Author: Richard Wagner

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Tony Flannery: ‘I’ve no doubt that the Vatican has nothing to do with God’

The dissident priest reveals why he voted ‘yes’ to repeal and why he considers the exclusion of women the ‘biggest blight’ on the 
Catholic Church

Fr Tony Flannery pictured at Ahane, near Newport, Co Tipperary.

By Ellen Coyne

Fr Tony Flannery started laughing as soon as he read what he was expected to sign.

The outspoken priest, who was suspended by the Vatican in 2012, received a letter in September that suggested he could return to ministry if he signed a document vowing to obey the church’s teaching on women and LGBT+ people.

He had been effectively banned for publicly saying the church should change its position on such issues. “What kind of crazy people are they?” he laughed. Fr Flannery and others had hoped that Pope Francis had ushered in a more open era for the Catholic Church, but the Vatican still takes a hard line with those who challenge it.

Fr Flannery is aware of others who had taken on the Vatican and had died “because of the stress of the thing”.

“I’ve said to myself, the one thing I have to avoid is becoming embittered. Because if I become embittered I will destroy myself,” he says. “There are a lot of people in the church who think like me. Why don’t they go public? Some of them would be afraid, yes.”

The 72-year-old has taken advantage of his position in the pews, rather than at the altar, to write a new book called From the Outside: Rethinking Church Doctrine. It calls for sweeping reform of the Catholic Church, including its attitudes to women and sexuality.

“The church is so locked into old doctrines and old ideas, even though the world has completely moved on and left all of that behind,” he says.

He has little faith in those who are at the top of the church at the moment, and says the Vatican is full of “pathetic” careerism. The Irish Catholic bishops don’t inspire him either, and he notes that Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was the only senior Irish cleric to publicly welcome Pope Francis’s recent comments condoning civil partnerships for same-sex couples.

Huge leap

“What Pope Francis said was that homosexual people are human beings, who are as entitled to love and relationships as anyone else and should be respected as such. That is a huge leap forward. Church teaching is still very reliant on the old, awful discrimination against gay people.”

Fr Flannery was a founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, and at the height of the clerical child sex abuse scandal found himself bombarded with requests for help from accused clergy.

As a child, he was a victim of sexual abuse himself. He recoils at the word “survivor”, because he does not believe that his experience of abuse has had a devastating effect on his life.

In 2014, he upset survivors of institutional abuse and advocacy groups when he suggested that priests accused of child abuse should be forgiven and allowed to return to the ministry. He still believes, and argues in his book, that child abusers are not entirely bad people, and claims that they deserve forgiveness.

“The idea that the person who abuses a child is inherently a bad person, I don’t go along with that. I think that we are all inherently a mixture of good and bad,” he says.

I ask if he is aware this is a very upsetting thing to say? First of all, because of the possible perception that those within the church are once again shielding paedophiles from the consequences of their actions, and secondly because many people see child sex abuse as an evil thing that they could not possibly forgive. “There is an element of evil to child sex abuse, it is an awfully evil thing,” he agrees. “But I’d be fully aware that what I’m saying is not in line with the popular consensus, but that’s what has me where I am.”

Fr Flannery tries to broach the thorny issue of the incidence of paedophilia among Catholic clergy. He explains that making priests “superior” people with closer relationships to God is “dreadfully dangerous”. He believes that this, combined with forced celibacy and the church’s regressive attitudes to sexuality, can manifest itself in abusive behaviour.

But isn’t that also a deeply controversial thing to say? Not least because it suggests that anyone could be capable of the monstrosity of child abuse if they existed in certain circumstances. It also appears to lay the blame for abuse on the institution rather than the individual carrying it out.

“It is, I know,” he says. “And I’ve dealt with that many times over the last 10 years. I’d be fully aware of that. But that is the truth as I see it.”

For most of the last decade, he has been attacked by right-wing Catholic commentators.

He says it’s “probably true” that groups such as the Iona Institute have put people off Catholicism. He singles out the American Catholic Church for its “appalling” support of Donald Trump.

A number of prominent US Catholics chose to back Trump over Joe Biden, a devout Catholic, because the Republican candidate claimed to be anti-abortion while the Democrat supports pro-choice policies.

“Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict put the most right-wing, narrow-minded and reactionary people into office in the church in the United States,” Fr Flannery says.

“Abortion is a single issue, and life is much more complicated than that. The ironic thing is that Trump was doing feck all about abortion. He couldn’t care less about abortion.”

Fr Flannery said that he finds the issue of abortion “very, very difficult” but after much internal wrangling voted ‘yes‘ in the 2018 referendum — the most difficult vote of his life.

“I don’t have any connection with the emotion and the distress and everything else of pregnancy, the whole world is foreign to me. Here I would be again, another male celibate priest, telling women how they should live their lives. And I said, we’ve had more than enough of that,” he says.

The banned priest says that the more he has thought about it, the more convinced he is that the church’s attitudes to and exclusion of women has been a “biggest blight” on the institution since the beginning.

“It has to change, and it will change,” he said, dismissing attempts by Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict to shut down discussion on the issue as a “total failure”.

Even the current pope, who Fr Flannery refers to sympathetically as “poor aul’ Francis” for his uphill struggle for reform, has disappointed him.

“Some of the things he says about women are so patronising. Oh God, I go mad at times,” he says.

Fr Flannery’s arguments for church reform are clear and unapologetic.

But was there ever any fleeting doubt? Did he ever worry that the Vatican might be right, and that God might disapprove of what he was calling for?

“No,” he said, firmly. “I’d have no doubt that the Vatican and the way it operates has nothing to do with God.”

Much like Mary McAleese, Fr Flannery’s calls for the Catholic Church to be better have been regularly met with derision from some right-wing Catholics and the suggestion that he should “go off and become a Protestant”.

Well, why wouldn’t he? Surely after everything he’s been through with the Vatican, he must have considered it, even briefly?

“Arah, no,” he says. “Catholicism is part of what I am and has been all my life. I couldn’t even conceive of it.”

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The Catholic Sex Abuse Crisis Is Far From Over

What can we learn about needed reforms from the Vatican’s damning report on the defrocked cardinal Theodore McCarrick?

By Elizabeth Bruenig

After the Catholic sex abuse crisis exploded into headlines in 2002, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops promulgated standards that would guide the American church’s efforts to protect children. In May 2002, the editorial board of USA Today met with an American bishop who would play an important role in shaping the new regulations.

“We haven’t been focused on the Lord; I’m trying to do that,” he told them. “As I see the bishops losing credibility in many areas, I want to try to be as good a bishop as I can be. I’ve got a long way to go.” It now seems that bishop, Theodore McCarrick, had further to go than it seemed.

But the report the Vatican released Tuesday on Mr. McCarrick’s history of sexual misconduct before he was removed from the College of Cardinals and defrocked in 2019 sheds harsh light on the church’s unfinished response to the sex abuse crisis. It indicates policy weaknesses and dangerous habits that must be corrected so figures like Mr. McCarrick cannot again wreak havoc on future generations of Catholics.

Mr. McCarrick’s own history of abuse underscores the gaps left by the standards he helped craft in 2002.

While the charter improved the church’s policies on sex abuse prevention and its management of allegations, it was directed specifically at shielding children and youths from the predations of priests. As Mr. McCarrick’s exploits show, it isn’t just children who are at risk of sexual exploitation in the church.

While Mr. McCarrick did sexually abuse children, some of the more egregious of his offenses were committed against adults, namely seminarians he met during his tenure as a bishop in New Jersey. In the report, it is clear that his peers and superiors were convinced his case wasn’t particularly urgent because Mr. McCarrick preyed mostly on adults.

There appears to be confusion among prelates throughout the document as to whether what had transpired between Mr. McCarrick and these seminarians ought to be seen as consensual sexual activity between adults — which would be a sin and an error, by the church’s count, though not necessarily a career-ending disgrace — or as something much more insidious and abusive.

Pope Francis has since expanded the church’s definition of “vulnerable adults” from those without the mental or physical capacity to resist sexual advances to include those who have “some deprivation of personal freedom,” which could include seminarians and junior priests who rely on their bishops for ordination, promotion and favorable appointments.

Yet even that definition can be easily misconstrued. The Vatican ought to clarify that any sexual contact suggested or initiated by a superior in the church hierarchy involving an inferior will be met with the same rigorous reprimands — including removal from one’s post and possibly laicization — as similar offenses committed against children. Likewise, priests, seminarians and other adult victims of clergy sex abuse need reliable ways to report misconduct with transparent accountability and no threat of retaliation.

The church is also due for a slew of cultural reforms. According to the report, Mr. McCarrick was able to coerce seminarians into bed with him by creating an atmosphere of fearful cooperation at Seton Hall’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology. I have heard many similar, recent accounts from seminarians across the country, involving a number of clergy members. Sexual abuse in Catholic seminaries has been well known since at least 1983, when the author Paul Hendrickson published “Seminary: A Search,” detailing his own experiences. The Catholic seminary system is long overdue for a thorough, independent investigation into these disturbing patterns.

As a character study of Mr. McCarrick, the report offers another important area for review: the spiritual formation of its clergymen. Mr. McCarrick’s sexual behavior seemed at times juvenile, arrested; he clearly felt lonely and longed for intimacy and was unable to find a licit way to channel those emotions. If policies regarding the Catholic clergy and sex aren’t going to change, then something must, and it’s reasonable to begin with the way those considering holy orders are taught about the nature and goodness of sex.

Then there is the problem of bishops. While America’s bishops have vowed to hold themselves accountable for sexual abuses via a hotline for tips and procedures for investigation of bishops by senior bishops, those policies allow for no oversight from laypeople. But lay participation in accountability processes is crucial, because laypeople provide a perspective less entwined with the interests of the church hierarchy, and because trust and transparency are sorely lacking in the church.

Tuesday’s report is, I suspect, as remarkably unflinching as it is precisely because it was written by a layperson, the American lawyer Jeff Lena, who was given vast investigative power by the church. It should be seen as a model for accountability processes for bishops and other senior church officials going forward.

The church stands at a crossroads. It can continue to fight legislation that would empower victims to seek redress and respond to abuse long after the fact, such as the suspension of statutes of limitation in sex abuse cases. Or it can confess the way it asks us to confess, and repent the way it asks us to repent: Fully, openly, over and over again, as often as it takes, as painful as it is.

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Paul Shanley, Ex-Priest in Child Sex-Abuse Scandal, Dies at 89

A former counselor for gay and troubled youths, he became a sexual predator and a central figure in a crisis that engulfed the Boston Archdiocese.

Paul R. Shanley being led away in 2005 in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, Mass., after a judge sentenced him to 12 to 15 years in prison for raping a boy in 1983.

Paul R. Shanley, a former priest who figured prominently in the child sexual abuse scandal in Boston in the early 2000s that rocked the Roman Catholic Church, has died at 89.

The police in Ware, a town in west-central Massachusetts where Mr. Shanley had lived since his release from prison in 2017, confirmed his death on Friday. WFXT-TV, Boston’s Fox News affiliate, said he died of heart failure on Oct. 28.

Mr. Shanley became well known in Boston and beyond in the 1960s and ’70s as an admired “street priest,” counseling gay and troubled youths. The journalist J. Anthony Lukas mentioned him in “Common Ground,’’ his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Boston.

But in 2004 the Vatican defrocked him after dozens of men came forward and reported that he had sexually abused them. In 2005, he was convicted of raping a 6-year-old boy in 1983 at a suburban church where he had been pastor. He was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison.

His release in 2017 set off a firestorm of protest by some of his victims and their families.

The clergy sex-abuse scandal exploded in Boston in 2002 after The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation team revealed that for decades dozens of priests, including Mr. Shanley, had molested and raped children while church supervisors covered up the crimes and shuffled the priests from parish to parish. (A 2015 movie based on the investigation, “Spotlight,” won the Academy Award for best picture.)

Internal church records that were made public during the scandal indicated that Mr. Shanley had attended a forum with others who later formed the North American Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA, a pedophile advocacy organization.

In a long article about him as the scandal unfolded in 2002, The New York Times wrote: “Interviews with Father Shanley’s accusers, his relatives and people who worked with him, as well as an examination of thousands of pages of court papers and his previously undisclosed private writings, portray a man split in two: part protector, part predator, with the church central to both roles, providing both his mission and his cover.”

A police chief who was involved in his arrest called him simply “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Paul Richard Shanley was born in 1931 in Boston in Dorchester, at the time a heavily Irish-American, working-class section of the city. His father owned a bowling alley and pool room. His mother was a legal secretary. While in high school, Paul Shanley worked as a camp counselor. He later maintained that as a 12-year-old he had been molested by a priest.

He attended St. John’s Seminary in Boston and was ordained a priest in 1960.

The Archdiocese of Boston, the fourth-largest in the United States, with more than 1.8 million Catholics, has called Mr. Shanley’s crimes against children “reprehensible.”

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Popes knew of allegations against ex-Cardinal McCarrick years ago, report finds

McCarrick, one of the most prominent figures in the U.S. Catholic Church before his fall from power, was expelled from the priesthood in 2019.

In this Nov. 14, 2011, file photo, then Cardinal Theodore McCarrick prays during the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual fall assembly in Baltimore. A lawyer says the key accuser in the sex abuse case against ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has met with New York City prosecutors, evidence that the scandal that has convulsed the papacy is now part of the broader U.S. law enforcement investigation into sex abuse and cover-up in the Catholic Church.

By Claudio Lavanga, Deborah Lubov and Adela Suliman

Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II were aware of sexual misconduct allegations against American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whom the Vatican later defrocked after investigating the claims, but they did not halt the powerful cleric’s rise through the church, according to a report released Tuesday.

McCarrick, one of the most prominent figures in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church before his fall from power, was expelled from the priesthood in 2019 after a Vatican investigation.

The 449-page Vatican report released Tuesday outlines how the two popes, as well as senior U.S. Catholic officials, were aware of the sexual misconduct allegations, including that McCarrick shared a bed with seminarians at his New Jersey beach house and an unsuccessful attempt to restrict his role in public life in the 1990s.

The report said there was “credible evidence” that McCarrick had abused minors when he was a priest in the 1970s but that the evidence did not surface until 2017. Before then, the church was only aware of consistent rumors, the report found, with McCarrick’s denials accepted for decades.

“At the time of McCarrick’s appointment and in part because of the limited nature of the Holy See’s own prior investigations, the Holy See never received a complaint directly from a victim, whether adult or minor, about McCarrick’s misconduct,” the report said.

“For this reason, McCarrick’s supporters could plausibly characterize the allegations against him as ‘gossip’ or ‘rumors.'”

John Paul II served from 1978 until his death in 2005 and was succeeded by Benedict, who retired in 2013 and is now pope emeritus. John Paul was declared a saint in 2014 and had appointed McCarrick to the prominent post of archbishop of Washington D.C., in 2000.

The allegations against McCarrick, the highest profile church figure to have been dismissed from the priesthood in modern times, date back decades.

James Grein, one of the men whose accusations of sexual abuse resulted in McCarrick’s defrocking, has said he personally told John Paul II about the abuse during a 1988 Vatican audience.

“He blessed me, he put his hands on me, then he dismissed me,” Grein said during a news conference in August 2019 in Manhattan.

He was among hundreds of child sex abuse victims who filed lawsuits in New York under the Child Victims Act, which allows individuals to sue regardless of when the alleged acts happened. The legislation was bitterly opposed by the Catholic Church and other religious groups and blocked for years by Republicans in the state Legislature.

Grein was not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.

McCarrick, 90, who has been living in seclusion in the U.S., has previously responded publicly only to the allegations of abuse of minors, saying he had “absolutely no recollection” of them.

Against the background of the #MeToo era, tackling sexual abuses that have battered the Catholic Church’s reputation has been a major challenge for Francis, with victims demanding a crackdown on bishops accused of concealing or mismanaging cases.

According to the report, which was commissioned in 2018 and includes interviews with over 90 witnesses and details incidents and allegations of abuse, Pope Francis was given evidence of McCarrick’s misconduct only in 2017. Francis has consistently denied knowledge of McCarrick’s sexual misconduct.

Saint Peter’s Square a day before the Vatican releases its long-awaited report into disgraced ex-U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.Remo Casilli / Reuters

The report “did not examine the issue of McCarrick’s culpability. … That question has already been adjudicated,” but the report said Vatican investigators did look at “institutional knowledge” surrounding his behavior.

A former archbishop of Washington, D.C., McCarrick was familiar to U.S. political elites.

He presided over the 2009 funeral of Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., in 2009 and was present at the funeral Mass of President-elect Joe Biden’s son Beau in Delaware in 2015.

The four U.S. dioceses where McCarrick served — New York; Metuchen and Newark in New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. — also carried out separate investigations that fed into the Vatican report.

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It outlined how McCarrick seemingly managed to rise through the ranks of the church, despite accusations of alleged sexual misconduct with adult male seminarians and minors.

Cardinal-Designate Wilton Gregory of the Archdiocese of Washington called the Vatican’s report “an important, difficult and necessary document.”

“Nonetheless, we know that if true redemptive healing is ever to commence — for those who have been harmed and for the Church Herself — this disclosure must be made,” he said in a statement in response to the report on Tuesday.

McCarrick has not commented on alleged sexual misconduct with adult men or on this report.

“We publish the report with sorrow for the wounds that these events have caused to the victims, their families, the Church in the United States, and the Universal Church,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, said in a statement.

Parolin said that he and Pope Francis had viewed the testimonies of victims and that in publishing the report “the truth has been pursued.”

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Pope may support same-sex unions, but that doesn’t mean the Vatican does

Professor believes Francis sees road to lasting change as a long one

By Colleen Walsh

The disclosure this week of Pope Francis’ support of same-sex civil unions sent shockwaves through the Catholic Church and progressive and conservative circles alike. It came in a papal interview in “Francesco,” a documentary that premiered Wednesday, and represented a major break with Vatican teaching, leaving many wondering whether an official change might be coming soon. In the film Francis says, “What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered.” The Gazette spoke with Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and professor of comparative theology, about the pope’s comments and what they mean for members of the Catholic LGBTQ community. 

GAZETTE:  What was your reaction when you heard about the pope’s comments on same-sex unions?

CLOONEY: On the one hand, it’s not surprising at all, because Archbishop Bergoglio [now Pope Francis] struggled with the issue of formal marriage relationships when he was in Argentina and pointed to a compromise such as calling same-sex unions civil unions and not marriage. This debate is similar to what we went through in this country a decade or so ago. But I think Francis’ openness to same-sex unions is also more fundamentally representative of his instinct that human beings have a right to be together, a right to union, a right to family, and therefore, that it would be unjust to provide no way at all for people to live together as a couple. I think it’s his basic sense of human compassion and his openness to finding ways to help people to live the lives that they feel they must live.

On the other hand, you can’t imagine previous popes speaking in this fashion. That doesn’t mean that someone like John Paul was not a compassionate person, but they were so clearly linked to, focused on, church doctrine, and the preservation of marriage between a male and a female and, given their attitudes toward homosexuality, they simply wouldn’t speak in this fashion, whatever they may personally have felt. And I think what is new here is that Francis, as all the reports say, is in the non-authoritative context of a documentary — not sitting on the chair of Peter as pope making a proclamation ­— speaking his mind as probably most Catholics in the West would also speak their minds and say, “Well yes, some kind of way to allow people to live their lives happily and in peace is what matters.”

GAZETTE:  Does this change anything about the church’s overall doctrine?

CLOONEY: Probably not, because he hasn’t pushed it that far in terms of recognizing gay marriages. But implicitly, it’s undercutting the rhetoric that being gay is a grave disorder or that being gay and living out a gay commitment is something that God disapproves of. Francis is taking a positive attitude and therefore changing the climate, even if there are going to be Catholics who resist this greatly.

GAZETTE:  I know Bishop Thomas J. Tobin in Providence, R.I., has come out very strongly against this. Do you expect an even greater backlash from conservative and other voices in the church?

CLOONEY: Yes, but not as much as one might think. This news is based on a documentary, and it’s in keeping with things Francis has said previously. Conservative critics are not going to be surprised by this, even if they will be very annoyed by it. People who are against any compromise in this direction will see this as another sign that Francis has gone astray, that he is not adhering to church teaching. And they will add this to their list of complaints about him, even though he’s the pope and deserving of their respect. You may recall much earlier in his papacy, when people asked him about his thoughts on homosexuality, he said “Who am I to judge people in their lives?” This is Francis, and for many, this is a wonderful Francis; but for some, it’s the Francis they can’t abide, and they will continue to protest.

GAZETTE:  Can you see him pressing this forward to doctrinal change?

CLOONEY: Several years ago, when there was discussion with the pope and some of the bishops about divorced and remarried Catholics returning to Communion, Francis didn’t bite the bullet and declare that they’re welcome back to Communion if they’re in a stable second marriage. But he said that good priests, who know how to be pastoral, will know how to relate to people. It was as if to say: If a couple who are divorced and remarried comes to you, you’ll help them to find their way. My sense is that Francis is not the man as pope, particularly going on 10 years into his papacy, to be making declarations that push the church where it’s not ready to go. But rather, again, he is giving a green light, really, to priests and others involved in counseling couples to say we have to find ways to welcome Catholics as they are: Be pastoral; be like Jesus. And I think this opens the door, even though it will be controversial in some circles, to saying couples who are in a same-sex marriage are members of the parish and welcome in Catholic worshipping communities. Of course, in some dioceses, such couples will not be welcome to Communion. There will be differences in response and pastoral practice. So I think what is at stake is a kind of incremental pastoral disposition, whereby things will change, as they always have, only slowly. The pope is saying things that other popes never would have said previously. But I don’t see Francis being in the position to make any kind of daring pronouncement in the years to come about gay marriage. I wouldn’t anticipate that coming.

Frank Clooney.
“People who are against any compromise in this direction will see this as another sign that Francis has gone astray, that he is not adhering to church teaching. And they will add this to their list of complaints about him,” says Professor Francis Clooney.

GAZETTE:  Does this kind of comment potentially set the stage for another Vatican council?

CLOONEY: Well, there have certainly been calls for a coming Vatican III. I think there’s a sense that some 50 or 60 years after the last council, which opened things up, there’s a need to consolidate and catch up to where things are in the world around us now. How much has changed since 1965! Some, who still regret the way Vatican II was implemented, will also want to have a Vatican III, if not turn back the clock, rather to tighten things up under a more conservative pope. In a sense it’s like calling a constitutional convention in this country: Liberals and conservatives would see such a convention as to their advantage. But I think all this depends first of all on how long Francis is pope. He’s not said he’s going to retire, but he seems to be the kind of man who would be sensible enough to say, “If I can’t do the job, I will retire,” even if he hasn’t said that yet. So then it will also depend on who the next pope would be.

GAZETTE:  Do you have a sense of whether the church is on a more liberal trajectory in terms of selecting popes?

CLOONEY: Sometimes there’s this sense that if you’ve gone from Benedict on the more conservative side to Francis on the more liberal side, it could be that the cardinals look around and want a shift back a little the other way. And therefore, the next pope would be less likely to make any bold gestures. But again, in 1957 or 1958, nobody expected John XXIII, who was put in as an older caretaker pope, would suddenly call Vatican II. This knocked many cardinals off their seats, so to speak. It could be that such surprising things may happen fairly quickly.

All of this is analogous to how change happens in this country with Congress and the Supreme Court making decisions, sometimes behind popular opinion, sometimes against it. But remember that Francis is in a sense a pastoral incrementalist. He believes that you’ve got to change the way we Catholics, clergy, bishops, all of us think about human decency, our responsibility to members of the church, compassion, helping people in trouble. If you change people’s minds and hearts, then the church will continue to grow in new ways. Whereas if you put in something legally that is too far ahead of where people are, it could be counterproductive.

GAZETTE:  Can you talk a bit about the complexity of being the pope for a global community?

CLOONEY: It’s one thing were Pope Francis the pope only of North America and Western Europe. But everything he says will be read by Catholics in South America, which is still very Catholic in many ways, and also by Catholics in more conservative Catholic communities in Africa and Asia. So going incrementally and pastorally step by step is probably Francis’s instinct, because he knows either he would infuriate Catholics in the West by not going fast enough, or anger Catholics in other parts of the world, who would say, “This is far too fast. This is out of keeping where our culture is.” In certain African countries, homosexuality is still, I think, illegal and can be punished. So saying something about same-sex marriages will be heard in one way in certain countries in Africa, and very differently in New York or Boston or London, where the response will be quite different. I think Francis has to be looking in both directions. And his basic sense is: Change our hearts, how we think as priests and bishops, and so on, and then that will be an infusion of the whole church with a new attitude slowly arriving.

GAZETTE:  Could you see Pope Francis making other kinds of comments about women priests or priests being able to marry going forward?

CLOONEY: Many Catholics have been hoping, with each pope for the past 50 years or so, that the pope would say something to change the dynamic on married priests and women priests, but it hasn’t happened. There has been the issue of women deacons serving in ordained ministry — there’s evidence about women deacons in the early church. But Francis, thus far into his papacy, hasn’t really changed church policy even on that. But with his “who am I to judge” comments, Francis was showing that the church is like a Red Cross station on the battlefield of life, there to help people and not to sit in an ivory tower casting judgments on people. In this way he has set a tone, which is quite clear, about wanting to have an inclusive church, wanting to have a church where people are not left out because some particularities about themselves, their self-identity.

But he doesn’t seem to be the one, as more liberal Catholics would want, to say, “Let’s just ordain women deacons, period. Let’s just do it.” I think as pope, he in theory at least has the power to do that, just as Pope John Paul claimed the power for himself to stop entirely the discussion about the ordination of women, saying it’s not even to be discussed in the church anymore, period. But that didn’t work, it didn’t stop discussion. Francis could say something like that, speaking very firmly on marriage or ordination. But again, would it be wise?

You think of Supreme Court decisions in this country like Roe v. Wade, and can ask whether decisions from above are the best way to change how people think about these issues. I think Francis feels the change has to come more from leaders talking to the people, listening to the people, so that ideas and sentiments seep upward through the church, not just come down from above. So I don’t think he’s going to say anything dramatic about women in the church or married priests in the church. Remember that the bishops of the Amazon region had their annual meeting just a year ago. In their document they called for married priests, arguing that they simply didn’t have enough priests, and that people have a right to Mass and the sacraments, and that the only way to do that is to ordain married men. Francis had the prerogative of issuing the final statement, and he left out reference to that request. He didn’t condemn them and say it’s impossible, but he just didn’t follow up on it. And I don’t see evidence that he’s going to suddenly start acting more boldly at this point on issues such as marriage. A positive attitude toward civil unions may well be as far as he goes.

In terms of his recent comments, people who are in gay unions or gay marriages should therefore not be expecting that suddenly everything is going to be all right. But given Francis’ view of how things change, simply that he’s willing to say these things and air new ideas again and again is a big step forward. It’s not an authoritative pronouncement from Vatican City, per se. But it’s the slow change that moves things forward in a healthy way.

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