Roman Catholics: Authority Under Fire

The Roman Catholic Church is an authoritarian, hierarchal institution whose Pope and bishops claim to govern by divine right as descendants of Christ's Apostles. This fundamental Catholic concept is now undergoing widespread scrutiny, criticism and questioning, leading to what Father Joseph Gallagher an editor of Baltimore's archdiocesan weekly bluntly calls "a crisis of obedience in the church." What is being questioned is not authority as such, but how it is exercised; not the concept of obedience, but what it means in the modern world of free men.

The Spirit of the Time. The current Catholic mood of restlessness and discontent is in part inspired by challenge to authority plentifully visible in secular society. "Members of the church are also citizens of the world," writes Father Gallagher in the weekly Ave Maria. "They are unavoidably influenced by the spirit of their own time in history ."

The re-examination of authority also stems from the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council, which is transforming Catholicism, in the words of Kansas City Layman Robert Hoyt editor of the National Catholic Reporter "from a religion of paternalism to a religion of personal responsibility ." The debates in St. Peter's have made it clear that it is no sin to question outdated traditions. Moreover, the council's decree on the nature of the church marks the triumph of a revolution in theological thinking about what Catholicism is. It not only restores to bishops collegial rule that was theirs in the early church; it also justifies freedom of action and thought by the laity, who, the decree says, are "permitted and sometimes even obliged to express their opinions on those things which concern the good of the church."

This restructuring of authority has led to conflict and tension at almost every level of the church. Among bishops, for example, there is widespread resentment against efforts of the Roman Curia to limit the council's reforms and the scope of the bishops' collegial power. Last week, the U.S. hierarchy's ecumenical commission met in Washington to formulate rules for interfaith contacts; it ignored an order limiting those contacts handed down recently by Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, the apostolic delegate (TIME, March 12).

Outspoken Journals. Among laymen, the new spirit of questioning shows in the tone of such lay-edited Catholic journals as Commonweal, Ramparts Jubilee and the National Catholic Reporter, which have sharply criticized such authoritarians as James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre, and have given plenty of space to speculative proposals for further Catholic reforms in clerical celibacy and the theology of marriage. It is also apparent in the zest with which laymen are writing about Catholic theology, often critically. In a new book called Objections to Roman Catholicism, British Housewife Magdalen Coffin challenges many devotional practices as superstition; Rosemary Haughton writes a sharp but reasoned demand for more freedom in the church.