COMMENTARY: President Carter’s Lesson for Catholic Bishops

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) The pope and bishops should pay close attention to former President Jimmy Carter’s announcement that, in […]

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) The pope and bishops should pay close attention to former President Jimmy Carter’s announcement that, in a certain Southern tradition, he has seceded from the Baptist church.


Well, sort of, as, although he has severed his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, he will continue to serve as a deacon and to teach Sunday School in his Plains, Ga., Maranatha Baptist Church that retains its ties to the SBC.

The former president, perhaps the only public servant in our common memory who seemed deeply committed to religious belief, emerges now in a prophetic role he was never able to achieve during his presidency.

He is a prophet because in coming to “a painful decision” to detach himself from the official structure, or “hierarchy,” he has made it a symbol for the superstructure of religions-in-general and Catholicism in particular.

Carter has expressed publicly what uncounted numbers of believers, particularly Roman Catholics, have done privately. He has separated himself from “increasingly rigid” official Baptist positions while continuing to be a committed Baptist.

Carter said his painful decision was finally made when the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest of the Protestant churches, declared in June its opposition to women as pastors. He had also been troubled by the group’s literal interpretation of the Scriptures.

What is new here is not that a sensitive and deeply religious person might differ with the top ranking officials of his church but that it does not trouble him to reject their ideas and to remain in good conscience within the fold.

Others who have made similar decisions against the administrators of their faith have often either molted the skin of their religious identity at the same time and grown another in a different church. Or they have been excommunicated for their rebellious attitudes and had the skin of their identity flayed off publicly.


What the former president has done has been so unacceptable to church organizations that anybody who attempted such a major public disagreement was routinely treated to instant and severe penalties. Branded heretics, they might once have been imprisoned or burned at the stake.

More recently, the reprisals have been, in their way, no less drastic.

Hans Kung and Charles Curran, distinguished Catholic scholars, were stripped of their titles as “Catholic” theologians for holding opinions on such issues as infallibility and birth control that are widely held by almost all their fellow Catholic thinkers.

During this past fevered year, Sister Jeannine Gramick was brutally removed by the Vatican from her pastoral work with homosexuals, forbidden to write or speak on the subject, prohibited as well from discussing the secret process by which these unforgiving and unforgivable penalties were imposed.

Jimmy Carter is prophetic because he is bearing the public pain of doing what, in fact, untold thousands of Catholics have borne in private decisions to separate themselves from the opinions and influence of their bishops while continuing to practice their religion, often in a deeply committed fashion.

It is interesting sociologically that the pope and the bishops can only discipline priests and religious men and women who depend on the organization for their identification and support.

They cannot reprimand lay Catholics, many of them conservative, many liberal, and, perhaps more than either of these, the great group of Catholics who identify themselves as neither but go on, day after day, trying to live good lives, raise their families, and do good work in accord with their Catholic sense.


It is interesting psychologically that so many Catholics resolve this question without histrionics after conscientious reflection on whether the officials of their church _ in short, the bishops _ say anything that helps them live their faith more deeply.

This is the real silence of the lambs to which the shepherds should attend. It is also the biggest unreported Catholic story of the year. As a private action, it is almost impossible to report or to survey. As a character in “Our Town” says about anything important in life, you have to “overhear” it.

The American bishops, however, are not, for the most part, trying to hear, or overhear, what their people are saying. They are straining to hear what they can do to please the pope, what flare of loyalty they can loft above their dioceses in hopes someone in Rome will notice and write in the Vatican book of life and promotions.

Jimmy Carter has now written one of the signs of the times across the sky. People can be true to their faith even when they pay little attention to its officials. They can take their faith seriously while not taking its hierarchs seriously.

DEA END KENNEDY

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