A Still and Quiet Conscience: The Archbishop Who Challenged a Pope, a President, and a Church by John A. McCoy (review)

In 1978 John Paul II became Pope and three years later Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was appointed to lead the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith. Over the next few years, they worked together to strengthen the Vatican’s authority over local churches and Catholic theology across the world. In the United States, Roman-oriented bishops were appointed to major sees and steps were taken to reduce the role of the national conference of bishops. Individual bishops dealing with dissidents at home and groups of bishops making ad limina visits to Rome found that the Holy Father and Cardinal Ratzinger were ready to take complaints seriously and believed that each of them was directly responsible on even the smallest matters to the Holy See. They made that clear by launching formal investigations of the Archbishop of Seattle and the Bishop of Richmond, Virginia.

In 1962 Raymond G. Hunthausen, a priest of the Diocese of Helena, Montana, was appointed Bishop of Helena, becoming at 41 the youngest U.S. bishop to attend the first session of the Second Vatican Council. As a priest he was a moderately conservative pastor, coach, and college president, a warm hearted churchman committed to all the taken-for-granted teachings and practices of the church. Like many other American bishops, he experienced the Council as a genuine conversion: “the Council turned my head around,” he said. Returning home he set out to implement the conciliar vision of a more collegial church marked by community, conscience, ecumenical dialogue, and social engagement. He worked closely with his priests, religious, and lay leaders and was, in short, a Vatican II bishop. The only unusual mark of his leadership was his lifelong, modestly but publicly expressed opposition to nuclear weapons. In the 1980s he even announced he would withhold a portion of his taxes to protest the arms race.

Hunthausen was genuinely surprised when in 1975 he was appointed Archbishop of Seattle. There his simplicity, modesty, and willingness to collaborate with priests, religious, and laity marked a change from the top-down leadership of his predecessor. He was popular but in Seattle as elsewhere small, organized groups contacted Rome about some of the liturgical, pastoral, and personnel changes that took place. Most controversial now was Hunthausen’s commitment to nuclear pacifism at a time when the administration of President Ronald Reagan pursued the Cold War arms race with renewed vigor. He was hardly alone as more than 100 bishops joined Pax Christi, the Catholic peace organization, and the Bishops’ Conference published an extraordinary pastoral letter on nuclear weapons in 1983.

In that year, the Archbishop was informed that the Vatican was sending an Apostolic Visitor, Washington Archbishop James Hickey, to investigate complaints about his leadership. The agenda of issues seemed remarkably trivial – improper liturgical bread, first communion before first penance, laxity in dealing with marriage cases, allowing former priests to serve in non-liturgical ministries and, in one case, allowing the wife of a former priest to continue working in Catholic education. The action that seemed most to arouse Rome was allowing Dignity, an organization of Catholic homosexuals, to join celebrations of Mass at the local cathedral. Hunthausen had spoken out in defense of gay people and had suggested the possibility of the ordination of women and married men, but Hickey was well aware that he was a churchman and by no means a dissident.

Hunthausen was never allowed to read the Visitor’s Report but Rome decided to send him an auxiliary bishop, Donald Wuerl, who would take control of five areas the Vatican determined to be problematic. After extended negotiation, Hunthausen accepted on the understanding that Wuerl would oversee those areas but he as archbishop would have final authority. Wuerl apparently was told that he would have final responsibility, so tensions developed although both bishops tried to make the awkward arrangement...