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Vatican Miscategorizes Women’s Rights Advocates with Child Abusers


Catholic organizations issue statement denouncing the oppression of women and
the inadequate response to child sex crimes

The Vatican issued a clarification of its canonical procedures for how dioceses should handle priests who sexually abuse children. As part of the statement, they have added that the “attempted ordination of a women” has now been added to the list of “delicta graviora,” or most serious crimes in church law, alongside the sexual abuse of minors.

Catholic leaders from across the country have issued the following joint statement in response:

We, the undersigned, express our solidarity with Catholics who continue to seek equality, including those who practice feminist ministries and those who are ordained. We know these women and men to be firm in their faith and courageous in their work as they seek an inclusive and accountable church, undeterred by threats of excommunication or other canonical penalties.

 In addition, we stand with our brother priests and bishops who are also being threatened by this new policy for their support of women’s equality in the church. Furthermore, we take great offense that good faith struggles for gender equality could be misunderstood as a sacrilege and placed on par with the sexual abuse of children. In 1976, the Vatican’s own Pontifical Biblical Commission concluded there is no valid scriptural reason for denying ordination to women. Therefore, we welcome such efforts to expand the scope and variety of ministry and we celebrate women’s faithfulness despite huge institutional obstacles.
We are gravely disappointed that the Vatican would largely repackage its sexual abuse policy norms from 2001 in today’s re-issued statement without adding many meaningful changes to canonical procedures on how to handle the sexual crimes of its religious leaders. We stand with survivors in calling for the release of the names of all credibly accused Catholic religious leaders and for the Vatican’s immediate adoption and implementation of global child protection policies. Nothing less is adequate to the crying needs of a community torn asunder by its own leaders’ crimes.

(Reposted with permission. For more information see: http://www.womensordination.org/)

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Is the Roman Catholic Church Lost at Sea?


The Bark of Peter, it seems,  is drifting somewhere these days with neither map nor compass.

The Lord has not abandoned the People of God; but our institutional leaders have lost their bearings.

A quick summary of what’s been happening……

(1) Sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy and religious and the episcopal cover-up of  that rape and sodomy are now a systemic deformity in the global church. Put a pin in your globe for every country where Roman Catholic sexual abuse has been acknowledged and you have a sieve not a globe. Austria, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Chile, Brazil, India, Italy – you can add a new country every day with your morning coffee and newspaper.

(2) And then we have the still-to-be-revealed other forms of sexual abuse. Certainly the Vatican knows about the practice in some parts of Africa where women religious are expected to help priests relieve their sexual tensions with special attentiveness: young “brides of Christ” turned into present day temple prostitutes, with a covert snicker from church authorities.

(3) And certainly the Vatican knows about those prominent bishops, archbishops and cardinals – often publicly homophobic – who have an inordinate fondness for androgynous young seminarians.

(4) Roman Catholic hierarchical credibility is at an all-time low. If one is a “successor of the Apostles,” the expectation is that the fellow (officially we have only fellows who are successors of the Apostles in the Church of Rome) carries on and lives the faith, ministry, and witness of the Apostles. Far too many members of our hierarchy today have the imposition of hands but their actions and attitudes seem terribly distant from those of the Carpenter from Nazareth and his band of faithful followers. The moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership has never been weaker. The men dressed in purple and red have sold their souls to self-protective power, control, and arrogant privilege and prestige.

(5) The Dean of the College of Cardinals (and former Secretary of State under Pope John Paul II) Angelo Sodano complained on Easter Sunday that news reports about sexual abuse in the Church were petty gossip. That same old gentleman was long-time friend and supporter of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, Founder of the Legionaires of  Christ and a favorite of John Paul the Great.

Some fellow that Father Degollado: when he had abdominal cramps, invited seminarians to his room to masturbate him.  At   other times of physical and psychological malaise, Degollado penetrated and masturbated seminarians. Good at sexual multi-tasking, Father Marcial also fathered at least one child and (according to his son’s testimony) sexually abused his own son. But perhaps Cardinal Sodano would say this is just more petty gossip.

(6) According to Cardinal Darió Castrillón Hoyos, former prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, sexual abuse is just a fact of life; and lawyers and the media have unfairly focused on it. In 2001 he praised a French bishop for breaking the law and refusing to hand-over to civil authorities a priest engaged in the sexual abuse of minors.

(7) Increasingly our bishops and cardinals parade around and process down the central aisles of churches and cathedrals like princes in some medieval royal court. Twenty-feet-long red trains are now in vogue as episcopal haute couture. And Jesus only complained about tassels and phylacteries! 

            The signs of the times call for creative action and deep and serious planning for the future.

As an institution we seem to have all our engines running full-speed in reverse.

The Roman Catholic institutional regression began with the election of Pope John Paul II. And now under Cardinal Ratziner-become Pope Benedict XVI and his “reform of the reform” we are moving back to a nineteenth century Roman Catholic ethos that stresses power and control and demands unquestioning obedience to Rome.

 Pope John XXIII opened the church’s windows to the contemporary world; and the council he inaugurated stressed collegiality and shared decision-making at all levels in the Church. Pope Benedict XVI is nailing those windows tightly shut. All roads now go in one direction back to Rome.

Joseph Ratzinger’s institutional church is a centralized power structure which controls everything in the Catholic Church through a network of Vatican congregations controlled by a group of old men who demand strict compliance to what they deem orthodox. Censure and punishment await the disobedient. Control and command have replaced conversation and persuasion.

Most recently Pope Benedict has announced the creation of a new department at the Vatican: the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization. The Pope hopes his new office will clear up the problems created by secularism out there in Western Europe and the United States.

I think the Pope should focus first of all on the problems at home: in the very heart of his institutional superstructure.

Some readers have accussed me of being both anti-Catholic and anti-hierarchy.

NOT TRUE!

I just want the Church to be what it should be:

TRULY   CHRISTIAN    AND    TRULY    CONTEMPORARY

    

 

 

 

The Lord has not abandoned the People of God; but our institutional leaders have lost their bearings. The Bark of Peter, it seems,  is drifting somewhere these days with neither map nor compass.

 

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Vatican Rules: Ordaining Women Priests a Crime Like Sex Abuse of Children


As David Gibson and others have reported, new rules the Vatican is expected to issue soon on penalties for priests who sexually abuse children will also put the ordaining of women in the same category of the most serious crimes under church law.

So let me see…..the official institutional response to sexual abuse by male priests is to abuse and denigrate women who are priests and any male priests who support them.

Curiously MISSING in the new Vatican legislation is any ecclesiastical punishment for all those bishops who have condoned and covered-up sexual abuse: like for instance Cardinal Bernard Law, still living in grand style in Rome.

Posted on by Dr. John A. Dick

RIP William R. Callahan: Champion of Social Justice


Rev. William R. Callahan, an international leader in movements for social justice, peace, and reform of the Roman Catholic Church,

died on Monday, July 5th in Washington, DC

In 1976, together with Dolly Pomerleau and Jesuit Bill Michelman, he founded the Quixote Center, where – as he put it – “people could dream impossible dreams of justice and make them come true.”

In 1980, Bill was silenced by the Jesuits on the issue of women’s ordination, but resumed his public stance a year later. 

In the late 1980s, he founded Catholics Speak Out, a project of the Quixote Center that encouraged lay Catholics to take adult responsibility for the direction of their church.

In 1989, the New England Province of the Jesuits, at the direction of the Vatican, threatened Bill with dismissal unless he severed his ties with the Quixote Center, Priests for Equality, and Catholics Speak Out, and returned to Boston.

He was dismissed from the Society of Jesus in the early 1990’s. 

Over the years, Bill guided many projects that the Quixote Center initiated.  These include: New Ways Ministry, a gay-positive ministry of advocacy and justice for lesbian and gay Catholics, the successful Karen Silkwood case on nuclear safety issues (completed by the Christic Institute), and Equal Justice/USA – a project opposing the death penalty.

Bill, far better than many Catholic leaders, understood the tension between laws and justice. Laws vary from time to time and place to place. Justice is unconditional. Laws are real but justice is a spirit that haunts laws and those who make and enforce laws.

People with enough power and influence often violate the demands of justice under the protection of the law and persecute the just.

The George W. Bush administration did it every day by unjustly making the poor poorer, by shrinking the size of the middle class, and by  filling the pockets of the rich with perfectly legal tax breaks.

The Christian Right — among whom are far too many prominent Roman Catholics — calls for law and order but makes hardly any mention of the biblical demands for social justice: justice for people forced to move to a foreign land to squeeze out a meager living. Justice for people caught in the poverty of inner-city life. Justice for people forced to work for below-subsistence wages and with no health care.

The God of forgiveness, mercy, compassion, and JUSTICE shines like a bright spotlight on the hypocrisy of those who, under the cover of God and in the name of Jesus, oppress the most defenseless people in our society.

In the Gospels the only time we see an angry Jesus is when he shows his anger at the hypocrisy of religious authorities who made a living denouncing sin while thriving in and concealing their own corruption. And they did it all, like those bishops today who cover-up sexual abuse of children, in the name of God.

A prophet is not someone who sees the future but a man or woman who warns about the consequences in the future of a present evil.

A prophet hears the call of justice as a human cry for help and the beating of a human heart.

Let us thank God for prophets like William R. Callahan and may we be inspired and encouraged by his example and memory.

 

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What Rome Never Understood: From Power and Control to the Reign of God


The Roman crucifixion of Jesus is the iconic and ironic symbol of today’s deeply troubled Church.

 

A brief meditation about Sacred irony

 

With cruel mockery, the Romans labeled Jesus “King of the Jews.” The crucified Jesus proclaimed for all time the essence of genuine Christian belief: the Reign of God — the Way of Jesus —  is not about the strong-arm rule of power and control.

In the Reign of God the weak are strong. God’s Reign —  rule of Jesus —  invites and extolls  self-giving, patient listenting, tolerance, understanding, and forgiveness.

Some Christians just never seem to hear or understand what authentic belief is all about.

Christianity is about the powerless power of the Reign of God. And that powerless power reigns wherever the questioning, the least and the most undesirable are favored while the most orthodox and the most powerful are put on the defensive.

When the institutional Church degenerates into the nineteenth century Catholic ethos, it regresses into a sinister and deeply un-Chritsian lifestyle.

No. It is not just a question of a diffent theology or a different ecclesiology. It is a matter of poor theology and bad ecclesiology.

The Rule of Rome is not the Way of Jesus.

Without a change of heart, our old instituition risks the loss of of its immortal soul…..

 

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Pastoral Reflections about People Who Exercise Authority in the Church


“He taught with authority, not like the scribes and Pharisees”

Pope Pius VI    —    Pope from 1775 to 1799

 

Authority comes from Latin auctor which means author: the capability to influence people.

Jesus provided the model for Christian authority: service and invitation to live the life of the  Spirit.

 

Historical Evolution of Authority in the Church:

In the second and third centuries authority is identified with trusting and trustworty leaders who preside over and guide the church.

In the fourth to eleventh centuries, authority becomes identified with political authority, now exercised by church leaders.  Monasticism with its stress on moral authority is a reaction against this.

In the eleventh century Gregorian reform (reform against lay encroachments on the church), the papacy claims monarchical authority.

The sixteenth century Council of Trent stresses hierarchical authority.

Vatican I (1870) stresses papal authority, the monarchical papacy, and proclaims the pope infallible.

Vatican II stresses that — in the style of Jesus — authority is for service and should be exercised in a collegial mode.

How we should understand church authority today:

I      The ability to influence and create specific consequences in the life of another, for good public order in the church.  This is impersonal, normative and legal authority. This is necessary but easily regresses into authoritarianism and self-serving mechanisms — often secretive — of institutional power and control.

II    The ability to motivate and transform people based on trusting relationships.  This is operative and relational authority.

 Contemporary reflections:

Good leaders and good followers are good listeners — in contact with reality.

Responsive leadership generates credibility which is the bond of trust that must exist in any healthy faith community.

Secrecy and a lack of tranparency in how leaders and followers make their decisions destroy Christian community.

Polarization in the church is an unhealthy development.

With honesty and transparency we need to focus

on mutual responsibilities, mutual conversion, and mutual collaboration in building and maintaining the church.

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The Year for Priests: Special Uncensored Photo Celebration


The Year for Priests, called by Pope Benedict XVI, draws to an official conclusion on 19 June 2010.

 

On the  19 June closing day, St. Peter’s Square will be especially animated by priests, bishops, and the Pontifex Maximus himself: Benedictus XVI. Cameras will be clicking constantly. Images will be sent around the world with cyber speed and accuracy.

The ceremonial dress and ritual will be colorful and memorable, as only we Catholics can do!

———————————

My Personal Contribution to the Celebration

Unfortunately, due to another commitment, I will not be able to attend the events in Rome. I also realize that some priestly images of course will not be sent out during these Roman celebrations. Therefore, as my own small contribution to the Annus Sacerdotalis, I have collected some of my own favorite priestly images – Catholic and ecumenical.

My Year of the Priests Cyber Photo Collection

And so the discussion moves along as does the church……

A memorable year in so many ways.

 

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A Brief Meditation about Vatican Colonialism


The Only Contemporary European Colonial Power?

 

Colonialism is a process whereby sovereignty over one colony is claimed by the monarch of the “mother” country, who as needs arise, can impose a new government, new linguistic and cultural forms, and new social structures on the colony.

Colonialism establishes and reinforces unequal relationships between the monarch and the colony and between colonists and the indigenous peoples.

Prime reasons for the practice of colonialism:

  • To expand the power and prestige of the monarch.
  • To convert the indigenous population to the monarch’s religion, often through Christian conversion missions.
  • To instill discipline and respect for authority and to control people who are  disobediently wayward

In a few weeks, on July 4th, we citizens of the United States will, of course, once again commemorate our own Declaration of Independence from colonial servitude to the King of England.

Colonialism is demeaning and destructive. It stunts normal individual and social human growth. It restricts the development and exercise of mature responsibility and shared decision-making.

When I think about Pope Benedict sending his episcopal emissaries to Ireland for the autumn 2010 Apostolic Visitation, I get a strong sense that the Holy See may very well be the last European colonial power.

The collegiality of Vatican II and the post Vatican II stress on the importance of national conferences of bishops were healthy moves away from ecclesiastical colonialism.

More than forty years ago we Catholics said it was time to move beyond all forms of colonialism.

Colonialism has no place in the Church of Jesus Christ.

————————————————————–

American Catholics Should be Especially Adverse to Colonialism.

We can be  proud of Archbishop John Carroll: our first American Catholic Bishop.

 

(1)      Carroll, first bishop of Baltimore, had respect for the Pope, but was keenly alert to the dangers of papal colonialism. He wanted no part of it for the developing Catholic Church in the United States.

(2)      Were Archbishop Carroll alive today, no doubt most of his successors in the USCCB would brand him a  disloyal and disobedient dissident — if not a first class heretic.

(3)      Carroll struggled to avoid “any dependence on foreign jurisdiction.” In 1783 when he heard that the Vatican independent of the American clergy, was about to appoint a superior for the American clergy he was enraged. He wrote to his English friend Charles Plowden:

“This you may be assured of: that no authority derived from the Propaganda will ever be admitted here. The Catholic clergy and laity here know that the only connection they ought to have with Rome is to acknowledge the Pope as the spiritual head of the Church. No congregations existing in his (Papal) States shall be allowed to exercise any share of his spiritual authority here.…If we are to have a bishop, he shall be an ordinary national bishop in whose appointment Rome shall have no share.”

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The Agenda for American Catholics


Catholic and American

The Work We Need to Do

A few months ago I had lunch with a  couple bishop friends. We chatted and laughed about all sorts of things — well we are old friends — but then  the discussion turned serious. I told my friends that they and their colleagues in the US episcopacy have just about no credibility. That went over hard. We then had a brief discussion about the “important issues” confronting the Catholic Church in the United States. My bishop friends stressed what they saw as the big three. Anyone care to guess?

Yup………. abortion/euthanasia, birth control and same-sex marriage.

I then presented my list. And they looked at me bug-eyed. One friend chuckled and said, “My goodness! You and I sure live in DIFFERENT worlds!” I replied: “It’s the same world. I guess we just wear different glasses….”

In any event, I think this is the work we have to do, if we will have any Catholic credibility in our American society:

As Catholics — lay and ordained, men and women, gay and straight, young and old — we need to explore together how we can resolve major problems connected with:

  • Loss of credibility and loss of confidence in our bishops
  • Rescuing the American Catholic Church fromVatican domination
  • The role and ministry of women in the church
  • Institutional fundamentalism and cultism rooted in control, fear, and anti-intellectualism
  • Homosexuality
  • Divorce and re-marriage and active sacramental life in the church
  • Clerical celibacy
  • Declining numbers of priests
  • Major financial problems which impact all church life
  • Ministerial burnout
  • Catechetics and religious education with increased Catholic illiteracy
  • Spin-off from Pedophilia among priests and religious
  • Uncritical American Catholic citizenship

 

 

 

 

 

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It’s Time to Relativize the Papacy


High on the list of reforms for the contemporary Roman Catholic Church must be a theologically-based reform of the Roman papacy.

Basic Principles for Papal Reform

 

1. The historic Jesus did not establish the papacy. When imperial Roma collapsed, the imperial papacy took its place.

2. The imperial papacy has flourished because an exaggerated self-serving and self-propagating authoritarianism replaced servant ministry as the key  institutional virtue.

3. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have consistently pushed and maneuvered to reinforce the imperial papacy:

      a. The anti-communist Polish Pope replaced communist authoritarianism with authoritarian Catholicism and appointed Joseph Ratzinger to enforce  the  party line.

      b. The post-Nazi German Pope abolished Vatican II collegiality with Rome-centerd (Pio Nono) nineteenth century papal imperialism.

4. Bishops should not be held accountable to the Pope. They should be held accountable to their people.

Now we need to get the word out and launch the reform.