c. 1997 Religion News Service
MUNDELEIN, Ill. _ Leaders of the Roman Catholic Common Ground project gathered for the first time since the death of its initiator, Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, and came away from the weekend saying they remain committed to the effort to bring the church’s feuding factions together.
The first formal meeting of the initiative, held behind closed doors at Mundelein Seminary on the grounds of the University of St. Mary of the Lake, brought together 40 lay leaders, scholars and church officials from the moderate right to moderate left on the church’s ideological spectrum March 7-9 for a hard look at the challenges facing Christians in modern American culture.
The Common Ground project was initiated last year by Bernardin and a number of church activists, intellectuals and journalists in an effort to see if they could bring together leaders from opposing sides on such church-dividing issues as the role of women in church and society, religious education, liturgy, and the meaning of human sexuality _ all issues on which Catholics have been influenced by their surrounding culture.
Those looking for sparks to fly, for challenges hurled at the Vatican or for threats of excommunication in response, were disappointed.
Michael Novak, of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, said in his paper that American culture is in a”free fall from the heights of moral principle reached at the founding”of the nation.
Today’s Catholics, he said, must”defend vigorously the (American) founding principles”such as natural law, virtue, and character”against those on the right and the left urging us to abandon them.” After the meeting, participants said they wrestled with the church and culture issue _ including the role of women _ and what response people of faith should make to the culture in which they find themselves.
While they all agreed elements of popular culture can be hostile to many values of the church _ the acceptance of poverty and the undermining of family commitments, for example _ they disagreed as to how vigorously to denounce a society which, for all its faults, they believe still values gender equality and individual responsibility.”We are apart from the world, but still of it,”said Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb of Mobile, Ala., who has taken over as chairman of the initiative in the wake of the death of Bernardin.”Since the Second Vatican Council, we have been very much a part of the world as a leaven that the (secular) culture could never bring,”Lipscomb told a news conference at the end of the conference. But American Catholics are as part of the evolutionary process of American culture and also must take some”ownership,”or responsibility for it, he said.
Other topics of discussion in the closed meetings included the role of women in the church and the use of inclusive liturgical language, said Sister Doris Gottemoeller, president of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas.
Often, she said, the experiences of women are not represented in dialogue and even at the weekend’s conference, only about one-fourth of those taking part were women.
Also on the agenda were questions involving younger Catholics. Those under 40 years old, Lipscomb said, have grown up in”a different kind of culture than the one in which we grew up.” The Common Ground project has been criticized from both the left and the right. Those on the left say it will not actually take up such controversial issues as ordination of women, priestly celibacy, and the rights of gays and lesbians. Those on the right argue that the group is likely to depart from Vatican teaching on precisely those issues.
Lipscomb noted criticism that has been leveled against some forms of theological dialogue by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church’s doctrinal watchdog agency. Ratzinger has been increasingly critical of”relativism”_ a theory that does not hold to absolute moral values _ he thinks results from some ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.
Lipscomb, however, said the Common Ground project calls for dialogue”accountable to the Catholic tradition and to the Spirit-filled, living church that brings to us the revelation of God in Jesus.”Ours is not the dialogue of relativism but of fidelity,”he said.”We were all seeking after the truth, hoping to lessen the tensions and divisions in the church.”
END CAMPBELL
