c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Looking back on the curious incident in the cathedral bookstore, perhaps I was naive to ask for “Catholicism” by Notre Dame theologian Richard McBrien.
The proprietor’s joviality dissolved and he put on his game day face. “McBrien is suspect,” he announced, turning away as satisfied as an Inquisition judge who has just condemned a heretic.
“Father McBrien’s work,” I responded, “has been thoroughly examined in Rome and he’s in good standing. It is wickedness to say otherwise.”
The proprietor immediately called security to have an unruly man removed from his store. The manager has since apologized to me, sort of, but I remain puzzled that so many bishops want to put McBrien on a “Most Wanted” poster.
Why have so many bishops dropped McBrien’s weekly column from their diocesan papers? Editors usually deny that the bishop gave such orders and rationalize their decisions in the “dog ate my homework” style of Brian T. Olszewski, executive editor of the Milwaukee Catholic Herald, who told me simply that “we have been over-columnized.”
Compared with such convoluted language, perhaps McBrien’s clear and direct writing was too much of a contrast. But my guess is that Olszewski was just a good soldier implementing orders from his boss, Archbishop Timothy Dolan.
A few years ago, I asked several editors if they dropped McBrien’s essays on their own or at the command of the bishop. Being good, honest Americans, almost all of them first denied and then acknowledged that, yes, the bishop made me do it because McBrien was a “dissenter.” I asked if they had examples of dissent in his columns. No, they answered, nor could they identify any heresy, attacks on the pope or the church, or any other problems with McBrien’s columns. Their bishops, apparently in bird-dog mood, sensed problems nobody else could detect and ordered action.
Almost before Robert Finn put on his miter as archbishop of Kansas City last year, he excised McBrien’s column from his paper. Finn is proud of his more-orthodox-than-thou reputation, but that hardly describes Milwaukee’s Dolan, who has manifested a gentler pastoral style in dealing with sex abuse victims with a sensitivity rarely displayed by other bishops.
My theory is that bishops are dropping McBrien even though people like Olszewski acknowledged McBrien’s column “certainly was a `teaching column”’ as he told one complaining reader.
This subtle style of the campaign against McBrien matches the word-of-mouth vendetta carried out a generation ago to prevent the Catholic gay group Dignity from meeting on church property. The implication for bishops was clear: kicking gays out would give them a better in with the pope.
But why would the well-regarded Dolan drop a column whose orthodoxy has never been seriously challenged? As bankers clean up their stock portfolios at year’s end to make them look good, perhaps Dolan is removing anything, however trivial, that might blot his copybook in Rome.
Francis George was tapped as archbishop for Chicago a decade ago by Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law as soon as Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s cancer was diagnosed. George was positioned to replace Bernardin in Chicago.
Now George himself has been ill with bladder cancer, and it is just possible that Dolan wants his portfolio cleared of anything that might interfere with his succeeding George in Chicago. An ambitious man must wear a clean uniform and wear his catcher’s mitt should a cardinal’s red hat fall from the sky.
Dolan is a good man, but so is McBrien. It is scandalous that, in a problem-filled church, McBrien is considered a question when he is really one of the answers.
KRE/JL END KENNEDY
(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.)
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