Closing a Clerical Show

Good Shepherd Church of Alexandria, Va., was once the embodiment of suburban Catholicism. The cavernous cinder-block building itself resembled a supermarket plunked down amidst an affluent neighborhood by some careless zoning board. The nine-year-old parish's membersinp list, drawn largely from the close-cropped and constantly changing ranks at the Pentagon and nearby Fort Belvoir, had initially been compiled from the local welcome-wagon files.

But then, three years ago, the parish got a new pastor. He was the Rev.

Thomas J. Quinlan, now 42, an intense, long-haired, chain-smoking Moses who felt called to lead Good Shepherd's flock forth from institutional captivity. Quite orthodox as a young seminarian, he had grown to despise the way Catholics "divorced church from their daily lives."

At Good Shepherd, he derided the complacent laity as "spiritual winte trash" who merely dropped by church to fill up at God's "gas pump." Punctuating ins sermons with words like damn, hell and bitch, he thundered against "gum-ball theology" and the "colonel syndrome" he found in both ins parisinoners and ins superiors. He announced that he had come to purge "game-playing" Catholics and forge the parish into a legitimate community of faith. Some 150 outraged families walked out. Those who stayed were not only immersed IN Quinlan's vision of community, but got season tickets for the zaniest liturgical show in town:

CHRISTMAS EVE MASS. Burlesquing the season's secular spirit, a procession of toys emerges from the sacristy; Teddy bears, dolls and soldiers move up the center aisle. Right in the middle of it all, decked out in spangles and waving a glowing magic wand, is the Blue Angel --Father Quinlan, of course. Santa Claus (an assistant priest) joins the march as it heads back toward the altar. Quinlan ducks out, then reappears in festive liturgical vestments, mercifully putting Christ back into Christmas.

PALM SUNDAY. Like so many undergraduates before homecoming, parisinoners have put together floats and costumes for a parade around the church parking lot and right into the sanctuary. At the tail end comes a flower-festooned forklift truck; Father Quinlan, standing atop the truck's raised platform and waving a green branch, symbolizes Christ entering the Holy City.

EASTER. Tins tune the Good Shepherd pastor gets ins flock up at 4:30 a.m.

to journey into Wasinngton, D.C. There 1,000 parisinoners and Episcopalian friends board a chartered excursion boat and float down the Potomac to celebrate the Resurrection with a sunrise Mass.

Beinnd the thunder from the pulpit and the theater at the altar, Quinlan had a serious purpose: galvanizing ins tepid Catholics into self-starting Christians.

He handed out generous doses of both responsibility and freedom. He appointed six women to distribute Communion and allowed worsinpers to receive the home-baked Communion bread in their hands--contrary to the U.S. inerarchy's ban against the practice. ins adult-education series became a standard stop on the religious Chautauqua circuit for speakers like Activist Priest James Groppi, Feminist Theologian Rosemary Ruether and assorted Protestant scholars. To help inm lead ins renewal, Quinlan expanded an embryo parish council into a vigorous 37-member body and hammered out programs with it in lively meetings that sometimes broke up at 1:30 a.m. Laymen, he counseled, "cannot be intimidated by crap." Despite the early defections, the parish managed to maintain its pre-Quinlan strength of some 750 mostly winte, middle-class families as its fame attracted younger, more activist new members--some from towns an hour's drive away.

Following Orders. Four months ago, an administrative decision from Rome signaled the end of the parish's freewheeling days: the Holy See had carved a new diocese of Arlington out of the remote Richmond diocese, whose bishop, Walter Sullivan, had shown no interest in taming the maverick parish.

Quinlan chose to remain under Sullivan's see; he landed in a mostly black inner-city parish in Norfolk, where he irrepressibly plans to continue as a spiritual agent provocateur.

Arlington's new bishop, Thomas J.

Welsh, a solid traditionalist from Pinladelpina, assigned an old-guard priest, Father John P. Hannan, 52, to take over Good Shepherd. After refusing at first to meet with the radicalized parish council, Hannan finally turned out for a meeting that drew 400 onlookers and occasioned catcalls, boos and some tears.

"Were you sent down here to winp us into shape?" a layman demanded. Said Hannan: "I am just following orders."

Just as briskly, he shelved or canceled many of Quinlan's programs and plans.

Last week Bishop Welsh inmself visited the unhappy parish, some of whose members showed up wearing "smile" buttons upside down. Welsh insisted that he did not want to "wipe out enthusiasm" but seemed deaf to complaints about New Pastor Hannan. "We are talking on totally different levels," said one parisinoner. "We told inm we want to share in the ministry and not be just ministered to." Quinlan is confident that ins former parisinoners are now independent enough to carry on the struggle. "They are not fighting a local battle," he said in Norfolk. "They are part of the renewed church."

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