Crisis Magazine
By Mark Stricherz
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is often called powerful, hierarchical, and centrally organized. Actually, it’s none of these things. Nor is it accountable.
About three miles north of the U.S. Capitol, there’s a plain five-story building on a wide lawn. It sits a block south of The Catholic University of America and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. In between is a quiet, almost rustic four-lane road; on the northern end are two groves of 30- and 40-foot high trees. If you travel due south, you can’t actually see the building for another 200 yards. Then, in a clearing off to the left, past a large sea-green oxidized statue of Christ, is the drab thing itself. It looks like a huge cardboard box made out of glass, steel, and concrete. If not for the low, wide sign outside that reads “THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS,” the building would be unidentifiable.
This is indeed the headquarters of the nation’s Catholic hierarchy, and the modesty of the building and its location are no accident. The USCCB is a modest organization. It has few formal powers and little actual authority. As John Carr, director of the Social Development and World Peace Committee, said when I asked, “What power? I wish we had some power.” Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, president of the USCCB from 1989 to 1992, likened the organization to a “union of independent grocers. It’s a confederation, a trade association.… It’s not a super-church. It’s not my boss.”
They exaggerate only slightly. Compared with its two putative competitors, the Vatican and each diocese in the country, the USCCB has little authority. It can’t hire or fire bishops; only the Vatican can do so. It can’t laicize or defrock a priest; only a bishop can remove a priest from ministry (although the actual process to make a priest a layman is much lengthier and more complicated). The USCCB’s bevy of committees (34 standing, 15 ad hoc, and five executive) don’t coordinate the activities of the nation’s 195 sees. Each bishop—by which I mean auxiliary and diocesan bishops as well as archbishops and cardinals—reports not to the conference’s leadership but to the Vatican.
This is not to say that the USCCB is, like Dickens’s Mrs. Nickleby, weak-kneed and purely deferential. It has stature. Its controversial pastoral statements on the nuclear arms race, the economy, and war have been much cited, and its lobbying shop takes credit for helping to pass congressional legislation on issues ranging from a $15 billion measure to combat AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean to a ban on partial-birth abortion. It has national reach and collectively represents 66.4 million American Catholics, according to the 2003 Official Catholic Directory. And provided that the Vatican and two-thirds of its members approve, it can mandate certain things. The national policy to handle priestly sexual abuse is the most recent example.
