Church in the World

Nuncio tells bishops to be teachers, not watchdogs

United States

As the papal representative to the United States urged a less "adversarial" role in the nation's hierarchy, the American bishops approved an ambitious set of statements during a plenary meeting this week at which they planned to lower the profile of the conference itself.

In a cost-saving move, this year's "November Meeting" of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) moved from its traditional site of Washington's Capitol Hill to Baltimore, US Catholicism's historic seat, where it will remain until at least 2010.  Even before settling into its agenda, the meeting was greeted with complaints from some supporters of organised labour within the Church, who protested over the conference's selection of a non-union hotel to host the Church's landmark gathering.

The almost 300 bishops attending dealt with the controversial topics of homosexuals in the Church and reception of the Eucharist, but the statements seemed to be a "last hurrah", as a streamlining of the USCCB's apparatus approved at the meeting indicated a turn towards a less significant public role for the conference. There will be fewer committees and less travel for its employees and officials.

In a debate that aroused bouts of exasperated laughter from the bishops, an initiative on ministerial outreach to "persons with a homosexual inclination" developed into a heated series of exchanges between prelates on either side of the debate on how the Church should engage with gay and lesbian Catholics. Archbishop Raymond Burke of St Louis argued forcefully for an endorsement of "Courage" - a group that calls its members to chastity, moving "beyond the confines of the homosexual identity to a more complete one in Christ", according to its mission statement. The bishops finally consented to a mention of Courage in a footnote to the final text. 

The bishops also took sides on a document on the worthy reception of the Eucharist, with several of them keen to specifically mention dissident politicians among Catholics who, "in [their] personal or professional [lives] were knowingly and obstinately to reject the defined doctrines of the Church" and should be precluded from the Sacrament. While that amendment was also turned back before the document's approval, Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Paterson, chairman of the Doctrine Committee, told reporters that "anyone who is publicly in defiance of Church teaching ... becomes a cause of scandal" when they continue to receive Holy Communion. The conference intends an abbreviated version of the statement to be printed in parish bulletins.

On the meeting's opening day, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the apostolic nuncio in the United States, said that he found "the bishops and the faithful of the Church in the United States ... thirsting to muster again the courage to experience [the] Wisdom of God" after the debilitating abuse scandals of the last five years. Exhorting them to embrace the mass media as a tool of evangelisation, Archbishop Sambi advised against bishops acting as adversarial "watchdogs of the faith", saying that their optimal task was "something much more difficult": the "munus docendi", or teaching role, of the office.

In his presidential address, USCCB's president, Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, said that he was "frequently appalled by the coarseness that seems to be a growing phenomenon" in the American polity. Extending his plea for civility to discussions within the Church, he said that "there is a difference between spirited debate and debasing personal attacks".