c. 2004 Religion News Service

(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.)

(UNDATED) Pope John Paul II might as well be French for the studied distaste he expresses about America. He recently warned a group of Midwestern bishops, the Chicago Tribune reported, that their people “are hypnotized by materialism, teetering before a `soulless vision of the world.”’

Perhaps the pope, like many a priest climbing the pulpit without a prepared sermon, merely made a hasty withdrawal from his memory account and, as in improvised homilies we have all heard, one association ignited another until the resulting blaze roared with heat while giving little light.

Giving America bad reviews is a standby of popes. Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) criticized the vaguely defined ills of “Americanism,” including “idealizing the separation of church and state.”

Leo XIII, called “the Great,” is a good starting point for a re-examination of whether the church should condemn or listen more carefully to America. Leo XIII claimed, in an 1890 letter to all bishops, that “almost nothing was more venerated in the Catholic Church … than that she looked to see a slavery eased and abolished.”

In fact and unfortunately, the Catholic Church in a number of Conciliar decrees and papal statements supported the status quo of slavery. Popes Urban VIII, Innocent X and Alexander VIII “were personally involved in buying Muslim galley slaves” and, in 1866, after the 13th amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in America, the Holy Office stated that “Slavery itself … is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law. … For the … ownership which a slave owner has over a slave is nothing more than the perpetual right of disposing of the work of a slave for one’s own benefit.”

While America was debating the evil of slavery and plunging toward a Civil War to end it, numerous anti-slavery tracts were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would have ended up there as well. It is clear, however, that while Rome was burning with indignation at “Americanism,” it was also still fiddling with medieval concepts of slavery.

Where was the moral high ground? In America, bloodying itself and fighting on for another century and more to undo the evil of slavery? Or in Rome where, as historian Diana Hayes tells us, “The Roman Catholic Church did support and maintain with all its power, secular and spiritual, the enslavement not only of non-Catholics but of its own Catholic faithful.”

Pope John XXIII bade the church in Vatican II to listen again to the world, which approached learning and morality on the basis of its experience, thereby discovering truths about ourselves and our cosmos that ecclesiastical leaders rejected to the grief of the pioneers it condemned and to its own grief as well.

The Vatican left Galileo condemned as a heretic for four centuries because he challenged the notion that the Earth was the center of the universe. Repeatedly, the struggles to understand the world and ourselves, whether carried out by Darwin on evolution, Freud on the unconscious, or America itself on overturning slavery, have been ignored or condemned less by the pure Catholicism of the Gospels than the alloyed Catholicism of benighted church officials.

These same officials tell the pope that America is a terrible place as they close the windows to the world that John XXIII opened in Vatican II. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the difference between America, condemned by the Vatican as sexually relativistic, and the Vatican itself than the long covered-up sex abuse scandal among the clergy.

The Vatican had to learn from America that pedophilia is not only a spiritual and emotional failure but also a crime. America gets to the truth and calls it by its right name. Until Rome overcomes its reluctance to do either, Pope John Paul II might well learn from rather than lecture to America about moral superiority.

DEA/PH END KENNEDY