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) If, as the old Kermit the Frog song reminds us, “it’s not easy being green,” neither is it easy being any shade of purple or red for Catholic bishops.

Now and then, one of them restores faith in the entire cohort of the bishops by speaking to his people as a good pastor would about a serious problem. Washington’s Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, for example, recently sorted out the issue of whether the Eucharist should be denied to pro-choice Catholic politicians, or even, as some bishops had suggested, to Catholics who vote for them.

Summarizing his conversations with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, McCarrick explained that, before any candidates are denied Communion, their bishops should meet with them in a serious discussion of the church’s teaching on abortion and the extent of the candidates’ actual support of this practice.

“Cardinal Ratzinger,” McCarrick noted in a speech to his brother bishops on June 15, “clearly leaves to us as teachers, pastors and leaders whether to pursue that path.” Permit me to add emphasis to McCarrick’s next words: “The question for us is not simply whether denial of Communion is possible, but whether it is pastorally wise and prudent. It is not surprising that difficult and differing circumstances on these matters can lead to different practices.”

This illustrates the genius of the pastoral approach that respects the church, the law and ever imperfect human experience at the same time. Catholicism’s perennial strength lies in applying its teachings “humano modo,” in the human way, recognizing the complexity of our condition and finding a way to teach, correct and support without placing impossible burdens on the backs and consciences of their people. That pastoral approach is as old as Catholicism itself.

Think how hard it is for many contemporary bishops who, lacking pastoral experience, were summoned from seminary faculties or Bob Cratchit Chancery desks to head dioceses. When all you know is the church as bureaucracy, it is difficult to understand it as a family that needs an understanding father more than an imperious law-giver.

These bishops are further hobbled by trying to operate through a hierarchical model of the church which is confident that power resides and information is controlled at the top and sends a Niagara of directives washing down on the people on the lower and lesser levels.

America’s bishops are mostly intelligent, good-hearted men who, without pastoral experience, feel compelled to operate through a hierarchical filter that muffles rather than transmits their true voices, making them all sound the way most of them are not _ authoritarian, theologically rusty and personally remote.

Hillary Clinton’s failure in restructuring health care has been attributed not to a generalized refusal to face its need, but to a secretive hierarchical methodology that doomed it by imposing everything from the top. The same hierarchical process hamstrings bishops as they try to preach and apply church teachings in the modern world.

The bishops feel obligated to support an approach that, in the Space and Information Age, simply does not work and has been abandoned or greatly modified by most big corporations. The exploration of space doomed the hierarchical model based on a lowly Earth split off from lofty heaven. The Information Age ended the isolation and control of power at the top of any organization. Soviet hierarchs could not hide or control the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and their whole system collapsed a few years later.

Our good bishops need to be encouraged to embrace the collegiality of the early church to which the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) returned long before General Electric or General Motors realized that hierarchies don’t work anymore. Clearly, Cardinal McCarrick understands this and has given our bishops a pastoral example that lets them listen to their people while finding their own true voices in responding.

In the process, they reveal a better side of themselves than they can when they speak only “hierarchese” _ for which there is no Rosetta Stone and no good translation _ about matters as thorny as giving the Eucharist to pro-choice Catholic politicians.

KRE/MO END KENNEDY