Indianapolis, Ind., Jan 4, 2019 / 04:30 pm (CNA).- Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) founder Curtis Martin encouraged members to recall the real purpose of their lives while speaking at the organization’s annual conference.
&nbs… […]
Washington D.C., Jan 4, 2019 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- This week the U.S. bishops gathered at Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago for a weeklong retreat, held at the urging of Pope Francis. Under the guidance of the preacher to the papal household, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, they will spend a week “pausing in prayer” to “reflect on the signs of the times.”
Although recent scandals loom large over the meeting, the pope has asked the bishops to focus on their own conversion, before further discussion about new systems or structures to address the sexual abuse crisis.
In a letter sent to the American bishops ahead of their retreat, Pope Francis underscored that the recent crisis has “severely undercut and diminished” the Church’s credibility. Only response grounded in unity and communion, the pope wrote, has the power to restore the Church’s authority and authenticity.
The pope warned the bishops to avoid temptations to seek either the “relative calm resulting from compromise, or from a democratic vote where some emerge as ‘winners’ and others not.”
These temptations remain strong. One of the great frustrations for many of them during the Baltimore assembly was what they saw as a missed opportunity to produce “a solution,” in whatever form.
Whatever model bishops supported in November: the proposed lay-led national commission or the so-called metropolitan model, at least some seemed to be looking for a silver bullet, a powerful “fix” that would restore confidence now and prevent scandals from repeating.
Many American Catholics, too, seemed to expect a cure-all structural reform, and are now hoping that at the global summit on abuse in February, Rome will produce the reforms the U.S. Church could not.
But expectations that there can be one practical solution to solve the crisis are likely to prove false hopes. It has become obvious to most observers that no new policy, structure, or process can answer or prevent what is essentially a crisis of sin.
In his letter, Francis called administrative reforms “necessary yet insufficient” as they “ultimately risk reducing everything to an organizational problem.” The pope called the bishops to recognize their “sinfulness and limitations” and to preach to each other the need for conversion.
The pope’s diagnosis seems to be rooted in the evidence of recent months.
The current crisis is really better understood as a web of intersecting crises. The sexual abuse of minors is rightly seen as the most scandalous among them, but it has festered – as the pope has observed – among other illnesses in the body of the Church.
Clericalism, sexual permissiveness, moral indifference, and administrative negligence are themselves serious problems that require answers of their own.
But, if recent history is any guide, those answers are unlikely to come from any canonical or structural reform, however dramatic or well-intended.
As Cardinal Blase Cupich noted in November, there have been structures and commitments of various kinds in place in since 2002. The Statement of Episcopal Commitment was designed to ensure Church law was always followed when allegations were made, no matter who was being accused. And in 2016, Pope Francis issued the motu proprio Come una madre amorivole, which established – or was meant to – an entirely new canonical procedure for investigating and triying allegations against a bishop.
But even with those those policies and promises, Church officials have not seemed to consider themselves bound to any uniform procedure for handling allegations against bishops. Meanwhile, Francis has withdrawn the reforms of Come una madre before they were ever tested.
Many are now realizing that the problems facing the Church have never been the result of a lack of procedures. Instead, attention is beginning to shift to an enduring lack of will in the Church to employ its policies consistently and with rigor.
Absent a moral commitment to see them applied unsparingly, no reform measures – however systematic – can prevent the worst from happening.
As a case in point: last month it emerged that the Archdiocese of New York, which has some of the clearest, best-established abuse policies of any U.S. diocese, left a priest in ministry even after its own independent commission offered compensation to several of his alleged victims.
As recently as last month, the office of clergy personnel issued a letter of good standing stating “without qualification” that no accusation had ever been made against him; this despite an ongoing investigation by the archdiocese’s own review board.
The failures in New York were not caused by a lack of policies and procedures. Instead, they appear to have been truly human failures.
This may be the reason the pope appears skeptical that another policy or structure could yield different results, at any level of the Church, without personal conversion by the people charged with implementing them.
In August of last year, at the height of the Church’s summer of scandal, the USCCB’s own lay-led National Review Board agreed, issuing a statement that ruled out further structural reforms as a solution.
“The evil of the crimes that have been perpetrated reaching into the highest levels of the hierarchy will not be stemmed simply by the creation of new committees, policies, or procedures,” the review board wrote.
“What needs to happen is a genuine change in the Church’s culture, specifically among the bishops themselves. This evil has resulted from a loss of moral leadership and an abuse of power that led to a culture of silence that enabled these incidents to occur.”
Moral leadership, as the pope has told the U.S. bishops in no uncertain terms, cannot be effected by a vote. It requires a personal conversion in the face of failure and sin. Real change will require a totally new mindset among bishops, and the Curia.
The 19th century British Prime Minister George Canning ridiculed what he called “the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the carriage.”
“Men are everything,” Canning said, “measures comparatively nothing.”
Pope Francis echoed this sentiment in his letter to the bishops, warning them that the Church’s lost credibility “cannot be regained by issuing stern decrees or by simply creating new committees or improving flow charts.”
Instead, the pope wrote, the Church will only regain her credibility by “acknowledging its sinfulness and limitation” while at the same time “preaching the need for conversion.”
After the scandals of 2002, many bishops and officials treated the new measures and standards as a hardship to be endured, rather than a new reality of ecclesiastical life to be internalized. The “cultural change” called for by the national review board and the pope may prove to be the only means of breaking what has begun to resemble a cycle of scandal.
By warning the American bishops against measures aimed at recovering their reputations rather than amending their ways, the pope may have set the bar by which his own February summit will be measured. In his letter, Francis has called for a “shared project that is at once broad, unassuming, sober, and transparent.” Such a project, it seems, would bear little resemblance to past attempts to respond to the sexual abuse crisis.
As the bishops pray in Mundelein and the pope’s advisers prepare for February’s meeting in Rome, many Catholics begin 2019 wondering if a hierarchy beset by scandal can truly convert, or merely reform – again.
Washington D.C., Jan 4, 2019 / 09:30 am (CNA).- In the first day of the new congressional session, the House of Representatives passed a spending bill that includes a provision to repeal a pro-life policy. The bill was one of two appropriations bills p… […]
Marquette, Mich., Jan 4, 2019 / 03:34 am (CNA).- Irving “Francis” Houle was a Michigan father of five known for his holy life. He appeared to bear the stigmata, a physical manifestation of the wounds of Jesus Christ, and said he experienced… […]
New York City, N.Y., Jan 3, 2019 / 07:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York wrote in a recent an op-ed that while he fully supports victims of sexual abuse, proposed legal reforms in the state should be crafted so as support all vi… […]
Washington D.C., Jan 3, 2019 / 04:10 pm (CNA).- The 116th Congress was gavelled into session on January 3, bringing almost 100 new lawmakers into office, and with Catholics making up nearly 30 percent of the congressional freshman class.
Cath… […]
Savannakhet, Laos, Jan 3, 2019 / 03:19 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Seven Christians in a Laotian village were arrested and detained for several days for holding a church service deemed illegal.
They were arrested Dec. 29 and released Jan. 2, according to Radio Free Asia, which aims “to provide accurate and timely news and information to Asian countries whose governments prohibit access to a free press.”
The detainees are from Nakanong village in the Phine District of Savannakhet Province. Three of those arrested were church leaders, and the rest were members of the church.
Human Rights Watch for Lao Religious Freedom told BosNewsLife that local authorities “demolished the [church’s] stage, cut off the power line, destroyed the sound system, and seized three mobile phones.”
Laos is a communist country of southeast Asia. Its constitution provides citizens the freedom to believe in religion, but religious groups must register with the government. The US State Department’s 2017 International Religious Freedom Report said that “freedom of religion tended to decline in the rural areas.”
It added that “government restrictions on registered or unregistered minority religious groups, particularly Protestant groups, remained disproportionately limiting in certain remote regions. Reports continued of authorities, especially in isolated villages, arresting, detaining, and exiling followers of minority religions, particularly Christians.”
Laos is a majority-Buddhist country, and less than two percent of the population is Christian.
The Ministry of Home Affairs must give permission for religious practice, and it can order the cessation of any religious activities or beliefs not in agreement with policies, traditional customs, or laws.
The International Religious Freedom Report also said that the decentralization of Laotian government contributes “to abuses by local officials, some of whom reportedly were unaware of laws and policies protecting religious freedom or unwilling to implement them. Religious groups stated that most, if not all, instances of abuse occurred in remote villages.”
RFA reported that four Christians were detained for a week in November in Savannakhet’s Viraboury District for holding services without permission.
Washington D.C., Jan 3, 2019 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- Pope Francis has written to the bishops of the United States calling for a “change of mindset” to restore the Church’s credibility and trust among the faithful.
“Clearly … […]
Nashville, Tenn., Jan 3, 2019 / 10:00 am (CNA).- An Episcopalian priest set out to write a book on finding and understanding the Gospel’s truth. Now, after he and his family have converted to Catholicism, he says they have found it.
Andrew Petip… […]
New Haven, Conn., Jan 3, 2019 / 09:09 am (CNA).- Catholics can be good US citizens and honest public servants, the head of the Knights of Columbus wrote Thursday in a message to members of the Catholic charitable organization.
“There have been times in our country’s past when uninformed or prejudiced people questions whether Catholics could be good citizens or honest public servants,” Supreme Knight Carl Anderson wrote in the letter.
“Sadly, it seems that in some quarters, this prejudice remains.”
Anderson’s Jan. 3 letter was occasioned by two senators objecting last month to a federal judicial nominee’s membership in the Knights.
Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked whether his membership in the Knights of Columbus would prevent Brian C. Buescher from hearing cases “fairly and impartially.” Buescher is an Omaha-based lawyer nominated to sit on the US District Court for the District of Nebraska.
The Supreme Knight noted that Buescher’s “fitness for the federal bench” was questioned by Hirono and Harris “precisely because our Order holds firm to the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life and marriage.”
Anderson said, “Such attacks on the basis of our Catholic faith are hardly new. The Knights of Columbus was formed amid a period of anti-Catholic bigotry.”
From the founding of the Knights of Columbus until the presidential election of John F. Kennedy, “many still held that Catholics were unfit for public office,” he added.
The Knights of Columbus has always adhered to Catholic teaching, Anderson said, adding that “our primary motivation” is Christ’s commandment “that we love God completely and our neighbor as ourselves.”
It is this commandment of love that compels the Knights’ charitable work, he noted.
“This love also motivates us to stand with the Church on the important issues of life and marriage, precisely because the Church’s teaching reflects and is based on that love. We stand with our Church because we believe that what our faith teaches is consistent with reason, is timeless and transcends the changing sentiments of any particular time or place.”
The Supreme Knight also noted that in his letter to the Knights’ 2013 convention, Pope Francis had asked that the organization “bear witness to the authentic nature of marriage and the family, the sanctity and inviolable dignity of human life, and the beauty and truth of human sexuality.”
Anderson pointed out the no religious test clause of Article VI of the US Constitution, and the free exercise clause of the Constitution’s First Amendment, saying, “any suggestion that the Order’s adherence to the beliefs of the Catholic Church makes a Brother Knight unfit for public office blatantly violates those constitutional guarantees.”
“Let us continue to express our love of God and neighbor by helping those in need and by standing with our Church, regardless of the popularity of doing so,” Anderson exhorted.
“Let us also remember that, from our founding, we have embodied the truth that a good Catholic is a good citizen who shows civility and dignity even in the face of prejudice.”
Buescher was nominated to serve on the U.S. District Court Nov. 3. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Buescher’s nomination Nov. 28, sending him written questions Dec. 5.
Hirono had asked Buescher if he would end his membership with the Knights of Columbus if confirmed, so as “to avoid any appearance of bias,” saying the organization “has taken a number of extreme positions.”
And Harris described the Knights as “an all-male society”, and asked if Buescher was aware that the Knights of Columbus “opposed a woman’s right to choose” and were against “marriage equality” when he joined.
Harris raised a statement from Anderson saying abortion constituted “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale” and asked Buescher if he agreed with Anderson.
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) noted the nominee’s previously outspoken opposition to abortion and asked, “why should a litigant in your courtroom expect to get a fair hearing from an impartial judge in a case involving abortion rights?”
Buescher ran in the Republican primary for Nebraska attorney general in 2014. During that campaign he described himself as “avidly pro-life” and said opposition to abortion was part of his “moral fabric.”
In his responses to the questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Buescher said if confirmed as a federal judge, he would follow established rules regarding conflicts of interest, and that he would not seek to advance personal opinions, but would make rulings in accord with the judicial precedents established by the US Supreme Court.
Anderson is not the only voice to raise objections to the senators’ line of questions.
A Jan. 2 Wall Street Journal editorial said that the senators’ “argument against Mr. Buescher fits a distressing pattern. No longer is it necessary to engage the political merits of a position, or—in the case of a judicial nominee—demonstrate he’d use personal views to override the law. Today it is enough to label a nominee’s religion or associations “extreme” and use that to try to banish him from public life.”
The editorial noted another recent instance in which a Catholic faced questions about her faith, mentioning the 2017 confirmation hearing for federal Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in which Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Barrett “the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” That comment sparked a groundswell of support for Barrett’s nomination.
Last month, a Washington, D.C. chapter of the Knights of Columbus invited Harris and Hirono to join in their charitable activities, including a February Polar Plunge raising money for the Special Olympics. Neither senator has responded to that invitation.
The Knights of Columbus is active in 17 countries. In 2017, some 2 million members carried out more than 75 million hours of volunteer work and raised more than $185 million for charitable purposes.
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