To Save a Bankrupt

U.S. Roman Catholic bishops suffered a sore surprise last year. A $500,000 study they had commissioned reported that U.S. priests disagreed sharply with their hierarchy over matters of church discipline, liturgy and even moral teaching (TIME, April 26). Last week in Chicago, Priest-Sociologist Andrew Greeley, director of the priesthood study, told an ad hoc committee of bishops and priests what they should do about the results. His outspoken recommendations were hardly less painful than the study itself.

"Honesty compels me to say," Father Greeley noted in a sad prologue, "that I believe the present leadership of the church to be morally, intellectually and religiously bankrupt." Unless the committee was ready to recommend representative government for the American church, he continued, it might as well go home. Most important, he urged that new bishops should be nominated by the priests of the dioceses in which they would serve. "There is no other way," Greeley submitted, "for the leadership to regain the power it has lost."

Citing the two-year study, Greeley reminded the committee that the basic crisis in the priesthood is over authority. No longer is that authority oppressive, insisted Greeley, because no one pays enough attention for it to be oppressive. Rather, the problem is "a collapse of confidence, credibility and consensus." Greeley noted that "priests do not consent to the teaching of the official church on the necessity of celibacy, on birth control and on divorce." They will not "acknowledge that Humanae Vitae was a legitimate and appropriate use of authority at least as far as birth control goes, nor will they attempt to impose its requirements on the Catholic laity."

On the other hand, Greeley attacked the widely held notion that priests as a group are more frustrated, more lonely or more immature than other segments of the U.S. population. Far from being irrelevant, he argued, the priest's profession is a newly vital one. Today's priest is alive in "the most religious time in human history." People are no longer born into a given set of beliefs that can be expected to claim their lifelong loyalty. "There are other choices available," said Greeley, "and it is a very heavy burden to have to choose. Questions of meaning and belonging are more explicit in contemporary America than they have ever been before"--questions that it is the priest's role to help answer.

Uncertain Future. Unfortunately, as Greeley sees it, there is little new religious scholarship to help formulate the needed answers. The Second Vatican Council dislodged much traditional thinking, and a good deal of what has been produced since then, Greeley told the committee, has been mere fad. The U.S. church needs to have perhaps "ten or 20 at-large bishops" who are scholars themselves, and who would be free to concentrate on various specialties. One area that desperately needs new theoretical formulation, Greeley said, is sexual morality "to take into account the insights of modern psychology and personalistic philosophy."

Another serious problem for the priesthood--far more so than priestly resignations--is the decline in vocations, Greeley emphasized. He suggested a separate church commission to explore the problem. In the past, many vocations were born of the personal enthusiasm that priests were able to convey to younger men. Now, though many priests still seem comparatively content, they are reluctant to recommend the priesthood so long as the vocation has such an "uncertain future."

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