Posted in category "Bishops"
Demanding what he calls greater “transparency and accountability” from the controversial religious order known as the Legionnaires of Christ and their associated lay movement, Regnum Christi, Archbishop Edward O’Brien of Baltimore directed both groups to disclose all activities within his archdiocese, and to refrain from one-on-one spiritual direction with anyone under 18. 
The ban on counseling minors, O’Brien said in an interview with NCR, is related to concerns that the Legionnaires and Regnum Christi practice “heavily persuasive methods on young people, especially high schoolers, regarding vocations.”
In a June 11 interview on the margins of the spring meeting of the U.S. bishops in Orlando, Florida, O’Brien said he is prepared to take the “next step” of barring the Legionnaires and Regnum Christi from the archdiocese entirely if they do not comply.
The directives came in the form of a June 6 letter from O’Brien to Fr. Alvaro Corcuera Martinez del Rio, the Superior General of the Legionnaires. The letter capped a lengthy series of contacts between the Legionnaires and the Baltimore archdiocese, O’Brien said, which began under his predecessor, Cardinal William Henry Keeler, who resigned in July 2007 at the age of 76. 
The June 6 letter, O’Brien told NCR, represents a last-ditch effort to repair relations. O’Brien said he actually reached a decision two to three months ago to ask the Legionnaires and Regnum Christi to leave the archdiocese, but was persuaded to stay his hand by three Vatican cardinals who asked him to meet first with Corcuera.
That meeting, O’Brien confirmed, took place earlier in June.
In the NCR interview, O’Brien also expressed skepticism that the Legionnaires will be able to implement needed reforms until they come to terms with the seemingly persuasive evidence that Fr. Marcial Maciel, the founder, engaged in activity that was “less than honorable, and maybe even sinful.”
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, the retired auxiliary bishop of Sydney, Australia, and former head of a panel investigating sexual abuse in that country, wrote a book in which he explores what he sees as the roots of abuse in the Church. Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church was published in the fall of 2007.
The book’s genesis, according to Robinson, came from his work as a member and then chairman of the Australian bishops’ commitee charged with addressing the sexual abuse crisis.
“For nine years it completely dominated my life,” he said of his committee work from 1994 to 2003. “It was an experience that changed me in so many ways that even if I wanted to, I could not now go back to being the person I was before.” 
Meeting and speaking with abuse survivors and their families convinced him that the roots of clergy sexual abuse lay in fundamental church attitudes toward power and sex, and that the only solution was first to examine and then to change those attitudes.
“Sexual abuse is all about power and sex, so to counter abuse, we must be free to ask serious questions about power and sex in the institution of the church,” he said. “Without this freedom, we would be attempting to respond to abuse while handcuffed and blindfolded.”
On a personal note, Robinson said his work with abuse survivors created an inner conflict between his loyalty to the pope and his “loyalty to that portion of God’s people that the Australian bishops had assigned to me, the victims of abuse.”
“It was the conflict between being a pope’s man and a victims’ man,” he said with emotion. “At all times, I would have loved to be both.”
“The conflict eventually became a genuine crisis for me when the pope of those years (Pope John Paul II) gave no real leadership in relation to abuse,” he said. 
In a May 8 statement, the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference listed its concerns with the book. The bishops said that “after correspondence and conversation” with Bishop Robinson, “it is clear that doctrinal difficulties remain.” Chief among them, they said, is Bishop Robinson’s “questioning of the authority of the Catholic Church to teach the truth definitively.”
In a brief statement dated May 15, Robinson responded, “In their statement, the bishops appear to be saying that in seeking to respond to abuse, we may investigate all other factors contributing to abuse, but we may not ask questions concerning ways in which teachings, laws, and attitudes concerning power and sex within the church may have contributed. This imposes impossible restrictions on any serious and objective study, and it is where I have broken from the bishops’ conference,” he said.
Before he left Australia for a book tour, Bishop Robinson sent a letter notifying several U.S. bishops of his speaking engagements in their dioceses. His May 16-June 12 tour included stops in Pennsylania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, Ohio, Massachusetts, Washington State and California.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, and 10 U.S. bishops asked him to cancel his speaking tour. Bishop Tod D. Brown of Orange, CA and Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles refused him persmission to speak in their dioceses.
Bishop Robinson said the call in his book for confrontation is a “confrontation of issues, not of people,” adding that “confronting bishops will not achieve change.”
“The major changes we seek cannot at present come from any source other than the pope, and we must be aware of the relative powerlessness of the bishops before the power of the papacy and the Vatican systems that support it,” he said.
“I suggest that we must, therefore, learn to work with the bishops rather than against them,” he said. “It will be a lengthy process in which we engage them in conversation, gradually show them there are problems in the culture they have been living in and that the new culture we would like to introduce to them has a real beauty and freedom in it.”
His book, he contended, was not an attack on the church, “but the beginning of a debate which will eventually lead to a better church.”
For Pepperdine law professor Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional lawyer who often writes on religion in the public square, the situation had uncomfortable echoes of the last presidential election cycle –a priest refusing to give Communion to someone based on their political views.
This time, though, the stunned Massgoer turned away by a priest was Kmiec himself.
The former dean of Catholic University Law School was an architect of the Reagan administration’s stance against abortion. His pro-life credentials include serving as a keynote speaker at March for Life’s annual Rose Dinner a few years ago.
The story begins with Kmiec’s March 2008 endorsement of Barak Obama for president in an article published in Slate magazine.
“I take him at his word that he wants to move the nation from beyond its religious and racial divides and that he wants to return the United States to that company of nations committed to human rights,” Kmiec wrote. He noted that he and Obama disagree on “important fundamentals” including legislation about traditional marriage and that life begins at conception.
He followed up that piece by writing May 15 for Catholic Online. There Kmiec said his Obama endorsement “baffled my political pals; it infuriated some of my fellow Catholics.” Some bloggers declared he was “self-excommunicated,” he wrote, and Kmiec went on to describe being denied Communion at a meeting of a Catholic business group.
At the event, Kmiec wrote, the priest “excoriated my Obama-heresy from the pulpit at length and then denied my receipt of Communion.”
He said he was pleased to hear that Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony had weighed in on the matter, in comments by his spokesman, Tod Tamberg, first included in a National Public Radio report.
Tamburg told Catholic News Service that the priest’s action in refusing Communion to Kmiec “was absolutely indefensible” both as a matter of canon law and the policies and practices of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “The archbishop’s office is well aware of the situation and will be responding in an appropriate manner,” he added.
Kmiec has drawn attention as one of the nation’s leading “Obamacons”-conservatives who find Obama’s call for a new approach to politics appealing.
Kmiec started life as a Democrat, but like many Catholic Democrats, he said he was profoundly attracted to Ronald Reagan. For Kmiec, five words in Reagan’s 1980 acceptance speech summarized the essence of a Catholic view of politics: “family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.”
But Kmiec has expanded that original view: “To think you have done a generous thing for your neighbor or that you have built up a culture of life just because you have voted for a candidate who says in his brochure that he wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade is far too thin an understanding of the Catholic faith,” he said.
A critic of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy, Kmiec added that Catholics should heed “the broad social teaching of the church,” including its views on war.
Kmiec said his pastor convinced him not to let the Communion incident go unanswered.
“He told me, ‘You may be resilient, but another person to whom this happens, it may destroy their entire faith,’” Kmiec said.
By a vast majority, he said, most U.S. bishops and church leaders are consistently good teachers on the range of political responsibilities expected of Catholics. However, he added, “if we continue to use religion as a political weapon than we’ve failed.”
Progressive Catholics may think Belgian Cardinal Godfried Dannueels is concerned about the Church moving away from the reforms and ideals of Vatican II. What really concerns him, he tells Robert Mickens in an interview in The Tablet, is the scarcity of intellectuals among bishops. “When I look at the synod assembly, so many good people are there with really pastoral hearts. They are good shepherds. But from time to time I think it would be good if five percent of them were also thinkers, that don’t lack hearts. We need among the bishops and cardinals some really intelligent people.”
He has publicly questioned the Vatican’s intransigence on certain issues, such as denying the sacraments to divorced and remarried Catholics or speaking against the use of condoms as a means of preventing AIDS.
There is also the infamous 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. “It’s a problem,” Cardinal Dannueels says. “We have concentrated the whole problem on the pill.” He points out that the encyclical has deflected people’s attention from the other good things the Church has to say about marriage.
Dannueels accuses not only the Church as an institution, but also himself, for not having done enough for families. When asked what more he could have done, the cardinal says withoutout hesitation that he could have “been more positive to support and encourage” strong families rather than mostly focusing on broken families.
When Cardinal Dannueels became Bishop of Antwerp in 1977 (he’s now Archbishop of Brussels-Mechelen), he wrote the first of more than 50 pastoral letters, which are issued at Christmas and Easter. He speaks proudly of these pamphlets, which he says are widely read “outside the Church.” He has covered a huge range of issues; one of the latest focused on stress. His first letter sums up the ideal he has tried to live. It was about the “ministry of encouragement.”
It was encouraging for me to read that Cardinal Dannueels was considered by some as a possible candidate to become pope of the death of John Paul II. Can you imagine–a man aware of modern life and culture, a thinker, a moderate on most issues–as our Pope. But alas, his candidancy could not be seriously considered because of the lack of priestly vocations from his diocese. Or so it was said.
What a missed opportunity, to have him as Pope. The Holy Spirit dropped the ball on that one.
As many as 29 parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis have used lay preachers at Mass during the past 25 years. In January, however, Archbishop Harry Flynn instructed pastors to discontinue the practice. He gave his retirement date of May 2, 2008 as the time by which parishes should develop a “pastoral plan” to end lay preaching at Mass.
In his January letter to pastors, Archbishop Flynn referenced the 2004 Vatican instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum, which called eucharistic lay preaching - a non-ordained person reflecting on the Gospel reading at the place in Mass usually reserved for a homily by a priest or deacon - a liturgical abuse.
Many lay preachers have expressed “enormous grief and anger” over the directive to stop the practice, said Patricia Hughes Baumer, who co-founded the lay preaching training organization Partners in Preaching with her husband, Fred, in 1997.
Proponents of lay preaching argue that canon law allows the practice and that both the congregation and pastors benefit from hearing Gospel reflections from diverse voices.
Archbishop Flynn told the local diocesan paper that he moved to formally eliminate lay preaching in his diocese after he became aware that the number of parishes with lay preachers was far larger than he realized.
For parishioners accustomed to hearing lay people preach on the Gospel, and for the lay preachers themselves, understanding and accepting this change has proven difficult.
Ruth Hunt, 52, a parishioner at St. Joseph in New Hope, MN, has been preaching for 13 years. When she first heard that lay preaching would end in her parish, she was filled with a very deep sadness and a sense of loss. The response of many St. Joseph’s parishioners was similar, she said.
Frank Schweigert, 57, preaches at St. Francis Cabrini. He grew up in rural Wisconsin where his father sometimes preached in the absence of a priest. He sees lay preaching tied into the Archdiocese’s Evangelization Initiative and lay people’s “ownership of the Gospel.”
After Vatican II encouraged greater participation of the lay faithful in the Mass, some pastors across the nation began to invite their parishioners to preach during the liturgy. Lay preaching differs from a homily, which is reserved for a priest or deacon.
Even if a parish had three full-time priests it would benefit from lay preachers, said Father Bob Hazel, a retired priest of the archdiocese. When he became pastor of St. Joseph nine years ago, he inherited its lay preaching tradition.
“A good part of preaching is to witness to one’s faith - we’re not just up there to give catechism,” Father Hazel said. “Lay preachers can witness to their faith in terms of the difficulty, the problems in the business world, work-a-day world, and in families, and priests just can’t do that in the same way.”
Lay preaching also brings a woman’s perspective to the Gospels, Baumer said. “The suppression of lay preaching is simultaneously the suppression of female voices, because no matter how God has gifted a lay woman…to break open the Word, the community will not have access to that word as it gathers on Sunday,” she said.
Was the banning of lay preaching by Archbishop Flynn a parting gift to his successor, the more conservative John Nienstedt; or, is the trend toward “liturgical purity” part of an effort to undermine the growing democratization of the Church?
The Most Rev. Geoffrey James Robinson, former Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Australia, will be making a stop near my home during his upcoming book tour. I want to go meet him, buy the book, shake his hand and thank him. I also want to be in the presence of someone whose faith is so important–so pure and strong–that they will face anything to proclaim it. To me, that will be the closest I’ll probably ever get to someone who is like the old-time saints.
Bishop Robinson headed the Australian bishops’ committee that developed guidelines and procedures for dealing with clergy sex abuse. He retired in 2004 when, he said, the burden of his “profound reservations” about the church he loved became too strong to be ignored. Actually, what he found, and the response of the church to the sex abuse crisis, made him sick.
In November 2007 he emerged from retirement to promote his new book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus Christ,” and to demand a better church.
Robinson says the church–especially the hierarchy in Rome–must tackle the twin problems of sex abuse and power.
In the book, he writes that the church has not confronted the sex abuse crisis; it’s simply managing it. He blames the late John Paul II, in particular, for failing to exercise the leadership demanded by the sex abuse crisis, allowing it instead to ravage the church.
He criticizes the church’s teaching on sex and sexuality, which are based on offences against God, as outmoded and inadequate. He suggests a sexuality morality based on human relationships.
Bishop Robinson told the National Catholic Reporter that he sees a fractured church with a major division between the “proclaimers of certainties and the seekers after truth,” with the proclaimers of certainties seeming to be in the favored position.
“This has left many people feeling a sense of alienation, of being marginalized, of no longer quite belonging to the church that had given them much of their sense of belonging, meaning and direction throughout their lives.”
“In writing the book I became aware that I was writing a book for these people, that I was trying to tell them that there is a church for them and that it is fully in accord with the mind of Jesus. I was telling them that there are basic certainties, but there is also abundant room for search, for taking personal responsibility and growing through that process to become all we are capable of being, all God wants us to be.”
“I became aware that it was important for many that there should be a bishop saying these things. At moments I felt that the needs of these many people were so great that it is perhaps true that I have never been more of a shepherd. I have never been more justified in carrying around a pastoral staff than I have in this.”
25 years before he was named bishop of Belleville in southern Illinois, Fr. Edward K. Braxton wrote a book titled The Wisdom Community: A Framework and a Program for Renewing Communication and Understanding Between Priests, Bishops, Theologians and the People in the Pews.
Bishop Braxton needs to sit down and reread his book. Right now.
The pastoral crisis in Belleville, where communication has broken down during the three years of Braxton’s leadership, is such that on April 17, the third day of Pope Benedict XVI’s U.S. visit, a quarter-page ad appeared in USA Today asking the pope to remove Braxton. The ad was written and paid for by Frank S. Ladner, 81, a Catholic philanthropist from Lawrenceville, Illinois.
A few weeks earlier, 46 Belleville priests, representing about half of the active diocesan priests, took the unusual step of signing a letter of no-confidence, urging Braxton to resign.
In the March 14th statement, the priests said that “because of the bishops lack of cooperation, consultation, accountability and transparency, it is the judgement of a great number of the presbyterate that he has lost his moral authority to lead and govern our diocese.”
In February the regional superior of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, an order that has served in Belleville for 138 years, wrote to the papal nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, urging him to “use all the power of your office to create a moment of change.” Citing “an unraveling of both trust and hope,” Sr. Jen Renz, the regional superior, said, “The climate of secrecy that surrounds committee meetings and actions within the diocese must end.”
In his defense, it appears Bishop Braxton wasn’t welcome in Belleville. Appointed by a dying Pope John Paul II, there was no consultation of anyone in the diocese, so there was a pot of resentment from the start. It would have taken someone with considerable people skills to overcome this rocky beginning, and Braxton doesn’t appear to have a lot of political or management smarts.
He has been accused of being monarchial. This could be just a slap by detractors. However, one small action seems to illustrate the point very well. 
Kelly Casey of Belleville noted that Braxton brought the old, ornate president’s chair out of the cathedral museum when he came, reinstalled it in the sanctuary and raised its height twice to better express his episcopal dignity. It’s the sort of thing that turns people off, said Casey.
Ann Hartner, a leader of FOSIL (Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity), a church reform group critical of Braxton, said she hoped the priests’ bold action would inspire priests in other dioceses to take action against tyrannical bishops. “In a sense, we hope Braxton stays,” she said. “He’s empowered us to take ownership.”
The Catholic church, if nothing else, is a believer in fresh starts. One is needed in Belleville.
There was a major push this past Lent for people to go to confession, now called the milder, “Sacrament of Reconciliation.” I’m not sure how many people followed through on this appeal, since the concepts of sin and priestly authority to forgive it have lost so much credibility in the last four decades, especially from the sex abuse crisis of the 90s, and the uncovering of the hypocrisy of so many influential religious figures.
In a survey released on April 13th by CARA, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, only 2% of Catholics said they participate in the Sacrament of Reconciliation once a month or more; and 45% say they never make a sacramental confession. 62% of Catholics agree “somewhat” or “strongly” with the statement, “I can be a good Catholic without celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation at least once a year.”
One of the reasons I hesitated in going to confession is that I wondered if the promotion of this sacrament now was primarily a push to restore power and authority to priests. The other is that I was unsure of the sacrament itself–surely it can’t be the same recital of mortal and venial sins we did as kids. It had to be deeper, more adult–an event, a circumstance of life, belief or time we kept silent in the face of abuse or injustice that makes us feel alone and unloved, or ashamed, or sad or angry. But how to approach this reconciliation was never articulated.
If people think they have to confess using birth control, or getting a divorce and remarrying, or making love with a member of their own sex within a commited relationship or without; then the light on the confessional door will remain off. People are not going to give up loving relationships or sex. These two things are the barriers for many Catholics to enter a confessional–because they cannot reconcile themselves to living without love, and human warmth and intimacy.
Bishop George Lucas of Springfield, Illinois authored a pastoral letter on the sacrament of reconciliation that I found to be gentle and sincere. I appreciated him touching directly on the the hurts and estrangement that sex abuse victims, women who have had abortions, divorced and remarried people, women who feel barred from priestly ministry, and what gay and lesbian Catholics, hear and feel from their church.
His is not a positive message of hope by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a hand of welcome. We don’t have to accept what he has to say as truth, or strive for change less, but I believe when a hand is extended in a genuine wish for contact, we should take the risk and extend ours, too. 
The entire pastoral letter is worth reading. His specific comments on gay and lesbian Catholics follow:
“Homosexual persons may feel that there is no place for them in the Catholic Church. Church teaching about homosexual orientation and practices may seem harsh, particularly as voices in modern culture wrongly portray those teachings as designed to deprive persons of their rights. I want any homosexual person to know that the Catholic Church supports your human dignity, wants to accept you as a full member and offers you the same share in the life of God’s grace enjoyed by all the baptised.”
“It is my responsbility to affirm the teaching of Jesus that calls each of us to live chastely, according to our state in life. The call to chaste living is challenging for many in our culture. It can be a particular challenge for persons with a homosexual orientation who cannot look forward to a chaste sexual partnership within the context of married life.”
“This challenge is not experienced only within the Catholic community. We see other Christian communities suffering fracture because of the struggle to be true to Gospel teaching, to preserve the traditional teaching of God’s design for marriage and to respect the true human rights of all. In the face of these challenges, I offer my prayful acceptance and support to homosexual persons who wish to live as full members of the church. I offer my encouragment as well to count on the grace of God to sustain your desire to come to full stature in Christ.”
