Vatican Scolds U.S. Catholics

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican, preparing for Pope John Paul II’s trip to the United States next week, said Friday that Roman Catholic Americans cannot “tailor one’s church to one’s own desires.”

A high Vatican official told a news conference that a key problem the Pope will tackle during his Sept. 10-19 visit to nine U.S. cities is the growing number of American Catholics who believe that it is not necessary to abide by all church teachings.

Archbishop Jan Schotte, the Belgian secretary general of the World Synod of Bishops, delivered an unusually blunt statement to U.S. Catholics only six days before the start of the trip.

In the United States, as in other Western countries, there is “an increased secularism and materialism,” Schotte said.

“There is also an increasing but gratuitous assumption that one can tailor one’s church to one’s own desires and turn it into a pick-and-choose church where it is accepted that being Catholic has little to do with adhering to all the church’s teachings,” he said.