Catholicism's new cold war: the church militant lurches rightward - The Political Power of the Catholic Church - Cover Story

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1993 by Gerry O'Sullivan

Each time Pope John Paul II has visited the United States, his hard-line message of Catholic fealty has grown a little sterner. Back in 1979, all of the papal fanfare obscured the realities of papal conservatism. Onlookers were too busy watching the popemobile whiz by to hear John Paul II's call for a return to pre-Vatican II Catholicism, cloaked in the rhetoric of adherence to the "spirit and essence" of the post-conciliar age.

By the time of his second visit in 1987, U.S. Catholics began to realize that their pontiff was less concerned with episcopal collegiality--a tradition which sees consultation and doctrinal inquiry as shared among the pope and body of bishops, which was reinforced by Vatican II--than with the assertion of his own authority. Widely respected prelates like Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, and Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee found themselves at loggerheads with the pope and his conservative supporters in the United States, who were bent upon what reactionary papal loyalists call the "Roman Restoration."

Several priests and bishops, including Hunthausen, became targets of critical and often vicious letter-writing campaigns, led by disaffected right-wing Catholics who voiced "concerns" about perceived leniencies on issues relating to sexuality, the sacraments, and the role of women in the church. Right-wing Catholic newsweeklies like The Wanderer continually vilified church leaders with whom they disagreed and sought to enlist Rome in a veritable holy war against perceived unorthodoxies among the shepherds of the faithful.

Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. bishops had very publicly pronounced positions on social issues ranging from the threat of nuclear war to homelessness and the rapaciousness of free-market capitalism. These did not sit well with Rome or Washington, and the Curia zealously sought the silence of any cleric deemed to be too "political," a code word for progressive. It was encouraged in this effort by Catholic reactionaries in the United States who have helped build a movement, a culture, and a new and receptive audience for the deeply conservative message of a deeply conservative pope. Throughout the 1980s, powerful and often wealthy Catholic rightists like J. Peter Grace, Thomas Monaghan, William Simon, and Michael Novak openly challenged the bishops and sought to align themselves with a papacy seemingly sympathetic to their own pro-capitalist, Cold War view of the world. Bishops be damned, they thought; we've got the pope.

When John Paul II returns to the United States in August 1993, he will be greeted by a stadium full of younger Americans reared on a steady diet of such Cold War Catholicism. And with the old Cold War officially over, the Catholic church has embarked on a new one--a struggle against the progressive tendencies within the American church and against the very project of modernity itself. This is, in fact, the most intensive campaign against modernism, secularism, and liberalization launched by the church hierarchy since the papacies of Leo XIII and Pius X at the turn of the last century. Under the present pope, the 1990s are looking more and more like the 1890s--not so much "back to the future" as "ahead to the past."

This pope has also packed the College of Cardinals with ideological soulmates--theological, political, and social conservatives more than happy to toe the Vatican line. And he has made many bishops, elevating only those deemed pontifically correct. They, in turn, have transformed their respective diocesan newspapers into organs of official policy, often sacking editors with whom they disagreed.

According to one tally reported in the May 19, 1993, New York Times, 22 editors left the country's 155 diocesan papers in 1992. In some of the larger cities (like Dallas, Hartford, San Diego, and Cincinnati), these resignations were due to outright disagreements between liberal-to-moderate editors and conservative bishops who now demand better public relations in place of fair and balanced reporting. Catholic editors and writers have banded together to form an organization known as Catholics for a Free Press, devoted to keeping diocesan weeklies and monthlies from becoming mere house organs for right-wing prelates.

Open debate is now rarely, if ever, tolerated, and liberal-to-moderate Catholics--priests and laity alike--find themselves increasingly alienated from the small neotraditionalist core. The result, as we shall see, has been an "official" American Catholicism all too willing to join forces with the evangelical Protestant right --folks like Pat Robert, son and his Christian Coalition.

Catholic seminaries have also become more conservative as Rome stresses a "return" to the fundamentals of the faith. In many areas, hardline Thomists have won the day, ejecting texts written by the visionaries of Vatican II, among them the late German philosopher and theologian Karl Rahner.

And given the ever-increasing shortage of priests in the United States, the Vatican now regards North America as something akin to a missionary region. Younger priests from Eastern Europe (particularly the pope's own Poland) have been called to serve in parishes throughout the United States, along with Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans trained in doctrinally conservative seminaries in their home nations.