From time to time in this space, I like to talk or even brag about the size of the Church, its universality across the planet and its constant pursuit of unity. Although there are always problems present, I have given the Church high marks in this area but have we entered, over the last few decades, into a new story in the life of the Church? The unity and doctrine is fairly consistent but respect for authority and leadership is now frequently questioned.

If you step back and watch the planet spinning through space, you will see many situations all across the globe. There is trouble in Australia, rebellion in Germany, tension in the United States, hostility in Ireland and so on. How has the Church been responding to these many and varied upheavals? I would like to quote from Robert Mickens of the London Tablet when in June he said that the biggest problem of the Church is not about communications, as serious as that issue is, but is the absence of a “governing strategy.”

“The head of an organization of 1.2 billion faithful, which is the Catholic Church, needs a program of governance.”

The author of that statement went on to say that despite the many internal and external structural problems facing the Church, the principal one is that it is still governed like an absolute monarchy.

“Even the Holy See has to realize that in the 21st century every authority, even the most ancient, must respond to public opinion about its actions, omissions and mistakes. English speakers call this accountability.”

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Usually, when a Church story is taken out of the religion section and makes it to the front page it does not last to the second day. Well, the story of the Vatican concern about Catholic nuns in the United States is still going strong after two weeks and it is doing a great deal of damage. There is nothing wrong with differences of opinion within the Church. The Vatican has a very real duty to struggle to maintain doctrinal purity across the planet. In so doing, the Holy See should make every effort to make sure that people understand what action they are taking and why they are doing it. This story is making the Church leadership look insensitive and indifferent.

No doubt, Church leadership has the responsibility for Christian correction but they have a corresponding responsibility to carry it out gently and lovingly. When bishops are perceived to be harsh and chauvinistic by a large segment of the population, it is the bishops who are being hurt. That is very much what is going on right now.

Either the Holy See knew that their decision on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious would create a bombshell of bad publicity or they did not care. If they anticipated the obvious reaction, they should have been much more careful in their approach, much more gentle. If they did not anticipate it, then they have a different problem; namely, that they are out of touch with the world to which they are sent.

Onward through the fog.

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Several times in my blog, I have commented, respectfully and positively, about the long delayed but gradually improving Church’s response to the sexual scandal of the last 10 to 15 years. Back in February, there was an important meeting in Rome on the subject and one of the speakers was Monsignor Charles Scicluna. Monsignor Scicluna is important because he is the Promoter of Justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the man responsible for dealing with these tragic abuse cases. In his speech to the symposium, he compared the “ecclesiastical cover up” with the Mafia bosses who enforce secrecy of their own criminal actions. He pointed out that the failure of the Church to ensure justice for the victims is no less a scandal than the abuse itself.

“It was a crime in canon law to show malicious or fraudulent negligence in the exercise of one’s duty,” Msgr. Scicluna said, indicating that bishops could be deposed from their sees for falling down in their duty in this respect.

Writing in the February 11th issue of the London Tablet (in my opinion, the most thoughtful Catholic publication in the English language), Robert Mickens states that, “Unfortunately the event has revealed a dark side. And that is the sad fact that there are still powerful men in the Roman Curia and the hierarchy who continue to downplay the seriousness of clergy sexual abuse. This is reflected by the fact that the symposium was not “sponsored” by the Holy See and took place more than a mile away on the other side of the Tiber.”

Onward through the fog.

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Don’t get excited. I am not talking about our present Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. I am talking about the first and only pope in 2,000 years who resigned having once been elected. In the grisly Middle Ages, a number did depart the office by having been assassinated but this case is quite different. I am referring to Pope Celestine V, who was born in 1209 and was elected at the age of 84 as a compromise candidate, when the College of Cardinals spent two frustrating years without agreeing on a new pope.

Pietro da Morrone, founded a religious community and was its superior at the time of the impasse and he really blasted the cardinals, threatening them with the wrath of God. They responded by electing him to the Chair of Peter!

A new book on this subject, The Pope Who Quit, by Jon Sweeney, tells us that the choice might even have seemed inspired raising the hope that a truly holy man would be the one who led the Medieval Church out of its corrupt ways. However, it turned out to be a disaster. He was too old, the problems too serious. He resigned after 15 disastrous weeks. His claim to fame is an interesting one. He is the only pope out of the 265 men who have held the office to have ever actually resigned.

Do you want to get your hands on interesting reading material? Start reading Church history. What a story!

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Everyone who is interested in the life of the Church is talking about it! We learned more than two years ago that the Vatican was taking a serious look at the inner-life of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization unifying the activities of 400 communities of religious women (nuns!) in the United States. A few weeks ago, the results came in.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has criticized LCWR for what it says and for what it does not say and accused it of a climate of “corporate dissent” on matters such as homosexuality and women’s ordination, and expressed regrets about the inroads of radical feminism into the religious communities. The Holy See has also appointed Archbishop James Peter Sartain of Seattle as its delegate with directions to review documents and speakers who might be scheduled for LCWR meetings. Needless to say, this has created a real uproar across the country and leading Catholic magazines, such as the London Tablet, America, Commonweal, and the National Catholic Reporter, are claiming that this is unnecessary and a destructive exaggeration of the fault lines in the American Church between men and women, between family values and women’s issues, and the expression “War on Women” is being bandied about.

I think everyone is pleased that the leadership of LCWR is handling the situation very calmly and the newly appointed supervisor, Archbishop Sartain, has a reputation for gentleness and has expressed a willingness to go slowly as the two sides try to find common ground. That may not be too easy.

In addition to the dramatic Vatican moves to more tightly regulate religious women in the United States, it has also tightened its control over Caritas Internationalis bringing it under the direct control of Cor Unum, the official Vatican office to foster social programs around the world. Cor Unum is to appoint an ecclesiastical “assistant” to Caritas and Cor Unum must approve any cooperative agreements between Caritas Internationalis and non-governmental organizations.

Most of us remember that last year the Vatican would not allow Secretary General of Caritas, Lesley-Anne Knight, to stand for a second term. Key issues are involved in these two situations, among them is a tragic lack of trust on both sides.

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Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has been serving as the Archbishop of Vienna since 1995. It has been a difficult assignment and for most of his twenty years in office there has been conflict and dissension within the Diocese. He was appointed there after the Holy See had to remove his predecessor due to a scandal. There have been other difficulties as well.

Currently, the Archbishop is facing very real dissension among the priests. In 2006, the Cardinal’s Vicar General, a well known media personality in Austria, helped launch a 400 strong Austrian Priests’ Initiative which has called for dramatic changes in the area of those to be ordained to the priesthood and a reappraisal of much of the Catholic Church’s moral theology regarding sexuality.

Last year, 311 theologians from Austria, Germany and Switzerland signed a memorandum demanding the ordination of women and married men, as well as an open dialogue on the Church’s structures of power and communication.

The Cardinal has handled himself with extraordinary gentleness and understanding. He has called for the Priests’ Initiative to drop the word “disobedience” from their title. He has not condemned them as a group and urged them to deal with these problems in their parishes in a pastoral way as Jesus would. As Jesus would? This means that the two groups can go on improving communication and possibly resolving the issues that are at hand.

Is Austria led by Schönborn becoming a testing ground on how to cope with some of the agonizing dilemmas facing parish priests and their pastoral work today?

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An outspoken Australian bishop is generating a lot of interest in the discussion of the need for changes in the Church’s administrative structure and how it operates, deals with conflict and handles dialogue. I am referring to Bishop Geoffrey Robinson who was removed from office by the Holy See over a year ago for publicly expressing his views that the Church needed to confront and resolve views on certain areas like the shortage of priests and conduct a thorough review on the Church’s overall positions on human sexuality. The Vatican then removed him from office! Nevertheless, Bishop Robinson continues to challenge the Church to face some really very difficult issues.

Bishop Robinson is now on a lecture tour. Speaking in Chicago to a very mixed audience, including about 150 priests, Bishop Robinson stated that the roots of the decades long clergy sex abuse scandal lie not in any set of rules or practices, but are found deep in the culture of the Church itself-

The “major fault” of the Church in the scandal, Robinson said, is that it “refuses to look at any teaching, law, practice or even attitude of the Church itself as in any way contributing to the crisis. In studying abuse, we must be free to follow the argument wherever it leads rather than impose in advance the limitations that our study must not demand change in any teaching or law.”

It is reported that his brother bishops were upset with his lecture tour and that Cardinal Roger Mahoney, then the Archbishop of Los Angeles, had denied Robinson permission to speak in the Archdiocese.

The Church certainly has many problems but one that always saddens me is an utter inability to enter into direct dialogue in areas or subjects that are either controversial or uncomplimentary to the Church. Today, the Church is badly battered and only an honest confrontation of its structural weaknesses will enable us to get out of this morass.

I side bar: In keeping with this, I noted that Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts withdrew an invitation to Mrs. Ted (Vicki) Kennedy as a commencement speaker and to receive an honorary degree. In doing so, the local bishop stated that he was merely following the 2004 statement that, “Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.

Does dialogue in the Church always have to be a one-way street?

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A very important meeting was held two weeks ago at the Jesuit run, Gregorian University in Rome. The Vatican had pulled together bishops, religious superiors and other key leaders from around the world for a four-day symposium on the agonizing scandal of child abuse by clergy. The meeting was excellent and reflects a determination that the Holy See is committed to confront and eliminate this issue once and for all. The speakers were excellent, well qualified to help guide the Church, but in my reading of the summaries two ideas really jumped out at me.

One is the need to eliminate what the chief prosecutor of the Vatican called the deadly culture of silence. This, he says, flows out of the long established, very wrong and ultimately useless effort to protect the Church’s reputation in the face of scandalous abuse. When evil is done it must be confronted and exposed, and Church leaders must go beyond and see that the protection of victims is more important than the reputation of the Church.

A second major issue brought up at the symposium was the lack of accountability for the bishops. In this painful situation, there is plenty of blame to go around, but the greatest responsibility descends upon the bishops who collectively have failed to respond immediately and directly.

We all know the horror of the fact that in the early years of this tragedy, most bishops, wrongly advised by their attorney, would not even meet with the victims. Then there was that period when the priest would be sent on retreat for a week and assigned to yet another parish! Currently, a priest in the Chancery of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, who was in charge of priestly personnel assignments, has been indicted for having routinely transferred priests with serious charges against them to new assignments. This is a very important case because if bishops and chancery personnel are really held responsible for their actions, it may do more than any other one single thing to get this situation behind us.

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