Who Elects A New Pope ?

Who shall elect a Pope?  Most certainly not those who have found the God within, who is always available 24/7 and speaks directly to our heart.  Why settle for ‘a representative’ who has no direct interest in your welfare and only communicates via complex and confusing documents.

 

Do Catholics have a say in who they want as leader of their particular religion?  The answer is a definitive ‘yes’ simply based on Jesus’ teachings!   However, in reality many Roman Catholics understand otherwise. The following article by  Matthew Fox from his book ‘The Pope’s War’ (2011) may help us discover or re-discover who and how a leader of the Catholic church may hopefully be selected in the future.   

“The late and esteemed Father Bede Griffith wrote a fine article on the true meaning of "magisterium," (the teaching authority of the church) saying: "Many people today think that the magisterium consists of the pope, and the Roman Curia, but this is mistaken. 'Magisterium' comes from the Latin magister, a master, and sig­nifies authority to teach. Strictly speaking there is only one such authority in the Church and that is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus promised to his disciples to 'lead men into all truth.'" He goes on to name four "organs of the magisterium" including the pope and the Roman Curia, which deals with day-to-day administration of the church; the second is the bishops. The pope is "subordinate to the authority of the bishops in communion with the pope who constitute the magisterium properly speaking. This was made clear at the Second Vatican Council." The third organ is the "periti" or expert theologians who advised the bishops. "In a sense it is to the theologians that the word magisterium properly applies, since a theo­logian is a master of sacred doctrine, who has been commissioned to teach theology in the name of the Church."

But the "most important" organ of the magisterium is the laity, "the people (laos)God . . . Strictly speaking, it is the laity, the people of God, who constitute the Church, while popes, bishops and priests are 'minis­ters' chosen from among the laity and commissioned by the Holy Spirit to act in the name of the Church." The whole church is called "a holy nation, a royal priesthood," and all members of the church share equally in the gift of the Holy Spirit The idea that authority comes from above, from the pope and the bishops, is not the ideal of the church as found in the New Testament. Such a "command structure" smacks much more of the Soviet Union than of New Testament church. Popes and bishops "are respon­sible to the laity, the people of God, for their teaching and their actions. Just as the pope has no authority apart from the bishops, so the pope and the bishops have no authority apart from the people from whom they are chosen and whom they represent."

Bede wrote these words at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. His prayer was that Eastern Europeans' newly found freedom might also extend to the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal John Henry Newman, who has recently received the dubious honor of being named a saint by the same organization that called Escriva a saint, would very much sup­port this analysis of teaching authority in the church. Newman said this about the papacy in his day: "It is anomaly and bears no good fruit. He [the pope] becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it." He called the papacy of Pius IX a "climax of tyranny" that was heretical, and decried the fact that an "extreme centralization . . . now is in use." Newman believed the laity should participate fully in the life of the church, and when a bishop objected he said: "The church would look foolish without them." Newman favored individual conscience over groupthink and blind obedience.”

 

Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were instrumental in developing policies that centralized the control of more than a billion Roman Catholics under the rule of the Vatican.When Benedict ignored collegiality by transferring the power of bishops to the Cardinals he immediately lost and avoided the voice or cry of the people. The role previously assigned to our bishops.So it is now that a select group of cardinals, sworn to be totally obedient to the Pope, are to select a new leader of the Roman Catholic institution.While we may hear that the Conclave is surrounded by the Holy Spirit while they cast their votes, the laity is certainly not less endowed with the same Holy Spirit which they received during their Sacrament of Confirmation.

 

Under the influence of a living but retired Pope our Cardinals are under enormous pressure to elect an individual who will ‘carry on business as usual’. And indeed it may require one more Pope to bring the involvement of the laity out of this antiquantied process. Today more and more educated Catholics understand that when Jesus spoke in parables he was talking about a kingdom (here on earth) that reflected upside down values where the least would be first and the first would be last.         

 

Links: 

CNN News:  http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/06/world/europe/vatican-pope-selection/index.html

      

 

 

Vatican Secrecy Behind Sexual Abuse Scandal

Recently, while commenting on a conservative Catholic website, I responded to  Pope Benedict’s legacy as follows:

• Kept silent about pedophile priests

 • Silenced more than 100 theologians

 • Denounced Liberation Theology

 • Refused any discussions about women and their role in the Church

• Dismissed Collegiality

• Labeled homosexual actions/relationships as intrinsically evil

• Politicized American bishops by instructing them how to encourage laity to vote

• Prohibited the use of available birth control methods

• Put into doubt the operation of Women Religious in USA

• Maintained that all other religions are inferior to Roman Catholicism

• Called for obedience to the Church teachings at the cost of the individual    conscience

• Re interpreted Vatican II

My comments sparked a number of opposing and rude responses. This was of course not totally unexpected.  However, when one individual surprisingly replied “I have been hearing about this “silence on pedophile priests” accusation for weeks yet I have not been able to find one shred of evidence”.   Perhaps this blindness may be attributed to  Benedict’s insistence that the laity must unconditionally obey church teaching even at the expense of their individual conscience. (a direct contradiction to the views held by Vatican II) For as long as we stick our head in the sand while the Vatican insists on keeping the sexual abuse issue a secret  we and others will not have to acknowledge or address the worldwide problem of sexual abuse.

As a very young victim of sexual abuse I feel compelled to bring this blight out of its present darkness in our church into the light of Christ.  Healing can only begin with truth.  Victims of sexual abuse must be encouraged to speak about their pain, no matter how difficult. Covering it up or hiding it merely allows it to fester and become a lifelong torment.  That the Roman Catholic Church should have choosen the latter is particularly devious and completely contrary to anything that one would suspect a religious institution under Jesus Christ would uphold. To date the church has yet to address the systemic and endemic issues that have led to this disastrous outcome.  Pray we will finally find a reason to address this world wide problem?

Unfortunately the Roman Catholic Church has a long history of secrecy about sexual abuse. Apparently as much as 2000 years according to some very credible and Catholic experts.   Thomas P. Doyle, A.W.R. Sipe and Patrick J. Wall in their book ‘Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes’ (2006) “The extreme secrecy that was imposed on everybody dealing with the investigation of priests accused of soliciting sex from penitents was, in the last century, imposed on every body involved in the investigation of clerical perpetrators of sexual abuse of children.”   

When the media revealed the extend of the sexual abuse that had taken place at Mt. Cashel Orphanage during the late 1980s and early 1990s involving more than 300 young victims some people might have believed this was an isolated incidence.  However, this proved to be only the beginning.  Today we know that these abuses, particularly as it affected pedophile clergy (including bishops and cardinals) within the Roman Catholic Church have occurred and continue to be revealed almost daily. Following its history of secrecy the church followed a policy that allowed these abuses to continue until the beginning of the 21^st. Century.  If anyone wants to understand why the church chose this position they will quickly discover how the church from the second century onward have repeatedly disparaged sex in all its human forms as dirty, sinful, unclean, and even un- natural.  More importantly the man made church wanted to portray itself as the very image of Christ – pure and without blemish or sin.  

Today authors such as David Gibson ‘The Rule of Benedict’ (2006), Richard P. McBrien, ‘The Church – The Evolution of Catholicism’ (2008), Jason Barry & Gerald Renner, ‘Vows or Silence’ (2004) and many others are beginning to reveal the abuse of power in the Papacy of John Paul II as well as Benedict XVI. For more details involving JPII read the following 1962 Vatican document Crimen Sollicitationis (PDF) file:

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Observer/documents/2003/08/16/Criminales.pdf

It wasn't until 2001, after a sexual abuse scandal had rocked the Catholic Church in the US, that Cardinal Ratzinger took action. He decreed that the local churches now had to report all such suspected cases to his offices of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome -- but under strict secrecy.  It was not until April 2010 that the Vatican finally issued guidelines dictating that "Civil law concerning reporting of crimes... should always be followed but it does not require the reporting of "allegations" or crimes where reporting is not required by law.

This policy of Vatican secrecy brought British author Geoffrey Robertson, QC to publish his book ‘The Case of the Pope” (2010), which directly accuses Benedict of being accountable for numerous Human Rights abuses. Robertson argues that . . . . .

“there is no doubt that the scale of the sex abuse scandal came about because of directives from the Vatican — specifically from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) — which required all sex abuse complaints to be processed in utter secrecy and withheld from local police and courts, under a Canon Law that was obsolete and ineffective and non-punitive. The Holy See claims the right to operate the system as one of its 'statehood' privileges, along with the exclusive right to speak and lobby at the UN to promote its theo­logical agenda: homosexuality is 'evil', and so is divorce; women have no right to choose, even to avoid pregnancies that result from rape or incest; IVF is wrong because it begins with masturbation; condom use, even to avoid AIDS within marriage, must never be counten­anced. The political power associated with statehood has proved beguiling for a Pope who, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was the Pre­fect (head) of the CDF from 1981 to 2005 and it was on his watch that a vast amount of the sex abuse took place. How much he knew of its extent, and how offenders were moved around parishes and trafficked to other countries and hidden from local criminal justice, will not be clear until the CDF is required to open its files, although enough evidence has emerged to make his moral responsibility — and that of John Paul II — a matter for anxious debate. His legal responsibility is complicated by his claim to sovereign immunity, but it is surely worth asking, at a time when Benedict XVI has set his face against essential reform, whether the Pope should be the one man left in the world who is above the law”.

 

Finally, to accuse a Pope of wrongdoing is without question a very serious thing. We may never know why Benedict felt it was necessary to apply such secrecy around sexual abuse scandal.  Perhaps it was inherited through the unbending influence of church history, or political pressure from the Roman Curia or simply the accumulation of so many controversial issues facing an already aging Pope.  Speaking to his Cardinals in his final audience concerning his retirement Benedict is quoted as saying   "Among you is also the future pope, whom I promise my unconditional reverence and obedience,"

 

In addition to the books l have mentioned in this blog, I also recommend the following links and references:

 

Wikipedia: Curial response to Catholic sex abuse cases -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curial_response_to_Catholic_sex_abuse_cases

Spiegel Online, Sex Abuse Scandal: Did Archbishop Ratzinger Help Shield Perpetrator from Prosecution? http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/sex-abuse-scandal-did-archbishop-ratzinger-help-shield-perpetrator-from-prosecution-a-684970.html

Celibacy, Sex and the Catholic Church,  http://www.richardsipe.com/

Thomas C. Fox, Sexuality and Catholicism (1995)

Thomas P. Doyle, AW.R. Sipe, Patrick J. Wall, Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes – The Catholic Church’s Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse (2006)

More on this topic from this week’s issue of The Tablet

 

Reform dominates the agenda - from the Editor's desk 
It would be entirely understandable if Benedict XVI wanted “business as usual” signs to go up at the Vatican as soon as possible after his retirement, and for the new man in charge to carry on the good work of the old though perhaps with extra energy. What is emerging is something rather different – a growing groundswell of conviction, apparently at all levels in the Catholic Church, that things cannot go on as they are. Read more .  .  .   

 

Benedict's resignation looks more like a change of seat in the boardroom: Michael Knowles, guest contributor

Right or wrong, the truth is I can barely contain my concern at one thing above all else that is going on in Rome: Benedict XVI's plans for the period of his retirement now that he has resigned. I find them incredibly insensitive and inconsiderate, even - let me say it - arrogant; and also wide open to being very harmfully divisive. I know we are not supposed to say such things, let alone publicise them, but the truth is, with every other Catholic I speak to about them, it is exactly the same. The Catholic Church is my Church as much as Benedict's. Read more

Pope Benedict is deeply hurt

Anyone familiar with John W.O’ Malley’s book ‘What Happened At Vatican II' (2008) will immediately understand the colorful characters involved and their clashes with one another.  This book also offers a new set of interpretive categories for understanding the council’s dynamics – categories that move beyond the tired “progressive and “conservative” labels.  As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the calling of this council, this work will help to explain why the Roman Catholic Church today, from the top down, is experiencing a huge crisis among its rapidly diminishing membership.

The depth and pain of this collapse within this once powerful worldwide institution is perhaps best mirrored by Pope Benedict himself when he recently said that he was ‘deeply hurt’ by German criticism as reported by The Tablet on August 24^th, 2012 as follows:    

Pope Benedict XVI "is deeply hurt" by the negative way the German Church appears to regard him, according to the Vatican's nuncio to Germany.
Archbishop Jean-Claude Périsset, added that German Catholics' "rejection" of Pope Benedict XVI was doing them more harm than the Pope.

"It is a great loss for the Catholic Church in Germany that it heeds the Pope so little," he said. In an interview with the German weekly Christ & Welt he said:

"Each comes with his own opinion and thinks he knows better."

Benedict’s re-action to world-wide criticism of his Church is almost certainly the result of serious leadership problems attributed to infighting within the Roman Curia *. 

The German Church has become increasingly critical of Pope Benedict. Bishops have complained about conservative "informers", Vatican II's rejection of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX)  the new translation of the Missal and no doubt the more explosive issue of the Vatileaks.

The popular German on-line news magazine The Spiegel already reported in June of this year that “the mood at the Vatican is apocalyptic.  Pope  Benedict XVI seems tired, and both unable and unwilling to seize the reins amid fierce infighting and scandal. While Vatican insiders jockey for power and speculate on his successor, Joseph Ratzinger has withdrawn to focus on his still-ambiguous legacy.”

For a deeper insight into the problem which affects every Roman Catholic I invite readers of this blog to read the excellent summary filed by the Spiegel under the heading ‘Exhausted in the Vatican – The Final Battles of Pope Benedict XVI’.  The ultimate fate of the Church seems to rest on the continued political differences held by the Curia rather than just the poor leadership qualities of Benedict.

These same deep divisions are especially evident among Roman Catholics everywhere.  There seems to be no common ground on any of the major issues facing the Church.   Be it the sexual abuse scandal, same-sex marriage, contraception, homosexuality, among just a few sexually related issues.  Rather than addressing the spiritual needs of its flock some bishops have elected the dangerous course of translating dogma and doctrine into absolute and bipartisan terms.  Meanwhile the American bishops unashamedly have thrown their weight behind the Republican party thereby causing the rift or division among Catholics to grow ever wider. 

It is not surprising then that we find Catholics fighting among themselves to determine who is right, who is wrong, who belongs and who does not!  Just note the tone, or frustration, in this response to one of the typical ‘Catholic issues’ being debated daily and publically .         

The current pope has inaugurated his re-evangelization program in order to reproduce the "glorious" church that existed before 1962. He, like his predecessor, believes that hiring mindless bishops and firing intelligent ones will help make this happen. He also thinks that condemning respected theologians, dishonoring a major Vatican Council, enforcing a nonsensical liturgy, depriving thousands the Eucharist, dehumanizing nuns and women in general, demoralizing people of a particular sexual orientation, and just plain pissing people off on just about every corner of the earth, is the way to go. Now I ask you, is there a problem here?  Submitted by Br. Robert (not verified) on Aug. 17, 2012.

It appears that the current troubles are not likely to disappear quickly.   These issues must be addressed if the Roman Catholic Church is to survive in the next fifty years.

Finally, Geoffrey Robertson, QC in his introduction to his book ‘The Case of The Pope – Vatican Accountability for Human Rights (2010) has this to add to this miserable situation:

. . . . there is no doubt that the scale of the sex abuse scandal came about because of directives from the Vatican — specifically from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) — which required all sex abuse complaints to be processed in utter secrecy and withheld from local police and courts, under a Canon Law that was obsolete and ineffective and non-punitive. The Holy See claims the right to operate the system as one of its 'statehood' privileges, along with the exclusive right to speak and lobby at the UN to promote its theo­logical agenda: homosexuality is 'evil', and so is divorce; women have no right to choose, even to avoid pregnancies that result from rape or incest; IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) is wrong because it begins with masturbation; condom use, even to avoid AIDS within marriage, must never be counten­anced. The political power associated with statehood has proved beguiling for a Pope who, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was the Pre­fect (head) of the CDF from 1981 to 2005 and it was on his watch that a vast amount of the sex abuse took place. How much he knew of its extent, and how offenders were moved around parishes and trafficked to other countries and hidden from local criminal justice, will not be clear until the CDF is required to open its files, although enough evidence has emerged to make his moral responsibility — and that of John Paul II — a matter for anxious debate. His legal responsibility is complicated by his claim to sovereign immunity, but it is surely worth asking, at a time when Benedict XVI has set his face against essential reform, whether the Pope should be the one man left in the world who is above the law.

 * Curia (Latin curia senate-house) The groups and people who form the centre of government for the Roman Catholic Church and assist the Pope and bishops. Every diocese has its own curia. See also Wikipedia for more detail.

Links (within this blog): 

Pope Benedict - political gaffs

 Pope Benedict - condoms

Pope Benedict - visit to U.K.

The Roman Catholic Church is seriously possibly ill

 

Dissent within the Roman Catholic Church

 

 

 

Dissent within the Catholic Church

The Irish Times filed this report May 19^th. 2012 about Pope Benedict’s problem with dissent within the Catholic Church.  Under the banner ‘Pope has consistently come down on dissent within the church like a hammer’. Reporter PATSY McGARRY provides the following retrospective view on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict XVI on April 19th, 2005.

The scenes on St Peter’s Square that afternoon illustrated what this divisive figure has meant for his church. Middle-aged and older people were crestfallen. A man sat at one of the great fountains in the square and wept openly. Around him danced seminarians from the North American College.

Well-scrubbed and in cassocks, they could not contain their glee. “Benedicto, Benedicto, Benedicto,” they shouted. “It’s a regular party,” a seminarian from Pittsburg told this reporter.

For them, the election of John Paul II’s enforcer as pope represented the final defeat of that liberal Catholicism ushered in following Vatican II which they and their mentors see as at the root of all that is wrong in the church today. The rigid certainties enforced by the new pope had so much more appeal for them than the porous, inclusive Catholicism of the previous generation.

Pope Benedict’s views were well-known, as were his attitudes to dissent. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger helped to force closed many windows thrown open by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.

For instance, where ecumenism was concerned and in his infamous Dominus Iesus document of 2000, he dismissed all reformed churches as not churches “in the proper sense”. They were merely “ecclesial communities”. All other faiths were“gravely deficient”. In 1997, he described Buddhism as an “auto-erotic spirituality”. Hinduism was based on a concept of reincarnation resembling “a continuous circle of hell”.

On celibacy, women priests or women in the diaconate, he was immovable. Similarly on the use of condoms even to combat Aids. On homosexuality he was virulent. In 1986, he described it as a “strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”.

Where dissent was concerned he brooked no hostages. It extended to former colleagues such as Hans Küng. In 1966, at Küng’s instigation, the Catholic faculty at Germany’s Tübingen university appointed Fr Ratzinger professor of dogmatics. In 1979, Küng was stripped of his licence to teach because he challenged papal infallibility. In 1981, when Ratzinger became dean of the CDF, he upheld that decision.

In 1986, he stopped US priest Fr Charles Curran from teaching because of his views on sexuality and ethics. A Brazilian, Fr Leonardo Boff, was silenced twice by him, in 1985 and in 1991. Fr Robert Nugent and Sr Jeannine Gramick, who worked with gay people in the US, were sanctioned in 1999. In 1995, Sri Lankan theologian Fr Tissa Belasuriya was excommunicated by him over writings on Mary, original sin and the divinity of Christ. He was later reconciled with the church.

There were so many more.

There is also something deeply insidious about the methods he and Rome use to silence those who disagree, as we have seen in Ireland. You might say Rome has ways of making you “think with the mind of the church” (sentire com ecclesia), in that memorable phrase directed by Rome at Fr Tony Flannery last month as he was told“ . . . to a monastery go!”

The Irish Times has, for instance, been aware for years of the curt silencing of three other Irish priests/theologians as they sought their way to a more compassionate, Christian understanding of human life. All three belong to different religious congregations.

In all instances, the head of their congregation was summoned to the CDF in Rome after anonymous complaint. The congregation head was advised to bring the“dissident” into line. He in turn contacted the congregation head in Ireland. The “dissident” was summoned and confronted with his aberration.

Usually, at local level, the relevant head has been kind. The priest/theologian in each case has been torn between a need to articulate his convictions for the benefit of the distressed and the consequences this for his congregation. Each priest felt he had to accept silence.

In each case too, those of us in the media aware of it were asked not to write about this lest the sky fall and bring further misery on the already crushed. So Rome has had its way and through exploiting finer human emotions such as loyalty and respect. Clever? Yes, but hardly Christian.”

Like any other Institutionalized religion Catholicism demands that its followers adopt a particular way of expressing the faith along with a prepared set of beliefs. Religious institutions demand that dissent from church teachings is not acceptable and can be met with certain censures and even excommunication.  But how do these demands meet our understanding of God?  While a lot will depend on our cultural and family background the bible suggests that God gave us complete freedom to choose. Scripture tells us that God proposed only two primary conditions necessary to receive his daily blessings to be shared among all his people and that was ‘to Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with your entire mind.  The second most important commandment is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as you love yourself.’   We are free to accept or reject God’s offer of love.  Even when we reject God it does not mean that God stops loving us.  God’s love is unconditional.  Only a merciful God is able to accept us after we have rejected Him again and again in our broken condition. Should religious institutions not follow suit?  Neither is God’s salvation limited to the converted or the ‘religious’.  Scripture tells us “for he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil”.  Should religious institutions not follow suit?

People celebrate their love for God in many different ways, but some have been made to believe that God can only be reached by following a prescribed form of prayer or particular form of liturgy.  Yet Jesus tells us “There are many rooms in my Father’s house and I am going to prepare a place for you.  I would not tell you this if it were not so.  And after I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to myself, so that you will be where I am”.  There is no hint here about exclusivity instead Jesus speaks of the many rooms  where unconditional diversity brings us together in unity.  Should we think that failure to accept certain religious teachings is a sin and a rejection of God?  Then remember that God meets us where we are.   And know that when our heart is right so God will respect and judge our decision. Should religious institutions not follow suit? 

Recently I came across a blog which seems to put the primacy of conscience in its proper perspective. 

  The perfect Scriptural example using one’s God given conscience is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. To any objective observer, such an act would be murder! Can you imagine Sarah’s reaction if God had permitted the sacrifice to occur? Put yourself in Abraham’s place. How was Abraham certain that it was God, rather than his ego, who demanded the sacrifice of Isaac?

Should religious institutions not respect an individual's primacy of an informed conscience when they cannot obey their teachings?

Readers may also be interested in 'How dissenters from Galileo to John Courtney Murray have helped the church to see mare clearly' which orginally appeared in the U.S. Catholic, July 28, 2008 by Jesuit Fr. Robert J. McCLory under the title 'When Wrong Turns Out To Be Right'.

Benedict XVI on God’s punishment

Church of Santa Sabina 

The Catholic NewsService reporting on Pope Benedict’s homily for the first day of Lent at Rome’s Church of Santa Sabina was filled with some incredibly dark images based on his  frequent literal   rather then interpretative interpretation of Scripture.

In his opening remarks the Pope said . . .   "In the Catholic liturgy, ashes are "one of those material signs that bring the cosmos into the liturgy," he said. They recall both the fact that God created human beings out of the dust of the earth and breathed divine life into them, but also that after Adam and Eve sinned, God cursed the ground and made it bring forth thistles and thorns.  Only by giving this passage a simple literal interpretation could any  reader deduce that it was God who cursed the ground.  Again in clear contradiction of scripture should we not recall that at the end of the sixth day “God looked at everything he had made, and he was very pleased”!  Could it be this passage marks the very first time man tried to create God in his image?

Speaking about the sins of Adam and Eve, Benedict went on to say. . .  “while God punishes people for their sins, his punishment is ‘medicinal’ because God is good and loving' . . . This was followed by an even more challenging theological interpretation as Benedict announced that . . . ‘God sent his son ‘to our earth devastated by sin so that we, prodigal sons and daughters, could return repentant and redeemed by his mercy to our true homeland" in heaven” . . .          

The Pope’s reference to God’s punishment reminds this blogger that our Pope is not only a  theologian with dark fundamentalist (Jansemism) views which sets back Catholicism centuries to the days of the Inquisition, crusades, witch-hunts, and the persecution of Jews but also why he is able to justify his unusual focus on the sexual sins of so many these days.  Our God does not punish, reward, demand, or play favourites - we do.  

The Pope's further suggestion that . . .  "God sent his son was because “our earth was devastated by sin”  . . . . offers yet another clear contradiction.  It ignores  Jesus’ message “I came so that you might have life to be lived in all its fullness’!  (John 10:10) God sent his son because he loves all of his creation.  No greater sacrifice could be made than to die for another, i.e., us!  The Pope’s fear based message is hardly likely to heal anyone’s image of a loving God.  His Augustinian view of the world makes a mockery of God’s unconditional love. (readers may be interested to learn that St. Augustine is Benedict's favourite Saint). BTW the word 'bless' and variations thereof appears more than 85 times in the book of Genesis.   Should that not tell us something about the true nature of God?  

Let us celebrate Lent with the knowledge that God does not punish, reward, demand or send anyone to hell.  God is only interested in blessing us.  Perhaps we could open our hearts to his many blessings and spend the next forty days reflecting on Jesus’ rejection of the only Satan that exists and that is our EGO. Of course as anyone knows that takes true humility and a change of heart. 

A Bishop speaks out!

After all the political manoeuvring by the Vatican dealing with the sexual abuse crisis one lone Archbishop in Ireland has finally and courageously spoken out.  The U.K. based Catholic weekly ‘The Tablet’ filed  this surprising report on their website  dated February 10^th, 2011:

Dublin archbishop says Ireland not ready to welcome Pope Benedict

10 February 2012

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin

The archbishop of Dublin has made the startling admission that the Catholic Church in Britain is now stronger than that of Ireland and has cautioned against Pope Benedict XVI visiting the country.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said the Church in Ireland was still recovering from the clerical sexual abuse scandal.

He hinted that were the Pope to visit during the 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in June he would face hostility because the anger over abuse was "much more raw" than in Britain.

"Catholicism in Britain is a minority religion and in some ways it is stronger," he told RTE, adding that while there had been opposition to the Pope's visit to Britain in 2010 it had gone "extraordinary well."

Finally, we have a member of the Catholic clergy saying in effect, stop the charade of parading innocent victims of child abuse by broken priests in front of the Pope, or ‘staging’ public forgiveness programs when the hierarchy is still unable to forgive itself by not addressing the systemic and endemic culture that produced the problem in the first place.

The Vatican’s inability to deal with sexual issues other than to suppress them is indicative of an institution that no longer able to recognize God’s wondrous gift of our sexuality.  Recently an unnamed medical physician articulated this ongoing problem this way: 

The sexual issue is the chief manner by which the Institutional RCC attempts to control people with fear and self loathing. For a church that claims to understand a natural law, the Institutional "understanding" of sex is extremely distorted. Mind and body are part of a whole humanity one that uses eroticism as creative not as sinful.

The church attempts to define what is very natural the bodily function of human sexuality as something that can be perfected by advocating the mind over body in a perfect union with what they define as Godly. This division of mind and body via perfection vs human natural emotion and need is truly against nature.

What it does is to pervert the psychological mind set of any who attempt to practice celibacy for it attempts to remove eroticism of all kinds from the minds and hearts of these men. What we see instead of creativity in this mindset is perversion. We see the perverted eroticism at work in a Cardinal Ratzinger who censures the thoughts of nearly all the great theologians of our time.

Think of all the creative growth the church would have today had so many of these wonderful ideas had the chance to grow and develop inside of an Institutional church. Instead this creativity was stunted stopped in its tracks inside the institution. Ratzinger turned his own eroticism into a perverted perfectionism that is impossible of not only one finite person but an Institution of finite beings. The perfection of spirit required by a life time of celibacy has in of itself been shown to be impossible by the figures about celibacy derived by Richard Sipe (a married former Benedictine monk and Psychological therapist to priests) showing that around 90% of all celibates break their vows when their own definition of masturbation is included in this vow. I believe this figure is not 90% but 99,999 % plus. In other words the perfectionism required of their own clerical membership is impossible. Surprise, surprise perfectionism in a finite human is impossible!

The worst part about this idealization of human lack of sexuality, asexuality, is that it stunts the creativity of ALL who attempt to practice it because it introduces as a mortal sin the lack of perfection in man. Wow no wonder the only answer these men can come up with in the sexual scandal is that all humanity is indeed sinful and we must pray. This type of prayer has NOTHING to do with human spirituality but only is an exercise in officially sanctioned perversion of spirit that fails to lead humans to creativity and growth and development.

For those who are interested in this way of thinking, I highly recommend the book "The Unhealed Wound" written by Eugene Kennedy. Dr. Kennedy is a former Jesuit* who left to marry. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Loyola university and is a syndicated columnist. He lives with his psychiatrist wife in Chicago.

* see correction in commentary below  

Is it not time for real dialogue with the People of God?   Is it not time for the Catholic hierarchy to stop hiding behind the crumbling edifices in the Vatican?