And Now Where?

Abstract

Soon after the Vatican’s disciplining of Father Curran and its stripping of areas of authority from Seattle’s Archbishop Hunthausen, Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee warned in a lecture at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan that disciplinary actions by the Vatican against prominent Catholic figures in the American church were alienating ordinary Catholics from the institutional church and causing many of them to drift away.¹ A month later, the outgoing president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop James W. Malone of Youngstown, Ohio, picked up the theme at the opening session of the U.S. bishops’ 1986 fall meeting. There was “a growing and dangerous disaffection” between some American Catholics and the Vatican, Malone declared, announcing at the same time that he was seeking an audience with Pope John Paul II to discuss the tensions in hopes of clearing some air before the pope visited the United States the following fall.² A month later came yet another warning that the American church was being seeded with disaffection. Catholic University’s Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, the American church’s preeminent historian, spoke at Seton Hall University in Newark, New Jersey, of a rift between “conservatives and liberals,” and he declared that this rift posed a real threat to the church.³ Storm warnings seemed to be going up all around.