c. 1998 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 Press.)

UNDATED _ Many Roman Catholics who think themselves members of the church family established by the Second Vatican Council are wondering whether their housing has been taken over by the landlord. They feel dispossessed, left on the curb with scraps of such once-comfortable furniture as collegiality and the freedom of academic inquiry.

This sense of loss about the church understood as a People of God rather than a Mighty Fortress stems from a flurry of decrees that have come out of Rome as bills come out of Congress just before adjournment.

These have broadened the category of teachings gilded with infallibility to include, for example, that Jesus established an all-male celibate priesthood.

As in changing the grading of meats, what was formerly considered intellectual conversation to deepen theological understanding has been restamped as dissent and made punishable in still unspecified ways.

Now bishops’ conferences have been told they can only make statements on which they have absolute unanimity and that these must, like medical treatments at an HMO, be approved by Rome before they can be discussed at all.

Many well-educated Catholics feel Vatican II has been operationally reversed and they have been disenfranchised from the roles they had eagerly taken on in the church. They feel hurt and some outrage, and long for a forum in which to voice their complaints.

These developments delight some extraordinarily right-wing Catholics who feel that at last the slate of Vatican II has been wiped clean and a hierarchy of dogmatic and moral truth has been restored. Some extremists label this backwardness as progress. Others, comparable to the loners who seem to thrive in Montana, are stockpiling brush and tinder to ignite the fires that will burn out heresy _ and maybe some heretics, too.

Is this what the next century of Catholicism will be like? With the repressors reveling in repression? If so, many thoughtful Catholics want to get off at the next stop.

A more measured approach identifies these recent decrees less as the cries of birth of a 21st-century style in Catholicism and more as the death rattle of a kind of mind and belief control long ago tagged”do not resuscitate”by history itself. The world in which we now live no longer considers information a”stock”good to be placed on the highest shelf, or in the most inward tabernacle, away from the view and beyond the reach of ordinary people.

Information is now a”flow”good whose life depends on its transmission and being shared by the widest assortment of people. Information can no longer be controlled by the CEO in business, facts can no longer be permanently manipulated by political leaders, and theological truth cannot be forever monopolized even by various ecclesiastical departments in Rome.

In the Information Age, everybody has access to the same information and institutions must adapt to this greatly changed reality if they are to survive. That includes the Roman Catholic Church, rightly concerned about preserving its religious authority. It does that not by returning to the past but, like the apostles at Pentecost, by learning to speak the truth in”entirely new languages.” Washington is famous for the smoke and spin given off by the leaders and commentators who think they are talking about the world when they are only talking about themselves and, to make it worse, to each other. It is referred to as”Inside the Beltway.” The Vatican decrees, likewise, are products of longtime Roman experts and careerists who think they are talking about the world when they are only talking to each other about themselves. That may be regarded as”Inside the Appian Way.” These sincere bureaucrats sense the adjournment of a papacy coming and they are getting out as much paper as they can in advance. They are the ones with the problem, not the millions of Catholics who still breathe the fresh air that Vatican II brought into the church.

These attempts at control are being issued by people who realize their capacity to control the faith and the work of the Spirit is slipping away from them. Think of them as space debris, once wonderfully functioning fragments cast off by time and chance and now moving in progressively collapsing orbits.

The only way to deal with space debris is to stay out of its way. Let it die, as it must, in the flames it once thought a purifying end for”heretics.”

DEA END KENNEDY