A tale of two dioceses: from Lincoln to Saginaw - Lincoln, Nebraska, and Saginaw, Michigan - Cover Story

Commonweal, June 6, 1997 by Charles R. Morris

By any institutional measure, the Lincoln system is a smashing success - Fessio was clearly right. But I doubt that it is widely replicable. In the first place, Lincoln itself is a very small diocese in a very conservative setting. Mostly conservative Protestant pressure had prevented the opening of abortion clinics until just a few months before my visit. The parishioners I met at Saint Teresa's stressed how conservative they were. "This is a middle-class conservative parish," one of them told me. "It's kind of Catholic ghetto, but we like it that way." One of the teaching nuns mentioned that it was harder to maintain Saint Teresa's level of cohesiveness in more affluent neighborhoods. Most of the priests and nuns I talked to came from small-town farm families, and were natural social conservatives. When I asked Barnhill what his career goal was - Barnhill is a diocesan officer, he studied in Rome, and is much traveled - he said, "I want to be a country parish priest in the kind of town I grew up in. That's all, just a country parish priest." The Kalin recruiting pipeline is unique, and his powerful personality is clearly a factor in its success. Whether it can survive his retirement is questionable.

More important, Lincoln has maintained the high status of its priests partly by excluding women from the ministry. Flavin insisted that lectors and acolytes be formally "installed" according to canonical procedures that limit the eligible pool to men. Saint Teresa's was the first parish I'd been to in my travels where the liturgy was an all-male affair - the entry procession, ushers, readers, the acolyte, altar boys, eucharistic ministers. Flavin justified the policy, I was told, on recruiting grounds; many lectors and acolytes go on to the seminary. Bruskewitz has recently authorized women lectors and acolytes in cases of necessity, and, since the Vatican has now officially approved altar girls, some Lincoln parishes have begun using them. When I asked parishioners about the exclusion of women, they seemed a bit embarrassed, but assured me that it "was not a problem" in Lincoln. Mother Joan Paul told me women went along with Lincoln's male-oriented policies because they had been "properly educated." Nemec said, just as the Vatican says, that women and men simply have different roles in the church, and that in any event there is no higher status than motherhood. It would have been interesting to see him explain that to, say, the young women in Richard McBrien's theology seminar at Notre Dame. Even very conservative Catholic women in another diocese run on the Lincoln model, Arlington, Virginia, were infuriated when their daughters were told they couldn't serve on the altar.

The Lincoln system is precisely in line with the model of the church that many conservatives - and possibly the Vatican - appear to insist is the only permissible one. To place the conservative and liberal models of the church in sharper relief, I visited another parish, in another midwestern, fairly conservative city, but in Bishop Kenneth Untener's very liberal diocese of Saginaw.