Out Of Touch – Page 117 – Hear Our Voices

April 9, 2012

Priests warn Vatican over move to censor one of their own

An 800-strong group of Irish priests has said it is disturbed over the Vatican’s silencing of one of its members for his liberal views.

The Association of Catholic Priests has warned that forcing Father Tony Flannery to stop writing for a Redemptorist magazine will fuel belief of a disconnect between Irish Catholics and Rome.

“We believe that such an approach, in its individual focus on Fr Flannery and inevitably by implication on the members of the association, is an extremely ill-advised intervention in the present pastoral context in Ireland,” the group said.

“We wish to make clear our profound view that this intervention is unfair, unwarranted and unwise.”

Fr Flannery, a founder of the association, has had his monthly column with the religious publication Reality pulled on orders from Rome.

A second priest, Father Gerard Moloney, the magazine’s editor, has been ordered to stop writing on certain issues.

Both priests hold liberal views on contraception, celibacy and women priests.

At least a dozen priests had already publicly declared support for Fr Flannery and Fr Moloney in messages on the association’s website.

In a strongly-worded statement, the group said Fr Flannery’s writings should not be seen as an attack on or rejection of the fundamental teachings of the church but a reflection on issues surfacing in parishes nationwide.

It said they also reject their portrayal in some circles as a “small coterie of radical priests with a radical agenda”.

“Accordingly, we wish to register our extreme unease and disquiet at the present development, not least the secrecy surrounding such interventions and the questions about due process and freedom of conscience that such interventions surface,” the group said.

“At this critical juncture in our history, the ACP believes that this form of intervention – what Archbishop Diarmuid Martin recently called ‘heresy-hunting’ – is of no service to the Irish Catholic Church and may have the unintended effect of exacerbating a growing perception of a significant ‘disconnect’ between the Irish Church and Rome.”

Fr Flannery, who has written on religious matters in the Redemptorist magazine for 14 years, is under investigation by the Vatican over his views.

As well as expressing opposition to the church’s ban on contraception and women priests, Fr Flannery publicly backed Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s unprecedented attack on the Catholic hierarchy in the aftermath of the Cloyne Report last year.

In a Holy Thursday homily at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Benedict warned that the church will not tolerate priests speaking out against Catholic teaching.

Complete Article HERE!

April 5, 2012

Women Priests in Santa Barbara

Perhaps in some prior century, Suzanne Dunn and Jeannette Love might have been burned at the stake as heretics. These two gray-haired women — both quick to smile, soft-spoken, and light of spirit — are exactly what the Pope and Vatican insist can never be: ordained women priests. Yet three years ago, Dunn — a one-time parish administrator at St. Joseph’s in Carpinteria — was ordained in Santa Barbara by female bishop Dana Reynolds, who claims she can trace her own ordination back to St. Peter, the first Pope.

Complete Article HERE!

April 5, 2012

Pope reaffirms ban on women priests, assails disobedience

One person’s disobedience is another person’s act of faith.

Pope Benedict on Thursday re-stated the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings.

Benedict, who for decades before his 2005 election was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer, delivered an unusually direct denunciation of disobedient priests in a sermon at a morning Mass on Holy Thursday, the day the Church commemorates the day Christ instituted the priesthood.

The pope responded specifically to a call to disobedience by a group of Austrian priests and laity, who last year boldly and openly challenged Church teaching on taboo topics such as priestly celibacy and women’s ordination.

“Is disobedience a path of renewal for the Church?,” he asked rhetorically in the sermon of a solemn Mass in St Peter’s Basilica on the day Catholic priests around the world renew their vows.

In his response to the Austrian group, his first in public, Benedict noted that, in its “call to disobedience”, it had challenged “definitive decisions of the Church’s magisterium (teaching authority) such as the question of women’s ordination …”

He then restated the position by citing a major 1994 document by his predecessor John Paul II that stated that the ban on women priests was part of the Church’s “divine constitution”.

A year later in 1995, the Vatican’s doctrinal department, which the current pope then headed when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ruled that the teaching on an exclusively male priesthood had been “set forth infallibly”, meaning it could not be changed.

The Catholic Church teaches that it has no authority to allow women to become priests because Jesus Christ willingly chose only men as his apostles when he instituted the priesthood at the Last Supper.

Proponents of a female priesthood say Jesus Christ was only acting according to the customs of his times.

DANGEROUS DISOBEDIENCE

The pope, who turns 85 this month, looked tired during the service, his second major event this week after returning last Thursday from a grueling trip to Mexico and Cuba.

In his sermon during the Mass, his first event in the three days leading to Easter, Benedict said that while discussion could be healthy for the Church, disobedience was dangerous.

He acknowledged that there could be concern about the slow pace of change in the Church, but “drastic measures” were not the way to achieve authentic, divinely willed renewal.

“But is disobedience really a way to do this? Do we sense here anything of that configuration to Christ which is the precondition for true renewal, or do we merely sense a desperate push to do something to change the Church in accordance with one’s own preferences and ideas?” he said.

The Austrian group that has demanded sweeping changes is led by the Reverend Helmut Schueller, a former deputy to Vienna archbishop Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.

The group, which says it represents about 10 percent of the Austrian clergy, has broad public backing in opinion polls and has said it will break Church rules by giving communion to Protestants and remarried divorced Catholics.

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

Catholic reform groups in Germany, Ireland and the United States have made similar demands.

A record 87,000 Austrians left the Church in 2010, many in reaction to sexual abuse scandals.

Later on Thursday, the pope was due to wash the feet of 12 priests in a ceremony commemorating Christ’s gesture of humility toward his apostles on the night before he died.

Complete Article HERE!

April 4, 2012

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson: 12 Elements Of Reform Needed To Deal With The Culture Of Abuse

Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s talk on the twelve areas with in Roman Catholicism which need reform, or as he might say, attending to. It’s a very comprehensive list. The following is a list of the Robinson’s 12 points and Brian’s short description. The video (below) is just over 26 minutes and well worth watching.

The Angry God: This image the institution projects of a God of Wrath and Anger needs to be challenged. It is wrong, and bad theology. It’s also really bad psychology.
The Male Church: Women have been marginalized and treated as second class by the institution for far too long.
The Culture of Celibacy: Not so much celibacy per se but mandatory celibacy has to take a major part of the blame as a contributing cause of this crisis.
Moral Immaturity: The seminary system and training of priests and religious has not encouraged moral and spiritual maturity. That needs to be changed.
Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy: Bishop Robinson argues there has been far too much emphasis on Orthodoxy (right belief) and far too little on Orthopraxy (right action).
Sexual Teaching: He argues there needs to be “a profound change in all of sexual morality” within the institution.
The Mystique of Priesthood: Priests have been placed on a pedestal of perfection for far too long. It’s dangerous to them and it’s dangerous to the people they are meant to be serving. Priests are not God — they struggle with all the challenges that any human beings struggle with in their lives. Often because of the positions on these pedestals they have been placed on they find it difficult to find support in their lives. The laity also have a huge part to play in keeping priests on those pedestals.
Professionalism: There has been a rise in professional standards across almost all professions — ethical codes, structures that protect and foster professional integrity but the priesthood has largely been excluded. He argues much more needs to be done to lift professional standards of those in ministry with the Church.
A Pope who can’t make mistakes: He argues that the way the pontiff has been placed on a pedestal and immune from criticism has been especially damaging to the institution. Creeping infallibility is a huge problem not only for some at the top who would seem to believe they have divine perfection already but also for many at the lowest rungs of the Church. This culture needs to be changed.
The Loyalty of Bishops to the Pope: Their oath of allegiance is to the Pope — not to God, or the Church. He argues significant blame has to be placed at the feet of the late John Paul II for his inadequate responses to the growing sexual abuse crisis.
A Culture of Secrecy: Bishop Robinson argues that the culture of secrecy in the Church has been a major cause of the problems. Bishops need to present themselves in the best light all the time and the culture of secrecy runs with that. It has been deeply damaging to the institution and needs to be changed.
The Sensus Fidelium: He argues the institutional leadership need to be listening far more to the thinking of the broad body of the faithful not just to the small sectors that crave authority figures and founts of certitude.

April 3, 2012

Pa. trial: Priest joked about abusing 3 boys in a week, another priest was called camp prowler

Jurors in a landmark priest abuse trial on Monday heard about a priest-turned-camp prowler and another who was accused of bragging about having sex with three boys in a week.

Also Monday, two jurors were replaced by alternates, but a gag order prevents lawyers from discussing the reasons for the move.

Monsignor William Lynn is on trial on charges of child endangerment and conspiracy. Lynn, 61, is the first Roman Catholic church official in the U.S. charged for his handling of priest abuse complaints. Prosecutors say he helped the church bury them in secret files, far from the prying eyes of investigators, civil attorneys and concerned Catholics.

In the day’s most startling testimony, a detective read internal church memos about a priest who is said to have “joked about how hard it was to have sex with three boys in one week.” The priest’s accuser also stated that the priest had a “rotation process” of boys spending time sleeping with him.

Defense lawyers argue that Lynn tried to address the problem as secretary for clergy from 1992 to 2004 but was blocked by the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua and others in the Philadelphia archdiocese. Bevilacqua died of heart disease on Jan. 31, a day after he was ruled competent to testify at Lynn’s trial.

The testimony Monday also included a 1992 complaint about a different priest accused of molesting boys at a church-owned camp three decades earlier.

Several junior counselors complained in the early 1960s that the priest was on the prowl at night, molesting them in their tents. They said it was a well-known secret among teen counselors for several years.

The priest remained in ministry, working at three archdiocesan high schools and serving as assistant superintendent of Catholic schools through 2004. The priest, confronted after a man complained to the archdiocese in 1992, admitted the “sin” of masturbation and said he had read up on that subject because so many people were mentioning it in the confessional.

Few victims or members of the public have been attending the trial in downtown Philadelphia, but retired Philadelphia detective Arthur Baselice Jr., of Mantua, N.J., turned out Monday.

His 28-year-old son, Arthur Baselice III, died of a drug overdose in 2006 after his civil lawsuit against the church accusing his high school principal of molesting him was thrown out because of legal time limits. The former principal, a Franciscan friar, is in prison for stealing from the school and the Franciscans nearly $900,000, some of which fed the younger Baselice’s drug addiction, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors are detailing allegations made against nearly two dozen priests since 1948 to show that Lynn and other archdiocesan officials kept suspected predators in jobs around children.

On cross-examination Monday, defense lawyers Jeffrey Lindy and Thomas Bergstrom had detectives concede that Lynn promptly interviewed both complainants and accused priests and sent the priests to a church-run hospital for mental health evaluations and treatment.

The man who wrote to the archdiocese in 1992 about the camp prowler was by then a 44-year-old married father of five girls. The priest he accused was chaplain of a suburban Philadelphia girls’ high school.

He remained there until 2004, when a church panel reviewing complaints in the wake of the national priest abuse scandal found the allegations against him credible. He only then admitted molesting three boys and explained earlier denials on the fact he had confessed and moved past it.

The archdiocese restricted his ministry — 40 years after the camp allegations first surfaced.

Complete Article HERE!