Yuku free message boards

Quote:

---

This Roman Phase was strongly hierarchical. It instilled a sacramental reverence for Church authority, a sense that Christ was present in every official decision. The laity were to receive authority the way they would receive sacraments.

Obedience became a central, defining virtue, a mark of holiness, an indispensable condition for approval and promotion. Dissent was treasonous, diagnosed as a pathology. Initiative withered.


This church gave safety to its compliant members but filled them with a sense of paranoia and suspicion of everything that was not Catholic.


It seemed a very long time ago indeed when democracy and open discussion were promoted in Catholic Church circles.



More. . .

---

Our Church hierarchy, all the way from Vatican City to diocesan Chancery, has already provided all the accountability it intends to provide, has already recognized, defined and devised a clear plan for dealing with all of the issues facing our faith community. THEY have the clear vision; it is the activists who are calling for reform who do NOT. Instead, activists are calling on the very hierarchy that has abused them for generations to lead the way to change. Won't happen!!

The current call for reform by Catholic activists seems to focus on the priesthood: bring back the laicized priests, allow a married priesthood, ordain women. Dear friends, this is not CHANGE, and the hierarchy-in-place knows this.

So they continue to ignore and stonewall all reform efforts that are not to their liking. In the example I cited above, their bishop replied:" If I come to your parish, I would have to go to every parish!" ....obviously NOT a commitment to the hard work of the people of St. ABC parish on the topic which the bishop originally sent to these good and concerned Catholics, i.e, how to prepare for the pending shortage of priests in XYZ Diocese.

Yes indeed, THEY are still in charge! But perhaps John Carroll and John England were right after all.....


More . . .

To my mind, the Vatican is less credible, not more credible, when it condemns theologians. Bad style relativizes good substance. The same Holy Spirit that guided Jesus guides all Christians, the Christian churches and the Catholic Church preeminently. The rock star style of Pope John Paul II never impressed me. He wrote voluminously and even brilliantly at times, but he was a dictatorial pope who refused to allow competing ideas in the Catholic Church during his reign. Intellectually, his was a reign of terror for thinking Catholics. Great Catholic thinkers living and dead - Teilhard de Chardin, Hans Kung, Charles Curran, Edward Schillebeeckx, Leonardo Boff, Anthony de Mello, Roger Haight, Thomas Reese - were censured in one way or another. Cardinal Ratzinger was the enforcer.

So I spent the entire reign of John Paul in a state of religious embarrassment. I was embarrassed to be a Catholic long before the news of the pedophilia scandals began to break. I was not embarrassed about the Vatican's probing and judging the ideas of the Catholic thinkers and theologians but about the way the Vatican carries on its necessary work. The Vatican's probing, questioning and testing of theological work are important and necessary. But even before that, the theologians must probe and ponder the Gospels and other writing for ever deeper meanings and ever broader applications. The style of the Vatican's response need not be anathemas and condemnation.

There are various ways and degrees of censure that are used by the Vatican in reviewing theological work. When a theological work is published, official Vatican theologians or the Holy Office should offer a preface or appendix that criticizes the work from an official point of view. Catholics should be regarded as intelligent enough to compare the work and its criticism and to make their own conclusions. Teachers of theology in the colleges could then refer to the Vatican response as well as to the new ideas, as they are found under the same cover. It is a question of style that very soon becomes a question of substance. The church's guidance will be more accessible, more effective and more respected. It will at last show charity and respect toward theologians and other thinkers.


More . . .

Pope John Paul II's encyclical <Veritatis Splendor> will make it difficult, if not impossible, to claim the compatibility of dissent and
the Catholic faith. Reports before its publication cite these passages:


Radical dissent basically comes down to letting believers have it both ways: they call the Church their Mother but not their Teacher. They can say yes to things in their faith which they like and reject the truths they dislike, and so become 'cafeteria Catholics' picking and choosing on the basis [of] the feeble lights of their favorite theologians.

More . . .

WOMEN WANT A ROLE

As in other parts of the world, the majority of parish members and active participants in Africa are women and their rights and needs also were repeated topics of concern at the synod.

Sister Felicia Harry, the superior general of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of the Apostles, asked the bishops to imagine what the Church would be like if there were no women members.

The superior general from Ghana told the synod that women are happy to "teach catechism to children, decorate parish churches, clean, mend and sew vestments," but they also want to be part of Church decision-making bodies.

Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu of Lusaka, Zambia, said women's "potential massively huge contribution to the Church" has not been recognized or "sufficiently celebrated."

More. . .

The Wanderer has followed the Catholic Campaign for Human Development's funding of radical, left-wing political organizations, many of them carrying the brand of Saul Alinsky.

The Wanderer also covered the first Call to Action conference - the months of "hearings" leading up to it, its orchestrated structure and contrived demands - and our reporters commented on the Alinskyian nature of it, not merely in its tactics but in its outcomes.

In hindsight, we can see that organized dissent in the Church was a product of organized parishes, filled with Alinskyian-trained laity.


More . . .