BROTHER FRANCIS, YOU OWE US...

Dear Brother Francis,

   We are happy that you are coming to America in September, and we expect you to speak clearly and forcefully on the importance of family life, and on the sinfulness of our income inequality.  But you owe us much more.  You have already asked the faithful of the world for our best discernment on marriage and family life.  With all due respect, as you prepare for your visit, and when you come, you owe us the opportunity to help you more fully understand our North American sense of our faith, and with it, our sense of morality.

   Rome does not really understand or trust us North Americans.  The recent scandalous attack on our nuns' leadership is one example.  For another, back in the 1980's, when Pope John Paul II suppressed our bishops' documents on Peace, and on the Economy, he let it be known that our North American sense of the faith was not to be respected or trusted, but needed to be "Roman."   Pope Benedict XVI did not change Rome's attitude toward us.

   Admittedly, our shallow, greedy and sexually charged culture shows us to be heavily "secularized."  But looking more deeply, Rome does not see or appreciate our having any valid spiritual insights concerning our everyday experience of marriage and family--experience gained under very difficult social and cultural conditions.  Rome doesn't understand--or doesn't want to understand--why so many of our young people, and many others, are walking away from the church in large numbers.  Our disaffected brothers and sisters see our church, already disgraced by the sex abuse tragedy, as stultified and unprepared to help Catholics in their everyday struggle for authentic spiritual meaning in terms that fit our society and culture.

   Brother Francis, if you look deeply into our hearts and souls, you will see that very many of us are very sensitively attuned to the "signs of the times," i.e., to God's presence and intentions for us in our everyday society here in the United States.  We are very aware that we live in a culture that is running out of control.  Yes, some of us are caught up in the torrent, including some of our Catholic legislators and TV personalities, who actually foster our soul-dead inequalities for their own benefit.  But most of us are struggling very hard to live faithful lives, with little meaningful understanding, respect or guidance from our clergy, bishops and the Vatican.

   If we North American Catholics are to be an effective force in helping change the immoral social-economic structures of our society, we first need to be an effectively organized force as a fully participating and fully respected part of our own church.

   Brother Francis, you need to openly proclaim our full spiritual dignity and our shared ownership of our church as faithful, discerning laity.  You know that the church believes 

infallibly only when the whole church--all of us together--believe what God is teaching us.  And you know that there is no such accord today--and that we laity are being unjustly blamed for it.  You need to listen to us respectfully when we tell you the everyday experiences of our faith.  We know that our moral judgments are the result of our faith, especially of God's infinite love for us, and also of our best understanding of our own human nature, especially in matters of sexuality and love.  You owe us an open, respectful, contemporary discussion. Here are some suggestions:

1.  Let's start by discussing what for us is already a foregone conclusion.  Faithful Catholic married couples deeply experience the awesome beauty and responsibility of married love. We experience the pressures of today's unjust society and we have maturely discerned and decided that the responsible use of contraceptives is natural, reasonable and conducive to a good and loving marriage.  So let's discuss that Pope Paul VI was wrong when he rejected the valid findings of the birth control commission in 1968, and that faithful Catholic married couples have correctly discerned the truth of this matter.

 2.  Very, very many Catholic couples are working hard to live deeply committed married lives in our shallow culture.  And we know from experience that even the best intentioned marriages can and do die.  Certainly, in divorces one or both parties can be guilty, but also one party can be innocent, and in some cases, even both parties can be innocent.  Do you really believe that Jesus held all married people to perfection, here on earth, here in space/time?  Only God is perfect.

3.  Everyday we experience that our homosexual children and friends are normal, loving persons who have every right to engage in serious, responsible sexual love, as heterosexuals do.  Let's open the way to discuss sexual orientation openly and honestly, using the best understanding of today's science and God's overwhelming love for all of us. Once and for all, let's put aside what expert Biblical scholars know are outworn, incorrect, so-called Biblical "proofs."  Let's accept the updated, contemporary understanding of human nature, and let's open our homosexual children and friends to the opportunity for the fullness of love, as Christ already offers them.

4.  And while we're at it, just declare priestly celibacy to be optional, and then reopen the discussion on ordaining women.  Priests are not the image of the first century, male, Jewish Jesus, but of the eternal, infinite, universal Christ, in whom there is neither male nor female.

   By opening these important moral matters to the fullness of discussion and the light of truth, you will uplift and strengthen all American Catholics in our faith and moral judgments. And you will have enlisted an enthusiastic army, young and old, of ever spiritually maturing
"everyday prophets," who can speak and act, as Vatican II teaches, to elevate our society and culture, and where necessary, humbly and effective correct it, to make it more luminously human in the healing and saving grace of Christ.

   Brother Francis, God told Saint Francis to rebuild his church.  Today, we need nothing less than a deep restructuring of the church, so that all the baptized can claim their rightful ownership of it in accord with our own vocation and graces.  In September, you can more effectively open the way to that restructuring.  If you speak openly and clearly, our timid, reluctant bishops will hear you and hopefully learn how to open the way to this needed restructuring.

   Brother Francis, we are waiting.  Saint Francis is waiting.  Christ is waiting.

      

  

THE VATICAN NEVER ERRS

   During my years in Rome and at Vatican II, I had the pleasure of meeting Hans Kung, the Swiss born theologian who, together with Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) were then young, progressive assistants to the German Council Fathers.

   A few years later, Kung came to Philadelphia to speak at the University of Pennsylvania. He graciously invited me to come to hear him speak and to join others at dinner with him. During his talk, with a smile and twinkling eyes, he recited a little ditty in Latin.  He explained that it originally applied to the ancient Roman Senate, but he now applied it to the Roman Curia.

                                                      Senatus numquam errat.

Etsi errat,

Errata numquam corrigit,

Nisi videator erravisse.

The Senate never errs.

And even if it does err,

It never corrects its errors,

Lest it be seen to have erred.

   I just read that the Vatican has unexpectedly closed its long running dispute with the Leadership Committee of Women Religious.  A few years ago, clearly with Pope Benedict XVI's approval, Cardinal William Levada, and later his successor, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, accused the group of such things as promoting radical feminism, inviting unorthodox speakers, honoring Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, (whose outstanding book, Quest for the Living God, brings the understanding of God into today's everyday life), and most especially, paying too much attention to their work for social justice for the poor, sick and oppressed, while not stressing church doctrine regarding, e.g., same-sex marriage and abortion.  

   The nuns defended their sacred work in several ways, including riding around the country in a bus, to the great acclaim of the laity.  In their official defense, they defended themselves intelligently and vigorously, showing theological and spiritual maturity.  Cardinal Mueller, however, chastised them for showing regrettable attitude and behavior during the process, and being in open provocation to the Holy See.  No solution seemed in sight.

    And now, all of a sudden, everything is all right.  Clearly, Pope Francis intervened in this dispute.  The official report will be published next month.  According to the press, the Vatican will say that the nuns created a grave doctrinal crisis, and it will admonish them to ensure that their publications have a sound doctrinal foundation and that they take steps to safeguard the theological integrity of their programs. 

                                                                                                                                                                                       I sincerely hope that I'm wrong, but I would bet that the Vatican will not admit that it was wrong.  Not in any way.  Pope Francis may have intervened to end this sad nonsense, but I will bet he won't go far enough to have Cardinal Mueller, or even some lesser Vatican spokesperson, admit that the Vatican committed any error.  That will be a real shame.  If Francis misses this opportunity, he will further entrench the Roman Curia in their disastrous addiction to be right in every case.  And the church will lose more of what few shreds of credibility it still may have left.

   A major part of Francis' challenge is to reform the Curia's centuries old infrastructure of always being free from error--an error in itself that was disastrously reinforced by Vatican I's declaration of the pope's infallibility.  In the almost century and a half since Vatican I, the Curia has extended the aura of papal infallibility to cover itself.  As a result, the authority structure in the church has flip-flopped.  For example, the Curia should serve the bishops of the world.  Instead, the bishops serve the Curia.

   Completing Vatican I, Vatican II extended the infallibility of belief to all the members of the church taken together--laity, religious, clergy, hierarchy and pope--in its teaching on the "sense of the faithful."  But John Paul II and Benedict XVI never explained or implemented this important teaching.  So infallibility still resides in Rome alone.  In such a rigidly frozen power structure, the nuns and laity in general can never be right in their experienced belief, especially when their experienced belief arises from their Christ-like work in today's society.  

       

   Francis has a great opportunity to tell the truth about the humanity of the church and about its human errors.  He should have somebody at the Vatican show the nuns the basic human and spiritual respect they deserve, and humbly and truthfully, publicly apologize to them. But I fear the Curia will fight hard against admitting the obvious truth of their fallibility, a truth that has been buried under centuries of the leadership's distortion of power.