Thoughts on reforming the Church in America

Fr. Jay Scott Newman, writing for First Things, wants to end to the Imperial Episcopate. He warms my native Kansas populist heart.

A friend of long-standing, Newman is a priest in the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina, and pastor of St. Mary’s in Greenville. To put his parish and pastoral practice in perspective, George Weigel once (maybe he still does) called St. Mary’s the best Catholic parish in America. St. Mary’s and its pastor are featured in Weigel’s book, Letters to a Young Catholic.

He has a number of reforms. Eliminate titles (Eminence, Your Excellency, so on) that distance the bishop from the clergy and even further from the laity. Instead, revert to “Father.” As reforms go, it ought to be a piece of cake. I would think a reasonably modest man would be embarrassed by the lavish titles anyway. Can you see him shaving in the morning and talking to the mirror like that?

I think a bishop should be the kind of guy whose palms still sweat a bit when entering the pulpit, accompanied by a small number of butterflies in his gut. I would like a bishop who knows (or at least remembers from the early days of his priesthood) two paradoxical sensations: exhilaration at preaching the Gospel, simultaneously linked to an honest doubt as to whether the Holy Spirit made the right choice in picking him to do it, yet determined to do his best because it’s his job.

Newman also wants to eliminate the elaborate attire:

We should encourage bishops to abandon colored sashes, buttons, piping, and capes and stick to simple black. Like the Eastern Orthodox clergy, let all bishops, priests, and deacons wear the same black cassock, with bishops identifiable by their miters, pectoral crosses, and rings.

All good, but do nix the miters. Considering miters originated as head gear worn by imperial Byzantine court officials, it ought to go. Besides, they didn’t catch on in the West among clerics until the 11th century; a kind of fad, I take it. Fads come and fads go; time for this one to go, I think.

Newman also suggests much leaner diocesan staffs, accessible bishops, and complains about the multiplicity of titular and auxiliary bishops, “a deformation of the episcopate,” because in his vision every bishop becomes first a pastor to pastors and, by extension, to the seminarians.

For this the bishop must reestablish himself as the parish pastor of his cathedral, in name and in practice. A bishop would do this by conducting liturgy and preaching at the principal Sunday mass, every Sunday.

This, in my thinking, might be a problem. I recall the late Richard John Neuhaus, the founding editor of First Things magazine, speculating on a Church of vastly smaller dioceses. Actually, what he had in mind was to increase in the numbers of dioceses. No diocese, say, would have more than fifty parishes.

This, Neuhaus suggested, would permit the bishop to visit his entire diocese, one parish per Sunday, over fifty weeks and still have a two-week vacation afterwards, not discounting Wednesday visitations for confirmations and the like. He could still conduct Saturday eveing masses in the cathedral (if Saturday attendance did not improve, that might be another issue.) I’d add bishops should do their own grocery shopping now and again. Okay, I just threw that in.

Presently bishops are part of a more or less self-selecting process. A priest is marked, so to speak, for ecclesiastical greatness and moved along by the right mentors, promoted in the right circles, brought to the ear of the papal nuncio in America. That, I fear, is part of the catastrophe we are in. There is also a more grassroots solicitation process that happens, one involving opinions of fellow priests. But it all goes through the nuncio, there to the Vatican, and back and forth, vetting here and more vetting there. It is lengthy and still doesn’t prevent lemons. It is not unusual for a diocesan vacancy to last a year or longer.

A rather notable number of priests who are approached refuse consideration for episcopal appointment. They should be the real candidates, but the vetting process is what it is.

Unless, re-erecting some old history from the early Church, bishops were to be selected locally by diocesan synods of priests and laity. Of course, the election of Callistus I (martyr, d. 223) as bishop of Rome was the occasion of the first anti-pope, but it all worked out. The selection process did have merit.

And there’s some model for that approach in American Catholic history. That roughly is how Fr. John Carroll became the first bishop in the United States, elected by his fellow priests in Maryland. There were 9,000 Catholics (not counting slaves) in Maryland and the pope gave permission to the nineteen priests to elect a bishop. John Carroll got the job, elected by the chapter in November 1783; the pope confirmed it in June 1784.

So, it’s been done before. The addition of parish lay representation would simply mimic the practice of the early Church (without the occasional riot following some elections). We could insist that the successful nominee received three-quarters approval, clergy and lay, each counted separately, and include an additional caveat, direct papal approval. If for some good reason the pope could not approve, the diocesan synod would vote again. My dream process, incidentally, would eliminate some of the bureaucratic tangle in the Vatican; nobody would have to worry about American appointments anymore, would they.

Naturally, you should read the article by Newman for yourself. As I said, he got my populist juices going. His entire approach is creation of an approachable episcopacy. Or, as he puts it, “the retrieval of the episcopate as an Order in the Church for the preaching of the gospel—rather than as a clerical caste in which narcissism can twist good men into caricatures of prelatial pomposity.”