The Embattled U.S. Bishops

At the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in Rome last month, Catholic prelates and theologians alike warned that the bishops who sought a larger role in shaping church policy had better be prepared to share that power with priests and laity at home. Last week, as 221 members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Washington's Statler-Hilton Hotel, that prophecy proved correct. The Rev. Patrick O'Malley, 37, moderate president of the National Federation of Priests' Councils representing some 35,000 of the nation's 58,000 Catholic priests, proposed that the bishops turn over most of their conference's responsibilities to a national policy-making board composed of bishops, priests and, eventually, laymen. If the bishops did not do so, warned O'Malley, they would face "revolution instead of evolution" in the church.

41 Demands. O'Malley was perhaps the mildest critic the bishops heard all week. Outside the closed-door sessions, leaders of ten dissident Catholic organizations, both clerical and lay, joined together in a loose coalition to present the bishops with a "People's Agenda," a grab bag of 41 wildly varied demands for church and social reform. Among them: that the church allot a regular tithe to blacks; back immediate withdrawal from Viet Nam; set up a draft-counseling program; develop family-planning programs; re-examine Catholic teaching on divorce; phase out parochial schools; endorse optional celibacy and female priests.

Steered principally by four conservative cardinals,* the bishops decided to stand pat on most issues, but advanced on some. On celibacy--the noisiest controversy--they once again issued a thumping statement in support of the old discipline, though the 145-to-68 vote for issuing yet another such document was not so lopsided as it had been in the past. The week's most promising advances were the adoption of an elaborate proposal to ensure due process in church administrative procedures, and the establishment of a national office for black Catholicism.

The due-process plan recommends that each diocese establish and publish standard policies on hiring, firing and other administrative practices. It also sets up conciliation and arbitration procedures for disputes between bishops and their priests and laity. The National Office of Black Catholics will work to increase the number of black seminarians, establish a black campus ministry, and help train white priests and nuns to work in black communities.

The most bizarre event of the week was a so-called "Peace" Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The service opened with the entry of the Catholic choirs from the nation's three service academies. Then came 200 Knights of Columbus and Knights of St. John bearing swords, uniformed chaplains from various branches of the service, and 175 invited members of the hierarchy. Finally an armed color guard marched in. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen gave the sermon in which he called for a return to "asceticism" as the way to peace.

A chance for asceticism came quickly enough to a group of Catholic peace protesters who were passing out handbills on the shrine's steps. While the Mass went on inside, shrine officials, charging trespass, called the Washington police. Six of the peace advocates were hustled off to jail--including a girl who had been distributing the broadsides from her wheelchair.

* Los Angeles' James Francis Mclntyre, Philadelphia's John J. Krol, Washington's Patrick L. O'Boyle, and John J. Wright, former Archbishop of Pittsburgh, now a member of the Roman Curia.

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