GUEST COMMENTARY: Discord in the Heartland

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) You don’t generally think of Nebraska as a hotbed of controversy, Catholic or otherwise. Lately, however, what began as a relatively minor imbroglio has boiled over into wider Catholic circles. Ten years ago, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., said Catholics who belonged to any of 12 organizations, including […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) You don’t generally think of Nebraska as a hotbed of controversy, Catholic or otherwise. Lately, however, what began as a relatively minor imbroglio has boiled over into wider Catholic circles.

Ten years ago, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., said Catholics who belonged to any of 12 organizations, including the lay reform group Call to Action, were automatically excommunicated. Bruskewitz’ forbidden list included five Masonic organizations, two that promote abortion, two connected with the late breakaway Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and the Hemlock Society, which supports assisted suicide.


In a recent letter, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, affirmed Bruskewitz’ action.

Call to Action Nebraska (CTAN), part of the national organization that promotes a liberal Catholic agenda _ especially married clergy, women priests and birth control _ has been in an uphill battle with Bruskewitz since its inception in 1996. To give you an idea of the size of the hill, we’re talking about a diocese that is the only one in the nation that does allow girls to serve as altar servers.

So the thought of a group that has invited liberal Catholics like Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Fox and social commentator Edwina Gately to Nebraska is nearly funny until you realize that the bishop is playing hardball.

Even before he had Vatican support for his edict of excommunication, Bruskewitz refused Communion to CTAN founding member John Krejci, who then approached the altar and administered Communion to himself after the bishop put down the ciborium containing the consecrated wafers. Both knew precisely what they were doing. Krejci is a married former Catholic priest who attended a seminary in Rome two years behind Bruskewitz. Krejci says the bishop has instructed the pastors of three nearby churches to refuse him Communion.

In addition to chastising former classmates, Bruskewitz stands out among the 195 U.S. Catholic bishops by his lack of cooperation with their annual sex abuse audits. In 2003, he threatened to sue the bishops’ conference if it tried to force him to report his diocese’s statistics or participate in the separate abuse study by John Jay College. Reportedly, he was simultaneously ending a few sex abuse suits with cash and confidentiality agreements.

Canon lawyers can set your head spinning with the distinctions, but the bottom line is that Bruskewitz can pretty much do as he pleases. On the matter of excommunication, he can determine that an organization is anti-Catholic and advise that if you join it you’ve left the church. The national bishops’ conference has no authority over Bruskewitz or any other bishop.

In the heady days that followed the Second Vatican Council, Call to Action was initiated by the U.S. bishops themselves. In the mid-1970s, Holy Cross history professor David J. O’Brien gathered suggestions for _ you guessed it _ church reform for the bishops’ conference. The problem is that what began as a garden-variety reform group has grown to include women priests celebrating Mass at its national convention last November.


Cardinal Re’s counsel to Bruskewitz _ that “the activities of Call to Action in the course of these years are in contrast with the Catholic faith due to views and positions held which are unacceptable from a doctrinal and disciplinary standpoint” _ is more than just Vaticanese for “you’re right.”

Bruskewitz said recently that “the best lesson that can be learned from everything that has happened is that one finds happiness, joy and satisfaction in obedience to the Church.” But who is “the Church?”

Ordinary expectations apply to everyone but him. The pity of it is that all those Catholics in Nebraska seem to be terribly angry with each other. And their bishop has become a force for more divisiveness, rather than for healing.

Bruskewitz might be right about those groups locally, but his secretiveness and intransigence in the national Catholic tragedy make his edicts easy to ignore.

KRE/RR END ZAGANO

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University. Her books include “The Exercise of the Primacy” (Crossroad, with Terrence W. Tilley.)

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