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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JANUARY 20, 1984
PAGE 5
who is as close to the Pope as any U.S. prelate, insists that "it
is wrong to say that the Pope considers the U.S. church worse off
than the others. But he does see it as a very important link with
the rest of the world. Whatever happens in the U.S., it's just�
matter of time before it happens elsewhere."
Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul summed up the situation in a
baseball analogy:
"If a .150 hitter goes into a slump, it
doesn't make much difference to the team. But if a .350 hitter
goes into a slump, the manager really gets worried."
On John Paul's mind is one disturbing fact about the U.S. church:
It is losing some of its most dedicated workers. Over the past 17
years the ranks of U.S. nuns have declined by 61,000 to 121,000,
and the number of priests has barely grown despite a 12% increase
in the number of baptized Catholics•••.
The liberal Jesuits at the seminary in Berkeley, California,
barely speak to their colleagues across the bay at the University
of San Francisco.... A conservative priest at the university
protests, "We have priests saying Mass in sports shirts and some
using French bread�" Similar views are stated even more color
fully by the WANDERER (circulation: 35,000), an extreme right
wing Catholic weekly published in St. Paul, which is said to be
closely read in the Vatican.
This month the paper thundered
against "secularist sex education, dissident priests and theolo
gians, politicized Catholic agencies and aberrant liturgies."
The same issue of TIME carried an accompanying sidebar article on the
extremist archbishop .of Seattle, Raymond Hunthausen.
On a cloudy morning last January the grieving couple arrived at
St. Michael's Church in Olympia, Wash., to bury their only son.
He had died at 37, leaving a wife and two young children. The
parents' first anxiety developed even before the funeral Mass
began: many of the worshippers entered the nave with cries of
joy, and the celebrant, Father Paul Dalton, was clad in festive
mod vestments.... At the Communion, both Catholics and non
Catholics went forward to receive the consecrated bread and wine.
Worse was to follow. A dancer appeared and glided through the
sanctuary� then�� clown, carrying balloons, who began skip
ping around the coffin chanting, "Today my brother and sister are
dancing together in heaven." The mother, already deeply offended
and in tears, only later realized that the clown's voice was that
of her own daughter. After the daughter tied the balloons to the
coffin, pallbearers in work shirts carried the coffin to the dead
man's Chevrolet pickup truck.
Since...Raymond ("Dutch") Hunthausen became Archbishop of
Seattle in 1975, his flock of 287,000 has become accustomed to
such unusual rituals. The Vatican has been inundated with com
plaints from conservative parishioners, including one from the
parents of the man whose coffin was decorated with balloons.
Three weeks ago, Pope John Paul dispatched Archbishop James
Hickey of Washington, D.C., on an extraordinary "apostolic visit
ation" to probe what Hunthausen has wrought.