In documentary filmmaker Eric Kruszewski’s second video on the LEAD Ministry, a LGBT group within the Saint Matthew Catholic Church in Baltimore, we follow a gay couple as they take their daughter to be baptized.
“The kind of support St. Matthews has given us has been tremendous,” says one of the dads. “Tremendous in the sense of a place where can go and honor our relationship with each other. When we were going through our difficulty with adoption, it was a place we could go to cry and center ourselves spiritually.”
Twelve clerics seek open discussion of issue and say sanctions have silenced those in favour
Fr Tony Flannery is one of 12 priests who could “no longer remain silent because to do so colludes with the systemic oppression of women within the Catholic Church”.
Twelve Catholic priests have issued a joint statement calling for open discussion on the need for equality for women in the church, including where priesthood is concerned.
“Discriminating against women encourages and reinforces abuse and violence against women in many cultures and societies,” they say.
The priests, many of whom have been prominent in the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP), are Frs Tony Flannery, Eamonn McCarthy, Kevin Hegarty, Roy Donovan, Pádraig Standún, Adrian Egan, Benny Bohan, Seán McDonagh, John D Kirwin, Ned Quinn, Donagh O’Meara, and Tony Conry.
“We believe that we can no longer remain silent because to do so colludes with the systemic oppression of women within the Catholic Church. So, in the spirit of Pope Francis constant encouragement of dialogue, we are calling for free and open discussion concerning the full equality of women in all facets of church life, including all forms of ministry,” they say.
Their statement begins with a quotation from St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. ”
It notes how “in the Catholic Church women, despite being equal to men by virtue of their Baptism, are excluded from all positions of decision making, and from ordained ministry” and how “in 1994 Pope John Paul II declared that the exclusion of women from priesthood could not even be discussed in the church.”
This, they say, was reaffrimed and even strengthened by Pope Benedict who insisted “that it was definitive and that all Catholics were required to give assent to this view”.
Pope Francis “has said that Pope John Paul II had reflected at length on this matter, had declared that women could never be priests and that, therefore, no further discussion on the ordination of women to ministry is possible”.
The 12 priests say “we, the undersigned, believe that this situation is very damaging, that it alienates both women and men from the church because they are scandalised by the unwillingness of church leaders to open the debate on the role of women in our church. This alienation will continue and accelerate.”
They were “aware that there are many women who are deeply hurt and saddened by this teaching. We also believe that the example given by the church in discriminating against women encourages and reinforces abuse and violence against women in many cultures and societies.
“It is also necessary to remember that women form the bulk of the congregation at Sunday Mass and have been more active in the life of the local churches than many men.”
The “strict prohibition on discussing the question has failed to silence the majority of the Catholic faithful,” they say.
“Survey after survey indicates that a great many people are in favour of full equality for women in the church. But it has managed to silence priests and bishops, because the sanctions being imposed on those who dare to raise the question are swift and severe.”
The synod on the family was closed before having been initiated. The possibility of a serious discussion with respect to homosexual people was already eliminated in the time of its preparation, when the church was not even able to scientifically verify its own false language: today it goes on – in an ideological way – speaking about “tendencies” instead of “sexual orientation” of human people. In the preparation of the synod, Church has ridiculed and eliminated the homosexual question, deceiving the expectations of humanity for a serious and respectful discussion of the experience of humanity and the scientific knowledge related to the persons belonging to non-heterosexual minorities and their family life, their life of love.
The synod doesn’t have “laying closed hearts, which bare the closed hearts which frequently hide even behind the Church’s teachings or good intentions, in order to sit in the chair of Moses and judge, sometimes with superiority and superficiality, difficult cases and wounded families” (Francis, Conclusion of the Synod of Bishops, 24.10.2015). On homosexual persons, on their families and children the synod has produced only a homophobic closing of the reason and the heart. The synod has been incapable of reading the reality of homosexual people and considering them in their human dignity and in their aspirations of love. Such people are only considered inside their own families, almost as they were immature people who require a special care from the other members of the family, all of that behind the dishonest and insensitive “respect”. Without any indication for the life of homosexual people, the synod has only repeated the worst of the documents of the Congregation for the doctrine of the faith: “between the homosexual unions and the God’s plan for marriage and family doesn’t exist remote analogy”. Such repetition is shameful and offensive to the reality of the homosexual and lesbian families, and to their happy children. One wonders if for living according to the wish of synod this persons should get rid of their families and children. Behind the conclusions of the synod dangerous antihuman insinuations can be glimpsed, inciting to arouse sense of guilty and inferiority, of complex and negativity between children and their homosexual fathers or their lesbian mothers. The position of the Congregation repeated by the synod is the offense to the reason, to the human reality and to the Christian sensibility taught by Jesus. It is not the humble discernment of the reality, wished by the Pope Francis. It is an ignorant abuse of the spiritual power of Church.
The lack of sensitivity of Jesus in the synod is a deplorable and particularly serious irresponsibility of Catholic Church. For years I have experimented this irrational multilevel closing of Church. I have experimented the sabotage of the pontificate and Pope Francis’ synods by the Congregation for the doctrine of the faith, where I worked. This way, at the beginning of the synod, with priestly passion, I had asked in my letter to Pope Francis to take seriously in consideration the dignity of homosexual people, of their families and their children. I considered that the Pope is the only person that can stop the absurdity of the retrograde impositions. Today I make public my letter (the next post), taking note of the insensibility and the hateful refusal of persons belonging to sexual minorities. That synod, in mouth of a Father of Synod, has only known to compare homosexual people to the Nazi and to the enemies of humanity. In civil societies such offenses should be denounced: they are defamatory and they arouse hate homophobic hate. The silence of Church on that subject is embarrassing.
A mother holds her child at the Synod on the family on Oct. 24.
To my mind, the Synod on the Family, no matter what the outcome of the Synod’s final report, or the Pope’s final statement, has been a resounding success. The assembled participants have had the chance to discuss some of the most important issues facing the church, and the discussions have been open, transparent and free. Thus, it has been a great success, and betokens still more openness in the future. Pope Francis has given the church a gift with this Synod.
But this morning something very disturbing was revealed, thanks to a perceptive question by Thomas J. Reese, SJ, former editor in chief of America and currently a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. Brother Herve Janson, a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, an order noted for its poverty and simplicity, was one of the participants at the daily press briefing. It was noted that he was also a voting member.
Father Reese asked, rightly, “What is the rationale for you being admitted to the Synod and religious women not being admitted to the Synod? (The exchange can be seen on the video below, starting at 42:00)
What does that mean? Basically, Brother Janson is not ordained. Some may not be aware of this tradition, but you can be a member of a men’s religious order and not be ordained: thus the term “Brother.” Brother Janson is neither a bishop, nor a priest, nor a deacon. Technically, his canonical “status” in the church is that of a layman. That is, he has the same “status” as that of a woman religious, or in common parlance, a Catholic sister. And the same status as a laywoman as well.
In response to Father Reese’s question, which produced some uncomfortable laughter from the other panelists (who immediately grasped the challenging nature of the question): Brother Janson said (my translation from the French): “That is a big question….I felt very uncomfortable (malaise)….Before, the distinction was between cleric and lay. And now, it became between man and woman, exactly as you said very well….I asked myself the same question.” Strikingly, Brother Janson said he thought of refusing (renoncer) the invitation to be a voting member, out of solidarity with women religious. (This exchange can be viewed at 42:00 in the video below.)
This is a serious failure for the Synod. Previously, at least as far as I had known, it seemed that ordination was a prerequisite for voting. That is, there were priests who were appointed, in addition to the bishops, as voting members. There were strong theological arguments that could be advanced for that: it was a synod of bishops, and, in Catholic theology, priests participate in the ministry of the bishop through the sacrament of holy orders.
Now, it seems that the prerequisite for being a voting member was not ordination, but being a man.
It would have been extremely easy for the Synod to have invited—as it did with Brother Janson—a Catholic sister to participate in the Synod, with voting rights. Perhaps the head of a women’s religious order could have been invited, or a woman religious who worked in the Vatican, or a woman religious who had experience in the theology of family life. It would also have been easy (since Brother Janson is a layman) to invite another layman or a laywoman to vote.
For me this is the worst kind of sexism. It goes against the Pope’s explicit desire to have more women in “leadership roles” in the church, as he said in Evangelii Gaudium: “We need to create still broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the Church.” (10).
It is also, to use some theological language, a sign. The church teaches, as Jesus did, by both word and deed. The “sign value” of having a voting member who was a woman—even one—would have been immense. It was a huge missed opportunity.
Finally, while some may dismiss my comments as off topic, the decision to not to include women has to do with the family. Sexism is something that many, if not most, of our mothers, daughters and sisters have to deal with. The last thing the Synod should have been doing is creating more problems for the members of our family.
Deeply divided clerics at a landmark Vatican summit echoed the more inclusive tone of Pope Francis on Saturday, extending more welcoming language to divorced and gay Catholics but stopping short of calling for clear alterations in policy and leaving the extent of any change in the hands of the mercurial pontiff.
The meeting — known as a synod — marked the culmination of a two-year process to recalibrate the faith’s approach to families in the 21st century and broke new ground by tackling issues once considered taboo in the Roman Catholic Church. In the most significant pronouncement, the clerics cracked open the door for divorced and remarried Catholics, who the church teaches are technically living in adultery, to receive Communion — a sacrament from which they are currently officially barred.
But the synod did not explicitly condone a change either, leaving Francis room to interpret the will of his hierarchy. The document also recognized the “dignity” of homosexuals, while also saying there was not even a “remote” similarity between same-sex unions and “God’s design on matrimony and family.”
The final communiqué, while a significant bellwether of the hierarchy’s thinking, nevertheless amounts only to a recommendation to Francis. As pope in the benevolent autocracy that is Vatican City, Francis now has the final say.
Liberals at the synod were pragmatic, saying they were impressed they got as far as they did given significant conservative resistance. But the staunch opposition to fast change suggested how difficult it may now be for Francis to translate his revolutionary style into substance.
It also puts him in a highly difficult position. If he fails to change the status quo, he risks disappointing liberal Catholics — as well as many non-Catholics — who have heralded him worldwide as an agent of change. Yet going too far beyond the recommendations could alienate many in his own divided church, triggering an even stronger backlash among conservatives — some of whom are already openly questioning the direction of his papacy.
“What the pope has to do now is take all of this in and decide how to we use it,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington. “He may decide to use bits and pieces in different ways.”
