MARYKNOLL, NY – One of the youngest bishops to attend the Second Vatican Council, Raymond G. Hunthausen served as archbishop of Seattle, WA during what proved to be a pivotal era in the American Catholic Church. In A Still and Quiet Conscience, a new biography, author and journalist John McCoy shows how Archbishop Hunthausen was the quintessential Vatican II bishop, personifying the spirit of renewal that Pope John XXIII and the Council fathers embraced.
Transformed by his personal experience of the Council, Hunthausen set out to implement its mandates, both as bishop of Helena, MT, and then as archbishop of Seattle. He instituted parish and diocesan councils, a priests’ senate, and various commissions and committees to help guide and govern the local church. He reached out to the excluded and marginalized: women and gays, Central American refugees and Native Americans, the divorced and remarried, and former priests. He urged Catholics to bring the church’s moral voice to the issues of the day, and became the first American bishop to advocate tax resistance to protest nuclear arms—no small gesture for a pastor whose diocese included the naval base housing the world’s most lethal atomic weapon.
But in doing so, he ran up against the policies of the Reagan Administration and the determination of Pope John Paul II to police Catholic doctrine and enforce papal teaching. Caught in a perfect storm of Cold War and Vatican politics, Archbishop Hunthausen became the highest-ranking U.S. prelate to be investigated by the Vatican and was eventually pressured to retire after a protracted process that first stripped him of his authority and ultimately reversed his many initiatives.
Written with a reporter’s eye for detail, A Still and Quiet Conscience is an absorbing account of one man’s prophetic stance—and the steep price he paid. In the era of Pope Francis, it rekindles the vision of a more inclusive and compassionate church, one that embraces the whole “People of God.”
A Still and Quiet Conscience: The Archbishop Who Challenged a Pope, a President, and a Church by John A. McCoy
MAY 10, 2015 ISBN 978-1-62698-117-1 paperback 368pp., index, b/w photos. $26.00
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