Pressures on the unity of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the most educated and informed laity in the Church’s history appear to increase by the day. Where Pope John XXIII called for opening the windows of the Church to the contemporary world, as the Second Vatican Council promised, a hierarchy chosen for blind conformity is increasingly oblivious of the lives of the “People of God.”

The breaking point cannot be far off.

Millions of people now have Catholic higher educations; a fair number are familiar with Catholic social teaching, their bishops’ disinterest notwithstanding. Yet, year in and out, our shepherds ignore the dire environmental crisis, ignore immoral Iraq and Afghanistan wars, ignore enabling of Zionist denial of Palestinian human dignity, ignore U.S.-sponsored slaughter in Colombia, ignore John XXIII’s emphatic declaration that health care is a human right, and are quiet about an economic system predicated on greed.

Informed Catholics are concerned with things like the sundering of established, loving parish communities for want of celibate male priests — even though Eastern rite priests marry and Latin rite priests did for a millennium. Some know that gender is also not essential: Unordained women presided at early house Eucharists; recently, Czech women were ordained behind the Iron Curtain.

Yet Rome ignores the effectiveness of married clergy to require celibacy of priests, many with no calling to it, resulting in sexual immaturity and the abuse scandal.  Three successive popes have dismissed Pope Paul’s declaration that all are equal in the Christian community to argue that “the Church does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination,” that the tradition is constant, that it is “God’s plan.”

To thinking Catholics, the Vatican assertions lack basis, come out of thin air or the midieval sexism that burned witches, or are mumbo jumbo in the light of reason. To escape drowning in dissent, Pope John Paul II forbid further discussion about it. 

Fr. Roy Bourgeois was in Maine in September. Along with continuing his campaign to close the School of the Americas, he has argued against denying ordination to women, for which he has been excommunicated. After 36 years of Christian witness, he is dazed by the primacy of conscience that Vatican II declared means nothing.

Since, a Cincinnati nun who headed diocesan social justice education has been silenced for espousing women’s ordination, as a huge majority of the huge female majority of church workers do. A teacher who wrote a supporting letter was fired. Meanwhile, with 70 percent of Brazilian Catholics lacking a priest to give the Eucharist on Sunday, the pope warns against service led by laymen.

Here we have Bishop Malone inundating his flocks with paper demands that would force the Church’s reservation of marriage to heterosexuals upon everyone, admittedly at a loss of significant rights to those denied. He argues against same-sex couples’ protection against discrimination in public accommodations, protection that legislation he earlier supported has already given them. 

The diocese is also financing and embracing the same deceitful and sleazy appeals to fear and prejudice that opponents of same-sex rights in California discovered to be the only way to win: the lie that children will be indoctrinated with homosexuality.

In one Maine parish no one would circulate Malone’s petition. In another a brave soul stood and protested. At least one priest refused to preach Malone’s line. One friend went to the U.U. church that Sunday, another to the U.C.C. church. Many put protest notes in the collection. Another with a gay daughter who would marry wept all week.  Malone’s letter hid behind the clueless Benedict VI’s theologically, scripturally, rationally unsupportable assertion that it is every Catholic’s moral duty to oppose legalization of same-sex marriages.

Millions of Catholics have walked, unable to distinguish the People of God from the hierarchs who see themselves as the Church and defile it. The remaining who have escaped the old “pray, pay, and obey” mentality are outraged at their bishop for abusing communities united in the Eucharist,  and dividing the Catholic community in an ugly, unscrupulous campaign to deny human rights to people seeking only to have a life.

William H. Slavick of Portland has written extensively in the Catholic press.