The Catholic world was rocked this past Tuesday when a new president was elected for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The results were shocking; for the first time since the creation of the conference in 1966, the sitting vice president lost the election for the presidency. In a stunning rebuke, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, the vice president of the USCCB and scion of the liberal wing of the Church in America, was passed over for the New York Time’s biggest foe, the bellicose Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York City.
The two represent different ideologies, one in ascendency within the Church, another in decline. Archbishop Dolan (who will certainly be made a cardinal in the next few years) represents a new, “Ratzingerian” generation of bishops. These are men who strongly adhere to the Church’s teachings on controversial moral positions: they are strongly pro-life, strenuously opposed to legalized gay marriage, and fierce proponents of the right of the Church to speak in the public forum. At the last round of USCCB elections three years ago, Kicanas beat Dolan for the vice presidency by a vote of 128 to 106; this time, he lost 128-111. The difference lies in the 42 American bishops Pope Benedict has appointed since 2007.
Few of the Ratzingerian bishops have been more forceful in the public square than Dolan. The archbishop has been a particularly prominent voice in the New York and national media, taking on the New York Times for the anti-Catholic bias of their reporting and defending the Holy Father from unjust accusations made against him in connection with clerical abuse scandals.
Beyond that, he has been a leader for the Church in the United States ever since he was a priest, when he served as the rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, one of the premier seminaries for American aspirants to the priesthood. His book, Priests for the Third Millennium, has become a charter for the program of priestly formation in more and more American seminaries, and a blueprint for the modern priestly vocation. One recently appointed bishop, according to Rocco Palmo of Catholic news blog Whispers in the Loggia, said that Archbishop Dolan “was already an inspiration to us long before we became bishops.”
Kicanas, on the other hand, represents the ossified, dying Church of the 70’s and 80’s. Their great heroes included Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, and — before his homosexual love affair and financial misappropriations were exposed — Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee. They profess to be champions of the buzzwords of “peace and justice” — indeed, Kicanas’ episcopal motto is “Justice Begets Peace.” While they have promoted praiseworthy initiatives to help the poor, much of their fight for social justice seems to be focused on fighting for Democratic Party policies on social welfare spending, amnesty for illegal aliens, and abolishing the death penalty — political policies on which Catholics can legitimately have varying levels of disagreement and debate. However, they haven’t seemed to be too engaged in the chief evil against which the Church has focused her energies in the modern era: abortion, a violation of the natural moral law whose legality a Catholic cannot legitimately endorse. Many of the bishops of this generation are now retiring and being replaced with fresh, “Ratzingerian” blood.
I would like to add with some irony that this was a victory for the principle of collegiality. This concept — that bishops should exercise their office in a manner that more strongly emphasizes communion with the Bishop of Rome than submission to him as a superior — is a development that has come about in the Church since the Second Vatican Council. Many people in the “conservative” wing — such as Pope Benedict — view it as a positive development, allowing bishops to act more intelligently and cohesively as a local body with less authoritarian imposition from Rome, while still operating in fidelity and obedience to the pope. These were the motives behind the creation of national bishops’ councils, such as the USCCB itself.
Many lefty theologians, however, have viewed collegiality as an excuse for bishops to disobey the pope’s rightful decrees, to dissent from the pope’s teaching, and to promote an idea that the pope is simply a first among equals, as opposed to the visible head of the Church on earth. Even though these conferences have no actual magisterial authority over the faithful, many liberal priests and theologians will cite a wishy-washy document written by some paper-pushing, feminist nun at the USCCB’s office as if it were infallible. Because the liberal interpretation of collegiality seemed to hold greater sway for the Church in America for most of the last 40 years, conservatives have tended to be far less enthusiastic about collegiality than liberals.
However, when the University of Notre Dame violated the USCCB’s directives by inviting the stridently pro-choice President Obama to receive an honorary degree and give the commencement address in 2009, it was Dolan who collegially stood with the huge number of bishops in support of the USCCB’s policies; meanwhile, Kicanas was one of the few liberal bishops who defended Notre Dame’s decision. Going it alone against the USCCB? Sounds pretty un-collegial to me.
Archbishop Dolan, you’re in my prayers, along with all your brothers in the episcopate who are united with the pope.
John Gerardi is a student at Notre Dame Law School. He writes on topics relating to religion and society.