Rebels in the Pews

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The guerrillas are gathering in the basement. They used to meet Sunday nights at St. John the Evangelist Church in Wellesley, Mass., but the crowd got too big, so now they have broken into cells, gathering nightly by the dozen in parochial school cafeterias or places like this spare church cellar, plotting and testifying under flickering institutional lights. First up is a man in a gray suit. "If the church were a business," he says, "the hiring manager would be out of a job, and the CEO would be on the next boat out." Next comes a psychiatrist, who calls the Roman Catholic Church a dysfunctional family. Then a theology student, then a young father, then the mother of an abused boy and, finally, Marie Darcy. Darcy has 10 children back home in Merrimack, N.H., but left them tonight to conspire with the Catholic lay group Voice of the Faithful because, well, because it touches on her status as part of the body of Christ. "We are all heirs to Christ, but it doesn't feel that way," says Darcy. "The decisions come down from above, and that's it. The people in the pews quake, wondering what's going to happen."

Into the night the group discusses how to change that, imagining the radical reinvention of the relationship between flock and leaders that Voice claims is the American Catholic Church's only road to salvation. Like many Catholics, they are suffering a crisis of confidence as a result of the sex-abuse scandal of the past months, but unlike some others, they see in it opportunity. "If there was ever a time for reform," argues Gisela Morales-Barreto, who attended her first meeting in April, "this is it." At their regular meetings, the rebels pray for the victims of abuse. But they also pray for their bishops: "that their hearts and minds be opened to inclusion and collaboration with the faithful."

Who could have guessed that the bishops were listening? It wasn't just the crimes; it was the attitude. Catholics have been enduring tragic sex scandals on and off since 1985. What has shocked them for the past four months has been the news reports and court documents that confirmed the worst caricature of a hierarchy endlessly protective of its clergy but deaf to the agony of mere churchgoers. That portrait, composed as it is of worst-case scenarios, may well be distorted. But it has raised fundamental questions of authority. "It creates a disconnect," says William V. D'Antonio, a sociologist at Catholic University of America. "It puts the whole system under structural stress."

And an entire spectrum of Catholic laity has responded. Voice of the Faithful, which wants to turn the church into a representative democracy, is only the most radical. Just a few miles away, a more moderate Boston faction annoyed Bernard Cardinal Law recently by suggesting the creation of an independent diocesan advisory council that would compete with a group he appointed. In Belleville, Ill., an existing organization called the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity suddenly tripled its membership and actually scheduled a lay synod this past weekend. The headlines have energized a graying generation of reformers and raised up new ones. Some dream of a nationwide lay congress and press for election of parish councils, pastors or even bishops. Others demand financial transparency or rollbacks of Vatican limitations on the lay liturgical role. Even the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak, a conservative theologian and columnist who would condone little of the above, admits that "both conservatives and liberals are very upset. The bishops are God's shepherds, and they've let the wolves among the flock. Some lay leadership is needed to help find which direction to go in and what to do."

And now the movement appears to have picked up what some might consider the unlikeliest partisans of all. This week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops will meet in Dallas, charged by Pope John Paul II with arriving at a set of norms on clerical sexual abuse. In preparation, the group has released a draft of the charter it will put to a vote: a no-nonsense plan establishing a one-strike-and-you're-out rule for all future offenders (past abusers get more leniency) and requiring bishops to report any allegations to civil authorities. Upon reviewing it, most Catholics will probably hope it passes and--a dicier prospect--receives approval from skeptical Vatican officials.

But in addition to the charter's muscular response to abuse, there is a subtler but equally important message about the treatment of the American Catholic laity. The issue arises twice in the document. The bishops mandate the establishment of clergy-review boards to advise each diocesan bishop on abuse cases, and they specify that a board's majority will be "lay persons not in the employ of the diocese." Some dioceses have had such boards for years, but others do not, and the bishops are aiming for a uniform standard and process for handling accusations. In its conclusion the charter goes further, addressing the laity in much broader terms: "We ... wish to affirm our concern especially with regard to issues related to effective consultation of the laity and the participation of God's people in decision making that affects their well-being." And with that statement, painfully qualified though it may be, the bishops place themselves gingerly on the side of the American Catholic majority--but at possible loggerheads with their Pope.

Few faiths offer as sharp a definition of a lay person as Catholicism. In most Protestant denominations the line between the the congregation and its pastor is porous. In Catholicism the priest, through the laying on of a bishop's hands, is "set apart," as the church catechism puts it. He is uniquely qualified to act "in the person of Christ" in giving the sacraments and is both a vessel for the church's teaching and the on-the-ground representative of a hierarchy culminating in Rome. For centuries, his seminary training made him more educated than many of his flock. As millions of Catholic peasants and laborers immigrated to the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries, only an elite few would presume to advise the church, much less imagine a role in governing it.

That changed through the next century. As Catholics moved into the middle and professional classes, some anticipated a parallel empowerment within their church. When John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council in 1962, many who flocked to Rome believed he would usher in the Age of the Layman. But the Council's legacy proved ambiguous. Part of the ongoing bitterness regarding Pope Paul VI's 1968 extension of the church's birth-control ban dates to his decision to convene a prominent lay committee to help him study the issue--and then to ignore its advice. The ideological gap only widened when John Paul II definitively ruled out female ordination, and ambitious women came to see lay empowerment as their only vehicle.

Many American parishes eventually found necessary what Rome found distasteful. The growing shortage of priests, combined with a general progressive impulse, has led some hard-up churches to use the laity for every function short of consecrating the host. Even where there was a priest, lay people read Scripture and sometimes even preached the homily. Some bishops appointed pastors from slates provided by the congregations. Lay people--including women--achieved the powerful, previously priests-only administrative position of diocesan chancellor. Conservatives were not happy about the pattern: Novak complains that "lay people are being made into little clergymen, up around the altar during the Mass." He argues that many who agitate for more lay governance are actually more interested in reopening questions of doctrine, such as female ordination.

And in fact such objections find a willing ear in Rome. John Paul could not possibly track all the experiments and infractions, but his bureaucracy has done what it could. It has reiterated the position that lay people may distribute the Eucharist only if ordained personnel are absent. In the late 1990s it issued a document prohibiting lay hospital chaplains from using that title. Two months ago, its most recent step-by-step instructions on the liturgy pointedly noted that only the ordained may give the homily at Mass. Notes Margaret Steinfels, editor of Commonweal, an independent Catholic magazine: "This Pope thinks lay people are empowered to go out and feed the poor, which is natural, but he sure doesn't think they're empowered to run the church."

By the beginning of this year the American church had hit a classic impasse. The majority of U.S. Catholics clearly--but quietly--favored some kind of power sharing. When polled in 1999, reports Catholic University's D'Antonio, 65% of the "high-commitment Catholics" supported "more democratic decision making" at the parish level, and 56% wished for more at the diocesan level. But after years of simply ignoring birth control and abortion edicts out of Rome, many simply did not care enough about church governance to join liberal activist groups. Admits D'Antonio, whose leanings are liberal: "Things were going slowly." That is, until the Boston Globe's reporting connected the dots between abuse and hierarchical arrogance. Suddenly, says D'Antonio, "you have people who were ready to wait another 30 years for any kind of reform saying 'By gosh, this is the time.'"

James Muller, the founder of Voice of the Faithful, is a professorial type who portrays himself as a latter-day Catholic Thomas Paine. The lay people, he would say in his addresses to fellow rebels this spring, were plagued by "donation without representation." The press and legal frenzy over the scandals were like "the Boston Tea Party," and Voice meetings resembled "the Constitutional Convention." Said Muller: "Two hundred years ago, Americans gave representative democracy to the secular world. We're now attempting to do the same thing again--this time for the church."

A year ago, such rhetoric would probably have gone nowhere. This year it went viral. Starting as a post-Mass discussion group of two dozen people in January, VOTF has seen its e-mail membership climb to 10,000, and Muller reports receiving inquiries from parishes in 40 states about founding their own chapters. Muller himself, a cardiologist, has grown more cautious as his movement has grown bigger. On the Voice website is a set of presentations marked "VOTF Working Paper." They appear to outline a church in which elected lay people would wield as much authority as the clergy, but he will not confirm this as policy. Nor will he commit to favoring popular election to diocesan boards or more transparent church finances, although his group's majority clearly favors both.

Perhaps this is because of the lessons he learned in his past campaign: in 1980 he and four doctor friends founded Physicians Against Nuclear War. Five years later they were sharing a Nobel Peace Prize with some like-minded Soviets, at the helm of a 150,000-doctor international organization. His success, he notes, depended on not getting too hung up in divisive specifics, and that is his guiding principle now. He doesn't want VOTF to be seen as just one more group of liberal Catholics demanding women priests and an end to celibacy. Instead he envisions the group as a congress for various political parties of Catholics, not a political party itself. "The majority of Catholics are neither progressive nor conservative," he says. "By keeping the focus, we get the center."

Less politic is Kennedy School of Government professor Mary Jo Bane. Bane was part of the Boston group that proposed sending representatives from each of the city's existing lay councils to a central, deliberative "All-Parish Council." Cardinal Law, notoriously mum on his role in the abuse scandals, spoke up almost instantly against the idea, letting it be known that Boston's pastors were not to "join, foster or promote" the group, on the ground that it would compete with an existing panel. Bane called Law's response "astonishingly stupid" given that neither the idea--nor the people involved--were radical. "Lay organizations can't force the leadership to acknowledge them or give them power," she says. "But if the church ignores them, I think they'll see some pretty widespread exits."

That may be a risk the Pope is prepared to take. Convinced already that Americans are cafeteria Catholics, who stay in the church while ignoring the edicts they find inconvenient, he may doubt that they will leave now in droves over issues of governance. Certainly he has shown no desire to increase lay influence. Addressing a delegation from the West Indies last month, he warned against lay people becoming "too clerical or too politicized," either by usurping the priest's liturgical role or supplanting him in "tasks of pastoral governing."

That puts the bishops in a bind. They have heard the rumblings from the faithful; they know the reluctance of Rome to entertain revolutionary ideas. The sex-abuse scandals may have led to at least one mutually acceptable innovation. Dioceses that have created lay-led panels to advise the bishop in handling such cases seem to have effectively reduced scandal and nourished a sense of enfranchisement. "This board helps the church as well as the people who are directly involved," says Louverne Williams, a retired schoolteacher who serves on a review board in Minneapolis-St. Paul, along with a psychologist, a lawyer, a law-enforcement expert and other lay members and clergy. "It is my ministry." It has heard about 15 abuse cases since its founding in 1995; in the two cases with child victims, the board recommended the priests be defrocked. If the charter is adopted in Dallas next week, such panels will become part of the power structure in every diocese.

Advisory panels, however, while a step toward healing a broken trust, are designed to address isolated crimes, not daily life. While intent on reaching out to their flocks as never before, the bishops are not moving toward the kind of representative democracy that some lay activists dream of. "I don't believe that the solution to the church's problem is to replace clericalism with laism," Bishop Wilton Gregory, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told TIME. "I do not see the Catholic Church becoming a democracy." That was not Jesus' vision, he contends; and it is not the church that Scripture and tradition reveal. The touchiness on all sides was displayed on Friday when the conference canceled its Dallas invitation to a major victims group because the group had filed suit against the bishops on Thursday.

But a change is coming nonetheless, Bishop Gregory says, "a greater collaborative approach to the issues that we have to face together." As he sees it, it's about "you respecting my office, my respecting your competence, realizing that together we can do an awful lot that neither of us can do apart." If the attitudes change, he suggests, the church can uphold its hierarchical structure while honoring its constituents at every level, for the contribution they make. The challenge will be whether his vision--"a community of mutual respect and interdependence"--will prove acceptable to the basement revolutionaries and the Vatican enforcers at the same time.

--With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Belleville, Matt Kelly/ Wellesley, Maggie Sieger/Chicago, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis and Adam Pitluk/Dallas

With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Belleville, Matt Kelly/Wellesley, Maggie Sieger/Chicago, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis and Adam Pitluk/Dallas