Roman Catholics: The Unlikely Cardinal

(3 of 10)

In parish life, renewal means a comprehensible liturgy with parishioner participation instead of novenas, family study groups instead of membership in the Holy Name Society (an organization formed in part to cut down profanity). It means the displacement of what Layman Michael Novak calls "nonhistorical orthodoxy"—the abstract, rationalistic theology that has dominated Catholic thinking since the Council of Trent—by a Gospel-centered Catholicism that is open to accept the insights of Freud, Camus, and even Marx.

To the renewal elite, the church is not only a juridical institution governed by the Pope and the bishops, but also the "people of God." Such Catholics feel free to challenge betrayals of the moral law—segregation or political expedience—even when they are tolerated by priests and bishops on grounds of prudence.

Conservative Backlash. Inevitably, millions of U.S. Catholics are indifferent to this kind of renewal—the born-and-bred bead-sayers for whom faith is simply a comfortably furnished apartment of the mind. Inevitably, too, there is a "renewal backlash" of Catholics who like the church the way they find it, and look upon its unchanging doctrines and structures as pillars of security in an age of flux. Such ecclesiastical conservatives complain that Mass in English will turn them into "Bapto-Catholics," and look upon the church's denunciation of contraception as a sign of strength rather than rigidity. "I left the Baptist Church for Roman Catholicism, and now it is being dismantled all around me," says one Denver housewife. "At the rate they are going, it will look like the Baptist Church before long."

By temperament and training, most American bishops are inclined to share such conservative forebodings, and the extent to which Catholic renewal is encouraged varies considerably from diocese to diocese. Los Angeles' Mclntyre openly supports the status quo. Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York objects to "change for change's sake," and classifies most change as just that.

Chicago's reclusive Albert Meyer is regarded as a moderate who promotes liturgical reform. St. Louis' quiet-spoken Joseph Elmer Cardinal Ritter is a proponent of change; his archdiocese will be the setting of the first English Mass in the U.S. on Aug. 24, when more than 10,000 priests and laymen will gather for the annual North American Liturgical Week. But church renewal has been most actively supported by the man whose episcopal motto is Ut Cognoscant Te (That they may know thee), Boston's Cardinal Cushing.

A Round of Beer. Cushing is an unlikely sort of cardinal to be encouraging the renewal of American Catholicism, but that is partly because he is an unlikely cardinal. He is the only life member of the N.A.A.C.P. who has publicly endorsed the aims of the John Birch Society. A doer rather than an original thinker, Cushing openly confesses his inability to follow theological argument; yet his lengthy pastoral letters are often eloquent. He is a tireless fund-raiser out of the mold of brick-and-mortar prelates, but his greatness is measured in intangibles: his extraordinary love for people, the good will he has fostered among men of other faiths.