Heard It Before

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 10/31/02)

Recently I took part in a conference on the present situation and future prospects of the Church in the United States. The other participants, numbering 50 or so, were more or less evenly divided between liberal and conservative Catholics. Listening to them talk, I had a disconcerting thought: I've heard all this before.

Those bright, articulate people were engaged in the same old argument about the same old issues that Catholics have debated for four decades: authority and conscience, sex, the role of women, sex, clerical celibacy and married priests, sex, the liturgy, sex, politics, and then…a little something about sex.

As my sense of déjà vu increased, so did something else: the awareness that, 40 years after the opening of Vatican Council II, the postconciliar era was finally over.

Maybe it ended earlier for some people and will end later for others. For me it ended then and there. Suddenly I knew that we had turned a corner, entered a new era. The period that could helpfully be described as 'post-Vatican II' had come to an end.

Not, certainly, that the issues we've argued about all these years have been settled. Quite the contrary. As the conference I attended made abundantly clear, those issues still very much with us, and one of the biggest complications in this new era is precisely that we've carried all the old baggage with us into the new.

But a new era it most certainly is.

In the United States, the watershed event has been the sex abuse scandal and the reaction to it. I'm not going to rehash all that here. For present purposes, it's enough to say that the situation of the Church is radically different as a result of this episode. There will be no going back to how things were.

It is in this context, I think, that the proposal being pushed by a hundred or more American bishops to hold a new plenary council for the Church in the U.S. can best be understood. To one degree or another, it's fair to say, these men share the sense that a tectonic shift has occurred and something needs to be done in response.

What these bishops want, it seems, amounts to a sweeping spiritual renewal—"purification and growth in holiness," as their petition puts it—of American bishops and priests. The program would focus on "solemnly receiving" and teaching the doctrine of the Second Vatican Council and the Magisterium concerning episcopacy, priesthood, and sexual morality.

The authority to convoke a plenary council (the last was the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, held in 1884) rests with the bishops' conference of the United States, subject to approval by the Holy See. Last month the conference's administrative committee turned the question over to a committee with instructions to report back at the bishops' general meeting in Washington in mid-November. The administrative committee specified that there would be no vote for or against a plenary council at that time, but there will be a discussion.

What happens then is anybody's guess. Some bishops are opposed to holding what they believe would be perceived as a council on sex abuse. Some prefer to leave the bishops' business at the national level in the hands of the bishops' conference.

But others are convinced that a dramatic step like a plenary council is just what the bishops and the rest of us now need to position the Church in America to meet the challenges of the difficult new era that's just begun. We shall see.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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