Shrinking the Bishop's Conference
by Russell Shaw - December 4, 2006
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
When 250 or so American bishops travel to Baltimore in mid-November for a sentimental journey into the Catholic past, they may find more comfort in looking back than looking ahead. But look ahead they must. Their national organization, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), has come to a historic turning point.
Since the USCCB has its headquarters in Washington, D.C., the usual site of the hierarchy's fall general assemblies is a pricey, dismal hotel at the foot of Capitol Hill. The Baltimore convocation will be a one-time special event celebrating the renovation and reopening of the city's Basilica of the Assumption. Completed in 1818, it's the work of British-born architect Benjamin Latrobe, who also designed the U.S. Capitol and other notable buildings.
This will be a time of ritual and rhetoric. There may be self-celebrating talk about the achievements of the American hierarchy. And in fact the bishops may need some such shoring up to see them through the business portions of their November 13–16 meeting, where the principal agenda item will be the unavoidably distressing process of shrinking the bishops' conference in program, budget, and staff.
By a notable coincidence of timing, the shrinking coincides exactly with the tenth anniversary of the death of the man who more than anyone shaped the episcopal conference in its now indisputably overextended form—Joseph Cardinal Bernardin.
Born in 1928 in Columbia, South Carolina, to Italian immigrant parents, Joseph Bernardin was a 40-year-old auxiliary bishop of Atlanta in 1968 when he was selected as general secretary of the new National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference (the NCCB/USCC became today's USCCB more than a decade ago). He held the position until 1972, then became archbishop of Cincinnati. From 1982 until his death from pancreatic cancer on November 14, 1996, he was archbishop of Chicago.
At various times he also served as president of the bishops' organization and chairman of some of its most important committees. A man with a genius for consensus, he combined collegial manner with political shrewdness to dominate the NCCB/USCC in the years after the Second Vatican Council, molding it into a high-profile, frequently controversial body.
Predictably, though, the structure Cardinal Bernardin built eventually started showing signs of age. Lately the bishops' conference has been battered by fallout from the crisis of clergy sex abuse. Growing financial problems make it clear that something will have to give.
