c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ Pope John Paul II moves valiantly across this century’s penultimate page, an ice-heavy schooner bucking an Arctic storm, trying to make port before the weather closes in for good. He is a lion-hearted pope in everyone’s estimation and few would lay down their own money against the designation given to him by his late biographer, Jonathan Kwitny _”Man of the Century.” One can be stirred by the pope and admire him greatly and still find questions forming spontaneously on that borderline between the Catholic conscience and the Catholic imagination, questions that are hard to ask in the right way, for how, after all, do you properly place a question with so many rungs on the ladder of hierarchy separating us from him?

One problem is that anybody who asks even a good question about the pope is almost instantly branded”disloyal”by a phalanx of insiders whose idea of dialogue seems to have been shaped by James Carville. Attack and Denounce are tactics frequently employed to discourage questioners in advance. Read the wild Wanderer or even such temperate papers as Our Sunday Visitor for examples.

Still, these questions are like metaphors within a writer, making him restless until they are expressed. What might some of them be?

If the Holy Father, who attended and voted for the documents of Vatican II, believes in those documents still, why has he allowed the collegiality that was the genius of that convocation to lapse in so many ways? Does he understand that by his personality and by his sure sense of himself on the stage of the world he has, in effect, overwhelmed the other bishops so they do not seem his collegial brothers as much as his grateful and indebted appointees?

If the world’s bishops, who possess, according to Vatican II, authority in their own right, are selected only if they meet such criteria as (a) never having challenged the church’s position on birth control and (b) never having advocated ordaining women to the priesthood, would it not seem to any observer that the process of making bishops may serve the organizational needs of the church more than the pastoral needs of its people? Would they not, in any other structure, run the risk of being labeled”yes men”whose task is not to exercise their own authority but to support his without question?

Is religion directed at the will or the imagination? Does the pope, no stranger to the uses of the imagination, believe that demands for obedience that bypass the intellect as well as the imagination can really evoke or satisfy the deep spiritual longings of the human race?

What is the pope thinking when at one moment he praises the work of intellectuals and the freedom that must be granted to curiosity and wonder while, in the next, he orders legitimate theological and scriptural inquiry cease on such issues as the ordination of women?

Does the Holy Father believe, as some of his right-wing American informants assert, that the church here is filled with rebellious Catholics and unorthodox scholars? Is that what prompts the repeated investigations of such utterly loyal men as Notre Dame theologian Richard McBrien?

And how, when the latter’s probity is obvious in any search of his work, can some bishops order his column dropped from their papers so they cannot be accused of endorsing a guiltless man who is suspected nonetheless? Wouldn’t you, as a man acquainted with the demands of a scholar’s life, encourage rather than discourage such a theologian?

Is the church well served when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States has been destroyed as a reflective, collegial and pastoral body by demands that the body cannot forward anything to Rome for approval unless the bishops have voted unanimously for it?

Is this the original offer that cannot be refused that smashes collegiality and turns the bishops’ conference back to the timid pre-Vatican II era when it was dominated by cardinals and met briefly and but once a year?

Is the idea of a hierarchically ordered church really of divine origin when scholarship reveals the model of hierarchy is based on a primitive reading of the way the universe was constructed and is not even a particularly Christian notion? Is it possible the enormous effort now under way to restore a hierarchical church may fail and so compromise rather than reinforce the authority of the magisterium?

Are there dangers to your clear voice in the devouring media that watches for a faltering move and does not listen for the words of life? Are these same media casting you as a great man dying rather than a man wholly alive? Do they accidentally make the papacy overshadow the church itself? In the Age of Celebrity, are these needy media making you the Celebrity of Celebrities, the Catholic rather than the pastor of the Catholic church, a presence so overpowering that everything seems to depend on what you do, where you go and what you say?

You cannot, can you, want your legacy be that of the last pontiff of a time ending rather than of one about to begin?

DEA END KENNEDY