Posted on 10/06/2011 5:46:02 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
THE FIRST annual general meeting of the Association of Catholic Priests was told last night that if people had a vote on such matters church leaders would be swept out of office.
If Irish Catholics had a democratic way of reflecting their feelings “church leaders would suffer a defeat as cataclysmic as that administered to Fianna Fáil in the recent general election”, Fr Kevin Hegarty said.
What was needed was a church which would open its doors to “married priests and women priests”. It would benefit from secular insights like, for example, on human intimacy and democracy, he said. It would work at developing a “healthy and holistic theology of sexuality”.
The Mayo priest said church leadership now seems divided and rudderless. Not since the 19th century “has there been such public disagreement among the bishops. Cardinal Cullen’s Tridentine temple has come tumbling down”.
Fr Hegarty is a priest of Killala diocese who serves in Carne parish on the Mullet peninsula. He was speaking at the gathering in the Green Isle Hotel on the Naas Road, Dublin, where the attendance was put at 300 – including some lay people who wished to give support.
There was “a torpidity about the Catholic Church in Ireland today. Take the preparations for the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress” with “earnest emissaries from the congress office . . . travelling throughout the countryside valiantly trying to drum up some enthusisasm”.
It reminded him of a description applied to former British Tory party deputy leader Willie Whitelaw, as he canvassed in an election: that he was going around “stirring up apathy.”
Fr Hegarty added that for those whose lives were shaped by the influences of free speech, democracy, accountability and respectful academic dialogue, the church has been a cold place for the last 30 years. For those who believed in a Vatican II style of church there has been considerable disillusion.
Fr Hegarty was ordained in 1981 and said he was “like most priests in Ireland . . . merely a hod carrier for the kingdom. We have no real input into leadership decisions.”
In the association, he said, they had found that once again the hierarchy had dismissed their concerns about the conservative theology and the exclusivist male tone of the new Roman Missal as “first premature and then irrelevant”.
He said that “in my 30 years as a priest, the sea of Catholicism has receded. I have heard its long withdrawing roar . . . I have worked in a crumbling church. In 1981 it seemed as if it might be different.”
Then “the golden glow of the papal visit still enveloped the institution. Now we recognise it as the last ard fhéis of traditional Irish Catholicism. It induced as sense of complacency and hubris; a deadly combination.”
Basking in the reflected glow of papal adulation, he said, church leaders dropped from their calculations the effects of social change. “In the age of the sat nav they hung on to antiquarian maps.”
Church structures were a barrier to conversation and “despite the promise of the Second [Vatican] Council . . . the church in Ireland failed to evolve a strategy that could learn from and contribute to the new consciousness”.
An authoritarian hierarchial structure “is contemptuous of intellectual challenge and is fearful of leaps of the imagination. The consequences have flowed.”
It was “a sign of a church in crisis that so few men and almost no women are prepared to offer it lifetime vocational service.”
The Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne reports “highlight the acute level of dysfunction in the church”, but he didn’t sense “that the majority of Catholic leaders in Ireland have actually got the extent of the breakdown in trust that these reports have engendered”.
....Fr Hegarty added that for those whose lives were shaped by the influences of free speech, democracy, accountability and respectful academic dialogue, the church has been a cold place for the last 30 years. For those who believed in a Vatican II style of church there has been considerable disillusion. Fr Hegarty was ordained in 1981 and said he was “like most priests in Ireland . . . merely a hod carrier for the kingdom. We have no real input into leadership decisions”....
....In the association, he said, they had found that once again the hierarchy had dismissed their concerns about the conservative theology and the exclusivist male tone of the new Roman Missal as “first premature and then irrelevant”....
....The Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne reports “highlight the acute level of dysfunction in the church”, but he didn’t sense “that the majority of Catholic leaders in Ireland have actually got the extent of the breakdown in trust that these reports have engendered”.
This priest is an example of what has failed. He knows better when he talks of a need for married and women priests. Devotion is needed. Acceptance that there is a right and a wrong and we must choose and strive to live accordingly.
Yes, he is supposed to just carry the wheelbarrow for the Church - that’s a priest...do the red, say the black. Creativity is a personal god to worship.
The Church is headed by humans, sin and cowardice is a reality. Jesus never put things up to the Apostles for a vote, other than “Are you with me?” and that’s the same choice this priest has today. The Church is for the imperfect, the weak - failures will happen, we will fall, and we will rise.
You want democracy, join some disintegrating protestant church’s example. Only 500 years old and they’re still changing and they’re disintegrating! We’re just having another cleaning.
God has blessed the Church in Ireland by permitting the exposure of this sinful behavior FINALLY so His Church can be righted. (In a few years, this behavior could otherwise become acceptable for anti-religious folk as it is being pushed in the US as “minor attractions”, so this is perfect timing).
Now is not the time to throw out the good and add wrongheaded changes, but to clean up the mess and enjoy the original, the universal Church, as set up by Christ, yet again, uninspiring and cowardly bishops and all.
Ah. So that means 87% didn't join.
:::Shrug:::
More dissident bafflegab here, for those odd-bodkins who have a taste for it(Link)
I guess since the Bible isn't working for him, he would like to invent something new? How about we let God develop a theology of sexuality and the priest does his part by spreading His message.
He said that “in my 30 years as a priest, the sea of Catholicism has receded. I have heard its long withdrawing roar . . . I have worked in a crumbling church.
For those who believed in a Vatican II style of church there has been considerable disillusion.
Liberalism is failure. At least this priest can commiserate with Obama and his supporters, they feel his pain.
Well said.
The Church already knows that people are very fond of fornication and adultery, and that the people also like preventing or erasing the consequences.
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