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"The family of Jesus Christ is incomplete so long as one of us is missing. Won't you please join us?" Responding to this half-page newspaper ad and similar appeals, 12,000 Roman Catholics in the Memphis area--one-fourth of the local diocese's membership--turned out at the city's Mid-South Coliseum. They created a rare Sunday afternoon traffic jam that delayed the rites for a half-hour. The event, unprecedented in U.S. Catholicism, was a "Day of Reconciliation." It offered sacramental absolution without individual confession to all participants, both practicing Catholics and those who had become alienated from the church, including those who had divorced and remarried. For many, it was the first Mass in years.

"I am overwhelmed by your presence," said Bishop Carroll T. Dozier, 65, as he welcomed the crowd to the giant auditorium. Sixty-one priests helped officiate at the Mass, and when it was done, there was an outburst of applause.

Dozier is considered a liberal among the U.S. bishops, and his controversial innovation will surely rouse opposition in more conservative dioceses. He had received a guarded message from the Pope's Apostolic Delegate to the U.S., Archbishop Jean Jadot, who wished him well but offered neither approval nor condemnation, a possible signal that Rome was willing to let the idea be tested. Dozier's experiment was derived from the revised rules for the sacrament of Penance, which went into effect in the U.S. earlier this year.

Expand Grounds. Although there was no breakdown on how many of last week's participants were regular or, for whatever reason, estranged members, church officials reported numerous calls from divorced and remarried Catholics who have yearned for Communion. Under an 1884 decree of the U.S. hierarchy, such people are automatically excommunicated until their previous spouses die. The Memphis ceremony was not a permanent change in discipline. All those who took Communion were instructed to make individual confessions later. Those who are divorced and remarried, in Memphis as elsewhere, must gain annulments, in which the church rules that their previous marriages never truly existed. However, the once difficult procedure is now handled locally rather than in Rome, and many dioceses have expanded the grounds to include psychological factors at the time of marriage.

At a landmark meeting in Detroit in October, delegates from U.S. dioceses boldly asked their bishops to renounce the 1884 decree and welcome back the remarried. That appears unlikely, but Dozier's experiment--he scheduled a second ceremony this week in Jackson. Tenn.--may inspire a series of reconciliation days in other parts of the nation.

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