My mother made novenas and I made [peace movement] banners.” So Cathleen Kaveny, Notre Dame law professor, summarized the differences between two generations in the Catholic Church.
How could a professor get away with such an overstatement? Because she was a woman in a supposedly patriarchal church? Because her colleagues were too polite to correct her? Or because, in dull uniformity, they agreed with her?
In any event, no one—not a bishop, a priest, or a New York Times religion editor—corrected Dr. Kaveny on a teleconference concluding the bland three-day Conference of the Catholic Common Ground Project, held at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary March 7-9, at Mundelein, Illinois.
After attending three public sessions of the conference, I came to an initial view that Common Ground is going nowhere because of the timidity of its leaders. So fearful are they of discord that they won’t allow robust dissent. With Cardinal Bernardin gone, there is no master of public relations to push the project for the media. Instead, the public phase of the conference dealt with mind-numbing mechanics.
The only near-flashpoint in the news conference came when Robert McClory, an ex-priest writing for The National Catholic Reporter, asked politely what happened behind closed doors on the issue of women priests. No answer. But Doris Gottemoeller, RSM, pointed out with some vehemence that women at the conference were outnumbered 3 to 1. Then she left to catch a plane while the conference considered her legacy—the concept of God as bestower of gender quotas.
On its public face at least, Common Ground has no liberal tigers or conservative wolves, just university relativists in sensible shoes. At such a conference I would have welcomed either Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz or Hans Kung—and preferably both. We got neither: just monotonous explanations of how important it is to stay in the middle—thus appearing to reduce the unknowable to something not worth knowing at all.
The Common Ground Project may well stay as dull as it appeared at Mundelein, where reporters left shaking their heads. My fear: It won’t. If it comes alive with a leader of Bernardin’s gifts, the magisterial Church will be in for a tussle with some people who, for many different reasons, misrepresent both the Church’s past and present.