A Feisty But Loyal Flock
American Catholics take dissent seriously
Julia Roberts is a lifelong Roman Catholic who learned the rules early. "In religion class they said, 'It's not a buffet; you can't select what you believe,'" says the 26-year-old paralegal at the U.S. Department of Justice. But as an adult she has come to think that birth control is a responsible moral choice. "I don't want to deny what I believe. I struggle with that because I don't want to be a hypocrite."
Among America's 67 million Catholics there is a distinct minority who feel that Pope John Paul II's traditionalist ideas and hard line on social issues put the church back on track, giving it structure and clear guidance. But the pope's teachings made keeping the faith more difficult for the many so-called cafeteria Catholics, who embrace some but not all of the church's tenets. According to a recent Gallup Poll, 78 percent of American Catholics support allowing Catholics to use birth control, 63 percent think priests should be able to marry, and 55 percent think women should be ordained as priests. Last week Gallup reported that more Catholics than non-Catholics believe that homosexual behavior, divorce, and stem-cell and human-embryo research are morally acceptable. "The paradox," says David Gibson, author of The Coming Catholic Church, "is that while [the pope] was enormously popular, he did not necessarily change behavior" of the lay people in America.
But he had an enormous influence on the clergy. The seminarians at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary outside Philadelphia, like many who found their vocation during the 26 years of John Paul II's pontificate, "are drawn to the fact that the pope had the conviction to say, 'This is not an open question,' " says the rector, Joseph Prior. Dean Hoge, a Catholic University of America sociologist who has studied priests' attitudes for decades, notes that "John Paul II priests" are generally more traditionalist and often at odds with the more liberal clergy ordained during the 1960s and 1970s. "The result," says the Rev. Robert Silva, president of the National Federation of Priests' Councils, "has been a growing gulf between the clergy ordained since 1985 and the laity" who, in the post-Vatican II years, had grown used to having more autonomy within their parishes.
The pope took a Vatican-down approach to church governance. Not a man to mince doctrine, John Paul II delivered more encyclicals than any pope in history, over time declaring the church's opposition to birth control, premarital sex, in vitro fertilization, abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research, homosexuality, and the death penalty. Priests, he said, were to be male and celibate. On his second visit to the United States, he declared it a "grave error" for Catholics to think of themselves as faithful if they dismissed church teachings, and he warned bishops that dissent was unacceptable, both in parishioners and among the clergy. "He was adamant that if a priest had spoken about the ordination of women or waffled on issues of abortion and contraception, he should not start looking for red robes," says Lawrence Cunningham, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. During the 1980s the Vatican removed several American priests for disagreeing on social issues.
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