An Open Book — Closed

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 5/22/03)

Last year, at the height of the media firestorm over the sex abuse scandal, bishops were heard invoking "transparency" as the new standard for doing business in the Church. Henceforth, it was said, the conduct of ecclesiastical affairs would be an open book.

That was then. Then is now. The open book is closed — at least, where the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is concerned.

When the bishops' conference meets in St. Louis June 19-21, six and a half hours out of a total of 16 will be in open session. The other nine and a half hours will be behind closed doors. And — wouldn't you know? — the truly important questions will be discussed behind those doors, while bishops chat in public about a "directory of catechesis" and the permanent diaconate.

What truly important questions am I talking about?

First and foremost: whether to hold a plenary council for the Church in the United States. And, if not, then how else to deal with the present crisis of American Catholicism — things like authentically receiving and carrying out the teaching of Vatican Council II, promoting the practice of priestly celibacy and sustaining the Church's doctrine on sexual morality in a hostile culture.

Those issues were surfaced by the eight bishops who originally floated the idea for a plenary council. (The number supporting it is said now to be more than a hundred.) Meeting in Washington in November, the USCCB agreed to an in-depth discussion in St. Louis this June — and, quite possibly, at an extraordinary meeting next year — so that the bishops could argue out the pros and cons of a plenary council.

A plenary council is an assembly at which a country's bishops, subject to the approval of the pope, legislate for the Church in that country. There have been three of them in the United States up to now — all in the 19th century. It's a measure of the seriousness of the current crisis that the idea should be revived.

There are cogent arguments for and against a council, but, with the debate behind closed doors, most Catholics will never hear them. Yet the question impacts on us all. Certainly it's the bishops' business — but it's everyone else's, too.

In fairness, it's easy to see why the USCCB wants privacy. The bishops' meeting in Dallas a year ago was a media zoo, with 700 journalists looking for blood. Although a repeat of that is improbable, the USCCB evidently is taking no chances.

But there are two overriding reasons why secrecy is a mistake.

First, one major casualty of the abuse crisis has been the authority of the bishops. They need badly to be seen — collectively and in public — acting as responsible leaders of the Church.

Second, Catholic lay people have a duty and right to know more about important issues in their Church than many do. That won't happen as long as secrecy remains the rule. John Henry Newman made that point at the close of his essay "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine," published in 1859, citing the people's enthusiastic reception of the decision by the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) that the Virgin Mary was rightly called theotokos — God-bearer, or Mother of God. Indeed, he added, the Church always is in better shape when Catholics know what's going on than when they don't. Whereas, he warned, keeping people in ignorance "in the educated classes will terminate in indifference, and in the poorer in superstition."

That was true then, and it will be true when our bishops meet.

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

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