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 Catholic  Dissidents Call for Openness
 
 By Alan Cooperman  and Daniel Williams
 
   VATICAN CITY  --  Some quantitative measures of John Paul II's papacy are well known: He visited more countries, named more saints and issued more teaching documents than any other pope. But there is another statistic that is seldom mentioned here: By some estimates, the Vatican silenced or reprimanded more than 100 Roman Catholic theologians during John Paul's 26-year reign.
 
  As 115 cardinals prepare to enter a conclave Monday to elect the next pope, dissidents are calling for a new openness and willingness to debate such topics as the ordination of women, condom use to fight HIV/AIDS and the morality of homosexuality.
 
  "Suppression of thought, loss of ideas, closing down of discussion  --  that's not an act of faith. That's not of the Holy Spirit," said Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun from Erie, Pa. "Unity is good, but it has a dark side."
 
  Chittister is one of several critics of John Paul's legacy who have been brought to Rome by an international dissident network, We Are Church, in an effort to widen the pre-conclave debate. Feeling they are shut out of normal discourse with church leaders, they are holding a series of news conferences, hoping to have an impact through the media.
 
  Their appeals for greater tolerance of dissent are echoed by theologians such as the Rev. Hans Kung of Germany and the Rev. Charles E. Curran of the United States, both of whom were stripped of authority to teach in Catholic universities under John Paul. Neither Kung nor Curran has come to Rome, but they are speaking out. "Many people are now hoping for a pope who will seriously free up the log-jam of reforms" and "have the courage to make a new start," Kung said in a statement.
 
  Advocates for sex abuse victims, Catholic feminists and groups seeking a greater role for the laity in church governance are also calling for a pope who will allow more open debate. Giovanni Avena, editor of the Catholic lay newsletter Adista, said John Paul created a "medieval atmosphere" at the Vatican by emphasizing ritual for ordinary believers while restricting discussion on important issues to his inner circle. He said the decision to bar the College of Cardinals from talking to the media after John Paul's funeral exemplified this attitude.
 
  "They let everyone watch the rituals. Then they forbid access to reality," said Avena, a priest who once worked to turn young people in Sicily against the mafia. "There is no real participation. That is why in Italy you have plazas full of people for this kind of spectacle, and empty churches. Dissidents are asking simply for citizenship to be restored to the people of the church, to the community of believers."
 
  By all indications, the cardinals are focused on a different set of issues. Before they stopped speaking to reporters last Saturday, they pointed to the spread of Islam, the declining vitality of the church in Europe, the challenge of Pentecostalism in Latin America and the rapid march of biotechnology as their top concerns.
 
  But dissidents have taken heart from a few cardinals' comments about the importance of "collegiality," which in church jargon refers to the principle that all bishops, not just the pope, govern the church. In the view of some prelates, John Paul was a great evangelizer but an inattentive administrator who left too much authority to his curia, the Vatican's bureaucracy. On this, at least, the dissidents agree.
 
  "With the pope's declining health, greater authority devolved toward Vatican officials," said Lavinia Byrne, a British commentator on Catholic affairs. "The balance of power became skewed as power was taken away from bishops and national and local churches and invested in the center." Byrne was a nun until 2000, when she left her order, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, after refusing to repudiate the arguments for women's ordination in her book "Women at the Altar."
 
  "I want debate on this to be reopened," she said. "The arguments against women's ordination have never really been spelled out conclusively. It's not that I think there will be women priests overnight, but why can't we even talk about this?"
 
  The answer from Vatican officials is that the matter was firmly settled by John Paul in 1994 in a short letter saying that Jesus had anointed only men as apostles and that the church "has no authority whatsoever" to ordain women. This judgment, he added, "is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."
 
  More broadly, the Roman Catholic Church, like all faiths, has to define and protect its "real treasure," the teachings it considers essential, said the Rev. Augustine DiNoia, an American priest who is the second-ranking official in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican department charged with ensuring orthodoxy and disciplining theologians who cross the line.
 
  "In theology as in softball," DiNoia said, "you can't play the game if you don't agree on the rules."
 
  Curran, who remains a priest, was forced to leave a tenured position at Catholic University in Washington in 1986 because he was at odds with the church on contraception, sterilization, homosexuality and divorce. This week, he took issue with what he called the "fundamental presupposition" behind DiNoia's  --  and the late pope's  --  approach to dissent.
 
  "John Paul II's presupposition was that the church teaches the truth about humankind," Curran said in a telephone interview from Southern Methodist University in Texas, where he is a professor. "But the Catholic tradition accepts that there are different levels of truth, and more significantly, history reminds us that the hierarchical church needs to learn the truth before it can teach it."
 
  Curran noted that the Catholic Church long accepted slavery, barred the collecting of interest on loans, opposed democracy and battled freedom of conscience, which one 19th-century pope called "the sewer into which all garbage flows."
 
  "John Paul II said slavery is intrinsically evil. If it is intrinsically evil, why did the Roman church not condemn it until the end of the 19th century?" Curran said. "The fact that we have changed our teaching on important things like slavery shows that the hierarchical church is a learner as well as a teacher  --  and therefore you cannot be so absolutely certain about your teaching."
 
  John Paul's crackdowns on theologians began with his first foreign trip as pope. In 1979, he traveled to Mexico and reined in the liberation theology movement, which had been organized among the poor and which the pontiff considered to be infected with Marxism. Among the final acts of his pontificate was a notification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that the Rev. Roger Haight, a Jesuit priest in New York, could no longer teach theology at a Catholic university because of doctrinal errors in his book "Jesus: Symbol of God."
 
  The exact number of theologians disciplined by the Vatican is uncertain because many cases are handled privately, according to the Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America. But he said a figure of more than 100 had been cited by Catholic theologians. "A church that cannot openly discuss issues is a church retreating into an intellectual ghetto," Reese wrote in an editorial called "On the Challenges for the New Pope."
 
  In 1998, John Paul decreed that national bishops' conferences could not issue theological teachings unless they were unanimous or had prior approval from Rome. He encouraged synods, larger gatherings of bishops from several countries, but kept them under tight control. The pope reserved the right to set their agendas and write up the conclusions.
 
  "When you have synods and you ask them to share their concerns but then you tell them there are things they cannot discuss, that is a suppression of thought that undermines the creativity of the whole church," Chittister said.
 
  Jason Berry, a New Orleans journalist and co-author of "Vows of Silence," a 2004 book on sex abuse in the church, said he believed that John Paul's experience in Poland under Nazism and communism led him to "romanticize the priesthood as a chivalrous caste." Even when confronted with mounting evidence of sexual abuse, "the pope who said, 'Be not afraid,' was incapable of a fearless introspection of the priesthood" and shut off debate over celibacy, homosexuality and the priest shortage, he said.
 
  In Berry's view, the epitome of this circle-the-wagons approach was the Vatican's long refusal to investigate sex abuse allegations by nine men, including two priests, against Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of the Legion of Christ, a renewal movement in the church. This year, a church prosecutor said the case had been reopened  --  years after it was first filed.
 
  As a Catholic, Berry said, he felt great sadness at the death of the pope. But he also said he was dismayed by fawning media coverage that included no mention of the pope's possible flaws. "With all this video hagiography going on, nobody wants to talk about it, but I think we have an obligation to be honest," he said.
 
  Many of John Paul's critics say he was, nevertheless, a great pope. We Are Church, founded in Rome in 1996, issued a statement applauding John Paul's efforts to free Poland and his renunciation of the church's historical anti-Semitism.
 
  Curran said he admired the pope's criticisms of capitalism and excessive individualism, as well as his teachings against war and the death penalty. "I agreed with him on everything except when he talked about church, women or sex," he said.
 
  Kung, a Swiss-born professor at the University of Tubingen, praised John Paul's personal piety and his travels to 130 countries.
 
  "But soon the triumphal appearances will become faded memories, and the speeches promoting human rights in the world will be so many words in the wind," Kung wrote. "Meanwhile, within the church there is a crisis of hope and confidence."
 
  
 
   

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