The Bishops’ Meeting – Point By Point (Part III)

The Bishops’ Meeting — Point By Point

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
December 12, 1974

Part III

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Tuesday afternoon was almost fully taken up, once again, with debate on capital punishment. Despite minor revisions, the Bishops were still not satisfied with the seven-page statement which they were supposed to promulgate on this subject. (The first drafts of the statement had been written, by the way, by Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw.) As the debate drew to a close, Cardinal Krol ruled that a seven-page document was too long to be considered a “resolution,” and hence would require a two-thirds vote. Thereupon the statement was decisively rejected — 119 opposed to 103 in favor.
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The Bishops’ Meeting – Point By Point (Part II)

The Bishops’ Meeting — Point By Point

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
December 5, 1974

Part II (Continued from last week)

WASHINGTON. D.C. – Monday afternoon. Nov. 18th, was devoted to departmental reports from the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC), which is the civil corporation and social action arm of the U.S. Bishops. The most important of these reports was from the Education Department, presented by Archbishop William D. Borders of Baltimore. Borders is chairman of the Bishops’ committee which is supposed to oversee the operation of the Department, but very little overseeing, in any useful sense of the word, has been done for some years. Borders is the hand-picked successor in this job of Auxiliary Bishop William McManus of Chicago, a man who achieved national notoriety in 1971 by publicly identifying himself with the bitter resentment of the USCC educationalists against the General Catechetical Directory issued by Rome.

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The Bishops’ Meeting – Point By Point

The Bishops’ Meeting — Point By Point

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
November 28, 1974

WASHINGTON, D.C. — John Cardinal Krol gave his final address as president of the NCCB on Monday morning, Nov. 18th, with a rather olympian air. He would not fall in, he said, with the “prophets of gloom” because, “from its founding, the Church has undergone the severity of trials, has endured a fury of internal disorders, and has survived violent oppression and persecution. But the Church, ever beset, ever ailing, ever weakened by dissension and defection, ever exhausted and expiring, continues to survive and increase in vigor and in numbers.” In other words, despite appearances, the Church is immortal — a thing of which one likes to remind oneself precisely when the appearances are sorry indeed.

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