The Future Church

by Alan Cooperman

The Rev. C. John McCloskey thinks he knows where the Roman Catholic Church is headed. His 10-page account of what life will be like for American Catholics in 2030, while playful in parts, is meant seriously.

He imagines a church that has reemphasized its traditional teachings. Helped – not hurt – by sexual abuse scandals, it has restored a truly celibate priesthood. Pope John Paul II has become Saint John Paul for leading this renewal. But the church has shed a third of its U.S. members.

Today, as American Catholics face a deepening legal, financial and moral crisis over sexual misconduct by priests and alleged coverups by bishops, it is unclear what direction the church will take. Two broad camps advocate what seem to be irreconcilably different solutions.

One is a liberalizing camp, stronger among the laity than among the clergy, that believes the only way out is radical change, including allowing priests to marry and ordaining women or, at least, substantially elevating the role of women in the church.

The other is a traditionalist camp that speaks of restoring holiness and discipline. Many traditionalists blame the encroachment of secular, hedonistic American culture – of "pansexualism and libertinism," as a Vatican spokesman put it last week – for the church's woes. The answer, they say, is not to fall more deeply into that culture but to firmly reject it.

McCloskey, a priest in the conservative Opus Dei movement who runs the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, belongs to the traditionalist camp. Clearly the pope does, too.

In a pre-Easter letter to the priesthood Thursday, John Paul II spoke of sexual abuse as a manifestation of supernatural evil that has cast "a dark shadow of suspicion" over all the fine priests performing their duties with honesty and self-sacrifice. While the church tries to comfort the victims, he said, priests must "commit ourselves more fully to the search for holiness."

To the disappointment, if not to the surprise, of liberalizers, the 81-year-old pontiff made no mention of failures by American bishops to remove predatory priests or of any systemic problem in the way priests are selected and supervised. He acknowledged a "grave scandal" but gave no indication that radical change is even remotely under consideration.

"The ideological joy riding on this scandal for women priests and married priests is not going to go very far. It won't move the U.S. bishops, and it certainly won't move Rome," said Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute, a Washington think tank on religion.

Royal, who considers himself a Catholic traditionalist, denied that his camp wants to move backward. Although traditionalists come in many stripes, he said, their common position is "loyalty to traditional Catholicism with confidence that it can be presented in a dynamic, contemporary way."

He also said he believes that "a new generation of bishops will be coming to the fore who have not been formed to think that scandals are to be avoided at all costs." Such men as William E. Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., and Wilton D. Gregory, the first black president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, "understand that there is a price to be paid, financially and morally, for not taking problems head on," he said.

Royal predicts that America's bishops will become "much more meticulous" in choosing candidates for the priesthood, particularly in screening out sexually active gays. Like many traditionalists, he contends that the scandals are really "more about homosexuality than pedophilia," because most of the abuse cases involve gay priests having sexual contact with teenagers, not with small children.

McCloskey posted his vision of 2030 on the CatholiCity.com Web site before the latest scandal broke in Boston in January. Nonetheless, he said, it reflects what the church needs to do now.

In the Web posting, McCloskey, now 49, imagines himself as a 77 year-old writing to a newly ordained priest, explaining how far the church has come since 2000.

Beginning with the pivotal papacy of John Paul II, he writes, the church experienced "growth in piety, apostolic zeal, and doctrinal solidity." Orthodoxy and rigor were restored to Catholic seminaries and universities. The priesthood became "healthy in belief and spirit" again. The laity took on greater responsibilities, dissent disappeared, and even Catholic architecture returned to classical forms.

True, the writer concedes, the number of American Catholics dropped from more than 60 million in 2000 to about 40 million in 2030. But those who remained "assented wholeheartedly to the teaching of the Church," while those who left had never really "been with the program."

Liberalizers consider the departure of millions of Catholics to be the only realistic part of McCloskey's vision.

"I'm a lifelong Catholic, but there is going to be a great divide here soon, and I know what side of it I stand on," said Thomas Cahill, author of "How the Irish Saved Civilization" and a biographer of Pope John XXIII. "The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition of celibacy, but it belongs to a time that is truly gone."

Janice Leary, a pastoral counselor and activist Catholic in Natick, Mass., said the church's first step should be to invite back into active ministry most of the several thousand men who have left the priesthood to marry in the past 20 years.

"I'm absolutely convinced that in my lifetime – and I'm past the 50-year mark already – I'm going to see married priests and women priests," she said.

Leary admits that she is not clear on exactly how this will come about. But she believes that "the next pope, whoever he is, is already sizing up the situation." And she says that in the Boston area, many lay Catholics have been jolted into action by revelations that a former priest, John J. Geoghan, had molested more than 130 children while being moved from parish to parish by superiors who were aware of his pedophilia.

"The exciting thing is, out of all this horrific mess, there is a bright light: In the parishes, people are speaking and being heard by each other like never before," Leary said.

The need for greater activism within the laity is one of the few points on which liberalizers and traditionalists seem to agree. McCloskey believes the church has "to make clear that the clergy's function is to serve and not to rule."

But, he added, "the so-called liberals can scream and yell all they want, and it's still very unlikely they're going to get their way."

"We want everyone to stay. But it's like if you're in a club and you want the rules to change, and they don't," he said. "You can stay and be a malcontent. Or you can just move on."

First appeared in The Washington Post on March 24, 2002. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.