Three keys to reading the Dolan win at the USCCB

Archbishop Timothy might just be the man to deal with the missal translation mess that evolved under Archbishop Francis of Chicago's leadership.

Perhaps, it is time for the USCCB with Archbishop Timothy to remind the curia that all of us are one church, not a branch of the church in Rome.

"That choice [of Archbishop Dolan] could be taken as an imminently rational reaction to recent events."

Is the choice of 'imminently' rather than 'eminently' inadvertent or deliberate? The first seems more likely, but the second is more fun to think about while pondering the election of the likely imminent Eminence.

Well, whatever. As an old priest, I long ago got out of the habit of watching bishops and worrying about Rome. I expect very little and am usually not disappointed.

I'm having a hard time understanding how Archbishop Dolan's loud denunciations of The New York Times, art museums and the like as being "anti-Catholic" is going to do anything positive for the church's image. And while it may be true that "[w]ith Cardinal Francis George, the American bishops knew they had a leader who could go toe-to-toe with the heavyweights of the Roman Curia as a full equal, and more or less the same point can be made of Dolan," did Cardinal George and will Archbishop Dolan ever stand up for Rome on behalf of the conference? The missal mess clearly has involved the Vatican disrespecting the conference's competence, and did I miss Cardinal George defending the conference?

John, I usually love your analysis, but I wish you could refrain from infusing a discussion of Church politics with terms most appropriate to American politics. Specifically, there's the ever-present danger to equate the "theology" with "ideology"---as if the truths of the Faith which the Bishops, as successors to the Apostles, are charged to spread and defend in every era are 'just another world-view.' While the discussion of lurking world-views can be an interesting and valid intellectual exercise, isn't is more accurate, when speaking of the Catholic Bishops, to recall that they are brother servants of the same One Faith, whose differences are limited to matters of interaction with the secular world, application of the dogmatic truths of the Church in the lives of laity, and similar matters?

This latter point seems to be exactly what your analysis is---and a refreshing one at that, given the preponderance of conservative/liberal commentary circulating this election in a body that, in truth, holds no religious power, but coordinates the efforts of the leaders of the Church in America to interact with Secular America. On that point, you are, as usual, well-spoken and insightful. But the suggestion that Catholic theology is just another ideology roaming the marketplace of ideas ultimately only serves to diminish the transcendent truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Within the Catholic Church there is no such thing as conservative or liberal. There is only fidelity or infidelity.

May we have another more un-biased view, please.

Phooey...just more right-wing Church politics ad nauseam...electing a noisy glad-hander just covers the real problems.

John Allen makes this claim

"In Dolan, the bishops have turned to their most gifted natural communicator, a leader with a demonstrated capacity to project a positive image for Catholicism in the public square."

Dolan in New York, has demonstrated the opposite by his unfounded and misinformed attacks on the New York Times.
--an attack straight out of the play-book of Bill Donohue and his so-called Catholic League.

So far, in NYC, Dolan has no demonstrated record of social justice for the poor. And he has not projected any image of a thoughtful, intelligent leader. He seems to enjoy his reputation as a beer-drinking back-slapper.

Amen on the Missal translation. Language should not be a gimmick to induce a state of awe without comprehension, nor a gimmick to ensure colloquialisms at the risk of wrong comprehension. Rather, language should speak in the language of the audience to communicate clearly the substance of the source. "Consubstantial", while perfectly good English and with a definition in my computer's dictionary application that is perfectly correct and defined as referring to the Trinity's relationship within itself/among themselves, is scarcely intuitive for an American audience. "One in being" says the same thing using common words. And so forth.

Revision of comment: Is imminent eminence more Christlike than renewal relevance???

Pax. Aristophilos

The Comments are more interesting than the Article. Sorry John

While I agree generally with the analysis, it is hard to accept that Archbishop Dolan could be a better communicator than Bp. Kicanas. While Archbisop Dolan is a good speaker and seems rather affable, Bp. Kicanas is in a class by himself when it comes to communication skills. He is a remarkable speaker and very gifted in dealing with people which is why the USCCB has frequently turned to him to speak publicaly on some of the more delicate conference issues. Bp. Kicanas is one bishop who stands out as a very genuine person. I don't think for a minute that Archbisop Dolan could ever do better in the communications department than Bishp Kicanas except for the fact that NY gives him a bigger platform from which to speak.

"In other words, it might be more analytically productive to read Dolan’s election not so much as a victory of conservatives over liberals, but rather as an endorsement of the “affirmative orthodoxy” wing of the conference’s conservative majority over its harder ideological edge."

Yes, but one crucial qualification needs to be made: "..rather than as an endorsement of the 'affirmative orthodoxy' wing of the conference's conservative majority over its harder ideological edge AND the conference's liberal wing".

Maybe it's because I'm beyond the pale as a New Yorker, but I haven't found Archbishop Dolan's comments regarding the New York Times and other anti-Catholic targets of his (nor his comments about the Muslim Community Center in downtown NYC) helpful or correct. Yes, shades of Bill Donohue and the Catholic League. I can't believe that we can't do better.

Allen writes: "Dolan’s victory signals a broad conservative shift within the conference." Not really. Dolan won election on the third ballot with the shift of only a dozen votes or so. The conference has been shifting to a more imperious style (don't call it "conservative" because the lord-bishops are not conserving anything; they are forcing thinking Catholics OUT) ever since JPII started replacing Jadot's servant bishops with lord-bishops in his own image. Kicanas's election as v.p. three years ago represented what some of us considered a move back to a more listening, accountable leadership. But the rambunctiousness of our Taliban bishops didn't want that to happen. Now we have Dolan, a company man all the way, despite Allen's guess (with no evidence to back it up) that Dolan is a man "who can go to Rome and make American judgments stick."

North Country et al. (David James) see Dolan's attack on the N Y Times as "unfounded" or otherwise counterproductive. As a daily reader of the Times, I beg to say, "au contraire . . ." With a few hours' work I could bring up article after article since Archbishop Dolan published those remarks and demonstrate that even when they are critical, the Times is more careful to get their facts right. Even Ken Woodword has called them out on that, beginning an article in "Commonweal" on 28 April 2010 as follows: "The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive litigator on behalf of clergy-abuse victims. Fairness dictates that the Times give Anderson at least a co-byline."

And it gets better after that, some of the most trenchant criticism I've read. I love the "Times," but you'd have to be blind not to see it pushes a secularist agenda and sees little role for religion than that ascribed to it by 19th century cultured despisers of religion. That is to say, help keep the behavior of the uneducated masses at least a bit moral. While not in on New York clerical gosspip, I know of at least two times events where the archbishop has gone out of his way to ask opinions of non-insiders. While I don't want to cast aspersions on his predecessor, I once spent an hour and ahalf sitting across the aisle facing him at the Westchester County Airport when he was Bishop of Bridgeport but after his appointment to New York had been announced. If my memory serves, the magazines he was reading seemed to be like "Fortune" and "Business Week." He was a businessman among businesspeople men in an businessperson's upscale suburban airport. Timoth Egan, on the other hand is both very smart, very folksy, and -- if reports are to be believed -- very pastoral and human.

Okay, he's conservative. Give him a break. He's also an Irishman who knows that many New York Times-reading New York elites are often very anti-Catholic under their genteel veneer. Bill Donohoe he's not.

The problem with all of this, is the fact that the bishops have lost all moral authority and not many really care who they elected. It makes no difference to the lives of most people.

The whole Bishops' conference are mere yes men for the pope. They can't even make their own translation of the Missal or sacramentary.

When and if, the bishops ever regain their credibility, all this might me important.
Right now, most people just yawn!

Dolan is a high-octane, populist American expression of what I’ve called the “affirmative orthodoxy” of Benedict XVI: no compromise on matters of Catholic identity, but a determination to express that identity in the most positive key possible, keeping lines of conversation open with people outside the fold.

Interesting that you see it that way. For those of us on the outside, especially we of progressive bent, the current Catholic identity is expressed in the most negative way possible and certainly has little opening for conversation. To us, this election merely confirms that the trend of the hierarchy is towards reactionary conservatism that says "my way or the highway". Which is what led my wife to leave the RC church, and why our local Episcopal church is burgeoning with liberal Catholics dismayed by the secular culture warpath taken by the US Bishops.

Dolan sounds promising, but no matter who leads the USCCB, the bishops have a monumental task of regaining a semblance of credibility and respect. Increasingly, lay people consider them irrelevant.

Dolan, Sholman - whoever. Just another president of the USCCB to ignore.

However, I do believe when an organization has an established pattern - established over decades - that the vice-president advances to the presidency, I think it's more telling than John A. indicates when that parrtern is broken. Typically, the vp is elected fully expecting he'll be the next president - and his qualifications to be president agreed to at that time.

Would it hurt Dolan and the American church for him to take his turn at VP and become the next president?

Kevin

"Second, while Dolan certainly is more “conservative” than Kicanas, it’s not what’s distinctive about him. To be sure, there are plenty of other conservatives in the USCCB. Dolan’s defining quality isn’t really his ideology, but rather his capacity to build relationships with people who don’t share his outlook."

The conservative/ideological take is the flaw in this analysis. Catholic life is based on doctrine and truth. "Relationships with the people who don't share Abp Dolan's outlook?" Well about what? Cardinal Giacomo Biffi in his Memoirs went after the notion that the "nice guy" is pastoral while the insistence on sound doctrine is ideological. Truth demands loyalty in or out of season

If it's a matter of policy say denying Communion to pro-abort Catholic pols, does the present reluctance to do so advance Vatican II's teaching that abortion is an unspeakable crime? What if Catholic pol's were voting for racist policies, say segregation? Would there be the same reluctance to deny them Communion? The PC calculus is too much with us and it is not a stranger to the Conference. That is an outlook in many respects at odds with Catholic doctrine and morals.

No not ideology but Catholic Faith and discipline and the obligation of the bishop to see that these are not undermined within the Church by the Church's own institutions and personnel. That obligation does not always produce smiles or bridges with people that have no desire to uphold the Faith.

Either you are in the Church or you are playing games as a wishy washy Catholic, that includes Bishops, priests, sisters and the laity.
From everything I have seen and heard of Dolan. especially on EWTN
where his talks aren't edited, he is very eloquent and in line with Rome.

On the other hand. the writer of this article doesn't sound
like he even knows who the present Pope is and its not JPII.
Bendedict XVI is shepherding this flock of wayward sheep
and goats on earth. He is not a mirror of JPII whom I never liked.
If JPII had been in the Vatican paying attention to the scandals brewing, instead of wandering the world, he might have halted the mess long before
he died, maybe 10 years before!

Did the smiling Irishman do something in Milwuakee other than raise money?

Thanks for the thoughtful (non-ideological) analysis.

"...watching the cycle of meltdowns in Rome..."
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/214368?eng=y
http://abyssum.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/the-hits-and-misses-of-benedict-...

Memo to the Holy Spirit:
KEEP 'EM COMIN'!

Dolan will say to Roma: Amen, Amen, Amen.

Time to know the anglo'american Catholic Church, having turned its back upon her cruelly, culturally and economically oppressed immigrant ancestors from Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and other places east, having for so long worked to identify herself with the oppressors, led by Al Haig and Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Peggy Noonan and the rest, and the bishopric, can no longer serve as a stable, unfolding vessel of the Holy Spirit of Charity, of Hope, of Faith, for the poor pilgrim people of God.

Come to the Spanish Mass.

Come to the desert, where no bishop ever goes, as there is no material wealth and power here.

Only God´s love.

Maybe Dolan's election was just a consolation prize for not having won a red hat.

a MERE 17 vote difference cannot be read with ANY significance, no matter how valiently the admirable Mr. Allen spears it upon the traditional Roman Catholic three point schema.

Mother Church lost, by a margin as slim as baby Bush´s or Calderon´s in Mexico.

Come to the desert, beyond the hearing of the anglo bishops

Rachel, Northcountry I, and David James are right-on. John Allen, in his usual pompous strategy of playing it cozy with the hierarchy, is once again blowing smoke. Frankly, I know nothing about Bishop Gerald Kicanas except that the press and media report that he is less conservative, perhaps more centrist than the typical American and Vatican hierarchy. That's the primary reason the assembled voted to screw-over Bishop Kicanas. This was underscored by the way they filled the vice-presidential spot. They elected ultra conservative Archbishop Kurtz with super conservative Archbishop Chaput as the runner-up. Where does that fit into Mr. Allen's let’s play it safe with the hierarchy analysis?
Anonymous

Maybe I'm reading John wrong, but he seems to be inferring that this choice is about PR and money vis a vis Rome. Great. No wonder they neglected to debate the fact they have lost millions of their flock, and millions more are out of work.