Theology Today - Vol 36, No. 4 - January 1980 - EDITORIAL - John Paul II and American Catholicism

544 - John Paul II and American Catholicism

John Paul II and American Catholicism
By John A. Coleman

BEFORE, DURING, and after Pope John Paul II's visit to the United States, commentators have wondered about the significance of his trip. Did he have a special agenda for American Catholicism and could he learn anything from the American church? Especially prominent in remarks about his visit was the sharp contrast between the Pope's social liberalism and his conservative theological stands on a host of issues which he precipitately and, ultimately unsuccessfully, tried to close to further debate: women's ordination, pastoral strategies for ministering to the divorced-remarried, homosexuals, priests who have resigned from the ministry, married couples who struggle to achieve responsible parenthood.

The Pope's nuanced remarks about peace and justice, the arms race, and the centrality of human rights which marked his speech at the United Nations stood in stunning contrast with what seemed like ukases or gross simplifications on complex issues of sexuality and the pastorate. With regard to the second set of issues, in most cases he chose to announce decisions rather than give any reasoned theological defense of his actions. This acute and almost startling contrast between a highly sophisticated and reasoned approach to touchy issues of the international order and an unargued decisionism on questions of church discipline had already marked John Paul II's visit to Ireland.

In my judgment, the two best keys to understand this admittedly complicated man are that he is a man of the Second World and that he sees the dangers of secularity without understanding its promise. These two explain his simultaneous social progressivism and his rigidity on areas of sexual morality and church discipline.

At some levels, the papal tour was an extraordinary triumph. John Paul II came to America and saw and conquered its heart and imagination as he earlier won affection and allegiance in Mexico, Ireland, and Poland. It is perhaps significant that the secular press and media seemed in genuine awe-star-struck, even-when faced with the papal presence. Consequently, it was mainly in the religious press that

John A. Coleman, S.J., is Assistant Professor of Religion and Society at the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He is the author of The Evolution of Dutch Catholicism, 1958-1974 (1978). This essay is based in part on a review of three books: Andrew M. Greeley, The Making of the Popes 1978 (Kansas City, Andrews and McMeel, 1979, 302 pp., $12.95); James Hitchcock, Catholicism and Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation (New York, Seabury, 1979, 250 pp., $12.95); and Mieczyslaw Malinski, Pope John Paul II (New York, Seabury, 1979, 283 pp., $10.95).

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one found, albeit guarded, critical evaluations and probing questions. Last year John Paul II, was chosen by Americans as the second most admired man in the world, after President Carter, in the year-end Gallup poll. John Paul II's success in this poll when compared to Paul VI (who usually ranked about sixth on the list of top ten) is almost entirely due to a more positive assessment of the sitting pontiff by American Protestants. Who is John Paul II and what did he meet in American Catholicism?

Three recent books wrestle with these questions. None is deeply profound. Two (Greeley, Malinski) were written in haste. Andrew M. Greeley's book seems, at first glance, farthest removed from these questions since its focus is on the politics of coalition-building and compromise in papal conclaves. The book has already been raked over the coals by experienced Vaticanologists who claim it is riddled with factual errors and gratuitous assumptions. Even if it is in part fiction or imaginative projection, it makes engrossing journalistic reading about the politics of Vatican intrigue. I found it the best guide of the three to the question of John Paul's identity and the needs of American Catholicism, but its value lies primarily in Greeley's assumptions and less in the book's story-line.

Ostensibly pursuing a strategy analogous to that of Theodore White in documenting the making of the presidents, Greeley is sometimes cute (he alludes to a source, "Deep Purple," who informed him about the conclaves' inner voting processes), sometimes obsessed (the intrusion throughout of Greeley's certainly understandable animosity against Chicago's Cardinal Cody grates in a story where Cody is a very peripheral actor), and sometimes gossipy and even down-right irresponsible (e.g., the allegation as fact that the French Jesuit Cardinal Jean Danielou died in a bordello while seeking a sexual assignation).

Greeley, unlike Malinski and Hitchcock or-I would contend-Pope John Paul II, understands secularity, its promise as well as its challenge to traditional religion. Greeley has argued persuasively in a number of his earlier books against a trite and mythic version of the "secularization" thesis in sociology of religion which maintains that by some inevitable and irreversible master trend in history-variously labeled technology, the triumph of science, the Enlightenment, industrialism, or urbanization-the sacred is withering away in the modern world. Greeley knows that the so-called secular modern world of which the United States is the prime exemplar is pregnant with religious possibility and deep religious questions. If nothing else, the reception of Pope John Paul II by the American populace should strongly confirm this assumption. As the Princeton Religion Research Center study, The Unchurched in America, makes clear, in America secularity is not secularism, i.e., the eclipse of the sacred.

Yet Greeley also knows that modernity has introduced vast geologi-

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cal shifts in the structure of the spiritual quest. Pluralism, the necessity of choosing the myths one lives by, a shift of morality to an ethics of responsibility, and the cult of human autonomy undercut traditional authoritarian styles of spirituality and the exercise of religious leadership. Unfortunately, there seem, as yet, few successful articulators of a spirituality and spiritual authority appropriate to this century and this nation's deeply secular assumptions about pluralism and responsible autonomy. Deep longings and authentic searches have met a moral vacuum in both secular society and the organized churches. Hence, there has occurred a phenomenal growth of the new religions.

Greeley also sees how the desire for a direct experiential rooting of religion unleashes new questions. Our age and nation is as replete with religious possibility as any other. But the religious quest will take on new forms. Traditionalist styles and modes, while essential or helpful to a large segment of the population in modern Western societies-the "orthodox" who usually show up in sociology of religion surveys as, simultaneously, the socially more marginal or as exhibiting traits of an inflexible personality structure-seem to the majority to come from another age, culture, or place. As Greeley's surveys have shown with great regularity, increasingly American Catholics dissent from the Pope and bishops on a wide range of issues connected with sexual morality, public policy issues, and internal church discipline, such as a married clergy, the ordination of women, divorce, contraception, and the acceptability of homosexuals as good Christians.

It was predictable, in advance, that renewed papal affirmation of traditionalist stances on these issues was never likely to meet with much success, especially if it did not engage the positive elements of a sense of growth, integrity, historicity, and responsible choice which lie behind the search for a changed pastoral approach. I find it particularly lamentable that the Pope's renewed condemnation of the ordination of women was not set in the context of a positive evaluation of the role of women in the church's ministry such as marked his speech when he visited the shrine of St. Catherine of Siena, "the scourge of popes" (perhaps, itself, a sexist epithet), during the first year of his pontificate. I find John Paul's disciplinary position on resigned priests both indefensible and scandalous in the light of a Christian theology of forgiveness and new possibility, even if one grants his own premise that a promise once given freely should never, ideally, be retracted. People genuinely like the optimistic self-assurance of this present pope and his style of challenging people to sanctity, rather than essaying direct condemnations, but they continue to dissent from his stands as they did from those of Paul VI.

Clearly, for Catholics in America, the de-mythologization of the papacy will continue. The majority of American Catholic theologians would probably argue that this is a necessary process if an ecumenically

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understood petrine authority in the church is to emerge, although they may underestimate how de-mythologizing the papacy could possibly proceed so far as to undermine the moral authority of the office- something no sane person would desire. There is clearly a new kind of Catholic in America in the post-Vatican period. As the Princeton Religion Research Center report, Religion in America 1979-1980, puts it: "Large majorities [of Catholics] disagree with the church's position on key questions such as divorce and birth control, yet they are staying within the church and in many cases are among the most devout members."

American Catholics stay within the church, even while dissenting from official policies and beliefs, because what they are primarily seeking in their religion is a viable identity, a sense of incorporation into community and pastoral resources to help them formulate and live with and through their own questions. In Greeley's phrase, they turn to "religion as the fundamental source to answer questions of meaning and belonging." Even John Paul's amazing charisma and winning personality will not suffice to quell widespread disclaimers from "official" (i.e., papal and episcopal) teaching. Nor will it lessen the dangerous and growing cleavage between the "official" church and the majority of the faithful who are seeking less imposed answers than pastoral resources to help them achieve Christian integrity in married love or priesthood, religious and single life, and to experience church community as a base to address a growing host of societal problems. In America, John Paul met something that neither church nor state knows in Poland-a loyal opposition.

III

He also met something which is to be found in most of the churches of the First World but not in the Second or Third World-secularity. Behind the differences which show up in survey data on a host of issues related to sexual morality and church discipline lie two very different pastoral strategies for the church. The first, well articulated by the Hitchcock book, follows Peter Berger in seeing pluralism and secularity as primarily dangerous realities which undermine belief and certainty. They trivialize religion by reducing it to a consumer item in the giant super market of "relative" truths. This approach assumes that the church contains a body of once-for-all truths, called revelation, which it safeguards and proclaims, in fidelity to the Lord, in time but without either the corrosion or influence of time and culture. It seeks substantive definitions and is unhappy with process categories.

Most of all, this first pastoral approach sees the modern world and secularity as generally inimical to Christianity. There is, by definition, no spirituality appropriate to the secular except as a defense against it. This approach desires a clear "no" by the church, a confrontation with modernity rather than capitulation. It is an approach which is still rooted in an Augustinian view of the classical imagination which finds

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security against change in timeless truths and the quest for certitude. For about half of America's church members-if the evidence of sociologists of religion is to be believed-this approach is most congenial. Indeed, those churches which clearly adopt it are growing apace. Hitchcock has read with great approval Dean Kelley's book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.

Hitchcock wants American Catholicism to clarify its own identity and encourage what he terms "true pluralism" (i.e., separate enclaves in inter-action) by protecting its members against indiscriminate contacts with non-Catholics. I think Hitchcock is profoundly wrong in his analysis mainly because he cannot see the ambiguities of modernity and secularity, but I welcome his reminder to liberals who are often mindless proponents of change for its own sake or willing to trade the precious Christian heritage for a mess of psychologized pottage of the possible devastating costs of capitulation or even too generous adaptation to secularity and modernity. It seems clear, however, from almost all of the available survey data, that the overwhelming majority of American Catholics approve of the changes initiated by Vatican II and desire even greater ecumenical relations with other Christian and non-Christian groups. Thus, Religion in America 1979-1980 shows 67 percent of the national Catholic sample approving changes since Vatican II and 84 percent stating that they would like to see the church become more ecumenical. This population is not well described by Hitchcock's analysis nor would it be well served by his remedies.

The second pastoral strategy has been best painted by Paul Thibaud, editor of the French Catholic journal, Esprit, in an article reprinted in both Commonweal and Cross Currents on the eve of the papal visit to the United States. Thibaud asks for a spiritual authority appropriate to the conditions of secularity which have so pervasively penetrated the West as background assumptions and guiding metaphors. This pastoral presence would know how to "accompany, to break the solitude, to communicate." It would challenge as well as comfort, but its challenge would come from a genuine appreciation of the authenticity of conditions of secularity. It would accept the guiding modern metaphors of historicity, democratic procedures, human autonomy, a concern for discovering trustworthy processes in life's journey rather than substituting certain answers which foreclose the need for journey. While it would also challenge aspects of these assumptions, it would do so from within their own presuppositions and horizons. Moreover, this second pastoral approach, respecting pluralism, would not try to impose these assumptions and metaphors of the West on Asia or Africa.

The conditions of secularity, according to Thibaud, are "linked to personal interrogation and a sense of responsibility in history, to the courage of taking risks and tackling a difficult job. Historical memory and the communitarian sense of belonging together can now serve only as reference-points for our questions, not as a rule of life defined once and for all in an univocal manner." As Thibaud sees it, for this type of spirituality of secularity, ecclesial interventionism would be seen as an

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intolerable premature closure of unfinished questions or the denial of the search for an autonomous, internalized, and self-chosen law. Thus, a spiritual authority which addressed itself to the conditions of secularity "would not speak in the name of truth presented as unalterable and identified with an organization, but assuming contingency and relativity as aspects of all formulations of the truth, would be among us the memory of saints and prophets."

This second pastoral approach also wants a "no" to much in modernity-especially everything which trivializes and depersonalizes the quest for a community which also respects human freedom. Indeed, secularity itself has generated a massive "no" to the reductionist assumptions of the Enlightenment and the superficial nineteenth century belief in an inevitable evolutionary moral progress or a revolution which would end history and its ambiguities. Increasingly, much of modern secular thought is a tragic chastened humanism which searches for authentic grounds for hope-surely an apt conversation-partner for those who seek an authentic Christian spiritiual life. Thus, this second pastoral approach welcomes the papal challenge against Western materialism but dissents from John Paul's attempts to impose traditionalist categories in inner-church discipline. It agrees with the Pope that sexuality and sex roles are not merely matters of private conscience but does not think public consensus on the public implications of sexuality and sex roles can take place by pronouncements from on high which by-pass consultation and consensus-building. It finds it difficult to be authentic in challenging oppressive societal structures in the name of human rights unless the church also works for a more humane structure which accepts inner critique and revision. Increasingly, the only truths which sway the hearts of the modern world by their credibility are authentically self-chosen, embodied truths, not those imposed from without.

Secular society is central to the experience of the West-and only the West up to now. A pope from the Second World where socialist systems still function as an explicit ideology, as a religion without transcendence, is ill-prepared to be a spiritual authority for a spirituality appropriate to secularity. Whatever his authentic Polish pastoral experience, carefully delineated in the Malinski book, he is also ill-prepared to be pastor in this second approach to the pastorate. Perhaps by the nature of the case, this pastoral presence of the church in witness, challenge, and sojourneying is not to be expected at the level of papal action. It is best carried forth at the national and even local level, in groups ministering to those who seek to be spiritual in a new way which does not, in Bonhoeffer's terms, shrink from "a religionless Christianity" and the reality of humanity "come of age."

One of my deepest frustrations in dealing with the papal visit is the failure of most observers to go behind and beneath the superficial divisions on questions of policy and discipline to unearth these two very different understandings of spirituality, truth and historicity, and the pastorate which lie at the core of the divisions. Clearly, both approaches

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speak to genuine needs of church members. Thibaud's surfacing of these two approaches can help us to understand both the limits and possibilities of a Second World pope (or, for that matter, a pope from any of the three divided worlds) who must try to be, simultaneously, an authority "for those who demand solid benchmarks because they are engaged in massive spiritual resistance, or (in Latin America) because they are undertaking a work of popular conscientization, and at the same time for Westerners who reject an authoritarian form of regulation. "The papacy, itself, like earlier formulations of doctrine which presupposed an ahistorical orthodoxy, must undergo new thinking of how it can function across cultures without trying, once again, to impose a specious supracultural or acultural unity of precisely formulated doctrine, discipline, and strategy for church and world. In many ways, it seems to me, Paul VI understood the issues and questions on this problem better than John Paul II.

The Pope's insistent call for a heroic turn away from consumerism and a dedicated turn toward the world's poor met such an enthusiastic response from his American audiences that he must surely have been led to revise the view attributed to him in the Malinski biography which sees the United States and Western Europe as societies so oriented toward consumption that they are really blinded to altruistic values. John Paul may be part of a long list of foreign visitors to America who discover that easy charges of "materialism" miss an enduring religious dynamic and an almost obsessive idealism in the American soul. However one deciphers the religious anomaly of America, it continues to exhibit, as de Tocqueville saw one hundred and fifty years ago, a strange blend of both the lure of comfort and altruism, of hucksterism and the heroic quest.

But if John Paul II may have misread the American temper, Americans may be in no less danger of misreading his if they forget that he is essentially a man of the Second World. While no doctrinaire Marxist, he has wrestled long within the intellectual world of Marxist structural analysis. His challenge to American consumerism was not a claim that Americans were not individually virtuous enough. He was not calling for moral rearmament in the classic tradition of American social conversion stories or the progressive political rhetoric of the West. As the United Nations speech makes very clear, John Paul couched his remarks in terms of systems of distribution of goods and systems of participation "in the whole process of production and in the social life that grows up around that process" (a decidely Marxist bias shows through here in the very papal formulation of the relation between the economic and political orders). Further, he decried structures which allow "the radical separation of work from property."

In this way of formulating the issue of human rights, the Pontiff, like the tradition of papal social teaching he was drawing upon and

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extending, comes to issues of human rights-as -do the Marxists-with a certain predilection for economic and social rights as the more basic arena of rights; he views civil and political rights as necessary preconditioning derivatives of a fundamental humane restructuring of economic realities. The social encyclicals of Paul VI were often accused of being "warmed over Marxism." The social pronouncements of John Paul II are those of a man who shares the world-view of Second World dissidents. It is a mistake for Americans to see these dissidents as secret admirers of the West. These dissidents would not yield that the First World, on all scores, is more admirable than the Second World in the deliverance of human rights. In particular, they share the socialist bias toward communal goals as taking a certain precedence over individual desires, even when they call for a challenge to the assumption that all rights are derivative from the state. John Paul II's lexical ordering of the threats to human rights in the world adopts the Marxist bias which sees the first threat in unjust systems of the distribution of goods. He inverts the Western bias which tends to deny that economic and social rights, which it sees as policy ideals, are really rights at all.

The Pope, quite properly, challenged Americans to become aware of their international obligations and linkages of solidarity with the world's poor. In so doing he performed an essential petrine function by reminding American Catholics that they belong by right and priority to a community which is world-wide. He undercut national patriotisms which might become self-enclosed. But John Paul, the teacher, gave few clues that he learned anything from the American situation. In particular, he showed little awareness of American ecumenism as one of the promises of secularity and pluralism. This is all the more tragic since by reason of his commanding self-assurance and personality, John Paul shows promise of achieving-even beyond any of his recent predecessors-his goal of becoming a spokesman for humanity. If, as Greeley claims, the "pope is inevitably the most powerful religious leader in the world," the credibility and power of his most powerful pulpit will depend on his learning to do more pulpit sharing. The failure to include more Protestant and Jewish voices in the papal liturgies and rallies made them seem, even to American Catholics, somehow un-American. To achieve his noble goal of becoming a spokesman for humanity's poor, John Paul will have to take some cues from Paul VI's pontificate and make rather soon some genuine gestures of initiative toward non-Catholic religious bodies. It seems unbelievable that a whole year of his pontificate has gone by without any clues from him as to how he sees the direction of Roman Catholic ecumenical dialogue. America seemed the ideal place for him to begin the process of giving such clues, but the opportunity was missed.

The Malinski biography-largely a hagiography by a close friend of thirty years-unveils a fascinating portrait of Wojtyla the scholar, poet, actor, pastor, athlete, and factory worker. In it, four themes of the

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Wojtyla episcopate emerge: concern for religious liberty; commitment to collegiality among bishops and between bishop and priests; dedication to human rights in the public order; a willingness to experiment-in the Polish situation-with new pastoral methods. Malinski confirms my intuition that John Paul does not see the positive side of secularity. One helpful citation, however, is Wojtyla's response to criticism of one of his homilies when he was Archbishop of Cracow: "It is a very good thing for the faithful to tell their bishops the truth."

This winning person who, as Malinski notes, also "is a man who knows what he wants" is now my pope. I wish him well as he struggles to forge a credible and challenging petrine minstry for a Roman Catholic church of many cultures and in a ecumenical dialogue with her sister churches. I applaud his attempt to become-across national boundaries-a spokesman for the world's poor and a challenge to the world's established disorder. I accept him as the authoritative and legitimate successor to the petrine ministry in the Roman Catholic church. I pray for him since, as Thibaud notes, "the task of the pope seems impossible." I want to struggle with and for him as he continues to discern what neither he nor I nor anyone else yet fully knows: what will be the contours of an ecumenical, pastoral petrine ministry which looks not only to a deeper unity in Western Christendom but a profound spiritual meeting of East and West? John Paul's papacy could be as exciting and bracing as the Wojtyla personality. Clearly American Catholics, called by the Pontiff to eschew mindless consumerism, will not be passive spectators or consumers as the papacy-at the heart of the Catholic symbolic imagination-undergoes a profound evolution in our time.