c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Like the famous backward flying bird that the late humorist Fred Allen describes as less interested in where he is going than in where he has been, the new year looks back over its shoulder at the best movies and performances of 2004, welcoming nominations for Golden Globe and Academy Awards.

Who is in contention for similar awards in the universe of Catholic life this year?

For revealing, at its best, the church as a people of God, the award goes to the commission of lay Catholics who gave generously of their time and paid their own expenses to research and to deliver an insightful report on the nature and extent of the sex abuse crisis among the clergy.

Chaired by Justice Anne Burke of Chicago, and including such distinguished Catholics as Washington lawyer Robert Bennett, this group exemplified the mature and theologically sophisticated generation of Catholic men and women who love the church by helping it to understand and solve its problems.

But in the bureaucratic church, no good deed goes unpunished and the work of this committee and the honor of its members were called into question by a few highly placed hierarchs whose transparent efforts to cut off funding for its work and put off discussion of its findings were repudiated by the Catholic public and the larger and healthier majority of the bishops themselves.

Still, the bureaucratic faction of the bishops that denied Judge Burke the full title of chairperson after she succeeded former Gov. Frank Keating thereby retired the Clericalism at Its Worst award. Do you really think that they would have demeaned a man by keeping him as interim chair during this long period of difficult work?

There are many contestants for the You Couldn’t Buy This Bad Publicity for a Billion Dollars Award. Think of the New Jersey bishop who invalidated the first Eucharist of a girl suffering from celiac disease who received a non-gluten wafer. Hugging the letter of the law, he missed the spirit completely, alienating many Catholics, and confirming the suspicions of many already prejudiced persons that the Catholic Church is a nut house.

Also in the running is Chicago’s Francis Cardinal George, who ordered his priests to deny the Eucharist to homosexual Catholics wearing the rainbow sashes by which they bolster their human identity. This demeaned a longsuffering population and humiliated the good priests who were forced to offer a blessing instead of the Eucharist to these Catholics for doing no more than presenting themselves for the sacrament to which they have a right according to Canon Law (#213).

Notre Dame managed, in its spectacular bungling of the dismissal of African-American football coach Tyrone Willingham and its low comedy efforts to woo another coach who spurned them, to outrage and offend almost everybody and to seem anything but Catholic in the process.

And then there is Boston, where an already blushing bureaucracy embarrassed itself further by having the police arrest Catholics sitting in churches to protest their closing. Archbishop O’Malley, call your mother for her opinion before you attempt such maneuvers again.

The Unsung Prophet Award goes to Joseph Claude Harris, the brilliant analyst who, by analyzing the church’s own data, has revealed a church that, contrary to the blues played on many an observer’s piano, is flourishing in America. For example, the sex abuse scandal has not damaged contributions. In 2002, the year the scandal broke, they increased 4.9 percent and by 4.1 percent in 2003.

His point is that a great transition has already taken place in Catholicism and that the figures reveal more ministers, more members and more money. This Church is served and sustained by lay Catholics who are themselves the fruit of the Catholic education system built by the sacrifices of their immigrant forebears. Get a copy of his essay. You can find it online.

The Person of the Year is the Catholic priest who serves generously with little notice and not much reward. Catholics in general love their priests who often function alone, at the hub of a wheel of ministries carried out by their people. Instead of being praised by their bishops, they are investigated for carrying out such church-approved practices as general absolution.

Take a priest out to lunch this week, although he would probably prefer dinner. And what are America’s faithful priests suspected of? Good pastoral sense because most of them never let small regulations _ the jot and tittle dismissed by Jesus in the Gospel _ keep them from doing good.

MO/JL RNS END

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)