Church reform is hard work, but not impossible.

David J. O’Brien, Catholic Church historian, writing in AMERICA last week and in recent lectures, offers a check-list for implementing genuine and lasting church reform. It is not enough to just want reform, he stresses. Reform requires skill and organization.

In what follows, my summary and adaptation of some main points…….

1. We need to help our people to ask in the Church the political questions they would ask in any other pubic forum. Who is in charge and how did they get there? What is the relationship between power and authority? Are we depending on the good will of an individual bishop or pastor or are we building systems that express shared values and common objectives?

2. We need to encourage people to say yes to all invitations to genuine shared responsibility and reach out to those who do so. Get to know the people serving on parish councils and diocesan boards and committees, for example. Catholics do need to work together.

3. We need to say yes as well to independent associations like the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church, Call to Action, Future Church, Voice of the Faithful, etc. Structures of shared responsibility will work better if there are independent associations asking hard questions. And we need to dream up new forms of organization among ourselves, ways of drawing people into public action on behalf of our Church.

4. We need to talk to organizers. We need to learn from people who know how to organize to get things done.

5. To steal a phrase from Catholic social teaching, we need to make a preferential, but not exclusive, option for the laity. Think lay. Ask what each decision, proposal, interpretation means from the point of view of ordinary lay men and women. Pastoral care in our kind of society requires dialogue, communication, relationships of mutual trust and understanding. It will come when we learn to read our daily experience in light of our faith, and our faith in light of our daily experience. It won’t come by simply yelling in the bishop’s ear. So think lay.

6. Finally, we must not forget: it’s all about people. This Church is a voluntary organization. It works best through persuasion, not coercion. Persuasion has its own discipline, not least of which is a liking people. No one persuades people one does not respect or like. Many of our problems in the past have come about because we did not trust each other. Restoring or preserving trust begins with simple encounters.

As Detroit’s Cardinal John Dearden said some years ago: The church is a community of faith and friendship. Changing the church begins here: getting to know each other well enough to work together to make us, as church, the presence of Christ.

Next time…..some more thoughts about getting organized.

Using new software on my ipad, I had some spelling and formating problems in my latest post. See corrected version here:

http://anothervoice-greenleaf.org/2012/08/16/contemporary-catholic-voices/

Now that the London Olympics are over, we can focus again on the Vatican games. Three LCWR comments from this past week still echo in my head…the voices of Burke, Campbell, and Appleby.

“How in the world can these consecrated religious who have professed to follow Christ more closely . . . be opposed to what the Vicar of Christ is asking? This is a contradiction,” Cardinal Raymond Burke, leader of the Vatican’s Supreme Court, told Catholic TV station EWTN. “If it can’t be reformed, then it doesn’t have a right to continue.”

Cardinal Burke

“They’re saying it’s only about doctrine. But for us, the dialogue is about reflecting on our lives out of Gospel. Theology in our view is about exploration and discovery. They think that’s wrong. It’s like cutting the heart out of who we are,” said Sister Simone Campbell, a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington who this summer led nuns on a well-publicized tour called “Nuns on the Bus.”

Sister Campbell

“Both sides in the standoff speak of ‘dialogue,’ but they seem to mean different things,” said R. Scott Appleby, a historian at Notre Dame. Leading bishops “understand dialogue as a conversation about how best to implement the pope’s vision of religious life and witness. The sisters mean an open-ended give-and-take that is more of a mutual discernment of where the Spirit is leading the Church at a given moment in history.”

Professor Appleby

…….

And a Greenleaf reflection about the term “Vicar of Christ.” The term has a long and problematic history. In the third century, in the epistles of Tertullian the term meant the Holy Spirit. Later it meant pastors of parishes. When the papacy became a powerful monarchy in the later Middle Ages, it was adopted by popes as a self-descriptive term for their authoritative power. Currently the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that all bishops are vicars of Christ……..

Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 asked that the term be used to describe him. The 2012 edition of the Annuario Pontificio (the official Vatican directory of the world’s bishops) gives “Vicar of Jesus Christ” as the second official title of the Pope, the first being “Bishop of Rome.”

Jesus of course never knew the term. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus says:
“I am the vine. You are the branches. Those who live in me while I live in them will produce a lot of fruit. But you can’t produce anything without me.”

So in fact we are all branches…..or all vicars. Hmmmmm ….

Then Cardinal Burke would have to say: “Sister Campbell is vicar of Christ on earth.”

Many months ago, when I launched ANOTHER VOICE, I decided that I would not take sides with any US political party. I am an historical theologian not a political campaigner.

I am also a strongly committed Roman Catholic who, even with so much current Vatican-inspired nonsense, says proudly “hell no I won’t go!”

Being Catholic for me means belonging to the Catholic wisdom tradition. It means appreciating all human striving for personal meaning, integrity and justice. And it means looking at the world from a Jesus perspective. It means adopting an outlook that encourages personal growth and social transformation. It means building community and learning from history. It means not being afraid to ask questions about faith, about the Church, or about the world in which we live.

Now that the Mormon Mr Romney has picked the Roman Catholic Mr Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate, I have some serious questions. I see a new Catholic political dilemma; and I have serious questions about what it means to be “pro-life.”

I clearly remember this past April, when our USCCB sent a blistering message to the House Ways and Means Committee. Our US bishops insisted that any federal budget must be judged by the way it protects the “least of these.” I remember the words of Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, Calif., the chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Domestic Justice, Peace and Human Development, when he stressed that “The House-passed budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria.”

The architect of the federal budget that our Catholic Bishops deemed immoral was of course Rep. Paul Ryan, a Catholic, who has now joined Mitt Romney as his running mate on the GOP ticket.

Catholic voters will now have a choice in the November 2012 presidential election that highlights contemporary Catholic tensions and ethical priorities.

Tensions and ethical priorities are of course an essential part of our Catholic life.

LCWR, as of last Friday, August 11th, has formally rejected the Vatican takeover of its  organization. The sisters have been accused of emphasizing work with the poor and not focusing enough on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. It is a question, once again, about our broad-based catholic (meaning universal) CATHOLIC perspective on human life.

LCWR Sister Simone Campbell, who participated in “Nuns On A Bus” tour during which she and other sisters traveled to nine states protesting the budget proposal of Rep. Paul Ryan, has continually reiterated that Ryan’s budget “rejects church teaching about solidarity, inequality, the choice for the poor, and the common good. That’s wrong.”

At the end of April 2012, Representative Ryan was invited to speak at the Jesuit affiliated Georgetown University. Before he arrived, Ryan was sent a letter signed by more than ninety members of the Georgetown faculty. In that letter, the vice presidential candidate was again taken to task. “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” the letter emphasized. “Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”

So now we have much food for Catholic thought over the next three months. And…..ironically or not…..both the current vice-president and the recent vice-presidential addition to the Republican ticket are Catholics from heavily Catholic states.

I close with remarks from Michael Sean Winters, writing in the National Catholic Reporter on August 11th:

“Mr. Ryan has taken to invoking Catholic Social Teaching, and especially the concept of subsidiarity, to defend his budgetary schemes. Alas, he could not tell the difference between subsidiarity and sausage…. Mr. Ryan has put forward no strategy for assisting the poor, protecting the vulnerable, guaranteeing health care to all. He simply wants to roll back the role of government to pre-FDR days. And, to be clear, to achieve his goal, he is willing to engage in explicit dissent from years and years of explicit magisterial teaching. Dissent may not bother non-Catholics. It may not, in this instance, bother some Catholics. But, I look at our socio-cultural landscape and think Catholic Social Teaching is the only thing that can save our ideologically confused, socially centrifugal culture from itself. Ryan’s willingness to dissent from it – and for what? for Rand ? – is not only bothersome. It is dangerous.”

Thanks to a journalist friend, who noticed the error, the author of the poem in today’s post is John CHUCHMAN……….not Churchman.

And here is more information followed by a photo:

John Chuchman, a graduate of John Carroll University has been a Hospice volunteer since 1990. He has received Pastoral Bereavement Counselor certification and a Certificate in Spirituality. In 2000, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree in Pastoral Ministries from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. In July, 2010, John was ordained by the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit. John shares his story, his experiences, his wisdom-discoveries in a series of workshops, seminars, and weekend retreats with his Sacred Quest Team, more and more centered on Spiritual Growth. John has spoken at a number of state, national, and international conferences and has written a number of books (13) on his life experiences, grief and caregiving, spiritual discoveries, and frustrations with institutional church. He has been published in Spirituality magazine and his article Forgiveness: A Key to Grief Healing has been published in Healing Ministry magazine. His books can be ordered directly from John or Amazon.com. His website, Sacred Quest, is http://www.torchlake.com/poetman.

Some of John’s writings can be viewed on http://apoetman.blogspot.com

His books are available on KINDLE.

ANOTHER VOICE is back. I have been on vacation but also on a pilgrimage. Visiting a number of cities in Turkey, like Ephesus and Pergamon, I heard again the courageous, creative, and critical voice of Paul.

John W. Greenleaf

A BIBLICAL REFECTION:

Jesus said, “The rulers of the Gentiles [the Romans] lord it over those who are under them, exercising authority over them.” Jesus was speaking of top-down authority….of hierarchical leadership.

But Jesus says, “Let it not be so among you!” Jesus came set people free. Not to lord it over them. Not to control them. But to set them free. That is what we as church ought to be about……. And that is the ministry of Jesus Christ.

A CONTEMPORARY PASTORAL REFLECTION
BLESSED TRINITY CATHOLIC PARISH, CLEVELAND OHIO

From the Desk of Fr. Doug, (pastor), Sun, May 27, 2012

What the Nuns’ Story is Really About

Many of you have asked me to comment on the recent investigation into the US nuns. Here goes. In short, the Vatican has asked for an investigation into the life of religious women in the United States. There is a concern about orthodoxy, feminism and pastoral practice. The problem with the Vatican approach is that it places the nuns squarely on the side of Jesus and the Vatican on the side of tired old men, making a last gasp to save a crumbling kingdom lost long ago for a variety of reasons.

One might say that this investigation is the direct result of the John Paul II papacy. He was suspicious of the power given to the laity after the Second Vatican Council. He disliked the American Catholic Church. Throughout his papacy he strove to wrest collegial power from Episcopal conferences and return it to Rome.

One of the results of the council was that the nuns became more educated, more integrated in the life of the people and more justice-oriented than the bishops and pope. They are doctors, lawyers, university professors, lobbyists, social workers, authors, theologians, etc. Their appeal was that they always went back to what Jesus said and did. Their value lay in the fact that their theology and their practice were integrated into the real world.

The Vatican sounded like the Pharisees of the New Testament—legalistic, paternalistic and orthodox— while “the good sisters” were the ones who were feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, educating the immigrant, and so on. Nuns also learned that Catholics are intuitively smart about their faith. They prefer dialogue over diatribe, freedom of thought over mind control, biblical study over fundamentalism, development of doctrine over isolated mandates.

Far from being radical feminists or supporters of far-out ideas, religious women realized that the philosophical underpinnings of Catholic teaching are no longer valid. Women are not subservient to men, the natural law is much broader than once thought, the OT is not as important as the NT, love is more powerful than fear. They realized that you can have a conversation with someone on your campus who thinks differently than the church without compromising what the church teaches. (For example, I could invite Newt Gingrich here to speak. You’d all still know what the church teaches about divorce in spite of him) Women religious have learned to live without fear (Srs. Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clark, Ita Ford) and with love (Mother Teresa). And the number of popes and bishops and cardinals following in their footsteps, Jesus’ footsteps, is_____?

This is what annoys American Catholics. The Vatican is hypocritical and duplicitous. Their belief is always that someone else needs to clean up their act; the divorced, the gays, the media, the US nuns, the Americans who were using the wrong words to pray, the seminaries, etc. It never occurs to the powers that be that the source of the problem is the structure itself. We can say that now with certainty as regards the sex abuse crisis. It was largely the structure of the church itself, the way men were trained and isolated, made loyal to the system at all costs and not to the person, that gave us the scandalous cover-up.

US nuns work side by side with the person on the street. They are involved in their everyday lives. Most cardinals spent less than five years in a parish, were never pastors, are frequently career diplomats.

Religious women in the US refuse to be controlled by abusive authority that seeks to control out of fear. They realize that Jesus taught no doctrines, but that the church, over time, developed what Jesus taught in a systematic way. Nuns have always tried to work within the system. This time their prophetic voices may take them out of the system. They may take a lot of Catholics and a lot of their hospitals, schools, colleges, orphanages, prison ministries, convents, women’s shelters, food pantries and, of course, the good will they have earned over the centuries with them.

This investigation is not about wayward US nuns. It is the last gasp for control by a dying breed, wrapped in its own self-importance. It is a struggle for the very nature of the church; who we are, how we pray, where we live, who belongs, why we believe. The early church endured a similar struggle. The old order died. The Holy Spirit won. Happy Pentecost Sunday!

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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