The 1976 U.S. Catholic Bishops' Call To Action Conference in Detroit

Commonweal Special Supplement
New Face on an Old Criticism

DENNIS P. MCCANN

 

Call to Action received strenuous criticism from the beginning. Most notable was Andrew Greeley's polemic against the 1975 discussion booklet, Liberty and Justice for All . Later, after Call to Action was little more than a wistful memory, Joseph Varacalli subjected it to acute ideological criticism in his full-length study, Toward the Establishment of Liberal Catholicism in America (University Press of America, 1983). There were, of course, hundreds of other critical commentaries, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Cobo Hall conference, when the specific resolutions as well as the way the conference was conducted drew fire from various camps. The Greeley and Varacalli critiques, however, are particularly worth reexamination, since they pointed to issues that remain alive ten years later.

Joseph Varacalli's thesis is that Call to Action represented something of a coup within the church, by which the "New Catholic Knowledge Class" came to dominate the USCC staff, and through them the NCCB itself. This "New Catholic Knowledge Class" is a Catholic counterpart of the New Class of socially activist academics, government bureaucrats, and media intellectuals that neoconservatives like Peter Berger, who directed Varacalli's study, are fond of denouncing. It is the moral passion animating this New Class critique that is most significant here. The innuendo surrounding this thesis concerning the "New Catholic Knowledge Class" suggests some sinister conspiracy: under the banner of social justice and church renewal, a bureaucratic elite is seeking to assert an unprecedented hegemony over episcopal decision-making in matters of doctrine and discipline.

The charge here is a subtle one. It is not that Call to Action was wrong because it reflected a budding insurgency among grassroots Catholics; rather Call to Action was wrong because it betrayed the concerns of ordinary Catholics in favor of the class interests of the new elite. Those disposed to ignore the proposals recommended in the Call to Action process could do so in good conscience, for the process was really only a carefully stage-managed exercise in manipulation. The conference's resolutions represented but one more tawdry exhibition of the struggle for power, the circulation of elites, which marks the history of any institution, including the church. They are not an emerging sensus fidelium deserving serious consideration on the part of established authority.

Andrew Greeley's contribution-an essay on "Catholic Social Activism: Real or Rad/Chic?" - which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter of February 7. 1975, did not go as far as Varacalli later went in identifying the architects of Call to Action with the "New Catholic Knowledge Class." But Greeley did attempt to drive a wedge between old-style Catholic activists like Msgr. Jack Egan and an allegedly new breed acting under the spell of Daniel Berrigan and the Washington-based Center for Concern. Certain essays in the Call to Action discussion guide, according to Greeley, Are indicative of the incompetence and the wrongheadedly confrontational style of those captivated by "the Berrigan experience." Greeley was probably right about the essays he singled out for attack in the discussion, although his rhetorical excess unfortunately exaggerated the influence of radical social activists on the Call to Action process as a whole. If one can get beyond his denunciation of the Detroit meeting as "a ragtag assembly of kooks, crazies, . . . and other assorted malcontents," much may still be learned from his attempt to sketch an even newer style of Catholic social activism reconciling the passion of the "new breed" with the political savvy of the veterans. Nevertheless, given Greeley's influence at the time, his intervention did undermine Call to Action even before the newer style could fully emerge from the process of consultation.

What makes the criticisms of Greeley and Varacalli worthy of continued notice is their uncanny anticipation of controversies surrounding the bishops' recent pastoral letters. Just as there is continuity linking the pastoral letter process with Call to Action, so is there continuity in the criticism. Greeley's challenge to the competence of Catholic social activists has found a response in the bishops' drafting committees' efforts to demonstrate competence in their public policy analysis. Greeley's fear that the USCC's openness to dialogue with various advocacy groups for "outsiders" might lead to an abdication of political responsibility has been acknowledged, at least tacitly, by the letters' concern to address the mainstream of American public opinion. Despite the tone in which it was delivered, Greeley's criticism in hindsight tums out to have been constructive.

The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for Varacalli's analysis. This post-Marxist (but semi-Marxist) dwelling on the social location of the "New Catholic Knowledge Class" and its drive for ecclesiastical hegemony has become, ironical1y enough, the focal point of the neoconservative attack on the pastoral letters. One need only review the series of articles appearing under the title "USCC Watch" by Philip Lawler (a one-time Heritage Foundation employee who headed an effort to establish a rival "American Catholic conference" and has recently been hired by Cardinal Law as editor of the archdiocesan Boston Pilot) or read Lawler's pamphlet, How Bishops Decide: An American Catholic Case Study published earlier this year by Ernest Lefever's Ethics and Public Policy Center. The game has changed, the strategy remains the same. Since the bishops are presumably incompetent in the matters on which they have been making moral judgments, they are forced to rely on USCC staffers who, of course, are conspiring to promote the leftist liberal agenda of the New Class. Lawler is not alone among neoconservatives in wielding considerable rhetorical skill to persuade us of this thesis. The bishops' economic analyses lack credibility, according to Michael Novak, because they reflect only the views of those economists in synch with the USCC staff. By controlling the flow of information to the bishops and thus setting the restricted terms for their debate over matters of public policy, the "New Catholic Knowledge Class" maintains its hegemony.

To his credit, Novak recognizes that the issues separating neoconservative Catholic intellectuals from defenders of the pastorals are profoundly ecclesiological. Novak has written in sympathy with Cardinal Josef Ratzinger's challenge to the teaching authority of national episcopal conferences. In his counter pastoral letter, Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age, Novak has proposed a theological innovation which would restrict bishops from drawing any concrete applications from their understanding of the principles of Catholic social teaching. Such "prudential judgments" would be reserved for the distinctive competence of the laity, presumably laity who, like the members of the self-appointed Lay Commission on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy which he, along with William Simon, chairs, remain untainted by the subversive efforts of the "New Catholic Knowledge Class."

The lessons to be learned by remembering Call to Action in our current chilly circumstances, it seems to me, have to do with how difficult the road must be for American Catholicism to realize responsibility. Genuinely open, consultative processes, like the one aspired to in Call to Action, will always be open to the charge of elitist manipulation by anyone hoping to discredit the outcome. By the same token, those who traffic in the profoundly modernist strategy of stressing ideological critiques like the New Class Theory will always be vulnerable to having the tables turned. Isn't the recent effort of neoconservative intellectuals to discredit the bishops' pastoral letter on the economy itself the most dramatic instance of an entrenched New Class conspiring to maintain its passing hegemony in public-policy debate?

Instead of abandoning our aspirations for genuinely open processes of consultation within the church, perhaps it would make more sense to submit once again to the discipline of public dialogue. The answer to the criticism of Call to Action is not less open-ended consultation but more of it. If the process is in danger - as any such process always will tend to be - of being manipulated by factions within the church, then let us all have the courage of our democratic aspirations and follow the advice of James Madison: expand the circle of participation so that it will be virtually impossible for any clique, no matter how noble their motives, to impose their will on others. Is it possible for American Catholics to become a church on that basis? One thing is certain: no further progress in that direction can be made unless we continue to risk genuinely open dialogue. Without controversy there can be no genuine consensus. Without consensus there can be no genuine community.

DENNIS P. McCANN teaches business ethics and world civilizations lit DePaul University in Chicago. His Most recent work, New Experiment in Democracy: The Challenge for American Catholicism, will be published in January by Sheed and Ward.

 

This Special Supplement, dated December 26, 1986 has been reprinted with permission of Commonweal Magazine.