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Kelly left Providence to "go fishing." Reaction to his resignation ranged from the pro forma regrets of his conservative superior, Providence Bishop Russell J. McVinney, to the declaration of the 100-member Rhode Island Association of Laity that McVinney had "contributed" to the resignation by being "unresponsive to direct communication." In the Vatican, a high official described Kelly's move as the expectable act of an "extremely emotional" liberal impatient with a hierarchy of "instinctive conservatives." For 23 young priests in the diocese, however, the resignation was "an act of prophecy showing us that we as a church are out of tune with the needs of God's people." The housekeeper at St. Joseph's rectory, not a Catholic, put it in more personal terms. She said: "It's like there was a death."
The day after Kelly's resignation, U.S. bishops found themselves under attack from another source: the independent Association of Chicago Priests voted 144 to 126 to censure John Cardinal Cody and his five auxiliary bishops for failing to present and defend priestly concerns at the Detroit meeting. The resolution assailed the bishops for not even discussing in open meetings the results of a much-heralded consultation of clergy and laity held in the Chicago archdiocese last winter. The association also passed resolutions charging that the four episcopal delegates to next fall's Synod in Rome were "unwilling to represent the diversity of opinion" among U.S. priests and called for their resignations from the delegation.
One of the Chicago auxiliaries, Bishop Thomas J. Grady, expressed the "hurt and pain" that the bishops felt over the censure but pledged that there would be "no answering hurt for hurt." Other critics argued that the A.C.P. is not representative: the association includes only 900 of Chicago's 2,400 priests, to be sure, but many of the nonmembers are in religious orders that are not directly under Cody's authority. Some 300 priests showed up at the meeting last week to vote. Whatever the numbers involved, the action was nonetheless an audacious first of its kind in the history of U.S. Catholicism, a fact that did not escape a Vatican prelate who labeled it "incipient guerrilla warfare against the hierarchy."