c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) The late Ronald Reagan had two things that our beleaguered Catholic bishops could use right now _ a sure sense of timing and a wonderful sense of humor. As when he observed ironically that the problem with government was exemplified by naming the office overseeing everything outdoors the “Department of the Interior.”

Perhaps because they have become so Roman, many bishops have misplaced the Irish good humor that, as with Reagan, could save them from bad days and worse headlines and reveal a side of themselves they seem determined to hide.

Take their relationship with the media about whose prejudices or failure to report their statements in context they frequently complain.

But they invite the media to see them at their worst and keep them out when they might just see them at their best. At Dallas, two years ago, they willingly obsessed in front of the cameras as they cobbled together a program to advertise their toughness on clerical pedophilia.

This year, in Denver on retreat, meditating and praying and revealing themselves at their best, they are refusing to let the media see them at all. Go figure, as they say.

Had they been monks setting themselves on fire, they could not have gotten more attention for their Dallas decision to paint a bull’s-eye on every priest by vowing “One Strike and You’re Out,” even on the basis of one phone call or a muddled recollection of some pastor’s innocently patting an altar boy on the head half a century before.

Then, with the whole world watching, they exempted themselves from the Draconian reforms they were calling in like pre-emptive airstrikes on their priests. Having covered up clergy sex abuse for years, they then invited prosecutors to raid their files for evidence Eliot Ness-style, apparently hoping that the criminal justice system would solve their problem for them, advertising publicly their sudden learning that pedophilia was a crime.

They achieved that trifecta of disaster, looking solemn, regretful and pleased with themselves for what they thought were acts of virtue as the cameras rolled. Never has so big a mistake been committed against so many by so few.

Now, two years later, having had lawyers flock to diocesan offices as if they were swallows beaming in on Capistrano, and having spent more time reading depositions than their prayer books, the bishops have decided to have a meeting as a retreat and they’re not letting anybody in to see them at prayer.

Other evidence supports their seeming gift for hiding their light beneath bushels of bad timing and questionable judgment. They claim that the Eucharist is indispensable to Catholicism but, in public, they are preoccupied with refusing, in many dioceses, the Eucharist to pro-choice Catholic officeholders and, as in Chicago recently, to gays wearing sashes.

They are determined to deny the Eucharist to some public officials but they are indifferent to whether they provide it for everyday Catholics in the privacy of their own churches. Their unimaginative solution to a supposed priest shortage is to close churches and eliminate Masses, making it harder for everyday Catholics to receive the Eucharist at all.

But perhaps the greatest public/private irony is the news that Bernard Cardinal Law, who left Boston in the wake of his mismanaging the sex abuse scandal, is now head of an ancient Roman basilica with quarters in a palazzo that Henry James might have created for just such an American expatriate. Oh yes, and there is the monthly stipend. This may be exile but it isn’t Elba or some Alcatraz of a monastery for penitent pastors.

Two years after the scandal, Cardinal Law exercises considerable influence in Rome and is still running American Catholicism. In short, the mussed bedclothes of the American church have been smoothed over but the sheets haven’t really been changed. Can somebody please adjust this picture?

Saul Bellow once said, “The unexamined life may not be worth living but the examined life is driving me crazy.” The good men who are American bishops may be examining their consciences this week but, with out-of-joint ironies the order of the day in American Catholicism, they are driving their people, not themselves, crazy.

DEA/PH END KENNEDY