Preview of the Bishops' Conference

Catholic Bishops To Readjust Priorities

By Rachel Zoll
Associated Press
Monday, November 13, 2006; Page A13

There was a time when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was a powerful force for bringing the church's moral teachings to bear on national policy debates.

In the 1970s, the bishops led the fight against abortion after Roe v. Wade was decided. During the Cold War, they drew international notice by questioning the morality of nuclear deterrence.


But the bishops now face a world where their moral authority has been diminished by the clergy sex-abuse scandals, where money for church programs is scarce and where many American Catholics have little understanding of, or regard for, church teaching.

At a national meeting starting today in Baltimore, the bishops are expected to make changes that adjust to their new circumstances. They plan to channel resources away from broad social pronouncements and focus more on defining Catholicism for an often-uninvolved flock.

"It's not that the bishops as a national organization will no longer be interested in sociopolitical issues," said Russell Shaw, a writer on Roman Catholic issues who spent more than 15 years as a spokesman for the conference. "But the emphasis is shifting to the life of the church itself and its own internal problems."

The new focus is clear from the agenda for this week's gathering.

The bishops will vote on documents explaining the church's ban on artificial contraception and worthiness for receiving Holy Communion. The prelates will also consider new guidelines on ministry to gay Catholics, which explain the theological underpinnings of church teaching that marriage should be limited to one man and one woman.

In addition, the bishops plan to take up a proposed restructuring of the conference's Washington headquarters to reflect their new priorities. Under the plan, American dioceses would send less money to the conference, which would cut jobs and committees.

Bishops have complained for years that the funds they turn over for conference work are badly needed in their home dioceses. Others consider the large staff unnecessary, a hangover from the conference's heyday in the early 1980s, when Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was guiding its work and the prelates undertook such ambitious projects as the pastoral letter on nuclear war called "The Challenge of Peace."

"Some of the younger bishops are less formed by the bureaucracy and are more suspicious of it, and more likely to want to have more direct ways of responding to crises," said Helen Hull Hitchcock, director of Women for Faith & Family, which represents traditional Catholics.

Critics see the conference's turn inward as disturbing. The Rev. Thomas Reese, former editor of the Jesuit magazine America, noted that the agenda included no mention of the war in Iraq, although bishops could still raise the topic from the floor.

"It's the most important moral issue facing the country, and in the past the bishops would have said something about it," Reese said.

The bishops also will conduct more business behind closed doors. This week, 1 1/2 days of the 3 1/2 -day meeting will be in executive session. Formerly, the conference held only a half-day executive session at its fall meeting, but a spokeswoman said the extra time was needed for "prayer and reflection." Shaw said the bishops understandably feel more comfortable talking in private, but he called the extra closed sessions "a mistake."

"God knows, I don't begrudge the bishops meditation and prayer, but they have many opportunities to do that," Shaw said. "They don't have to carve large chunks of time out of a working meeting to do that when their work affects us all."