Friday, July 24, 2015

About Womens' Ordination And Other Issues Fr. McBrien on Friday

I was puzzled last week to read an article by an atheist who is hostile to the Catholic church and, perhaps, Catholics in general, one of those writers who can be counted on to parrot all kinds of the typical Brit-atheist anti-Catholic bromides founded in either a grotesquely uninformed and exaggerated view of actual historical events or in nothing but the imagination of ancient Anglican propagandists.  What puzzled me is that the article slammed Pope Francis for refusing to revisit the issue of the ordination of women.  If there is one thing that would happen with the approval of the ordination of women as Roman Catholic priests it would be a drastic reduction in the number of parishes without priests - there is no doubt that the move would also be accompanied by allowing married men (and, no doubt, women) to be ordained and inviting back priests who had been laicized at their request in order for them to follow a call to be married.  You would think that among the last things an atheist who is hostile to the Catholic religion would want to see would be a revival and swelling of the numbers of Catholic priests in the world.  But people often aren't careful about what they wish for.  If Pope Francis, acting on revelation, changed policy on that this afternoon, I don't think atheists would like the result.

Over time, perhaps a very short time, that would lead to a re-invigoration of  Catholicism, not only because it would restart many parishes which have been dying under the celibate-male-only* rule it would also probably provide a pool of more competent leaders for parishes and the Church in general, one which would probably be far more in touch with the lives of more Catholics and other people.   I can imagine a lot of the foolish things that bishops and cardinals have done over the past forty years might have been avoided by having had a deeper pool from which to appoint those from.  I can imagine a married clergy would also promote a more democratic church, one that consults the thinking and judgement of The People, something which wasn't novel in the first millennium of Catholicism when The People were far less likely to be literate and educated and informed than those who are entirely ignored today.   While that can be bad on occasion, so can the centralized authoritarian system the last two papacies have govern the church and the world.  This column about the beatification of the first of those popes by the second of them is relevant to that.

The late Pope John Paul II was beatified on May 1st and is now well on the way to canonization. Some people have complained about the speed of the process, but as the pope’s biographer George Weigel has correctly pointed out, there were no complaints about the speed with which Mother Teresa’s cause was advanced.

The speed of the process, however, is not the issue, nor is there any doubt in the minds of most critics that John Paul II is in heaven. 

What is at issue is the record of his long pontificate. Canonization is a public declaration not only that the new saint is in heaven, but that his life or hers is worthy of emulation (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, n. 50).

While it is certainly the case that John Paul II’s pontificate included many achievements (his three social encyclicals, the renegotiation of the Lateran Pacts, his outreach to Jews, his interfaith gathering and prayer for peace at Assisi), its two major deficiencies were his grave mishandling of the sexual-abuse crisis in the priesthood and his appointment and promotion of exceedingly conservative bishops to, and within, the hierarchy.

Both deficiencies continue to define the Catholic Church in our time, and account for the severe demoralization that afflicts so many in the Church today. 

They also explain why so many thousands of Catholics have left the Church in recent years, so many in fact that in the United States ex-Catholics would constitute the country’s second largest denomination if they constituted a church unto themselves.

Therefore, it is the case that, on Blessed John Paul II’s watch, the greatest crisis to hit the Catholic Church since the Reformation was allowed to grow and to fester, and the bishops appointed during his long reign were unable to offer the kind of pastorally effective leadership that the crisis required. 

Indeed, these bishops were not selected in the first place for their pastoral qualities, but for their unquestioning loyalty to the Holy See on such issues as contraception, abortion, priestly celibacy, and the ordination of women. 

Bishop William Morris was recently sacked from his diocese of Toowoomba, Queensland, in Australia because he had urged in a pastoral letter that the ordination of women to the priesthood and the end of obligatory celibacy for priests at least be considered by the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI gave as his principal reason for dismissing Bishop Morris from his diocese that the bishop had effectively denied that the matter of women’s ordination had already been permanently settled by an infallible teaching of Pope John Paul II.

Many Catholics are demoralized today because of the continued stench from the sexual-abuse scandal in the priesthood and because of the repressive, pastorally insensitive behavior of some of the bishops appointed by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

They may have an additional reason for demoralization on the First Sunday of Advent later this year when the “reform of the reform” goes into effect. Some will resent the millions of dollars spent on new missals and song books, and will be confused and disoriented by the loss of familiar wordings.

Those who are more ecumenically-minded will lament the fact that, for the first time since Vatican II’s reform of the liturgy, the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian denominations will not be celebrating the Eucharist with the same words.

Close observers of this column and of my many contemporary lectures, writings, and television appearances know that, at the beginning of the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, I expressed not only the hope but also the expectation that both pontificates would be highly successful, notwithstanding the doubts that many other commentators were expressing. 

In the former case, I welcomed the election of the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years. In the latter case, I was encouraged by the new pope’s selection of the name Benedict. Benedict XV (1914-1922), as I had pointed out in my Lives of the Popes, “may well have been one of the finest popes in history, but surely one of the least appreciated” (p. 355).

I judged Benedict XV to be one of the twelve “good” popes in papal history, calling him “Perhaps the most underrated of the modern popes” (p. 436). 

For those who wonder why the Catholic Church seems to be passing through one of the worst patches in its history, more benign explanations are, first, the premature death of Pope John Paul I after only 33 days in the papacy and, second, the refusal of Cardinal Carlo Colombo of Milan to accept election to the papacy in the second conclave of 1978.

The decline in the number of active Catholics in that period would be seen by a hierarchy in touch with The People as a severe crisis that should be addressed as soon as possible.   That it was unaddressed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI is a good indication of what happens when leadership isn't particularly concerned with The People as opposed to authority.   I would guess that people will respond to a pope and bishops who see them as important.   I can't respect John Paul II for his handling of the terror campaign the Reagan administration funded against The People of central America and elsewhere.  I can respect some of what he said about economic justice, I can't respect what he often did and the bishops he appointed here who were openly supportive of some of the most criminal and immoral politicians we've had as leaders.   I am certain that some of the remnants of those appointed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI will support some of the worst Republicans in the coming election, whose policies are a total violation of the entire Catholic tradition on economic and social justice and, certainly, peace.  They are also in fundamental violation of the teachings of conservatives about the value of life, most notably on the imposition of death but, also, in everything except opposition to legal abortion.

I would be counted among those "ex-Catholics" though, so far as the Catholic church is concerned, I'm still a Catholic.  I can receive communion without violating any of the rules and, in fact, did the last time I attended a mass.  More generally, I'd like to see a revival of liberal Catholicism because it has been and is a positive good in the world.   So, I've got both standing to have an opinion in the matter and an interest in it.

It is quite fair that I mention another group of Catholics at odds with the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Women Priests, who, though formally excommunicated, consider themselves to remain as Catholics and Catholic priests and bishops.   If time will lead to them being recognized as validly ordained priests under apostolic succession, who knows?   I don't have any quarrel with them, they seem like the real thing to me.  They say "all are welcome", hospitality being about the most ancient of all obligations in the tradition Catholicism is a part of.

*  John Paul II certainly opened the door for relaxing the rule against non-married priests by allowing married ex-Anglican and Episcopalian priests who left over the ordination of women to be "reordained" as Catholic priests and to serve as parish priests.  I will probably post another of his columns on that issue soon.

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