c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) America’s Roman Catholic bishops meet June 16-18 in Chicago, a sparkling city set conceptually if not quite geographically at the center of the country. Convinced that a newly elected pope is signaling a return to religious absolutes, these sincere men may think they can again demand obedience from what they see as the disobedient throngs.

Some bishops think the circling world is filled with pleasure-seeking sinners who, like St. Paul, need to be knocked off their horses and be called to repentance. They are relieved to think that they have a new pope who will end the church’s peace negotiations with the world so that they can condemn what they see as its horrors.

In trying to push evil away from themselves, they are failing to see the good in their people. One example is their refusal to let Voice of the Faithful, a lay group seeking more church accountability, meet on church property.

Why else have bishops renewed their interest in exorcism to expel the devils in their sinning people? Some have appointed official exorcists. The Wall Street Journal reports that the International Association of Exorcists drew 500 to its conference last year in Mexico City.

By locating the era’s badness inside good people, bishops spruce up their self-esteem as they stretch out for the brass ring that is their idea of authority _ getting control over their people rather than setting them free in the spirit.

This conviction that they must poke their pastoral staffs into the rheumy eye of Satan as he peers in through the windows of their meeting room deepens their belief that Catholicism is not meant to be a user-friendly religion. The utterly romantic notion that the church would be better off if it pared itself down to a lifeboat of true believers who feel they are in while everybody else is out is profoundly anti-Catholic.

Drawing a tighter defensive perimeter around the church is a desperate act by leaders who have yet to accept their own responsibility for a sex abuse crisis that is far from over. The bishops might do well to listen to the people who are the church and who feel that the bishops have not yet repaired the trust they violated by their authoritarian leave-this-to-us tactics.

The bishops are good-hearted men who feel that they must support the institution even when this blind loyalty leads them to abuse Catholics in general by locating church problems inside them rather than inside themselves. Do they think they can impose harsh terms of surrender on those they find guilty of sexual revolution, and refuse to explore the sexual context from which sex abuse flowered inside the organized church?

American Catholics are concerned. They want the sacramental faith of Catholicism to be available for their children and grandchildren. They are deeply involved in their church, and many of them understand as much if not more theology than their bishops do. Even those with less opportunity for education expect the church to listen to them and to respond to their needs.

Do the bishops think that these good people _ the ones slowly circling their meeting _ will accept forever being abused like the lost sheep that must be herded roughly back into the enclosure?

If they throw away their thick agenda books and really look at and listen to their people, they would take a first step in restoring their own credibility and regaining their own authority.

MO/RB END RNS

(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.)