US Catholic (the magazine) has applauded Father Anthony Ruff, OSB

for his speaking out about the liturgical translation

US Catholic deserves congratulations as well!

Now let’s get this ball really rolling……

(See lead paragraph below.)

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Bravo, Father Anthony Ruff, OSB

Friday, February 4, 201

By Bryan Cones

Finally a national-level liturgist has refused to any longer be a part of the translation fiasco. Father Anthony Ruff, OSB of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota has long provided on his PrayTell blog a forum for people to discuss the coming translations and had been scheduled to deliver several talks on the new Missal’s implementation in
preparation for its Advent 2011 debut. He has withdrawn from those engagements in an open letter to the U.S. bishops. (More coverage from America magazine here.)

Observe – Judge – Act

 

Some developlments that will have implications far into the new decade….

PHOENIX

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix declared that St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, can no longer call itself a Catholic hospital
because of a dispute over whether a procedure performed at the hospital last year was a direct abortion.

“Though we are deeply disappointed, we will be steadfast in fulfilling our mission,” said Linda Hunt, President of St. Joseph’s. “St. Joseph’s hospital will remain faithful to our mission of care, as we have for the last 115 years. Our caregivers deliver extraordinary medical care and share an unmatched commitment to the wellbeing of the communities they serve. Nothing has or will change in that regard.”

“Consistent with our values of dignity and justice, if we are presented with a situation in which a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, our first priority is to save both patients. If that is not possible we will always save the life we can save, and that is what we did in this case,” said Hunt. “We continue to stand by the decision, which was made in collaboration with the patient, her family, her caregivers, and our Ethics Committee. Morally, ethically, and legally we simply cannot stand by and let someone die whose life we might be able to save.

INDIANAPOLIS

Pope Benedict XVI named a former aide to disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston as auxiliary bishop of Indianapolis, making him the heir apparent
for Indiana’s largest Roman Catholic diocese. Indianapolis Archbishop Daniel Buechlein’s response was asked if he and his new auxiliary bishop have known each other a long time. The archbishop replied: “We met over the phone…”

The 52-year-old Christopher Coyne was Law’s spokesman in 2002, when the sexual abuse scandal erupted in the Boston diocese. Law resigned months after a judge unsealed court records in January 2002 that showed he had allowed priests with confirmed histories of molesting children to continue working in parishes.

David Clohessy, executive director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, condemned Coyne’s impending elevation to bishop. “It’s irresponsible and callous for the Pope to promote one of disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law’s top aides to be a bishop. It’s thumbing your nose at the hundreds of men, women and children who were sexually assaulted by Catholic clergy in Boston and Indianapolis,” Clohessy said.

NEW YORK CITY

Taking to his blog , Archbishop Timothy Dolan, wrote a piece entitled “Why we need the Catholic League, praising the right-wing Catholic group’s figurehead Bill Donohue. Dolan frames Donohue as a noble defender of the Church from anti-Catholic attacks, but ignores Donohue’s controversial history–only acknowledging that “some may take occasional issue with his style.” But the criticism of Bill Donohue isn’t just about style, it’s about substance too. Specifically, his track record of offensive, untrue and stridently partisan statements raise many questions as to whether the top American bishop should be endorsing him.

Donohue’s problematic past includes promoting discredited links between pedophilia and homosexuality to scapegoat gays for the Church sex abuse
crisis, blaming sex abuse victims for their abuse, calling Catholics he disagrees with “termites” and accusing them of disloyalty, and stoking anti Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry.

DUBLIN

A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police – a disclosure that
victims’ groups described as “the smoking gun” needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests. The newly revealed letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican’s rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland’s first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.

The Vatican has now announced that this is all a big misunderstanding. Maybe a case of Teflon cassocks as well as Teflon consciences?

VATICAN – Probably the Biggest Red Flag of All

Pope Benedict has announced that his predecessor will be beatified on 1 May 2011. Pope John Paul II was a tragic pope of great contradiction.
The tragedy lies in the discrepancy between John Paul’s commitment to reform and dialogue in the world and his return to authoritarianism within the church.

It was especially John Paul’s ecclesiastical authoritarianism that contributed to the greatest tragedy of his papacy: the sexual abuse of thousands of children. John Paul II perpetuated a poisonous  environment in which priests were permitted, often repeatedly, to sexually abuse children as long as the criminal behavior was kept secret. All to protect the public imlage of the Church.

“It is clear to an objective bystander that John Paul II was the leader of the Vatican’s cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org. “The facts that have come to light should absolutely delay the current effort to canonize him.”

Santo Subito should be delayed ad Multos Annos….

BRUSSELS

A Pontifical Mass will be celebrated by Archbishop André-Joseph Leonard, Primate of Belgium. The Mass will take place on the 30th of January at 6:30 p.m. at the Church of Minimes (Minimenstraat 62, 1000 Brussels). In November, Léonard established in this church a new FSSP mission in Brussels. This will be a unique occasion in Belgium as it will be the first Tridentine Mass celebrated by a Primate of Belgium in more than 40 years.

The F.S.S.P. consists of priests and seminarians who intend to pursue the goal of Christian perfection according to a specific charism, which is to offer the Mass and other sacraments according to the Roman Rite as it existed before the liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council. Thus, the Fraternity uses the Roman Missal, the Roman Breviary, the Pontifical (Pontificale Romanum), and the Roman Ritual in use in that year, the last editions before the revisions that followed the SecondVatican Council.

On January 5^th, Pope Benedict appointed Archbishop Léonard to the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization along with, among others,  Cardinal William Levada, from the CDF; and Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York. Maybe the New Evangelization will be in Latin as well…

LOUVAIN

In it’s one hundred and fifty-fourth year the American College of Louvain will be closed in June 2011. One of two – and the oldest – of seminaries operated under the auspices of the  United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American  College will be closed by the USCCB in June. Latest developments about this unexpected shut-down indicate that very few people believe – even in the halls of the USCCB headquarters in Washington DC – that the official reasons for closing – funding problems and decreased enrollment – are the reasons.

Louvain theologians contributed greatly to the documents and vision of the Second Vatican Council. Perhaps current  US bishops no longer consider Vatican II and a Louvain education worthwhile. They have clearly jumped on the nineteenth century conservative bandwagon to suppport the North American College in Rome….

The Journey of the Magi

T.S.Eliot 1927

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

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Adoration of the Magi

Hieronymus Bosch

1495

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My very best wishes for Christmas 2010 and the New Year 2011.

Another Voice returns in early January.

John W. Greenleaf

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This week I would like to congratulate two bishops from Minnesota for their outstanding ministry and witness to Christian values: John Quinn and John Nienstedt.

These two bishops have filed a legal motion to force a survivor
of clergy sexual abuse to pay $132,000 so that the bishops may recoup their
legal costs incurred fighting against his claims in court.

The bishops’ move sends a chilling and intimidating signal to other
sexual abuse survivors who may be considering coming forward after years of
suffering silently with their wounds.

“We know that intimidating tactics like these only serve to perpetuate a
culture of secrecy where truth is not welcome and justice is denied,” says
Jim FitzGerald, Executive Director of Call To Action. “While recouping
legal costs may be a tactic in corporate culture, this is no way for our moral
leaders to behave.”

You can send your own congtratulatory notes to these bishops at:

Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis
Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt

Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis
226 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55102-2197

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Diocese of Winona
Most Reverend John M. Quinn

Bishop of Winona
P.O. Box 588
Winona, MN 55987

A Letter from the Editor

(A medieval John Greenleaf)

Dear Readers,

A couple readers of Another Voice have rather strongly reprimanded me for contributing “ever more to the destruction of the Catholic Church.” One reader told me to come out and honestly admit that I am really anti-Catholic and that I must take “great delight in bishop-bashing.

So for the record (once again) let me state a few personal positions as clearly as I can:

(1) I am the proud product of eight years at a Catholic grade school, four years at an excellent Catholic high school, four years at a truly exceptional Catholic college. And I have two doctorates from Catholic universities. I am proud and grateful for the Catholic education I was fortunate to receive.

(2) For almost fifty years I have worked at and for Catholic institutions. I am neither anti-Catholic nor anti-bishop.

(3) I am VERY concerned about what I see as a major leadership failure by our Catholic bishops going all the way from Rome, Italy to New York City, USA.

(4) Our bishops have turned their backs on contemporary people and the contemporary world and now have their heads deeply planted in the sands of a nineteenth century ethos that stresses triumphalist clerical authoritariansm.

———————————

What do we mean by authority in the church?

I           The ability (power) to create specific consequences in the life of another.  The power which affects the public order of the church.  This is: Impersonal: normative and legal authority. We see good contemporary examples in people like Cardinal Raymond Burke and Cardinal-in-waiting Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

II         The ability to motivate and transform people based on trusting relationships.  This is operative and relational authority. We see the best historic example in the life and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. We see it as well in the documents of the Second Vatican Council.

What behavior do I look for in our bishops?

I           Genuine listening…….not a paternalistic dismissal of what the people have to say.

II         Contact with contemporary reality. In November the USCCB decided to shut down the American College in Louvain. The hallmark of Louvain is that its theologians have always had one foot anchored in Catholic tradition and the other solidly rooted in contemporary life. Closing the American College of Louvain is a sign of the closing of the American episcopal mind.

ÌII        Consonance of word and deed. I am disgusted for instance at new cardinals who spend $15,000 on their red costumes and rings, when most of the world is in a serious economic depression. When this dissonance was brought to the attention of one new cardinal, he chuckled and said: “the poor we will always have with us…”

Unable to Live in the Present and Refusing to Accept the Challenges of Tomorrow

Our Bishops Today have Only Rear-View Mirrors in their Wagons

As they Backup Full-Speed into the Triumphalism, Legalism and Clericalism of a Nineteenth Century Catholic Ethos

A Reflection as the Vatican Provides In-Service Training to the College of Cardinals

How Authoritarian Followers Think: Rome Has Spoken so Shut Up and Obey

1. Uncritical Thinking

Without starting from objective evidence, authoritarian followers uncritically accept conclusions that support their religious and ethical beliefs and prejudices.

• Authoritarian followers do not have a very critical outlook on anything unless their authorities have condemned it for them. Then they can be extremely critical.

2. Compartmentalized Minds

• Authoritarian followers easily endorse inconsistent ideas.
• Just present slogans and appeals to traditional values, and then present slogans that invoke opposite values in the name of tradition…..Yes-saying authoritarian followers are likely to agree with all of them.

3. Double Standards

• When their ideas live independent lives from one another it is pretty easy for authoritarian followers to use double standards in their judgments. They simply call up the idea that will justify (afterwards) what they have decided to do.
• E.G. More black criminals in America are condemned to death than white.

4. Hypocrisy

• E.G. The conservative homophobic bishop who in secret has a boy-friend…….

5. Blindness To Self

• If you ask people how much integrity they personally have, guess who pat themselves most on the back by claiming they have more than anyone else.

6. Profound Ethnocentrism

• Ethnocentrism means dividing the world up into in-groups and out-groups, and it’s something people do quite automatically.
• Good guys and bad guys — the holy and the diabolic, the orthodox and the heretical.

7. Dogmatism: The Authoritarian’s Last Ditch Defense

• By dogmatism one means: relatively unchangeable, unjustified certainty.

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(With appreciation to Bob Altemeyer and his book The Authoritarians.)

In our country, the Tea Party People are running wild and
irresponsibly.

In OUR church, narrow-minded bishops from

Rome to Madison

are

running wild and irresponsibly.

The usual refrain from official churchmen is that “the church is not a democracy.”

This is of course ….. Nonsense!

Informed people know that the church – in fact — is more a democracy than a monarchy.

The church is the “People of God” not a hierarchical superstructure in which clerics preside over all the “sheep.”

An archaic and dictatorial monarchy is the style of Pope Benedict and his crop of cardinals and bishops.

Joseph Ratzinger’s institutional style is absolutely alien to the spirit and style of Jesus of Nazareth.

But his style was absolutely the style of Imperial Rome.

The choice is clear:

…….. Do we want the style of Jesus of Nazareth or the style of

the Roman Empire?……

It is time for a change!

An Understanding of Contemporary Church Power

(1) All hierarchical systems are dependent upon the obedience and cooperation of the “faithful.”

(2) The “faithful” have the ability to limit or withhold their contributions and obedience to the system.

(3) If the faithful withhold their contributions and refuse obedience to the system in LARGE ENOUGH numbers and for long enough time, the hierarchical system will have to either negotiate or collapse.

Friends, it is time to act!