Look out for the ambitious clerics in purple

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 15, 1995 by Andrew M. Greeley

As the American media prepare for Pope John Paul II's visit by readying the usual simplistic cliches, they might consider the problem that the pope's bishops are causing for American Catholics and indirectly for the pope himself.

A story illustrates the problem:

A new bishop, a man without any parish experience, is addressing the priests of his diocese. I don't like women Mass servers, he tells them. I can't stop you from having them, but I still don't like them. I don't want you to have them when I'm at your parish. If you do, I can't stop you, but I'll remember what you've done to me.

Naturally this story spreads throughout the diocese; the clergy and the laity know that they're stuck with a creep.

The same bishop, it turns out, strongly objects to women distributing Holy Communion at Mass.

Or again:

A new and ambitious archbishop informs a meeting of the Serra Club (an organization of lay people that promotes vocations to the priesthood) that there is no need to worry about the shortage of priests. If Catholics remain faithful to the teaching authority of the church and pray for priests, the vocation problem will be solved.

If this archbishop means what he says, he is guilty of the sin of the "temptation of God" -- of denying the need for positive human effort. If he doesn't mean it but is only trying to promote his career by saying something that he thinks the Vatican wants to hear, then he is a hypocrite. Perhaps he is both.

With unrelenting consistency in recent years, the Vatican has appointed to the American hierarchy men who are meanspirited careerists -- inept, incompetent, insensitive bureaucrats who are utterly indifferent to their clergy and laity. In all its 200-year history, the American hierarchy has never been in worse shape.

This same policy has been implemented all over the Catholic world in the name of restoring to the church the loyalty of the clergy and people. The Vatican does not seem to have learned from the disastrous results of these tactics in such countries as the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. Not only do some of the new breed of bishops turn out to be emotionally troubled and intellectually dull. Far from strengthening loyalty to the institution, this new breed of bishops drives people away from the institution, though not necessarily from their Catholic faith.

Watch them on television when the pope comes to New York as they -- sometimes deftly, more often clumsily -- angle for papal recognition. Now that 75-year-old Cardinal John J. O'Connor has submitted the mandatory letter of resignation, the New York archdiocese may soon be blessed with a new archbishop. Perhaps the pope will ponder the appointment during the trip. Maybe the right word or the right gesture will catch the pope's eye and tip the balance in the right direction.

If this crowd of thoroughly unpleasant men lusts after New York, their desire for Chicago -- the biggest prize of all -- is even more powerful. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin has recovered from his cancer surgery and seems to be in excellent health, but the campaign to take his place has already begun. Wealthy Catholic reactionaries are whispering that the "Bernardin mistake" must not be repeated.

Others are saying that Chicago must be punished because it refused to sell the grounds of an old seminary to the reactionary and secret Opus Dei. At least a dozen bishops and archbishops at the New York events will be assiduously scheming about strategies by which they can win Chicago and the coveted red hat. Who will be the favorite? Pick the meanest, the least intelligent, the most incompetent -- the one most likely to make Chicagoans wish that John the late and unlamented Cardinal Cody was still around.

All of this will be going on just behind Cardinal Bernardin, who is very much and very vigorously still alive. In Chicago, we pray that he lives as long as his aged mother and confounds the hierarchical creeps who are more interested in their careers than in the future of the church.

These kinds of machinations will be the background music for the papal visit. Watch the men in purple who slobber over the pope during his visit. They are an unappealing lot -- and as a group they have become one of the biggest problems of the Catholic church in this country.

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