The 1976 U.S. Catholic Bishops' Call To Action Conference in Detroit

Commonweal Special Supplement
Decades of disarray: a call to unity

MSGR. JOHN TRACY ELLIS

 

What have the last ten years seen by way of realizing the Detroit resolutions of 1976? Any attempt at an answer must be a qualified one. At Detroit the delegates called again and again for a broader participation in framing policy and in executing action in all that pertained to the church. Has that principle been found to work on the diocesan and parish level? It has-and it has not-according to the willingness of the clergy and laity to yield to each other in a truly participatory way. According to a study of the National Pastoral Life Center, in those parishes where genuine participation obtained there were fewer defections than in those where participation was blocked by clerical intransigence or by extreme and unrealistic demands made on the part of the laity. In a word, it has been a blessing in some parishes, while in others the attempt has ended in a frustration that only furthered parochial division. Given human nature, this result should be no surprise. For a healthy ecclesial life in the time ahead, a policy of the fullest possible participation should be pursued in the hope that its success in certain dioceses and parishes will ultimately become the norm for others. In this way the immobilisti may be brought to see that there is no turning back to an era of virtually total clerical control, just as it may make clear to the laity that if they are to realize their rightful participation they must demonstrate an undoubted competence as well as a degree of moderation.

No thoughtful and discerning Catholic is today happy with the present condition of the American church. Would he or she be so if the more than one hundred resolutions passed at Detroit had been enacted? Frankly, no. Wide as the representation was at that gathering, it could not be said to have been a reflection of the approximately fifty million who then constituted the church's membership. More important, most of the disappointment that followed the event was the blame of no person or group but of the state of society in 'general. About a quarter century ago a profound revolution struck the Western world, the results of which are still with us. A few days after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the late Walter Lippmann, generally recognized as one of the wisest citizens of the Republic, wrote a sentence that I have pondered many times, "I know of nobody, and I've heard of nobody, who has come anywhere near to understanding fully and practically this revolutionary condition." If the ecumenical council of the 1960s disturbed many Catholics, the societal revolution that broke later in the decade deepened. their perplexity and contributed significantly to the imbalance they still feel in their lives. In the face of this extraordinary "revolutionary condition," resolutions, however well intended and reasoned, were doomed to encounter a formidable obstacle.

What of the time ahead? In the ten years that have passed since the Call to Action congress, the single most serious problem for American Catholics, in my judgment, has become the divisiveness which has steadily mounted in recent years. I instinctively think of these things in terms of the American church's history. Only twice in the nearly two centuries since the consecration in 1790 of John Carroll as the first bishop of the United States, have Catholics of this nation known what one might rightly term serious crises, namely, the lay trustee troubles dating from about 1785 until the Civil War, and the so-called heresy of Americanism that surfaced in the 1890s. In neither case, however, was the trouble faintly comparable to the current malaise in depth and extent of the disarray that set in about 1966. In both of the previous instances no more than a minority of Catholics was involved, whereas today scarcely more than a handful remains untouched. No community, religious or otherwise, can prosper in such a divisive state, allowing opinion always for the altogether justified differences of that normally obtain among large groups. In 1854, Newman told Orestes Brownson:

If there is one misery greater than another, it is division among Catholics. . . If we have traitors among us, of course let them be duly dealt with-but, in cases where treason is not suspected, let us interpret each other's words in meliorem partem, and aim at cultivating that charity, which "thinketh no evil."

Alas, there is too little of that spirit in Catholic ranks at the present hour. Somehow or other, a basic unity must become once again a prime goal if the objectives of 1976 and the more pressing issues of the ensuing decade are to be realized.

Msgr. John Tracy Ellis is professorial lecturer in church history at the Catholic University of America. He was a member of the History Subcommittee of the Catholic bishops' Ad Hoc Committee for the Bicentennial, and attended the Sacramento Call to Action hearings.

 

This Special Supplement, dated December 26, 1986 has been reprinted with permission of Commonweal Magazine.