NEWS FEATURE: After 30 years, bishop details the dissent leading to resignation

c. 1999 Religion News Service UNDATED _ As a young American prelate who participated in the Second Vatican Council, Bishop James Patrick Shannon became widely known as an articulate spokesman for the U.S. hierarchy and an interpreter of church reforms. He was in demand as a retreat master for priests all over the country. A […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ As a young American prelate who participated in the Second Vatican Council, Bishop James Patrick Shannon became widely known as an articulate spokesman for the U.S. hierarchy and an interpreter of church reforms.

He was in demand as a retreat master for priests all over the country. A social activist, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr., at Selma, Ala., and was an early critic of the Vietnam War.


Many considered the handsome, red-haired auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis to be among the best and brightest of future church leaders, perhaps destined for a red hat one day.

Then, in 1968, he resigned _ one of the highest ranking church officials to resign in dissent from church policies.

Now, for the first time, Shannon, 77, reveals his reasons in an autobiography,”Reluctant Dissenter”(Crossroad Publishing).

In conscience, Shannon writes, he could not accept the ban on artificial means of birth control that Pope Paul VI announced in an encylical letter,”Humanae Vitae,”in July 1968. The pope issued the letter despite advice to the contrary from a papal commission that had examined the issue.

In the furor that greeted the pope’s letter, including demonstrations against it on the campus of the Catholic University of America, Shannon kept his silence. As a bishop he was duty-bound to uphold the pope’s teaching. As a matter of conscience, he could not give his assent to it.

He conferred privately with his superiors about his dilemma and in a personal letter to the pope in September 1968 expressed his anguish:”In my pastoral experience I have found this rigid teaching is simply impossible of observance by many faithful and generous spouses, and I cannot believe that God binds man to impossible standards.” Shannon got a most indirect response via the pope’s representative in Washington, D.C., then Archbishop and later Cardinal Luigi Raimondi. He offered Shannon posts outside the United States with ill-defined duties which Shannon took to be a way of buying his silence. He declined.

Shannon’s book comprises a crash course in such ecclesiastical maneuvers and the way members of the hierarchy play power politics.


A direct and straight-forward person, he said in an interview he was never a good practitioner of what he calls”that vital ingredient of episcopal style, Romanita”_ speaking indirectly and not taking a stand on touchy issues.

His straight-forwardness gave him an ability to communicate well and made him a natural choice as the official press spokesman for the Catholic bishops in the heady days following the Vatican Council.

Not surprisingly, as a progressive young bishop, Shannon had repeated run-ins with the arch-conservative archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal James McIntyre.

McIntyre had objected to most proposed changes during the council and continued raising objections afterward at semi-annual meetings of the U.S. Catholic bishops until his death in 1979. He and Shannon were polar opposites on most issues, from the Vietnam War to vernacular language in the liturgy, and McIntyre took issue with just about everything Shannon stood for.

They had direct confrontations at the closed bishops’ meetings. For example, McIntyre wanted the bishops to continue meeting in secret while Shannon and others argued some of the meetings should be open to the press.

Bishops often engage in sharp debate _ they did so particularly in that time when the church was in flux _ but their differences are seldom understood to be personal.


It was different with McIntyre. For some reason that Shannon said he has never understood, the powerful cardinal took a dislike to him. McIntyre set about _ successfully as it turned out _ to undermine Shannon personally and professionally. Shannon writes that he was shocked to learn from his archbishop that McIntyre’s letters to Rome complaining about him blocked his promotion to become bishop of Duluth, Minn. _ a promotion his own archbishop and other bishops had endorsed.

The dispute reached its apex when Shannon was asked by the bishops’ radio-television committee to moderate an NBC-TV documentary on changes in the church called “The New American Catholic.” Shannon at first demurred, saying a more senior prelate, perhaps an archbishop, should do it. But two prelates who were approached turned down the assignment and he reluctantly accepted.

The program was aired nationally on June 21, 1968. Shannon got high marks. “The choice for narrator could not have been better,” a Los Angeles columnist wrote. A critic for the New York Times said Shannon provided “the closest thing to a balanced perspective.”

McIntyre predictably thought otherwise. He issued a press release that blasted the show as “erroneous, misleading and unauthorized” and said “Bishop Shannon was not speaking for the people of God.”

McIntyre was much harsher in letters to every high official in the church _ but not to Shannon _ accusing the young auxiliary bishop of near heresy.

The following September the issue came before the administrative board of the bishops’ conference. McIntyre introduced a resolution denouncing the television show and Shannon. Shannon felt he could count on the support of fellow bishops, but was soon disillusioned. The resolution passed 13 to 7, with 8 abstentions.


Worse yet, Shannon felt he was betrayed by the two Minnesota archbishops who had promoted, mentored and befriended him but, in the crunch, declined to stand up to the bullying California cardinal. One abstained from voting and the other did not show up.

“My great pride in being an American Catholic bishop suffered a blow that day from which it has never recovered,” Shannon writes.

He was granted a leave of absence in the fall of 1968 to think about his future but never returned.

He has had a productive and varied career since he left the church’s precincts. He moved initially to Sante Fe, N.M., where he was offered a position as vice president of St. John’s College, a private, non-sectarian institution.

In 1969 he married Ruth Wilkinson, a widow with whom he had been acquainted since 1964. They are looking forward to their 30th anniversary on Aug. 2.

After acquiring a law degree and working as a corporate lawyer, Shannon was invited to return to Minnesota to do what ministry best prepared him to do _ give away money for worthy causes, first as executive director of the Minneapolis Foundation and later as executive director of the General Mills Foundation. He retired in 1988.


He considers those jobs “ministries of service.” Shannon said he still harbors love for the Catholic church and the faith that nurtured him from boyhood. The only faith he lost, he said, was in the church’s administrative processes.

“I am pretty well over the bitterness,” he said in the interview from his home in Wayzata, Minn. “I was never angry at the church, only some of the people in it and what they did.”

DEA END RENNER

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