c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Kennedy is an author and longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church.)

UNDATED _ Organized religion cannot complain it is excluded from the great debates in the public square when, in the midst of a muddled public conversation on the moral obligations of civic leaders and the conditions for war, they have little to say.

America’s Roman Catholic bishops, for example, who a little over a decade ago commanded the nation’s attention through their memorable pastoral letters on the morality of nuclear war and of the capitalist economy are now almost as silent as Trappist monks.

Nothing is more tragic than quiet clergy in morally troubled times, as many were in the 1930s when the hunters went unconfronted while the hunted Jews went into hiding. Such reticence cries to heaven for vengeance.

And today? Few religious leaders from any denomination have spoken out on the moral core of any of our torturing issues: Is the moral temper of national leaders irrelevant in assaying their performance as public servants? Are there moral limits to the investigative power vested by law in the office of Special Prosecutor.

Do moral constants exist that outlast the news cycle? We seem to have deconstructed into nothingness commandments still as tersely worded as Variety headlines:”Thou shalt not commit adultery”and”Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”Polls are now the governing authority over our moral ambition and behavior.

Can America’s Catholic bishops make a distinction for us between spin and sin? Spin is the sausage ground out daily by the advertising/public relations complex. If the bishops don’t want to find out how that sausage is made, they cannot warn their flocks about its Mad Cow disease effect _ the destruction of the national brain and the devastation of the national soul.

A country whose citizens can no longer tell if they are sinning or not has lost its passion for life.

Without a true voice, institutional religion loses the attention of its people, not because they are hard of heart but because so many churches and synagogues seem to have nothing to say to them. The Second Vatican Council, it seems, has been replaced by the Renaissance Weekend.

How could America’s Roman Catholic bishops watch Pope John Paul II travel to Cuba, bent and frail and yet with a prophet’s fierce eye, to proclaim religion’s rights and its teachings, and remain so scandalously timid about addressing the moral vacuum in their own country?

They have apparently forsaken their forum _ the National Conference of Catholic Bishops _ established in 1966 to implement the Vatican council’s reforms. By the time of the death of one of its greatest leaders, Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in 1996, it had become an echoing ruin. Having left their bully pulpit behind, the bishops, at their November 1997 meeting, debated bringing back meatless Fridays for Catholics and went home a day early.

The fact that the U.S. Catholic cardinals have chosen to speak as a group about Iraq accents two things: the eclipse of the bishops’ conference as a vehicle of collegiality and their determination to speak in a low voice and carry a small stick.

While the bishops have spoken out often against abortion and one can agree with them on that issue it is still possible to challenge their claim to be pro-life if they ignore other moral choices affecting everybody’s life and the welfare of the republic at this moment.

Indeed, they erode their moral credibility if they are silent when America stands uncertainly on the verge of a morally dubious bombing campaign against Iraq. And when the presidency is in greater turmoil than it has been in a quarter of a century and when they should be examining whether, in our post-Nixon zeal to investigate our leaders, we have written fascism into the laws governing how we do it.

Absent the voice of religious leaders, seeking the truth in these issues is turned into a taffy pull by lawyers and public relations operatives.

Most Catholic bishops and other religious leaders have chosen to exercise their right to remain silent as if they wanted to speak with an attorney before saying anything. How great the tragedy if their largely passive, mute stance repeats that which we find so easy to condemn _ the failure of churches to speak out when, in 1930’s Europe, their voices might have changed the course of history.

DEA END KENNEDY