"A Sense of Freedom, Joy and Rightness"

HUNCHING forward on a chair in the living room of his adobe house in Santa Fe, N. Mex., James P. Shannon, former Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, talks concernedly about the exodus of priests and nuns. "What they need," says Shannon, "is some sort of reassurance that their 'one act' has not completely vitiated them as ministers, as priests, as human beings." Shannon knows what he is talking about. For his "one act"--marrying without dispensation Mrs. Ruth Wilkinson, 51* --he was automatically excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church.

Shannon still wears his episcopal ring as well as a wedding band. He attends Mass regularly at St. Anne's Church in Santa Fe, but carefully honors the excommunication penalty and does not receive the Eucharist; to take communion, he feels, "would be disruptive of the good order of the church." He cares deeply about that order, still reverently referring to Pope Paul as "the Holy Father." Shannon says grace before every meal. He conducts simple home devotions--Scripture readings and a few prayers--several times a week.

Shannon's entry into clerical ranks was considerably less traumatic than his departure. He was born 49 years ago this week in Minnesota, one of six children in the family of a South St. Paul cattleman. After graduating as valedictorian from the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul in 1941, he entered St. Paul Seminary, and was ordained in 1946. Soon Shannon was off to academia: an M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota (1951), a doctorate in American studies from Yale (1955), the presidency of the College of St.

Thomas (1956). In 1965 Shannon was consecrated bishop by the Most Rev. Egidio Vagnozzi, then the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate to the U.S. "They criticize us for not having intellectuals in the hierarchy," remarked Vagnozzi. "Now we have an intellectual, and we shall see what happens."

What happened was that Shannon soon emerged as the most progressive and provocative member of the U.S. hierarchy. He was the only Roman Catholic bishop to march with Martin Luther King at Selma. He was also the only bishop to join a group of Catholic intellectuals in signing a 1967 open letter criticizing U.S. policy in Viet Nam--thereby earning a tough reprimand from Vagnozzi. He publicly endorsed Milwaukee's Father James Groppi and California's Cesar Chavez. Then, in 1968, his appearance on an NBC television special about the U.S. Catholic Church occasioned a critical resolution from the executive board of U.S. bishops.

At that point, Shannon had all but decided that he was serving no useful purpose as a member in bad standing of the bishops' club. What finally impelled him to quit the hierarchy was his disagreement with Pope Paul's 1968 encyclical against artificial birth control and the necessity of "keeping two sets of books" as a bishop, privately believing one thing but having to teach another. Two months after the encyclical was published, Shannon wrote directly to the Pope: "I cannot in conscience give internal assent, hence much less external, assent to the papal teaching in question." In November 1968, Shannon submitted his resignation from office to St. Paul's Archbishop Leo Binz. Two months later, he went off to teach at St. John's College in Santa Fe, a sister institution of Annapolis' famed "Great Books" school. News of the resignation did not break until May (TIME, June 6).

Catholic liberals, saddened by his resignation, were further upset by his marriage, on Aug. 2, to Ruth Wilkinson, a longtime friend who shared his interest in civil rights. "She is not an alternative," he says to any suggestion that he left episcopal office to take a wife. "She is a real woman whom I love very much. I'm supposed to be 'pining away,' but I'm not." Life with the vivacious, personable Ruth, says Shannon, has given him "a sense of freedom, of joy, of happiness and of essential rightness which I have not experienced in recent years." Shannon surveys his future with equanimity, hoping eventually to "work usefully" with the Spanish Americans of New Mexico. Though he refuses to encourage troubled priests to follow his example, Shannon takes a measure of satisfaction in the fact that many of his Catholic friends have by now accepted the logic of his decision. Even a few bishops have had the grace, and courtesy, to write in hopes of renewing their acquaintanceship.

*Who had been married three times before. Her first two marriages were civilly annulled; she was divorced from her third husband, who died in 1964.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.