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In asserting control over doctrine and discipline, John Paul's Vatican often runs up against a striving toward more freedom for local and national expressions of Catholicism. In Africa's churches, problems involving the inculturation of Christianity range from the kind of dancing and drumming to permit during Mass to ways of dealing with polygamy. If Vatican officials have trouble with Latin America, says Simon E. Smith, an American Jesuit missionary, "they will be infinitely less able to understand and accept the developments under way in Africa." He warns, "Excessive interference in legitimate and responsible inculturation projects could provoke schism." For the most part, Rome so far has gingerly handled the young African churches, whose growth rate is among the fastest in the world.
In the U.S., progressive Catholics tend to talk about disagreements with Rome in terms of their own democratic culture. They demand civil rights within the church, often sounding like "Don't Tread on Me" revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the rule of Europe. Says Sister Monica Asman (known as "the mosquito nun" because she teaches entomology at the University of California at Berkeley): "In Rome they don't understand us as Americans, that we have democratic roots." The untitled leader of the U.S. hierarchy, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, handles the question of national vs. universal Catholicism rather cautiously: "I think the American experience is very important and that the church can learn from us--and we can learn from the rest of the church too."
A difficult challenge to Rome on the autonomy issue has arisen in The Netherlands, which John Paul will visit next May. For many years the bishops there followed a live-and-let-live policy, as activists in the parishes tested liturgical novelties, ignored Vatican dictates on matters like interfaith communion and called for married priests. A close adviser to John Paul calls it "our worst-case scenario in Western Europe. A whole generation has been lost there." But there has been a recent slowdown in dissent, he thinks, and the Pope's activism is the reason. Meanwhile, the Pope has appointed several conservative bishops who have called a halt to much of the experimentation. One result of the clampdown, however, is that large numbers of liberal Dutch Catholics are so discouraged that they do not bother to deal with the official church any more, much less attack it. An influential progressive, Ton Crijnen of the Catholic weekly De Tijd, says, "Young people are turning away from the Catholic Church in huge numbers. The church has split down to its foundation."
Since Vatican II, national bishops' conferences have gained considerable power, coming to share the role of mediation and communication with Rome that was formerly played exclusively by the Vatican's diplomats. Some U.S. bishops are privately wary of the accumulating power of the hierarchy's national agencies, while liberals say that Vatican officials prefer to deal with individual bishops, rather than with a more powerful national phalanx.