Is the Vatican Being Ignored?

by Brian O'Neel

Rarely has the Vatican been as prolific as it has been during the last two years. In that time the Holy See has produced a remarkable number of directives, instructions, bulls, apostolic letters, encyclicals, and other assorted documents. Each document addresses timely and important subjects, and so each should arrest the interest of not just bishops and theologians, but all Catholics.

Yet despite their importance, many perceive that these documents—and thus, by extension, the Vatican authorities who produced them—have been ignored in America. Can this be true? Is there, as some suggest, a deliberate move afoot to ignore the Vatican? If so, is this symptomatic of a much larger problem?

The consensus to these questions is a qualified Yes.

Ignoring the Holy See

The Vatican is ignored “to a good extent,” says James Akin, senior apologist for the Catholic Answers apostolate in San Diego. “If that were not the case, then the Holy See wouldn't have to repeat itself over and over again.”

Father Peter Stravinskas, editor of the Catholic Answer magazine, agrees, saying, “My concern is that the vast amount of documents issued recently have passed under the bridge and have been roundly ignored. That lack of enforcement only adds new pastoral problems to the pile.” He continues:

My guess is that the Holy Father and Cardinal Ratzinger and others are of a mind that the most critical thing they can and should do at the moment is to enter the truth into the record. This way the future will know that in 1999, the Catholic Church still taught this and expected that. At that level, a very important primary goal is achieved.

That many are prone to ignore Rome is not a new problem, Father Stravinskas observes:

For example, five to six years ago a document was released by the Holy See. It indicated that every priest, while in public, must appear in clerical garb. Most priests don't even know the document exists. Many who did read it thought it was a joke. I'm not aware of anyone who tried to enforce it. It was ignored.

“The catechetical directories, for instance, have been routinely ignored, and this is well documented in such books as Catechisms and Controversies,” says Father George Rutler, who travels widely around the United States to his many appearances as a public speaker. “Also, the Pope has said the faithful have the right of access to the Latin Mass if they so desire it, yet that is deliberately ignored.”

Others have pointed to the Pope's call for an end to the abuses of the annulment process in America, and the problems with inclusive language in liturgical translations produced by the International Commission for English in the Liturgy (ICEL). It seems that despite the many cautions and admonitions issued by the Holy See to ICEL on translation projects ranging from the Roman Missal to the Breviary, ICEL continues to steam ahead with the use of inclusive language. While ICEL has reluctantly acquiesced when Rome actually rejects the group's efforts, frequent reports suggest that in some places (a Benedictine monastery in the midwestern United States comes to mind) the inclusive-language texts are still used in defiance of the Vatican bans.

And how many times has the Vatican explained that women can never be priests? Yet despite the Pope's unmistakably clear statement that the subject should be considered closed, pressure is continuously exerted from all corners of the Church in support of women's ordination.

For those who have followed the recent developments within the Catholic Church in Australia, all of these complaints will sound familiar. The major difference is that dissenters in the Australian Church are more forthright about their disdain for the Vatican's authority. In America, dissenters seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They dissent and yet continue to claim that they are loyal to the Pope and faithful to what the ordinary magisterium teaches.

The power of the bishops' conference

But while authoritative pronouncements and documents seem to receive short shrift in the US, some documents with much less authority are accorded great weight—specifically, the documents coming from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB).

Ordinarily, the documents which proceed out of Washington, DC, under the aegis of the NCCB, are not actually approved by the full body of US bishops. More often these documents are produced by some subset of the bishops' conference: either a particular committee within the structure of the NCCB, or (still more frequently) the committee's staff. In his 1988 apostolic letter Apostolos Suos, Pope John Paul II made it clear that documents issued by episcopal conference hold authority only when they are approved by the full body of bishops—not when they are issued by committees or their staff aides. Moreover, the Pope added that even when the full body of bishops votes to approve a conference statement, that statement cannot be considered binding unless it wins unanimous approval. In any given diocese, a document issued by the bishops' conference carries only as much authority as the diocesan bishop chooses to give it.

Nevertheless, some pastors and church activists, anxious to advance their own agenda, continue to cite NCCB documents as if they were the definitive authority. Take for instance the 1997 document Always Our Children, which was put out by the Marriage and Family Subcommittee of the NCCB. Although Always Our Children does not contradict the Church's teaching on homosexuality, various pro-homosexual groups have used the document to suggest that the Church's teachings have changed, and that Catholicism now accepts homosexuality as natural.

Or take Environment and Art, a document published in the late 1970s by the NCCB's Liturgy Committee. That document was “where the idea came from that the tabernacle and statues should be off the altar,” says Phil Gray, a canon lawyer and director of Information Services for Catholics United for the Faith (CUF) in Steubenville, Ohio. Pointing to the widespread confusion regarding the proper placement of tabernacles—and on other controversial matters that arise during the design or renovation of church buildings—he explains:

Many claim that this was a discipline approved by Rome, but there's absolutely no evidence of that. Yet many bishops and parish priests are using it to say this is why we have to move the tabernacle, remove the confessionals, and all the rest. It's a good illustration of a certain principle: If a group of people want to push their agenda, they're going to try and appeal to a certain authority. If you want to remove the statues and the tabernacle and confessionals, the faithful will complain. So you have to point to some sort of authority. It's all a matter of what the person appealing to the authority wants to accomplish.

Yet isn't it a problem when the document cited as the source of authority really carries very little authority? And what effect does the repeated use of this tactic have on the legitimate governance and discipline within the Church?

Abuses unchecked

When considering how a document should be promulgated, many Catholic historians look to the example set by Pope Pius XI. Upon the release of the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, which decried the errors of Nazism, Pope Pius ordered that the document be read from every pulpit throughout Germany. While some of the faithful may have ignored his declarations and warnings, no practicing Catholic could plead ignorance of the Church's position on this vital matter.

Today things are different. Many Catholics can and do plead ignorance as to Church teaching on any number of topics. And because so many lay Catholics have not been properly taught, what the Church teaches is that much easier to ignore. Indeed it is not difficult to list dozens of instances in which abuses were committed because someone either did not know Church teaching on a certain matter or plausibly feigned ignorance and ignored the teaching he did know. The result is an ecclesial situation many Catholics of earlier generations would never have thought possible.

For example, a priest at a Newman Center in New Orleans sat with the congregation during the Good Friday liturgy while laymen conducted the entire service. He explained that if the congregation did not see anyone standing in persona Christi, they would feel more keenly the pain of the apostles over the loss of Christ. In Columbia, South Carolina, a priest dances around the altar after the consecration. A priest in Minnesota, with the tacit approval of his bishop, has women dressed in albs and deacon's stoles give “reflection homilies” during Sunday Mass. The Life Teen program has actually decided that it is a “necessity” that the young members of the congregation should stand during the consecration. It is actually the norm at all Life Teen Masses for the young people to gather around the altar during the time of the consecration—in blatant disregard of the Holy See's attempts to instill reverence for the Eucharist by mandating that the faithful should kneel during the consecration. In Oregon a priest prescribed a “mandatory penance” for his congregation during Lent, asking them to leave their pews during the sign of peace to walk around the church. (When no one complied, he berated his parishioners.)

Such situations have left many Catholics feeling frustrated, because they perceive that no one acts to curtail such abuses. While their bishops may indeed stand up for the teachings and disciplines of the Church, they rarely do so in public. So when the statements from the Holy See are met with silence—or what the ordinary church-going faithful perceive as silence—many lay people are naturally inclined to think, “They're ignoring the Pope!” And in some cases their complaints are probably on target.

The problem appears even more acute when a few bishops actually do come out with strong public defenses of the Vatican position. Why do some Church leaders—such as Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, Colorado, or Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, Australia—receive so much popular attention? Is it not because they (and a few others like them) seem unreluctant to use the “bully pulpit” that comes with their diocesan duties?

Yet this forthrightness is the exception and not the norm. Bishops are bureaucrats, says Rutler, and the “bureaucratic mind does not like bad news.” He enlarges on that theme:

A symptom of that is that you shoot the bearer of the bad news. If a catechist or chancery bureaucrat knows he's not going to be corrected by the bishop, he's going to continue what he's doing. And if the bishop knows he won't be disciplined, he will continue what he's doing.

Bishops as teachers

For those Catholics who are inclined to find first fault with the bishops, the problem can be easily summarized. Most of the teaching documents of the Church are addressed to bishops. There is a reason for this. According to the Second Vatican Council—and indeed the constant teaching of the Church—the bishops are the magistri who compose the magisterium; they are the teachers who hold and exercise the Church's teaching authority. It is their responsibility, then, to disseminate what the Church hopes to impart and to teach, in union with the Holy See and all the faithful bishops around the world. Lay people deserve bishops who will teach them properly and who will preserve an unbreakable union with the Supreme Pontiff, without whom no bishop has authority (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 880-886). But all of this in turn requires that the officials to whom the bishops delegate the work of disseminating, enforcing, and explaining Church teaching are equally sympathetic to the mind of the Church. These subordinates must also understand the mind of the Church, and possess a moral desire to represent the mind of the Church. Often, however, diocesan officials do not have those dispositions.

A canon lawyer based in the southern United States asserts:

If something is not expressly written down, many will play games with it. The bishops are basically orthodox, and they don't ignore the documents so much as they'll interpret them as strictly as possible while still giving their chancery as much freedom of movement as possible.

But are American bishops really willing to ignore the intent (if not the letter) of the directives that issue from the Vatican? Not surprisingly, the bishops interviewed for this article scoff at that notion.

“The conscientious bishop has a very sincere desire to fulfill his role as a teacher and to do that teaching in communion with the Holy See, so what comes out of the Vatican is not ignored at all,” says Bishop J. Patrick Ziemann of the Diocese of Santa Rosa, California. “It's very much read, and it's discussed, and where it's needed, it's applied.”

The bishops who were interviewed for this article insisted they have applied the teachings of such documents as Dies Domini (on keeping the Lord's Day holy) in their diocesan synods and congresses. The Archdiocese of St. Louis, for example, plans to insert the teachings of Dies Domini into its pastoral plan. Bishops have also sent out the various documents to their priests, most often with memos attached highlighting the salient points contained in the Vatican directives.

How to reach the faithful

To reach large numbers of the faithful, the most popular means employed by bishops is the diocesan newspaper. Bishops will often write their own weekly (or monthly) columns on a new Vatican document like Dies Domini, or direct the paper's editor to highlight a particularly interesting article on the new documents that has been put out by a Catholic news syndicate. But how many Catholics actually read the diocesan newspaper?

“I don't bother with the diocesan newspaper, because it just seems I could spend my time doing other things than reading something that's so liberal,” admitted one director of religious education, who asked to remain anonymous. Several other diocesan officials interviewed for this article reported that they did not read their diocesan papers because they found them uninteresting, and because other publications do a better job of covering the Church. And if diocesan officials do not read the newspaper published by their own chancery, it is pointless to expect that ordinary lay Catholics would read those papers. So efforts to publicize Vatican directives through the diocesan press are not likely to be very successful.

Even in places where the diocesan newspaper is widely read, there are strict limits on how much that one publication can do to explain the latest statements of the magisterium. In Charleston, South Carolina, for example, the diocese claims that two-thirds of all the registered Catholic households receive the diocesan newspaper. Yet in 80 percent of those households, that newspaper is the only Catholic periodical that family members read. If we assume that a document such as Dies Domini is announced and explained in one column by the bishop, and perhaps one story from a national news syndicate, that coverage would still give lay readers at best a superficial understanding of the document.

But newspapers and synods are only the public means the bishops can use to teach the faith. Most of efforts made by bishops—on behalf of the Holy See or otherwise—are made behind the scenes. The fact that the public cannot see a bishop taking his teaching duties seriously does not mean that he is sleeping on the job.

Diocesan politics

“Unless you are in a bishop's chair, there is no way you can know what a bishop has to deal with,” said one Midwestern diocesan official. He elaborated:

Just because you didn't see him take some action or see some direct result of a document's release in Rome doesn't mean he let something slip by. The bishop has a tight schedule, but he's also a servant of the Church. At any minute he can be—and is—called to Rome, to Africa, to anywhere around the globe. Now when he is obedient and does that, is he dropping the ball on what's left behind, or is he doing the best he can?

Interestingly enough, some bishops will admit that they do ignore certain documents, but for reasons that are far from nefarious.

“What you emphasize and what you don't is the art of the pastoral dilemma that most of us face,” says Bishop James Wingle of the Diocese of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. “You do have to have a discerning heart. If one attempts to engage in battle on every front, one can exhaust one's forces entirely.” Bishop Wingle adds wistfully that “sometimes the quantity of documentation coming out of the Holy See is so abundant it is, practically, very difficult to absorb at one time.” Despite his reputation as an outspoken Vatican loyalist, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, concedes, “I don't know how one can completely reach the Catholic population with significant information all the time.”

In many cases the bishops' response (or apparent lack of response) to a Vatican document will hinge on a matter of interpretation. Most readers saw the August 1997 Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of the Priest as a call to eliminate the habitual use of extraordinary eucharistic ministers (EEMs). But Dan Andriacco, spokesman for Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, says, “The archbishop's reading of the document is that it calls for guidelines for extraordinary ministers, [and] he has directed [that these] be formulated.”

Diocesan politics may also determine how bishops handle the Holy See. “It's often very delicate,” reports a Midwestern diocesan official. He argues that “there are certain things people are not ready to handle. We know from the Old Testament scriptures that people are not always able to handle everything at once. God was patient in bringing them along.”

Yet this approach begs a crucial question. When this diocesan official says that the situation is “very delicate,” he is certainly not suggesting that loyal, orthodox Catholics would be outraged if the bishop were to take a strong stand against the habitual use of EEMs, for example. Why was the situation not “very delicate” when Rome opened the way for the use of altar girls? Girls had been serving at the altar illegally in many parishes before the change in discipline was announced from Rome. But when that decision was announced, the acceptance was instantaneous and enthusiastic in dioceses and parishes all around the country; one Sunday all the altar servers were male, and the next week its seemed that they had grown ponytails and long polished fingernails. Many orthodox Catholics were upset—even outraged—by this innovation, but their reactions were evidently not taken into account when the new policy was implemented. Why are the thoughts of more conservative Catholics not accorded equal weight when diocesan officials consider a new policy? Several of the people interviewed for this article responded to that question with roughly the same answer. When bishops, diocesan officials, and pastors have the will to enforce a rule, they said, those officials will find a way to do so—whether or not the situation is “very delicate.”

This sort of selective enforcement of Church discipline creates the impression that bishops and chancery officials tiptoe around some Vatican directives because of a desire to placate the dissidents who hate the Church as she is, want to change Church teaching and discipline, and are ready and willing to make a lot of noise. Loyal, orthodox Catholics feel that they do not receive the same treatment, perhaps because they are not likely to cause a public scene. Whether it is entirely accurate or not, this impression is surely widespread.

Even among those bishops who want to promulgate the teachings of the magisterium, there are some complaints that the task is complicated by a simple lack of manpower. Pressed to find pastors for every parish assignment, the bishops do not have enough capable and dedicated priests remaining for chancery work. “Rome has some good stuff out there,” says the canon lawyer, “but the bishops . . . can't enforce that because we have a priest shortage.” But Father Stravinskas notes the circular nature of this argument, and responds: “If we took seriously what these documents are all about, we wouldn't have a priest shortage.”

Not just the bishops

But if there is a problem with American Catholics who ignore directives from Rome, the fault certainly does not lie with the bishops alone.

“To those who say the bishops aren't doing a good enough job, my first response would be, ‘Mea culpa,' but then, ‘Tu quoque,'” says Bishop Bruskewitz. “It's not only the bishops who can do more. . . . Even the most skilled bishop can't carry on alone. An architect, even the best architect, who is asked to build a skyscraper and given a toothpick to do it with is not going to be able to.”

Looking beyond the bishops themselves, some observers argue that the real problem lies at the level of the diocesan bureaucracy. Those who hold this view say that diocesan staff members are out of touch with the mind of the Church and espouse a view of Catholicism that does not seek to form the world so much as it seeks to be formed by it. These critics contend that bishops often feel compelled to “deal with the hand they've been dealt” in terms of personnel. “So when it looks like their staff is ready for open rebellion, they take the path of least resistance,” says Father Stravinskas. While there is evidence that this is true in some dioceses, most bishops would scoff at such a notion.

Another key factor is the attitude of individual pastors. Asserts one official in the Archdiocese of Washington, “I can say, from having worked for the Church in three dioceses, that all documents are taken very seriously.” But he concedes: “How individual pastors carry it out is a different matter.”

Indeed, virtually every bishop interviewed for this article stressed that he had sent the recent Vatican documents to all his priests. While some might fault the bishops for not following up more vigorously, priests are also at fault for essentially sitting on the information. This is not true across the board, of course. Some pastors have regularly addressed the issues brought up in the recent Vatican documents in their parish bulletins or preached on the appropriate issues at Sunday Mass. But most priests have done little or nothing to educate their parishioners about what the Church is currently saying on a host of important issues.

One priest who is by no means shy of saying he has no use for what the Vatican has issued of late is Father Declan Dean, pastor of St. Monica Catholic Church in Moraga, California. “I'm not enthusiastic about what has come out of the Vatican lately,” he says. “I would say most people are the same. [We] ignore them.” While he by no means speaks for all priests or even most of them, there is no doubt that he speaks for many.

The more sympathetic critics of the clergy argue that pastors are unable to bring about better implementation of Church directives because of their many pressing pastoral duties. Moreover, some Catholics hold to the belief that the priest has no latitude to preach on any subject beyond the Scripture readings assigned for that day's Mass. Father Stravinskas, however, disputes that notion:

The General Instruction for the Roman Missal does not require celebrants to preach from the Gospels. In fact it says they should preach on various aspects of the Christian faith. So if you have an intuition that your parishioners' catechetical level has greatly deteriorated, then you should address the teachings of the faith at the homily, because that is the only time you'll get them all together.

Everyone's responsibility

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that bishops, diocesan officials, and pastors are the only Catholics who should shoulder the responsibility for the American tendency to ignore the Vatican. “It gets back to, ‘Don't pull a speck out of your brother's eye when there's a log in your own,'” says Curtis Martin, executive director for CUF and the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. “During their lives most of the laity will spend less than five hours studying Church documents.”

Martin illustrates his point with an incident from his own teaching experience:

I recently gave a workshop to 25 Catholic schoolteachers, most if not all of whom had very critical things to say about the Church's refusal to ordain women. I asked if they had read the Pope's letter on why the priesthood is reserved to men alone. That document is eight pages long, yet not one of those 25 teachers had read it. These were not only Catholics but Catholic teachers, and they hadn't even engaged the issue on that level of seeing what the Church has to say.

“The Holy Father insists on our being engaged in the faith,” says Bishop Wingle of Yarmouth. “We can't just be passive recipients if we're engaged in a life of belief. Faith is a gift, it is true, but it must be used once it is received.”

But if laymen are not having many first-hand encounters with the documents that come out of Rome, part of the fault may lie with the Vatican. “The intrinsic problem with official documentation is that it's too prolix,” says Father Rutler. “The documents are not accessible. The ponderous style and wordiness tends to discourage attention. I have often thought a long encyclical should have a condensed version attached to it for more common consumption.”

Others blame the Vatican for different reasons. One canon lawyer opines:

A lot of people working in the Vatican entered the priesthood at a very young age, and they have never lived outside in the real world. They know it all intellectually but don't actually have experience with it. So a lot of what they say makes beautiful, logical sense and is actually true, but it doesn't relate to where people really are. We can't ignore Jesus' teaching, but there's no sense from Rome that they're really aware of the situations here that much. They look at it strictly from a theoretical standpoint.

But from his diocesan post in Nebraska, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz rejects that argument:

That's utter nonsense. I worked at the Vatican for 11 years and I think I was pastorally alert, as were the men I worked with. My priests work in the Holy See, and they have more than an adequate amount of pastoral experience and know better about what is going on in the world. Also, the Vatican doesn't work in a vacuum. When crafting a document, it calls on its contacts around the globe.

Assessing the response

But the perception that the American Church ignores Rome could be just that: a perception. Perceptions often have more to do with psychology, sociology, and opinion polls than reality. The proof, therefore, is in the pudding. Is it possible to gauge whether the Holy See is being ignored by measuring the response to documents which have recently been released? And if so, what has been the response to the most recent Vatican documents?

Church officials interviewed for this article were asked speak about their response—or the response of the Church in their dioceses—to four specific Vatican documents which clearly called for implementation at the diocesan level:

• Tertio Millennio Adveniente, the 1994 apostolic letter in which the Holy Father outlined his plans for the observance of the Jubilee;
  
• Dies Domini, the 1998 apostolic letter in which Pope John Paul II encouraged proper observance of the Sabbath as a day of worship and of rest;
  
• Incarnationis Mysterium, the 1998 papal bull which set out the formal program for the Jubilee celebration, and listed the indulgences that could be gained by the faithful who participated in the celebration; and the
  
• Instruction on Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of the Priest, the unusual 37-page document issued jointly in 1997 over the signatures of eight different heads of Vatican dicasteries.

There was a general agreement that American bishops have done a good job in following the Pope's three-year plan of preparation for the Jubilee Year 2000. Most bishops have some sort of program in place to celebrate the Jubilee. But as Curtis Martin says:

Most people don't have a Christ-centered vision for their lives or of the political world. Therefore, for many Catholics the fact that this is the Year of God the Father is as meaningful as the Chinese zodiac—not because they don't know about it, but because they don't know what to do with that knowledge. It shows just how far our evangelization work has to go.

Dies Domini has also been well received. Many pastors report that they have preached on the observance of the Sabbath; many lay Catholics say they have heard such sermons on it. Some bishops plan to use the Pope's admonitions about the importance of Sunday worship as a theme for discussion at diocesan gatherings. And Bishop Jude Speyrer of the Diocese of Lake Charles, Louisiana, says that he has “seldom been more impressed by a document from the Holy See than this one.”

With Incarnationis Mysterium, the response has also been mostly positive. The NCCB has issued a booklet on indulgences in response to the bull, which has received high marks from Father Stravinskas and others. Some bishops, like Michael Pfeifer, OMI, of San Angelo, Texas, plan to feature indulgences as a major part of their Jubilee preparations. And James Akin reports that Catholic Answers has received a surprising number of calls from Catholics interested in the contents of the papal bull.

Granted, there are also a few disgruntled priests like Father Declan Dean, who says:

The people I meet, they read about the indulgences and they didn't give it a good welcome at all. It's redolent of the whole debate with Luther, and indulgences are one of the most unattractive features of Catholicism. God forgives, there's no temporal punishment.

But for the most part, the Church in America has given this papal bull a positive reception.

Does it apply here?

It is the reception of the August 1997 Instruction on the proper role of lay people in Church ministry that leads many Catholic Americans to say that the Vatican is being ignored. The Instruction was clear and specific in describing the abuses that should be eliminated. Laymen should not give homilies, the Vatican document said; EEMs should not be used habitually; lay people should not receive titles such as “chaplain” or “pastor”; priestly vestments should be worn only by men who have received Holy Orders. Yet all of these abuses remain commonplace in America.

The reception of the Instruction was problematic from the beginning. Many bishops asserted that the problems the Vatican sought to address in this document were not a problem in this country—at least not in their dioceses—that the Vatican message was intended for Europe, not the United States.

Some bishops still cling to that view. One bishop told this reporter that the abuses cited in the Vatican document—abuses which were, again, serious enough to command the attention of eight different prefects of Vatican congregations and presidents of pontifical councils—were not serious enough to warrant such emphasis. “Perhaps it addressed problems in Europe, but I doubt it,” he said. The use of extraordinary Eucharistic ministers, he said, is “a ministry that is badly needed in most places. To speak of it being ‘abused' is imaginary, in my experience.”

But Father Stravinskas disagrees:

If that's the case, let's ask Ratzinger. He'll never say that. I have spoken with a number of the cardinals who signed that document. They are eminently clear in their minds that it was written for the entire Church. And besides, anything going on [in Europe] is going on here too.

Many lay Catholics who had held out the hope that the Instruction would correct abuses in the United States were further disillusioned when the NCCB announced the formation of an ad hoc committee that would determine how to apply the document. Father Stravinskas recalls:

When I first heard there about the committee, I thought, “What is a committee supposed to do?” A committee has no authority. The document makes clear that the directives are not to be implemented by the national conference of bishops but by the local bishop. The language is straightforward. It's self-explanatory. They are attempting to complicate what is simple.

According to a spokesman for the United States Catholic Conference, during their November 1998 meeting the American bishops received a report from the committee that had been charged with proposing ways to implement the Vatican Instruction, but that report had not yet been made public.

There are some bishops who have acted on the Instruction, however. Bishop John Myers of Peoria has revoked the authority he had previously given to EEMs, and is requiring each Eucharistic minister to be newly certified and personally approved by him. Some EEMs have reacted to the Vatican instruction with equal vigor. In Phoenix, one couple who had acted as Eucharistic ministers for 20 years quit after the document came out and they realized that the use of EEMs at their parish was indeed habitual. And in one very specific response to the Instruction, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Archbishop Sheehan of Santa Fe has decreed no lay person may anoint anyone else—regardless of which oils he uses.

But for every place like Peoria and Santa Fe, there are dozens of places where Eucharistic ministers are used routinely, even when the congregation is small. This is a clear violation of the Instruction and of the stipulation in canon law that EEMs should be used only when there is a great number of the faithful, and an inadequate number of ordinary ministers—priests and deacons—to distribute Communion. Father Stravinskas argues:

The whole thing has become institutionalized. That's the problem. Nowadays, it's absolutely inconceivable that lay people won't distribute Communion. And when you go to a place where this has been the practice and try to remedy the practice one of the first things you're told is, “You're destroying my ministry.”

I gave a talk in the Midwest last spring, and in the question and answer period that followed, someone asked about the document. Afterward a woman came up to me, tears streaming down her face, and said, “Father, are you telling me that if I'm an extraordinary eucharistic minister, I ought to quit?” I told her, “Absolutely.” She then said to me, “Do you realize I've been doing this for 22 years? I'll have no meaning left in my life.” And that's what I mean when I say it's institutionalized. The situation is so far gone that short of a pastor or bishop saying, “This is it, there'll be no more of it,” we won't rectify the situation.

Complications

But in the eyes of many Catholic leaders the issues are not so cut and dry. As they see it, there are many legitimate questions surrounding the Instruction. “The Instruction, quite honestly, is open to a little bit of interpretation,” says Auxiliary Bishop Michael Sheridan of St. Louis:

What does “habitual” mean? Sometimes a document like that can be used as an excuse to get rid of extraordinary Eucharistic ministers altogether by those who never liked them in the first place.

Phil Gray of CUF argues that the term “habitual” should be seen in the proper context. It does not simply refer to the number of times that extraordinary Eucharistic minister are employed, he reasons:

It takes time for a man to go through the seminary, so if EEMs are used for four years, that doesn't amount to “habitual.” As long as the diocese or parish is seeking vocations, then it's not necessarily “habitual.” But if someone is not really trying to find vocations, and specifically and politically not seeking them so they can promote women or married priests or the idea that you only need the laity, and that's why they continue to use EEMs, that's wrong. Then you're forcing the extraordinary to become ordinary. My guess is that in many places, that is what is going on. Also, where EEMs are not being used properly because the priest doesn't want Mass to take an extra 5 to 10 minutes, that's “habitual.” The ordinary ministers of the Eucharist are clerics, and if you have enough of them, there shouldn't be EEMs present. Just because it will take the priest 5 to 10 more minutes to finish Mass is not a reason for him to use EEMs.

Some dioceses are making a good-faith attempt to implement the directives contained in the Vatican Instruction, but are facing serious difficulties. Says Mary Jeffcoat, director of communications for the diocese of Charleston, South Carolina, “We are struggling with the terminology for those who are assigned to leadership positions in parishes without a resident priest. We are looking at which direction we should go.”

James Akin says:

To be fair, certain aspects of it can require time to implement. But there have obviously been many cases where there has been a deliberate delinquency in implementing, or outright defiance of what is required by the Instruction. And some of the changes require no time at all to make. A statement simply has to be made that so-and-so won't be referred to anymore by this particular title or that the laity are not to engage in certain activities that are prohibited by this document.

Looking beyond questions of how they could implement the Instruction, many pastors wonder why they should try to implement it at all. People like Father Dean look at the Vatican document as simply another attempt to heighten what they call “clericalism.” And again, many bishops interviewed said they honestly did not believe the problems addressed by the Instruction were problems in their dioceses.

Solutions

For those who truly believe there is a problem with the reception of Vatican documents, Curtis Martin says:

You can curse the darkness all day long, but I would much rather couch the question not as where is the problem, but where is the solution? If Mother Teresa had focused solely on the problem of why starvation exists, she would never have fed anyone. She focused on the solution, feeding the poor, and prayed that God would take care of the rest.

So if there is a problem, what are the solutions?

One possible consideration is that other Catholic leaders could follow the lead of Pope John Paul II, who has stressed time and again that if the Church is to experience any significant renewal, her members must themselves encounter Christ. As one director of religious education in the Denver archdiocese puts it:

People haven't met Jesus. Oh, they go to Mass and receive him, but nothing happens subjectively or interiorly. Christ is there and all-powerful, ready to make saints, and we can barely stay awake through Mass.

Many lay Catholics find that movements such as Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, Regnum Christi, and the Neo-Catechumenal Way offer a way to give concrete expression to the demands of the Christian apostolate. But as the same director of religious education from Denver notes:

A difficulty is that many fear such “innovations.” There is a mentality among pastors that if this “outside” group thrives, “my” parish will suffer. Of course, this is nonsense. All of these groups have a strong sense of ecclesial communion. It is a fear of pastors to “lose” sheep even if the sheep awaken for the first time in decades. I talked to an Italian in the Neo-Catechumenate, and he said in his town, the only active Catholics were involved in the Neo-Catechumenal Way or in Communion and Liberation. The parishes where these movements are active haven't collapsed; they've come alive.

A broad consensus among the people interviewed for this article supports the notion that the best response to the problem lies in better education—most of which will by necessity be self-driven. Bishop Bruskewitz adds that “pastoral zeal must be kept hot and glowing,” and that bishops and priests must do a better job of exhorting the faithful to educate themselves more about the issues facing the Church and the documents coming from Rome. Curtis Martin suggests that priests should hold adult-education sessions in which Vatican documents and Church teachings are read, discussed, and analyzed. One program that has sprung up in several different locations around the United States does exactly that; concentrating on the catechetical and pastoral needs of young Catholics, the program known as “Theology on Tap” has consistently gathered 200 to 400 young adults—including many who may have been alienated from the Church for years—to hear lectures explaining the documents of Vatican II and the teachings of the faith. Participants report that Theology on Tap has helped to reinvigorate the spiritual lives of many young people, and bring many others back into the active practice of the Catholic faith.

But since some bishops and pastors will not agree to sponsor the sort of forum offered by Theology on Tap, many lay Catholics will be thrown back on their own resources. “There is no reason why people can't take these documents and study all sorts of issues,” says Curtis Martin. “You may not answer all your questions, but you will answer many.”

“But Catholics, regardless of their position in the Church, should read more,” Martin argues:

A reading Catholic is a contagious Catholic. It's amazing how what we read will work its way into our conversations and the way we live. Even if only a fraction of the laity did this it would act as a leaven within the Church.

Christ did not call us to be spoon-fed through our entire Christian lives.” St. Paul in 1 Cor. 3:1-2 says, “But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready.” We're living through an age where we need to encourage Catholics to grow up spiritually, and we need to do so with healthy confidence that Catholicism is right, that it is true, and that it will improve your life.

Brian O'Neel writes from Sacramento, California.

This item 6379 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org