Religion: Aftershock from a Papal Visit...

U.S. Roman Catholics take stock of John Paul's tough messages

The setting for the sermon on the Mall could hardly have been more dramatic. The preacher was Pope John Paul II, and his key topic was abortion. In the windswept Washington congregation of 175,000 sat Chief Justice Warren Burger, who concurred with the opinion that struck down all antiabortion laws. In the distance was the Capitol, where Congress had long been ensnarled in a nearly $500 billion budget impasse over abortion funding. Declared John Paul: "We will stand up every time that human life is threatened. When the sacredness of life before birth is attacked, we will stand up and proclaim that no one ever has the authority to destroy unborn life."

The speech was an aptly symbolic ending to the Pope's spectacular American tour. Throughout it he had propounded a vision of justice and unselfish dedication that rebuked the secular and self-indulgent elements in American culture. Toward the end of the journey, John Paul had turned increasingly to internal Roman Catholic Church issues. On these matters, too, his message was uncompromising. The theme was, in the words of one strategically placed Vatican official, "that all the test and trial after the Second Vatican Council is ended. He doesn't care how much opposition he encounters." Nowhere is that opposition likely to be stronger than in America. While most U.S. Roman Catholics last week basked in the afterglow of his visit, the church's liberal wing was ready to end something of a moratorium on criticism of the new Pope.

In Philadelphia and Chicago, John Paul came down hard on the conservative side of issues that divide the American church: there should be, he said, no artificial birth control, no married priests, no women priests, no acceptance of divorce or of sex outside marriage, including homosexuality. At the Chicago meeting with the U.S. church hierarchy, he praised American bishops for their doctrinal unity with the papacy. But their unity was anything but total. Grumbled one bishop: "He was harkening back to an orthodoxy that I thought we had passed by years ago." Said another: "I almost expected the bell to ring, telling us it was time to go to the next class."

The clash between liberals and the Pontiff came out in the open at a service for 7,000 nuns at Washington's National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. As millions watched on television, Sister Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, used her welcoming speech to inform the Pope of the "intense suffering and pain" of "half of humankind." In the church, she declared, women must be admitted to "all ministries," meaning the priesthood. The Pope was taken by surprise, but gazed impassively as most of the audience burst into prolonged applause.