c. 1998 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Two years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the nastiness that communism had sown, Europe’s Catholic bishops came to Rome and uttered a collective hallelujah. At last, they declared, the closed European societies to the East would experience a renaissance in religious freedom.

They did, of course. But what hath freedom wrought? “Various delusions resulting from the incapacity of the political, social and economic structures to satisfy the aspirations of the person,”according a Vatican assessment of the church in Europe nearly a decade after the hopeful thaw in geopolitical tensions.

The unusually blunt language is contained in an outline of Europe’s woes intended to serve as a starting point for a meeting of European bishops next year in Rome.

For pure raucousness, said one Vatican monsignor who helped prepare the document, the assembly”promises to be a good one.” The gathering, or synod, of European bishops will mark the final series of such meetings the pope has called for the three years leading up to the observance of 2,000th birthday of Jesus. The church has conducted synods on Africa and the Americas. It will host one on Asia, April 19-May 14.

The Asian synod is expected to be nearly timid in tone by comparison. There will be much talk about the need for Catholics to reach out to other religions and the importance of Asian culture permeating the rites of Western Catholicism.

The most incendiary topic _ repression of the Catholic Church in China and Vietnam _ will likely be addressed, perhaps forcefully by bishops in the region. But Rome has already signaled its unwillingness to stoke tensions with Beijing and Hanoi at the present time.

On the contrary, however, all bets are off among the bishops of Europe, where squabbling among the faithful seems to be the one thing that Catholics on the continent have in common.

Nearly every European country has petitioned Rome with some grievance _ from gripes about Pope John Paul II’s selection of conservative bishops to church doctrine barring women from the priesthood and priests from marrying as well as ban on artificial contraception and abortion many of Europe’s faithful find objectionable.

For its part, the Vatican contends that European Catholics have failed to responsibly respond to new freedoms and progress, having forsaken spiritual well being for material wealth. “A naive euphoria has developed, prompted by the regaining of the basic freedom of the individual,”the outline said.”And yet this freedom is unsupported by a sound attitude of how to exercise it.”Increasingly more widespread in the West are the evils of a human progress often times devoid of spiritual values and those values related to the person,”it added.

The document was prepared by a pre-synod committee of European bishops who were selected by the pope. It includes a list of questions about religious and social issues that all of Europe’s bishops are expected to address. Those responses will be incorporated into a broad document that will serve as the framework for the meeting, expected to be held in the fall of 1999.

In its outline for the synod, released this week, the committee of bishops did acknowledge shortcomings of the church in the past nine years, and wrote that”the church needs to make an examination of conscience, above all in those fields where the proclamation of the gospel affects human needs.” But on balance, it put the blame for the climate of dissent squarely on individuals for what it contends are unrealistic expectations.”Religious indifference,”the document said, has given rise to tensions that have contributed to the growth of sects and new religious movements”which make false promises of salvation.”Though freedom of choice is a person’s inalienable right, it can serve as a pretext for justifying a code of behavior exclusively centered on the person.”

DEA END HEILBRONNER