BishopAccountability.org
	American Pope an Unlikely Fit Cardinals Expect Church to Keep Distance By Alan Cooperman and Daniel Williams Journal Gazette [Vatican City] April 6, 2005 VATICAN CITY – American cardinals come to Rome representing an enthusiastic home church, one widely admired for its spirit and for its generosity in giving to Catholic causes. But even before the 11 U.S. cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel to take part in electing a new pope, they know he will not be an American. "You have to ask what’s best for the mission of the universal church. It may well be at this time it’s not best that there be an American pope," said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. "We’ve done some good things and some not-so-good things – and good or bad, we’re resented by a lot of people and we’re suspect in a lot of quarters." Such comments are not heard about any other nationality. Catholic leaders are actively discussing the possibility of choosing a pope from Europe, Latin America, Africa or Asia. The central notion is that the United States is too powerful an actor on the world stage to supply the head of the world’s 1 billion Roman Catholics. The bias stems from conflicting views of the United States in Europe in general and in the Vatican in particular. The United States is regarded with derision for its coarse consumerism, with admiration for its spirituality, with fear for its power and with envy for its clout in world affairs. Moreover, the American church often baffles the Vatican, which regards it as something of a maverick, U.S. church leaders say. American Catholicism has been in the vanguard of interfaith dialogue and feminism within the church, and it has a highly educated and sometimes disobedient laity. "In the lingo, ‘the American church’ has become the description of a church that is not necessarily right with you. The American church has become synonymous with a church that is more independent" than the Holy See would like, said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington. As a result, the American cardinals stand at an awkward intersection. They represent a dynamic but restive flock to the Vatican and an opaque, ponderous Vatican bureaucracy to their flock. "I think that many people in Europe – and that would mean, therefore, many people in the church – see the United States as the center of materialism in the world and consumerism generally," McCarrick said in an interview Tuesday at the North American College, the U.S. seminary in Rome where he is staying until the conclave to select the next pope begins. But he added that he often defended the American church by telling Pope John Paul II about the U.S. response to a group of European Catholics, called "We Are Church," who began circulating a petition in 1995 calling for the ordination of women, an end to mandatory celibacy in the priesthood and other radical changes in the church. "They collected a million signatures in Austria. Then they went to Germany and collected more than a million signatures there," McCarrick said. But in the United States, after a major publicity campaign, "they got 38,000 signatures in a church that is obviously much larger than the church in Germany and Austria." "I told the Holy Father that story many times. I said, ‘That’s how much the American church loves you and is faithful to you and to your vision,’ " he said. Cardinal Edmund Szoka, a former archbishop of Detroit who is now in charge of Vatican City finances, said U.S. Catholics send more money than any other nationality – close to $100 million – to defray the Holy See’s expenses, support its charities and sponsor its missions. The United States also boasts more Catholic colleges and universities than any other country. Catholic Charities USA is the largest Catholic-run charity in the world. And some U.S. church leaders maintain that on any given Sunday, there are more Catholics in the pews in the United States than in all of Western Europe. After John Paul published his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae decrying abortion and calling for a "new culture of life," he was astonished to learn that paperback copies were on sale in some U.S. supermarkets, according to biographer George Weigel. That fact "amazed and pleased" the pope, who had thought of the United States as a secular society but gradually "came to understand that the United States was a modern, robust, developed democracy that was also intensely religious," Weigel said. Yet Vatican officials are also painfully aware that the United States accounts for nearly 70 percent of all the requests for marriage annulments in the Catholic Church each year. Of the 67 million Roman Catholics in the United States, more than 6 million have obtained civil divorces and remarried without an annulment, making them ineligible to take Holy Communion. Polls have shown that a majority of U.S. Catholics disagree with the church’s teachings on sexuality, particularly its ban on birth control. And the United States is failing to produce enough priests to serve its flock. Few issues in recent years have generated as many misunderstandings and recriminations as the scandal over child sex abuse by U.S. priests. Vatican officials at first suggested that the scandal was overblown, and some still think that the U.S. bishops overreacted to public pressure in 2002 by instituting a "one strike, you’re out" policy toward child sexual abusers in the priesthood. "The pedophile scandal suggested to the Vatican that the American bishops were not capable of leading their church," said Alberto Melloni, a historian of the Catholic church. American cardinals contend that the sex abuse scandal, the priest shortage, rising divorce rates and declining church attendance are problems afflicting all developed countries. But they also accept some criticism for their own performance. Rather than arguing that the Vatican bureaucracy has exerted too much control over local affairs, "you could argue that there wasn’t enough control, enough oversight," said George, the archbishop of Chicago. Underlying some of the arms-length attitudes toward the American church is a longtime European opinion that the United States has no culture and is given over to fads. "America has not given a major intellectual contribution to the universal church," argued Vittorio Messori, an Italian journalist who interviewed the pontiff for a book on his teachings. Moreover, the aggressiveness of U.S. liberal movements scares Vatican officials – whether they are campaigns inside the church for the promotion of priestly marriage and equal rights for gay men and lesbians, or campaigns outside the church in favor of abortion. "There are so many groups with perverse ideas," said Karl Romer, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Vatican department in charge of promoting traditional families. On the flip side, the Vatican admires the vibrancy of parish life and the practice of faith at large in the United States. Because the United States lacks a history of anti-clericalism, it is more fertile ground for Catholic teaching than Europe. "I am always impressed by the spirituality of the people," Romer said. According to McCarrick, the near impossibility of an American pope is not a reflection of the quality of the 11 U.S. cardinals who are under age 80 and therefore eligible to vote in the conclave.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.