“The American church is defiant. It thumbs its nose at Rome, allowing someone like [Father Charles] Curran to infect his students with rebellion for 20 years . . . letting altar girls serve all over the Chicago archdiocese . . . rejecting the official position on birth control. As far as I can see, the American church is schismatic!” –Kathleen Sullivan, cofounder of the National Catholic Coalition.
“First, they watered down the faith, threw out the words that people understood, and introduced this idea of me and my rights and my freedoms. Now it’s getting worse. The tone of some Catholic priests and sisters is anti-Catholic. If we have a God and we know what his plan is, we can’t mess with it; we can’t change it. This confusion has to stop!” –William Fairman, chairman of the Chicago chapter of Catholics United for the Faith.
When Pope John XXIII initiated the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, he wanted only to “open the window a little, to let some fresh breezes blow through the church.” But the council became for the Roman Catholic Church what the American Revolution was for world politics. It overturned the traditions of centuries, introducing new styles of language, liturgy, and leadership. As a result, the differences between Protestant and Catholic became blurred. The highway signs aren’t so clear anymore. To a large extent, American Catholics have become democratized and even (one hesitates to say it) Protestantized!
Bernardin and other Chicago church officials are regularly deluged with letters and calls of complaint claiming priests are disputing the magisterium (the church’s official teaching) in the confessional and in counseling sessions (usually about contraception) or are deviating from the rules in celebrating the Mass and administering the sacraments. Said one chancery official, who asked to remain anonymous, “The tone of much of this criticism is so mean spirited it’s almost incredible.”
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In this they reflect one of the Christian church’s oldest tenets: a passion for unity. Jesus said his followers should be “one.” Saint Paul insisted the many little primitive communities he founded formed but “one body in Christ.” As early as the second century, the focus of unity in each of these communities was the local bishop, the leader whose authority stemmed from his being recognized as a successor of one of the original 12 apostles.
As Christianity spread through the Mediterranean world and beyond, it was buffeted by the various cultures it encountered. Jewish, Greek, and Roman converts understood the world in different ways, and so the role of the bishop in pulling his diverse flock together became all the more crucial. It was intolerable that the church should break up into fragments or operate in different ways in different places.
Then came Pope John’s open window and the subsequent opening of the church to the world. The rigid insistence on unity, conformity, and submission was replaced by tolerance and the acknowledgment (though often not explicitly stated) that much of what seemed absolute and changeless was far more the result of historical circumstance than of divine decree.
