The Edict That Split Believers

By LARRY B. STAMMER

May 15, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES RELIGION WRITER

LINCOLN, Neb. — On the morning of March 19, the Most Rev. Fabian W. Bruskewitz--by the grace of God, bishop of Lincoln--left his home and drove the mile to his office.

He had been up since 5:30. Rising early is part of his spiritual discipline: prayer and meditation before dawn, then Mass in his private chapel at 7:30.

But this day would be anything but routine.

Bruskewitz settled in behind his worn wooden desk and examined the ultimatum he was about to sign. Drawing a small cross before his first name to signify his rank as bishop, he affixed his signature to an unprecedented decree that would send a tremor through the Catholic Church in America.

He was excommunicating Catholics in his diocese of 83,000 who refused to give up membership in any of 12 groups the bishop deemed “perilous to the Catholic faith.” Among them were five Masonic groups, two abortion rights organizations, the Hemlock Society and four groups promoting church reforms.

As news of the excommunication--which takes effect today--spread, reaction was swift. Conservatives rejoiced that someone was standing up for the church against what they saw as the erosion of traditional values. But liberal reformers likened Bruskewitz to a tyrant and vowed not only to keep their memberships in the targeted groups but to defy his excommunication order by receiving the Holy Eucharist.

The church hierarchy--the nation’s bishops and cardinals--seemed to wince at the entire controversy.

Just as the bishop’s order echoed throughout the nation, it rang with cold reality at the home of James McShane. He is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He and his wife, Carol McShane, are lifelong Catholics who last winter joined with fellow Catholic activists to form a state chapter of Call to Action, a national reform group that advocates ordination of women and optional celibacy for priests who want to marry. Even before the Nebraska group formally adopted its own agenda, Bruskewitz issued his excommunication order banning membership in the national and state groups.

The bishop and the reformer come to the controversy from the far corners of their church, two 60-year-old men united in a centuries-old faith but torn by warring visions of how it should apply to modern life.

To Bruskewitz, there is nothing less at stake than the soul of the church.

To McShane, it’s far more personal: Excommunication would cut him off from the sacraments and, following Catholic belief, place his soul in peril.

Colleagues Astonished

Defiance of religious authority and dissent are not new. But at a time when finesse--not force--is the preferred way of maintaining order and discipline within the Catholic Church, Bruskewitz’s edict is widely seen as a throwback to the days when reformers like Martin Luther were excommunicated for challenging the church’s teachings.

Excommunication, as it is understood today, is viewed more as a corrective than a penalty. Still, it remains the gravest disciplinary measure available to churches. It is usually invoked by a bishop and generally as a last resort. The order can be appealed to church authorities in Rome.

For believers, to be cut off from the church is to be cut off from the means of attaining eternal salvation. Their souls are not necessarily condemned but they are held to be at great risk.

Blanket excommunication is “unique,” said Msgr. Robert Tisco, a professor of church history at Catholic University of America in Washington and editor of the Catholic Historical Review. “I [can’t] think of any historical precedents.”

That the Lincoln prelate would make such a sweeping move before conferring with other bishops or first imposing less drastic measures astonished fellow bishops.

It also rekindles questions religious leaders of many faiths have long struggled with:

How does a bishop exercise monarchal authority in a democratic society? How does any religious leader lay claim to possession of a singular and universal truth in a secular age rife with religious and cultural diversity?

“I do feel that the [excommunication edict] was enacted in . . . an atmosphere of prayer and from a motive of genuine pastoral love and pastoral concern for the people entrusted to my care,” Bruskewitz said. “I think I was simply a bishop who understood his duty and tried to do that duty as God gave him to see it.”

Without the threat of excommunication, he added, he believed his concerns could be dismissed as “mere exhortation.” He needed to impress upon the faithful the gravity with which he views their membership in organizations he believes are incompatible with being Catholic.

So, he targeted 12 organizations. Among them are five Masonic groups: the Freemasons, Job’s Daughters, Rainbow Girls, DeMolay and Eastern Star. Also on the list are the Hemlock Society, which promotes the right to euthanasia, and Planned Parenthood and Catholics for a Free Choice, both national abortion rights groups. In addition, there are four groups pushing for reforms in the Catholic Church: Call to Action, its Nebraska chapter, and two conservative organizations that reject the sweeping changes of the Second Vatican Council, which modernized the church in the 1960s.

Few were surprised that the bishop would crack down on Catholics who join groups that advocate abortion rights, euthanasia or artificial birth control. The church’s opposition to such views has been repeatedly underscored by Pope John Paul II.

But the ban on joining Masonry, one of the oldest and largest fraternal organizations in the world, was more difficult for rank and file Catholics to understand. This was particularly true in Nebraska, where each year the Masons cooperate with the Knights of Columbus--a Catholic fraternal organization--in raising funds for Catholic charities serving the mentally retarded.

The problem, the bishop said, is that the Vatican in 1983 said the two belief systems are fundamentally incompatible. According to the Vatican, while the church holds that Jesus Christ is the sole teacher of truth and revealer of God’s plan, the Masons say there are many ways of knowing God’s plan.

But the organization the bishop said made him put his foot down--and quickly--was Call to Action. Of the 12 groups, only Call to Action was pushing for reforms that had already been rejected soundly by the church, the bishop declared.

Rome, he said, “has spoken.”

Viewed as Agitators

In better days, McShane had been there for his local parish. He had volunteered at spaghetti feeds. He led the rosary before Mass at St. Teresa’s. Several of his students, he said, became Catholics because of his example. His wife led the preschool Sunday school.

But that, the McShanes said, was before they were pegged as agitators in the 1980s because they were in a local group--Catholics for Active Liturgical Life--that asked that women be allowed to serve as readers at Mass and to be Eucharistic ministers who distribute already blessed Communion to shut-ins after Mass.

It didn’t help the couple’s image when McShane pulled his children out of St. Teresa’s school--a cornerstone of parish life--and enrolled them in public school. He made the move for a number of reasons, he said. He recalled the time one of his children came home and repeated what a nun said when told that a truck had hit a pedestrian.

“The sister said he must have done something really terrible that God would hit him with a truck,” McShane recalled.

In 1994, the couple’s standing in the parish slipped further when Carol ran as a Catholic abortion-rights supporter in the Democratic primary for the state Legislature. She lost.

“They would prefer that I not show up” at services, James McShane said of other parishioners. “People I’ve known for years, people whose children I’ve taken care of at the university, turn their back when I come into the church.”

He paused to steady his composure. “What I do,” he continued, “is arrange it so I don’t have to worry about that.” He barely got out the next words: “Come late. Leave early.”

Even now, the McShanes appear to be a model of Catholic life, at least as it is expressed in service and care for others, family values and the importance of education.

Carol McShane runs a nursing business and volunteers at a soup kitchen and two homeless shelters. Unwed mothers, a homeless woman and an ex-convict have been house guests.

The couple, who met while students at Georgetown University, have two high-school-age daughters and five grown children, several of whom do social work or served in the Peace Corps.

A good Catholic family, except for one thing that bothers McShane: All but one of his children will not go to church because they don’t like what their parents have had to endure.

News of the excommunication decree came abruptly. McShane was in his campus office when a local newspaper reporter called for reaction. He said was “astounded.” He couldn’t believe it.

Through the years, despite the slights McShane said he has received from other parishioners, he has clung to his childhood faith. “It’s the grace of God and nothing else. And some of it is I’m Irish,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling, “and rock head.”

Startled by Uproar

Even as a boy growing up on a farm near Milwaukee as the son of “ardent, practicing Catholics,” Bruskewitz thought about becoming a priest.

Like many Catholic and Protestant clergy, he finds it hard to point to a defining moment when he was called to his vocation.

“It’s hard to say--apart, of course, from God’s grace,” he commented. “The love and example of my parents. The devotion of my parish priest. The religious sisters who taught me in elementary school may have had an influence.”

Bruskewitz studied for the priesthood in Rome, was ordained in 1960 and later returned to Italy as a Vatican official from 1969 to 1980. He was named bishop of Lincoln in 1992.

And now he is at once the hero and the villain of a morality play. He says he is startled by the national uproar his edict has triggered. At most, he thought there would be some comment, or, perhaps some local opposition.

Conservatives welcome his decisive move, declaring that they are tired of wishy-washy politicians and political correctness.

McShane is “misguided,” said Joe Hanigan, 62, who has been a member of St. Teresa’s for 40 years. “This bishop has said there are things which Call to Action is discussing that are not up for question,” said Hanigan, a commercial property developer. “The things that he outlined, if you participate in these things, if you believe in these things, you’re out of the church in this diocese.”

Yes, Hanigan declares, he backs his bishop and so do most of his fellow parishioners. The bishop himself says 97% of his mail is favorable.

On the other side, opponents are outspoken. The bishop’s order is “reminiscent of the 13th century and the Spanish Inquisition,” said the Assn. for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, based in Delran, N.J.

“An unfair attack on faith-filled Catholics” and a “serious violation of our rights and dignity as members of the Catholic Church,” said Call to Action in Chicago.

Bruskewitz’s edict “was very, very ill-advised,” said Father Richard P. McBrien, a liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame and frequent critic of the Catholic hierarchy.

“What you had,” he said, “was embarrassed silence from the [other] bishops. . . .”

Indeed, the nation’s most prominent cardinals, including Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, Joseph Bernardin of Chicago and Bernard Law of Boston, were guarded in their responses. But in the rarefied world of bishops, even a mildly negative comment can toll like a cathedral bell.

“I do not think,” said Bernardin, the nation’s most senior active cardinal, “that cutting off Call to Action’s members completely from the Catholic community would serve any good purpose; indeed, it would exacerbate the situation.”

Mahony, who heads the nation’s largest archdiocese, said that “within the Catholic Church, penalties are really a matter of last resort. . . . We really need to employ all other pastoral measures to deal with a problematic situation. . . . Jesus hardly ever imposed penalties on people. He is always calling them to conversion and change of heart. . . . Penalties in my experience just don’t do it.”

Even conservative Archbishop Elden F. Curtiss of Omaha, whose archdiocese adjoins the Lincoln diocese, declined to impose excommunication on Catholics under his jurisdiction after the controversy prompted him to publish his own policy.

He simply enjoined Catholics who publicly disagreed with church teachings from serving on archdiocesan or parish councils, or serving in any teaching, liturgical or ministerial role.

Bishop Stands Firm

Despite the guarded reaction from other bishops--or any public sign of encouragement from Rome--Bruskewitz remains convinced that he is right.

In fact, he is more certain than ever that the excommunication edict was “far more the work of the Holy Spirit than his,” according to Msgr. Timothy Thorburn, chancellor of the Lincoln diocese.

McShane remains unbowed as he faces the excommunication deadline--and as he has weathered his bishop’s displeasure. As the controversy unfolded, Bruskewitz upbraided him in an April 24 letter for presuming to appoint himself a reformer of the Catholic Church.

“Chutzpah has been defined somewhere as that quality which enables a man who murders his father and mother to plead for mercy because he is an orphan,” Bruskewitz wrote. “Perhaps less dramatically, but in a real sense, it appears that you possess an enormous quantity of chutzpah.”

He exhorted McShane to turn from a path of “disobedience and aggressive rebellion.”

McShane was passionate in his response: “I was ticked. I was furious! I was also very sad,” he said, his voice becoming a whisper. “I, uh, grew up in this church.

“It’s where I learned about love. It’s where I learned about social justice. It’s where I learned about the channels of grace. All those things. And some guy wants to say because I joined a group which does not require me to sustain all its positions I can no longer take the sacraments.”

But the bishop says McShane’s soul needn’t be in peril. “I can’t see why it should be in jeopardy. If the law is obeyed, then the [excommunication] sanction doesn’t take place. I think there is a great deal to be said in giving up membership in these societies and obeying the law.

“That would bring peace and serenity to Mr. McShane,” the bishop said, “and perhaps to all of us.”