COMMENTARY: The best bishops are experts in two-way communication

c. 1997 Religion News Service UNDATED _”Whatever is going to happen to our poor church?”a woman asked me at a recent dinner party. Like virtually all the social encounters I had with Catholics over the holidays, the conversation was about the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.”What do you mean?”I replied.”All those dried-up old men in […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _”Whatever is going to happen to our poor church?”a woman asked me at a recent dinner party.

Like virtually all the social encounters I had with Catholics over the holidays, the conversation was about the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.”What do you mean?”I replied.”All those dried-up old men in their funny hats who are our leaders.” Her words provoked me to rise in admittedly limited defense of the lords spiritual.”Not all of them are old,”I told her.”Some of the old are not dried-up. But I take your point about the miters: they do look weird in those things.” Then I made my real point:”Although many members of the hierarchy think that they are the church, in fact, they are only a part of it. The real church is people like you in the parishes. That’s where the future is and always has been.” Nonetheless, our bishops are not the leaders we deserve. First of all, intelligence, imagination, sensitivity, and competence are usually obstacles to being made a bishop. Secondly, the body of bishops is cut off from the experience of the laity and the parish clergy because they really do not believe that the Holy Spirit is at work among them. They seem to believe instead that the Spirit comes to them from Rome and from Rome only.


All communication in the church, according to the implicit model to which most of them subscribe, is downward. There is no need for upward communication because the”magisterium”(the pope and his bishops) has a monopoly on truth and the answers to all pertinent questions.

There is no need, therefore, to listen to anyone but the pope and the bishops insofar as they reflect what the pope is saying. The proper role for a bishop is to be the pope’s spokesman in his own diocese.

But according to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, a bishop is supposed to speak for the whole church to his own diocese AND for his own diocese to the whole church. He must”discern the Spirit”among his people and communicate that Spirit upwards. He is the crucial communication link between the people and the leaders of the church.

If a bishop does not play this role with sensitivity and balance, the flow of communication gets clogged up; leaders and people become isolated from one another.

Few members of the hierarchy today are brave enough to play the crucial role of a two-way communicator. Thus, to the extent that the Spirit is at work among God’s people, She is simply not heard. The bishops, in effect, have tuned Her out and turned Her off. They do not need to listen to the laity and the lower clergy. And the pope really does not need to listen to them.

To prove that I am not exaggerating, here’s a letter of Archbishop Eldon Francis Curtiss of Omaha recently published in America, a Jesuit magazine.”In the long run the effectiveness of a Catholic bishop does not depend on his cleverness or his charm or his rapport with the people,”Curtiss wrote.”… Rather, it depends on how well he held his local church together in unity with the larger church. History demonstrates that some personally popular bishops left their dioceses weakened because they failed to strengthen the unity of their people with the one church.” Leave aside the question of how Archbishop Curtiss proposes to enforce that unity on his people _ how, for example, to make them stop using artificial birth control. The important point is that in his model there is no sense that the lives and the faith and the experience of God in his people have any value at all in the ongoing life of the church.

His letter makes him appear unaware that he has an obligation to communicate upward the results of the presence of the Spirit among his people. Curtiss’ letter was a defense of conservative members of the hierarchy who last year criticized Bernardin’s attempt to find”common ground”among various groups of Catholics. The church in Omaha may be less”weakened”than the church in Chicago, whose late cardinal was an expert in that two-way communication that is so vital to the life of the church.


Deliver us, O Lord, from any attempt by the archbishop of Omaha to strengthen the church in Chicago.

MJP END GREELEY

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