{"id":16,"date":"2010-06-17T08:38:35","date_gmt":"2010-06-17T08:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-cardinal-george-theory-of-church-governance.html"},"modified":"2010-06-17T08:38:35","modified_gmt":"2010-06-17T08:38:35","slug":"the-cardinal-george-theory-of-church-governance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-cardinal-george-theory-of-church-governance.html","title":{"rendered":"The Cardinal George Theory of Church Governance"},"content":{"rendered":"

So now we know: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops cares
\nmore about its authority than being right. That’s the clear import of a
\nfine piece
\nof reporting<\/a> by NCR’s John Allen on the split between the USCCB and
\nthe Catholic Hospital Association (CHA) over the health care bill
\n(which, you’ll recall, the former opposed and the latter supported).<\/p>\n

Writing
\nfrom the CHA’s annual meeting in Denver, Allen got Cardinal Francis
\nGeorge, the USCCB’s current capo, on the phone from St. Petersburg,
\nwhere the bishops are assembled in semi-annual conclave. The cardinal
\nallowed as how the substance of the bill was subject to different
\ninterpretations: “different lawyers have said different things.” The
\ncore issue, he insisted, was “about the nature of the church
\nitself, one that has to concern the bishops.” As in: “The bishops have
\nto protect their role in governing the church…”This may be a narrow
\ndisagreement, but it has exposed a very large
\nprinciple.”<\/p>\n

In other words, never mind that faithful and
\nknowledgeable Catholic organizations and officials might actually do a
\nbetter job of applying agreed-upon doctrines of faith and morals to a
\ncomplex piece of legislation than we do. It’s our way or the highway. <\/p>\n


\nAmazingly,
\nAllen managed to find one bishop who begged to differ. “I’ve been
\nassociated in one way or another with the episcopal
\nconference of the United States since 1972,” St. Pete Bishop Robert
\nLynch told him. “I have never before this year heard the theory
\nthat we enjoy the same primacy of respect for legislative interpretation
\nas we do for interpretation of the moral law.”<\/p>\n

“I think this
\ntheory needs to be debated and discussed by the body of
\nbishops,” said Lynch, who sits on the CHA’s Board of Trustees.<\/p>\n

I
\nwouldn’t hold my breath for an open debate. But I also wouldn’t be
\nsurprised if a fair number of bishops feel that the USCCB got way too
\ndeep into the legislative weeds on health care, and that there needs to
\nbe room–in line with the principles of conscience laid out in their own
\ndocument on political choice, Forming
\nConsciences for Faithful Citizenship<\/a>–for honest disagreement among
\nthose officially identified with the church.<\/p>\n

In the meantime,
\nit’s worth bearing in mind that the USCCB has no authority to bind a
\nsingle American bishop to its opinions. So let’s suppose that one of
\nthem–Bishop Lynch, say–had decided to dissent from the party line and
\nembrace the CHA’s position on the health care bill (just as a few
\nconservative bishops dissented from Faithful Citizenship). Would that
\nhave meant, under the George Theory of Episcopal Governance, that all
\nCatholic institutions and officials in the Diocese of St. Petersburg had
\nto support the bill too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So now we know: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops cares more about its authority than being right. That’s the clear import of a fine piece of reporting by NCR’s John Allen on the split between the USCCB and the Catholic Hospital Association (CHA) over the health care bill (which, you’ll recall, the former…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Cardinal George Theory of Church Governance - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-cardinal-george-theory-of-church-governance.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Cardinal George Theory of Church Governance - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So now we know: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops cares more about its authority than being right. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}