Catholic Common Ground

CARDINAL HUME' s Washington address, an edited version of which appears on pages 4 and 5, was to be explicitly presented as part of the "Catholic Common Ground Initiative", launched before his death by the late Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago (who also died of cancer). It was to be a plea — consistent with Cardinal Hume's whole minstry, first as abbot and then as Archbishop of Westminster — for Catholics to concentrate more on what unites them than on what divides them. But in choosing specifically to support the Common Ground Initiative, he was taking more of a risk than might at first be apparent to Catholics on this side of the Atlantic: for, ironically, Cardinal Bernardin's project became itself a rock of disunity almost as soon as it was launched.
Within hours, Cardinal Law of Boston released a public statement, distancing himself from Cardinal Bernardin's initiative and from the document which summarised his main ideas on how the American Church might overcome its divisions. "The fundamental flaw in this document," argued Cardinal Law, "is its appeal for 'dialogue' as a path to `common ground'. Dissent from revealed truth or the authoritative teaching of the Church cannot be 'dialogued away'." The following day, Cardinal Hickey of Washington pronounced that "while decrying partisanship, the statement tends to reduce authoritative Church teaching to a partisan voice in debates on neuralgic issues". The Common Ground Initiative, to Cardinal Bernardin's distress, became widely seen as an attempt to buttress an effort, in the words of one commentator, to "driving a wedge between the American Church and Rome".
In choosing to support the Common Ground Initiative, therefore, Cardinal Hume was grasping a hot potato. Cardinal Bemardin was not only a personal friend: it was entirely Humean to sympathise with Bernardin's unhappiness at a certain "mean-spiritedness" in debates between American Catholics. But he saw no future for a common ground that did not include a perception of the chair of Peter as the ultimate source of unity.
His intention was therefore to relaunch the initiative on firmer foundations. The address supports the teaching of Veritatis Splendor in its rejection of appeals to conscience which are "no more than an exercise of private judgement". He rejects, too, the notion of attenuating the Pope's central role , by seeing him as just another bishop, a primus inter pares. There are some things "to which we must hold fast", he insists, including "the primacy of the successor of Peter and fidelity to Catholic tradition and scripture". The address is a courageous attempt to bring unity to a divided Catholic community by establishing common ground not on the swamp of doctrinal relativism but on the rock on which Christ built his Universal Church. Now it is part of his legacy to us, too.