Tag: Discontent

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Pope Francis called to restore the Church

Leonardo Boff’s weekly columns are available in Spanish from Servicios Koinonia and in Portuguese on his blog. Some of his older columns are available in English at LeonardoBoff.com.

by Leonardo Boff (English translation by Rebel Girl)

On the social networks, I had proclaimed that the future pope would be named Francis. And I was right. Why Francis? Because Saint Francis’s conversion began when he heard the Crucifix in Saint Damian’s Chapel say to him, “Francis, go and restore my house, which as you see is falling into ruin.” (St. Bonaventure,Legenda Maior II, 1).

Francis took these words literally and rebuilt the Portiuncula Chapel in Assisi which still exists inside a huge cathedral. Then he realized that restoring the “Church that Christ saved through his blood” (ibid) was a spiritual matter. It was then that he started his movement for renewal of the Church that was presided by the most powerful pope in history, Innocent III. He began to live with the lepers and arm in arm with one of them, he went along the way preaching the gospel in the vernacular and not in Latin.

It’s good to know that Francis was never a priest but just a layman, Only at the end of his life, when the popes forbade lay people to preach, did he agree to become a deacon, on the condition that he not receive any kind of remuneration for the post.

Why did Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio choose the name Francis? I think it’s because he realized the Church is in ruins because of demoralization due to the various scandals that have affected the most precious thing it had: morality and credibility.

Francis isn’t a name; it’s a plan for a Church that is poor, simple, gospel-centered, and devoid of all power. It’s a Church that walks the way together with the least and last, that creates the first communities of brothers and sisters who recite the breviary under the trees with the birds. It’s an ecological Church that calls all beings those sweet words “brothers and sisters”. Francis was obedient to the Church and the popes and at the same time he followed his own path with the gospel of poverty in hand. So theologian Joseph Ratzinger wrote: “Francis’ ‘no’ to this imperial type of Church couldn’t be more radical; it’s what we could call a prophetic protest.”(in Zeit Jesu, Herder 1970, 269). Francis doesn’t talk; he simply inaugurates something new.

I think Pope Francis has in mind a church outside the palaces and symbols of power. He showed it when he appeared in public. Normally the Popes and mainly Ratzinger would put over their shoulders the mozzetta, that short capelet embroidered in gold that only emperors could wear. Pope Francis came dressed only in white. Three highly symbolic points stand out in his inaugural address.

First: He said that he wants to “preside with charity”, something that has been called for since the Reformation and by the best theologians of ecumenism. The Pope should not preside as an absolute monarch, clothed in sacred power, as provided for in canon law. According to Jesus, he should preside in love and strengthen the faith of the brothers and sisters.

Second: He gave a central place to the People of God, as Vatican II highlighted but which had been left aside by the two previous popes in favor of the hierarchy. Pope Francis humbly asked the people of God to pray for him and bless him. Only afterwards would he bless the people of God. This means that he’s there to serve and not be served. He asked them to help him build a path together and called for brotherhood for all humankind, where human being don’t recognize each other as brothers and sisters but are tied to economic forces.

Finally, he avoided all spectacle in the figure of Pope. He didn’t extend both arms to greet the people. He remained still, serious and sober, even frightened, I would say. One only saw a white figure who greeted the people affectionately. But he radiated peace and confidence. He showed his mood by speaking without official-sounding rhetoric, like a pastor speaks to the faithful.

It’s worth mentioning that he’s a pope who comes from the Great South, where the poorest of humankind are and where 60% of Catholics live. With his experience as pastor, with a new view of things, from below, he will be able to reform the Curia, decentralize the administration, and give the Church a new and credible face.

Complete Article HERE!

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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.

Fr. Robert Marrone censes the congregation during the Community of St. Peter liturgy Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011, at 7100 Euclid in Cleveland. (Peggy Turbett)

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!

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Roman Catholic leaders need to get rid of their groupthink

By Lisa Miller

Recent events prompt a stating of the obvious. The Roman Catholic Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It values neither free speech nor freedom of the press. Its leaders are not elected officials, so they do not sweat opinion polls. Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals do not represent the interests of their members, and members, if dissatisfied with their leadership, cannot vote those leaders out. The next pope, the Vatican press office continually reminds us, will be selected not by the 115 cardinals who will soon be sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, but by God.

But in the 21st century, this blatant disregard of democratic principles rankles. Even the cardinals from the United States showed uncharacteristic irritation when their daily news conferences in Rome were canceled last week. Italian newspapers had published leaked accounts of the closed-door meetings at which the voting cardinals are gathering pre-conclave and painted the leadership of the church as divided, rancorous and political. No one accused the Americans of leaking outright, but the news conferences abruptly stopped, and the U.S. cardinals weren’t happy. “In true old-style Catholic school teacher fashion, someone talks and everybody stays after school,” Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the Associated Press.

After decades of sex scandals, financial improprieties and rumors of further financial scandals to come, the American cardinals had been demanding more transparency from the church’s governing body, the Curia. “Obviously, we want to know and learn as much as we can relative to governance in the Church, and the Curia is part of that issue,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston. “So, certainly we want to discuss and learn what we can, and I think that will go on as long as the cardinals feel they need the information.”

When their news conferences were shut down, the USCCB issued a news release: “The U.S. Cardinals are committed to transparency.” Others in the College of Cardinals, the statement seemed to be saying, not so much.

Transparency is not just a post-Enlightenment, democratic ideal. It’s a post-Watergate value, learned the hard way. Corrupt leaders betray the faith and trust of generations to come. Healing and renewed trust in authority happens only when all the secrets have finally been revealed. No one understands this better than Americans, who have gotten used to seeing their government and business leaders apologize, express remorse, and — sometimes cynically, sometimes not — remediate their sins before re-committing themselves to power. The church’s continued refusal to do this after wave upon wave of revelations of abuse of innocents and corporate malfeasance infuriates even her most loyal members.

Institutions as wide-ranging as Google and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia have made transparency a core value. A group called Transparency International ranks countries on the basis of the perceived corruption in their governments. (The United States is 19th, after the United Kingdom but before Chile.) How is it in a world such as this, the men at the Vatican’s highest levels continue to close ranks and insist not only on their own authority but also on their own moral privilege? How is it that the church can continue to be faced with evidence that it abused children and insist that it protects the weak and the vulnerable?

A rereading of Jonathan Haidt’s wonderful book “The Righteous Mind” (just out in paperback) is illuminating here. Groups of like-minded people reinforce their own beliefs. And worse. They convince themselves that those beliefs are moral, even righteous. Individuals “lie, cheat and cut corners quite often when we think we can get away with it,” he writes, “and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue.”

Groups are worse. Evolutionarily speaking, “group selection pulls for cooperation, for the ability to suppress antisocial behavior and spur individuals to act in ways that benefit their groups. Group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders.” In other words, in the most powerful groups, people work together — suppressing individual quirks and desires — to protect the group. And then they overlay that group-serving behavior with a moral righteousness that explains and exonerates their ruthlessness. Democratic values — openness, transparency, diversity, free exchange of ideas — do not come naturally to groups, Haidt explains. The brilliance of the American experiment is that it created the freedom for many different groups to thrive.

But then Haidt issues this warning, which the men who run the church would do well to heed: The most effective groups take good care of the people within them.

And the group known as the Catholic Church includes all of its believers, not just the cardinals.

Complete Article HERE!

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Former Catholics say rigid church forced them to leave

Opposition to female ordination and the prohibition on marriage for priests are among the factors causing an exodus from the Catholic Church.

By: Leslie Scrivener
Joanna Manning, former nun, award-winning religion teacher, advocate for the poor and activist-intellectual, was battle-weary.

For decades she had challenged the Catholic Church, arguing for women’s ordination, the right of priests to marry and accountability in repeated sexual abuse crises.

So Manning, once the public face of the reform movement in Catholic Canada and a persistent burr in the side of the church establishment, decamped a decade ago.

She is now a priest in the Anglican Church.

“I did go through a period of grieving for the loss of the vision I’d grown up with after Vatican II,” says Manning, now 69, referring to the 1962-1965 council to modernize the church. “But the church hierarchy had shut down and retreated . . .”

Critics say the Catholic Church hierarchy is disconnected from many if not most of its followers on issues of reform. Theologian Hans Kung writes that a recent poll in Germany shows 85 per cent of Catholics say priests should be allowed to marry, 79 per cent say divorced persons should have permission to remarry in the church and 75 per cent favour ordaining women.

“There’s a catastrophic shortage of priests, in Europe and in Latin America and Africa,” Kung wrote in the New York Times last week. “Huge numbers have left the church or gone into ‘internal emigration,’ especially in the industrialized countries.”

Around the world there are 49,000 parishes without a resident priest pastor.

The question, says Kung, author of the forthcoming book Can the Church Still Be Saved? , is whether cardinals, gathering to elect a new pope — likely in the next 10 days — will discuss progressive issues, or be “muzzled, as they were at the last conclave, in 2005, to keep them in line.”

In Canada many churches have closed and priests have been brought in from other countries to serve. The Catholic Register has reported that in the Archdiocese of Halifax, elderly priests have been brought out of retirement to serve in parishes.

In the sprawling diocese of London, 42 Catholic churches — including half those in Windsor — closed between 2006 and 2008. About one-third of the remaining parishes are “clustered” or share a priest. Declining attendance, the shortage of priests and the high costs of maintaining old buildings have all contributed to the shuttering, says Connie Paré, the diocese’s director of pastoral planning. “It was a very painful process.”

Speaking from her Bloor West home, Manning recalls of her break with Catholicism that she “had put too much energy into something in which I could see no future.” Her spiky white hair, jeans and purple jacket, worn with a clerical collar, contribute to her youthful appearance. “At my age I could no longer give my life over to resisting.”

She looked elsewhere for a place to practise her faith and found, about 10 years ago, San Lorenzo Anglican church on Dufferin St., which has a Spanish-speaking congregation.

“I’d been in exile and alien in my own church,” says Manning, who received horrific hate mail for her views. “Finally, I’d found a place where I was accepted for who I was without having to check anything at the door, including my brain.”

About five years after she joined the San Lorenzo community, Manning, who is single and has two adult sons and two grandchildren, was unprepared when her fellow parishioners suggested she consider the Anglican priesthood. “It was like I was surprised by the Spirit.”

Women have been ordained as Anglican priests in Canada since 1976.

Manning was ordained in 2011. More than half of those who attended the service were Catholic.

Among them was Ted Schmidt, retired teacher, author and former editor of the Catholic New Times. “This was a woman so far ahead of the institutional leadership she would be shot as the enemy,” says Ted Schmidt, a church progressive. “She’s a prophetic person.”

Manning now works as an assistant curate at two parishes, the inner city All Saints Sherbourne and All Saints Kingsway. She finds herself living with a “deep, abiding joy. A place where I can exercise all my gifts.”

She compares her present state to 10 years ago. “My energies were being drained by struggle. I felt a real outsider. I’d been rejected and was on the fringes of the church. Today my energy is so positive, I feel a flowering . . . at my age to have a second chance to do God’s work in the world.”

The Anglican Church has also attracted Catholic men who wanted to marry and raise families as much as they wanted to be priests. The Rev. Canon Joseph Asselin has been the rector of St. Cuthbert’s Anglican Church in Oakville for the past 13 years.

He was raised Catholic — and was a student of Ted Schmidt — and was so committed that as a young person never once missed Sunday mass over 20 years. His mother continues to attend mass up to four times a week.

Asselin was steeped in Catholic social teaching, he says, and was taught to challenge the culture of consumerism and materialism. His experiences in the church were positive. “I was so happy to have healthy role models and mentors.”
But he could never consider being a priest in the Catholic Church. “This could never happen because I always wanted to be a husband and father. Probably, what I find the greatest joy in is being a father.”

He and his wife, Maureen, an elementary school teacher, have a teenage daughter and son, whose photos adorn his church office.

“The Catholic Church is turning its back on a lot of people who have a genuine calling to be priests, and they are the poorer for it,” says Asselin, 49. “No surprise,” he adds, “women can have the same calling.”
He counts many Catholics in his congregation and has married divorced Catholics who do not want to go through painful, lengthy annulments.

“I am able to relate to families here, with all the joys and challenges of being in a family,” he says.
He adds that the Anglican Church has options for men who feel the calling to live celibate lives as monks.

“When you see priests not leading sexually health lives, it saddens me, because they have been asked to a live a life that is not really for them.”

A radical option for Catholic women who feel called to the priesthood is to be ordained in the Catholic Church.
The price is excommunication.

Monica Kilburn-Smith, a 52-year-old Calgary hospice chaplain and mother of two, is a member of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests group, and was ordained in 2008. “The first priests and bishops in our movement were ordained by male bishops in full communion with Rome, who did this out of their own conviction/conscience that it was wrong for women to be refused this sacrament,” she explains.

Pope John Paul II said that the church has no authority to ordain women, using the argument that the first apostles were all men.

Later, Pope Benedict XVI declared that anyone taking in a woman’s ordination was committing a grave sin.

Kilburn-Smith’s St. Brigid of Kildare Catholic Faith Community is growing, she says, with 200 on the mailing list and up to 60 coming to a monthly service held in a United church. By the fall she hopes to say mass twice monthly.

“When women come to mass for the first time and see a woman in vestments and all that represents, on the surface and at deeper levels, it hits them and makes them cry,” says Kilburn-Smith. “It’s not about me; it’s seeing a woman as a person as a representative of God.”

The movement is not just about getting women into the priesthood, but also about a renewed church for the 21st century.

Why not leave the church and join a denomination that ordains women? “To leave women’s voices out just seems wrong,” Kilburn-Smith says.

“If you see something isn’t right, and you feel called in your own faith, why would you go? The Anglican Church changed because women were ordained. It didn’t come from the hierarchy.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Flocks and shepherds

As a conclave gathers to elect a pope, many in the Catholic church want change

WANTED: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.

On March 4th the princes of the church began a series of preliminary “general congregations”, the first step to electing a pontiff. They have much to discuss. After four sessions, they had still not—as expected—fixed a date for the Conclave, the electoral college, made up of cardinals below the age of 80, which will actually choose the next pope.

The papal spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the members of the general congregation, who include older cardinals, are not “hurrying things”. By March 6th, when they adjourned, the assembly had heard 51 speeches. As Father Lombardi tactfully put it, they spoke “freely and with rather effective colour”. That is code for candour—even bluntness. Indeed, given the crises the church faces, delicacy might seem remiss.

The procedure is usually to identify the main threats facing the church and then find the cardinal best able to deal with them. Of the subjects cited by Father Lombardi, half concerned the Vatican itself. Deeper questions include the loss of religious faith in Europe; the challenge from evangelical Protestantism in Latin America; persecution of Christians in the Middle East and clerical sex abuse. But none is as pressing as the turmoil in the Roman Curia, the church’s central administration.

Benedict, intellectually fearless yet personally timid, was unable to keep order. Many in Rome believe that was the true reason for his departure. The Curia has become a battleground. Prelates loyal to the secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who in many cases were appointed by him or come from his native region of Piedmont, are at furious odds with papal diplomats who resented the appointment of a secretary of state with no knowledge of their business. Other feuds abound too. The leaking of documents by the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, though apparently motivated by genuine dismay at decisions taken in the Vatican, was entwined with this venomous plotting and squabbling.

Following the will of God
The findings of an investigative panel of three cardinals will cast a long shadow over the conclave. Last month an Italian newspaper wrote of a ring of gay prelates, some being blackmailed by outsiders. In the first general congregation, three cardinals—reportedly all Europeans—demanded (in vain) access to the findings. If the report will indeed be kept secret until it is handed to the new pope, it is unclear who made that decision. Secrecy fosters suspicions that the contents are dreadful.

The episode may also strengthen the resolve of the mainly English- and German-speaking cardinals who want a vigorous pope to clean up the Curia. This was last reformed under Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978. Cardinal George Pell, the burly archbishop of Sydney, said he wanted “a strategist, a decision-maker, a planner, somebody who has got strong pastoral capacities already demonstrated so that he can take a grip of the situation.”

For I have sinned

Among those watching the decision making in Rome with apprehension, fear and optimism is the Catholic priesthood. In many countries, their declining and ageing ranks are beset by the revelation of past scandals—both at the parish and at the top. This week Scotland’s most senior cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, admitted that his sexual conduct at times “has fallen below the standards” expected of him. A radio interview by his former counterpart in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, marked by a nervous laugh and opaque language, compounded the ire.

Victims of sexual abuse believe the reckoning has barely begun. They want not just proper investigation, but apologies and punishments—and in some cases cash. For them, Benedict exemplified the secretive, cautious response that aggravated the misconduct. It will be hard for any new pope to meet their expectations.

Along with frustrations of church politics and shame about misconduct, attendance at mass is falling. In America it has declined by over a third since 1960. In Britain data from the 2011 census show a similar trend, with numbers of Christians down 12 percentage points since 2001. Average Sunday attendance has fallen for the past 20 years. In mostly Catholic Italy only 39% attend on a monthly basis.

But parish life goes on. Timothy Radcliffe, the former head of the Dominican order, says priests are mostly happy, albeit overstretched. After a peak of 110 vocations in England and Wales in 1996, the figure dropped to a mere 19 in 2006. But this year 38 ordinations are expected. In a reversal of the old days of Western missionaries, many were born overseas. Father Stephen Wang, of Allen Hall seminary in London, counts men from Africa, India and Australia in this year’s cohort of 54.

Movements such as “Youth 2000” and World Youth Day encourage vocations through what has been called “evangelical Catholicism”, says Father Wang, in which the faith is “more confident” about presenting itself. Traditionalist groups such as the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter or the Institute of Christ the King are attracting younger members. The provost of the Brompton Oratory, a traditionalist church in central London, is Father Julian Large, a 43-year-old former journalist who draws a youthful following.

The brighter shore

In some respects the woes of the church in the West seem far away from the parts of the world where it is thriving. In a leafy sanctuary from the heat and frenzy of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s biggest city, Father Aurel da Silva sits under a tree on the tidy front lawn of a monastery. On the wall behind him hangs an oversize portrait of Michel Nielly, who a half-century ago established it as a beachhead for the Dominican order. Today it houses some 30 seminarians from across the region and its small wooden chapel attracts Abidjan’s elites for Sunday mass.

Near the guardhouse, employees raise money for local charities by selling mushrooms that grow in the monastery’s garden. Ceramic water filters distributed to the poor are also displayed prominently. A pink leaflet posted on a bulletin board advertises job-training programmes for unemployed youth. When violence engulfed Côte d’Ivoire after its disputed 2010 presidential election, the towering St Paul’s cathedral in the heart of Abidjan sheltered nearly 2,000 people.

The rapidly growing African Catholic church, says Father da Silva, has great ambitions as a social force. But autonomy must be the watchword. The doctrinal debates and papal intrigue in Rome hardly concern him. “I haven’t spent time in Rome, but I don’t need to,” he says. “What I do here is more important.”

Some of his seminarians have softer attitudes to the Vatican, but they insist that the church’s social message is secondary: spirituality comes first. The African church is no hotbed of liberalism. Its leading contender for the papacy, the Ghanaian cardinal Peter Turkson, is widely regarded as a conservative in the mold of Benedict.

But one of Father da Silva’s older colleagues stakes out a more radical position. The church must evolve, he says. His priorities are: the end of clerical celibacy, women’s ordination, and, above all, greater tolerance for dissent: “You have to accept other people’s way of thinking.”

Those views chime across continents and oceans. In the beautiful, desolate west of Ireland is the village of Moygownagh, the home parish of Father Brendan Hoban. He is a co-founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, which aspires to represent the 2m Irish people who attend mass at least once a month. It is campaigning for an end to celibacy, “inclusive ministry” (code for women priests) and a rethinking of sexual teaching, especially on contraception.

Nearly a quarter of Ireland’s 4,500 priests (and probably a higher share of its able-bodied, energetic ones) has joined. It is in touch with similar bodies in Austria, where a grass-roots initiative among priests incurred a papal rebuke last year, as well as France, the Czech Republic, Australia and the United States.

The Irish association has special credibility. It speaks for a country where the hierarchy is reeling from horrific revelations about abuse in church-run institutions and clerical cover-ups, but where the population, despite the onrush of secularism, remains relatively pious by the standards of the rich world.

The village exemplifies both the crisis and strength of Irish Catholicism. Half of its residents attend weekly mass and most of the remainder look to the church for rites of passage, from first communion to anniversary masses for the dead. Despite the recession, generous donations are paying for church refurbishment.

Moygownagh belongs to a small diocese with 32 priests serving 22 parishes; that number sounds high, and it reflects a flood of vocations in the 1960s and 1970s. But only seven priests are under 55. Father Hoban is nearly 65. When he retires, he expects that the village will be left without a priest of its own for the first time in centuries. In his parents’ time, he recalls, a local farming family would be proud if a son joined the priesthood. Now, he says, even a “faithful Catholic family might panic” if a son announced a similar vocation. “They would feel he was embarking on a life of stress, isolation and low social prestige.”

Almost all the church’s recent woes can be ascribed, in Father Hoban’s view, to the top-down decision-making which has marked the past two papacies. Like many Catholic liberals, he feels that the trouble started when the church hierarchy hijacked the devolutionary reforms of the second Vatican council and blocked change or implemented it badly.

The result, viewed from an Irish village, is that “Rome doesn’t listen to the national bishops; the bishops don’t tell Rome the truth because Rome doesn’t want to hear it; the bishops don’t listen to the priests, the priests haven’t listened enough to the people.” With lay involvement, the child-abuse cover-ups would not have happened. He does not want the church to be “literally democratic”, but nor should it “preserve structures inherited from the Roman empire.”

What do priests of his school expect from the conclave? “In some ways we don’t hope for that much, because all the cardinals have been appointed under the present order. But we hope that some can see the dysfunctionality of the Vatican in its present form…the cardinals need to bite the bullet and appoint somebody who can challenge the Curia.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Catholic Patriarchy: What the Papal Transition Means and What Feminists Can Do About It

By Mary Hunt

The obvious question is why any self-respecting feminist would worry about the Pope, the Roman Catholic Church, and its machinations. My simple answer is POWER. Religion is one of the many sources that shape how power is shared (or not) in this world. Feminists need to pay attention to the sharing of power if we think we are going to reshape the world in a more just and egalitarian way. As someone who speaks “Catholic,” indeed as a theologian rooted in the tradition, I think there is a lot of power in the balance at the moment, and I want to see it shared.

The papal transition underway in Rome is a classic example of patriarchy prancing for the world to see live and in color. It is without a doubt the biggest religious news story thus far in the 21st century, and there is not a woman in sight. Think about that in light of the media coverage. Apart from the many women reporters now in Rome, the players in this story are all men, all the time.

Of course women are seen in the vast crowds that flock to St. Peter’s Square or greeting the helicopter bearing the out-going pope at his new digs at Castel Gandolfo. But there are virtually no women in the big news of the papal transfer save the nuns who were relocated from their convent so that the Pope Emeritus will have a new place to live in his old neighborhood. They are symbolic of the problem I am underscoring, as I doubt they were consulted. Even the Virgin Mary was consulted!

Likewise, the story of the implosion of the patriarchal church (what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has better called “kyriarchy”[1]) is utterly devoid of women. Whether the Vatican banking scandal, sexual abuse, or episcopal cover-up, this has been a men’s show from the beginning, and they have done a royal job of making a mess.
I do not think women would necessarily have avoided these pitfalls. However, the historical fact is that as far as we know, women were not involved. Therein lies the most obvious place to start looking at this situation from a feminist perspective. Who else isn’t there and why? Young people, married people, out LGBTIQ people, more than a few men of color, the list is endless. Yet no one seems to notice, or if they do notice they do not seem to care. I notice and I care!

The Conclave will start soon. 115 mostly older men will select the successor to the man who named them as cardinal electors (virtually all of the cardinals were named by Benedict XVI or John Paul II for whom Benedict was the shadow pope for several years). Chances are good that the new pope will be even more conservative than the two before him. Perhaps he will be a little more charismatic, or a little better manager, maybe even from a developing country, but the fundamental conservative trajectory is set, not to be undone.

I would guess that he has already been selected. What organization the size of the Roman Catholic Church would be without a succession plan with an 86 year old CEO? I suspect he is already at work despite the many myths and stories of the secrecy and spirituality of the conclave, and now the display of robes in small, medium and large on hand to fit the fellow who is saddled with the impossible job of being pope. The current discussion, as far as I can tell, is really about what team will hold sway. All heads of Vatican offices must resign at the end of a papacy. So there are many personnel matters, i.e. who will have what power, being decided at the official meetings that began in Rome on March 4, 2013.

There are also lots of informal meetings going on constantly as the gentlemen reshuffle the deck. This is a power shift akin to when a Republican defeats a Democrat. There are a lot of careers and plenty of ideology at stake for which the actual pope is but a vivid symbol. The best analogy is electing a U.S. president because of whom s/he will elect to the Supreme Court. Think of how carefully they have to vet all of the players now that Scotland’s Cardinal O’Brien has been brought down by his former lovers. Skeletons in closets do tend to rattle when the stakes are high, and the stakes are high in terms of the power to shape the future direction of this big church.

No matter who is elected, the process is mortally flawed because it represents a model of church that is long out of date. Until and unless structural changes take place to develop a well integrated, representative governing model in which all members of the Catholic community—including women, married/partnered people, young people—are involved there will be no change. Beginning with local base communities and parishes, adult members need to have real decision-making power about personnel, money, property, sacramental, and social justice work. The same goes for dioceses and regions such that increasingly representative bodies make decisions that clerics cannot overrule. This includes people from the poorest most marginalized parts of the world whose well being and dignity ought to be the center of Catholic concern but clearly is not. We who are part of the community expect and demand that we exercise voice, vote, and responsibility in ministry and in governance.

I am not interested in the personal characteristics of a new pope, even in betting on the outcome of the papal horse race. That is the patriarchal frame of the discussion, which I think feminists need to reject. If I respond favoring Cardinal X over Cardinal Y, or if I sketch out the characteristics of a “kinder gentler” pope, then I am conceding that the model is acceptable. It is not.

I am interested in getting rid of the papacy and other trappings of monarchy in favor of a democratic, participatory model of church. Please don’t suggest that I become a Presbyterian. Though some of my best friends are Presbyterians, I am what a Catholic can and should look like in the 21st century. This is the change we need.

Even though my goal of dismantling the kyriarchy is unlikely to hold sway, I want to look at the religious significance of the elite, exclusionary approaches to governance that are playing out on worldwide television and web because they have a shaping influence. I try to forget what I know about all of the inner dealings of the Roman Catholic Church (electing a pope is like watching the law and sausage being made—not a pretty sight) and imagine what those who simply see the spectacle played out on screen think. I suspect that what people see is at once convincing and confusing.

The trope of tradition is very persuasive. Even though the most recent pope resigned and then made up new rules for the conclave that will replace him, most people do not see the clear elasticity of the church. Those in power reserve to themselves such conscience-bound decisions as resigning from the papacy, while women who make choices about their own bodies are labeled sinners. The gentlemen change the conclave rules with the wave of a Motu Proprio (“on his own impulse”) as they call it, but when we lay people decide on our own impulses to use birth control or to love in a same-sex way we are considered sinful.

The smoke and mirrors that the media report on draw people’s attention to mistaken notions of timeless, tradition-bound splendor. It is hard to compete with the costumes—everyone knows about the pope’s red shoes that signify the blood of the martyrs—the music, the buildings, the grounds for what appears to be God’s own realm. People love the quaint notion that the Cardinal electors will be locked away without their smart phones to let the Holy Spirit decide on the pope’s successor. I do not want to offend anyone, but I am realistic enough to think the deal is long done and the pageantry, not unlike the Wizard of Oz, is simply good for business.

What astounds me is why intelligent people, especially those in the media, are not scratching their heads in utter confusion about the whole scene. Shareholders, stakeholders have absolutely no input into the process. Imagine if this kind of election took place in Cuba or in Washington! I would think they would have some critical questions to ask—where are the women, where are the young people, where are more people of color who make up the growing majority in the church? Of a billion people this tiny cadre has all the power? What is wrong with this picture?

A great deal is wrong with it. The worst part, in my view, is the instrumentalization of religion, of people’s faith, to reinscribe and reinforce ways of being and acting as if they were the will of the divine. This is blasphemy. I make no such counter claim that my approach is what God wants. Rather, I assume that human beings can and should organize themselves in ways that reflect their most deeply held values. To see 115 men hold the power in a worldwide community is frightening because of what it means about their sense of the divine. Obviously they think God favors men over women, the few over the many, their privileged information over the sensus fidelium. Where they read this in Christian scripture is not clear. I respectfully disagree and urge us to change the power model as quickly as possible, beginning by withdrawing financial support from the institutional Roman Catholic Church.

There are deep social implications of the world’s largest Christian denomination modeling a monarchical way of being in an increasingly democratic world. Apart from looking ridiculous and offending people at every turn such that the second largest denomination in the US is ex-Catholics, the outcome of this exercise is to reinforce the power of patriarchy. If these men can act with impunity then other corporations can have few if any women in their boardrooms. If this monarchical model is acceptable, than governments do not need to allow their citizens voice and vote. If God wills the outcome of a papal election, then surely God wills wars, ecocide, and other human-made problems. I reject this theology.

It may be imputing too much power to the Roman Catholic Church to say that it shapes people’s worldviews. But there is virtually no other religious body—not Islam, not Judaism, not the World Council of Churches—that will be the focus of such attention, that will be able to foist its narrative on the world for free in the next few weeks. Given the fact that it is misogynist, exclusivist, kyriarchal in every sense of “lordship” over the majority, I think feminists need to reject it while still affirming the underlying fundamental values of love and justice.

Several feminist strategies are important for countering this approach and creating constructive new ways of being church that focus on participation, safety, and accountability. Keep it simple—stop, look, listen—as we say to children when we teach them to cross the street.

STOP the process.
There is no reason that the papacy cannot remain vacant for a time. Church history includes examples of deadlocked conclaves, lengthy meetings that lasted months unto years. Pope Benedict’s own resignation and subsequent change of conclave rules are evidence of the elasticity of customs and laws.

The current situation of the church is grave: sexual abuse and cover-ups, financial problems, loss of trust and transparency, tawdry sexual conduct, and most importantly, the wholesale exclusion of most members of the community, especially women, from decision-making. Given this gravity, the best solution is simply to call off the conclave. The energies and resources saved can be channeled into envisioning and constructing new, more inclusive ways of being church where safety and accountability are paramount.

LOOK at the facts.
Contemplative Catholic spirituality invites “a long loving look at the real.” Despite the pomp and pageantry of the papal transition, institutional Catholicism is in tatters. No amount of white smoke can obscure the corruption and infighting. No Gregorian chant can drown out the cries of those who have been abused. No reading of the Gospel can excuse the oppressive treatment of women and same-sex loving people.

By contrast, small base communities, some parishes, and many religious communities are robust places where sacraments and solidarity are the norm. Groups across the globe work on social justice, education, and health care based on Catholic commitments without institutional connections. The disconnect is profound between hierarchy and laity. Nonetheless, educated, willing, and capable Catholics abound who embrace the responsibility to be church despite the scandalous actions of the leaders.

LISTEN to the Spirit.
Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit infuses the world with grace. Rather than watch a new pope emerge from the delegates who have been handpicked by the previous two popes, it is time for new ways of organizing and governing the more than one billion members of the Catholic community. Contemporary culture of inclusion and participation demands it, and technology makes it possible.

One new model of church would include a team of people from around the world who represent various and sundry national/regional groups, different styles of worship and ministry, various lifestyles and families, religious and secular people. It would be a democratic assembly of equals, a global network of the people of God, who delegate the fruits of their decisions to ministers who carry out the will of the body in teaching and preaching, sacraments and social justice, finances and public witness.

For those who are not Catholic, this is a time to stop worrying about charges of anti-Catholicism and join voices with those of Catholic feminists who cry foul on the process and the product of the upcoming conclave. Those who have no stake in Catholicism can be helpful by asking the obvious questions of who is not included, involved, able to minister, make decisions, and otherwise exercise adult faith. There is no need to settle for the answer, “They do this because they are Catholic,” and be told if it is not your tradition to have no voice.

The stakes, when examined in global terms, are simply too high. If religions shape worldviews, then everyone has the right and responsibility to look critically at it and go about the communal task of creating something better.

Complete Article HERE!

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Sex, power scandals to loom over Vatican pre-vote talks

By Tom Heneghan

The sex and power scandals haunting the Catholic Church look set to play a big role in meetings before next month’s papal election after two senior cardinals called on Tuesday for more internal debate about them.

A leading support group for victims of clerical sexual abuse also made what it called a “last-ditch plea” to Pope Benedict to use his authority before resigning on Thursday to discipline bishops who have protected predatory priests in their dioceses.

The abuse issue took on new urgency after Scotland’s Cardinal Keith O’Brien, accused of improper behaviour with young priests, quit as Edinburgh archbishop on Monday and pulled out of the Sistine Chapel conclave to elect a new pope.

A Scottish Catholic Media Office spokesman has said O’Brien was taking legal advice and contested the “anonymous and non specific” allegations against him.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, now the only British prelate due to attend pre-conclave talks among cardinals at the Vatican next week, said in London the sexual abuse of children was the most serious scandal in the Church.

“That will be one of the main things the cardinals will be discussing,” said Murphy-O’Connor, who cannot vote because he is over 80 years old but can join the cardinal electors in their closed-door discussions about the challenges for the next pope.

French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said in a newspaper interview that the cardinal electors, who number 115 after O’Brien stepped down, should also be informed about a secret report on Vatican corruption prepared for Pope Benedict.

The retiring pontiff has decided to reserve the report for his successor, but the three cardinals over 80 years old who drew it up will be allowed to inform the cardinal electors about some of its findings during next week’s consultations.

ASKING TO NAME NAMES

“The cardinal electors cannot decide to choose this or that name to vote for if they don’t know the contents of this dossier,” Tauran told La Repubblica newspaper.

“If it’s necessary, I don’t see why they should not ask for names,” said Tauran, a former Vatican foreign minister who now heads its department for interreligious dialogue.

Italian newspapers have been speculating for days about conspiracies and alleged sexual scandals inside the Vatican that may have influenced Benedict to become the first pope in some six centuries to step down rather than die in office.

The Vatican has accused these newspapers of spreading “false and damaging” rumours in an attempt to influence the cardinals who are starting to arrive in Rome for the pope’s farewell meeting with them on Thursday.

Two directors of the United States-based abuse victims’ network SNAP arrived in Rome on Tuesday to draw attention to their demands for tougher Church policies.

“We’re here to make a last ditch plea to Pope Benedict to use the remaining hours of his papacy to take decisive action to protect kids,” said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

He acknowledged that Benedict had met some abuse victims and made some strong statements condemning the molestation of minors by priests, but said he only acted under public pressure.

“We long for the day when Church officials announce that this cardinal or this bishop is being demoted because Church officials have found proof of wrongdoing and Church officials want to clean things up,” he told journalists.

SNAP saw no papal candidates ready to fire bishops for shielding wrongdoers, he said, but added: “It’s hard to believe there aren’t some cardinals who are grabbing their colleagues by the lapels and saying ‘We simply have to do better’.”

CATHOLICS CRITICAL OF ABUSE HANDLING

Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, one of the three who drew up the secret report for Benedict, echoed the Vatican attack on the media in an interview on Monday with the daily El Pais.

“This wanting to see snake pits, warring mafias, internal hatreds – all this is absolutely false,” he said.

Because conclaves are such secretive events, it is hard to see what effect the heightened public pressure over the abuse issue might have on the cardinals who will elect the next leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics around the globe.

Italian newspapers, which dedicate several pages a day to the papal story, have begun mentioning Cardinal Sean O’Malley as a possible “clean hands” candidate because he was sent to Boston to deal with abuse scandals that erupted there in 2002.

But other factors could lead them to choose a man whose main strengths lie elsewhere, such as an aptitude to promote its “new evangelisation” drive, aimed at rekindling the faith in Europe and boost it in other regions.

Recent polls in two important national churches, in the United States and Germany, show that Catholics give their leaders low marks for their handling of the abuse crisis.

A Pew Forum poll last week showed U.S. Catholics have become increasingly critical, with those saying Benedict has done a poor job rising from 40% in 2008 to 63% now.

A survey in January for the weekly Die Zeit showed that only 28% of German Catholics polled believed the Church really wanted to clean up the mess the scandals have caused.

Complete Article HERE!

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The new pope’s three key challenges

An obstructionist Vatican, a chronic shortage of priests and a shrinking worldwide congregation: the list is daunting

By Andrew Brown

When 117 cardinals gather in Rome to choose the next pope this month, the first thing that will determine their choice is what job they are hiring the man for. Catholicism is in a crisis: the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch compares it to the great changes of the Reformation and the medieval reforms, 400 years earlier, under Pope Innocent VII.

who's next?The convulsions that started with the second Vatican council of the 1960s have still not played themselves out. On the other hand, the pope will still be a Catholic. There are not going to be female priests, and only what absolutely has to change will change. The ban on contraception will remain: the best – and the least – that can happen is that it is quietly ignored, even by the hierarchy, and no longer used as the shibboleth of orthodoxy in any priest who wants promotion. Some things can’t change, and we shouldn’t assume that the new leader will take up the agenda of the Guardian or the New York Times.

But it’s clear from the pope’s resignation that he knows things can’t go on as they are. So what does the crisis look like from Rome?

It seems to me that there are three interlocking difficulties for the church. There is crisis in the curia, the Vatican itself. There is a crisis in the clergy. And in the developed world, there is a crisis in the laity.

There is also a strategic problem in that the church must deal with the increasing militancy of Islam in the Middle East, and, beyond that, the rise of China and India. But that doesn’t require new thinking, just the application of well-practised principles.

The problems of the laity and clergy are intertwined, and in the developed world their symptom is obvious: there are not enough of either, and both are ageing rapidly and sustained only by immigration from the south.

There is little that a pope can do directly about the problem of the shrinking laity, even in an age of global travel. Wherever he goes, he can draw vast crowds, but the interest and excitement subside when he has gone. The congregations continue to drain away.

The effect has been most marked in places where Catholicism was part of the national or regional identity – Ireland, Quebec, Boston and France come to mind. But it has happened almost everywhere in the developed world. And in the countries where churchgoing has shrunk, the clergy have also got older and – by report – more gay. Seminaries have closed. More and more priests are imported from Africa, from Latin America, and from the Philippines or Vietnam.

That is something the new pope could do something about, but only by relaxing the mandatory celibacy rule. To allow the ordination of already married men on a much wider scale than already happens with Anglican converts would transform the priesthood and bind it much more closely to the laity. From the outside, such a development looks inevitable.

Whether it seems so simple inside the Sistine chapel is another question. But, if it does, the electors will choose accordingly. Paradoxically, they are more likely then to choose a cardinal from Latin America or Asia, where the celibacy rules are already widely ignored, than from Europe or North America, where they are followed in the letter, if not in spirit.

Changing the rules on celibacy would still be a convulsive step that would bring fresh problems of its own. But it may appear to the cardinals a necessary and unavoidable adjustment to a reality that can no longer be denied.

The problem of the curia is different in nature. The central administration of the Vatican is plagued by corruption allegations and obstructionism. It functions too much like the rest of Italy. A pope of enormous energy and willpower and administrative experience would be needed to clean it out. Yet this, too, may be inevitable, as the VatiLeaks scandal showed. The Italian model of politics doesn’t even work in Italy. You can’t run a global organisation on those principles.

Any loosening of central control would also be fraught with dangers for the church’s coherence. A liberal reformer might suffer the fate of a Gorbachev and be swept aside by the forces he unleashed. I suspect that the reform of the curia would be the priority of any non-Italian European, such as Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria. But I doubt the electors have any great enthusiasm for the task.

Complete Article HERE!

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Church needs saving from its dysfunctional structure

By DIARMAID MACCULLOCH

The Catholic Church, aka the western church of the Latin rite, trades on tradition. That is what so fascinates many people: the lure of its continuity, the certainty, the serene provision of answers.

Pope Benedict XVI leads his last Angelus prayer before stepping down in Saint Peter's Square at the VaticanAs anyone mildly acquainted with its history will know, this is a series of illusions. Christian history, like all history, is a delicious Smorgasbord of unintended consequences, paradoxes, misunderstandings, sudden veerings in new directions.

If you like to call that the work of the Holy Spirit, then fine, but do note that the Holy Spirit delights in confounding human expectations and going its own way.

The church of Rome, having been around from near the start of the story, illustrates this general truth particularly well. Its prestige derives from possessing the tomb of the Apostle Peter, who probably never visited the city.

This Palestinian fisherman, who would have spoken a version of Aramaic, plus enough street-Greek to make himself understood in the forum, may have been illiterate in either language, but he is represented among the books of the Bible by two elegantly-penned Greek letters written by two different authors – he himself was neither of them.

The current position of the Roman Catholic Church as the largest section of world Christianity depends on a variety of later accidents. One of these – the French Revolution of 1789 – produced the modern papacy. Until then, the pope was one Italian prince among several others.

Certainly he was equipped with a dozen centuries and more of ideological baggage, bulging with his aspirations to be something universal.

But he shared his power in the church inescapably with European Catholic monarchs, prince-bishops of the Holy Roman Empire and a host of other fiercely independent local jurisdictions in cathedrals and the like, all of which were themselves the products of the happenstance of history.

The revolution dealt them a devastating blow. As its consequences unfolded, it swept nearly all away, and the first World War delivered the coup de grace.

To begin with, it looked as if the revolutionaries would do for the pope as well. Poor Pius VI died in a revolutionary prison in France, his death in 1799 being recorded by the local mayor (with chilling Jacobin wit) as that of “Jean Ange Braschi, exercising the profession of pontiff”. But the papacy drew on its historical resources and on revulsion in much of Europe against revolutionary brutality and destructiveness.

It very successfully played the tradition card to create something brand new: a monarchy for the whole western church, which increasingly eliminated competition from rival jurisdictions. The 19th century revival of Catholicism laid the foundations of the rock-star papacy of John Paul II, kissing airport tarmac and thrilling crowds with the force of his exceptional personality.

While popular participation in secular politics has grown throughout Europe and America over two centuries, precisely the reverse has happened in the church of Rome: it has eliminated any wider participation, even that of kings.

The post-revolutionary Vatican remodelled the church across the world, to eliminate independence in church government, local initiative or scholarship.

In Ireland, the process took up the later 19th century, to produce the variety of Catholic Church still easily within the memories of many, embodied by such prelates as the late and widely unlamented John Charles McQuaid.

The reforming work of the second Vatican Council (1962-1965) looked for a moment as if it would roll back this 19th-century innovation, but the curia’s bureaucrats in the Vatican were left to implement council initiatives, and we all know the results of that in the two pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Benedict, arch-traditionalist, expounding even this week a narrative of Vatican II in which nothing much happened at all to the church, has by his resignation set the church on yet another new path.

It is paradoxical but admirable that this sensitive and learned man has recognised the limits of his office. The all-powerful, all-providing papacy constructed after 1789 has simply been too much for any one man to embody, regardless of whether he is frail or old.

The cardinals whom John Paul and Benedict appointed to parrot the myth of enduring tradition will no doubt resist the implications, scrabbling around to find the most convincing representative of the post-French Revolution state of the hierarchy. But it is just possible that the Holy Spirit might seize them afresh.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful surprise for the Christian world if they reached beyond the conclave and chose someone from beyond their ranks? That’s a big ask at the moment. But look back before the French Revolution, and we can find stories to help the church in framing a more workable version of its future than the present dysfunctional structure.

At the moment, the debate between Catholic “liberals” and “conservatives” is stuck around the second Vatican Council: what happened there? Not much? A lot? Even more than a lot, but frustrated by the Curia? Let’s recognise that the debate is much older than that.

A great many Catholics over the centuries have considered a monarchical papacy a very bad idea: particularly all those monarchs, prince-bishops, cathedral chapters. They constructed coherent theologies out of their convictions.

Historians use labels for these ways of thinking which have become merely pieces of historical jargon: Gallicanism; Cisalpinism; Conciliarism.

It’s a pity that these words now seem off-putting and archaic, because once they were living affirmations that the church’s future should be decided in broader arenas than a few chambers in the Vatican palace.

That future won’t resemble the past – it never does – so I’m not suggesting we restore the Holy Roman Empire, or the heirs of Louis XVI to the French throne. But history has rich resources to offer: showing how they did things in the past, so Catholics can find sensible solutions for what to do next.

In the middle of what any fool can see is a deep crisis in Catholic Church authority, let historians ride to the rescue.

Complete Article HERE!

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Benedict XVI Could Turn into a Shadow Pope

Progressive Catholic theologian Hans Küng, whose authority to teach Catholic theology was rescinded by the Vatican in 1979, spoke to SPIEGEL about the challenges facing the next pope and the need for reform of the Catholic Church.

By Peter Wensierski

SPIEGEL: What will change now that Pope Benedict XVI has resigned?

Hans Küng: There is now a realization that a pope should step down when the time has come. Joseph Ratzinger made it very clear that he could no longer fulfill his duties. His predecessor felt he had to turn his death into a show. Fortunately, Benedict chose another way, in order to demonstrate that when a pope is no longer capable of doing his job, he should give it up. This is exactly how the office should be approached. In John Paul II’s final years, we weren’t led by a pope so much as by a curia, which governed the Church in his place.

SPIEGEL: Who would you like to see lead your Church as pope?

Hans Küng: A pope who is not intellectually stuck in the Middle Ages, one who does not represent mediaeval theology, liturgy and religious order. I would like to see a pope who is open first to suggestions for reform and secondly, to the modern age. We need a pope who not only preaches freedom of the Church around the world but also supports, with his words and deeds, freedom and human rights within the Church — of theologians, women and all Catholics who want to speak the truth about the state of the Church and are calling for change.

SPIEGEL: Who is your ideal candidate for the office of pope?

Hans Küng: If I were to name anyone, he would most certainly not get elected. But background should not play a role. The best man for the job should be elected. There are no more candidates who belonged to the Second Vatican Council. In the running are candidates who are middle of the road and toe the Vatican line. Is there anyone who won’t simply continue on the same path? Is there anyone who understands the depth of the Church’s crisis and can see a way out? If we elect a leader who continues on the same path, the Church’s crisis will become almost intractable.

SPIEGEL: Is there likely to be friction between the former pope and the incumbent pope?

Hans Küng: Benedict XVI could turn into a shadow pope who has stepped down but can still exert indirect influence. He has already assigned himself a place within the Vatican. He is keeping his secretary, who will also remain prefect of the papal household under the new pope. This is a new form of nepotism, and one that isn’t appreciated in the Vatican either. No priest likes to have his predecessor looking over his shoulder. Even the bishop of Rome doesn’t find it pleasant to have his predecessor constantly keeping an eye on him.

SPIEGEL: So the new pope will have a hard time asserting himself?

Hans Küng: If the next pope is clever, he will appoint a cabinet that will allow him to lead effectively. A solitary pope, isolated from the curia the way that Ratzinger was, will not be able to lead a community of 1.2 billion people. The pope urgently needs a cabinet made up of new, competent men (and why not women, too) in order to overcome the crisis. Unless there is an end to the tradition of the Roman royal household and an introduction of a functioning, central church administration as well as a curia reform, no new pope will be able to bring about change and progress.

Complete Article HERE!