Category: Occupy the Church

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Bread for All, Work for All, Dignity for All

I was invited to share with you a pastoral letter from the bishop of an inclusive Catholic church. You’ll find nothing like this coming from the Roman church.

Bread for All, Work for All, Dignity for All:
A Christian Revolution

A Pastoral Letter

 

Bishop James Alan Wilkowski
Evangelical Catholic Bishop for the Diocese of the Northwest

The Latin word “revolution” means to turn around, to take an opposite direction or make often drastic changes.

An infinite variety of reasons have been explored by historian presenting both justification for revolution as well as purely emotional and even irrational reasons for humankind’s behavior in this regard. Is there a “gold thread” as it was that has appeared in history which can shed some light on the causes of revolts?

It is necessary to travel back in time, perhaps tens of thousands of years to a time we call pre-history. Let’s look at a time when human population was small and our hunter gatherer ancestors were pretty much on their own in eking out an existence. There was a time when families joined together for their own survival. More and more families came together to form a clan, a group with the belief in the strength in numbers. Ultimately, there came a time when a structure was needed to address mutual issues. Nature was always a problem and it was much easier for a large group working together to provide protection and to insure food clothing and shelter be available.

Eventually, it became clear that a social structure was needed and leaders were selected as well as rules for living together. There came into existence what was called “the unwritten social contract”. This was a concept that stated that each individual would surrender some of his personal freedom so that there could be a harmonious social relationship. In order to receive assistance from the group, I will agree to abide by the rules, the structure of the group and I will be able to participate in the goods and services available to the members of the group. There was a group leader and members of a council responsible for organization of the distribution of goods and services as well as providing for the safety and protection of group members.

Complete Letter HERE!

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Bishop Robert Morlino cracks down on Madison nuns for espousing ‘New Ageism’ and ‘indifferentism’

File under: More of them dangerous nuns on the loose!

By DOUG ERICKSON

Two longtime Madison nuns who lead an interfaith spirituality center have been banned by Madison Catholic Bishop Robert Morlino from holding workshops or providing spiritual direction or guidance at any Catholic churches in the 11-county diocese.

Sisters Maureen McDonnell and Lynn Lisbeth, both Sinsinawa Dominicans, have diverged too far from Catholic teaching, according to a confidential memo sent Nov. 27 to priests on behalf of Morlino. A copy of the memo was leaked to the State Journal.

Two other women connected to the interfaith center, called Wisdom’s Well, also have been banned as part of the same action.

The memo says Morlino has “grave concerns” about the women’s teachings, specifically that they “espouse certain views” flowing from such movements as “New Ageism” and “indifferentism.” The latter, according to the memo, is “the belief that no one religion or philosophy is superior to another.”

The women “may not share an authentic view of the Catholic Church’s approach to interreligious dialogue,” the memo said.

Brent King, a spokesman for the diocese, said three other potential parish guest speakers, all male, have been banned “in recent years.” The women are not prohibited from attending Mass or, if Catholic, from receiving communion, King said. Asked whether they could contribute to parish life in other ways, such as reading Bible passages from the pulpit or chairing a church committee, King said that would be up to individual priests.

The action comes amid a papal crackdown on nuns. Earlier this year, the Vatican accused the most influential group of Catholic sisters in the U.S. of “serious doctrinal issues” for not following Rome’s lead on topics such as the male-only priesthood and homosexuality.

Interfaith approach

Wisdom’s Well was founded in Madison in 2006. The center has no physical facility but offers workshops and retreats on topics such as nonviolence, contemplative living and Christian meditation.

The center’s website says it “serves to support those who desire to grow spiritually, seek inner wisdom, and yearn for a transformative spirituality.” Its mission statement says the center is “grounded in the Christian tradition, while embracing the wisdom found in other religious traditions.”

Along with the sisters, the third staff member is Beth O’Brien, a married mother of two and a religious layperson affiliated with the Benedictine community. She also is banned, as is Paula Hirschboeck, a philosophy professor at Edgewood College in Madison who helped found Wisdom’s Well but is no longer on its staff.

The women declined comment, referring questions to the Dominicans of Sinsinawa Congregation, based in southwestern Wisconsin.

‘Valued members’

The order’s spokeswoman, Tricia Buxton, released a statement saying McDonnell and Lisbeth are “respected and valued members” of the order, and that both women “have been dedicated to religious life and preaching and teaching Gospel values for nearly 50 years.” The Sinsinawa Dominicans “wholeheartedly support our sisters and hold them in prayer as we continue our mission of participating in the building of a holy and just church and society,” the statement said.

Buxton said Sinsinawa Dominicans have never before faced a prohibition like this in the diocese. The order has 521 sisters.

Both McDonnell and Lisbeth are well-known in Madison. McDonnell served for 21 years on the campus ministry staff at Edgewood College, her alma mater. Lisbeth regularly leads classes in spirituality at the Madison Senior Center.

At the time the memo went out, McDonnell was co-facilitating a series of weekly classes with 12 students at St. James Catholic Church in Madison titled, “Just Peace Initiative: The Challenge and Promise of Nonviolence for Our Time.” The class has been moved, according to an organizer, who did not want the new site published.

Diocese’s ‘duty’

The memo sent to priests says the four women “are not to be invited or allowed to preach, catechize, lead spiritual or prayer instructions or exercises, or to provide spiritual direction or guidance at churches, oratories or chapels within the Diocese of Madison.” No publicity materials from Wisdom’s Well are to be allowed inside parishes.

The memo does not give specific examples of things the women may have said that violate church teaching. Rather, the memo references problematic statements on the center’s website, including that the sisters embrace “the wisdom found in other religious traditions.”

King said it is both the diocese’s duty and right to ensure parish speakers transmit true church teaching. “A proposed speaker’s association with a group whose philosophy is inconsistent with the Catholic faith disqualifies a proposed speaker,” he said.

The prohibition against the sisters came only after the diocese “patiently and prudently” investigated the matter, King said. The memo says the diocese “sought clarification” from the sisters, but “the responses from these individuals proved insufficient and inconclusive to resolve grave concerns.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican disciplines Austrian dissident priest

File under … “Oh Snap!”
Apparently someone’s got his white cassock in a twist. The pettiness of these “holy” men is absolutely astounding.

By Philip Pullella

The Vatican has cracked down on a prominent Austrian Roman Catholic priest who has been leading a disobedience campaign to openly challenge Roman Catholic teachings on celibacy and women priests.

The Vatican said on Thursday it had stripped Father Helmut Schueller of the right to use title monsignor and said he also was no longer a “Chaplain of His Holiness”. Schueller remains a priest.

Schueller, a former deputy to Vienna’s archbishop, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, had been given the honorary title in his capacity as head of the Austrian branch of the Catholic charity group Caritas.

Schueller is head of the group “Call to Disobedience”, which has broad public backing in opinion polls and says it represents about 10 percent of the Austrian clergy.

Nearly 150,000 Austrians left the Church in 2011-2012, many in reaction to sexual abuse scandals.

The group wants Church rules changed so that priests can marry and women can become priests. It has said it will break Church rules by giving communion to Protestants and divorced Catholics who remarry.

Schueller told Austrian media that the Vatican decision had not shaken his principles.

Reformist Austrian Catholics have for decades challenged the conservative policies of Benedict and his predecessor John Paul, creating protest movements and advocating changes the Vatican refuses to make.

Schueller has met like-minded clergy in Austria and abroad since launching the “Call to Disobedience” group. Catholic reform groups in Germany, Ireland and the United States have made similar demands from the Church.

The Catholic Church does not allow priests to marry and teaches that it has no authority to allow women to become priests because Jesus willingly chose only men as his apostles when he instituted the priesthood at the Last Supper.

Proponents of a female priesthood say Jesus was only adhering to the social norms of his times.

Last week, the Vatican disciplined another priest who advocated women’s ordination.

Father Ray Bourgeois, an American of the Maryknoll religious order, was kicked out of the priesthood and the order by the Vatican’s doctrinal department, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Last year, Bourgeois, who had been a priest for 40 years, was among a group of Roman Catholic activists detained by Italian police after they tried to deliver a petition to the Vatican in favor of a female priesthood.

Benedict, who for decades before his 2005 election as pope was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer, directly denounced disobedient priests last April, saying it was not the right path to renewal in the Church.

Complete Article HERE!

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50 Reasons to Boycott the Catholic Church

The Church uses its resources to oppose social progress and positive change all over the world.

By Adam Lee

Last month in Ireland, Savita Halappanavar died, and she shouldn’t have. Savita was a 31-year-old married woman, four months pregnant, who went to the hospital with a miscarriage in progress that developed into a blood infection. She could easily have been saved if the already doomed fetus was aborted. Instead, her doctors did nothing, explaining that “this is a Catholic country,” and left her to suffer in agony for days, only intervening once it was too late.

Savita’s death is just the latest in a long line of tragedies directly attributable to the doctrines and beliefs of the Roman Catholic church. I acknowledge that there are many good, progressive Catholics, but the problem is that the church isn’t a democracy, and those progressives have no voice or vote in its governance. The church is a petrified oligarchy, a dictatorship like the medieval monarchies it once existed alongside, and it’s run by a small circle of conservative, rigidly ideological old men who make all the decisions and choose their own successors.

This means that, whatever individual Catholics may do, the resources of the church as an institution are bent toward opposing social progress and positive change all over the world. Every dollar you put into the church collection plate, every Sunday service you attend, every hour of time and effort you put into volunteering or working for church organizations, is inevitably a show of support for the institutional church and its abhorrent mission. When you have no voice, there’s only one thing left to do: boycott. Stop supporting the church with your money and your time. For lifelong Catholics, it’s a drastic step, but it’s more than justified by the wealth of reasons showing that the church as an institution is beyond reform, and the only meaningful response is to part ways with it. Here are just a few of those reasons:

1. Throughout the world, Catholic bishops have engaged in a systematic, organized effort going back decades to cover up for priests who molest children, pressuring the victims to sign confidentiality agreements and quietly assigning the predators to new parishes where they could go on molesting. Tens of thousands of children have been raped and tortured as a result of this conspiracy of silence.

2. Strike one: “What did the pope know and when did he know it?” The current pope, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was personally implicated in a case from the 1970s in which at least three sets of parents reported that a priest in his diocese had sexually abused their children. In response, Ratzinger assigned the priest to therapy, without notifying law enforcement, and washed his hands of the matter. That priest was back on duty in just a few short days and went on to molest more children.

3. Strike two: In 1981, again when the current pope was Cardinal Ratzinger, he got a letter from the diocese of Oakland asking him to defrock a priest who had acknowledged molesting two children. Ratzinger ignored this letter, and several followup letters, for four years. Finally, in 1985, he wrote back saying that more time was needed, and that they had to proceed very slowly to safeguard “the good of the Universal Church” in light of “the young age of the petitioner” — by which he meant not the victimized children, but the pedophile priest. (By contrast, when a rogue archbishop ordained married men as priests, he was laicized six days later.)

4. Strike three: In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a letter, De Delictis Gravioribus, to all Catholic bishops advising them how to handle accusations of sex crimes by priests. There was no recommendation to contact the police, but rather an instruction for them to report such cases only to the Vatican and tell no one else: “Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret.”

5. Some church officials, like the American friar Benedict Groeschel, have blamed the epidemic of child molestation on sexually wanton boys who tempt priests into assaulting them.

6. They threaten to cut off funding for immigrants’ rights advocates because they sometimes work with gay-rights advocates. Preventing immigrants from getting legal and medical aid is less important than ensuring the church isn’t contaminated by even indirect contact with anyone who helps gay people.

7. In a sign of how ridiculously disproportionate and unhinged the church’s martyrdom complex is, the current pope has compared expanding the rights of women and gay people to the murderous anticlerical violence of the 1930s Spanish civil war.

8. They’ve used their official UN observer status to team up with Islamic theocracies like Iran and Libya to oppose calls for family-planning services to be made available in the world’s poorest nations.

9. They’ve gone to desperately poor, AIDS-ravaged regions of Africa to spread the life-destroying lie that condoms don’t prevent transmission of HIV.

10. In the mid-20th century, they appointed a special papal commission to study whether Catholicism should permit the use of birth control. When the commission almost unanimously recommended that they should, they ignored that recommendation and doubled down on their absolute ban on contraception.

11. They excommunicated the doctors who performed an abortion on a pregnant 9-year-old who’d been raped by her stepfather.

12. They did not excommunicate the stepfather.

13. Savita Halappanavar wasn’t the first: Catholic-run hospitals are willing to let women die rather than get lifesaving abortions, even when a miscarriage is already in progress and no possible procedure could save the fetus.

14. They refused to provide contraception or abortion to women who were abducted and forced to work as prostitutes, and then filed a lawsuit complaining it was violating their religious freedom when the government took away their contract.

15. In Poland, they ordered politicians to vote for a law banning IVF and threatened to excommunicate any who didn’t comply.

16. They were a major source of the pressure on the Komen Foundation that led to its disastrous decision to cut ties with Planned Parenthood.

17. They’ve announced an inquisition into the Girl Scouts to get to the bottom of its association with morally suspect groups like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam.

18. They’ve been one of the major forces attacking Obamacare, filing lawsuits arguing that non-church Catholic employers should be able to decide whether or not employee health insurance plans will cover contraception. This is effectively an argument that a woman’s employer should be allowed to force her to pay more for medical coverage, or even place it out of her reach altogether, based on his religious beliefs.

19. In Australia, they allegedly derailed a police investigation of an accused pedophile, putting pressure on higher-ups to get an investigating officer removed from the case.

20. They demanded that Sunday school teachers sign a loyalty oath agreeing to submit “will and intellect” to the proclamations of church leaders.

21. Some top church officials, including the current pope, have advocateddenying communion to politicians who support progressive and pro-choice political ideas. Notably, although the church also opposes preemptive war and the death penalty, no conservative politician has ever been denied communion on this basis.

22. They’ve cracked down on American nuns for doing too much to help the poor and not enough to oppose gay marriage, condemning them for displaying a seditious “feminist spirit.”

23. In Germany, where parishioners pay an officially assessed tax rate to the church, they’ve tried to blackmail people who don’t want to pay the church tax, threatening to fire them from jobs in church institutions. In some cases, if the person opts out but later loses the paperwork, they demand on-the-spot repayment of decades of back taxes.

24. In America, bishops have compared Democratic officeholders, including President Obama, to Hitler and Stalin and have said that it jeopardizes a person’s eternal salvation if they don’t vote as the bishops instruct them to.

25. They fight against equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. It’s not enough for the Catholic church hierarchy that they refuse to perform church weddings for gay and lesbian couples; they want to write that prohibition into the civil law and deny marriage equality to everyone who doesn’t fit their religious criteria, and have invested vast amounts of money and effort into doing so. In the 2012 election cycle alone, the church spent almost $2 million in an unsuccessful fight to defeat marriage-equality initiatives in four states.

26. They’ve compared gay sex to pedophilia and incest and called for it to be forbidden by law, saying that “states can and must regulate behaviors, including various sexual behaviors.”

27. They’ve shut down adoption clinics rather than consider gay people as prospective parents. The church’s official position, apparently, is that it’s better for children to remain orphans or in foster care than to be placed in a loving, committed same-sex household.

28. They barred an anti-LGBT bullying group, anti-teen-suicide foundation from a Catholic school ceremony, explaining that the group’s mission is “contrary to the teachings of the Catholic church.”

29. They told a teenager he wouldn’t be allowed to go through confirmationbecause he posted a pro-gay-rights status message on Facebook, and theyexpelled a preschooler from a private Catholic school because his parents were lesbians.

30. They have a history of dumping known pedophile priests in isolated, poor, rural communities, where they apparently assumed that local people wouldn’t dare to complain or that no one would listen if they did.

31. They’ve given huge payouts — as much as $20,000 in some cases — to pedophile priests, to buy their silence and quietly ease them out of the priesthood, after specifically denying in public that they were doing this.

32. When the Connecticut legislature proposed extending statute-of-limitations laws to allow older child-abuse cases to be tried, the bishops ordered a letter to be read during Mass instructing parishioners to contact their representatives and lobby against it.

33. To fight back against and intimidate abuse-survivor groups like SNAP, the church’s lawyers have filed absurdly broad subpoenas demanding the disclosure of decades’ worth of documents.

34. In the Netherlands, some boys were apparently castrated in church-run hospitals after complaining to the police about sexual abuse by priests.

35. When a Catholic official from Philadelphia, William Lynn, was charged with knowingly returning predator priests to duty, his defense was to blame those decisions on his superior, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, thus acknowledging that the corruption reaches to the highest levels of the church.

36. When confronted with hundreds of complaints about child-raping priests spanning decades, a Dutch cardinal used the same “we knew nothing” excuse once given by Nazi soldiers. Several months later, it was reported that this same cardinal had personally arranged to move a pedophile priest to a different parish to shield him from accusations.

37. In one case, Mother Teresa successfully persuaded the church to return a suspected pedophile priest to duty because he was a friend of hers. Eight additional complaints of child abuse were later lodged against him.

38. In yet another case, they appointed a priest with a history of child molestation to a board that advises the church on what to do when they get reports of priests molesting children.

39. And after all this, they’ve had the audacity to plead for money and ask parishioners to pick up the tab for legal costs and settlements.

40. They abducted tens of thousands of babies from unwed mothers who gave birth in Catholic-run hospitals all over the world throughout the 20th century, forcing drugged or helpless women to give their newborn children up for adoption against their will.

41. They tried to have the Indian skeptic Sanal Edamuruku charged with blasphemy and imprisoned for debunking a claim of a miraculous weeping statue.

42. They publicly supported the Russian Orthodox church’s decision to have the punk band Pussy Riot charged and imprisoned for blasphemy.

43. Their finances are a disorganized mess, lacking strong accounting controls and clear internal separations, which means parishioners who give to the church can have no assurance of what the money will be used for. According to an investigation by the Economist, funds meant for hospitals, cemeteries and priests’ pensions have been raided to pay legal fees and settlements in several diocesan bankruptcies.

44. They’ve said in public that the sexist prohibition on women priests is an infallible part of Catholic dogma, and hence can never be changed.

45. They’ve silenced priests who call for the ordination of women and other desperately needed reforms, exhorting them to instead show “the radicalism of obedience.”

46. They’ve excommunicated at least one priest for advocating the ordination of women.

47. They lifted the excommunication of an anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying bishop who also thinks women shouldn’t attend college or wear pants.

48. When it comes to the question of who’s financially responsible for compensating the victims of sex abuse, they argue that priests aren’t employees and therefore the church bears no responsibility for anything they do.

49. They canonized Mother Teresa for doing little more than offering a squalid place for people to die. Outside observers who visited her “Home for the Dying” reported that medical care was substandard and dangerous, limited to aspirin and unsterilized needles rinsed in tap water, administered by untrained volunteers. The millions of dollars collected by Mother Teresa and her order, enough to build many advanced clinics and hospitals, remain unaccounted for.

50. They announced that voluntary end-of-life measures, such as terminal patients’ directives for when they wish to have a feeding tube removed, won’t be respected at Catholic hospitals.

Complete Article HERE!

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For Gay Catholics, an Alternative to the Collection Plate

By donating gift cards to local priests, churchgoers can support their parishes without accidentally funding political causes.

Salvatore Cordileone is the archbishop of San Francisco. Although — or, perhaps, because — he lives in the American city most identified with same-sex relationships, he is also the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage. During a press conference last Tuesday, a reporter asked Cordileone to comment on the string of successes for same-sex marriage during this month’s elections. The archbishop responded, “This is not a time to give up, but rather a time to redouble our efforts.”

The Catholic bishops may be holding firm, but their flock is drifting away from them. According to a recent poll by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has risen over the last five years. The poll’s authors attributed this decline in part to public cynicism about religious leaders who tap revenue streams from their congregations to advance their own political goals.

For gay Catholics our straight Catholic allies, this question became especially relevant during the recent elections. We saw the highly-coordinated efforts by some bishops to stanch the growing marriage equality movement – and the Catholic church resources that helped fuel their effort – and wondered, “Is it really possible to support marriage equality while still being a church-going Catholic who tithes?”

Take Minnesota, one of the four states where voters faced referenda on gay and lesbian couples. Using resources from churchgoers, the Minnesota Catholic Conference was able to give $600,000 to “Minnesota for Marriage,” an anti-marriage equality group. In Washington state, some Catholic bishops were so aggressive in their fundraising that the Public Disclosure Commission, the state’s campaign finance agency, had to warn the Washington Catholic Conference that they were not permitted to collect donations at Mass. (To comply with the law, volunteers were required to collect donations in separate envelopes.) In Baltimore, Archbishop William Lori headlined a pre-election fundraiser for Maryland’s anti-marriage equality group.

According to the Human Rights Campaign’s report Catholic Church: Top Funder of Discrimination, the Church and affiliated organizations – the Knights of Columbus and the National Organization for Marriage – were responsible for a whopping 60 percent of all funding for anti-marriage equality campaigns in the four states where the issue appeared on the 2012 ballot.

Yet according to a 2011 Public Religion Research Institute poll, nearly three-quarters of the American Catholic laity support state recognition of same-sex marriage or civil unions. According to that same poll, when same-sex marriage is explicitly defined as civil marriage – having no involvement with the church – support for it jumps from 43 percent to 71 percent.

Still, the reality is this: Every time Catholics tithe at a local parish, they are not only helping to keep the lights on for Mass and to make sure the priest has enough food in his stomach, they are contributing to diocesan coffers, which are often tapped for anti-equality ballot initiatives. So far, the IRS has not seemed especially interested in investigating allegations that the Catholic Church has violated its tax-exempt status by conducting political activity. And as Melissa Rogers, a legal scholar at Wake Forest Divinity School, told the Religion News Service, “When there’s an impression that the IRS is not enforcing the restriction – that seems to embolden some to cross the line.”

Given such circumstances, what are gay Catholics and our straight Catholic allies to do? Should we leave the Catholic church, as increasing numbers of Americans are doing? Or should we stay in the church and keep our hands at our sides, offering nothing more than a poker face when the collection basket comes around?

Fortunately, there is an alternative. Gift cards for priests — to local grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations — are a clear way to support the real work of the Catholic Church without undermining our own rights or those of our friends. We can ask our priests each week what their upcoming material needs will be and then following through with the appropriate gift cards — to local grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations. Catholic finance councils could even make arrangements with utility companies, allowing parishioners to make direct online donations toward a parish’s monthly utility bills. That would allow Catholics to help keep the lights on for Mass without unwittingly putting money in the hands of bishops like John Myers of Newark, who has publicly intimated that Catholics who support marriage equality are unworthy to receive communion.

Indeed, gift cards, which cannot be redeemed for cash, allow us to reaffirm our commitment to the clergy. Over the past several years, Catholic priests have had their image sullied in the public square, largely because of misguided bishops who chose to protect the church’s reputation instead of removing child abusers from the ranks. The entire profession suffered as a result. (A 40-something priest in the archdiocese of Washington once told me that at the height of the scandal, mothers at the supermarket would see him wearing his Roman collar and nervously pull their small children close to them.) Those of us who respect and admire our local clergy know that the vast majority of priests, far from being pedophiles, are good leaders who truly want the best for their congregations. Gift cards give us a way to empower them, making sure our funds go toward their immediate needs.

This non-cash tithing could result in an economic revival for Catholic parishes all over the country. It need not preclude cash gifts for specific Catholic charities and causes, like the St. Vincent de Paul Society or foreign missions. It would simply keep the anti-marriage equality movement from using faithful congregants as a major source of revenue. In this way, mainstream Catholics -the majority of whom support marriage equality for same-sex couples – can send an unmistakable message to Catholic bishops: We support our congregations and the clergy who serve them, but we also believe that love, happiness, and equal rights for everyone are part of God’s plan.

Complete Article HERE!

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Do you know where you were…

Do you know where you were on this date, 11/22, 37 years ago?  That would be 1975, for those who can’t do the math.

I was being ordained a Catholic priest in Oakland, CA. It all seems like a lifetime ago.

That day was filled with such promise and joy. Little did I know back then that the organization I was pledging my life too would turn out to be this rapacious monster, a destroyer of lives and vocations. That this organization’s leadership would become a heartless, insulated, monolithic, callous and tone deaf power structure hellbent on undercutting and dismantling The Second Vatican Council. Now, more than ever before and throughout the entire Church, people of conscience are being harassed, shamed and bullied, simply because they are not in lockstep with the old men in charge.

I thought things were bad when the Oblates of Mary Immaculate moved to dismiss me, on trumped up charges, in 1981. It took them thirteen years and a complete violation of our community’s rules and constitutions before they actually got around to tossed me out. I thought things were horrible back then. But those sad days pale in comparison to what is going on today. Just look what they’ve done to Roy Bourgeois. Not only did they dismiss him, but they excommunicated him and defrocked him too. Now compare the ruthless treatment Roy to how the hierarchy deals with pedophile priests in their midst and you’ll get a pretty good picture of the institution’s priorities.

It’s a scandal and it’s heartbreaking to watch.

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Church of England general synod votes against women bishops

The general synod of the Church of England has voted narrowly against the appointment of women as bishops.

The measure was passed by the synod’s houses of bishops and clergy but was rejected by the House of Laity.

Supporters vowed to continue their campaign but it could be five years before a similar vote can be held.

Controversy had centred on the provisions for parishes opposed to women bishops to request supervision by a stand-in male bishop.

‘Bigger consensus’

The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, spoke of his “deep personal sadness” after the vote.

He said: “Of course I hoped and prayed that this particular business would be at another stage before I left, and… it is a personal sadness, a deep personal sadness that that is not the case.

“I can only wish the synod and the archbishop all good things and every blessing with resolving this in the shortest possible time.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury after the vote on women bishops The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury was in favour of allowing women bishops

Both the archbishop and his successor, the Rt Rev Justin Welby, the current Bishop of Durham, were in favour of a “yes” vote.

Canon Simon Killwick, vicar of Christ Church, Moss Side, and leader of the Catholic group in the synod, had spoken against the move and said the legislation was “flawed”.

He said it would be possible for the issue to return before the next synod is elected in 2015 if there were “early talks held between the various parties and a real effort to build a bigger consensus”.

Twenty years after the introduction of women priests, the issue has continued to divide traditionalists – among those on the Church’s evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings – from reformers.

Had the motion been backed by the synod, the proposed legislation would have made its way through Parliament before receiving royal assent.

It needed two-thirds majorities in each of the synod’s three houses.

The votes were 44 for and three against with two abstentions in the House of Bishops, 148 for and 45 against in the House of Clergy, and 132 for and 74 against in the House of Laity.

The vote in the House of Laity, at 64%, was just short of the required majority – six more “yes” votes were needed.

The House of laity is the largest element of the General Synod and is made up of lay members of the church elected by its 44 dioceses.

The decision came at the end of a day of debate by supporters and opponents – and a 12-year legislative process.

The Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Rev Graham James, said: “It is very disappointing that the vote was lost so narrowly.”

Campaign group Women and the Church (Watch) said the outcome was a “devastating blow for the Church of England and the country”.

The Rev Rachel Weir, chairwoman of Watch, said “This is a tragic day for the Church of England after so many years of debate and after all our attempts at compromise.

The Right Reverend Graham James: “Obviously it is very disappointing that the vote was lost”

“Despite this disappointing setback, Watch will continue to campaign for the full acceptance of women’s gifts of leadership in the Church’s life.”

Watch said bishops would need to act promptly to offer pastoral support in the coming weeks to women clergy and others who felt devastated by the decision.

Writing in the Guardian, Lucy Winkett, who would have been in line to become a woman bishop, said the synod was “detonating its credibility with contemporary Britain”.
Emergency meeting

But synod member Susie Leafe said the outcome was because of faults in the legislation.

She said: “There were a lot of places along the way that we could have had a measure in front of us that wouldn’t have been voted down, and it’s very sad that this was able to go on without us facing the reality of the situation.”

The Catholic Group in General Synod said “mediation and conciliation are needed so that new legislation can be framed to provide fairly for all members of the Church of England”.

Zoe Ham, Church Society: “I am happy that the legislation in its form today has been rejected”

The group said in a statement: “We regret the synod was put in the position whereby draft legislation failed at final approval because it was unclear and unfair in its provision for those who, in conscience, are unable to accept the ministry of women as bishops or priests.

“The Catholic Group calls on the House of Bishops to reconvene the talks started in the summer between representatives of different groups, chaired by Bishop Justin Welby.

“The Catholic Group is committed to playing a full part in the process of achieving good legislation to enable us all to move forward together in mission and service to the nation.”

Traditionalist campaign group Together 4ward said: “We are reflecting on and praying about the outcome of general synod, and will make a fuller statement in due course.

“We are, however, pleased that synod has chosen not to pass the Women Bishops Measure in its current form, which we believe would not have allowed the Church to go forward together.”

The House of Bishops will hold an emergency meeting on Wednesday morning following the decision, a Church spokesman said.

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Film defrocks church hierarchy over handling of sex abuse

By Andrea Burzynski

Four deaf Wisconsin men were some of the first to seek justice after suffering childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, and a new documentary about the Catholic Church’s poor handling of such cases stemming from the Vatican seeks to make their voices heard.

“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” explores the impact of the Roman Catholic Church’s protocol as dictated from the Vatican for dealing with pedophile priests. It opens in U.S. cinemas on November 16, and will air on cable channel HBO in February.

Though American media coverage about child sex abuse by clergy has been extensive since a slew of cases came to light in Boston in 2002, Oscar-winning documentary director Alex Gibney wanted to connect individual stories with what he sees as systemic failures stemming from the top of the church.

“A lot of individual stories had been done about clerical sex abuse, but I hadn’t seen one that really connected the individual stories with the larger cover-up by the Vatican, so that was important,” Gibney told Reuters in an interview.

The film centers on the group of deaf men and their experiences as young boys attending St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin.

In a letter to the Vatican in 1998, the late Rev. Father Lawrence Murphy admitted abusing some 200 deaf boys over two decades beginning in the 1950s.

Murphy claimed he had repented, and asked to live out his last years as a priest, and was never defrocked or punished by civil authorities. He died in 1998.

In the film, the men communicate their frustrating attempts to bring their experiences to the attention of religious and civil authorities with effusive sign language and facial expressions, paired with voiceovers by actors such as Ethan Hawke.

The film also traces a convoluted bureaucracy – right up to the cardinal who is now Pope Benedict – to reveal a set of policies that the film portrays as often seeming more interested in preserving the Church’s image.

STRUGGLING TO BE HEARD

“These were deaf men whose voices literally couldn’t be heard, so there was a silence from them, and there was also this silence coming from the church, a refusal to confront this obvious crime, in part because they were covering it up,” said Gibney.

The Vatican has denied any cover-up in the Murphy case and in 2010 issued a statement condemning his abuse. It has criticized media reports about the Church’s handling of the cases as anti-Catholic.

Contrasting that, the film shows interviews with former church officials who talk openly of church policies to handle cases by “rehabilitating” abusive clergymen and snuffing out scandal.

Gibney said that all of the Vatican officials he contacted declined his interview requests.

Raised Catholic himself, Gibney no longer practices organized religion, but empathizes with Catholics who feel a sense of loyalty to the religion’s institutions and acknowledges that criticism of the church can feel like a personal attack.

“Mea Maxima Culpa,” a Latin phrase meaning “my most grievous fault” focuses on the failures of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy. But Gibney – who won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side” – said the film’s theme transcends religion and is also relevant for secular institutions.

“This is obviously about the church, but it’s also a crime film,” he said. “It’s about abuse of power and it’s about how institutions instead of reckoning with problems try to cover them up. It’s always the cover-up that creates the problem.”

He cited the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal that rocked Penn State University recently, and the BBC’s poor handling of abuse allegations against the late British TV personality Jimmy Savile as examples of secular institutions brought low by similar issues.

“The thing about predators is that they tend to hide in plain sight,” Gibney said. “You’re seeing it now with Sandusky, you’re seeing it now with Jimmy Savile in Great Britain, and you saw it with Father Murphy in the film.”

Gibney thinks that the public’s stubbornly rosy perceptions of charismatic authority figures, including priests, is a major factor in such scandals.

“They’re often involved in charity or good works,” he said of high-profile abusers. “That seems to give you license to do unbelievable things because people cut you all sorts of slack that they wouldn’t normally do for other people.”

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Dissenting Minnesota priest calls for archbishop’s resignation for defending marriage

BY KIRSTEN ANDERSEN

A Minneapolis-area priest has called for the resignation of Archbishop John Nienstedt after the archbishop supported Minnesota’s effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex “marriage.”

Fr. Michael Tegeder wrote a letter to the editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune oh Thursday requesting that Archbishop Nienstedt “prayerfully consider stepping down from his office.”

Fr. Michael Tegeder did not defend heterosexual marriage.
Calling Nienstedt’s support for the marriage amendment a “misguided crusade,” he suggested that the archbishop’s resignation would be “healing for our state” and “would show some magnanimity on [Nienstedt’s] part.”

Tegeder has long been a dissenter from Catholic teaching on the issue of homosexuality. He and the archbishop have clashed repeatedly over the issue.

Last year, Fr. Tegeder refused to comply with Archbishop Nienstedt’s request that all priests read a “marriage prayer” at Masses, asking God to grant the faithful “courage to proclaim and defend your plan for marriage, which is the union of one man and one woman.

The priest has since spoken to his parishioners and numerous media outlets about his opposition to the marriage amendment, prompting Nienstedt to send him a letter warning him that he may be stripped of his ministerial privileges if he continues to speak in defiance of Church teaching.

Click “like” if you want to defend true marriage.

Fr. Tegeder did not relent In June, the priest gave an interview to the liberal City Pages in which he criticized the archbishop for his stance in favor of the gay marriage ban.

“Nienstedt is just so rigid about these things,” Fr. Tegeder said. “But, you know — just let go of it. What are we trying to defend?”

Just a few weeks before Minnesotans voted on the marriage amendment, the priest sat for another interview, this time with the Star-Tribune.

The interviewer described him as angry and emotional, alternately pounding on the table and breaking down in tears.

He wore a rainbow button and talked about how it hurtful it was to see “sweet, sweet” homosexual men being taunted. He again had harsh words for Abp. Nienstedt, claiming that the archbishop’s attempt to silence his pro-homosexual speech was a sign of “moral bankruptcy.”

Archbishop Nienstedt “is saying he knows what’s best for Minnesota,” Fr. Tegeder told the Star-Tribune. “Well, he just got here. He’s in over his head. We don’t deserve him, and he doesn’t deserve us.”

The archbishop first arrived in Minnesota in 2001 when he was assigned bishop of New Ulm. He has served continuously in Minnesota since then.

It is unknown whether Abp. Nienstedt will proceed with removal of Fr. Tegeder’s ministerial privileges, in accordance with his prior warning.

Calls and e-mails to the Archbishop’s office requesting comment were not immediately returned.

Complete Article HERE!