Priests In Trouble – Page 167

March 11, 2013

Cleveland priest excommunicated for role in breakaway worship community

By Brian Roewe

Cleveland Bishop Richard Lennon has issued a decree formally excommunicating Fr. Robert Marrone, the pastor who followed his parishioners from St. Peter Church to the independent worship community that formed in the wake of their parish’s closing.

“It is with sadness I recognize that the Reverend Robert J. Marrone, a priest of the Diocese of Cleveland, has broken communion with the Catholic Church,” Lennon’s decree, issued Monday, reads. “He is found to have withdrawn submission to the pastors of the Church and from communion with the members of the Church subject to them.

“I hereby declare that by doing so freely and with knowledge, the Reverend Robert J. Marrone has incurred ipso facto the automatic penalty (latae sententiae) of excommunication as stated in canon 1364, [paragraph 1] of the Code of Canon Law,” he said.

The decree accuses the priest of schism and forbids him from participation in celebrations of the sacraments or in public worship. Marrone can neither receive sacraments nor hold a position in any ecclesiastical office. Canon law allows him 10 days from his excommunication’s publishing to appeal the decree — in this case, until March 14.

Marrone addressed his status in a brief statement to members of the Community of St. Peter, stating the action “reflects the continuous pattern [in the diocese] which has marked the process of clustering, consolidation, closing, suppressions and reopening of parishes. I must, as I have stated repeatedly in the past, follow my conscience in this matter.”

Marrone expressed his gratitude to the community while reaffirming his commitment as their pastor-administrator.

“I will continue to serve the Community of Saint Peter as long as they call me to do so and as long as I am able to fulfill the responsibilities of the work entrusted to me,” he said.

The community scheduled a meeting for registered members only March 11 to discuss their pastor’s current status and future.

At posting time, Marrone had not responded to NCR’s request for comment.

In a statement accompanying his official decree, Lennon said, “The desired effect of excommunication is not to ban someone from the Church permanently. Rather it is a temporary status meant to be medicinal and to encourage the person to reconcile with the Church.”

He added that though excommunicated, Marrone remains a member of the church but has harmed his relationship with it and God through his actions, specifically holding a leadership position with the breakaway St. Peter community.

In March 2009, Lennon announced the closing of St. Peter Parish as part of a wave of closures across the diocese. In all, he shuttered 50-plus parishes and churches, primarily in response to decreasing membership and increasing costs.

Several parishioner groups appealed their cases to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, and in March 2012, it ruled in favor of 11 parishes, saying Lennon improperly shuttered them and ordering their immediate reopening.

Among those was St. Peter, which, given its unique circumstances, presented a more difficult process than the others. Unwilling to disband as a community upon learning of their church’s closure, a large contingent of St. Peter parishioners chose instead to incorporate themselves in October 2009 as a group outside the diocese’s authority.

A year later in August, they gathered for the first time at their new worship site, a renovated warehouse on Euclid Street. Marrone celebrated the Mass despite his prohibition to publicly celebrate sacraments under the terms of his requested one-year leave from priestly ministry.

Lennon in his statement said he met with Marrone a month before that celebration but said the priest refused to talk. Further attempts to meet also proved futile.

In January 2011, Lennon took a first step toward action against Marrone, giving him a formal canonical warning that he must resign from leadership with the Community of St. Peter. Marrone declined.

In May, Lennon issued a “Declaration of Loss of Canonical Office,” which removed Marrone as pastor of St. Peter Parish and requested he reconcile with the diocese by leaving the Community of St. Peter or face suspension from ministry.

“I will not comply with your decree to leave the community of Saint Peter because I must, before all else, follow what my conscience dictates,” Marrone responded in a letter to Lennon.

A month after St. Peter Parish officially reopened, Lennon in October began the administrative penal process outlined by canon law, with a formal canonical warning sent to Marrone in late October.

Addressing the diocese, Lennon urged parishioners to pray for Marrone and pray that the incident could bring the diocese together.

“I pray that this action may be perceived by the faithful as an initiative to bring unity and peace to the Body of Christ,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

March 6, 2013

Strong policies on abusive priests vital, O’Malley says

Ya gotta love this guy!

By Lisa Wangsness

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley said Tuesday that the next pope must make sure the Roman Catholic Church adopts measures to deal with bishops whose “malfeasance” allowed abusive priests to remain in ministry.

O’Malley said in an interview that the successor to Pope Benedict XVI will need to continue Benedict’s campaign to get bishops across the world to adopt policies for dealing with accused abusers. That should include procedures for disciplining bishops who protect abusive priests, said O’Malley, among dozens of cardinals gathered at the Vatican.

The US bishops adopted a zero-tolerance policy on clergy sexual abuse a decade ago, requiring removal from ministry of any priest credibly accused of abusing a minor, but some church leaders have not followed it. The bishop of Kansas City was convicted last fall of failing to report child abuse by a priest, but the church has not sanctioned him.

“There needs to be a path” for disciplining bishops, O’Malley said. “Right now, it’s not terribly clear, but it’s something the next pope will have to deal with.”

Without a protocol in place, he said, it falls to the Vatican to decide what to do with each errant bishop on a case-by-case basis. “My point is always that if you don’t have policies, you’ll be improvising, and when you improvise, you make a lot of mistakes,” he said.

‘There needs to be a path’ for disciplining bishops. ‘Right now, it’s not terribly clear.’

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston discussed some of the issues at stake in the papal election in a brief interview Tuesday in a corridor of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, a peaceful hilltop seminary about 10 minutes by foot from the Vatican.

O’Malley is among the US cardinals staying there before the conclave. Once voting begins, the cardinals will move to lodgings within the Vatican and remain isolated from the world until they elect a pontiff.

The conclave is held in the Sistine Chapel, which closed at 1 p.m. Tuesday so that work crews could begin installing a raised floor, under which they will put antibugging devices, and the stoves in which the ballots will be burned.

O’Malley, who during the interview wore a gray cardigan over his hooded brown habit and blue socks peeking through his sandals, spent the morning in one of a series of meetings the cardinals are holding before the conclave, called general congregations, in which they discuss issues facing the church.

Being part of the papal process is “surrealistic,” he said, but also moving.

“Growing up a Catholic and knowing a little bit about these traditions and the way the Holy Father is selected in the church — it’s a far cry from seeing it up close and being part of it,” he said.

O’Malley also seemed to ache for a little down time. He had just finished a long press conference and had more reporters to speak with before a dinner with cardinals. He said he had not been able to spend much time going out to dinner or otherwise enjoying the city. “If I didn’t have all these interviews,” he said with a laugh, “I could be in a bookstore right now.”

Yet the shy O’Malley seemed at ease at the press conference. He said that after almost 30 years of being a bishop, he had grown accustomed to being the face of the church and interacting with the press. “It’s not always easy, but it’s important; it’s the way we can communicate with the largest number of people,” he said.

He has been highly sought after by the Spanish-speaking press because of his fluency in the language and his work with the Hispanic community in the United States and with the church in Latin America.

Asked in the Globe interview what he was looking for in a potential candidate, O’Malley said the next pope must “relate well to the universal church.” The Catholic Church is growing quickly in Africa, and more than 40 percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America.

He said Benedict’s successor also needs the spiritual and intellectual capacity to deal with the church’s many challenges. Governance of the Vatican, he added, is also an issue.

“We want the Holy Father to have a good team of people around him in a way that will support his ministry and allow him to focus on his teaching office, which we see as so important,” he said.

O’Malley has been deflecting a lot of questions lately about the possibility he could be a contender for pope. Most Vatican analysts consider the notion of an American pope a long shot, but some say that O’Malley’s chances could improve if there is no consensus after a few days of voting.

One reporter at the news conference said she had a question from her daughter: Would O’Malley continue to wear his “cappuccino robe” if elected pope? O’Malley, a Capuchin friar whose order’s name derives from the brown hooded habits its members wear, blushed and chuckled with his audience.

“I have worn this uniform for over 40 years, and I presume I will wear it until I die, because I don’t expect to be elected pope,” he said. He stammered slightly. “So — I don’t expect to have a change of wardrobe.”

The press conference focused on the general congregation meetings, a tricky subject, because the cardinals take oaths promising not to reveal the content of the discussions to outsiders.

As described by cardinals and Vatican representatives, there is little back and forth in these sessions. Cardinals sign up to speak and essentially make speeches without debate.

A half-hour coffee break gives the cardinals time to chat informally. Cardinals who are over 80 years old — the cutoff for being eligible to vote in the conclave — are invited to join the general congregations.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston, who presided alongside O’Malley at the press conference, said the congregations were “pretty serene — it’s not campaign-like.”

The College of Cardinals has not yet set a date for the conclave, nor have cardinals decided when they will set a date. All electors must be present for the date to be set, and a Vatican representative said 5 of the 115 electors were not yet in Rome. Church law requires the conclave to begin no more than 20 days after a papal vacancy.

O’Malley said the cardinals want to be sure they allow themselves enough time to weigh issues and contenders before the conclave to make sure the voting itself does not “drag on.” All the conclaves in the last century have ended within five days; in earlier centuries, some voting sessions lasted for months or even years.

O’Malley and DiNardo said cardinals who, like themselves, were in charge of dioceses, hoped to return home by March 24 for Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. But they said the prelates do not want to rush. “This is the most important decision that some of us will ever make, and we need to give it the time that’s necessary,” O’Malley said.

He told the National Catholic Reporter Sunday that he hoped the cardinals would meet twice a day every day this week to move the process along. But Tuesday the cardinals decided against meeting twice that day, and they plan on meeting only during the morning Wednesday. O’Malley smiled a little tightly when asked about that. “This is Rome,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

March 4, 2013

O’Brien priest worries that church wants to ‘crush’ him

Key figure behind allegations of inappropriate behaviour attacks Catholic church’s response to complaints

By Catherine Deveney

A key figure behind allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Cardinal Keith O’Brien has launched a powerful attack on the Catholic church’s response to the complaints, saying he fears the church hierarchy would “crush” him if they could.

Last Sunday the Observer revealed that the former priest, along with three serving priests, had reported O’Brien’s behaviour to the Vatican, prompting the UK’s most senior Catholic to resign the following day. Now the former priest, who says he was the subject of unwanted attention by O’Brien when he was a 20-year-old seminarian, has come forward to explain why he made his allegations public and to lambast the Scottish church leadership’s reaction to last week’s story.

He is “disappointed” by the “lack of integrity” shown by the Catholic church. “There have been two sensations for me this week. One is feeling the hot breath of the media on the back of my neck and the other is sensing the cold disapproval of the church hierarchy for daring to break ranks. I feel like if they could crush me, they would,” he told the Observer.

He added that he was shocked when Peter Kearney, director of communications for the church in Scotland, claimed O’Brien’s resignation was not linked to the Observer story and that the church did not know the details of the allegations.

Kearney said he was unable to comment on suggestions that a new complaint had been lodged as a result of last week’s story. When asked to outline the church’s programme of support for complainants, he said only that they would be directed to Antonio Mennini, the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s ambassador to Britain, to make a formal statement.

“The vacuum the church has created has allowed whimsy and speculation to distort the truth,” the priest said. “And the only support I have been offered is a cursory email with a couple of telephone numbers of counsellors hundreds of miles away from me. Anyway, I don’t need counselling about Keith O’Brien’s unwanted behaviour to me as a young man. But I may need counselling about the trauma of speaking truth to power.”

The former cleric says he feels that he, rather than the cardinal, has been the subject of scrutiny. “I have felt very alone and there is a tendency to become reclusive when people are trying to hunt you down.”

He said he felt particularly angered by demands that the identity of the four complainants be revealed: “To those who want to know my name I would say, what does that change? And what do you think I have done wrong?”

He said that when the four came forward to the church, they were asked to make sworn signed statements to Mennini. But they were also warned that if their complaints became public knowledge, they would cause “immense further damage to the church”. The church, he says, failed to act quickly and appropriately, adding that he fears the matter was in danger of being swept under the carpet.

“For me, this is about integrity. I thought it was best to let the men and women who put their hard-earned cash in the plate every Sunday know what has been happening. If you pay into something you have a right, but also a duty, to know what you are paying for.”

He said that the men’s complaints were not maliciously motivated. “I am as sinful as the next man – as my partner and pals frequently remind me. But this isn’t about trying to own the moral high ground. I feel compassion for O’Brien, more compassion than the church is showing me, but the truth has to be available – even when that truth is hard to swallow.”

He also dismissed suggestions that the accusations contain an element of homophobia. ” This is not about a gay culture or a straight culture. It’s about an open culture. I would be happy to see an openly gay bishop, cardinal, or pope. But the church acts as if sexual identity has to be kept secret.”

Complete Article HERE!

March 4, 2013

Cardinal O’Brien’s confession turns spotlight on Scottish Catholic church

Admission of sexual misconduct exposes former head cleric and church to claims of hypocrisy especially over gay rights

By Severin Carrell

The Scottish Roman Catholic church is facing a series of questions about the conduct of its former leader and its attacks on gay rights, after Cardinal Keith O’Brien admitted to a secret sexual life dating back decades.

O’Brien is expected to face a more detailed investigation by the Vatican after admitting to incidents of sexual misconduct throughout his career, which started in 1965.

After a week of denials over allegations of sexual conduct and approaches by four men, the cardinal said on Sunday he was guilty of conduct that had “fallen beneath the standards expected of me”.

In a statement that left questions unanswered about the nature of that misconduct, he added: “To those I have offended, I apologise and ask forgiveness. To the Catholic church and people of Scotland, I also apologise.”

Those admissions are likely to supersede the original Vatican investigation, first revealed by the Observer, into formal allegations levelled against O’Brien in early February by three serving priests in his former diocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and a former priest.

The latter said he left the priesthood after he was sexually propositioned by O’Brien in the 1980s. Other incidents involving O’Brien, who became archbishop in 1985 and then cardinal in 2003, included a series of “drunken fumblings” and unwanted advances, church sources said.

His remarks are an admission that he breached ecclesiastical codes on celibacy and against homosexuality, and that his officials misled the Vatican, the Scottish church and the public in their denials following the Observer article.

While the Vatican inquiry is expected to remain confidential, and will be set up once 116 or so of the church’s cardinals gather in Rome elect Pope Benedict XVI’s successor within the coming days, it will ask O’Brien for further details about that misconduct.

It also exposes the cardinal and the Scottish church to claims of hypocrisy, and raises questions about whether other senior figures in the church knew about his private life and covered it up or failed to take action.

It also emerged last week that a fifth priest had reportedly made accusations to the Vatican against O’Brien late last year, concerning an incident in 2001. In 2003, O’Brien took office as a cardinal, signing an oath about upholding the church’s teachings: until then, he had been regarded as a liberal archbishop.

O’Brien has since become notorious among equal rights campaigners for his vigorous attacks on gay marriage and gay adoptions, calling homosexuality a “grotesque subversion” and “harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved”.

Colin MacFarlane, director of Stonewall Scotland, which named O’Brien “bigot of the year” last year, challenged the cleric and the Scottish church to explain why he had not apologised directly to the gay community.

“We note with sadness that the cardinal didn’t find it in him to apologise to gay people, their families and friends for the harm his vicious and cruel language caused,” he said.

Church officials confirmed on Monday that O’Brien had left Scotland for an undisclosed location to rest and escape the furore over his admission of misconduct. He had been due to attend this week’s conclave in the Vatican. Before being disgraced, he had been scheduled to visit a parish in Dunbar, East Lothian, after retiring on his 75th birthday later this month.

Professor John Haldane, an adviser to the Vatican and a leading commentator on Scottish Catholic affairs at St Andrews University, said the O’Brien affair raised a number of “broad lessons” for the church and a challenge to the Scottish church to reform itself.

Writing in the weekly Catholic newspaper the Tablet, Haldane said the church was guilty of double standards for denouncing homosexuality as an inherently disordered condition while knowing many of its priests and trainees at its seminaries were gay, or wrestling with their sexuality. Regardless of their sexuality, priests ought to be made to explicitly pledge to remain wholly celibate or leave the priesthood, Haldane said.

He added that the Scottish church should abolish at least half of its eight diocese – a throwback to the size and power of the pre-reformation church.

The Scottish church is struggling to fill five bishop vacancies. It has only three full-time, permanent bishops or archbishops in post. It needed a new body of at most six lay advisers to help in that transformation, Haldane said.

Catherine Deveney, the journalist who broke the original story in the Observer, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme none of the four accusers she had reported on was pursuing a personal vendetta against O’Brien.

“One of the individuals concerned said that to take the cardinal on as an individual himself would have been like running into a brick wall,” she said, adding: “These men are spiritual men – they want to see an open and transparent Catholic church as a result of this, they don’t want to see it destroyed.”

Complete Article HERE!

March 4, 2013

Cardinal Keith O’Brien: how Britain’s Catholic leader fell from grace

By Catherine Deveney

What is it about a gold mitre, a flowing robe, a flash of cardinal red that so clouds our judgment? It is as if we believe these things hold a kind of magic. Don them and the wearer becomes pure and invincible. No human urges, no troublesome sexuality. Some people are naively enthralled by hierarchy. Priest, good. Bishop, better. Cardinal, best of all. The four complainants in the Cardinal O’Brien affair, who have accused him of inappropriate behaviour, haven’t rated much sympathy within this strange moral hierarchy. “Who are they?” I have been asked all week. “Where are they?” has been another frequent question. But I have rarely been asked: “How are they?”

A narrative has begun to be embroidered on the cardinal’s magic mitre. A fairytale. He is named but his accusers are not, and therefore the accusations are invalid. Let us be clear about one thing: the three priests, and one former priest, who have made complaints are not anonymous. They have given sworn, signed statements to the papal nuncio. The unnerving thing about the hunt to “out” these men (my phone has not stopped ringing with offers to “make it worth my while”) is that it suggests people who have suffered traumatic events have no rights over how to tell their story, or how much information is made public. We demand not just that the appropriate authorities know names – we, the public, should know them, too.

In purely human terms, the story of Cardinal O’Brien’s resignation is tragic. He had spent a lifetime reaching the upper echelons of his church, but after allegations of inappropriate behaviour made in the Observer last Sunday his fall from grace took just 36 hours. Not one of the four complainants takes any satisfaction from that. This is not about the exposure of one man’s alleged foibles. It is about the exposure of a church official who publicly issues a moral blueprint for others’ lives that he is not prepared to live out himself. Homosexuality is not the issue; hypocrisy is. The cardinal consistently condemned homosexuality during his reign, vociferously opposing gay adoption and same-sex marriage. The church cannot face in two directions like a grotesque two-headed monster: one face for public, the other for private.

There have been some misunderstandings about the timing of this tale: ridiculous accusations about the complaints spoiling the cardinal’s retirement and having “the whiff of payback” for petty jealousies. Then it was suggested that this was all a conspiracy to prevent Keith O’Brien going to the conclave.

But in many ways this story was overtaken by events. The four complainants made their statements to the papal nuncio, Archbishop Mennini, around 8 or 9 February. On 11 February the pope resigned. The first response the complainants received from the nuncio said O’Brien should continue to go to Rome because “that will make it easier to arrange his retirement to be one of prayer and seclusion like the pope”. The complainants recognised church subtext. In a message to me one wrote: “This is saying, ‘leave it to us to sweep it under the carpet and you can forget about it. It will fade away as if we have dealt with it.’ Not acceptable.”

On 22 February, the cardinal gave an interview to the BBC about going to the conclave. He also said that church rules on celibacy should be reviewed. Informally, the men heard that the church was unhappy about that interview. Action would be taken. The cardinal would not go to Rome.

So did the church act because it was shocked by the claims against the cardinal or were they were angry he had broken ranks on celibacy? Two days later, the Observer published the story.

But why had the men waited so long to report allegations dating back to the 1980s? The answer is that people who have suffered trauma are not public property. They have the right to come to terms with it in their own time and express it in their own way, when they are ready. Being ready can simply be a collision of circumstances. Often, it’s as straightforward as realising you are not the only one.

Sometimes as a journalist, you hold one piece of a jigsaw puzzle for a very long time. Gradually, you pick up another piece, and then another, until the picture clicks together and makes sense. I had known one element of this story for years: the former priest’s. Let’s call him Lenny. Now married, Lenny had been approached by the cardinal while a seminarian. Lenny says the cardinal was his spiritual director and used bedtime prayers as an opportunity to make advances to his young student.

“I knew myself to be heterosexual,” he says, “but I did say to others that I thought it would be easier to get through seminary if you were gay.”

Last month I received a call from Lenny. He was very shaken. He had had a conversation with a priest – we’ll call him Peter – whom he hadn’t spoken to for years. Peter told Lenny about an inappropriate relationship the cardinal had instigated with him. Two other priests were drawn in: Kenny and John. Both had experienced unwanted advances from the cardinal.

“I’d never wanted to ‘out’ Keith just for being gay,” says Lenny. “But this was confirming that his behaviour towards me was part of his modus operandi. He has hurt others, probably worse, than he affected me. And that only became clear a few weeks ago.”

Last week there were claims the cardinal did not know details of the allegations. How could he respond, the implication was, if he did not know what he was being accused of? That was simply untrue. Last Saturday, the day before the Observer printed the story, the cardinal did not respond to calls and messages left for him. The Scottish Catholic Media Office was approached. Peter Kearney, the communications director, asked for the allegations to be put in writing. They were. In that email, four separate allegations were outlined. At the end, a direct question was posed: “Is it true that the cardinal has broken his vow of celibacy?” The allegations could not have been more specific.

Kearney certainly seemed to understand at the time. His response was brief: “The cardinal is consulting his lawyers. These claims are contested and should not be published.” But I had four statements that described the cardinal attempting to touch, kiss, or have sex with people in his care.

“He started fondling my body, kissing me and telling me how special I was to him and how much he loved me,” one had written. One of the statements was five pages long. Given the strength of the evidence we had, the Observer chose to publish the story.

There have been many questions about the four complainants that cast doubt on them and their motives. So let me tell you about the men I have come to know. They are men of conscience and integrity who desperately want to do “the right thing”. Men who love the church but recognise that the way it covers up scandal and hides wrongdoing is damaging. On a personal level they are funny, kind, spirited, generous, conventional and unconventional in different measures. But above all they are brave. Peter wrote to me saying it had been the worst week of his life. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Each of those men spoke out knowing it could ruin their lives. Some of them were trying to work out what order they might be able to take refuge in if the church disowned them for speaking.

The biggest sin in the Catholic church has historically been “scandalising the faithful”. That is why the abhorrent cover-ups of child sex-abuse scandals have been part of the church’s history. They shield their own – and if you speak against them, you stop being their own. Archbishop Tartaglia of Glasgow – who caused outrage last year when he linked the tragically premature death of David Cairns MP to his homosexual lifestyle – publicly said prayers for the cardinal at mass in Edinburgh after being named as the cardinal’s temporary replacement. He invited the cameras in while he did it. It is right that the cardinal is given adequate support. It is not right if the church pretends that he is the victim in this. The gold mitre, the cardinal’s robes, do not make him more worthy of support than the men in ordinary clerical collars.

It seems there is a great deal of displacement activity going on in the Scottish Catholic Church. It is not the behaviour of the four complainants that should be concentrated on. It is the behaviour of the cardinal. How big a crisis this is for the church lies in its own hands. The signs so far do not suggest a new era of openness. But, as the church itself proclaims, redemption is always possible for a sinner.

Priests tell me there is a “gay culture” in the Scottish Catholic church – but not an open, healthy one. In some ways, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. The church has always had a deeply cynical side when it comes to sexual morality. Lenny recalls being a young priest, accompanying an older priest who would rise to great heights in the church. The older man was drunk and was ranting about men who left the priesthood. Why leave to have sex? Why didn’t they just visit a sauna and go to confession in the morning?

A cardinal does not resign overnight over trivia. Some people have questioned, though, whether his alleged behaviour constitutes abuse. After all, this involves adults, not children. One commentator even suggested it’s all just a scandalous homophobic plot. That completely misunderstands the nature of the power a spiritual director has over his seminarians and a cardinal has over his priests. Lenny gave up his priesthood when O’Brien was promoted to be his bishop. He did not want to be in his power. “He harmed me in so many ways,” he explained.

And ask Peter if this story involved abuse. Peter has undergone long-term psychological counselling. His experiences with the cardinal are part of his records. Peter admits he even contemplated suicide. And still people are shouting “Reveal yourself!”

Why should he?

A few nights ago Lenny had a dream. He and his fellow complainants were in a cold, damp church, searching for a piece of scripture for a funeral. The Bible they were looking in was tattered. They could not find the words. When he woke, Lenny knew exactly the passage they had been hunting for: Ecclesiasticus 2. He wants the words read at his own funeral, to be acknowledged in the end as a priest.

“My son, if you aspire to serve the Lord,
Prepare yourself for an ordeal…
…Since gold is tested in the fire
And chosen men in the furnace of humiliation.”

There is the superficial gold of the mitre, and then there is solid gold. The church has to learn the difference. When Lenny told the others his dream, one said he, too, had dreamed about their situation. His dream had been simpler. Keith O’Brien had asked their forgiveness for his behaviour. All of them had granted it.

Complete Article HERE!