Cardinal Nichols says he has ‘no wish to walk away’ as bishops launch safeguarding overhaul

Rome Newsroom, Nov 27, 2020 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- The French bishops’ conference announced Friday that it would submit another appeal to the Council of State, calling a proposed 30-person limit on public Masses during Advent “unacceptable.”

In a statement issued Nov. 27, the bishops said that they “have a duty to ensure the freedom of worship in our country” and therefore would file another “référé liberté” with the Council of State regarding the latest government coronavirus restrictions on Mass attendance. 

A “référé liberté” is an urgent administrative procedure that is filed as a petition to a judge for the protection of fundamental rights, in this case, the right to freedom of worship. The Council of State both advises and judges the French government on its compliance with the law.

French Catholics have been without public Masses since Nov. 2 due to France’s strict second lockdown. On Nov. 24, President Emmanuel Macron announced that public worship could resume Nov. 29 but would be limited to 30 people per church. 

The announcement elicited a strong reaction from many Catholics, including several bishops.

“It is a totally stupid measure that contradicts common sense,” Archbishop Michel Aupetit of Paris said Nov. 25, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro. 

The archbishop, who practiced medicine for more than 20 years, continued: “Thirty people in a small village church, we understand, but in Saint-Sulpice, it’s ridiculous! Two thousand parishioners come to certain parishes in Paris, and we’re going to stop at 31 … It’s ridiculous.”

Saint-Sulpice is the second largest Catholic church in Paris after the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. 

A statement issued by Paris archdiocese Nov. 27 argued that the government measures could have “easily have allowed the resumption of Mass in public for all, while applying a rigorous health protocol and guaranteeing the protection and health of all.”

In addition to filing the “référé liberté,” a delegation of French bishops will also meet with the prime minister on Nov. 29. The delegation will include Archishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the French bishops’ conference.

The French bishops’ initial appeal earlier this month was rejected by the Council of State on Nov. 7. But in response, the judge specified that churches would remain open and that Catholics would be able visit a church near their homes, regardless of distance, if they carried out the necessary paperwork. Priests would also be allowed to visit people in their homes and chaplains permitted to visit hospitals.

France has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, with more than two million recorded cases and over 50,000 deaths as of Nov. 27, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Following the Council of State’s decision, the bishops proposed a protocol of reopening public liturgies at a third of each church’s capacity, with increased social distancing.

The bishops’ conference statement asked French Catholics to abide by the government’s rules while the outcome of their legal challenge and negotiations are pending. 

In recent weeks Catholics have taken to the streets in major cities across the country to protest against the public Mass ban, praying together outside their churches.

“May the use of the law help to calm the spirits. It is clear to all of us that the Mass cannot become a place of struggle … but remain a place of peace and communion. The first Sunday of Advent should turn us peacefully to the coming Christ,” the bishops’ statement said.

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Dublin, Ireland, Jun 25, 2018 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- Former Irish President Mary McAleese has said that the baptism of infants is a form of coercion, calling on the Catholic Church to change its practice.

“You can’t impose, really, obligations on people who are only two weeks old and you can’t say to them at seven or eight or 14 or 19 ‘here is what you contracted, here is what you signed up to’ because the truth is they didn’t,” she said in a June 23 interview with The Irish Times.

Baptizing babies, she said, makes “infant conscripts who are held to lifelong obligations of obedience.”

McAleese, Ireland’s president from 1997-2011, is a student at Rome’s Gregorian University, pursuing a doctorate in canon law. Her doctoral dissertation criticizes Catholic practices regarding infant baptism, The Irish Times reported.

“If your parents are Catholic and you are baptised in a Catholic Church, that baby becomes a member for life – according to the teaching of the church – of the church and it has rights and obligations,” she said.

McAleese said that in previous centuries, Catholics “didn’t understand that they had the right to say no, the right to walk away.”
 
“But you and I know, we live now in times where we have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion and freedom to change religion. The Catholic Church yet has to fully embrace that thinking,”
 
“What the church has failed to do is to recognise that there has to be a point at which our young people, as adults who have been baptised into the church and raised in the faith, have the chance to say ‘I validate this’ or ‘I repudiate this,’” she added.
In the same interview, she said that the Church must respect the right of Catholics to dissent from Church teaching.

“Let’s be frank about it, very little of the magisterium – there are elements of it that are obviously infallible, things like the teaching on Christ and his divinity – but there are other things that over many, many centuries were taught with great passion that quietly now have been abandoned by the very magisterium that taught them.”

McAleese, who has previously advocated publicly for ending abortion restrictions in Ireland, same-sex marriage, and women’s ordination to the priesthood, drew headlines earlier this year when she spoke March 8 at a women’s conference in Rome held outside the Vatican.

The annual conference, “Voices of Faith,” had previously been held in the Vatican City State. In 2018, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Vatican dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, objected to some speakers, including McAleese, and would not approve use of the Vatican’s space for the conference. Organizers moved the event to the headquarters of the Society of Jesus.

“We are here to shout, to bring down our Church’s walls of misogyny,” McAleese said at that conference.

Referring to the Church hierarchy, she added that “I hope that all the hearing aids are turned up today!”  

The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls on parents to baptize their children as soon as is possible after they are born.

“Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called,” the Catechism says.

“The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism.”  

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CNA Staff, May 21, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- A new law treating all adults in England as potential organ donors unless they opt out “potentially undermines the concept of donation as a gift,” the country’s bishops have said. 

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