Saturday, July 23, 2011

Vatican facing increasingly open defiance among liberal priests

More than 150 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have signed a statement in support of a fellow cleric who faces dismissal for participating in a ceremony that purported to ordain a woman as a priest, in defiance of church teaching.

The American priests’ action follows closely on the heels of a “Call to Disobedience” issued in Austria last month by more than 300 priests and deacons. They stunned their bishops with a seven-point pledge that includes actively promoting priesthood for women and married men, and reciting a public prayer for “church reform” in every Mass.

And in Australia, the National Council of Priests recently released a ringing defense of the bishop of Toowoomba, who had issued a pastoral letter saying that, facing a severe priest shortage, he would ordain women and married men “if Rome would allow it.” After an investigation, the Vatican forced him to resign.

While these disparate acts hardly amount to a clerical uprising and are unlikely to result in change, church scholars note that for the first time in years, groups of priests in several countries are standing with those who are challenging the church to rethink the all-male celibate priesthood.
Read the rest here.

8 comments:

Igumen Gregory said...

sounds like the problems is not the priests but the bishops who tolerate this nonsense. Time to prune the garden of these old broken down libs. the Episcopal church would be a warmer climate for such nonsense!

Stephen said...

Pity Rome doesn't treat these guys the way it treated Lefebrve. Makes one wonder why.

Bob Glassmeyer said...

It's no surprise that the RC American bishops tolerate this crap; they did the same thing by setting up roadblocks when Benedict XVI made the Traditional Latin Mass more available. These "shepherds" will not get their priests in line, nor will the Vatican get the US bishops in line.

And if the priests who signed the statement are removed, which I think may happen AFTER the Pope's wedding, there will be fewer priests than now to administer the sacraments.

I wonder if the fewer numbers of priests and closing of churches have anything to do with the watering down of our faith, and of our obsession with making it "relevant" and "meaningful."

Ecgbert said...

In addition to the three good comments so far, ISTM this goofiness almost always comes from people living in Protestant countries, whence these ideas come, not from the heart of (the Holy Spirit guiding) the church.

Yes, kick those priests out and while we're at it the bishops who put up with that for so long or ever actually promoted it.

Stephen is definitely right about JPII's 'conservatism'. Archbishop Lefebvre was right not to trust him. Benedict has in theory opened the door to trads: he's even fixed all the real problems with the Novus Ordo in English! So I don't see a double standard from him.

Fr Gregory, the reasons more such don't just switch to Episcopalianism are 1) locally they get away with more or less what they want and 2) the Thomas Day factor, or, ironically, the Episcopalians retain more of the 19th-century Roman Catholic liturgical style they adopted about 50-100 years ago which I like and these low-church libs definitely don't. Day, a Catholic music professor, blames liberal low churchmanship not only on Modernism but a historic Irish indifference to flowery ritual, because they were persecuted in the mother country and couldn't have that. So instead of becoming Episcopalians, the American liberal priests want to turn Rome into a sort of low-church ethnic-white version of Episcopalianism (guitars, Glory and Praise and 'we get to change doctrine by vote').

Bob, to answer your last question, yes. Liberal Christianity is self-defeating; the kids cut right past it and besides they don't have many kids.

Ecgbert said...

P.S. Finish that thought!

2) the Thomas Day factor, or, ironically, the Episcopalians retain more of the 19th-century Roman Catholic liturgical style they adopted about 50-100 years ago, which I like and these low-church libs definitely don't, than Rome does locally in practice.

Pope Scoobus I said...

"Pity Rome doesn't treat these guys the way it treated Lefebrve. Makes one wonder why."

Lefebvre ordained bishops without papal mandate. These libs have not done that (yet).

"Stephen is definitely right about JPII's 'conservatism'. Archbishop Lefebvre was right not to trust him."

No. JPII quite obviously did a great deal to facilitate what Benedict XVI is only now able to carry out, especially with regard to the reform of the English translation of the Novus Ordo. I wonder who was pope when Liturgiam Authenticam was produced? I'm quite sure Benedict XVI has no concern over what you happen to think about JPII.

Stephen said...

Dear Pope Scoobus:
Puhleeze, you must get my drift; yes, these libs have not YET ordained bishops w/out papal mandate, but that is hardly my point, as I think you well know. NONE of these libs have ever had to endure the slings and arrows hurled at Lefebreve. Popes and Bishops find their backbone quite easily in taking on Lefebreve and his fellow travellers, knowing that they will be applauded by the secular world for doing so, but become jelly when it comes to taking on the liturgical destroyers of the left. Of course, that these lefties dominate most chanceries in the West (including Rome), it would take a bishop of real courage to cast even a raised eyebrow of skepticism at lefty nonsense.

Conchúr said...

Stephen,

Milingo was excommunicated, as were the four men he consecrated bishops. Exactly the same treatment as Lefebrve.