnant, it said, had been the decision to hold six hundred Taliban, including five teenagers between thirteen and sixteen, and five men over eighty, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba without recognizing them as prisoners of war. In another explosive charge, the editorial said the rebuilding of Iraq is “chancy" because “the Western countries that should make it happen seem more interested in exploiting Iraqi oil than in the reconstruction of the country."
The editorial bluntly said the U.S.-led war had been unjustified. Noting that Iraq’s army was weak and that weapons of mass destruction had not been found, the editorial said these facts “have clearly shown that there were not sufficient reasons for moving against Iraq, because the country did not constitute a true threat for the United States and its allies." The editorial said the most urgent task now is to “reestablish international legality, wounded by the ‘unilateralism’ of the United States." It called for the United Nations, not the United States, to direct the postwar work in Iraq. “It’s a matter of relaunching the spirit of the United Nations charter, based on cooperation, rather than on competition among enemy states and on domination of an imperialistic sort by the hegemonic superpower."
Many Americans, especially American Catholics, have been surprised to hear this sort of rhetoric from the Vatican, which can call to mind the harsh anti-American broadsides of the secular European left. Indeed, key officials in the Bush administration were initially taken off guard by the depth of Vatican opposition to the war when public discussion first began in earnest in late 2002. Many on the Bush team had expected support, at least implicitly, from John Paul II, given what they perceived as his blessing for the American-led strikes in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Moreover, the Bush team had become accustomed to thinking it enjoyed an unusually warm relationship with the Holy See, born of common interests on issues such as cloning, abortion, and the role of religion in public life. Condoleezza Rice was not being disingenuous when she told the Italian weekly Panorama in the fall of 2002 that she “didn’t understand" the Vatican’s argument against the war. That incomprehension was widely shared among American personnel, both in Washington and in Rome.
The surprise reflects the fact that the political psychology of many Americans, including Bush administration officials, took shape in the Reagan years. During the Cold War there was a clear intersection of interests between the United States and the Holy See in support of anti-Soviet resistance in Eastern Europe, above all Solidarity in Poland. Some American Catholic thinkers, most eminently the so-called Whig Thomists George Weigel and Michael Novak, saw this “holy alliance" as a harbinger of a broader global partnership between America and the Catholic Church, based on shared values (pro-life, pro-family) and on shared political objectives (human rights, economic freedom, and democracy). The project, on this theory, was delayed by eight years of Clinton liberalism, but the election of Bush put things back on track. And indeed, there was a Catholic honeymoon in the early days of the Bush administration, as the president’s elimination of public funding for abortion, his restrictive decision on stem cell research, and his two visits to the Pope during his first year in office all played to positive Vatican reviews.
From the perspective of many conservative Catholic Americans, the rift over the Iraq war was thus a temporary disruption of a natural alliance; the needle would eventually swing back into place. In fact, however, a careful reading of recent history suggests another hypothesis—that Cold War politics made temporary bedfellows out of the Vatican and the United States, and what is reemerging now is the caution and reluctance that have always characterized Vatican attitudes about America. In other words, perhaps it is the alliance that was the aberration and the rift that is the natural state of affairs. From this point of view, the clash of cultures most exac
erbated by the Iraq war may not be between Christianity and Islam, but between the Holy See and the United States.
Both the Iraq war and the sex abuse crisis suggested to Vatican observers that the ghost of John Calvin is alive and well in American culture. These reservations are well documented, from Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae, condemning the supposed heresy of “Americanism," to Pius XII’s opposition to Italy’s entrance into NATO based on fears that the alliance was a Trojan horse for Protestant domination of Catholic Europe. Key Vatican officials, especially Europeans from traditional Catholic cultures, have long worried about aspects of American society—its exaggerated individualism, its hyperconsumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos. A fortiori, they worry about a world in which America is in an unfettered position to impose this set of cultural values on everyone else.
The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favored, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to them to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology. The Iraq episode confirmed Vatican officials in these convictions. When Vatican officials hear Bush talk about the evil of terrorism and the American mission to destroy that evil, they sometimes perceive a worrying kind of dualism. The language can suggest a sense of election, combined with the perversity of America’s enemies, that appears to justify unrelenting conflict. After Cardinal Pio Laghi returned to Rome from his last-minute appeal to Bush just before the Iraq war began, he told John Paul II that he sensed “something Calvinistic" in the president’s iron determination to battle the forces of international terrorism.
In the aftermath of the war I once found myself in the Vatican and struck up a conversation with an official eager to hear an American perspective on the war. He told me he sees a “clash of civilizations" between the United States and the Holy See, between a worldview that is essentially Calvinistic and one that is shaped by Catholicism. “We have a concept of sin and evil too," he said, “but we also believe in grace and redemption." Vatican officials, it should be noted, are not the only ones to detect a strong Calvinist influence in American culture. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago made a similar statement during the Synod of Bishops for the Americas in November 1997. George said that U.S. citizens “are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith." American society, he said, “is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of Scripture and private experience of God." He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic Church’s teaching of community and a vision of life greater than the individual.
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