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Maybe
the Catholic furor over a women's march will put bishops back in charge
of the Church The Report Newsmagazine There may be no such thing as a science of ecclesiastical seismology, but there ought to be. It would explain the recent rumblings among Catholics in Canada over support for the feminist World March of Women 2000. Granted, it's not a seismic event on the scale of the schism of 1054, when the papal legate and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other. Nor has it set the earth shaking as Martin Luther did when he nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1517. It is, however, an unprecedented crack in the ``solidarity'' which Canadian Catholic officialdom has maintained in recent decades. It has also fomented a rare but widespread mood of rebellion within the 100,000-member Catholic Women's League. On April 3, The Interim newspaper's on-line service, LifeSite News, revealed that the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) had endorsed the World March of Women 2000, a leftist anti-poverty event which includes in its list of demands the right of a woman ``to control her body and reproductive function''--that is, to have an abortion. The bishops' official social justice agency, the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (CCODP), backed up the endorsement with a hefty cash donation of $135,000. The national office of the Catholic Women's League of Canada (CWL) was also on board. Understandably, the news was met with outrage by ordinary Catholics, especially those active in the pro-life movement. CWL councils across the country have pulled out of the march, including several leading diocesan groups and the entire British Columbia-Yukon contingent. But in the unfolding controversy, an even more remarkable thing has happened: seven of the country's most prominent bishops have taken sides publicly on the issue--three in favour of the march, and four opposed--thus ending the fiction that if the CCCB supports something, it must be seen to enjoy the unanimous approval of the country's 84 active Catholic bishops. Toronto's Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, the ranking prelate of English- speaking Canada, Vancouver's Archbishop Adam Exner, Hamilton's Bishop Anthony Tonnos and Yarmouth's Bishop James Wingle, have opposed the march. Cardinal Ambrozic and Archbishop Exner withheld all or portions of their contributions to the CCODP this year, and the latter asked the CCCB and the CCODP to ``reconsider'' their endorsements. In support of the march were Calgary's Bishop Fred Henry (already famous for picking ideological fights with Premier Ralph Klein and Calgary Herald proprietor Conrad Black), London's Bishop John Sherlock and Ottawa's Archbishop Marcel Gervais. Remarkably, Bishop Henry also took shots at ``rude'' pro-lifers who objected to the march, and Bishop Sherlock mounted a startling attack on pro-lifers for their ``judgmental,'' ``ghetto'' mentality. Such episcopal wrangling in public is unprecedented. There was a minor clash in 1992 when two bishops dissented from the CCCB's baffling opposition to Canadian airing of the TV programs of orthodox U.S. nun Mother Angelica. And back in 1983 Cardinal G. Emmett Carter, then archbishop of Toronto, issued a stinging rebuke to the CCCB social affairs committee for their statement on the economy (a document which even hard-core NDPers would regard as a little extreme). By contrast, the World March controversy reflects an open and dramatic rupture among the country's top English-speaking bishops on a matter of crucial moral and pastoral concern. Faithful Catholics in Canada have long objected to the CCCB's tendency to push positions which are not necessarily supported by all the bishops, and which are not necessarily representative of Catholic doctrine. Over the years, for example, the bishops' conference has opposed cruise missile testing in Canada and the U.S. military's ``Star Wars'' program, and has endorsed every social engineering project from universal tax-funded daycare to aboriginal self-government. The CCCB, to put it bluntly, often acts like an authority unto itself, and does so according to a grotesquely politicized, left- liberal interpretation of Catholicism. In a 1998 letter on the authority of bishops' conferences, the Vatican appeared to side with traditional Catholics, saying the conferences have no intrinsic doctrinal authority. Fortunately, even supporters of the march now seem to agree. CCCB general secretary Monsignor Peter Schonenbach said as much in a letter to Vancouver pro-lifer Cecilia von Dehn; Bishop Henry listed his own response to the march among three possible Catholic responses; and Bishop Sherlock said he ``respects'' the decisions of the bishops who have opposed the project. Still, it leaves unanswered an obvious question: if there is no clearly Catholic position on the acceptability of the march, why on earth is the CCCB officially supporting it? There is every reason to hope that many of Canada's Catholic bishops are now wondering the same thing, and that the liberals in the Church have finally gone too far. If so, the tremors experienced of late will prove to have been a good thing. It will have led the bishops finally to reconsider the wisdom of surrendering their individual authority to an unaccountable and activist 50-person bureaucracy--which in turn would free them up to show real leadership on life and family issues. And that would mark the beginning of the end of the culture of death in this country. Courtesy
of LifeSite Daily News, a production of Interim Publishing. |