In Los Angeles a Victory for Truth: NCR Editorial

For those of you aware of the unfolding scandal, which has rocked yet another US Archdiocese, the National Catholic Reporter has written an editorial mapping some insight into the, apparently increasing lack of accountability of US bishops. It further develops to explain the absence of a response from the Institutional Church as a whole in these matters.

As a pastor I continue to fail to see how theological dialogue is considered a capital crime in our Church while those who offend, in the very gravest of matters against the vulnerable, are allowed to continue to enjoy the privileges of office.

The credibilty of our bishops is shattered. What are we as People of God to do in examining our complacency with allowing our Church to continue to do this?

The following is well worth your time to read:

To those familiar with the protocols of the Catholic hierarchy, the news was stunning. The archbishop of Los Angeles publically rebuked his predecessor, a cardinal, for his failures in dealing with the priest sex abuse scandal.

The action by Archbishop Jose Gomez, relieving Cardinal Roger Mahony of "any administrative or public duties," was remarkable on two levels.

First, it broke with the unspoken but nearly ironclad rule of the culture of Catholic hierarchy that bishops do not publicly criticize other bishops. That courtesy extended even to the most egregious examples of ecclesial malfeasance -- the deliberate and persistent hiding of criminal activities by priests. No one to this point had uttered a word against a predecessor, not in New York or Connecticut, not in Philadelphia or Milwaukee, not in Seattle or Santa Fe. There were "mistakes made," they would say, and offer vacuous apologies. For whatever reasons yet unknown, Gomez broke the code.

Second, the language Gomez used was blunt and unqualified. The behavior he found in the files, he said, was "evil." The acts themselves and the handling of these matters, as the files revealed, showed more than mistakes made, they showed a "terrible failure."

"I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed," wrote Gomez, who also referred to Mahony's sorrow "for his failure to fully protect young people entrusted to his care."

Gomez's words are a direct contradiction of the weak defense that Mahony has advanced for years, all the while spending untold sums in attempts to keep the truth hidden. It is the same list of explanations that he repeated in a lengthy and testy response to Gomez's statement. "Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem," Mahony wrote. In studying for his master's degree in social work, he said, no lecture or textbook ever referred to the sexual abuse of children.

There is, of course, some truth to the "we didn't know" defense. Few knew, years ago, the seriousness of the disease borne by those who molest children. Much of it remains a mystery today.
But the "we didn't know" defense quickly wears thin against the details contained in the 12,000 pages of documents recently released by the court in Los Angeles, just as it wore thin against the truth revealed when documents were released in other places like Philadelphia and Boston.

That's why Mahony spent so much time and money over nearly a decade attempting to keep the documents sealed. It's why, even after agreeing to release documents as part of a 2007 settlement with 508 victims costing $660 million, he continued to fight tooth and nail to keep the documents secret. It is why he and the diocese's lawyers tried a last-ditch and ultimately failed attempt to get the courts to redact the names of church officials from the documents so it would be difficult to tell who did what. The documents put the lie to the "we didn't know" defense.

What they demonstrate -- and we have yet to read through all the thousands of pages -- is that diocesan officials, while they may not have understood the intricacies of the sex abuser's mind and motivation, did know laws were being broken, children were being raped and otherwise abused. They knew they had to take extraordinary lengths -- sending priests to counselors who were also lawyers so they could claim their conversations were privileged, sending some priests out of the country and others from parish to parish and diocese to diocese -- to avoid detection by the law and by the very Catholic community the officials were charged to serve. They knew enough to understand they had to hide the crimes and the behavior if they didn't want to besmirch the good name of the clergy culture.
Consideration of what was happening to the abused children and their families was incidental, at best.

What Mahony and others -- Cardinals Bernard Law, Justin Rigali, Edward Egan, Anthony Bevilacqua, and a host of archbishops and bishops -- really didn't understand was the degree to which their moral compasses had been distorted by the strong magnetic pull of the clergy culture. In their fierce allegiance to that exclusive club at all costs, in their willingness to preserve the façade of holiness and the faithful's high notion of ordination, they lost sight of simple human decency and the most fundamental demands of the Gospel.

It doesn't take a master's or a doctorate to understand that the first obligation of adults is to protect the children. When the first instinct became protection of the clergy and the institution, our leaders became disfigured at some deep and essential level. The Catholic community is still waiting for them to deal honestly with that reality, with what happens to them when their robes turn to purple.
Meanwhile, there are no heroes in any of this. Gomez may have broken with normal behaviors, but as many have already pointed out, he had access to the documents for two years and said nothing. And it is reasonable to expect that if Mahony and the lawyers had succeeded in keeping the documents sealed, nothing would have been said. The "evil" would have remained festering on some chancery shelf.

If Gomez really wants to do a service to the people of God in Los Angeles, he will reveal how much of the archdiocese's treasury was spent during the last decade on trying to hide that truth. By its own admission, the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocese spent $1.39 million in a failed 18-month attempt to defend Bishop Robert Finn from charges of failing to report a child pornographer, and the Milwaukee archdiocese has spent $9 million in a two-year-long, far-from-settled bankruptcy case precipitated by sex abuse law suits. The amount of money the Los Angeles archdiocese has spent hiding these documents must be mind-boggling. That is evil, as well.

There are no heroes among the many other chancery officials and public relations advisers and lawyers who knew, some for many years, what crimes and sins had been committed against children.
There are no heroes in the Vatican structures, on up to the pope, among those who years ago could have demanded a review of the documents, come to the same conclusions as Gomez and removed Mahony long ago. It would have saved the church of Los Angeles years of suspense and enormous amounts of money. We say we believe the truth will set us free. In too many dioceses today, the truth remains hidden and the church remains in chains fashioned by its bishops.

Endless speculation will swirl now about why Gomez did what he did and what precisely it means. None of that really matters. What matters is the truth that will outlast reporters, commentators, perpetrators, cardinals, bishops, victims and the rest. The revelation and preservation of that truth in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles just received a boost with the release of the documents.

Bishops; US Nuns; Transparency and a call for Action: NCR Report

The following is a lengthy reflection on the role of bishops (especially in the U.S.) who have and hold responsibility in the current sexual abuse crisis that is before us as North American Catholics. In my opinion, most people within our pews are grossly misinformed regarding the action and inaction our Church has taken to address these concerns.

From its palace in Vatican City, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith monitors compliance with Roman Catholic moral teaching and matters of dogma for the oldest church in Christendom.

These issues have little bearing on most of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. Faith, for them, rests in parish life and the quality of their pastors. In the 1980s, for example, when the congregation punished theologians who dissented from the papal ban on artificial birth control, the majority of Catholics who believe contraception is morally acceptable did not change their opinion.

But as the congregation accelerates a disciplinary action against the main leadership group of American nuns, many sisters and priests are reacting to a climate of fear fostered by bishops and cardinals who have never been investigated for their role in the greatest moral crisis of modern Catholicism: the clergy sex abuse crisis.

A small but resonant chorus of critics is raising an issue of a hypocrisy that has grown too blatant to ignore. The same hierarchy that brought shame upon the Vatican for recycling clergy child molesters, a scandal that rocked the church in many countries, has assumed a moral high ground in punishing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group whose members have put their lives on the line in taking the social justice agenda of the Second Vatican Council to some of the poorest areas in the world.

Many nuns from foreign countries wonder if the investigation is an exercise "in displaced anger," as one sister puts it, over the hierarchy's failure in child abuse scandals across the map of the global church.

Cardinals and bishops involved in the LCWR investigation have suffered no discipline for their blunders in handling clergy pedophiles, according to news reports and legal documents.

Cardinal Bernard Law was the prime mover behind the "apostolic visitation" of all American nun communities, other than monastic ones, and the subsequent doctrinal investigation of LCWR, according to sources in Rome, including Cardinal Franc Rodé, retired prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

Law, who refused to comment for this article, has not spoken to the press in 10 years. He resigned as Boston archbishop in December 2002 and spent 18 months living at a convent of nuns in Maryland, with periodic trips to Rome. In 2004, the Vatican rewarded him with a position as prefect of Santa Maria Maggiore, a historic basilica; he took an active role in several Roman Curia boards, and became a fixture on the social circuit of embassies in Rome.

Boston was a staggering mess. Settlements and other expenditures related to abuse cases there have cost about $170 million. Mass attendance since 2002 has dropped to 16 percent. Declining financial support has caused a storm of church closings, from nearly 400 parishes in 2002 to 288 today (soon to be organized into 135 "parish collaboratives").

Six years after Law found redemption in Rome, clergy abuse cases exploded in Europe.

"You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry," Pope Benedict XVI wrote to Catholics of Ireland in a letter on March 19, 2010, as the Irish reeled from a government report on a history of bishops concealing clergy predators. "Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated," the pope continued.

"You find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel. At the same time, I ask you not to lose hope."

Despite the uncommon tone of contrition, the pope's letter offered no procedures to remove complicit bishops or genuine institutional reform.

On April 6, 2010, as cases of clergy abuse in other countries shook the European heartland, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel criticized Benedict for "reluctance to take a firm stance" on the abuse a crisis, which "is now descending upon the Vatican with a vengeance and hitting its spiritual leader hard."

Almost three years later, the drumbeat of criticism has subsided, but the core problem is unchanged. Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Mo., remains in his office despite his conviction in criminal court, where he drew a suspended sentence for failure to report suspected sexual abuse of children. Benedict has not punished any of the hierarchs who recycled so many sex offenders by sending them to other parishes.

Under the logic of apostolic succession, which sees each bishop as a descendant of Jesus' apostles, the power structure gives de facto immunity to cardinals and bishops for just about any wrongdoing that doesn't bring a prison sentence. The double standard in church governance -- with the men of the hierarchy immune from church justice -- has become a glaring issue to leaders of missionary orders in Rome as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith probes the U.S. Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

In 2005, shortly after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger emerged from the conclave as Pope Benedict XVI, he appointed San Francisco Archbishop William Levada to succeed him as prefect of the doctrinal congregation. Levada became a cardinal soon after.

Levada was caught in a swamp in 2002 amid news reports on abuse cases under his watch in San Francisco. He formed an Independent Review Board of primarily laypeople to advise him and review personnel files on questionable priests. Psychologist James Jenkins chaired the board. Fr. Greg Ingels, a canon lawyer, helped set it up. Jenkins grew suspicious when Levada would not release the names of priests under scrutiny.

In May 2003, board members were stunned to read news reports that Ingels had been indicted for allegedly having oral sex with a 15-year-old boy at a local high school in the 1970s. Levada, the board learned, had known about the allegations since 1996, yet kept Ingels in ministry and as an adviser. Ingels helped fashion the church's 2002 zero-tolerance policy and wrote a bishops' guidebook on how to handle abuse cases. Ingels stepped down.

Jenkins quit his post, denouncing Levada for "an elaborate public relations scheme."

Levada was sued for defamation by a priest he pulled from a parish for blowing the whistle on another priest. In 1997, Fr. John Conley told police that the pastor with whom he served made advances on a teenage boy. Levada yanked Conley from ministry; Conley, a former assistant U.S. attorney, sued. After the accused priest owned up in a civil case, which paid the victim's family $750,000, the archdiocese paid Conley in 2002 a six-figure "pre-retirement" settlement before the suit went to trial.

Robert Mickens reported in The Tablet, a London-based Catholic weekly, in May 2012 that Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, a protégé of Law's, asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to investigate LCWR.

Lori established several communities of traditionalist nuns as bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., between 2001 and 2012.

As a canon lawyer, Lori helped write the U.S. bishops' 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. It has no oversight over bishops. In 2003, Lori approved a $21 million abuse victims' settlement involving several priests. The lay group Voice of the Faithful criticized him for allowing an accused monsignor to stay in his parish. In 2011 the priest resigned after a female church worker made sexual harassment allegations.

In a Jan. 12, 2011, Connecticut Post op-ed piece, Voice of the Faithful leader John Marshall Lee cited a priest who had been suspended for sex abuse yet appeared in clerical attire at public gatherings.

"Does this behavior contradict Bishop Lori's assumed supervisory orders suspending priestly public activities?" Lee asked. "How does a bishop enforce his instructions in this regard? Where does a whistleblower report this behavior, or determine if the priest in question was suspended in the first place?"

Lee cited another cleric who had been removed after "credible allegations of sexual abuse" but with no indication that he was defrocked.

"There is no current address for this man who might have been labeled 'sex offender' (had the church acted responsibly when leaders first heard of adult criminal behavior perpetrated on Catholic children) and who may continue to be a potential threat to children," Lee said. "Is the church saying that such men are no longer a public threat to children?"



Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, who wrote the secret report on LCWR for Levada, has said he got most of his information from LCWR literature. Writing in his diocesan paper, Blair made the accurate point that several speakers at LCWR conferences have taken positions, such as ordaining women, that are contrary to church teaching.

Does this mean that the ordination of women is a new form of heresy? If the truth of the church is defined by men who have violated basic moral standards in disregarding the rights of children and their families, how does their behavior meet the sensus fidelium, or sense of the faithful, extolled by the Second Vatican Council?

Blair's own background spotlights a double standard that rewards bishops who scandalize laypeople.

In 2004, the priest who had headed the Toledo diocese's 2001-2002 $60 million capital campaign was accused by two men of having abused them as boys many years before. Blair kept Fr. Robert Yeager as the diocese's planned giving consultant, and until Yeager's retirement in July 2005, the priest continued to solicit donations while an attorney negotiated settlements for the victims. The bishop removed Yeager from ministry in 2006, before the settlements made news.

Blair forcibly retired a veteran pastor who criticized the bishop's parish closures as "high-handed decisions with almost no collaboration with anyone." In one parish Blair installed a priest who had had a long relationship with a woman. When the parishioners found out, Blair reassigned the priest. A spokesperson said the bishop had to keep quiet as the priest had told him in confession.

In 2005, parishioners in the farm belt town of Kansas, Ohio, filed a Vatican appeal when Blair closed St. James Parish. It failed. They filed suit to save the parish in county court, arguing that the bishop was only one trustee but parishioners owned the property. The state sided with the bishop. "We spent $100,000 in legal fees," said parishioner Virginia Hull. "Bishop Blair paid his lawyers with $77,957 from our parish account." Blair had the church demolished.

Blair, Lori and Levada became bishops with help from Law, whose influence at the Vatican as a member of Congregation for Bishops is pivotal in selecting new American priests for the hierarchy.

Along with Blair, the second member of the three-man committee now supervising LCWR is Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill. In a 2007 homily in Grand Rapids, Mich., for the Red Mass, an annual liturgy for lawyers and judges, Paprocki, who has degrees in civil and canon law, declared, "The law is being used as an instrument of attack on the church. This was true from the earliest times when the earliest Christians were, in effect, outlaws in the Roman Empire for refusing to worship the official state gods."

He saw clergy abuse lawsuits were undermining the church's religious freedom. "This attack is particularly directed against bishops and priests, since the most effective way to scatter the flock is to attack the shepherd," he insisted.

"The principal force behind these attacks is none other than the devil," he said.

Equating the devil with lawyers seeking financial compensation for victims of child sexual abuse drew heavy criticism.

In a 2010 homily, Paprocki took a rhetorical back step, saying, "Apparently I did not make myself clear that it is the sins of priests and bishops who succumbed to the temptations of the devil that have put their victims and the Catholic community in this horrible situation in the first place."

In a column for his diocesan newspaper before the November election, Paprocki attacked the Democratic Party platform for its support of legal abortion and same-sex marriage.

Without endorsing Mitt Romney outright, he wrote, "A vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your soul in serious jeopardy."

Did bishops who sent child molesters from parish to parish, on to fresh victims, without warning parishioners, promote "actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil"? Does apostolic succession absolve them of all wrongdoing?

Bishops gain stature in the estimation of cardinals and popes by proving their loyalty. A chief way to do that is by serving as an investigator of priests or nuns who run afoul of the hierarchy as threats to the moral teaching upheld by bishops, regardless of what the bishops have done.

Leading the Vatican's supervision of LCWR, the doctrinal congregation delegated Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle to ensure that the nuns' leadership group conforms to changes the Vatican wants.

Sartain was previously the bishop of Joliet, Ill., a diocese that was wracked with abuse cover-ups and lawsuits under his predecessor.

In spring of 2009, a Joliet seminarian, Alejandro Flores, was caught with pornographic pictures of youths, some of which appeared to be of underage boys. No criminal charges were filed.

Sartain ordained Flores three months later, in June 2009. Then in January 2010, Flores was arrested for molesting a boy. He pleaded guilty in September 2010, the same month that Benedict promoted Sartain to archbishop of Seattle.

[Jason Berry, author of Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, writes from New Orleans. Research for this series has been funded by a Knight Grant for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.]

The Church Is About To Change...hopefully

Yesterday, a friend sent me a copy of a great hymn, "The Canticle of the Turning." It's a hopeful hymn with an Irish folksong melody. The refrain, addressed to God, goes like this:

My heart shall sing of the day you bring,
Let the fires of justice burn.
Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near
And the World is about to turn.

So I began to think: What would it mean if we sang, "And the church is about to turn"? As we approach the beginning of 2013, it seems appropriate to ponder that question.

Of what do we dream? The "fires of justice" would have to mean, first and foremost, building a church that welcomes authentic dialogue and begins to establish lay councils with real authority in dioceses throughout the world as well as at the Vatican itself. That sense of churchwide collegiality would begin -- just begin, mind you -- to fulfill the promise of Vatican II.

It would inaugurate a new effort to deal anew with the sex abuse crisis, calling to account those who covered it up, as well as the perpetrators of abuse.

It would also mean inaugurating a process to bring true gender equality to the life of the church, in all its ministries and offices. It would welcome a married clergy. It would initiate a churchwide discussion on the realities of being gay, lesbian or transgender in today's world. It would welcome a dialogue of Catholic women and men on controversial issues of sexuality and reproduction.

It would mean an end to the Vatican war on LCWR and American nuns. It would mean seeking dialogue with theologians who have new ideas, not condemning them.

And it would mean a wholehearted engagement with those of other faith traditions, seeking alliances that champion justice for the poor, peace in the world and environmental sanity in dealing with climate change.

OK, this sounds like a pipe dream, but it's a new year. We have to hope and dream.

And of course, I could go on, and many of you readers can add your own hopes and dreams. What would "the church is about to turn" mean for you in 2013?

Maureen Fiddler - National Catholic Reporter

Ordination of Women Would Correct an Injustice: NCR Editorial

Preamble: In light of recent happenings within the Church in the world I discovered the following editorial from the National Catholic Reporter to be timely and well written. It asks good questions and I believe it is representative of many people within the Church at this time. I believe this is a timely reflection and well worth your read. It is not only a question of women in the church, it is a question that we as priests need to address in an open and responsible forum. A retired Archbishop once told me, "Paul, if we never ask the question, than how will people know that this is important to us?" Take a look:

National Catholic Reporter, editorial, December 3, 2012:

The call to the priesthood is a gift from God. It is rooted in baptism and is called forth and affirmed by the community because it is authentic and evident in the person as a charism. Catholic women who have discerned a call to the priesthood and have had that call affirmed by the community should be ordained in the Roman Catholic church. Barring women from ordination to the priesthood is an injustice that cannot be allowed to stand.

The most egregious statement in the Nov. 19 press release announcing Roy Bourgeois' "excommunication, dismissal and laicization" is the assertion that Bourgeois' "disobedience" and "campaign against the teachings of the Catholic church" was "ignoring the sensitivities of the faithful." Nothing could be further from the truth. Bourgeois, attuned by a lifetime of listening to the marginalized, has heard the voice of the faithful and he has responded to that voice.

Bourgeois brings this issue to the real heart of the matter. He has said that no one can say who God can and cannot call to the priesthood, and to say that anatomy is somehow a barrier to God's ability to call one of God's own children forward places absurd limits on God's power. The majority of the faithful believe this.

Let's review the history of Rome's response to the call of the faithful to ordain women:

In April 1976 the Pontifical Biblical Commission concluded unanimously: "It does not seem that the New Testament by itself alone will permit us to settle in a clear way and once and for all the problem of the possible accession of women to the presbyterate." In further deliberation, the commission voted 12-5 in favor of the view that Scripture alone does not exclude the ordination of women, and 12-5 in favor of the view that the church could ordain women to the priesthood without going against Christ's original intentions.

In Inter Insigniores (dated Oct. 15, 1976, but released the following January), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said: "The Church, in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination." That declaration, published with the approval of Pope Paul VI, was a relatively modest "does not consider herself authorized."

Pope John Paul II upped the ante considerably in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (May 22, 1994): "We declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful." John Paul had wanted to describe the ban as "irreformable," a much stronger stance than "definitively held." This met substantial resistance from high-ranking bishops who gathered at a special Vatican meeting in March 1995 to discuss the document, NCR reported at the time. Even then, bishops attuned to the pastoral needs of the church had won a concession to the possibility of changing the teaching.

But that tiny victory was fleeting.

In October 1995, the doctrinal congregation acted further, releasing a responsum ad propositum dubium concerning the nature of the teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: "This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium." The ban on women's ordination belongs "to the deposit of the faith," the responsum said.

The aim of the responsum was to stop all discussion.

In a cover letter to the responsum, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the congregation, asked presidents of bishops' conferences to "do everything possible to ensure its distribution and favorable reception, taking particular care that, above all on the part of theologians, pastors of souls and religious, ambiguous and contrary positions will not again be proposed."

Despite the certainty with which Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and the responsum were issued they did not answer all the questions on the issue.

Many have pointed out that to say that the teaching is "founded on the written Word of God" completely ignored the 1976 findings of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

Others have noted that the doctrinal congregation did not make a claim of papal infallibility -- it said what the pope taught in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was that which "has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium." This too, however, has been called into question because at the time there were many bishops around the world who had serious reservations about the teaching, though few voiced them in public.

Writing in The Tablet in December 1995, Jesuit Fr. Francis A. Sullivan, a theological authority on the magisterium, cited Canon 749, that no doctrine is understood to have been defined infallibly unless this fact is clearly established. "The question that remains in my mind is whether it is a clearly established fact that the bishops of the Catholic Church are as convinced by [the teaching] as Pope John Paul evidently is," Sullivan wrote.

The responsum caught nearly all bishops off-guard. Though dated October, it was not made public until Nov. 18. Archbishop William Keeler of Baltimore, then the outgoing president of the U.S. bishops' conference, received the document with no warning three hours after the bishops had adjourned their annual fall meeting. One bishop told NCR that he learned about the document from reading The New York Times. He said many bishops were deeply troubled by the statement. He, like other bishops, spoke anonymously.

The Vatican had already begun to stack the deck against questioning. As Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese reported in his 1989 book, Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church, under John Paul a potential episcopal candidate's view on the teaching against women's ordination had become a litmus test for whether a priest could be promoted to bishop.

Less than a year after Ordinatio Sacerdotalis was issued, Mercy Sr. Carmel McEnroy was removed from her tenured position teaching theology at St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana for her public dissent from church teaching; she had signed an open letter to the pope calling for women's ordination. McEnroy very likely was the first victim of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, but there have been many more, most recently Roy Bourgeois.

Blessed John Henry Newman said that there are three magisteria in the church: the bishops, the theologians and the people. On the issue of women's ordination, two of the three voices have been silenced, which is why the third voice must now make itself heard. We must speak up in every forum available to us: in parish council meetings, faith-sharing groups, diocesan convocations and academic seminars. We should write letters to our bishops, to the editors of our local papers and television news channels.

Our message is that we believe the sensus fidelium is that the exclusion of women from the priesthood has no strong basis in Scripture or any other compelling rationale; therefore, women should be ordained. We have heard the faithful assent to this in countless conversations in parish halls, lecture halls and family gatherings. It has been studied and prayed over individually and in groups. The brave witness of the Women's Ordination Conference, as one example, gives us assurance that the faithful have come to this conclusion after prayerful consideration and study -- yes, even study of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

NCR joins its voice with Roy Bourgeois and calls for the Catholic church to correct this unjust teaching.

UPDATE: University of San Diego Votes No Confidence in President

Almost 100 faculty members at the University of San Diego have declared a loss of confidence in their president's leadership, saying her cancellation of a British theologian's visiting fellowship and her response to criticism of the move have shown her to be "ethically bankrupt."

The vote of no confidence by the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences, one of seven colleges at the Catholic university, is the latest response to president Mary Lyons' rescission of a fellowship for Tina Beattie, a theologian known for her work in contemporary ethical issues.

Beattie had been scheduled to begin a fellowship at the university's Frances G. Harpst Center for Catholic Thought and Culture on Nov. 6. Lyons, who says the theologian publicly dissented from church teaching by suggesting Catholics could support civil same-sex marriage, canceled the appointment in an Oct. 27 letter.

"The president has shown herself to be ethically bankrupt, for which reason the motion is placed that this body declare a loss of confidence in her leadership," read the motion approved in a meeting Tuesday of the academic assembly of the university's College of Arts and Sciences .
The vote was 99 in support of the measure, 16 against, and 19 abstaining.

Carlton Floyd, chair of the assembly's executive committee, told NCR that while the vote was "largely symbolic," "it is hugely important as a symbolic gesture."

"It lets the world know ... that faculty here do in fact support and believe strongly in academic freedom, believe strongly and support the leadership of its directors ... and that the reasons and explanations that have come to us [for the cancellation], we consider largely invalid," said Floyd, an associate professor of English at the university.

Calls to university representatives for comment were not returned Tuesday afternoon.
The faculty's action follows wide criticism of Lyons' cancellation of Beattie's fellowship from prominent academics in both the U.S. and the U.K.

The 47,000-member American Association of University Professors, which rates universities on their protection of academic freedom, said in a letter Nov. 5 that the situation raises "serious issues."
Lyons' cancellation came after an influential university alumnus and a conservative watchdog group backed by a high-ranking Vatican official protested the appointment to the university's board of trustees.

At a similar assembly Nov. 6, the San Diego University faculty had asked Lyons to reinstate Beattie's appointment or face the vote of no confidence.

Lyons responded to the Nov. 6 vote hours before Tuesday's faculty assembly. In a letter to Floyd on Tuesday morning, Lyons wrote she would allow Beattie to speak at the university, so long as the theologian was not given an "honorary affiliation" with the institution, a reference to Beattie's expected title of "visiting fellow" of the Harpst Center.

In the letter, Lyons wrote that she recognized that her decision to disinvite Beattie left "many very thoughtful and serious academics, students and others -- including theologians -- both on our campus and beyond questioning our university's commitment to Academic Freedom."

"In response to the Assembly's request [of Nov. 6], I am endorsing that Dr. Beattie be invited by the [Harpst Center] to speak at USD, as early as the Spring semester, without conferring upon her an honorary affiliation with the University," Lyons continued.

Gerard Mannion, the director of the university's Harpst Center, told NCR Tuesday the general feeling of the faculty was that Lyons' response was "too little, too late."

"People just felt that it didn't change anything," Mannion said. "It didn't apologize, as the assembly had asked. It didn't right any of the wrongs. They just felt it was compounding the wrongs that had been committed.

"She believes herself to have the right to veto or approve visiting scholar appointments, which is itself a violation of academic freedom," he said.

Beattie, a professor of Catholic studies at London's University of Roehampton, said she would have to consider before accepting a new invitation to speak at USD.

"The only thing that would make me feel inclined to accept it is I feel an enormous debt of gratitude to faculty and students at USD," said Beattie, who also serves on the board of directors of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet and is a theological adviser to the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development, the Catholic aid agency for England and Wales.

While Beattie said she was "amazed" at the response she had seen in her case from others worried about academic freedom and freedom of conscience, she also said her experience has made her believe there are "real problems" with U.S. Catholicism.

"One thing I think that your bishops there need to be aware of, and your funders, is that from this side of the pond, why on earth would any British intellectual want to go through this?" she asked.
"I can't see why anyone in my position would subject themselves to this in order to speak in America. Part of me thinks that you have a real problem with the politics of American Catholicism at the moment. And it's really a disincentive to people wanting to get involved."

The University of San Diego's College of Arts and Sciences lists about 212 faculty members.
Academic assembly meetings, which normally occur once a month during the academic year, are open to all tenure and tenure-track faculty in the college.

In a Nov. 5 statement to NCR, Lyons said Beattie's signature on an August letter in The Times of London -- one of 27 -- that said it would be "perfectly proper" for Catholics to support civil marriage for same-sex couples was the primary reason for her cancellation of the theologian's fellowship.
Among other theologians who have publicly questioned Lyons' move are Eamon Duffy, a professor of Christian history at the University of Cambridge and a former member of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, and Paul D. Murray, the president of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain and a consulter to the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Beattie's cancellation marked the university's second revocation of a fellowship from a prominent theologian in recent years. U.S. theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, a Catholic feminism scholar, was disinvited as the university's Msgr. John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology in 2008.

UPDATE: University of San Diego Called to Reverse Decision to Withdraw British Theologian

Following up on my post regarding The University of San Diego's President Mary Lyon's decision to withdraw a teaching invitation to theologian Tina Beattie the following has now transpired and here is an update from Joshua J. McElwee of the National Catholic Reporter:

More than 100 faculty members at the University of San Diego have presented their president with an ultimatum: Reinstate a canceled visiting fellowship for a British theologian or face potential public questioning of your capability to lead.

The faculty of the Catholic university's College of Arts and Sciences made the move Tuesday in response to president Mary Lyons' cancellation of a fellowship for Tina Beattie, a theologian known for her work in contemporary ethical issues.

Beattie was scheduled to begin a fellowship at the university's Frances G. Harpst Center for Catholic Thought and Culture on Tuesday. Lyons, who alleges the theologian publicly dissented from church teaching by suggesting Catholics could support civil same-sex marriage, canceled the appointment in an Oct. 27 letter.

In a meeting of their academic assembly Tuesday, the University of San Diego faculty agreed to ask Lyons to reinstate Beattie's appointment immediately or face a possible vote of no confidence in her leadership.

Carlton Floyd, the chair of the assembly's executive committee, said in an interview Wednesday that the move was "exceptionally important."

"The will of the faculty has made it very clear that they consider this matter a matter of extreme importance and a matter that requires our immediate attention," said Floyd, an associate professor of English at the university.

While Floyd said the official count of the vote was not yet available, he said the vote was "overwhelmingly" in favor of the move. Another faculty member present at the meeting put the tally at 117 in favor, two against and three abstaining.

Floyd said the faculty agreed to meet again next week to reconsider the matter and any possible response from Lyons. Although Floyd said he wasn't sure what the faculty would do next, he said a vote of no confidence in Lyons' leadership is "definitely on the table."

University representatives were not immediately available to comment Thursday morning on the faculty vote.

In a statement to NCR on Monday, Lyons said Beattie's signature on an August letter in The Times of London -- one of 27 -- that said it would be "perfectly proper" for Catholics to support civil marriage for same-sex couples was the primary reason for her cancelation of the fellowship.

"It is significant that she signed the letter as a 'theologian,' " Lyons wrote in the statement. "This action is materially different from the exercise of scholarship and teaching appropriate to the role of an academic and whose freedom to do so I consistently defend."

Lyons' move, which came after pressure from a conservative watchdog group backed by a high-ranking Vatican official, sparked wide-ranging criticism from academics in the U.S. and the U.K. who say the cancellation of Beattie's fellowship represents a stifling of academic freedom.

The 47,000-member American Association of University Professors, which rates universities on their protection of academic freedom, said in a letter Monday that the situation raises "serious issues."

The University of San Diego's College of Arts and Sciences, one of seven colleges and schools at the university, lists about 212 faculty members. Academic assembly meetings, which normally occur once a month during the academic year, are open to all tenure and tenure-track faculty in the college, Floyd said.

The faculty vote Tuesday came hours after about 170 faculty and students protested the cancellation of Beattie's fellowship outside the university's main administration building.

One visiting faculty member has resigned his position at the university in a sign of solidarity with the theologian.

Michael Davis, a professor at the University of California, Riverside who had accepted a visiting fellowship at USD, announced his resignation in an email Nov. 2, which has since been made public on a Facebook page supporting Beattie.

Davis, a member of Riverside's creative writing department who was expected to take up the USD's Knapp Chair of Liberal Arts in January, said he felt it necessary to forego the fellowship to be in solidarity with Beattie and "with the stand that's been taken by faculty and students."

"There's little to be said" about the resignation, Davis wrote in his email forgoing the post. "It's obvious that the University has been put under excruciating pressure by clerical reactionaries."

Terrence Tilley, the chair of the theology department at Fordham University, said in an interview Wednesday he thought Lyons might be "confused" about the relevance of Beattie's signature on the August letter regarding same-sex marriage.

"Beattie doesn't dissent from doctrine," said Tilley, who is also the Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Professor of Catholic Theology at Jesuit-run Fordham. "[Beattie] has just made a statement about the legitimacy of Catholics voting in favor of civil rights for people who want to marry people of the same sex."

"Of course, on moral grounds, the church finds this wrong," Tilley continued. "But that she has chosen to make a statement regarding politics means that she is not denying or opposing Catholic doctrine."

Regarding Lyons' claim Beattie's signature on the August letter is "materially different from the exercise of scholarship and teaching" of a theologian, Tilley agreed with the university president.

"Lyons' claim that this action is materially different from the exercise of scholarship and teaching is entirely correct," Tilley said. "But it's one of the things that scholars and teachers do. We also function as public intellectuals."

In its letter on the matter, the American Association of University Professors referenced similar concerns it raised about the university in 2009, when USD revoked an offer of an honorary chair position to Rosemary Radford Ruether, a prominent U.S. Catholic feminism scholar and theologian.

Referencing Beattie and Ruether's rescissions, Tilley said that "the only conclusion I can draw is that the University of San Diego has again showed its disdain for serious academic theological scholarship, at least if it's done by women."

Floyd also portrayed Lyons' decision as opposed to allowing a diversity of viewpoints on campus.

"Diversity is the hallmark of education," he said. "If you can’t have opposing viewpoints, what exactly are you looking at if you can’t engage in dialog about those matters? What exactly does a university do?”

Convicted US Bishop " Elephant in the Room" at US Bishops Annual Meeting

As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops gathers for its annual fall meeting Nov. 12-15 in Baltimore, one of the biggest issues confronting the prelates won't be on the formal agenda: how to cope with the re-election of a president whose policies many bishops denounced as unprecedented attacks on the Catholic church.

But another topic not on the agenda may loom just as large for a hierarchy hoping to wield influence in the public square. In September, Bishop Robert Finn of Missouri became the first bishop to be found guilty of covering up for a priest suspected of child abuse.

Unlike President Barack Obama's election, however, Finn's status isn't a subject the churchmen are eager to discuss.

The verdict against Finn, leader of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph and an outspoken conservative, initially prompted widespread calls for his resignation, a Vatican suspension or discipline from his fellow bishops.

Yet in the two months since Finn's conviction, no bishop or church authority has addressed his case, nor has anyone spoken to Finn privately, according to Jack Smith, Finn's spokesman.

"Bishop Finn will be attending the USCCB meeting, as he has been fulfilling all of his responsibilities as Bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph," Smith wrote in an email. "Bishop Finn and the Diocese, through its Office of Child and Youth Protection, are actively engaged in fulfilling the terms of probation."

Smith added that Finn did not intend to address the bishops either in their public or closed-door sessions. USCCB officials also said there were no plans by conference leaders to raise the issue of Finn's status.

By remaining silent on the issue, critics say the bishops are not only undermining their own policies -- Finn heads a diocese yet would not be allowed to teach Sunday school in an American parish under the USCCB's rules -- but they are undermining their credibility and their claims to have learned from the devastating scandal.

"Nothing has changed over the past 10 years," said Anne Burke, an Illinois state Supreme Court justice and an original leader of the National Review Board, a blue-ribbon panel of lay Catholics that the USCCB set up in 2002 to hold the bishops accountable.

Burke said the yawning hole in those policies is the lack of any mechanism for disciplining bishops who violate the charter, as the collection of child safety measures is known. While the bishops pledged to "apply the requirements of the charter also to ourselves," they have shown no willingness to do so, she said.

"They've never done anything before so why should we expect them to do anything now?"

David Clohessy of SNAP, the leading victims advocacy group, agreed. "Our secular justice system has punished his wrongdoing, but the full Catholic hierarchy has ignored his wrongdoing," he said of Finn. Clohessy said SNAP -- the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests -- was writing to Finn asking him to stay away from the Baltimore meeting as a sign of contrition.

There may be one opening for movement on the issue next week: Al J. Notzon III, current head of the 16-member National Review Board, said the board will be meeting in Baltimore and will talk about the problems raised by the Finn case.

"We will be discussing the issue of accountability and one of the issues we will be pressing is the issue of timely reporting," Notzon said Thursday.

Notzon declined to say whether the board would address Finn's case directly, but said that after their meeting they would then meet with the bishops' Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, headed by Bishop R. Daniel Conlon of Joliet, Ill.

Last August, Conlon told a conference of church workers who oversee child safety programs in American dioceses that the hierarchy's credibility on fixing the abuse problem is "shredded."

At the bishops' spring meeting in Atlanta in June, Notzon also warned some 200 bishops that they must follow their own policies against abuse more rigorously. "No one can no longer claim they didn't know" about what is required to protect children, Notzon said then.

On Sept. 6, Finn was found guilty of a single misdemeanor count for not telling police that one of his priests, Fr. Shawn Ratigan, had taken hundreds of lewd images of children in Catholic schools and parishes.

Evidence introduced by prosecutors showed that Finn, 59, had received numerous complaints about Ratigan's behavior over the course of a year, starting in December 2010, and did not tell authorities even after Ratigan attempted suicide. Ratigan, 46, subsequently pleaded guilty to federal child pornography charges.

Kathleen McChesney, a former FBI agent who was the first head of the USCCB's Office of Child and Youth Protection, agreed that the bishops have to discuss what happened and why in the "egregious" Ratigan case. And she said the best bishop to start that discussion would be Finn himself.

"The greatest gift he could give other bishops and the children is to come forward and talk about what happened," said McChesney, who now works as a consultant on child safety issues and often advises church groups and religious orders.

"What's at stake is continued disgruntlement, despair, and a lack of confidence and faith in the bishops," she said.

-David Gibson, Religious News Service

US University of San Diego Withdraws Theologian's Invite

A rare, but not unheard of, move has occurred at the University of San Diego. Tina Beattie, a professor of Catholic studies at London's private University of Roehampton known for her work in contemporary ethical issues and Catholic understandings of feminism, received notice of the cancellation Oct. 27. She was scheduled to take residence at the university on Tuesday.

There was pressure from the University's financial contributors over Professor Beattie's position on the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Although none of these issues were stipulated by the university she nevertheless had her invitation to the university withdrawn.

If this were truly a result of the cumulative fears of some financial backbenchers what does this signify for the future of Catholic Christian intellect? It is a slippery slope that has no clear end in sight. Professor Beattie is a world renowned theologian. I find the action of University of San Diego's President, Mary Lyons, to be lacking in justice and integrity. To bow, in the intellectual world, to outside pressure is to begin the process of eroding the very fabric with which our academic world is founded. To grow intellectually is to accept that we should never close the door on the surfacing of ongoing thought and reflection. What was Christ about if not dialogue?

I feel sorry for those "financial contributors" who pushed this to happen. I wonder what type of church they will find themselves in years from now. This "god in a box" mentality will guarantee a beautiful, if not empty, church.

For those interested in the article it may found here.