Message from the Bishops

The Catholic hierarchy of the U.S. issued a 25,000-word pastoral letter last week that was both a summons to continued renewal of the church and a warning against excessive zeal for reform. In the spirit of recent papal encyclicals on social affairs, it urged Catholics to be concerned with the eradication of "indignity, injustice and inhumanity" on the ground that "when one of us is denied justice, all are threatened." At the same time, the letter upheld the primacy of the spiritual over the secular and censured a kind of religious amnesia that has blotted out respect for past traditions.

"With sadness," the bishops said, "we notice that some today, using the noble word charism or employing theology almost as therapy, ridicule the church and, under the guise of being contemporary, seem hostile to everything except their own views. What begins as necessary and solid criticism seems readily to degenerate into a destructive attitude toward life unworthy of reason and inconsistent with faith."

This same desire for contemporaneity, the letter went on, has led to a number of errors that now threaten the church --such as the argument that the primary need in Catholicism is not "conversion to God" but a rebuilding of structures, and that the priestly ministry is not a special divine gift. In deploring the "derelict priest," who has scandalized the faithful by leaving the church, the bishops argued that the meaning of the priesthood cannot be made relevant in purely humanistic categories. "It is not the Christian vocation to canonize the human condition as such or to lament over it. It is our vocation to rise above it where it drags us down; to ennoble it by the operation of that Spirit Who continually refreshes the church and renews the face of the earth."

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