Religion: Replying to A Call to Action

Women priests. Married priests. A more tolerant attitude toward birth control and homosexuality. Those were among the 182 proposals issued in Detroit last October by 1,350 Roman Catholic delegates at a conference known as A Call to Action. While liberal Catholics happily mailed out copies of the Detroit proposals, which were based on the work of seven regional hearings and hundreds of discussion groups around the country, traditionalists urged the hierarchy to ignore them. One of the latter called the event "demonic."

Cincinnati's Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, president of the bishops' conference, acknowledges that...