Transcript

National Public Radio (NPR)

Talk of the Nation

June 13, 2002

Increasing the role of the laity in the Catholic Church



NEAL CONAN, host: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

Today, US Catholic bishops are meeting in Dallas to discuss the sex abuse scandal. On the table is a proposal drafted last week by an eight-member committee of bishops that addresses how the church should deal with priests, now and in the future, who have been accused of sexual misconduct. For the most part, the bishops will confer amongst themselves behind closed doors. But in an unusual move, they are also listening to what Catholics refer to as 'members of the laity,' ordinary everyday parishioners.

Since January, when news of the sex abuse scandal and the cover-up broke in Boston, more and more laypeople have begun to ask for a bigger say in parish decisions, not just about the handling of sex abuse cases, but in the assignment of priests and expenditures of church funds--that, in a church that has always left such decisions strictly to the clergy. What reforms do these lay Catholic reformers want, and why? What's the reaction of priests and bishops and the Vatican? And how would these proposed changes prevent problems in the future? Later in the show, we'll go to Dallas to hear the latest news developing out of the conference. If you have questions or comments, our telephone number is (800) 989-8255; that's (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org. For those of you who are Catholics, what's happening in your community? Are you happy with the way things are? Has the scandal shaken your faith in the hierarchy? Do you want a bigger say, or do you want to hold on to a structure that's been place for thousands of years? We want to hear from you this hour. If you're a member of a church whose important decisions are made by the congregation, how has that worked out? Any advice for your Catholic brethren?

With us now from member station WBUR in Boston is Luise Dittrich. She's one of the founders of a reform group called the Voice of the Faithful. And welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.

Ms. LUISE DITTRICH (Voice of the Faithful): Thank you, Neal.

CONAN: Can you tell us what Voice of the Faithful is and why you started it?

Ms. DITTRICH: Sure. Voice of the Faithful is a grassroots group...

CONAN: The--I'm sorry, Luise. There seems to be a problem there in the studio in Boston. They may have the wrong microphone up. If the engineer is listening, then maybe he or she could correct it, and why don't you try it again?

Ms. DITTRICH: Hi, Neal.

CONAN: No, we're still having a problem, and we'll start to make a phone call. It's a problem that we're going to need somebody to address there in your studio. And I--ah!--heard a bump, which sounds very promising.

Ms. DITTRICH: Am I there?

CONAN: Not quite. And there's a microphone open in your studio. It's just not the one you're on. And let's try it one more time.

Ms. DITTRICH: Hi, Neal.

CONAN: You're still a little distant. It's almost as if you're in another county, and...

Ms. DITTRICH: Well...

CONAN: I'm not sure--is there another microphone in the room?

Professor PAUL SCHERVISH (Boston College): Yes, there is, Neal. This is a later guest, Paul Schervish.

CONAN: Oh, hello, Paul. Well, you're on mike, so why don't you switch seats momentarily?

Prof. SCHERVISH: Yes. Easily to do.

CONAN: All right. So the guests in Boston are switching seats, and it's one of those moments behind the scenes here at National Public Radio, and well, we'll have to expunge this...

Ms. DITTRICH: Hi.

CONAN: ...from all of your memories.

Ms. DITTRICH: Am I here now?

CONAN: You are, Luise, and thank you so much, and we apologize for the problems.

Ms. DITTRICH: OK. No problem.

CONAN: Anyway, what is Voice of the Faithful, and why did you decide to start it?

Ms. DITTRICH: OK. Voice of the Faithful is a group that started just a scant 20 weeks ago, Neal. It's a very, very grassroots organization of outraged and heartbroken but very loyal Catholics. We are the people in the pews, if you will. We're not radicals, we're not conservatives, we are both and neither. I think we represent the great middle of the church that wants to remain loyal, but has somewhat, somehow come awake, and I think the reason we've come awake from a very long slumber is that there was danger and harm to our children. And I think that very human impulse kind of overrode, or has overridden, the natural deference that we have been brought up to give to the priesthood--the clergy, the hierarchy, the papacy--and we're outraged and we're just determined to bring some checks and balances into a system that has gone very sadly awry.

CONAN: There are in the Catholic churches--and there are in any number of religious organizations--any number of groups. There are parish councils, Holy Name Societies, various groups within the church already. Why a new group?

Ms. DITTRICH: OK. This is a very interesting phenomenon. There have been groups of progressive Catholics, like Call To Action and like--other groups who are trying to effect change, bring about change in the church. I think that what's happened is that either cleverly, or not so cleverly, the hierarchy has managed to isolate marginal groups and actually marginalized these groups as troublemakers and agitators and dissenters, and Voice of the Faithful is very determined not to let that happen to us because we're--yes, we're dissenters, but we seem to have a very good reason to dissent, and we won't be dissuaded from feeling that we're just in our cause.

What we've done is assemble a coalition--and I hope and pray that the coalition holds long enough for us to develop a critical mass, and the critical mass, if you think of the spectrum of Catholics and you think of the very, very conservative Catholics, Opus Dei, and traditional Catholics, Knights of Columbus and middle Catholics, parish council members and CCD teachers and nuns, and then progressive Catholics like Call To Action and Women-Church and those kinds of groups, I think what you'll find with Voice of the Faithful that's very different is that all of those groups are represented in our membership, as well as the sort of traditional couch-potato Catholic who's finally waking up and getting off the couch.

CONAN: So what specific reforms are you asking for?

Ms. DITTRICH: OK. We have three major goals that all of our activities fall out from, and those are--the first one is to support victims of clergy sex abuse. It's a moral no-brainer; it's something that should be as natural a reflex as breathing--to protect children. It should have been the same for the clergy and the hierarchy, and why it wasn't is a very interesting and complicated question that I won't attempt to answer. However, if the clergy and the hierarchy are not going to apologize abjectly to these victims, Voice of the Faithful will, and Voice of the Faithful is trying very hard to make it up to these survivors. We call them victims/survivors, sort of showing the two sides of that. We've had healing Masses and we've had other kinds of activities, fund-raising activities for support groups and so forth.

Our second goal is to support priests of integrity. The very vast number of priests are wonderful, holy people who have been very important in our lives and who've brought us--you know, baptized our babies and married us and buried us, and we love them very much. We know they're suffering. We know they have suffered a form of abuse as well, and they are still choking under that abuse, and it's an abuse of power.

Then our third goal is a more complicated one, and this is the one where, you know, people start to accuse us of things that aren't really our goal, but we want to shape structural change within the church, and I want to stress that word 'within' because we are not a schismatic group, we are not a fringe group, we are not a batch of lunatics. We are very mainstream Catholics, and we believe that lay voice and lay consultation, lay participation in the governance and guidance of the church is what's going to help build it back up and save it because otherwi--we're not into tearing down the church, and please, I hope the listeners understand that.

CONAN: Well, a lot of us outside the church have focused on the issue of sex abuse. What you seem to be saying--sex abuse and the cover-up of that sex abuse--what you seem to be saying is that structural reform is a way to handle this and other abuses of power.

Ms. DITTRICH: Yes. Well, it's a way to let the sunshine in and to let fresh air and ideas in. The clergy lives in a very closed parallel universe, and the higher up you go in this hierarchy, the more isolated they are. They don't hear from real people, they know next to nothing about normal human sexuality. They know next to nothing about women's rights and women's issues. They know next to nothing about democratic processes. And they have to know these things because we're in the 21st century. We're not in medieval, you know, Tuscany in the 1500s. We are in the 21st century. We're in an information age, we're in an age of partnership and collaboration and joint ventures, and information matrix, and we think they need us very, very badly.

CONAN: Do you have role at this bishops' conference that's going on now in Dallas?

Ms. DITTRICH: We have sent a delegation. There are three members of the Voice of the Faithful from the original group in Wellesley, Massachusetts, who have gone down. They had a press conference yesterday afternoon, basically, just before the bishops' press conference, and the reason for that timing was that we have not been able to get an audience with the bishops, although we did try. We sent a faxed letter to Bishop Gregory Friday and heard nothing back from him on that, and that was a call for zero tolerance and so forth. And we have had to actually fall back on you folks, the media, who have been wonderful to us in helping us to get our message out. But it's a sad state of affairs and a commentary on the brokenness of this relationship that we have to talk through the press. That's why we had our press conference just before the bishops' because we had some questions we wanted you guys to take to the bishops about lay participation and involvement.

CONAN: Well, I'm sure I'm not going to be the last person to advise you that the media is an unreliable ally. Anyway...

Ms. DITTRICH: We're aware of that.

CONAN: ...the bishops are considering a proposal that increases the role of laity in the church. What does it say, who wrote it, and what's your response to it?

Ms. DITTRICH: Good so far, I think. I think you're referring to that draft charter, that proposal. They did include, unlike the cardinals' report of a few weeks back in Rome, in which Cardinal McCarrick couldn't find the section on the laity, and the section on the laity got dropped out of the final draft--well, the laity are sprinkled throughout this draft charter, which is OK and very good, actually, as far as it goes.

What is a little bit of a red flag is that they feel the need to say, you know, 'to be appointed at the discretion of the bishops,' and language like that that covers them in terms of who gets to be this laity that's going to consult with them. Well, you know, we've got that already, right here in the Archdiocese of Boston, where we're having a horrible, horrendous crisis. I mean, there are pastoral councils that, you know, advise Cardinal Law, and financial councils. And for the most part, they have no teeth, they're formalities, and the very first mention, actually, of lay decision-making had to do, a few weeks ago, with the reneging of the Geoghan settlement. Well, you know--and that decision got put onto the lay council, lay financial council, which I thought was, you know, dripping with irony. What we want is real lay input, and we don't want to be dictated to about who, in fact, in their eyes, determines the laity.

CONAN: See if we can get to the phones. our telephone number is (800) 989-8255. Our first caller is Peter, who's on the line from South Bend, Indiana.

PETER (Caller): Yes. I've taught at Notre Dame for about 30 years, and I also taught in Roman Catholic university in Africa before that. And while sexuality and pedophilia are major issues at the moment, this broader issue of the involvement of the laity seems to me to be crucial. In other words, I have experienced at Notre Dame and elsewhere in the Catholic world a lack of transparency. And I think this is because the ecclesiology of the church is so autocratic. It's fearful; it can be, at its worst, arrogant. Vatican II, I would suggest, tried to overcome that by trying to push us in the direction of a more consultative church with an increasing laity playing a major part in that church.

The terminology that comes back to me from my years at Notre Dame and elsewhere is that the laity tend to be treated as the inferior community. And what we need to do is to move strongly, I suggest, in the broader church into a more consultative mind-set, to a more democratic and more participatory and representative one, against, in fact, the culture the Vatican, which has reinforced, post-Vatican II a pre-Vatican II ...(unintelligible)...

CONAN: Peter, we're running out of time. Peter, excuse--Peter...

PETER: ...epitomized by...

CONAN: ...excuse me.

PETER: ...John Paul II's speech.

CONAN: Peter can't hear me, obviously. I'm going to put him on hold. We'll hear the rest of his remarks when we come back from a short break. We are talking this hour about Catholic lay groups and the increased role some of them want to play in their parish. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. We're talking about the Catholic Church and Catholic laity and how the balance of power between the two might be changing as a result of the Catholic bishops' conference in Dallas, or perhaps more pointedly, as a result of action by grassroots groups in the aftermath of the sex abuse and cover-up scandal. Our guest is Luise Dittrich, one of the founders of Voice of the Faithful, one of those organizations that began in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in response to the sex abuse scandal. Of course, you're invited to join the discussion about democracy in a church that has not been a democratic institution. Our number is (800) 989-TALK. Our e-mail address, totn@npr.org. Before we went to a break, Peter was on the line with us from South Bend, Indiana, and, Peter, I'm sorry we ran out of time and had to cut off your remarks, and I wanted you to finish what you had to say.

PETER: Yes. Just one last thought to try and wrap it all up. I think there's a huge paradox here that John Paul II, the present pope, may play the major role in the downfall of autocratic communism. In a strange sort of way, the church has become a Leninist organization, with a one-party system, which is the clergy, and with democratic centralism where decisions are made at the top; no further debate is really encouraged or even tolerated. And Opus Dei has become a major organization accepted into the structures of the Vatican by John Paul II, and I think this is a defensive church, a church that's afraid of the modern world again and hasn't really listened to Vatican II. The easy answer to this is the church isn't a democracy. Maybe in its teaching authority, the clergy and the papacy and the bishops play a major role. But to function, the power in the church has to be shared, it has to become an open society, or it will be an atrophying church, and lose its role in history. And I wonder what your guest's response to that would be.

CONAN: Luise Dittrich.

Ms. DITTRICH: Well, I 100 percent agree with the caller. I feel very sad that Vatican II, which was the first opening of the windows in just, you know, centuries and centuries was really as close to dismantled as possible by subsequent popes and subsequent Curias, and what Vatican II did so magnificently was to bring in or reaffirm a kind of spirit ecclesiology, as opposed to a blueprint ecclesiology...

PETER: Exactly.

Ms. DITTRICH: ...and the church as a dynamic process of openness to the Holy Spirit, using the people of God and the primacy of conscience and basically the call--in Lumingentium(ph), one the Vatican II documents--a call for not just the right of the laity but the obligation of the laity to play a part in all matters having to do with the church. I want to say...

PETER: May I add a word to there?

Ms. DITTRICH: Please.

PETER: I think the great document, the pastoral document of Vatican II, Gardium et Spec, with joy and hope, called the church to learn from the world as well as to inspire the world. And a church that cannot learn from the world, that cannot tolerate decentralization, that cannot work easily with the great pluralism of our modern planet, our globalizing planet, is going to be in big trouble.

Ms. DITTRICH: I'd like to agree with that, and I'd also like to go back to something you said which was about democrat--the church as not a democracy, and that's sort of been true from the year 312 on, before...

CONAN: I must have missed the early meetings.

Ms. DITTRICH: Me, too, I hope. But before that, that is the time of the Edict of Milan and the conversion of Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Now before that, Christians were a persecuted minority and they were a despised minority and they were full of love and flowing with Holy Spirit and living stones and all kinds of metaphors like that. Once you've become the state religion, you start to adopt the postures of the state that you're the religion of. For instance, if we're talking about Roman Empire, you talk about a ruthless suppression and top down and legalism and militarism. There's a whole thing about, you know...

CONAN: And a lot of expansion as well.

Ms. DITTRICH: ...blind obedience and--yes, of course, conquering and then...

PETER: May I come in again, just briefly? Exactly right, and in fact, some of the great religious orders, like the Benedictines, tried to recover that sense of democracy I think, and as I see it, the present culture of corporate capitalism has pushed the church in the other direction too, reinforcing the sense of centralism and corporate and central authority, so you've got clericalism and the corporate culture of America, and of the global capitalism that we have reinforcing this autocracy, and the Holy Spirit has to break through this again and take us back to those great traditions you're talking about.

CONAN: Peter, thanks very much for the phone call.

PETER: Thank you for permitting me to come in.

CONAN: OK. Joining us now from her office in Bethesda, Maryland, is Donna Bethell. She's chairman of the board of directors at Christendom College, a Roman Catholic liberal arts college in Front Royal, Virginia. She's also vice chairman of her parish council, St. Anne's Church here in Washington, DC.

And welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.

Ms. DONNA BETHELL (Christendom College): Thank you.

CONAN: You've been listening to our conversation, including what Luise Dittrich has been saying. What's your response?

Ms. BETHELL: Well, I think that many of their points are very well-taken, but they don't go far enough. The laity have a--much more of a role to play, I think, than simply participating in some decisions, although as Luise very rightly pointed out, there are already councils, various kinds of parish councils, archdiocesan committees and so forth, that are participating in the governance of the church. But there are several points, I think, that really could highlight what else the laity can do. The first thing to remember is that the Catholic Church in its structure was established by Jesus Christ. Therefore the bishops and the laity don't have the authority to change the structure in its essence, which means that there are ordained ministers culminating at the top in the successor of St. Peter. So the bishops can't change that structure. They receive their authority and therefore their responsibility from God, and they don't have the power to delegate it in its essence to anyone else. So we're not going to have a democratic church. We can have more participation by the laity, but we're not going to have a fundamental change in the church.

The second point to remember is what the church is for. It's for the salvation of souls. It's for the teaching of the message of Jesus Christ and the mediation of his graces, the ability for us to understand what is the truth and what is goodness and the love of God, and to accept it and form our lives by it. That's what the church is about. Everything else is secondary to that, including managing property, finances, education, social work; everything else is secondary to that.

And because that is the primary role of the church, what the laity can do besides doing their best to live their lives in conformity with the teachings of Christ is to call the bishops to do the same, to call the bishops to holiness, to demand that they do their jobs. Don't take their jobs away from them, demand that they do them, that they teach the fullness of Catholic doctrine or get out of the way and let somebody else do it; that is, other bishops, new bishops. That they discipline their priests, that they select and train seminarians properly, that they operate in openness in all things, as the pope repeated they must do, as recently as this April. And this would include telling us what's been going on, who's been paid, how much money, for what. I thoroughly agree that the bishops should be paying attention to the victims and survivors. They should be meeting with them one on one, face to face, and apologizing for what's happened to them and for the way they were mistreated when they complained.

CONAN: You've talked about the reason why you don't think democracy is going to be possible in the Catholic Church, but what about the other things--some of these issues have been brought up, including transparency, a little bit more openness as to what the decision-making process is?

Ms. BETHELL: Well, exactly. That's why I said, as the pope has said, there should be openness in all things. There are very few things that have to remain confidential, and the rest should be open. We should be knowing what's happening with our funds. We should be knowing how our priests and seminarians are being trained. Most of all, we should have leadership from the bishops in repentance and conversion of life. I haven't heard them saying how sorry they are. I haven't heard them addressing the real root of how this terrible scandal, how this terrible mistreatment of young people happened. And they have said that we're going to have better guidelines for dealing with it once it does happen, but they have not addressed why it has happened, how they have failed for 40 years or more to teach the fullness of Catholic doctrine and to require their priests to do the same and to live it.

CONAN: Luise Dittrich, you've been listening to what Donna Bethell had to say. I would get a response from you on that.

Ms. DITTRICH: Well, I agree with a lot of what Donna says. Particularly, I'm struck because I feel the same way, that it's just an amazing absence of contrition, true contrition on the part of the bishops. I think they're in such a defensive posture that there's no humanity shining through. I don't think that these are necessarily evil men or, you know, bad people. But I think they have forgotten or lost their own message of Jesus' love and Jesus' compassion. Donna's right, they haven't said they're sorry. I cannot understand why they haven't said they're sorry. To his credit, Cardinal Law has said he's sorry a hundred times now; I will say that. But he only said it after he was dragged to court. You know, why? I can't understand, after stonewalling for, you know, years and years, I can't understand why it's so hard for the very Christian message to be lived by the very people who are teaching us and, many occasions, preaching to us quite autocratically.

Ms. BETHELL: Well, you know what, if I can say why. It's human nature. God help us, it's human nature. And we can all look at ourselves and the maybe relatively picayune faults that we have and know that we won't even admit to those. So we need to pray for these bishops and continue to call them to holiness. I think that the exposure of this terrible disservice that has been done by the media has been a tremendous blessing for the church. It's begun to open up this wound which, as I say, has very deep roots which need to be addressed. And the laity should be participating in this fully. We should be speaking up. We should be writing, sending, you know, fax more letters.

CONAN: Well, you two are both agreeing here, but you have fundamentally different positions on a couple of points.

Ms. DITTRICH: I have...

Ms. BETHELL: I'm not sure that we agree completely.

CONAN: Yeah, I was going to...

Ms. BETHELL: I think we really do have a very--I think we have a common appreciation that there is a very serious problem.

CONAN: But a different approach to how to address it.

Ms. BETHELL: Perhaps a different approach. Perhaps I am much more wary of tinkering with the structure of the church. I may be more skeptical about the usefulness, utility of more lay councils. As Luise's pointed out, we already have them and they tend to get co-opted. They tend to become formalities. So I think that rather than becoming a member of yet another council, I'd rather stay on the outside and keep yelling.

CONAN: Well, you're not on the outside. You are a member of the Parish Council, and your church, is it a rubber stamp?

Ms. BETHELL: It just got started this year.

CONAN: So is it a rubber stamp?

Ms. BETHELL: I've asked the pastor, 'What is it exactly we're supposed to be doing?' It hasn't participated in decisions to govern the church. I don't think that's been quite appropriate. We set ourselves a task which we've just finished, which I think was appropriate, and what happens next I don't know. Honestly, I'm not going to stay on it if it doesn't have an effective role to play.

Ms. DITTRICH: I've been a Parish Council member and I finished a rotation in Parish Council about three years ago. At that time, our big deal was that we were building an addition to our church and renovating the church. And it's more issues like that, nitty gritty, the running of the church, as opposed to anything more abstract than that or more conceptual than that. And I would agree, there's another way I agree with Donna, and there's one way I don't. I do agree that the business of the salvation of souls is something that they need to focus on. I think we on the ground tend to be more involved with that than they are. I find that there's nothing that Voice of the Faithful stands for that is inconsistent with the saving of souls as a goal of the church. And I do think that so many souls have been sent reeling by the abuse of power in this sex abuse. It's just people whose lives are ruined, whole families and generations of families. It's a very, very bad situation. Now the only place that I would actually take a different approach from Donna...

CONAN: Quickly, please.

Ms. DITTRICH: Well--is about ecclesiastical structure. I don't really find anything in the New Testament where Jesus put a church structure in place. And so I'm much more comfortable with the sort of spirit ecclesiology of being open to dynamic process, because the church has changed over the course of 2,000 years and will continue to do so, one hopes.

CONAN: And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Joining us now from Boston is Paul Schervish, a professor of sociology at Boston College, where he teaches a course on the sociology of religion. He's also a former Jesuit priest, and got a sneak preview of his voice earlier in the program. Paul Schervish, good to have you on formally now.

Prof. SCHERVISH: Here I am, Neal.

CONAN: OK. The desire of Catholic laypeople wanting more decision-making power, this is not new, is it?

Prof. SCHERVISH: Not at all. And as Luise pointed out, it does go back to the early days of the church where people actually elected the bishops and chose their church leaders. So there is a great history of participation in the church, not necessarily in the full way we understand democracy today. I don't think that democracy's going to be a winning hand in terms of the change in the church. It's more what Donna said, that it's a question of the quality of the spiritual life that the bishops and the church is offering its people and that the people are experiencing. But more in agreement with Luise, on the other hand, is that Luise--Donna's concerned about just tinkering with the structure. The question that Donna has to answer is just how did we get to where we are. And there is more than tinkering with the structure that is afoot in these kinds of movements and that has produced the crisis that we're in today.

The Catholic Church, interestingly enough, for both of our guests, is something they both love. And if you notice, this is one of the rare mass movements, or grassroots voluntary organizations in the world in which there is so little inclination to leave it when there is such a strong case of malfeasance. And this is a great tradition in the Catholic Church, and this is really the dilemma. There's one extreme, which is called loyalty. Anything goes; we'll support the church. The other one is exit. And that is to really carry on much more the American religious tradition, which is to found from grassroots origins new directions organizationally and spiritually in religion. And the third approach is voice. And that is to stay within but to be a critical force for change.

Now interestingly enough, we have two people that are attempting to do that very thing from different points of view.

CONAN: And...

Prof. SCHERVISH: But from a sociological point of view, that is a remarkable position to hold and not to take exit, given the depth of critique that they both have.

CONAN: In the less than a minute we have left before we have to go to a break, how is this likely to be received by the hierarchy, who've not been open to reform movements in the past?

Prof. SCHERVISH: The hierarchy is, just as Donna suggested, subject to human nature, like everybody else. And as a result, they're located in the midst of a human institution. And human institutions are going to respond to moral suasion, they're going to respond to legal suasion, or they're going to respond to financial suasion. And the Catholics who are interested in critical change have to find out which of those three they can carry out and what is going to be effective.

CONAN: We're talking about the Catholic laity and the hierarchy. When we come back from a short break, we'll have your phone calls. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. On the next "Science Friday," Ira Flatow talks about preparation for possible nuclear threats, a radiological dirty bomb, a nuclear weapon or an attack on a nuclear power plant. What health effects could we expect, and what could we do to stay safe? That's the next "TALK OF THE NATION/"Science Friday."

Today, we're talking about the role of laity in the Catholic Church. Our guests are Luise Dittrich, the co-founder of Voice of the Faithful, a newly formed organization of lay Catholics that wants stronger lay leadership; Donna Bethell, chairman of the board of directors at Christendom College, a Roman Catholic liberal arts college in Front Royal, Virginia; and Paul Schervish, a professor of sociology at Boston College. To get in on the conversation, give us a phone call: (800) 989-TALK. Our e-mail address is totn@npr.org. And our next caller is Kenneth, who's on the line with us from Miami.

KENNETH (Caller): Good afternoon.

CONAN: Afternoon.

KENNETH: I have a suggestion or a comment to make. But first I'd like to just make an observation on what Donna said. If our church was functioning as the time when Christ walked the face of the Earth, we certainly wouldn't have the church we have today, nor would we have priests not having to be single, because for so many years they were married. But my suggestion--in Miami, we have one of our sister parishes where an individual priest went out without anyone's knowledge and purchased a home for an excess of $600,000, a five-bedroom, four-bath house. And when the parish rose up and complained, the bishop said that he had the right to do that, and notwithstanding the fact that it was the parishioners' money that paid for it. And the reason was that he had company and visitors; they needed the space.

My suggestion, while it may sound a little radical, I think is certainly an acceptable approach. Everything functions with money, whether it's the church, our home, our business, our government. And the withholding of money is always a way of getting attention. I've talked to several people in my parish. We were talking about setting up an account with an attorney or with a bank; we're making half of our contribution to the church, and the other half into a trust account until we receive some authority not just being a board where we can say, 'I think we should do this,' but a board where we can make decisions. I'm curious what their comments might be.

CONAN: Well, Paul Schervish, this is going on, on a somewhat broader scale in Massachusetts, is it not?

Prof. SCHERVISH: Yes, it is. And what Kenneth is pointing out is the great disappointment that people have, not just about the sexual abuse issues, but about the quality and quantity of pastoral care. And this is the truly fundamental issue. And I don't think that anybody in the Catholic Church is going to come to grips with this until we talk about a Copernican revolution in and around the relationship between sex and spirituality; that the two are really reinforcing each other rather than enemies of each other. And until we have a new process of a wider array of people to select from for ministry, a better training process and a greater supply of ministers in the Catholic Church, we are really not going to ever solve the problem of monopoly, oligopoly, autocracy because of the shortage of clergy.

KENNETH: I don't think I could have said it better.

Prof. SCHERVISH: And until we handle that, we're not going to do that.

KENNETH: In this particular case, I'm talking about where they bought this home, simultaneous with the purchase of it, they cut out youth programs because they said they were short of funds. And the congregations just aren't accepting this, and they don't want to just sit on a panel that says, 'This is what I recommend.' They're sitting on a panel that says, 'These are my dollars going into the collection plate. I want to have a final voice and a vote on how it's spent.' And until that...

Prof. SCHERVISH: Kenneth, you're absolutely right.

Ms. BETHELL: I think that's right.

Prof. SCHERVISH: The ball's in your court.

CONAN: Well, thanks, Kenneth, for the call. And good luck to you.

KENNETH: Thank you, sir.

CONAN: OK. An e-mail question, and we've gotten a couple along these same lines. This one is from Kurt(ph) in Seattle. 'The Catholic Church,' he writes, 'is not a democracy regardless of what American Catholics with their traditions of representative government think that they deserve. To be a Catholic, one must agree that John Paul II, the pope, is the man and that what he says go. If that won't do, do what I did and leave. You know where the door is.' Luise Dittrich, is this--you don't want to take that door out.

Ms. DITTRICH: I don't want to take the door out, and I don't want to accept that there's no room for--you

know, that the pope is a king or the pope is incapable of making a wrong decision. As far as I'm concerned, Jesus was extremely anti-hierarchical. Jesus did not want to be crowned a king. He ran away when people tried to do that. He didn't have a villa, he didn't have a palace, he didn't have a beanie, he didn't have a crown. And I just think it's antithetical to the Jesus message what we have turned the pope into. We've turned--it's a monarchical model from the Middle Ages, and it's inappropriate and it's not--it's just not Christ-like.

Ms. BETHELL: May I say something here.

Ms. DITTRICH: I hope it doesn't sound harsh. I mean, I don't mean to sound harsh, but...

CONAN: I know, but let's let Donna get a quick reaction and get another phone call in.

Ms. BETHELL: All right. You're absolutely right, Jesus did not want to be a king. He said, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So he didn't want all those trappings. But he did say to Peter, 'You are Peter, and upon this rock, I will build my church and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. He who hears you hears me.' He gave him authority. Now I perfectly agree that that authority can get surrounded by the trappings of all kinds of earthly human organizations. There has to be some kind of a human organization, and the authority must remain intact in its integrity. But certainly we can--there are a lot of things that could be shed. There are a lot of things that could be talked about. And the pope himself has called for this. He has called explicitly for an examination of how the Petrine office, as we call it, the office of Peter, should be exercised in today's world.

CONAN: OK. And we know that everybody's got a response to that, but let's get on to the next question. Our next caller is Pat, who's on the line with us from Boston.

PAT (Caller): Yes. How are you?

CONAN: Fine, thanks.

PAT: I'm sorry. My phone's breaking up a little here, so hopefully I'll get through. I was a member--I'm sort of on the other side. I am a lapsed Catholic who, when I was active, was a member of a parish in western New York which was basically run fairly democratically. There was a Parish Council which made recommendations to the parish as a whole, which approved any major change in policy, fiscal or otherwise, by a two-thirds vote.

CONAN: And did that--how did that work exactly?

PAT: It worked exceedingly well. It worked well for a number of reasons. We had two priests in the lead who were very open to this and who really drove the process. We had a wonderful, vibrant parish. And, you know, when the leadership got there, it was very poor and it then went to, you know, a very robust collection and a lot of ministries. And in my experience, it worked very well. I should add that the parish--the professor will know it; it was Corpus, now Spiritus Christi in Rochester, New York--is now in schism because it disagrees with the church at large on matters, primarily sexual.

CONAN: Well, Paul Schervish, are you familiar with this?

Prof. SCHERVISH: No, not that particular one, I'm not. But this is a kind of an issue that is exactly what the potential is for change. Will Catholics push this to the point where if they do not get a quality of leadership from bishops or from priests, that they are willing to use the force of money, use the force of schism to find God in their daily life. The touchstone is not democracy, it is the quality of the religious life. And it behooves all of us to figure out what changes we want to see made, what changes we do not want to see made and how each one of those two paths contribute to the quality and quantity of spiritual life.

CONAN: Pat, does that sound like what was going on in your particular parish?

PAT: Very much so. My concern, sort of on a broader scale, because I now live in Boston, is we had two

exceptional priests. Priests are trained not to be open to this kind of process under the current system. And it's going to take a long time, and I don't think there are structures in place to replicate what happened in my parish elsewhere without, you know, basically schism. And that's my concern for the current sort of state of affairs.

CONAN: And do you think that this is going to be easily resolved in Dallas?

PAT: Oh, no, absolutely not. I don't think the bishops have the ear to hear it. I don't think they have the means sort of in themselves to address it.

CONAN: OK, Pat.

PAT: Or, I should say, a few do. There are a few progressives in the church, Matt Clark from Rochester being one, and in other dioceses off the East Coast. But are they going to be listened to is the question.

CONAN: Well, Pat, thanks very much for the call. We appreciate it.

You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And now let's go to Chris, who's on the line with us from Front Royal, in Virginia.

CHRIS (Caller): Hi. I just wanted to support the notion that the laity can do our job if the bishops do theirs. I'm a graduate of Notre Dame. I'm a family man. I don't want to run the church. I think the bishops could if they would concentrate on their jobs. This morning, Scott Appleby, from Notre Dame, made himself a self-appointed spokesman for the laity when he said that we need to democratize the church and to spread out the power and so on.

CONAN: I have the quote in front of me. Let me read it to you. "The apologies from bishops and the cardinals will not be heard until you go beyond the rhetoric of mistakes and errors and name it for what it is, a sin born of the arrogance of power."

CHRIS: Well, he's talking about power because so many of my former colleagues at Notre Dame and the folks at Boston College don't really think that the pope ought to have the authority that he does in matters of faith and morals. And I just want to point out that it's very easy these days to confuse misgivings about the bishops with true dissent about the teachings of the church on birth control, abortion, whether there's a heaven or hell. And I don't think we should allow those concepts of democratization and involvement of the laity to really be a cover-up for nothing more than sheer American dissent with the teachings of the church, which is very prevalent in the American church today. And that's why I'm grateful to the Boston College professor that he points out the possibility of schism because this is a doctrinal issue as well as an issue about management of the church and the bishops doing their job.

CONAN: Well, Luise Dittrich, I have to ask that some people believe that groups like Voice of the Faithful that you co-founded do have an agenda that would go to some of these issues, and including women in clergy and others.

Ms. DITTRICH: Well, Neal, Voice of the Faithful has absolutely taken no position on any of those sex and gender issues that might divide us. As I said at the top of the program, we are a coalition of conservative, moderate and progressive Catholics. We don't all feel the same way about those doctrinal issues. We prefer to separate dogma from doctrine. Dogma is our core set of beliefs; doctrines are teachings that are human-made--I guess I don't need to use inclusive language--that are man-made and that are subject to change. We're not tackling those changes right now. All we're doing is talking about lay voice.

Ms. BETHELL: Neal, can I comment on that?

CONAN: I was just going to ask you to.

Ms. BETHELL: Yes. I don't understand why Voice of the Faithful members have to say explicitly that they don't need to agree on these things. The points that the caller from Front Royal was making are matters of firm doctrine in the church. And let's not say there's some kind of semantic difference between doctrine and dogma. These are doctrines in the church. If you are a Catholic, you accept and believe these things on the authority of the church, on the teaching authority received from Jesus Christ. And so if you don't accept those points, then you are not a full Catholic, you are not a believing Catholic. You have a very serious problem because you apparently don't accept what the church is, as the church of Jesus Christ. And so I should think that if Voice of the Faithful finds that their membership can't agree at least on the basic--that they accept the basic doctrine of the church, then they need to ask themselves, are they Catholic?

Ms. DITTRICH: Well, you know...

Ms. BETHELL: And if they don't accept the basic doctrines of the church, then can they be trusted to participate in its governance?

CONAN: And, Luise, I'm going to give you a chance to respond, but we don't have a lot of time left.

Ms. DITTRICH: I just need to say that Voice of the Faithful is not about litmus tests. We're not about orthodoxy police. We are simply not into those issues. We are trying to save the church on the most basic level, which is lay participation and lay assistance.

Ms. BETHELL: Well, if you cannot be orthodox, then why do you think that you have a role to play in the governing of the church?

Prof. SCHERVISH: This is Paul. I think one of the most important parts to leave this conversation with--points--is to note that St. Peter betrayed Jesus in the Gospel, and that there was a way to call him to accountability. And while the bishops and the pope are constantly calling laypeople to accountability, there is no mechanism for Jesus in the institutional workings of the church to be represented in calling the pope and the bishops to accountability the way the Gospel has it charted.

CHRIS: Of course there is, and I think that the spirituality of the church need not be afraid of the pope doing his job, because I think that the professor invites, and Mr. Appleby, too, is the notion that the laity ought to decide questions on morality like abortion and birth control by majority vote.

CONAN: And, Chris, with that we are going to have to leave it. I'm afraid we're out of time. But thanks very much for an interesting call.

CHRIS: Thank you.

CONAN: Luise Dittrich, thank you very much as well.

Ms. DITTRICH: Thank you, Neal.

CONAN: Luise Dittrich, one of the founders of the Voice of the Faithful, a newly formed organization of lay Catholics that wants stronger lay leadership. She was at the studios of WBUR in Boston, along with Paul Schervish, a professor of sociology at Boston College. Thank you for joining us today, Paul.

Prof. SCHERVISH: My pleasure, Neal.

CONAN: And Donna Bethell, chairman of the board of directors at Christendom College, a Roman Catholic liberal arts college in Front Royal, Virginia. Thank you very much.

Ms. BETHELL: Thank you.

CONAN: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.