Another Voice

Posted on May 31, 2012May 31, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 4 Comments

On the Road

Dear Friends,

From now until the Fourth of July I will be on the road: a bit of vacation, time for my own spiritual reflection, and time to do some professional research.

As I pack my bags, I encourage you to remember the Peter Principle. It has great significance in our contemporary church.

The Peter Principle we devoutly recall is a belief that in an organization, like the church, the organization’s leaders will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, “employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.”

The Peter Principle was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book “The Peter Principle,” a humorous treatise, which also introduced the “salutary science of hierarchiology.”

Hierarchiology certainly resonates with our contemporary Catholic scene…..

According to the science of hierarchiology, leaders are promoted as long as they work loyally and obediently. (In our hierarchy we know of course that the big leaders are rewarded with red dresses. It is hard to ask in our hierarchy “who wears the pants in this church?”) Eventually the obedient leaders — we used to call them sycophants — are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (they have exceeded their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn any further promotions.

In time, every leadership post tends to be occupied by a leader who is incompetent to carry out his duties.

Institutional self-worship and self-justification take over. Leaders look for scape-goats and side issues to shift public attention away from their own incompetence and negligence.

A common refrain from incompetent leaders is: “They are taking away our freedom…They are persecuting us.”

A some point a reformation occurs……

We need a Fourth of July in the Catholic Church……..

++++++

And unless something really extraordinary happens….like Cardinal Tim Dolan publicly endorses the US presidential candidacy of Barack Obama…Or Pope Benedict appoints members of LCWR to the College of Cardinals, I will be silent throughout the month of June.

Peace be with you!
John W. Greenleaf

PS My email will be working for urgent thoughts….jwgreenleaf@gmail.com

Posted on May 24, 2012May 24, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick

A Prayer and a Thought for Pentecost 2012

Come Holy Spirit!

Give us the wisdom, strength, and courage of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli!

Shortly after becoming Pope John XXIII in 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli announced he would call for a second Vatican Council. Immediate reactions were mixed. Leading people in the Curia Romana were negative. Even Giovanni Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI. Montini remarked to a friend: “This holy old boy doesn’t realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.”
John realized very well of course exactly what he was doing……

Pope John’s frequent habit of sneaking out of the Vatican late at night to walk the streets of the city of Rome earned him the nickname “Johnny Walker.”

Very different from his current successor whose nicknames are “God’s rottweiler,” “the Enforcer,” and the “Panzer Pope.”

Pope John was an action man. Fifty years ago he was losing patience with the narrow-minded bureaucratic ecclesiastics at the Vatican. “The time has come,” he told the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Cicognani, ” to put an end to this nonsense.”

“Either the Biblical Commission will bestir itself, do some proper work….and make a useful contribution to the needs of the present time,” John said, or “it would be better to abolish it….”

Pope John was angry at the backward, literalistic views of the Biblical Commission and its attacks against Cardinal Agustin Bea, Rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, where progressive approaches to biblical scholarship were favored.

________________________________________________

Come Holy Spirit!

Help us put an end to contemporary church nonsense!

Come Holy Spirit!

Bless those who question, search, and challenge!

Come Holy Spirit!

Fill us with the faith and courage that animated Pope John!

Come Holy Spirit!

Renew and reform your church!

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 1 Comment

CRISIS and HOPE for the Catholic Church

Tony Coady, Roman Catholic and Professorial Fellow in Applied Philosophy at Melbourne University, is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford Uehiro Centre for Applied Ethics.

(Here are excerpts from his 18 May 2012 article in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford.)

The Vatican Response

The Vatican response to the spread of critical questioning from within has been to exercise what power it has to suppress ruthlessly any signs of dissent, even the mildest. Since the laity is these days largely immune to ecclesiastically imposed sanctions, the primary focus for the exercise of brutal power has been on the clergy (with occasional less effective forays against politicians).

Numerous Irish priests, including Fr. Tony Flannery and Fr. Brian Darcy have been disciplined recently for speaking and writing about contentious issues that the Vatican regards as closed. The Congregation for the Doctrine and the Faith (formerly known as The Inquisition, or more fully and pompously as The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition) has been prominent in these suppressions of the priests, several of whom belong to Ireland’s 850-strong Association of Catholic Priests. The ACP held a meeting in Dublin on May 7, this year, to discuss changes to the Church and it was attended by over 1000 people. The ACP also recently commissioned a survey of Irish Catholics which found that 90% would support the introduction of married priests. The survey also found that 77% of Irish Catholics want women to be ordained, while more than 60% disagreed with Church teaching that gay relationships were immoral.
Several recent examples serve as models to demonstrate the Vatican’s modus operandi.

An Australian Case

The first is the case of Bishop Morris in the Australian diocese of Toowoomba. Bishop Morris had been subjected to a campaign of hostility from Vatican episcopal bureaucrats since he was reported by some conservative people in his diocese for a supposed inclination to downplay personal confession in favor of the general form of confession involved in what is called the Third Rite of Reconciliation. A pastoral letter in 2006 in which the bishop discussed some of the problems facing the church with diminishing clerical vocations and an ageing clergy proved the final straw. In that letter, he argued that the church should be open to discussion of such possibilities as ordaining women, ordaining married men, welcoming back former priests and recognizing the validity of Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church orders.

This was particularly offensive to the Vatican since Pope John Paul II had prohibited even the very discussion of the issue of women priests. The Vatican appointed Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver (now Philadelphia, JG) to investigate the matter and after speaking with various laity, bishops and priests in Australia he made a secret report to Vatican authorities as a result of which Bishop Morris was forced to take early retirement.

Bishop Morris has openly stated that in his conversations with various authorities, including Pope Benedict, he was never told what specific charges had been made against him and hence given no right to defend himself. Nor did he ever see the Chaput report.

Alarmingly, Bishop Morris revealed that in the Pope’s final letter to him Benedict had claimed that ” Pope John Paul II had said irrevocably and infallibly that women cannot be ordained.”

The very idea that a disciplinary rule could be subject to infallible decree is nonsensical, and if the Pope and his associates think that the prohibition on the ordination of women is a matter of faith or doctrine they are surely deluded. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time that the previous Pope’s edict has been treated thus. The comment should probably be viewed as a piece of rhetorical exaggeration from an embattled leader.

Those Troublesome Nuns

As is commonly the case in organizations dominated by men, the Church’s top officials are especially apprehensive about the thoughts and conduct of the women in the ranks, especially the nuns. …. significant is the recent Vatican move against the United States Leadership Conference of Women Religious (USLCWR).

Since the liberalizing winds of Vatican II, the various orders of nuns have been in the forefront of new thinking and fresh policies in religious life. The Vatican had been investigating the feisty American ladies for some time and the result is that their major organization has now been placed under the guidance and oversight of, guess what, a MAN, the Archbishop of Seattle.

The Vatican apparently found fault with the Conference’s fidelity in promoting church teaching particularly on life issues. As another Australian Jesuit Andy Hamilton pointed , this move, though so far much milder, has echoes of the way the Church’s male leadership tried in the early 17th century to smash Mary Ward and her plans for a new congregation of religious women who would depart from the enclosure within a convent and who, adopting the Jesuit rule, would engage in pastoral work and teaching on an international basis without the supervision of men. Her congregation was suppressed and she was imprisoned for a short time.

The papal bull that suppressed the congregation expresses beautifully an attitude to women by church rulers remnants of which linger today. It said:

“Free from the laws of enclosure they wander about at will, and under the guise of promoting the salvation of souls have been accustomed to attempt and employ themselves at many other works which are most unsuitable to their weak sex and character, to female modesty, and particularly to maidenly reserve — works which men of eminence in the science of sacred letters, of experience of affairs of innocence of life undertake with much difficulty.”

It concluded, “we totally and completely suppress and extinguish them, subject them to perpetual abolition and remove them entirely from the Holy Church of God… And we wish and command all Christian faithful to consider them and think of them as suppressed, extinct, rooted out, destroyed and abolished.”

In spite of all this, Mary Ward’s sisters continue today and the picture of the role of nuns expressed by that papal rhetoric is, one would hope, merely comical and embarrassing even to Pope Benedict and his assistants…..

Church and Structures issues

(Today’s) Church structures steeped in a lost world of monarchical, absolutist sovereignty, secretive processes and male domination will have to be renovated to make them more consistent with the profound insights of the ideals of liberal democratic governance, even if those ideals are frequently betrayed and ignored in practice in the democracies that openly profess them.

It is understandable that those who believe that the current image and structure of the Church is somehow divinely ordained are reluctant to embark on such a journey. Less laudably, resistance to serious change is supported by anxiety about loss of power and about decline in the influence of the institutional offices and structures within which the lives of so many bishops, clergy and religious have been given meaning.

These latter factors, of course, were also prominent in the disgraceful reaction of the institutional church for so long to the sex abuse offences of clergy and religious. But the abuse scandal has shown that closing ranks, cover-ups, and stubborn resistance to admitting mistakes and failure are poor substitutes for facing facts and for changing attitudes.

In the era of Pope Benedict XVI (and for that matter his predecessor) the hope for such turbulent renovation may seem very dim. I would certainly not be confident of an early transition, but there are several factors that make for a small degree of optimism.

One is the great decline in vocations to the priesthood and religious in the industrialized world indicating that, outside the poorer, largely pre-modern regions of the world, the incumbent image makes little appeal.

Another is the battering that the idealized “holy Mother Church” has received from the treachery of the sex abuse scandals; this betrayal of trust, though not directly connected with doctrinal matters, did show up the degree of hypocrisy associated with much of the public clerical stance on sexual matters (some of the worst abusers were loud in their denunciation of condoms and in promotion of “family values”).

In fact, the insensitivity and confusion of the hierarchy’s attitudes to clerical child abuse was highlighted by the recent Vatican document revising canonical rules for dealing with the matter. The revised list of rules also treated attempts to ordain women priests as “a grave crime” suggesting that it was somehow in the same category as brutal raping of a child.

Vatican spokesmen denied this implication, describing the attempt at female ordinations as “a sacramental crime” rather than “an egregious violation of moral law”, but the damage had already been done (See “Vatican Revises Church Law on Sex Abuse”, National Catholic Reporter, July 15, 2010).

A third concerns the fact that not only are very many laypeople who still describe themselves as Catholic alienated from or indifferent to official teachings on the morality of sex, abortion, euthanasia, the role of women and much else to do with personal morality, but a great number of theologically literate clergy and laity are impatient with the rigidity of what one theologian has called “Vatican theology.”

Rome wasn’t built in a day and it won’t be reformed in a day, but massive, top-down political structures have a way of unexpectedly collapsing under the weight of their own incapacity to adapt to changed environmental forces, as we saw with the demise of the Soviet Union. – Tony Coady

……… And let us not forget Gandhi’s advice to reformers:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

It is up to us as we hear in the Ascension account in Acts of Apostles: “You Galileans, why are you standing there staring up into the sky?” It is time to stop staring off into space…..It is time to get busy.

Or as my old hero Desiderius Erasmus said:

If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don’t do it, and it won’t happen.

Posted on May 11, 2012May 11, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 6 Comments

USCCB TARGETS GIRL SCOUTS!

Maybe the old boys club would just like to have a church full of old boys.

According to David Crary, writing for the Associated Press, Girl Scouts USA is now suspected of deviant thinking and wayward behavior by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

At issue are USCCB concerns about program materials that some conservative US Catholics find offensive, as well as assertions that the Girl Scouts associate with other groups holding positions that “conflict with church teaching.” The Scouts deny the claims and defend their alliances.

The US bishops’ inquiry coincides with the Girl Scouts’ 100th anniversary celebrations. In effect the Catholic hierarchy is saying: Unhappy Birthday you naughty girls!

What terrible things have the Scouts been doing?

Last year, the Scouts angered some conservatives by accepting into a Colorado troop a 7-year-old transgender child who was born a boy but was being raised as a girl.

Some of the concerns raised by Catholic critics are recycled complaints that have been denied by the Girl Scouts’ head office repeatedly and categorically. It says it has no partnership with Planned Parenthood, and does not take positions on sexuality, birth control and abortion. “It’s been hard to get the message out there as to what is true when distortions get repeated over and over,” said Gladys Padro-Soler, the Girl Scouts’ director of inclusive membership strategies.

Girl Scout leaders hope the bishops’ apprehensions will be eased once they gather information. But there’s frustration within the iconic youth organization — known for its inclusiveness and cookie sales — that it has become such an ideological target, with the girls sometimes caught in the ideological crossfire.

To the Girl Scouts, some of the attacks seem to be a form of guilt by association. Critics contend that Girl Scouts materials shouldn’t contain links to groups such as Doctors without Borders, the Sierra Club and Oxfam because they support family planning or emergency contraception.

Another complaint involved a Girl Scout blog suggesting that girls read an article about the Girl Scouts’ CEO, Anna Maria Chavez — who is Catholic — in Marie Claire magazine. Critics said the blog’s link led to a Marie Claire home page promoting, among other items, a sex advice article.

With the USCCB now getting involved, the stakes are high. The Girl Scouts estimate that one-fourth of their 2.3 million youth members are Catholic, and any significant exodus would be a blow given that membership already is down from a peak of more than 3 million several decades ago.

The inquiry coincides with a broader effort by the bishops to analyze church ties with outside groups. Rhoades’ committee plans to consult with Girl Scouts leaders and with the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, which has been liaising with the Scouts for two years about various complaints that alarm our bishops.

Our bishops remain silent of course about ongoing sexual abuse within the church and past and present episcopal coverups.

And speaking of coverups, I found it highly symbolic that the bishops covered up the big sign (see below) in front of their Washington DC office building, when protesters gathered their to protest the bishops’ crackdown on women religious.

Please note: they did not cover up Jesus. Maybe Jesus put up his arm and warned them: “Keep your hands off me!” Good advice for sure.

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 10 Comments

WE HOLD THESE CATHOLIC TRUTHS…

There is a sinister spirit pontificating in contemporary Roman Catholic leadership. It is a kind of religious fundamentalism; and it is unwelcome, unhealthy, and unacceptable.

In the name of orthodoxy, today’s Catholic fundamentalists condemn and denigrate believers who study, ask questions, and call for a serious discussion. Increasingly silent about about sexual abuse in the church, and about past and present episcopal complicity in sexual abuse, they shout instead about the evils of questioning celibacy for ordained ministers, respecting the nature and dignity of gay men and women, and asking why women cannot be ordained.

Men in Renaissance robes who loudly proclaim “respect or life” are working overtime to squeeze every bit of life out of their church. People who challenge their authoritarian crack-down are labeled “disobedient,” or “anti-Catholic,” or “in grave sin.” Priests are silenced and removed from leadership positions and theologians are condemned, often without any genuine discussion about their research and thought. There is a major Catholic exodus from the church and our bishops applaud it as a necessary institutional purification.

We are not living in the middle ages. Every man and every woman has dignity and rights: to be, to enquire, to think, and to express one’s thoughts.

And every Roman Catholic man and every Roman Catholic woman has rights stated and guaranteed in Roman Catholic Church law.

Here a few significant Catholic rights (and the number of the canon in church law that affirms it):

Basic Rights

All Catholics have the right to follow their informed consciences in all matters. (C. 748.1)

Officers of the Church have the right to teach on matters both of private and public morality only after wide consultation with the faithful prior to the formulation of the teaching.4 (C. 212, C. 747, C. 749, C. 752, C. 774.1)

Decision-making and Dissent

All Catholics have the right to a voice in all decisions that affect them, including the choosing of their leaders. (C. 212:3)

All Catholics have the right to have their leaders accountable to them. (C. 492, C. 1287.2)

All Catholics have the right to form voluntary associations to pursue Catholic aims including the right to worship together; such associations have the right to decide on their own rules of governance. (C. 215, C. 299, C. 300, C. 305, C. 309)

All Catholics have the right to express publicly their dissent in regard to decisions made by Church authorities. (C. 212:3, C. 218, C. 753)

Due Process

All Catholics have the right to be dealt with according to commonly accepted norms of fair administrative and judicial procedures without undue delay. (C. 221:1,2,3, C. 223, 1,2)

All Catholics have the right to redress of grievances through regular procedures of law. (C. 221:1,2,3, C. 223:1,2)

All Catholics have the right not to have their good reputations impugned or their privacy violated. (C. 220)

Ministries and Spirituality

All Catholics have the right to receive from the Church those ministries which are needed for the living of a fully Christian life, including:

a) Instruction in the Catholic tradition and the presentation of moral teaching in a way that promotes the helpfulness and relevance of Christian values to contemporary life. (C.229:1,2)

b) Worship which reflects the joys and concerns of the gathered community and instructs and inspires it.

c) Pastoral counseling that applies with love and effectiveness the Christian heritage to persons in particular situations. (C. 213, C. 217)

Catholic teachers of theology have a right to responsible academic freedom. The acceptability of their teaching is to be judged in dialogue with their peers, keeping in mind the legitimacy of responsible dissent and pluralism of belief. (C. 212:1, C. 218, C. 750, C. 752, C. 754, C. 279:1, C. 810, C. 812)

Social and Cultural Rights

All Catholics have the right to freedom in political matters. (C. 227)

All Catholics have the right to follow their informed consciences in working for justice and peace in the world. (C. 225:2)

All employees of the Church have the right to decent working conditions and just wages. They also have the right not to have their employment terminated without due process. (C. 231:2)

For a more complete explanation of Catholic rights and responsibilities, please consult:
http://arcc-catholic-rights.net/arcc_charter.htm

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 4 Comments

A MAJOR LEADERSHIP CRISIS

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.

The Catholic Church is OUR church, because WE ARE THE CHURCH. We don’t have a Catholic problem. We have a CATHOLIC LEADERSHIP PROBLEM……

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.

Meanwhile…….

For your homework, check out ARCC. They have an excellent electronic newsletter. It is attractive, insightful, and very up to date.

Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church
Call: 877-700-2722

Email: arccnews@gmail.com

Web: arcc-catholic-rights.net

Posted on April 22, 2012April 22, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 12 Comments

Bullying Bishops: Reformers of the Reform

Bullying is a form of aggressive behavior using force or coercion to afflict others.

Bullying consists of three basic types of abuse – emotional, verbal, and physical. It can use subtle methods of coercion such as intimidation or not so subtle methods involving condemnation and punishment. It is always destructive and demeaning. Bullying has no place within the community of faith.

Bullying can range from simple one-to-one bullying to more complex institutionalized bullying in which the bully may have one or many “lieutenants” who assist the primary bully in his or her bullying activities.

Reviewing events of the past couple weeks, it is clear that contemporary Roman Catholic leadership in Rome, along with the Vatican’s lieutenants in the USCCB, have launched an aggressive program of Catholic bullying.

(1)Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky said during a Sunday homily at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois that President Obama is following previous governments that “tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches.”

“Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services and health care,” the (Peoria) Journal Star and Chicago Tribune quoted Bishop Jenky as saying during the homily. “In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda – now seems intent on following a similar path.”

(2) SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the largest, oldest and most active support group for women and men wounded by religious authority figures (priests, ministers, bishops, deacons, nuns and others). It is an independent and confidential organization, with no connections with the church or church officials. SNAP is now being bullied and attacked by Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn and his lawyers. SNAP is fighting hard to protect the confidentiality of victims, witnesses, whistleblowers, police, prosecutors. Bishop Finn, by the way, is making other headlines these days as well.

The first criminal case against a sitting U.S. Catholic bishop in the decades-long clergy sex abuse crisis will go forward after a Missouri judge’s decision that Bishop Robert Finn, head of the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese, must stand trial on charges of failing to report suspected child abuse. The charge against Finn centers on the case of Fr. Shawn Ratigan, a diocesan priest who was arrested last May on charges of possession of child pornography. While the bishop said he was aware of questionable images on the priest’s laptop as early as December 2010, Ratigan was not reported to police by the diocese until May 2011.

In separate indictments in October, prosecutors charged both Finn and the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese as a whole with criminal misdemeanors in the case.

(3) The most outrageous case of current Roman Catholic hierarchical bullying of course is CDF Cardinal William Levada’s doctrinal “assessment” of LCWR, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

The leadership and members of LCWR, the largest leadership organization for U.S. women religious, are “stunned” by the announcement that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has ordered a reform its statutes and has appointed an American archbishop to oversee its revision.

“The presidency of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious was stunned by the conclusions of the doctrinal assessment of LCWR by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” LCWR said in a news release. “Because the leadership of LCWR has the custom of meeting annually with the staff of CDF in Rome and because the conference follows canonically-approved statutes, we were taken by surprise.”

The Vatican announced it had appointed Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain to oversee LCWR, which has been the subject of a doctrinal assessment by the Vatican congregation since 2009.

According to the document from the congregation, Archbishop Sartain is given authority over the group in five areas, including:

(1) Revising LCWR statutes;
(2) Reviewing LCWR plans and programs;
(3) Creating new programs for the organization;
(4) Reviewing and offering guidance on the application of liturgical texts; and
(5) Reviewing LCWR’s affiliations with other organizations, specifically NETWORK and the Resource Center for Religious Institutes.

The document from Cardinal Levada’s CDF re-emphasizes the reason for the doctrinal assessment, writing that Levada told LCWR leadership in 2008 that the congregation had three major areas of concern with the group:
(1) The content of speakers’ addresses at the annual LCWR assemblies;
(2) “Corporate dissent” in regarding the church’s sexual teachings;
(3) “A prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” present in some of the organizations programs and presentations.

……………

Why Bishops Bully:

Bullying research indicates that adults who bully have personalities that are authoritarian, and they have a strong need to control or dominate. A prejudicial view of subordinates can also be a particularly strong factor.

Psychologists stress that a bully reflects the environment of his “home,” repeating the model he learned from his parents or superiors. In Roman Catholic history, we call this Roma locuta, causa finita: “Rome has spoken and the matter is closed.”

Bullying studies also show that envy and resentment are often key motives for bullying. Some bullies are arrogant and narcissistic. Others use bullying as a tool to conceal shame or anxiety or to boost self esteem: by demeaning others, the abuser him/herself feels empowered.

There is something terribly dysfunctional in Pope Benedict’s Reform of the Reform….I miss Pope Benedict’s enyclical: Deus caritas est! (GOD IS LOVE.)

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 2 Comments

BELIEF GAP: Church as Hierarchy or Church as People

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.”

He said Irish Catholics are “crying out for change and do not want the church to go backward, but to move forward and change.”

The belief gap is real. And not just in Ireland

Posted on April 11, 2012April 11, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick

Old Men and Their New Inquisition

Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) previously known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition or more familiarly as the “Holy Office,” will be 76 on June 15th. He should have retired last year. His predecessor prefect at the CDF, Pope Benedict XVI, will be 85 on April 16th. Popes don’t retire. They just move on eternally.

In Acts of the Apostles we read about old men dreaming dreams and younger men having visions. In the international press, these days, we read about old men dreaming dreams of sanction and silence for younger visionaries.

The Former CDF Prefect, we heard in his Holy Thursday homily, doesn’t like disobedient Austrian priests looking for answers. The Current CDF Prefect, we read today, doesn’t like Irish priests who ask questions.

Gerard O’Connell, Irish journalist, reports from Rome:

“The Association of Irish Priests (ACP) – which represents about a third of all the priests in Ireland – says it is ‘disturbed’ at the silencing of Father Tony Flannery, one of its founder members. The ACP issued a press statement on the afternoon of Easter Monday, April 9, expressing its ‘extreme unease and disquiet’ at this development. Its statement came after various Irish media, including The Irish Catholic (April 5) and The Irish Times (April 9), had already reported that the Vatican had imposed the silencing.

“….Vatican Insider has learned from informed sources that in mid-March Fr. Flannery, 65, a member of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, popularly known as The Redemptorists, was summoned to Rome for a meeting with his Superior General, Father Michael Brehl….

“In Rome, Fr. Flannery learned that Fr.Brehl, his Canadian Superior General, had earlier been summoned to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), where, according to sources, its prefect, Cardinal William Levada, had informed him that the CDF had concerns about the ‘orthodoxy’ of certain views expressed by Fr.Flannery in articles that he had written for the magazine Reality. The monthly magazine is published by the Irish Redemptorists, and has a circulation of around 6,500.

“In particular, the CDF was concerned about the orthodoxy of what Fr. Flannery had written regarding contraception, the possibility of married priests in Ireland, and the ordination of women as priests. The CDF also seems to have problems regarding his leadership role in the Association of Irish Priests, which today has 820 of the 3,400 Irish priests as members, and would like him to withdraw from that.

“Sources say the Superior General told Fr. Flannery that he cannot write or speak on any of the above mentioned subjects. Furthermore, he has asked the Irish priest to go to a monastery for about six weeks to pray and reflect on all this. At the end of that period, he hopes Fr. Flannery will return ‘to think with the Church’ (Sentire cum Ecclesia).

“Vatican Insider has learned too that the editor of the magazine Reality, Fr.Gerard Moloney, also a Redemptorist priest, has been instructed not to write on the above mentioned topics. Moreover, the magazine Reality has henceforth to be reviewed by a theologian before publication.

“Cardinal Levada wants the Superior General of the Redemptorists to report back to him by the end of July to assure him that Fr. Flannery’s situation has been resolved. Vatican Insider has tried to contact the Superior General to have his comments on this whole matter but he had left Rome, and could not be reached at the time of writing….

“The ACP affirmed ‘in the strongest possible terms’ its ‘confidence in and solidarity with Fr Flannery’ and stated clearly that it believed that ‘this intervention is unfair, unwarranted and unwise….’ The ACP rejected its depiction by ‘some reactionary fringe groups’ as ‘a small coterie of radical priests with a radical agenda’ and said it has ‘protested vehemently against that unfair depiction.’

” ‘We are and we wish to remain at the very heart of the Church, committed to putting into place the reforms of the Second Vatican Council,’ the Association stated firmly.”

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Dr. John A. Dick · 6 Comments

Apostolic Imagination

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.

Delivering his homily this past Thursday in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Benedict said the ban on female priests was a “divine constitution,” as Jesus chose only men to be his apostles during the Last Supper.

Surrounded by more than 1,600 priests, bishops and cardinals, the Pope stressed that he would not tolerate disobedience about these issues.

With all due respect, Pope Benedict is blind to the realities of the early Apostolic Church. And far too many highly-placed contemporary Church leaders spend more time reading L’Osservatore Romano than they do reading the signs of the times.

Very early in the history of our Church, there was a conviction that what Jesus taught and did should be faithfully remembered but not necessarily repeated in all the forms in which the first disciples received it.

Apostolic imagination and institutional creativity in the post-Resurrection Church.

Things the historic Jesus never directed, became normative in the Apostolic Church:

(1) By Baptism, in the Christian community, Gentiles were accepted as equal to Jews.
(2) A New Testament was written.
(3) Four different Gospels interpret Jesus Christ in four different theologies.
(4) A sacramental system is created with great fluidity and a variety of rituals.
(5) A plurality of ministries emerges based on individual charisms and community approval.
(6) Paul, who never met the historic Jesus is considered an apostle.
(7) Women are given the title “apostle.”

The processes of theological and structural creativity continued into the post-Apostolic Church.

(1) The Council of Nicea described Jesus in ways that the historic Jesus (along with Paul and other apostolic witnesses) would have never ever used: the Son as “consubstantial with the Father.”
(2) The Council at Ephesus described Mary in terminology the early Apostolic Church would have rejected: “Mother of God.”
(3) The Roman Papacy became an authoritarian power structure.

And the process continued…….and continues…..and must continue. Long ago I learned the old principle of Catholic life: “Ecclesia est semper ipse sed numquam idem.” (“The Church is always itself but never the same.” That should be emblazoned on every bishop’s coat of arms!

Resurrection is about on-going new life. On-going Apostolic Imagination.