Checking Up on "Dutch"

On a cloudy morning last January, the grieving couple arrived at St. Michael's Church in Olympia, Wash., to bury their only son. He had died at 37, leaving a wife and two young children. The parents' first anxiety developed even before the funeral Mass began: many of the worshipers entered the nave with cries of joy, and the celebrant, Father Paul Dalton, was clad in festive mod vestments. The rite began like a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, as worshipers were urged to introduce themselves. In his homily, Dalton reported that as the husband lay dying, it was the wife, not the priest, who anointed him with sacramental oil. At the Communion, both Catholics and non-Catholics went forward to receive the consecrated bread and wine.

Worse was to follow. A dancer appeared and glided through the sanctuary; then came a clown, carrying balloons, who began skipping around the coffin chanting, "Today my brother and sister are dancing together in heaven." The mother, already deeply offended and in tears, only later realized that the clown's voice was that of her own daughter. After the daughter tied the balloons to the coffin, pallbearers in work shirts carried the coffin to the dead man's Chevrolet pickup truck.

Since the Most Rev. Raymond ("Dutch") Hunthausen became Archbishop of Seattle in 1975, his flock of 287,000 has become accustomed to such unusual rituals. The Vatican has been inundated with complaints from conservative parishioners, including one from the parents of the man whose coffin was decorated with balloons. Three weeks ago, Pope John Paul dispatched Archbishop James Hickey of Washington, D.C., on an extraordinary "apostolic visitation" to probe what Hunthausen has wrought.

A native of Montana, the energetic, soft-spoken Hunthausen, 62, is known as the "peace Archbishop." He preaches unilateral disarmament, refuses to pay half of his income tax as a protest against Pentagon spending, and has denounced the local nuclear submarine base as the "Auschwitz of Puget Sound." During his week-long visitation, Hickey said he was not concerned with political issues but only with hearing out priests, nuns and parishioners, and among the 60 Washingtonians he spoke to there was no shortage of praise for Hunthausen; 252 of the 280 priests in the archdiocese signed a petition of support. "A lot of us see the Archbishop as a symbol of unconditional love here," said Pat Cervenka, a Catholic housewife who went to the airport to hand Hickey her own pro-Hunthausen letter. "The culture in the U.S. is different from Rome."

Critics claim that Hunthausen's pastoral solicitude runs only in a leftward direction. One witness, Father Paul Auer, was forced into retirement at age 59 and has petitioned Rome for reinstatement. "The Archbishop said I was unfit to be a pastor in this post-Vatican II age," he told TIME Correspondent Joseph Kane. He said he was upset by "liberal theologians who come here with the idea of remaking the church, always in the spirit of Vatican II," and he railed against such practices as entertainment in church, which in his view turns the Mass into "just a meal."

Jesuit Father William Sullivan, president of Seattle University, sees the archdiocese as a paradigm of a nationwide tension between liberals and conservatives. On one side are people like Hunthausen, "a man of Vatican II" who favors the "democratic mentality." On the other stands "the older notion of top-down authority" reinforced by the Pope.

Last week Hickey was being discreet on what he would recommend to Rome. Said he: "It wasn't easy, you know." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.