Replying to A Call to Action

Women priests. Married priests. A more tolerant attitude toward birth control and homosexuality. Those were among the 182 proposals issued in Detroit last October by 1,350 Roman Catholic delegates at a conference known as A Call to Action. While liberal Catholics happily mailed out copies of the Detroit proposals, which were based on the work of seven regional hearings and hundreds of discussion groups around the country, traditionalists urged the hierarchy to ignore them. One of the latter called the event "demonic."

Cincinnati's Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, president of the bishops' conference, acknowledges that the Detroit meeting "tended to increase polarization and factionalism" in some quarters. Nonetheless, last fall he named a task force of bishops to figure out what response should be made. The behind-the-scenes struggle centered on preparation of a statement giving the hierarchy's formal views on the issues. The statement of response went through seven drafts. One version, completed in March, had a "Neanderthal" view of the church, in the opinion of Bishop James Rausch of Phoenix, the former general secretary of the bishops' national staff.

Last week, however, when 246 U.S. bishops gathered in Chicago's Palmer House to discuss the matter at their semi-annual meeting, the 5,000-word final draft of the statement expressed appreciation for the Detroit meeting and a willingness to at least think about its long list of recommendations. Moreover, a group of 20 Call to Action enthusiasts, led by Newark's Archbishop Peter Gerety, put through an amendment that sets up a special committee to monitor the handling of the Detroit proposals over the next five years.

All 182 of the recommendations will be turned over to committees of bishops, but the four most disputed topics from Detroit have already been ruled out by the Vatican and therefore dismissed in advance by the U.S. bishops:

CELIBACY. The bishops' statement endorses the "longstanding view of the church" that requires celibacy for all Western priests, and notes that this was "overwhelmingly" supported by the 1971 international Synod of Bishops.

WOMEN PRIESTS. The bishops "affirm" the Vatican's recent statement barring women's ordination and defeated a proposal favoring women deacons. They pledge a generalized commitment to wider roles for women and "further study" of the priesthood issue, but rejected an amendment admitting that "many persons find difficulty" with the Vatican's reasoning.

BIRTH CONTROL. Though the Call to Action conference asked the bishops to endorse a married couple's right to decide what forms of contraception are moral, the new statement skirts the question of freedom of conscience and supports Pope Paul's statements against all artificial methods.

HOMOSEXUALITY. The bishops sidestep the Detroit appeal for an end to discrimination against homosexuals and repeat the church teaching that homosexual activity is morally wrong.

Of the Detroit issues, one of the most anguishing is divorce. It was 93 years ago, at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, that the U.S. hierarchy decreed excommunication for those who divorce and then enter second marriages against church law. Ever since, those who divorce and remarry have been treated as "lepers and outcasts," says Bishop Cletus O'Donnell of Madison, Wis., the plain-speaking progressive who heads the bishops' canon law committee. The Baltimore decree "is doing us no good," he argues, "so why not get rid of it?"

That is exactly what the bishops did last week. The excommunication issue was so touchy that it was treated in a closed-door session and was never listed on the bishops' public agenda. Although repeal had never come before the bishops' conference before, it passed after only 30 minutes of discussion. The removal of excommunication requires the personal approval of Pope Paul VI, but that should be a mere formality. For one thing, the bishops' vote to ask for the change was a lopsided 231 to 8; for another, only the U.S. church has ever imposed blanket excommunication.

Although the end of excommunication restores remarried Catholics to the margins of church life, they are still forbidden to receive Communion. Thus, says O'Donnell, the action is most important as "a gesture of love and reconciliation." The bishops hope that alienated Catholics will resume church activity and look into the possibility of getting church annulments of their original marriages. If they do, they will discover that the grounds for granting annulments have widened greatly in recent years, and that cases are handled locally under streamlined procedures.

The bishops also came close to endorsing a much-disputed liturgical change advocated by A Call to Action: letting worshipers receive the Communion wafer in the hand instead of on the tongue if they prefer. If enough additional bishops endorse the change in a mail ballot, the proposal will go to the Vatican for final approval. Many conservatives are deeply upset about the new practice, which they consider irreverent. John Cardinal Carberry of St. Louis even warned that wafers might be taken and used in satanic masses.

All in all, while the bishops resisted some of the most publicized Detroit proposals, they did promise to hold further consultations and, as Archbishop Bernardin put it, to "listen, learn, discern and make judgments."

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