c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) In this Jubilee year, Catholics can make pilgrimages without going very far from home. They gain the same spiritual benefits as they would from traveling to Rome by visiting designated churches in their own dioceses. The initial theme is the worthy and traditional one of forgiveness.

An observer may be forgiven, then, for noting another pilgrimage _ time travel, really _ that is also under way. Destination: Rome. The year: 1870. The Council: Vatican I. It ended abruptly after Pope Pius IX _ Pio Nono, as he is called _ oversaw the declaration of papal infallibility. That elevated the pope to a supreme and central role as, in effect, the monarch of the church.

This decision supported the notion that the pope could act alone, as Pio Nono had in 1858 by declaring the dogma of the Immaculate Conception without any consultation with or concurrence of the bishops of the church. The latter became, in effect, pro-consuls in dioceses that had been laid out on the model of the Roman Empire.

The purpose of this return trip to the first Vatican Council is to blend the second Vatican Council with the first, thereby erasing every memory of Vatican II’s restoration of collegiality as the governing mode of the church. Collegiality recognizes that bishops have their authority in their own right, that it is not delegated to them by the pope, and that he stands in relationship to them not as a hierarchical king but as the first among equals. Within their own countries and cultures, these bishops are to lead the local church rather than publish Roman directives.

This pilgrimage is led vigorously by Pope John Paul II, who revealed himself, early in his pontificate, as an enormous world presence who intended, with his actor’s gifts and his dramatic flair, to fill the world stage by himself and to reduce the world’s bishops to supporting roles or crowd extras.

Here are some tips on how to identify the dynamic of this movement to restore the ethos of Vatican I to Catholicism:

_ The systematic downgrading of the great German theologian Karl Rahner,who contributed so much to the accomplishments of Vatican II. A Catholic columnist recently suggested that Rahner wrote for an audience that never existed and is now irrelevant. There will be more of this.

_ Watch for the term “communio” as the replacement for collegiality. The arguments for this are not easy to follow, as one might conclude from the Catholic News Service summary of Cardinal Francis George’s explanation that “universal communion takes precedence over any local manifestation of the church. … The college of bishops came together in a council for the sake of communion. Understanding the church this way `rescues the pope’s ministry’ from a legalistic view.” In short, it’s Vatican I made to sound like Vatican II.

Such thinking justifies disarming national conferences as if they were dangerous nuclear devices that might otherwise go off as vehicles of collegial expression by the world’s bishops. The apparently threatening possibility of national churches ever expressing themselves outside complete papal control has been eliminated. A few years ago, for example, American bishops went along with a Vatican demand that they must have 100 percent agreement on any letter or statement (an impossibility) before sending it to Rome for its approval.

_ Blaming Vatican II for the vocation shortage. As a director of vocations put it recently in Notre Dame Magazine, “There is a vocation shortage today because 30 years ago churches were gutted, doctrine dummied down and sacraments cheapened. … Treasured symbols of Catholic identity disappeared virtually overnight.”

_ Expect defenses of a new generation of seminarians, such as the one in a mannered Commonweal essay by historian William Portier who assures us that, even though he has observed oddities, such as “a seminarian (who) nearly touched the floor in a solitary act of reverence,” this is an act of “witness,” and, as a group, they are “evangelical” rather than conservative.

To fold Vatican II into Vatican I demands a strategy as blatant as a Clinton political move. The first task is to deconstruct Pope John XXIII, and Vatican planners are doing just that by beatifying this father of Vatican II and its collegiality on the same day _ Sept. 3, 2000 _ with Pio Nono, the father of Vatican I and the imperial papacy that so diminished the authority and role of bishops in the church. The effort to “morph” these two very different popes into one is a curial special effect.

To keep abreast of this “Vatican I must increase and Vatican II must decrease” dynamic, read anything by papal biographer George Weigel, American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Novak or Father John Neuhaus.

KRE END KENNEDY