Chicago Tribune (CT) - FRIDAY, December 13, 1996 Edition: NORTH SPORTS FINAL Section: NEWS Page: 1 Word Count: 4,150
Stevenson Swanson and Vincent J. Schodolski, Tribune Staff Writers. Tribune correspondents Lisa Anderson and Joseph A. Kirby in New York, V. Dion Haynes in Los Angeles and Glen Elsasser in Washington contributed to this report.

Family feud.

Racked by diverse opinions, the Catholic Church in America is like an argumentative family gathered around the table. The question is whether the disputes will become so rancorous that the family will fall apart.

SERIES: JOURNEY OF FAITH. Catholicism confronts the doubts and demands of a new age. DAY SIX: THE CHANGING AMERICAN CHURCH. CORRECTION: Additional material published Dec. 14, 1996:

Corrections and clarifications.

A graphic Friday locating the archdioceses within the United States incorrectly included Cleveland as an archdiocese. The Tribune regrets the error.

TEXT:

This Sunday in America, the Roman Catholic mass will be accompanied by gospel music and shouts of "Amen," as it is at St. Brigid's in the Watts area of Los Angeles.

The mass will be celebrated in Spanish and Polish and Vietnamese and a host of other tongues, including Latin, still the true language of the church for traditionalists who have never accepted the changes that came in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.

Somewhere mass even will be said in a non-Catholic church, as happens once a month at St. George's Episcopal Church in New York, where an independent Catholic parish holds services.

Almost one-quarter of all Americans are Catholic, 60 million people as diverse as the country itself.

They range from suburban middle-class families comfortable with a church active on social issues to immigrants who rely on the church for a lifeline in a new land.

The church includes activists who push for the ordination of women and for changes in the church's position on abortion. They worship alongside conservative theologians who regret that Catholics no longer refrain from eating meat on Fridays.

In many ways, the American Catholic Church at the end of the 20th Century is like a big, argumentative family gathered around the dining-room table. Everybody is shouting at once, and everyone seems to have a different opinion about everything. Sometimes someone even storms away from the table. The question is whether the arguments will become so rancorous that the family will fall apart.

Overall, the number of people who embrace Catholicism has grown since 1985, when there were 52 million American Catholics. But because the overall population has also increased, the percentage of Catholics in the country has barely budged in that period, up one percentage point to 23 percent.

Within those numbers, however, some statistics underscore a church that is changing dramatically.

According to surveys, some 93 percent of American Catholics under age 20 attended mass every Sunday during the 1950s. By 1972 that figure had fallen to 40.4 percent for this key age group, according to the University of Chicago's General Social Surveys. By 1990 it had plunged to 13.2 percent, even though the church still teaches that Sunday mass is obligatory.

And despite the church's stance against sex outside of marriage, the university found that 56 percent of Catholics under the age of 30 approved of premarital sex. Again, despite church teaching, polls have found that Catholics differ little from other Americans in their almost overwhelming approval of birth control and their firm support for a woman's right to have an abortion.

Church a 'marginal force'

"Catholics simply do not hear or take seriously what the church says about these issues," said Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, a Washington-based organization that believes Catholics should be allowed to make decisions for themselves on sexual and reproductive questions. "They just don't feel these issues have very much to do with their Catholicity. Since the church puts so much emphasis on these issues, it makes the church a marginal force in the moral life of Catholics."

The church remains an important part of life for one group of Catholics, the newest Americans. Immigrants frequently see the church as a comforting reminder of their native land, as well as a source of help in adjusting to life in a strange country.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the oldest church in Los Angeles, the Church of La Reina de Los Angeles, nestled against the edge of Los Angeles' steel-and-glass downtown. Its adobe walls, completed in 1822, date from the period when the area was still part of Mexico.

Today, it is a Hispanic parish, overwhelmingly Mexican. On Sundays, 11,000 people attend the 11 masses that start early in the morning and run through late evening. All the services are in Spanish, and mariachi music accompanies some of the masses.

"They come because they like the liturgy and it is their culture," said Rev. Alberto Vasquez, pastor of the church. "They can also forget about the 'other world' outside. This is a first stop church. The newly arrived immigrants come here because it is the only thing that is familiar for them. When they get settled and get a good job, they move on and the next wave takes their place."

Immigration, largely from Central and South America but also from Asia, has been the main reason that the number of Catholics in the Los Angeles area has more than doubled in the last 20 years, from 2 million to 4.5 million.

A diocese of immigrants

In New York, the growth rate of the diocese of Brooklyn and Queens has been less dramatic--up 25 percent in 20 years, to 1.5 million--but it, too, has been fueled mainly by immigrants.

"At the turn of the century, the diocese was known as a diocese of immigrants, and at the end of the century, it's still a diocese of immigrants," said Frank De Rosa, the diocesan spokesman.

But those immigrants tend to come from a greater variety of places. On any given Sunday in New York, mass is said in 18 or 19 languages. Many come from the traditional sources of New York City's immigrant population, such as Puerto Rico and Ireland, but many also now come from Korea, the Philippines, Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

To serve these divergent groups, the diocese has a number of specialized offices that are generally headed by a priest who speaks the language of a group and can arrange out-of-the-ordinary services, such as celebrating a feast day that may be more important in, say, a Haitian parish than a Polish one. There are offices, called apostolates, for Spanish-speaking nationalities, Haitians, Brazilians, Chinese, Croats, Indians, Indonesians, Italians, Irish, Koreans, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Polish, Romanians, Russians, Vietnamese and West Indians.

In addition, the diocese has had a Catholic Migration Office since 1971, which has helped thousands of people obtain citizenship papers, find educational and employment opportunities, and learn English.

But immigration in the 1990s differs from the 1890s when Catholic immigrants usually brought their priests with them. Now, with a priest shortage in such places as Latin America, the immigrants add another strain on an already stretched Catholic clergy in the U.S.

For instance, the Los Angeles Catholic community has more than doubled in two decades. Yet the archdiocese still has about 1,300 priests, roughly the same number as 20 years ago, lending urgency to the serious operational problems that compound the social turmoil facing church. Crisis ahead

Nationally, trends are the same. In 1962, at the start of the Second Vatican Council, there were 55,581 priests in the U.S. In 1996 there were 49,099. That 6,500 decline is troublesome, but not terrifying for church officials. Rather, the looming crisis lies in the decline in seminarians. In 1962 there were 46,189 men studying for the priesthood in America. In 1996 there were 4,578, less than 10 percent the number of three decades before.

That decline in potential priests foreshadows a future shortage of ordained clergy to minister to the faithful. The number of nuns, who have historically been the church's source of low-cost teachers and nurses, also has plunged from 173,351 women in religious orders 34 years ago to only 89,125 in 1996.

To cope with the priest shortage, the church delegates many administrative and liturgical duties that priests once performed to ordained deacons or the laity.

But the church also is trying to slow, if not reverse, the trend toward fewer seminarians. In an effort to keep young men on the path toward the priesthood, New York's Cardinal John O'Connor annually plays host to a Weekend with the Cardinal at the archdiocesan seminary outside New York City, so that seminarians can ask the cardinal questions about their vocation.

The priest shortage appears to be especially grave among blacks. There are about 300 black priests in America, but only about 250 African-Americans are in seminaries, and the attrition rate is high.

At St. Brigid's, the parish in Watts, deacon William Hawkins sees trouble ahead.

"Unless they change the rules about celibacy, we'll be in a bind," said Hawkins. "You don't do it because you're losing priests. You do it because it's right. God calls men and women into service. There is nothing you could tell me to convince me that he's not calling women into the priesthood as well."

Observers of the Catholic hierarchy both in Rome and in America believe the stricture requiring priestly celibacy seems more likely to be dropped at some future date than the ban on women in the priesthood, one of the most divisive issues for American Catholics. Attempts by women's groups and Catholic reform organizations, such as the Chicago-based Call to Action, appear to have made little headway in the Vatican.

"The church has said unequivocally that this is not going to happen," said Rev. Joseph Fessio, editor of the Ignatius Press at the University of San Francisco and one of the most outspoken conservative voices in the country. "Yet there are people who say, 'Oh well, this will change with the next pope.' No it won't."

Even the liberal retired archbishop of San Francisco, Rev. John Quinn, who is sympathetic to the desire of women to be ordained, says it will never happen.

"It would destroy the unity of the church," he said. "We need to accept what the pope decides with reverence."

New choices for women

Nonetheless, he maintains that new avenues give women ample opportunity to involve themselves meaningfully in church life. Women play important roles in many rural parishes, for instance, where, because of the shortage of priests, they serve as administrators and counselors and conduct Sunday communion services.

Even such a seemingly small concession as permitting women to be altar servers was not approved by the pope until 1994. They are still barred in the conservative diocese of Arlington, Va. Bishop John Keating, former chancellor of the Chicago archdiocese under Cardinal John Cody, has defended his decision on the grounds that altar service helps young men decide to enter the priesthood.

Rev. Richard Neuhaus, president of New York's Institute on Religion and Public Life, maintains that too much emphasis is placed on the ordination of women.

"One should not talk about leadership strictly in liturgical terms," he said. "The premise underlying that is that only the liturgical leaders are the important ones. It's very difficult to communicate to people that the dignity and the status of the members of the church is to be brothers and sisters in Christ, all with equal value. And there's no doubt the clergy has been very much to blame for this. A lot of them enjoy clericalism."

Many gay and lesbian Catholics want to change another of the church's positions, its condemnation of homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered." Their efforts have not met with success in Rome nor among the American hierarchy of the church. O'Connor, for instance, opposes distribution of free condoms in New York's public schools, a tactic aimed at preventing the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. And earlier this year, the Catholic gay and lesbian advocacy group Dignity sponsored an event called Solidarity Sunday, on which Catholics who opposed violence against homosexuals were urged to wear a rainbow ribbon.

"We had a bishop who told me personally that he supported the event, but then withdrew his support because it was associated with Dignity," said Dignity president Marianne Duddy. "All you can think is how can there be such a climate of fear within the church that even our moral leaders can't support an anti-violence campaign because it's around gay issues?"

The church's stance has caused many gay Catholics to leave the faith for other, more welcoming religions. After being raised Catholic and attending Catholic schools in north suburban Wilmette, Benjamin Stilp, 26, now attends Middle Collegiate Church, a Protestant church in New York City.

"The church that I attend invites and welcomes the old blue-haired ladies, young El Salvordan couples with their kids running around, gaggles of gay men, families of color, everyone," said Stilp, director of communications for the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. "There's this very strong community. It's extraordinary and healing. The fact that the (Catholic) church claims this sort of very contradictory, very benign position, 'love the sinner but hate the sin,' is such a confused message. Being gay is part of your identity."

Still, Duddy says, an increasing number of Catholic churches welcome gay singles and couples, and some parishes publish notices of gay and lesbian discussion groups in their Sunday bulletins.

"I think gay issues in the church provide sort of the classic case where the church as the people of God moves a lot faster than the church hierarchy," Duddy said.

Many American Catholics seem more American than Catholic. They believe in democracy, and in an era when democracy reaches many places where it never existed, they find it hard to understand why their church can't be more democratic. But the Church of Rome is not a democracy. It is run by a relatively small number of older men.

"We are not being represented in Rome," said Robert Calix, 37, a Los Angeles marketing executive who belongs to Holy Family Catholic in South Pasadena.

"The world is largely democratic now. Unless that happens to a certain extent in the church, if people can't express their concerns, they will go elsewhere. That's a very, very serious issue that needs to be addressed."

Such calls for a more democratic church get a stony reception at the Vatican. Last June, Archbishop Quinn caused a stir in the Roman Curia and in the Catholic hierarchy in America when he criticized the Vatican bureaucracy for standing in the way of better communication between bishops and the pope. Speaking at a Jesuit school in Oxford, England, Quinn said open lines of communication would help the pope understand the lives and feelings of ordinary Catholics around the world.

Church in a new era

The retired prelate even suggested reviving an old church practice that allowed bishops to be chosen locally, instead of by Rome. Until the French Revolution, he noted, almost all bishops were chosen locally, sometimes by election. That practice ended in part because of the chaos of the revolution. Transferring the final say on bishops to the local level would promote greater dialogue and greater responsiveness to local problems, he said in his speech.

"New political, sociological and technological situations have changed the psychology of people today," Quinn said in an interview. "It (the church) is not the same as it was in 1800, or 1900. We are in a new context now. We didn't have drugs in the '50s. We didn't have the terrible problems of family life. We didn't have such terrible instability in marriage. We are not in the '50s and we have to realize that."

Following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many church practices changed drastically, especially at the parish level, to bring the church up to date. In the 1970s, for instance, churches introduced gospel music, which features prominently in masses at St. Brigid's, the church in Watts.

At times resembling a Baptist service, the 11 a.m. mass is interspersed with hand-clapping, gospel and spiritual songs, and the "down-home" preaching style of Rev. Charles Andrus, who wears a flowing green robe and a head covering of kinte-cloth, a brightly colored African-inspired print.

"We try to help people feel nurtured, to feel God is helping them through their struggles and burdens," Andrus said. "It calls for participation, contemplation and celebration. At times we're quiet and at times we're so noisy that the roof almost comes off."

To conservative Catholics, such changes challenge the notion of what it is to be a Catholic and erode the distinctions they value between themselves and other Christians.

"Catholics used to have a low divorce rate, lots of kids and little premarital sex," said James Hitchcock, theology professor at St. Louis University and one of the most prominent conservative Catholic lay theologians in America. "But Catholics have now been mainstreamed in America. There is little distinction between Catholics and Protestants. Things like not eating meat on Friday or nuns wearing habits may have been small things, but such visible signs are often very important in maintaining group identity."

Fessio, the editor at the University of San Francisco, goes so far as to call for a return to the strong, cohesive approach to traditional teachings and dogma of the 1950s and early 1960s.

"There was then a unified view of what it meant to be a Catholic," Fessio said. "That has been lost."

Many calling for church reforms note that the hierarchy of the American church is likely to change significantly in the next few years as the seats of large, traditionally influential archdioceses become vacant.

Chicago needs a new archbishop to replace Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who died last month. Cardinal O'Connor of New York is 76. Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C., is 75. Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia is 73. At age 75, bishops and archbishops must submit their resignations to the pope, who can either accept them or allow a prelate to remain in his post, as the pontiff has done with O'Connor and Hickey.

But new faces in these powerful sees do not necessarily portend new positions on the issues that separate the hierarchy from many American Catholics, even if they are selected by the next pope.

"No bishop is going to be appointed in this country who favors abortion, birth control and married clergy and all those things," said Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit who has written books about the American Catholic church hierarchy and the Vatican. "And because John Paul II has appointed about 85 percent of the cardinals who will pick the next pope, it's not very likely his successor is going to be very different in his view of these matters." Hope for the future

Still, reformers such as Linda Pieczynski, president of Call to Action, hope the next pope will be more liberal than John Paul II and that that will lead to changes in the American hierarchy.

"When the pope passes and a new leader is put into place, a lot of people who are in the upper reaches of the church, just like in a business, are very concerned about their careers," she said. "So, in a corporation, if the new boss is more progressive, all of a sudden his managers will be saying the same thing."

Such concerns about the shape of the American hierarchy are of less immediate importance at a New York City parish that resolved its dispute with the Archdiocese of New York years ago by simply leaving the archdiocese.

St. Sebastian's, which holds mass once a month in an Episcopal chapel, calls itself a "democratically run, non-canonical parish that meets the needs of alienated Catholics."

The parish dates to a church that was founded and built by an Italian community, but in the 1970s, the archdiocese decided to tear down the building. The decision outraged parishioners who decided to keep St. Sebastian's alive in spirit, even if they no longer had a building.

For years, the parish met in a Lutheran church. A few years ago, St. Sebastian's moved to the chapel of St. George's Episcopal Church, financier J.P. Morgan's church, a few blocks from Union Square in lower Manhattan. Above the chapel door is a figure of St. George killing a dragon, with the legend, "Fight the Good Fight of Faith."

No longer part of the New York archdiocese, the parish's 100 families run the church's finances and make decisions about their future.

"It has continued as a people's parish," said St. Sebastian's pastor, Rev. Louis Gioia. "We try to be a loving family. We are Roman Catholic in doctrine, Roman Catholic in sacrament, but we believe in shared authority."

Gioia will marry couples even if a previous marriage has not been annulled. He welcomes married Catholic priests to officiate at mass. Contrary to official church practice, divorced Catholics who have remarried can receive communion. He believes that women should be ordained as priests.

"We're not going to conduct an inquiry," said Gioia, the parish pastor since 1971. "If a person feels called by the Holy Spirit to attend services and receive communion, so be it. Let God tell them himself if he doesn't want them to take communion. He's old enough to speak for himself."

Mary Gaffney, 60, a Manhattan office manager, is struck by the warmth and sense of real life in the St. Sebastian service. Many times during the sermon, a priest will come down from the pulpit and ask questions or lead a discussion, she said. That's a far cry from most priests she's seen.

"Their form of imparting wisdom is basically brain-washing," she said. "I felt they tied people up in knots for centuries without an apology. I didn't want to be part of the fear. I didn't want to be part of a body count. This was a perfect fit for me."

Gaffney had attended the services of other denominations, but she felt somehow that she was still a Catholic, just as St. Sebastian's considers itself a Catholic parish.

Similarly, with all of its daunting problems and despite the many Catholics who have left the church in recent decades, the American Catholic community remains within the fold of the larger Roman Catholic Church, centered at the Vatican. Few observers see much chance of a split with Rome in the near future, and even disgruntled Catholics don't particularly want such a split.

"I think basically people are committed to changing the church, not leaving it," said Kissling, of Catholics for a Free Choice. "We are Catholics who want to continue to be Catholics. We think you can be Catholic and disagree with the institutional church on these issues."

Those dissenters are among the people Cardinal Bernardin tried to reach as he struggled to bridge the ideological divide and restore fiscal and spiritual strength to the archdiocese in Chicago, the city many regard as the focal point of the Catholic Church in America.

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THE SERIES

DAY 1: The Vatican's global challenge.

DAY 2: Protestant inroads in Latin America. DAY 3: Africa offers opportunity.

DAY 4: Recruiting and keeping new priests.

DAY 5: Poland and the limits of church power.

DAY 6: The changing American church.

DAY 7: Inside the Chicago archdiocese.

DAY 8: Life and doubt at the seminary.

DAY 9: The lop-sided world of Catholic schools.

DAY 10: Catholic hospitals' spiritual battle.

DAY 11: Stories of dissent and departure.

DAY 12: The changing face of one parish.

CAPTION: PHOTO (color): A baby is baptized in the oldest church in Los Angeles, the Church of La Reina de Los Angeles. Its walls were completed in 1822. PHOTO (color): In Watts, Rev. Charles Andrus greets choir singer Sister Ego Marie Therese Okpala outside St. Brigid Church following a Sunday mass. PHOTO: Wanda Figgers, a parishioner for 14 years, cries during prayer at St. Brigid Church. The pastor says the Los Angeles church "calls for participation, contemplation and celebration." PHOTO: Parishioners wait outside Church of La Reina de Los Angeles. On Sundays, 11,000 people attend the 11 masses that start early in the day. PHOTO: A New York landmark, St. Patrick's Cathedral on 5th Avenue in Manhattan draws tourists and worshipers almost around the clock. PHOTO: 'We try to be a loving family. We are Roman Catholic in doctrine, Roman Catholic in sacrament, but we believe in shared authority.' Rev. Louis Gioia, pastor at St. Sebastian, a New York parish that has broken away from Vatican control. PHOTO: Gloria Corpeno prays at Church of La Reina de Los Angeles. She visits the mostly Hispanic church in downtown Los Angeles at least once a week. PHOTO: A view from above in the Church of La Reina de Los Angeles. The church, with a large immigrant population, draws 11,000 people to Sunday masses. Tribune photos by Nuccio DiNuzzo. GRAPHIC: Catholics in America. Source: 1996 Almanac. Chicago Tribune/Steve Duenes and Lara Webster. GRAPHIC: Religious affiliations in America. Source: Bureau of the Census. Chicago Tribune.

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