c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(AT)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Reinhold Stecher, the retiring Roman Catholic bishop of Innsbruck, Austria, recently commented that the church”has lost the image of mercy and adopted one of harsh rule.”With this image,”he added,”the church will not make a mark in the third millennium and pompous millennium celebrations with many nice words will not change any of that.” Tough language.

The third millennium will last a long time _ maybe even 1,000 years! _ and who can say what the church will be doing even 10 years from now? Yet Bishop Stecher has described accurately the image many have of the church, including many Catholics.

Most see the church as harsh to women, harsh to homosexuals, harsh to divorced and remarried Catholics, harsh to married people who want to have sex without producing children, harsh to priests who have married, and harsh to theologians.

It often seems to observers there is little compassion or mercy in the Catholic Church.

Perhaps this image is unfair. It certainly is not the whole story about the contemporary Catholic Church, yet the image persists and the Catholic leadership has not been able to dispel it (indeed, it has not done much to even try to dispel it).

Hence, I share Stecher’s doubts about the”evangelization”programs into which the church is rushing as we approach 2000. Catholic leaders are putting an enormous amount of time and energy into projects unlikely to accomplish much of anything.

In addition to the problem of a harsh image _ which doesn’t sound much like good news _ the church’s preparation for the millennium suffers from many other problems:

_ Most Catholics do not have the slightest idea what the word”evangelization”means. It’s a Greek derivative and is not part of the vocabulary of the ordinary laity. Nor is it clear what the word means to those who propose to”evangelize.”One searches in vain in many of the projects for any clear, English-language description of their goals. Enthusiastic they are _ and dedicated _ but not very precise.

_ There are many hints the ultimate purpose of the millennium programs is to call Catholics back to their faith. For many lay Catholics, this is an insulting assumption: They already feel they are committed Catholics, surely not perfect, but certainly not pagans needing conversion. My own impression is that many of the laity are far better Catholics than we clergy are and we should listen to them preach the good news to us before we assume we have the good news and they don’t.

_ I also suspect”evangelize”means a hard-sell attempt to reimpose on laity the church’s sexual ethic. If 20 years of implacable attempts by Pope John Paul II to achieve that goal have not been successful, there is no reason to believe an orgy of enthusiasm at the end of the millennium will accomplish it. It is surely unfortunate, but most laity (85 percent on the subject of premarital sex) no longer think the church has anything relevant to say on sexual matters. This is an acute problem for the church and millennium celebrations will not address if effectively.

What might the Catholic Church do to celebrate the end of 1,000 years and the beginning of another (hopefully) 1,000?

It might try to go back to the good news preached by Jesus, especially in his parables: God is passionate and implacably forgiving love.

Father Paul Murray, an Irish poet and mystic, describes the nature of God’s love for us in hauntingly lovely lines that truly are good news for the new millennium:”He, giver of the gifts we bring,

He who needs nothing

Has need of us.

If you or I should cease to be,

He would die of sadness.” The church should seek to confirm and validate their commitment to the truth of God’s love instead of hassling the laity about their lack of faith in it.

MJP END GREELEY