A few days ago, after posting my reflections about bullying bishops, I got a rather nasty private email. The author, to phrase it here more politely, told me that if I despise the church and hate our bishops and the Pope so much I should simply leave the Catholic Church, move on, and shut up.

I don’t despise the Catholic Church. I don’t hate our bishops or the Pope. Some of my best friends are bishops, archbishops, and even a couple cardinals. 🙂

In all the heated Catholic rhetoric these days, it is easy to miss the main point.

We have a major Catholic leadership problem. It is reaching crisis proportions, as I write. This is bigger and more far-reaching than the sixteenth century Reformation.

In today’s news, we read about an increasingly angry Vatican……..

As reported in the The Irish Catholic and the The National Catholic Reporter, just some weeks after a Vatican report about the Irish Catholic Church lamented what it described as “fairly widespread” dissent from church teaching, it has been revealed that the Vatican has “silenced” a widely respected Redemptorist: Father Tony Flannery.

The Vatican silencing of Flannery has raised a strong protest among the members of the 800-strong Association of Catholic Priests, which has accused the Vatican of issuing a fatwa against liberal clerics.

According to Michael Kelly, the deputy editor of The Irish Catholic, Father Flannery, a popular author and retreat director, has voiced support in the past for opening up debates about the ordination of women, a change to the church’s ban on artificial birth control, and an end to mandatory celibacy. He also provoked dismay among senior Irish bishops when he publicly backed Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s 2011 attack on the Vatican, in the wake of the report into the mishandling of clerical abuse in the Cloyne diocese. Kenny accused the Vatican of “dysfunction,” “disconnection,” “elitism” and “narcissism.” Flannery described the speech as “wonderful.”

By acting against Fr. Tony Flannery now, Cardinal William Levada’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has provoked the ire of the priests’ association. Flannery is a founder of the association, which now represents some 20 percent of Ireland’s clergy.

Since its founding less than two years ago, the group has campaigned for reforms in the church and is due to hold a national assembly in early May to harness momentum. Key priorities for the group include “a re-evaluation of Catholic sexual teaching” and “a redesigning of ministry in the Church, in order to incorporate the gifts, wisdom and expertise of the entire faith community, male and female.”

Father Flannery is the latest Irish priest to face Vatican censure. In mid-April, it was revealed that moral theologian Fr. Seán Fagan had been silenced by the Vatican two years ago. His Marist order even took the bizarre step of buying up unsold copies of his 2008 book What Happened to Sin?.

The Irish Capuchin, Owen O’Sullivan, also fell foul of the CDF in late 2010 after he published an article suggesting that homosexuality is “simply a facet of the human condition.”

The well-known ecologist Fr. Seán McDonagh, a member of the Irish priests’ association’s leadership team, has accused the Vatcan of “outrageous” behavior in silencing of these Irish priests. He accused the Vatican of “throwing a fatwa” at the priests and said that some of Rome’s recent actions were like a return to the Inquisition.

The Irish association of priests has rallied behind Father Flannery, insisting, “This intervention is unfair, unwarranted and unwise”………….

We urgently need to engage ourselves in a CATHOLIC REFORM OF THE REFORMERS OF THE REFORM.

If you care about the Catholic Church, as I do, you cannot stand silently along the sidelines. What we see, hear, and read about is serious stuff. Please join the reform movement.

There are today a number of Catholic reform groups. I appreciate and support what they are doing.

My favorite reform group is one of the oldest. Perhaps it is in fact the oldest: ARCC – The Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church. It appears to be experiencing an energetic organizational rebirth. Rightly so, because the people in ARCC realize that we are the church and that, as Catholics, we have dignity and rights as Catholics. Our dignity and our rights are guaranteed in Catholic Church law, i.e. what is called “canon law.”

Next week a longer reflection about our Catholic rights: For all those who understand what’s happening in today’s church. We don’t have a Catholic problem. We have a deadly serious, aggressive, and festering Catholic leadership problem.

According to survey results published a couple days ago, three out of four Irish who identified themselves as Catholics find the church’s teaching on sexuality “irrelevant.”

The survey — conducted by the research association Amarach — also showed that almost 90 percent of those surveyed believe that divorced or separated Catholics in a stable second relationship ought to be able to receive Communion at Mass.

According to the results, 35 percent of those surveyed attend Mass at least once a week; 51 percent attend at least once a month. Five percent of Irish who identify themselves as Catholics never attend Mass.

The Association of Catholic Priests, which represents about 20 percent of Ireland’s priests, is campaigning for changes in the church. Its members maintain that they are mainstream church and not dissidents; their founder, Redemptorist Father Tony Flannery, has been asked by the Vatican to quit writing for his order’s monthly magazine.

The survey appeared to reveal a wide disparity between what the church teaches and what the self-identified Catholics believe.

Eighty-seven percent disagreed with church teaching on an unmarried priesthood and said they believed that priests ought to be allowed to get married, while 77 percent said the church should admit women to the priesthood.

When asked “to what extent do you agree with the Catholic Church’s teaching that any sexual expression of love between a gay couple is immoral,” 61 percent said they disagreed while 18 percent of those surveyed believed homosexual acts to be immoral.

Two out of three surveyed want a greater role in choosing their bishop.

The survey results were released April 12. One week earlier, during his Holy Thursday Mass, Pope Benedict XVI cautioned against dissent from church teaching, saying it was not a legitimate path to reform.

Father Sean McDonagh, a member of the leadership team of the Association of Catholic Priests, told Catholic News Service that the survey “confirms that those who are advocating for change in the church are not a tiny minority, but are, in fact, at the heart of the church.”

The belief gap is real. And not just in Ireland

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Pope Benedict XVI once again denounced the ordination of women and the abolition of priestly celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church during a stern Holy Thursday address.

As we begin Holy Week 2012, a reflection from Bill Press, writing (29 March) in the Chicago Tribune:

“No doubt about it. On abortion, Catholic bishops are against it. On homosexuality, Catholic bishops are against it. On same-sex marriage, Catholic bishops are against it. On contraception, Catholic bishops are against it. And they actively lobby Congress to pass laws supporting their position. Recently, the Conference of Bishops even identified their top priority for 2012 as persuading Congress to overturn President Obama’s mandatory coverage of birth control in all health plans. Two years ago, they opposed passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act….

“But still, as a Catholic, what I want to know is: Why are the bishops so quick and eager to speak out about issues involving sex — yet remain totally silent on so many other established teachings of the Church?

“The Catholic Church, for example, officially opposes the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment. But when is the last time you heard the bishops decry application of the death penalty? According to the Death Penalty Information Center, as of October 2011 there were 3,199 persons on death row in the United States. Shouldn’t that also be one of the bishops’ top priorities? Yet, to my knowledge, the bishops have never denied communion to any politician who voted in support of the death penalty, though they did deny the sacraments to Geraldine Ferraro, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and other pro-choice Catholics.

“Same with the war in Iraq. Pope John Paul II was outspoken in his opposition to the Gulf War in 1991 and the war in Iraq in 2003. “War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations,” declared the pope in January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq. But, again: American bishops never pressured Congress to vote against the war and never criticized Catholic members of Congress who eagerly voted for it.

“And what about working families? No institution has spoken out more strongly on behalf of economic justice than the Catholic Church. In his great encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII recognized the rights of workers to form unions, to engage in collective bargaining, and to earn a fair salary: enough to support the worker, his wife and family, with a little savings left over. But when’s the last time you heard a Catholic bishop talk about the “living wage”?

“….How shameful, then, that bishops maintain total silence about the House Republican budget authored by Paul Ryan. This year’s Ryan budget, like last year’s, is just the opposite of what the Church teaches. It would drastically cut social programs that aid the poor, including medical care provided to the poor through Medicaid. It would also threaten health care for seniors by ending Medicare as we know it — while preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans.

“The Ryan plan, in other words, is not preferential treatment for the poor. It’s preferential treatment for the rich. But what have Catholic bishops said about it? Absolutely nothing. Not a word. Zip. Nada.”

On March 24, 1980, Bishop Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated while celebrating Eucharist in a small hospital chapel. He was my hero.

On March 27, 2004, Bishop Ken Untener, Bishop of Saginaw, Michigan, died of leukemia. He was my hero and also my good friend. (And his death on March 27th at age 66 coincided with my 61st birthday.)

Oscar Romero and Ken Untener : great men and prophetic bishops.

Ken’s prayer, below, continues to inspire and motivate all who would walk in the footsteps of Romero, Untener, and the Man whose Death and Resurrection we will soon commemorate in Easter faith and hope.

It helps, now and then, to step back
and take the long view.
The kingdom [of God] is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realising that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

______________________________________________________

The prayer was composed by Ken Untener. He wrote it for a homily by Cardinal John Dearden in November 1979. Later, as a reflection on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Bishop Oscar Romero (24 March 1980), he included it in a reflection titled “The mystery of the Romero Prayer.”

John William Greenleaf