It Is Time to Revisit Church’s Stance on Contraception

By Celia Wexler

NOTE: This op-ed was first published September 6 by The Huffington Post.

In the immortal words of John Oliver, “How is this still a thing?”

The “this”, in this case, is the Catholic church’s official stance on contraception. Since most American Catholic women clearly have decided that the institutional church was out of touch when it deemed artificial birth control, “intrinsically wrong,” many of us believed that battle largely was won, if only by attrition. (Even by conservative estimates, it appears that about seven out of ten Catholic women in the U.S. have used artificial birth control.)

But, of course, that’s not true. Contraception, which could do so much good, continues to be a religious minefield. In Africa and Latin America, millions of Catholics follow the church on this issue.

Catholic hospitals and women religious, who should be at the forefront helping the disadvantaged plan their families, are stymied by the wrongheadedness of a long-dead pope.

The church has long had concerns about the morality of contraception, but so did the rest of society. In 1916, birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger was jailed for her advocacy. It took Congress until 1971 to actually repeal provisions of the federal law imposing restrictions on contraception. Courts invalidated many state laws.

As women pushed for equality and autonomy, scientists were developing a birth control pill that would place the decision solely in women’s hands. The problem was, the church was not progressing along the same timeline, although there was reason to hope for change.

In 1930, Pope Pius XII had strongly condemned artificial birth control, when there was worry about a declining birthrate after the deaths of so many young men in World War I. But by the 1950s, the church had relaxed that ban to permit natural family planning, which allows couples to schedule intercourse when the woman is not fertile.

In 1962, Pope John XXIII convened a commission to examine the ethical implications of birth control, a commission which was expanded and continued under Pope Paul VI. The commission, which included Catholic married couples and physicians, reportedly voted overwhelmingly to lift the Vatican’s blanket ban on artificial birth control, and to permit married couples to prudently plan their families.

But that hope was dashed in 1968, when Paul VI, writing in his encyclical, Humanae Vitae, once more declared artificial contraception “intrinsically wrong.”

A re-thinking of the church’s official position is long overdue. The progressive Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research, recently issued a lengthy and detailed rebuttal to Humanae Vitae, which has done so much harm in the fifty years since it was issued — harm not only to women, but to the church itself. To date, the statement has been signed by more than 80 scholars, ethicists and scientists.

Effective birth control gives women control over their own bodies, helps lift families out of the poverty caused by too many children, and shows careful stewardship of our over-taxed planet.

In this time of Zika, contraception may be the most effective way to prevent tens of thousands of infants from being born with serious, debilitating birth defects. As long as AIDS continues to threaten African women, including married women, and their offspring, condoms are vital.

Contraception may also limit the collateral damage of rape and sexual assault in countries where women have few defenses against predators.

The institutional church itself has suffered from this papal decision. Twenty-five years after Humanae Vitae was released, the late Jesuit moral theologian Richard A. McCormick regretted its aftermath — a cleric’s position on birth control became a “litmus test” for priests who aspired to be bishops; it discouraged theological discourse on sexual ethics, and it caused many Catholics to no longer rely on the church for moral guidance.

The scholars’ recent statement notes that a quarter of the world’s health-care facilities and schools are run by Catholic institutions, making a reversal of the church’s position very urgent.

The scholars contend that if the church permits natural family planning, which is a way to prevent conception, it should realize that other forms of birth control are equivalent.

They ask that the institutional church make clear that all birth control methods that do not induce abortions are approved for use by Catholic healthcare providers. (Birth control methods that do induce abortions should be evaluated on a case by case basis, applying ethical principles such as whether their use would be the “lesser evil.”)

They also urge that Catholic theologians whose opposition to Humanae Vitae caused them to be censured have their reputations restored.

A half a century is a long time for a mistake to go uncorrected. If Pope Francis really wants to leave behind a reform legacy, this would be a good place to start.

Celia Wexler is a free-lance journalist and author living in Alexandria, Virginia. Her book, Catholic Women Confront Their Church: Stories of Hurt and Hope, will be published September 30. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/byelines.


See also the previous posts:
• Dear Pope Francis: Saving the World Requires Contraception
• We Are the 98 Percent
• Contraception's Con Men
• Out of Step With the Flock: Bishops Far Behind on Birth Control Issues
• Church's View of Sex the Root of Its Troubles
• Overpopulation and the Catholic Church: Can't We Become Part of the Solution?
• Quote of the Day — February 12, 2012

Twice Removed: Why Our Sacraments Often Don't Connect with Real Life

By Joseph Martos

Note: This commentary was first published February 20, 2016 by the National Catholic Reporter.

In the first two centuries of Christianity, theology was based in experience. Words that were later taken to refer to things that are outside the realm of experience were originally attempts to talk about things that the followers of Jesus were experiencing.

For example, when Paul wrote about justification by faith, he was not talking about getting right with God by believing in Christ, but getting your life straightened out by trusting that what Jesus taught is true. When the Book of Acts talks about being saved through baptism, it does not mean washing away sin by going through a ritual, but being rescued from selfishness by being immersed in a caring community.

Scholars who study other early documents like "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles" (often called the Didache for short, from the Greek word for teaching) are finding that these writings were also attempts to spell out what the followers of Jesus were experiencing in their lives. But in the third century, things began to change.

Over time, the experience behind the early writings was forgotten. The writings were recognized as precious, called sacred Scriptures. Even the Didache appeared in some early lists of sacred Scriptures.

Christian intellectuals in the third century, sometimes called apologists, tried to explain their faith to people in the wider pagan world who suspected that the followers of Jesus were members of a dangerous cult. One apologist, Justin, compared the Christian community meal to a temple sacrifice, where pagans shared food in the presence of their god, to show that Christians were religious even though they did not worship in temples.

But other apologists began to talk about their faith as a set of beliefs rather than as a way of living. The words were becoming disconnected from the experiences.

In the fourth century, Constantine wanted to unify the Roman Empire with a single religion, so he legalized and promoted Christianity. When Christians began to travel freely throughout the empire, they discovered that people in different regions had different theologies. Instead of uniting Constantine's empire, Christians argued and divided it even further.

Constantine ordered all the bishops to his villa in Nicaea, and forced them to stay until they produced a document they could all agree on. They came up with the Nicene Creed, a statement of belief that said nothing about living like Jesus, but only about God and the church. The first removal of theology from the experience of Christian living was complete.


The Middle Ages

The attempt of the emperors to preserve the empire failed, and in the fifth century, the western half fell to barbarian invaders from the north. The so-called Dark Ages lasted until the 10th century. Theological thinking came to a halt while people struggled to survive.

Church life, on the contrary, evolved and flourished. The elaborate eucharistic liturgy got pared down to a Mass that could be said by missionaries who carried the faith to the tribes that were settling on the continent, and it was called a sacrifice even though no one remembered why.

Baptism became a short rite performed on babies in a church or adult converts in a river. Confirmation could be given by a bishop on horseback to children who were held up for him to touch. Private confession was introduced by monks for people who needed assurance of God's forgiveness.

Weddings became church ceremonies to be a public record of marriages. Ordination became a series of rites for apprentices who were learning how to be clerics as they ascended through a series of holy orders. Anointing of the sick began as a ministry to people who were ill, but in the absence of modern medicine, it became a last anointing called extreme unction.

By the 11th century, the chaos had subsided. The weather got warmer, farming flourished, commerce expanded, towns grew into cities, cathedrals were built, and schools were founded. Monks turned their attention from copying ancient manuscripts to studying them. Philosophy and theology were reborn.

Among other things, the schoolmen turned their attention to religious rituals, especially to sacraments. How did bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ? Why could baptism and confirmation be received only once? How did the sacraments of penance and extreme unction work? What were the different powers of priests and bishops? Why was the bond of marriage indissoluble?

The schoolmen did not realize, however, that much of their theological language was already somewhat removed from life. They thought that salvation meant going to heaven, that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were not experienced, that sins were remitted even if they were committed again, that the bond of marriage was indissoluble, that priestly powers were unrelated to priestly ministry, and that extreme unction could be received by someone who was unconscious.

They saw nothing amiss in a Mass that was performed by a priest using words that the people could not hear, much less understand, and who paid attention only when a bell was rung.

In many ways, sacramental ministry devolved into sacramental magic in the late Middle Ages, but the church's leadership rejected repeated calls for reform until the 16th century, by which time half of Europe had converted to Protestantism.

The Council of Trent reformed the sacramental system, eliminating the most superstitious practices, insisting that bishops be true shepherds of their flocks and that priests be trained in seminaries. From the 16th to the mid-20th centuries, Catholic sacramental practice and Catholic sacramental theology mirrored one another.

The baptismal and priestly characters explained why Catholics never left the church and why priests never left the ministry. The Eucharist was elevated at Mass and ensconced in a monstrance for exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, and was received only rarely, usually after a sincere confession of sins to a priest.

The indissoluble bond of marriage explained why Catholics never divorced. Confirmation and extreme unction did not have visible effects, but Catholics trusted that the former was good to receive in adolescence and the latter was good to receive before dying.

The Catholic church remained medieval in form and thought well into the 20th century.


Vatican II and after

At the Second Vatican Council, the world's Catholic bishops called for an updating of the church's sacramental practices. Historians and liturgists retrieved earlier forms of the Mass and other rites that had gotten lost during the Dark Ages — things like praying in the language of the people, receiving Communion in the forms of both bread and wine, rethinking the relation between sin and confession, and returning anointing to the context of ministry to the sick.

Unexpectedly, the unity of practice and theology began to dissolve. People stopped going to confession regularly. Priests began leaving the priesthood and the number of seminarians dwindled. Married Catholics started divorcing in greater numbers and even remarrying without waiting for an annulment.

The primary effect of confirmation seemed to be dropping out of church. Even baptism was no guarantee that people would remain Catholics or even Christians, as those who left the church sometimes became agnostics or atheists, Jews or Muslims.

Alarmed by this apparent defection, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI insisted on strict adherence to ecclesiastical rules, affirming traditional doctrines, stifling dissent, and denying any further developments in sacramental practice such as allowing deacons to anoint the sick or allowing priests to marry.

But the traditional doctrines no longer match Catholics' contemporary experience of church membership, marriage and ministry, not to mention their sense of sin and their experience of illness. Even Catholic worship feels different from the way it did in the days of the Latin Mass and Gregorian chant, and the previously strong sense of Christ's presence in the Eucharist is hard to recapture.

As happened in the third century, there is a growing gap between theology and experience, only this time the theology is twice removed from life. Official teachings about the Mass and sacraments are not only disconnected from people's everyday lives, but they are also often disconnected from people's experience of worship. For many people, the liturgy is not the main source of their spiritual nourishment, nor the high point of their week.

Around the time of Vatican II, Catholic thinkers like Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Bernard Cooke and Louis-Marie Chauvet tried to reinterpret the sacraments in more contemporary ways. Fifty years later, however, their work is not given much attention because it suffered from a fatal flaw.

Instead of reflecting on the experience of ritual worship, they reflected on the church's sacramental doctrines and tried to translate them into thought categories derived from existentialism and phenomenology, the psychology and sociology of religion, and even postmodern philosophy.

By being tied to medieval doctrines, however, these theologians had to explain why baptism is permanent, how confirmation gives spiritual strength, why confession is needed, how anointing benefits the sick, why marriage is indissoluble, and why the priesthood is forever.

But these ideas no longer correspond to the world inhabited by most Catholics, so contemporary theologies are just as removed from real life as the scholastic theology they had hoped to replace.

Is there a way out of the current confusion? There is, but it is neither a dogmatic reassertion of the past nor a freefall into cultural relativism. We need to rediscover what is essential to the Christian way of life, reinvent ways to ritualize that, and reformulate what those rituals mean in terms that are faithful both to the teachings of Jesus and to the experience of living in accordance with them.

Joseph Martos is a retired professor of religion and philosophy living in Louisville, Kentucky, where he divides his time between writing, social activism, and public speaking. He has held full-time teaching positions in Louisville KY, Allentown PA, Cincinnati OH, and Sioux City IA, and he has taught summer courses in over a dozen universities in the United States, Canada and Australia. He did graduate study in philosophy and theology at Gregorian University and Boston College, and earned a doctorate from DePaul University in Chicago, writing a dissertation on Bernard Lonergan's theory of transcendent knowledge. He served as the director of the Russell Institute of Religion and Ministry at Spalding University until the university discontinued all of its humanities programs in 2003. Martos is the author of many books and articles on the sacraments. His book The Sacraments: An Interdisciplinary and Interactive Study deconstructs Catholic sacramental theology, exposing its conceptual flaws and intellectual instability. This article is based on research published in Deconstructing Sacramental Theology and Reconstructing Catholic Ritual (Wipf and Stock, 2015).

What is Pope Francis’ Intent for Divorced and LGBT Catholics? We May Be About to Find Out

By Michelle Boorstein

Note: This article was first published March 18, 2016 by The Washington Post. There is a connection to the local church of St. Paul-Minneapolis in that Massimo Faggioli, a church historian who directs the Institute for Catholicism and Citizenship at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, is quoted. Of course, what's glaringly absent from this article is any commentary from women, LGBT people or divorced Catholics.

Pope Francis has a reputation for opening the Catholic Church’s doors when it comes to concepts of family. The next few weeks may clarify just how far he intends to open them.

On Saturday, the Vatican says, Francis will finalize a highly-anticipated teaching document on family issues that has been 1 ½ years in the making — including two closely-watched meetings of top bishops. The document isn’t expected to be released to the public for a few weeks, but pundits, priests and laypeople will be flipping through furiously as soon as possible to see how Francis proposes bringing more fully into church life Catholics who are LBGT, divorced-and-remarried, and cohabiting outside marriage.

Based on recent hints dropped by the pope and other top advisers, expert church-watchers believe Francis will attempt the papal version of skating’s triple-axle: not changing orthodox doctrine on anything but altering practice and rules enough to give different types of Catholic families new affirmation that they are a legitimate part of the Church.

Francis has made many powerful gestures and comments in the three years since he was elected that have made him an icon. But the time and resources he has put into this Apostolic Exhortation on the family is unique, and experts say the standing of his papacy – and its future — may be riding on it.

“This the most important test for this pope to show us how he deals with dissent in the church, how he deals with divided issues,” said Massimo Faggioli [right], a church historian who directs the Institute for Catholicism and Citizenship at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic school in St. Paul.

Faggioli said the conversation Francis launched through the two high-profile meetings, called synods, at which he encouraged dissent, “was the most important moment in the church in the last 50 years. This was the biggest sign of hope that in the Catholic Church there are ideas and we can talk about it. No one before Francis ever had the courage to think about that.”

Since the pope launched this process in the fall of 2014, much focus has been on the practicalities, in particular whether he would create ways so that the millions of disaffected Catholics who are divorced and remarried outside the Church can fully return, including receiving the core ritual of Communion. Regardless of what happens – or doesn’t — with any specific changes to practice, experts predicted the goal of Francis’ paper will be to make a much more sweeping statement about the importance of families. It could be similar in its radical scope, some said, to the document the Argentinian Jesuit issued last spring about the environment.

“The document will identify the current stresses on family life from poverty, migration and war, as well as the hostile legal and cultural framework of contemporary Western society, which Francis calls ‘ideological colonization,’” Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh predicted earlier this month in a piece for the Catholic publication Our Sunday Visitor. Francis will rail against what he has called “destructive” ideologies based on isolating Catholics from the mainstream culture, Ivereigh wrote. “The exhortation will be an uplifting tribute to the enduring power and beauty of family life, offering support and consolation to those struggling against fierce contemporary headwinds to hold families together,” Ivereigh said.

John Allen [left], editor of the Catholic site Crux and a longtime Vatican writer, said Francis may be trying to make a change that is undramatic in the short term but impactful in the long run, similar to when Pope John Paul held the first World Youth Day in the 1980’s. Back then, Allen said, very few dioceses even had something called youth ministry. “It wasn’t even a category. The church didn’t even think about it,” he said. Now, the Catholic Church and other faiths pour huge resources into thinking about how to engage young people.

Allen predicted the document will get far more attention in the West, where culture war issues about marriage and sexual mores are more on the front burner. In much of the rest of the Catholic world – now the fastest-growing parts of the church are in Africa and Asia – the document will be read differently and be seen as less dramatic, he said.

Concretely, Allen predicted the paper “will have huge symbolic and media resonance but won’t change much on the ground.”

Bishops at the synods agreed that families need much more focus, including, for example, increased marriage preparation. But they were clearly divided on things like Communion for the divorced-and-remarried and what language to use to be more welcoming of gays and lesbians and families who live together outside marriage.

There are more than 5,000 bishops around the world, Allen noted, who already take different approaches on these topics. “If you were inclined to take a flexible position, you already were. If you were inclined to take a hard line, you were.”

Pope Francis appeared to tip his hat last month during a plane press conference on the way back from Mexico, when he was asked about divorced and remarried couples. “All doors are open, but we cannot say that these people can take Communion…integration into the Church does not mean allowing people to take Communion,” he said before citing with disapproval divorced couples who “go to church once or twice a year and say, ‘I want to receive Communion,’ as if it were some prize.”

However, Monday, Cardinal Walter Kasper [right], a prominent theologian whose work Francis has often cited, said in a speech in Italy that Francis will “definitively express himself on family issues addressed during the last Synod, and in particular on the participation of the divorced and remarried faithful in the active life of the Catholic community,” the National Catholic Register reported, citing the Italian paper Il Terreno. Kasper was quoted as saying the exhortation will represent “the first step in a reform” that will mark the “turning of a page” in the Church’s history “after 1,700 years.”

“We must not repeat past formulas and barricade ourselves behind the wall of exclusivism and clericalism,” Kasper told the audience, according to Il Terreno. The Church must live in the current times and “know how to interpret them,” he said.

A key topic that experts can’t predict is how Francis will deal with a concept the synods called “the internal forum,” or the moral process of examining one’s own conscience within the framework of the church that allows for a sense of repentance while maintaining involvement in church life. The second and most recent synod, in the fall, talked about how Catholics might use the internal forum in conversation with a priest and be able to come to Communion — even in untraditional situations.

How Francis handles all this could say a lot about his standing going forward.

“The hard right both in the church and outside hasn’t liked this pope from the start. This may be the hard left deciding it doesn’t either,” said Allen, who described Francis as a “doctrinal moderate and a pastoral revolutionary.” The pope “wants the most tolerant application” of church teaching, he said.

Faggioli said many Catholics are anxious for a more radical change.

“In three years there is a lot he has accomplished. But there is a lot he has not accomplished,” he said. The synods and the paper that comes from them constitute “one of the most important moments in his pontificate, and how he gets out of this moment of fierce disagreement, [what] comes out of that will say a lot.”

Re-Jesusing the Catholic Church

By Garry Wills

Note: This commentary was first published November 19, 2015 by The Boston Globe.


How can a church whose officialdom is worldly and corrupt present Jesus to the world? Pope Francis thinks it cannot. He once told people at the morning mass in his small chapel, “To be believable, the Church has to be poor.” He has spoken of personal revulsion at seeing a priest drive an expensive car. When he spoke of money as “the devil’s dung” (he was quoting a church father, Saint Basil), some took this as an attack on Western capitalism. But it was a more general message, part of his apology in Bolivia for the church’s role in colonialism. And when Francis looks around the Vatican, he finds the same devil-stench. In one of his earlier interviews as pope, he said, “The Curia is Vatican-centric. It sees and looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests.” He said to assembled Cardinals that some approach the Vatican as if it were a royal court, with all the marks of such courts — “intrigue, gossip, cliques, favoritism, and partiality.’’

That list of sins could be taken as a table of contents for the scandalous activities recorded in Gianluigi Nuzzi’s new book, Merchants in the Temple, a title taken from the Bible account of Jesus driving money lenders from the Temple court. Nuzzi is the journalist who received the “Vatileaks” from the papal butler, revealing the scheming and profiteering that occurred during Benedict XVI’s papacy. He demonstrates an equal access to secret documents and conversations in the papacy of Francis, which show a concerted resistance to papal efforts to make the Vatican bear at least some resemblance to Jesus, however remote.

The official church is wealthy and poor because it always overspends itself. It lives on display, favoritism, and unaccountability. Its fourteen personnel agencies create honorary posts for clients who will be subservient to their patrons. This is as true of the Vatican State Department as of the Vatican banks. We know of the scandalous and money-laundering Institute for the Works of Religions — commonly called the Vatican Bank. But another money manager is equally unaccountable — the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See.

In what is called Peter’s Pence, Catholics from around the world send money to be spent on the poor. But four-fifths of that money is spent on maintenance of the bloated Vatican itself. The official church owns large amounts of real estate inside and outside Italy, but these holdings drain as much wealth as they collect, because so many of them are given at low or no rent to prelates and their flunkies, who redecorate them to their refined tastes, using Vatican money to do it.

Francis, who handled financial scandal in the diocese he took over in Buenos Aires, knew that he could not get control of the Vatican unless he had a true audit of where all the money was going. So he set up a special body to find this out – COSEA (Commission on Organization of the Economic Administration of the Holy See). This commission hired outside auditors, internationally recognized experts, to go over the money in all the papal departments (dicasteries). But faced with this demand for records from lay experts, the skilled ecclesiastical maneuverers in the departments reported sluggishly, incompletely, or not at all. COSEA’s frustrations over this may be why their members leaked tapes of their meetings to Nuzzi and others. Indeed two of them (a monsignor and a lay woman) were arrested in early November by Vatican gendarmes for leaking — though these leaks are on the pope’s side, unlike the earlier leaks.

Controversy about the official church has normally centered on doctrinal disputes, over things like contraception and abortion. These are seen as struggles for the mind of the church. Francis is more interested in the soul of the church. Does the church really speak from prelates’ posh apartments in Rome and from bishops’ palaces around the world? In our trips to Rome, my wife has given up entering St. Peter’s, since she cannot find anything like Jesus in that riot of celebration of the great papal families, with monstrous large statues of past pontiffs in all their ecclesiastical regalia. Jesus did not wear expensive chasubles and jeweled mitres (or any ecclesiastical garments). What Francis is engaged in is less a matter of theological dispute than a re-Jesusing of the church. If he fails, we have failed Jesus.

Garry Wills, a professor of history at Northwestern University, is the author of The Future of the Catholic Church With Pope Francis.

Catholic Church Fails Equality Test

By Kelly Doss


NOTE: This op-ed was first published November 27, 2015 by the St. Cloud Times.

As I reflect on this season of thankfulness, I am most grateful for the opportunity to be a godparent to my niece and nephew. Being a godparent may seem like an outdated or purely ceremonial role, but I see it differently. It places on me the responsibility, along with their parents, to develop in them a spirituality of interconnectedness with all that God created.

I love my godchildren more than I can say, and that is what prompted me to accept a position on the national board of directors of the Women’s Ordination Conference.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Women’s Ordination Conference, the largest national organization to advocate for equality, inclusiveness and accountability in the Roman Catholic Church.

Despite numerous surveys showing a majority of Catholics support women’s ordination, Pope Francis has maintained that “the door is closed” to discussing the topic and those who dare defy that mandate may suffer the consequences, including excommunication.

A few days prior to the pope’s recent visit to the United States, WOC hosted a global conference in Philadelphia, with nearly 500 men and women from 19 different countries in attendance, to support the cause of women’s ordination. It sends a message to the hierarchy that we are not the silent majority.

Women’s equality is not a radical concept. It is part of the equation that creates balance and harmony in this world. Despite reports by United Nations councils, recommendations by experts and theologians, and the voices of the people, the Catholic hierarchy chooses to remain oblivious to the maladies created by gender inequality. Among so many other things, it perpetuates psychological violence.

Authoritative sources like religious leaders have a powerful influence on the creation of our reality. By implying that women are unworthy to stand at the altar and by using non-inclusive language, the church is giving permission to all of society to degrade the female person.

I am astonished at the unwillingness of those in power to see that connection.

Perhaps that is the key word — power.

Considering recent discoveries in historical research now contest the church’s claim of “tradition” being the reason for the ordination ban, one must seriously question if it is rather due to the hierarchy’s irrational fear of sharing power with a woman. In reviewing the church’s record, I am of the opinion that sexism is indeed the “original sin.”

In a written statement to the Diocese, I declared I am withholding financial support as long as sexism persists in the church — as in no way, shape or form does sexism contribute to the betterment of humanity.

I would rather my godchildren experience a faith based on the Gospel values of love, compassion and equality instead of patriarchal dogmas and doctrines. I will teach my nephew that true love for the female person means seeing her as his equal, and I will teach my niece that her worth is not defined by the male-contrived concept of “feminine genius.”

Thankfully there are organizations like WOC that reinforce these values.

While the opposition has tried to extinguish the spirit of Vatican II, many have raised their voices, willing to sacrifice their careers and membership in their communities for the sake of justice. Intimidation does not bind all people to silence; some fight back. If the male-only clergy are not bound by fear, I challenge them to offer a public response to this question: What would Jesus find so offensive about a woman offering remembrance of him to God?

CCCR Responds to the Resignation of Archbishop Nienstedt

The Catholic Coalition for Church Reform (CCCR)* has issued the following media release in response to today's news of the resignations of Archbishop John C. Nienstedt and Bishop Lee Piché of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis.

The Catholic Coalition for Church Reform and the Council of the Baptized welcome the news of the resignations of Archbishop Nienstedt and Bishop Lee Piché. Healing can now begin.

Leadership change will not be enough, though: this diocese, and the Church as a whole, needs to shed the cloak of clericalism and adopt a new attitude of inclusiveness. The faithful need to step up and play active roles in the governance of our Church as prescribed by the Open Windows principles of the Second Vatican Council.

CCCR has called for the re-establishment and empowerment of an effective Archdiocesan Pastoral Council to consult with and to guide the bishops, and for the adoption of the Standards of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, the same standards of accountability and transparency in governance and management adopted by many of our parishes.

CCCR has already submitted to the Papal Nuncio, the Pope’s representative in Washington, DC, the names of proven senior pastors in our diocese who are outstanding candidates to be named bishop. Rome needs to hear the voices of experience and judgment of local Catholics in the selection of our next leader.

For more information, contact Bob Beutel, CCCR co-chair at 651-324-0577 or bob@anthrolaw.com.

* The Catholic Coalition for Church Reform is an organization in the Twin Cities metropolitan area that envisions a church fully alive, locally and universally, that radiates Jesus’ core teaching of radical equality, unabashed inclusivity, and transforming love.


See also the previous PCV post:
• In the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, "Regime Change is Not Enough"

Related Off-site Links:
Archbishop Nienstedt and Bishop Piché Resign – Maria Wiering (The Catholic Spirit, June 15, 2015).
Archbishop Nienstedt Resigns After Twin Cities Archdiocese Charged with Failing Children – Joshua J. McElwee (National Catholic Reporter, June 15, 2015).
Archbishop Nienstedt Resigns – Grant Gallicho (Commonweal, June 15, 2015).
Archbishop Nienstedt Resigns After Sex Abuse Coverup Charges Against Archdiocese – Inés San Martín (Crux, June 15, 2015).
Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt Resigns After Charges Over Abuse Scandal – David Gibson (Religion News Service, June 15, 2015).
In Twin Cities, A Clean Sweep – Archbishop and Auxiliary Take the Fall – Rocco Palmo (Whispers in the Loggia, June 15, 2015).
Minnesota Bishops Resign in Vatican Crackdown on Sex Abuse by Priests – Stephanie Kirchgaessner (The Guardian, June 15, 2015).
Minnesota Archbishop Steps Down After Rocky Term – Amy Foriti (The Associated Press via Yahoo! News, June 15, 2015).
Catholic Archbishop and Aide Resign in Minnesota Over Sexual Abuse Scandal – Mark S. Getzfred and Mitch Smith (New York Times, June 15, 2015).
John Nienstedt, Archbishop of St. Paul, Resigns After Archdiocese Charged with Cover-Up – The Associate Press via NBC News (June 15, 2015).
An Open Letter to Archbishop Nienstedt – Hank Shea (Star Tribune, June 13, 2015).
The Line in the Sand – Jennifer Haselberger (CanonicalConsultation.com, June 10, 2015).
It Will Take a New Leader to Repair Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis – The Editorial Board (Star Tribune, June 8, 2015).
Twin Cities Archdiocese Charged with Child Endangerment – Grant Gallicho (Commonweal, June 7, 2015).

Local Catholics Discuss the Need for a "Healthy Christian Theology of Sexuality"

On May 6, 2015, Mary Hanson, host of The Mary Hanson Show, talked with Mary Beth Stein of the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform and Mary Ellen Jordan of the Council of the Baptized. Stein and Jordan are co-authors of a position paper entitled “Toward a Healthy Christian Theology of Sexuality," which is being distributed widely throughout the Twin Cities.





See also the previous PCV posts:
• Twin Cities Catholics Respond to Pope Francis' Invitation and Speak Out on Sexual Issues
• Let Our Voices Be Heard!
• "All Voices Must Be Heard": A Response to Archbishop Nienstedt
• It's Critical That Catholics Find Their Voice
• Richard Gaillardetz on the Need to "Wrestle with the Tradition"
• Nicholas Lash on Dissent and Disagreement
• Homosexual Relationships: Another Look

San Francisco Archbishop’s Sex-Obsessed Message is Missing Mark

By Brian Cahill


Note: This op-ed was first published April 21, 2015 by The San Francisco Chronicle.

The controversy surrounding the failed leadership of Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and the resulting outcry for his dismissal is not about questioning the teaching role of the archbishop. It’s not about resistance to Catholic doctrine being taught in Catholic high schools. And it’s not about unchangeable doctrine. We’re not talking about the Trinity or the Resurrection or other unchangeable teachings. We’re talking about church teaching regarding sexuality, a set of teachings in serious need of updating — just as church teaching was updated when church leaders figured out the Earth wasn’t flat, and slavery was evil, and women were not inferior to men (although some bishops are still struggling with that one).

This controversy is about the pastoral insensitivity of a spiritual leader who is creating fear and uncertainty among parents, teachers and students, including those students who are out or who are questioning their sexuality. This is about an archbishop who does not know how to effectively promulgate Catholic identity in the real world in which our church exists.

It’s good for the spiritual leader of our local church to emphasize Catholic teaching in our schools, especially in the secular society in which our children are coming of age. But how a bishop promotes Catholic identity is what is crucial, and that is the issue here. The question is: How does a Catholic organization — a school that does not limit its hiring or its services to Catholics — manage the tension between what our church teaches about sexuality and how it is expected to carry out its mission in the pluralistic society in which it lives and operates? The answer: very carefully.

Cordileone is a far cry from our new pope, who is not changing church doctrine but who has moved the entire world with his compassion and his inclusiveness. There’s a man who knows how to teach. There’s a man with moral authority.

Instead, we have Cordileone, who is trying to force his sex-obsessed version of Catholic identity in Catholic schools.

Instead of a Pope Francis teaching moment, we have a lost teaching opportunity — to not only teach about the real message of the Gospel of Jesus, the message of love and justice, but also to assist parents and teachers to inculcate a solid sense of morality and personal responsibility, to point out the destructiveness of casual sex, of relationships not based on maturity, commitment and caring, and to highlight the power and grace of both the non-physical and physical intimacy of marriage.

Cordileone’s approach is driving away young Catholics, is an abuse of employment rights and is substantially decreasing the influence of the Catholic Church as a voice for a values-driven approach to sexuality, let alone a voice for social and economic justice. That’s why people are upset.

That’s why 80 percent of the teachers in these schools publicly oppose the archbishop’s approach; that’s why thousands have signed the petitions taped to the cathedral doors by the parent leaders of Teach Acceptance. That’s why the signers of the paid ad in The Chronicle are calling for the archbishop’s removal.

The archbishop’s advisers say the signers do not represent the Catholic community here. But how would his advisers know that? They’ve barely unpacked their suitcases. The signers of the paid ad, the parents, teachers and students, and a growing number of concerned Catholics are not going away. What is going away rapidly is the moral authority and credibility of the archbishop of San Francisco.

Brian Cahill is the retired executive director of San Francisco Catholic Charities.


Image: Michael Macor/The Chronicle.

Jesus' Radical Politics

By Brandon Ambrosino

In his kingdom, enemies are loved, the marginalized prioritized,
and wealth inequality exposed for the sham it is.

Note: This op-ed was first published April 1, 2015 by The Boston Globe.


Two thousand years have sanitized Easter for most people. Jesus is alive, we sing each spring, and now let’s get on with lilies and chocolates and bunnies and think about what his resurrection means for us — namely, that we get to go to heaven when we die, and perhaps more important, a lot of other people don’t.

A more careful look at the Gospels, however, might offer a much less sentimental, much more startling picture of the original Easter message, which was decidedly not, “Jesus is alive, and here’s what that means for the next world.” Rather, the true lesson was: “Jesus is alive, and here’s what that means for this one.”

The central claim of Easter — and indeed, of Christianity — has always been that the rejected, tortured, crucified, dead, and then resurrected Jesus is somehow Lord of the entire earth. If that doesn’t sound particularly scandalous today, imagine you’re hearing it for the first time while living in the Roman Empire. As many New Testament scholars argue, hearing “Jesus is Lord” in the first century might sound suspiciously like a bold rejection of the standard Roman creed at the time: “Caesar is Lord.” (There is a lot of discussion about this, but even a quick glance of the Gospels and Acts shows that the texts contain instances of anti-imperial rhetoric.)

What’s radical about Easter, then, is not that Christians claim a dead man rose from the dead. What’s radical is what that means — specifically, what it meant for Rome, and, by implication, what it means for all kingdoms everywhere, including the ones we live in. Jesus’ resurrection marked the end of Caesar’s way of doing things. It established a new kingdom in which enemies are loved, the marginalized are given primacy of place, and the poor are blessed. In this kingdom, hierarchies are subverted, concentrated power is decentralized, and prodigal children are welcomed home. Black lives matter here, as do queer lives and the lives of undocumented aliens within our borders — “Remember the stranger in your midst” is a common refrain in this kingdom.

Of course, speaking about Jesus in such a political way is not without its dangers. Many with political agendas are guilty of branding their particular ideologies with the name of Jesus, both on the right and left. But there’s no denying that, at least in recent US history, conservatives have been ready to marry God and government. As a result, Christianity has come to be associated less with policies aimed at helping the poor — and more with those that often serve to keep them down. The tragic irony, of course, is that, as the Gospel of Luke teaches, Jesus’ ministry is inaugurated with the announcement that the Spirit of the Lord compels him to preach good news to the poor.

Though the name of God is sometimes invoked to justify war and greed and the oppression of already marginalized persons, the broken body of Jesus seems rather like a prophetic protest against those values. Philosopher John Caputo discusses this irony in his 2007 book, “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” — a play on the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” that many conservatives have plastered onto their cars, T-shirts, bracelets, etc.

The gospels, Caputo writes, invite us to imagine a new way of life where the poetics of Jesus’ kingdom are transformed into political structures:

“What would it be like if there really were a politics of the bodies of flesh that proliferate in the New Testament, a politics of mercy and compassion, of lifting up the weakest and most defenseless people at home, a politics of welcoming the stranger and of loving one’s enemies abroad? What would it be like if there were a politics of and for the children, who are the future; a politics not of sovereignty, of top-down power, but a politics that builds from the bottom up, where ta me onta [lit. “the nothings”] enjoy pride of place and a special privilege?”

Caputo then asks this frightening question: “Would [this politics] not be in almost every respect the opposite of the politics that presently passes itself off under the name of Jesus?”

One look at current events across the globe today, and Caputo’s imaginings may be easily dismissed. How can Americans simply turn the other cheek to our warring enemies? How can anyone expect the government to make sure each child is looked after? And working to eliminate poverty? Wasn’t Jesus talking about spiritual poverty? That’s a private matter, not a public one. Those kinds of policies just aren’t practical in 2015.

Of course they aren’t. They weren’t practical in Jesus’ day, either. That’s one of the reasons Jesus was killed. He was, to use Caputo’s word, mad. How else do you explain his teachings? Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Do good to them who use you. Do not retaliate. Look after your neighbor. The meek will inherit the earth.

But the madness of God is wiser than the wisdom of man, as Paul reminds us, just like God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. And it’s the kingdom of this God — who, contrary to what anyone expected, is weak, mad, and disruptive — that Jesus is both announcing and installing.

“If I, with the finger of God, cast out demons among you, then the Kingdom of God has come near to you,” says Jesus, and his Jewish hearers might have understood the scandalous reference. Scandalous because in this brief line, Jesus seems to be identifying himself with the same God who heard the cry of oppressed Israel and took it upon himself to liberate them from Egypt. As the Book of Exodus recounts, when Pharaoh refuses Moses’ request to let the Hebrews go, a battle of miracles quickly ensues. Though Pharaoh’s magicians try to imitate the wonders that Moses ascribes to God, they don’t succeed. “This is the finger of God,” they explain to Pharaoh, which creates wonders, which liberates God’s people from the empires that enslave them. The finger of God, they reluctantly acknowledge, is mightier than the strongest arm of any world leader.

In reinterpreting this passage around his life and ministry, Jesus is giving us a glimpse into what he thought of himself (who but God alone works wonders by the finger of God?) as well as into what he thought about his kingdom: that, though it’s ultimate fulfillment will be in the future, look around you — it’s already here. As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright explains, for Jesus, God’s kingdom “wasn’t just an aspiration; it was an accomplishment.” Jesus was convinced that his life and preaching and miracles were bringing about the kingdom his followers had longed for.

Only, Jesus’ kingdom of peace and love looked much different than the one that Jews at the time hoped the Messiah would establish. One of Jesus’ more cryptic sayings is found in Matthew’s Gospel. After a strange discussion of kingdom, Jesus compares his audience to children sitting in the marketplace singing to each other, “We played the flute for you, but you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” Jesus, he hears them say, you are not the Messiah we expected. To which he responds: I will not dance when you tell me to dance. I will not cry when you tell me to cry. I will not be the Messiah you tell me to be. I am here to show you a different sort of dance, a different way; follow me, and build my father’s kingdom, which looks very different than the ones you cling to.

This is the prophetic memory of Jesus that rushes toward us today. What would Jesus do if he showed up today, say, in Washington, D.C.? Would he turn a blind eye to racial injustices in Ferguson and elsewhere? Would he lobby to ensure that entire swaths of our population continue to feel as if they don’t belong in their cities, in their religious congregations, in their local bakeries? Would he, interested as he is in the physical bodies of all he encounters, enact policies that bar people from the health care they desperately need?

At the same time, can we really be sure that Jesus would protest with Wall Street Occupiers, railing against the one percent? This is the same Jesus who, as Luke recounts, tells his followers that if just one of their sheep wanders away from the fold, they are to leave the 99 and go after the one percent. And can we be equally sure that this Jesus, who has no patience for greed, would spend all of his energy condemning the wealthy? This is the same Jesus, after all, who is rumored to be the friend of tax collectors.

This is why it won’t do merely to begin with a political ideology and brand it with Jesus’ memory. The memory of Jesus is disruptive to all kingdoms, to all earthly powers, without respect to any specific political affiliation or agenda.

What we can imagine that Jesus would probably do — indeed what he definitely did do, is to suddenly, without warning, announce that his new kingdom is breaking in upon all of us, has broken in upon us, and that this kingdom is almost the exact reversal of what any of us thought kingdoms were supposed to be. This new king will not tolerate oppression and systemic poverty, nor he will excuse violence directed at those in power. He has no patience for any dirges or dances. He is here about his father’s business.

THE BELLS of Easter Sunday, comforting though they may be, are actually a call to war, albeit a nonviolent kind of war; a call to rise up, to act up, to announce to the powers and principalities that rule our nations that their power has an expiration date, that their rule is a sham, that their kingdom has been undone by the one who undoes death.

The rebuttal here has always been: Open your eyes. This kingdom you’re talking about — where the last are first, where the outsiders are preferred — is not here. There is war. There is evil. There is death and rape and racism and unemployment and sex trafficking. There is a brutally agonizing world here and now, and to pretend otherwise is either naive or morally bankrupt.

But Easter doesn’t deny these things. After all, even the resurrected body of Jesus contains crucifixion scars, which are Jesus’ eternal reminder that he was murdered by the very people he came to save. What Easter teaches is this: Even in the midst of the kingdom you’re living in, it’s possible to actually pledge loyalty to a different one. By feeding the hungry, forgiving your enemies, and providing shelter for the homeless, you can actually choose to live in the kingdom Jesus established.

Hope, then, is not a spiritual thing, or a reflective exercise; it’s decidedly physical. If you believe Jesus was raised from the dead, the obligation that Jesus puts upon you is to meet people’s physical needs. “Do not abandon yourselves to despair,” said Pope John Paul II. “We are the Easter people, and alleluia is our song.”

This alleluia is both a praise and protest. The world is made new, alleluia, and all lives matter. Creation is transformed, alleluia, and therefore let us embrace the strangers in our midst. The tomb is empty, alleluia, now let us work to heal the hurt of all those who have been discriminated against, made to feel like second-class citizens. In God’s kingdom, after all, there is only one class of citizen, because all have inherited the same birthright from their heavenly father.

Two thousand years later, the promise of Easter has not lost its power. The risen Jesus, then as now, invites us to live in this world as if it is somehow a different world.

Because, alleluia, it is.


Brandon Ambrosino covers culture and religion for Vox.com.

I'm a Catholic Feminist, and My Church Needs Me More Than Ever

By Kristina Keneally


Note: This op-ed was first published January 28, 2015 by The Guardian.


I recall standing in my grandmother’s kitchen with her yellow Bakelite phone to my ear, waiting on hold for a talkback radio program. I was eight years old, and my family was in another room listening to the Catholic Bishop of Toledo take questions from callers on the local AM station.

Finally it was my turn. “Bishop Donovan,” I said, “I’m in third grade. The priest at our school has come to our class to ask for boys to volunteer to be altar servers. Why can’t girls volunteer too?”

Poor Bishop Donovan. He mumbled something about church tradition and the importance of serving at mass as a first step towards priesthood – where, again, one obviously had to be male – and moved on to the next caller.

Unsatisfactory, I thought. And my career as a Catholic feminist began.

38 years later, I’m still a Catholic and a feminist. I’ve got a degree in religious studies, specialising in feminist theology, and while girls can be altar servers now (take that, Bishop Donovan), we’ve still got a long way to go, baby.

Pope Francis’s recent comment that Catholics need not “breed like rabbits,” while insisting that artificial contraception is still banned, left many shaking their heads. Here was yet another example of the all-male Catholic hierarchy completely failing to understand what it is like to be a woman, or to live in a family, or to exercise control over fertility.

The Catholic church so overtly and fully excludes women from certain jobs and seeks to deny them certain rights that some dismiss the idea that a true feminist can profess the Catholic faith. Yet this is precisely why the Catholic church needs feminists.

The idea that one can’t be a Catholic and a feminist usually starts with a misunderstanding of what it is to be Catholic. In strict technical terms, a Catholic is someone who believes in those things listed in the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed: God, the creator of heaven and earth; Jesus Christ, the son of God who was crucified, died and resurrected; the Holy Spirit; the holy Catholic church (that is, the entire community of those who believe in Jesus Christ); the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

That’s it. No mention in our creeds of artificial contraception, an all-male priesthood, denying communion to divorced people or excluding homosexuals. It’s not particularly surprising – not one of the four Gospels records Jesus passing significant comments on such matters.

Everything in the Catholic church after Jesus’s death and resurrection represents human attempts to interpret and apply the teachings of Christ to our circumstances. Because men fairly exclusively ran the world until very recently, it has been fairly exclusively men in the Catholic church who’ve done the interpreting and applying. Not overly surprising, then, that the result is a set of teachings and rules that exclude and oppress women.

A Catholic feminist insists that women’s experience is just as valid as men’s when it comes to understanding the nature of God, the teachings of Christ, the movement of the Holy Spirit and how we are to live as Christians in the world today.

OK, I hear you saying, but how can a Catholic disagree with the church? Don’t you Catholics believe the (male) pope is infallible? Aren’t you required to follow what the (exclusively male) bishops say?

There’s no simple answer to that question, but the short answer is no. First of all, papal infallibility (and its related concept, the infallibility of the church) is not what people often think it is. The pope is not infallible in every utterance he makes. In fact, he only very occasionally speaks infallibly, and when he does it is specifically noted. For example, the Assumption of Mary (into heaven) is an infallible teaching. The ban on artificial contraception is not.

Secondly, a Catholic has an obligation to follow her fully-formed conscience, even if it brings her into conflict with church teaching. A fully-formed conscience consults not only scripture and church teaching but also the sciences and human experience.

Conscience is a crucially important aspect of Catholic teaching and was given great emphasis in Vatican II, the reforming and modernising council that took place between 1962-65. Conservative popes – such as John Paul II – have sought to redefine conscience in order to discourage debate and dissent, but the role of a fully-formed conscience in the life of Catholics is significant and cannot be extinguished.

A Catholic feminist is a bit like a conscientious objector. She loves what sits at the heart of her faith, and fights what she cannot, in good conscience, accept in her church.

Sometimes people ask me why I don’t just leave such an anachronistic institution and join a Christian church where women can have a say, serve as ordained minsters and formally contribute to theological and moral teachings. Sometimes I ask myself the same question. It’s not easy being a Catholic feminist – sometimes it is downright infuriating – but I love the sacraments and the liturgy of the Catholic church, and I love the value it places on scripture and tradition. Why should I abandon my expression of faith to the all-male hierarchy? Why not stay and advocate for a more inclusive church, better theology, and teachings more reflective of the lived experience of women?

I’m no saint, but when I am most exasperated with the church, I recall that among the communion of saints are hundreds of examples of people who openly disagreed with the church hierarchy. Think of Mary MacKillop – excommunicated at one point – now elevated to sainthood by the same institution that threw her out.

Agitators for change are part of the Catholic church’s rich history: Catholic feminists follow in that tradition.


Related Off-site Links:
Altar Server Scandal is Reminder of How Far the Catholic Church Has to Go with Women – Lydia O'Connor (The Huffington Post, January 30, 2015).
Vatican Hits Sour Note with Women, But Progress May Come – Nicole Winfield (Associated Press via Yahoo! News, January 31, 2015).
Pope Francis, Women, and the Band of Brothers: The Ambiguity of the Jesuit Heritage That's Being Ignored by Commentators on Francis as Reformer – William D. Lindsey (Bilgrimage, January 31, 2015).

Pope Francis and the Catholic Crisis

By Charles J. Reid, Jr.
Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas


NOTE: This commentary was first published December 15, 2014 by The Huffington Post.


There is a growing crisis haunting the Catholic Church. And it is a crisis larger than the events that have so greatly afflicted the American Catholic Church. The pedophilia scandals are a horrifying element of this crisis. So, too, are the bishops who covered up and excused these outrages. And so, also, the more general loss of confidence Catholics have in a hierarchy that seems oddly concerned with rank and privilege and with fighting yesterday's culture wars. Yes, these are all elements of the crisis, but the crisis is larger than this.

And that something larger is both sad and profound: a loss of faith in the institutions of the Church. Pope Francis, in his remarkable interview with La nacion, published the weekend of December 6 and 7, made it clear that he recognized the gravity of the moment. He was asked why so many people were leaving the Church. As posed, the question addressed Latin America. By implication, it looked to the world.

Pope Francis could have directed his answer at factors external to the Church. Indeed, one can imagine his predecessors alternatively blaming culture, or relativism, or the forces of secularism. Pope Francis, however, is different. His was a more introspective answer. We must look within, he advised, to what Catholics are themselves doing wrong.

At the root of the crisis, he proposed, was the problem of clericalism. Clericalism is strangling true Christianity. Pope Francis has spoken often about clericalism during his brief pontificate. It was the reason, early in his tenure, that he ceased granting applications by priests to be raised to the rank of monsignor. Being called monsignor adds little to a priest's life. But the quest for this title led, in Francis's judgment, to careerism and a preoccupation with title and honor that had little to do with the Gospels.

Well, it seems that in taking this step, Pope Francis was merely warming up. In recent speeches, he began to explore how deep the crisis of clericalism extends. It has poisoned the relationship between priests and lay Catholics. It can serve, for the laity, as heedless abdication of responsibility, and on the part of the clergy a dangerous concentration of power.

Thus Pope Francis declared in March, 2014: "Clericalism is one of the evils of the Church. . . . Priests take pleasure in the temptation to clericalize the laity, but many of the laity are on their knees asking to be clericalized, because it is more comfortable! . . . This is a double sin!"

So how should lay and clergy interact? The Pope sees a wide latitude here. It is an intersection that must be governed principally by a respect for the power of prophecy. The prophet, Pope Francis has stated, is someone with a sense of the historical moment. The prophet must appreciate the confluence of "past, present, and future." The prophet knows the past promise of God's word, but knows how to interpret this word in her or his life and "to speak a word [to others] that will lift them up."

Again, what is noticeable is what is omitted. The prophet is not someone who listens patiently for instructions from others, or is someone who is fond of restating that perennial objection to growth and development – "but we've done anything like that before!" No, the prophet is someone who sees things fresh, in context, and knows how to take creative action appropriate to the moment.

The clergy must come to terms with this dimension of the lay vocation and be supportive of it. "The priest's suggestion is immediately to clericalize," the Pope warns. This temptation must be resisted. The priest has a spiritual role, a pastoral role, and a sacramental role, but the priest must not subsume the role of the laity. Harmony between the two orders is what Catholics should strive for. It should never become a situation in which "the big fish swallows the little one."

Pope Francis, in other words, expects an active and engaged laity, a laity that can think for itself, and is not fearful of its own independence. But how shall this Church, of harmonious yet different orders, address the Catholic crisis?

It must not preach. It must not proselytize. It must not condemn, or throw tantrums, or engage in theatrics. Rather, the Church – the People of God, lay and clergy alike – must set a good example. They must know that the world is filled with human suffering and that they are called to go about relieving in some small quantum this great misery in ways adapted to need and circumstance.

Only a leader with a great sense of faith could propose such a radical agenda for the Church. And Pope Francis' interview with La nacion makes plain his great faith. Only a confident and faithful leader would have opened the Synod on the Family to the kind of free discussions that occurred last October. Other popes have hosted synods on the family. They were entirely forgettable affairs. The script was written well in advance, everyone recited their assigned lines, and nothing of significance occurred. Pope Francis, on the other hand, opened the Synod up to prophecy, and a consideration of the needs of the moment.

It is fair to describe Pope Francis's summons as a call to Christian adulthood, but not in some superficial or trite sense. Rather he expects all Catholics to show a spirit of leadership, independence, and good judgment. The Church, he has warned, must not be obsessed with the self-referential. It must instead do as Jesus did – minister to the afflicted and the marginal. It is truly a bold vision of renewal.

Tony Flannery in Minneapolis

.

By Michael J. Bayly


We’re at a moment in time when reform-minded Catholics must let their voices be heard.

This was one of a number of messages that both inspired and challenged the 300+ Catholics who gathered at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Minneapolis on the evening of Wednesday, November 5, 2014. It was a message delivered by Irish priest Tony Flannery.

Minneapolis was the tenth stop on Flannery’s 18-city speaking tour of the U.S., and was significant as it will be the only time he speaks on official Catholic Church property. This is because bishops throughout the country have banned the 68-year-old Redemptorist priest from church premises, or, perhaps more accurately, have warned parishes against hosting him. Flannery’s tour is sponsored by the Catholic Tipping Point Coalition, which offers the following explanation for the hierarchy’s inhospitable attitude.

Fr. Tony has been ordered to remain silent and forbidden to minister as a priest because of his refusal to sign a document that violates his conscience: namely that women cannot be priests and that he accepts all Church stances on contraception, homosexuality, and refusal of the sacraments to people in second relationships. After a year during which he attempted to come to some accommodation with the Vatican without success, he has decided to take a public stance on the need for reform in the Church. . . . Rather than remain silent, Fr. Tony and all people of conscience are ready to dialogue.

In Minneapolis, Flannery’s talk and the dialogue it facilitated took place on official church property due to St. Frances Cabrini pastor Mike Tegeder's decision to defy a directive from Archbishop Nienstedt. (Tegeder has a long history of criticizing and defying the archbishop. See, for example, here, here, here, and here.)

Responding to Nienstedt's concerns about Flannery's presence on Catholic property, Tegeder had the following message posted on the podium.

Tonight's speaker, Tony Flannery, is not to be perceived in any way as being sponsored by the Catholic Church. This announcement comes from Archbishop John C. Nienstedt, Chief Catechist of the Archdiocese of St. Paul & Minneapolis.

Of course, the first part of this statement is only true if one reduces "the Catholic Church" to its clerical leadership. Large segments of the local church, representative of the church as the people of God, clearly have no problem with supporting, welcoming, and, yes, sponsoring, a speaker like Tony Flannery.


Implementing Vatican II

Flannery first came to the attention of many outside his native Galway when, in response to the Irish bishops' “total lack of leadership” in dealing with the clergy sex abuse scandal, he co-founded the Association of Catholic Priests in 2009.

The association works toward the “full implementation of the vision and teaching of the Second Vatican Council,” with special emphasis on the primacy of the individual conscience, the status and active participation of all the baptized, and the task of establishing a Church where all believers are treated as equal.

Such work corresponds with the activities of Catholic reform groups around the globe, as do the specific objections of the Association of Catholic Priests, which include:

• A redesigning of ministry in the Church in order to incorporate the gifts, wisdom, and expertise of the entire faith community, male and female.

• A re-structuring of the governing system of the Church, basing it on service rather than on power, and encouraging at every level a culture of consultation and transparency, particularly in the appointment of Church leaders.

• A culture in which the local bishop and the priests relate to each other in a spirit of trust, support and generosity.

• A re-evaluation of Catholic sexual teaching and practice that recognizes the profound mystery of human sexuality and the experience and wisdom of God’s people.

• Promotion of peace, justice and the protection of God’s creation locally, nationally and globally.

• Recognition that Church and State are separate and that while the Church must preach the message of the Gospel and try to live it authentically, the State has the task of enacting laws for all its citizens.

• Liturgical celebrations that use rituals and language that are easily understood, inclusive and accessible to all.

According to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Flannery’s (and by extension the Association of Catholic Priests’) views on ordination, contraception, and homosexuality could be construed as "heresy" under church law. During his talk in Minneapolis on November 5, Flannery noted that the Vatican had been particularly alarmed by two views he had expressed in his writings for the Association: that the priesthood as we have it now is not of the mind of Jesus, and that the hierarchical, monarchical structure of the church as it exists today is not what Jesus intended. As a result of these statements, Flannery has been threatened with "canonical penalties," including excommunication, if he does not change his views.

Yet Flannery has no intention of backing down, noting that “the Vatican hasn’t got the Holy Spirit in its pocket.” To those who insist that he must submit in total obedience to the Magisterium, the legitimate teaching authority of the church, Flannery counters by stating that “any authority that tramples on the dignity and basic human rights of its members has long lost claims to legitimacy.”

In his recent book, A Question of Conscience, Flannery recounts his treatment by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.


Two central issues

Flannery believes that as Catholics we are living through extraordinary times with the papacy of Francis. In 100 years time, he says, historians will be writing volumes on this pivotal moment in the history of the church. The bulk of Flannery's November 5 talk was focused on what he identifies as two central issues facing the church at this important time.

The first of these issues is the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the church. Flannery says that there is currently a conflict between two notions of the Magisterium – a narrow notion and a broad one. The narrow notion sees the Magisterium as being composed solely of the bishops (including the pope as Bishop of Rome). The broader version recognizes that the church’s teaching authority depends on recognition of and dialogue among three groups: the bishops, Catholic theologians, and the collective wisdom of the Catholic people (the sensus fidelium).

Flannery contends that Pope Francis is doing the best he can to move the church from the narrow view of teaching authority to the broader view. Francis, says Flannery, wants to hear the voice of the sensus fidelium, and to embed in the structures of the church the broader view of the Magisterium.

Flannery was quick to point out that he’s not an academic, yet his grasp on theology, says Eugene Cullen Kennedy of Chicago’s Loyola University, is better than those in the hierarchy who have attempted to silence him.

Flannery’s condemnation by the Vatican, writes Kennedy in his January 25, 2013 National Catholic Reporter column, should be “recognized as a harbinger of the kind of problem that sure-of-their-infallibility Vatican authorities will encounter in their relationships with the rising generation of theological scholars, most of whom are laymen and women who will not accept condemnations such as that now imposed on Father Flannery.”

Continues Kennedy:

Even well-educated Catholics know as much or more theology than these veiled Roman enforcers. That also goes for the American bishops, who are wonderful men in general but who are unprepared for theological conversations with their people. One of the reasons the bishops have difficulty in communicating effectively with ordinary Catholics arises from their discomfort and/or inability to discuss theological issues with them. . . . Flannery's condemnation is an augury of the deepening estrangement that will take place if the Vatican does not respect the growing theological understanding of its members. The bishops are sincere in wanting to establish better channels of communication with their people. The best thing they can do to achieve that is to master the language of modern theological and scriptural studies that so many Catholics understand better than they do right now.

In his 2013 column, Kennedy also examines two of the issues that Flannery “is being forced to sign off on if he wants to continue his work: Christ's having established the church in hierarchical form and the assertion, employed constantly by bishops to legitimate their authority, that they are the direct descendants of the apostles.”

“If anything,” writes Kennedy “Christ called together a college of apostles, and the collegiality to which Vatican II returned is a far better image than the hierarchical form that was adopted from the hierarchical cosmological view of the universe and expressed in secular kingdoms, including the Roman Empire, whose provinces and proconsuls provided the model for laying out the governance of the church.”

In should be noted that Kennedy highlights an interesting discrepancy in the rhetoric of those who unquestioningly assert that the current structure of church governance is somehow ordained by God and has thus always been. The Vatican’s doctrinal chief Cardinal Gerhard Müller, for example, recently declared that Pope Francis’ Synod on the Family, which for Flannery is a prime example of the pope’s efforts to move the church from a narrow understanding of authority to a broader one, is evidence that the bishops are being “blinded by secularism.” Yet as many Catholics now recognize, the feudal and monarchical structure of the church is itself based on a secular structure from a specific historical era. If the church could adopt an organizing and leadership structure from secular society at one point in its history, why can it not adopt another, namely democracy, from a more current time? And as Robert McClory has compellingly documented, modern democracy actually is more aligned with the democratic impulse and egalitarian spirit of the early Christian church than the Vatican’s model of leadership, fashioned as it is around Roman imperial power of the fifth century.

Decision-making in the church was the second central issue highlighted by Flannery in his November 5 talk in Minneapolis. As with the issue of authority, two understandings of decision-making are currently in conflict – decision-making through authoritarian, top-down edicts vs. decision-making through discernment by the whole community through a process that honors conscience.

Flannery acknowledges that decision-making through discernment can initially cause confusion. But he is adamant that, over time, truth is discerned, “the Spirit’s voice heard.”


“Not a time for reform people to sit back”

Despite his obvious affinity for the group he co-founded, Flannery acknowledges that with the steady decline in the number of priests the true hope for future reform of the church lies with lay reform movements and groups, and with the growing number of intentional Eucharistic communities.

Flannery said he is impressed by the number and vitality of Catholic reform groups in the U.S., but cautioned that, despite the hopeful signs from Francis’ papacy, it is “not a time for reform people to sit back.” We need to do everything we can to ensure our vision of church is heard at the highest levels of church leadership. “Bishops should not only hear from conservative Catholics,” Flannery said, especially in over the next year in the lead-up to Synod on the Family 2015.

One way local lay Catholics are making their voices heard is through a process being facilitated by the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform (CCCR). Through this process local members of the clergy are being nominated for the next archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis. CCCR leadership notes that the lay people of Chicago spoke out about the kind of leadership they needed and that many believe they were heard, as evidenced by the appointment of their new archbishop, the moderate Blase Cupich.

After voting concludes on November 15, CCCR will announce the top three names in the polling. Local Catholics will then be encouraged to write to the U.S. papal nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, to let him know their thoughts about the kind of leadership needed in the St. Paul/Minneapolis Archdiocese. The goal is that when next there’s an opening for bishop/archbishop in the archdiocese, Archbishop Viganò will not only know that lay Catholics here are paying attention, but will also be aware of the names of men that Catholics have confidence in. (Note: In order to be eligible to vote in CCCR’s Bishop Selection Campaign, registration with the group’s Lay Catholic Network is necessary. You can register here.)

It is activities like CCCR's Bishop Selection Campaign – proactive and voice-raising – that encourage Tony Flannery and many others. Such activities are time-consuming, unglamorous, and more-often-than-not slow to yield results. Yet they are vital for reform-minded Catholics to engage in and spread the word about.

We truly are at a time when our voices need to be heard!

Recommended Resources for Letting Our Voices Be Heard:
The Lay Network in the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis – The Catholic Coalition for Church Reform.
Where Do We Go from Here? – Writing to Our Bishops – New Ways Ministry.

Recommended Off-site Links:
Controversial Priest's Visit Exposes Rift in Catholic Church – Jon Tevlin (Star Tribune, November 4, 2014).
Silenced Irish Priest Tony Flannery Touring U.S. – Dennis Coday (National Catholic Reporter, October 21, 2014).
A Review of Tony Flannery's A Question of Conscience – Dermot Keogh (The Independent, September 15, 2013).
Fr. Flannery's Grasp of Theology Better Than That of His Silencers – Eugene Cullen Kennedy (National Catholic Reporter, January 25, 2013).
Irish Priest Receives Support from Near and Far in His Vatican Struggle – Francis DeBernardo (Bondings 2.0, January 23, 2013).
Vatican's Demand for Silence is Too High a Price – Tony Flannery (The Irish Times, January 21, 2013).
Dissident Irish Priest Fears Excommunication Over Views on Women Priests – Patrick Counihan (IrishCentral.com, January 21, 2013).
Irish Redemptorist Father Tony Flannery Gets the Ray Bourgeios Treatment from the CDF – Colleen Kochivar-Baker (Enlightened Catholicism, January 20, 2013).
Priest Is Planning to Defy the Vatican’s Orders to Stay Quiet – Douglas Dalby (The New York Times, January 19, 2013).

See also the previous PCV posts:
• "Our Voices Are Growing"
• Creating a Liberating Church
• Let Our Voices Be Heard

Images: Michael J. Bayly.