Desperately Seeking the Mainline?
Roman Catholic Bishops & the National Council of Churches
by Mark Tooley
In November 1998, for the second year in a row, a representative from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops delivered formal greetings to the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches (NCC).
Bishop Timothy Joseph, a retired auxiliary bishop from Chicago, said his fellow bishops had so appreciated the visit by NCC officers to the Catholic bishops’ meeting in 1997 that they suggested the two bodies now exchange greetings every year.
Bishop Joseph told the NCC that Catholic bishops are “happy” about the continuing Catholic “collaboration” with the mostly Protestant NCC. In another symbol of that cooperation, the NCC’s next president, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, will be installed into his new office at a service at the Catholic cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, in November.
The courtesies exchanged between the NCC and the Catholic bishops represent a deeper and growing cooperation between the New York-based NCC and the staff of the Washington-based United States Catholic Conference (USCC), which is supposed to implement the policies of the Catholic bishops.
From environmentalism to welfare reform, from racial justice to demands for political “civility,” the NCC and the USCC find themselves working increasingly in tandem. The cooperation between American Catholicism’s public policy arm and the NCC might have been understandable 30 or 40 years ago, when the NCC still could claim to speak for America’s Protestant majority and was a serious player in the arenas of civil rights and foreign policy.
Today, the NCC is a shadow of its former self. Fewer than one third of America’s church members belong to NCC denominations, whose flagship churches (United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians) have suffered steep decline. And even among its own claimed constituency, the NCC bureaucracy is largely irrelevant. Mainline (or oldline) Protestants continue to vote and express their faith in ways very much at odds with their denominational representatives in the NCC.
So why the enhanced Catholic cooperation with an NCC that often lacks respect even among its secular left friends? Why is the USCC not instead seeking common ground with more robust Christian bodies such as the Southern Baptist Convention (America’s largest Protestant group), the National Association of Evangelicals, or the Pentecostal community? Why little to no cooperation with groups such as Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Family Research Council, or even the Christian Coalition? These groups are closer to Catholic teaching on moral and cultural issues, and they flex more political muscle than the NCC of today.
The answer would seem to be that the USCC staff prefers the left-leaning economic and foreign policy views of the NCC to the social and theological conservatism of the Christian Right. USCC personnel are supposed to represent America’s nearly 400 active and retired Catholic bishops. Not content with the already liberal-leaning statements by their bishops on disarmament, health care, and welfare, the staff has employed ecumenical cooperation with the NCC to justify policies even further to the left.
Meanwhile, social issues involving abortion, homosexuality, and pornography are often downplayed by the USCC so as not to disrupt its relations with the NCC. As Michael Warner writes in Changing Witness: Catholic Bishops and Public Policy 1917–1994, many on the USCC staff despair of winning the struggle against abortion and feel that it is a needless obstacle to ecumenical cooperation.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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