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The former archbishop of York has resigned from formal ministry following a report into allegations of child abuse that revealed systemic failures by the Church of England in tackling the issue. David Hope resigned from his position as an honorary assistant bishop on Thursday after a report published last week showed he failed to follow policy over complaints against the late Dean of Manchester Robert Waddington, who allegedly abused boys in the United Kingdom and Australia. The report said opportunities were missed when Lord Hope, from Thornes, West Yorkshire, failed to start an investigation into child abuse allegations, which may have led to a prosecution before Waddington’s death seven years ago.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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Soter Agbaw-Ebai
Pope Francis has put his voice in support of workers threatened by job cuts. A German firm with a factory in Terni, Italy wants to cut 550 jobs but Pope Francis has appealed to the firm on behalf of the steelworkers and their families. At his weekly audience the Holy Father told Thyssenkrupp, "you don't play with employment", urging the company to put people before profit. Francis added that "I express my deep concern for the grave situation that many families are facing in Terni because of the plans of Thyssenkrup". The Holy Father has frequently voiced concern about unemployment, especially among young people, and has called on business and political leaders to do more to maintain jobs.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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The Catholic Church has been hit with another sex scandal as a special envoy to Pope Francis is to investigate an Italian diocese for alleged sexual harassment of parishioners and involvement in pornography. Pope Francis is set to send the envoy to the northern city of Albenga in the region of Liguria to assess the allegations that the diocese has hosted a group of “playboy priests.” The priests in the diocese are accused of sexually harassing parishioners, posting naked photos of themselves online and raiding church coffers as well as moonlighting as barmen and stealing parish funds. In addition, a priest working for the diocese has been found guilty of organizing an underage prostitution ring. The Albenga diocese has been run for the last 25 years by Bishop Mario Oliveri, aged 70, and has been described by Italian media as “the most gossiped about diocese in Italy.” According to local media, Oliveri is expected to be replaced by an auxiliary bishop. Over the past few years, the Roman Catholic Church has been facing numerous scandals of child sexual abuse by priests, mainly in the United States and Europe. Those of Africa are not being reported by the media. More than 4,000 priests in the US have reportedly faced sexual abuse allegations since the 1950s in cases involving more than 10,000 children. Pope Francis has warned that there will be “no privileges” for bishops when it comes to child sex offenders. The pontiff also promised more action in response to accusations of cover-ups and excessive leniency by the Vatican.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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What is most frustrating in reading the media mutterings about the synod is the superficial experience of church life that most journalists have.Christina Odone is one who should know better. She is a lifelong British Catholic, a former editor of the UKs Catholic Herald and a longtime commentator on church matters. Nevertheless in this article she falls into the trap of clichés that every other journalist seems to be parroting.It is the false dichotomy between the so-called Franciscan reformers and the old timers in the Vatican who are hide bound and resistant to all change.Francis is portrayed as the smiling, warm hearted, merciful and compassionate pope who simply wants to open up the church to welcome all.His enemies are the legalistic old men who are going to resist all change no matter what. This false narrative is simply not the church I know as a parish priest on the ground level, nor does it represent the make up of the synod fathers and the reasons for the clash of the last two weeks.To characterize those who resist Francis’ reforms as hardhearted, Pharisaical legalists are a complete travesty. These are wise, learned, intelligent and sensitive pastors. They are not grumpy old men in frocks who are hung up about sex.They have a clear and coherent theology about God’s relationship with humanity. It is interlocked with a clear and coherent anthropology and understanding of human sexuality, marriage and society. Their complementary theology and anthropology is clearly integrated with the historic teachings of the Catholic faith and the history of the Church.They are also very well aware of the tensions in modern society. They, like all of their parish priests, know first hand the difficult cases of divorce and remarriage, the heartbreaking struggles of people with same sex attraction and their families, the difficult choices faced with couples who are co habiting, couples who are struggling with artificial contraception, in vitro fertilization, sterilization and all at the other seemingly impossible moral choices ordinary Catholics face. All we can conclude from Odone’s false dichotomy (and she is simply voicing the same sloppy thinking and easy stereotyping of most of the rest of the mainstream media) is that she is either ignorant of the reality or intentionally slanting the story to drive an agenda of change. Since she is an intelligent and informed Catholic woman we must assume the latter rather than the former.
The reality is far more complex and subtle. Those in the media who are predicting or calling for radical change in the Catholic Church never go so far as to suggest what, specifically, they actually want. Do they want the Catholic Church to endorse homosexuality as a positive alternative? Do they expect the Catholic Church to suddenly say divorce and remarriage is okay? Do they expect the Catholic Church to condone co habitation before marriage, artificial contraception, abortion, the whole secular progressive agenda? If not, what exactly do they think is going to happen? Is it simply that they want Catholic priests and bishops to be more easygoing, compassionate and kindly? How many Catholic priests or bishops do they actually know? How many have they met who are the hardhearted, harsh and condemnatory legalists that they hold up as typical? The synod fathers are not hardhearted legalists laying down the law ruthlessly. There may be some priests like this, but I have met very few. Far more priests are likely in everyday practice to already exert all the pastoral flexibility that the liberal synod fathers are asking for. Most priests I know–and I am one of them–are far more likely to err on the side of mercy, pastoral concern and tenderness towards those in difficulty than to lay down the law. Most of us already bend over backward to welcome all, make allowances for people and work with them to be full members of the church if that is their desire. The fact of the matter is that the majority of synod fathers understood that their primary purpose is to speak clearly to the faithful and to the world about the unchanging teachings of the Catholic faith. Their main job is not to bring about a major change in doctrine or moral teaching. They do not have that power since they are the guardians of the faith that has been once delivered to the saints. They know they cannot change the core teachings even if they want to. This is where secular journalists too often have not troubled themselves to understand the Catholic faith. We do not believe that these core teachings are simply something somebody made up long ago because that was then and this is now. We do not believe that our core doctrines are simply the result of various historical circumstances and cultural conditions and that they can therefore be changed according to other historical circumstances and cultural conditions.For better or for worse we believe them to be divinely inspired. That is why the synod fathers, even if they wanted to, were not going to make any radical changes.They can adjust the pastoral application of those teachings, but the problem with the synod was that the fathers of the synod felt that adjusting the pastoral applications of church teaching was not actually what they were being presented with.
A clash therefore erupted which is outlined by Damian Thompson. The progressives, who appear to be supported by Pope Francis, moved forward with proposals that gave considerable alarm not only to Catholic traditionalists, but many mainstream Catholics including the synod fathers. Sensing “reform” that was reaching beyond pastoral adjustments to matters of essential church teaching there was a revolt in the synod against Pope Francis and his appointed lieutenants. The synod fathers put the brakes on hard. SandroMagister’s analysis of the proceedings fills out the details. Magister is one of the most respected and experienced Vatican insiders and in this article he paints a picture of a synod that was hi-jacked by radicals on the inside. They are the ones who forced into the mid term report the radical thinking on homosexuality and treatment of divorce and remarriage. Once these matters were opened up the synod was no longer about adjusting things pastorally to help the people of God, but it became a matter of core beliefs being undermined. If Magister’s assessment is correct, then Vatican insiders (according to Magister appointed by Pope Francis himself) sabotaged the synod–forcing the synod fathers to revolt and stand up to defend the core teachings rather than focus their attention on pastoral adjustments. Thompson says “this was not Francis’ finest hour”, while Odone’s reporting uses stereotyped and cliches categories, she is correct in discussing a matter which will come up increasingly in the weeks ahead, and that is the question not whether Pope Francis’ papacy is now seriously compromised.For Francis, sexual mores are not at the heart of the Gospel – and they should not be at the heart of his Church’s ministry. The time had come, he believed, to lower the temperature around these issues. If he could persuade the Church to adopt an attitude of compassion towards divorcees, gays and members of other “irregular” unions, he could shift its focus to what really mattered.Alas, the Pope chose the wrong vehicle to effect his changes. The Extraordinary Synod not only torpedoed his hopes for a more inclusive Church – it may have derailed his entire mission.”
The Synod will therefore not only have disappointed Francis, but may have discredited him in the eyes of liberals and conservatives alike, weakening his leadership at a crucial time for the Church. The confusion over his true intentions and factional allegiance has only intensified: the briefings spoke of a liberal reformer of whom the final report bore no trace. If SandroMagister’s version of events is correct, then Pope Francis may have lost the support not only of more conservative Catholics, but also of a considerable number of his bishops and Cardinals. Once trust has been broken it is very difficult to re-build. I am convinced that Pope Francis wants the best for the Church. He wants us to be more like Jesus–not to be bound by legalism on the one hand, nor driven by sentimentality and naive ideology on the other. His excellent speech at the end of the synod expresses his wish for a balanced and Christ centered reform that ministers mercy while upholding the authority of the papacy and the timeless truths of the faith. He wants us to use the laws of the church for the cure of souls, not for their condemnation. The synod was the tool he wanted to bring about those reforms, but it looks at this stage as if it may have backfired and that his agenda of reform may be far more difficult to usher in than he first anticipated.
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- Ngwa Bertrand
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Thanks be to God’, as we Catholic children used to say with heartfelt enthusiasm as Mass was over for another week. The most divisive meeting of Catholic bishops since Vatican II has ended – and no real damage has been done. Except, I’m sorry to say, to the reputation of Pope Francis. No real progress has been made, either. This afternoon the official report of the Synod was released and so far as I can tell it cancelled the ‘earthquake’ implied by the half-way report of the debates on Monday. This called for the ‘gifts and values’ of homosexuals to be recognised and of ‘valuing’ their sexual orientation. This language has disappeared from today’s report – a ‘working document’ for a fuller Synod next year – whose paragraphs were voted on in sections. In its place are bland assurances that gay people are to be cared for with ‘respect and sensitivity’ and even that did not receive the 2/3 majority it needed to be officially adopted. (Update: Since the paragraph offered gay people nothing more than is already available, you have to wonder how 62 synod fathers couldn’t even countenance it.) But the Pope ordered that it be published anyway. Also not officially adopted: a paragraph implying change is possible in the rules governing the admission to Communion of people in second marriages ‘in very specific circumstances’ – perhaps by simplifying the annulment process. So now we await ‘consultations’ and ‘spiritual discernment’ before the next Synod in 2015 reaches. Which, as I’m forced to point out yet again, is very Anglican in flavour.
With this difference. The teachings of the Church on the sinfulness of sexual acts outside marriage cannot be changed. Believing Catholics would say that this is God’s will and anyone who thought otherwise did not understand the status of the Magisterium. Secular observers may conclude that there was a moment on Monday when it seemed that serious tweaking of the rules was a possibility. But the cardinals and bishops pushing for change overplayed their hand. They did so because the Pope allowed them to. Whether by accident or design we can’t say. For the first time, he has brought his carefree and impulsive style to bear on the institutional proceedings of the Church, and it appears that the Church fought back. The dust hasn’t settled, but it’s already clear how the liberal faction in the Church, dominated by Germans, managed to screw things up. Some points:
1. Cardinal Walter Kasper, retired head of ecumenism and a radical theologian by the standards of the college of cardinals, was invited by Pope Francis to introduce the Synod by rehearsing his controversial theory that Catholics in second marriages should be allowed to receive Communion if their first marriages met certain criteria of invalidity. (I think I’ve got that right: it’s pastorally complex, to put it mildly.) Liberals interpreted this as the starting point for the Synod’s discussions. But it was never going to be, because Kasper is a sort of Tony Benn figure on the left of the Church: ancient and beloved but essentially trapped in the sectarian discourse of the 1960s and 70s.
2. The ‘earthquake’ talk provoked by the half-way relatio was misleading because the document itself was biased. It did not give enough weight to the passionate opposition of leading cardinals to a relaxation of pastoral rules relating to divorce and homosexuality. Matters were made worse by a press conference also heavily weighted in favour of contentious liberal positions.
3. After Monday’s fiasco, as they saw it, some of the most powerful figures in the Church – including Cardinal Müller, head of the CDF and Cardinal Pell, head of finances – mounted an extremely effective fightback. These men are not bigots or theological dinosaurs. But they could see the Church falling apart if the German liberals tried to force their agenda on bishops in the developing world who were expecting the Synod to address the collapse of the family that is devastating their countries. Cardinals from Africa and Asia joined this fightback. Very few of them could be described as Benedict XVI-style traditionalists: they are more conservatives in the mould of St John Paul II.
4. Enter Cardinal Kasper, again, who in an interview with the respected Vatican correspondent Edward Pentin said that it was not possible to debate homosexuality with Africans because the subject is such a taboo for them – and ‘they should not tell us too much what we have to do’. These were not racist remarks but they were patronising and breathtakingly ill-judged. Left-leaning Catholic journalists tried to spin Kasper out of trouble, but they hadn’t reckoned on him denying that he’d said these things. Pentin, accused of lying by a Prince of the Church, promptly produced the tape recording of the interview. Oh, it was off the record, protested Kasper – it wasn’t – but by this stage his credibility was in tatters.
5. By Friday, this catalogue of mishaps had achieved a minor miracle, albeit not one Pope Francis wished for: the John Paul ‘conservatives’ and the Benedict ‘traditionalists’ had put aside long-standing differences over liturgy. They ensured that today’s document – with or without the paragraphs obliquely dealing with divorce and homosexuality – was entirely different in tone and content from Monday’s.
6. Therefore there will be no earthquake this time next year – just, at most, a mild readjustment of pastoral attitudes that Pope Francis could have effected without a pointless airing and deepening of theological divisions within a supposedly universal Church. The annulment process may or may not be streamlined: we’re talking about a tremor on the Richter scale. (Update: for liberals, the paragraph talking of ‘eventual access to the sacraments should be preceded by a penitential path’ is a tiny chink of light – but remember that this was a paragraph that didn’t reach the 2/3 majority.)
As for gay people, any change will involve the time-honoured hypocrisy of turning a blind eye. (Update: one never really knows what Pope Francis is thinking, but my guess is that the Communion ban is an issue that troubles him and the status of gay people rather less. Remember his assertion before he was Pope that gay marriage was ‘diabolical’ in origin?)
‘Pope suffers synod setback on gays’ was the BBC headline this evening – a misleading and meaningless verdict. But I’m afraid he asked for it
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Agbaw-Ebai Maurice Ashley (AMDG)
Church Historians and Vatican watchers are telling us that a confrontation like that had never been seen before, perhaps not even at the Second Vatican Council. Soon after nine on Thursday, October 16, 2014, the General Secretary to the Synod, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, took to the floor and announced that the relationes of the circuliminores would not be made public, a reverse course from what had always happened in the past and that was affirmed in the previous days. In other words, only the Relatio post disceptationem, which Cardinal Peter Erdo signed and which Archbishop Bruno Forte wrote, would have been fed to the press. Cardinal George Pell rose up strongly against Cardinal Baldisseri’s novelty. After him, a long line of Fathers, from the Archbishop of Brussels, Abp. Léonard, to that of Durban, Cardinal Napier, asked that the matter be at least put to a vote. Even the Secretary of State took the floor. At the end, as Cardinal ChristophSchönborn said at a press conference some hours later that, "the decision to render public the relationes of the circuli was taken by a large majority." The texts are clear, and go in an opposite direction as the one upheld by Cardinal Walter Kasper.The Major Archbishop of Kiev, SviatoslavShevchuk, spoke directly of the need of "sending a clear message to the faithful and to the Pope" on the fact that "the family is the stable, faithful, and sacramental union between a man and a woman."
The most controversial and delicate points, from the question of the approaching of remarried divorcees to the Eucharist, to the overture to homosexual unions, were dismantled almost unanimously because many Synod Father said very little had been said of same sex unions - not more than three interventions in the assembly -yet Monday's Relatio spoke about it ad abundantiam. A clear consequence of Cardinal Baldisseri's miss-steps and Kasper's anti-African interview to Edward Pentin, led to the addition of one African, Cardinal Napier, and also an Australian, Abp. Dennis Hart of Melbourne, to the original six-man papal drafting committee. Cardinal Kasper has since denied the interview he gave to Edward Pentin, who responded by pasting the recorded interview online. Cardinal Kasper has now been publicly revealed, thanks to the Pentin interview and his denial as a man filled with incomprehensible anti-Christian racial superiority. On a trip to US that took him to Boston College and Fordham University, New York and other cities, Kasper even made sarcastic side comments about the liturgical reforms of Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI. His criticisms did not stop there. The eventual target was Humanae Vitae of Blessed Paul VI, a magisterial document that has turned out to be very prophetic in many ways. Take number 17 for example: “Let men and women first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. (Humane Vitae, 17).
Why Cardinal Kasper cannot see that changing Church discipline cannot ignore a change in Church doctrine remains a puzzle. If the second marriage is not “in the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:39), then the words of Christ to the Samaritan woman is applicable: “You are right in saying ‘I have no husband, for you have five husbands, and he whom you now have in not your husband; this you said truly” (John 4:17-18). In this case, not only will the Church be ignoring the clear and stern admonition of Our Lord on divorce and remarriage as constituting adultery (Mathew 19:9; Mark 10:10-12); but the will be guilty of facilitating the situation described by St. Paul: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:27). Cardinal George Pell said it all: “On the question of divorce and remarriage, I am sticking with Jesus!” Kasper has to be reminded that the solution to the empty pews in the German Church is not a dilution of Christ’s teaching! The Lutherans already did that and the pews became emptier. The Church of England did that and more Muslims go to the Mosques on Fridays than Anglicans go to the Church on Sundays in England! A crisis of faith is met by a robust re-proposal of the joy of the gospel, to cite Pope Francis. At a time when the world is confused about the very meaning of marriage and the family, Catholicism owes the future of civilization the duty of offering to the world, once more, the beauty of marriage, “in the Lord,” – a union of one man and one woman, exclusive and open to the gift of life, forever – symbolizing the “forever” love of Christ for the Church (Ephesians 5:32-33). This is not the time for heterodoxy hidden under a false sense of “mercy” to dominate a synod of bishops. Catholicism cannot afford to speak from both sides of the mouth on the issue of marriage and the family. Fortunately, we have a rich magisterium to draw from: CastiConnubi, Gaudium et Spes, Humanae Vitae, FamiliarisConsortio, Evangelium Vitae, Deus Caritas Est, Evangelii Gaudium, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and above all, the Sacred Scriptures, not leaving out the teaching of Fathers of the Church.
We thank God that the 2014 sausage-making Synod is over. We thank God for the bishops who stood for the faith of our fathers and mothers. Now is the time to journey deeply into the timeless teachings of our Holy Mother, the Church. Now is the time for Kasper to retire to a monastery and pray for the Church! Benedict XVI showed a beautiful and wonderful example of the apostolate of prayer worth emulating, when he abdicated the throne of Peter to take up the new position “at the foot of the cross” – in his own words, to pray for the Church!
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