well but .. .yeah ...gee..........they're all just sinners, just like him... .heh. ..:-(
Remember this one?__Bring the Pope to Justice
by Christopher Hitchens Apr 22, 2010 8:00 PM EDT
Filip Singer / EPA-Corbis
Detain or subpoena the pope for questioning in the child-rape scandal? You must be joking! All right then, try the only alternative formulation: declare the pope to be above and beyond all local and international laws, and immune when it comes to his personal and institutional responsibility for sheltering criminals. The joke there would be on us.
The case for bringing the head of the Catholic hierarchy within the orbit of law is easily enough made. All it involves is the ability to look at a naked emperor and ask the question "Why?" Mentally remove his papal vestments and imagine him in a suit, and Joseph Ratzinger becomes just a Bavarian bureaucrat who has failed in the only task he was ever set—that of damage control. The question started small. In 2002, I happened to be on Hardball With Chris Matthews, discussing what the then attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas Reilly, had termed a massive cover-up by the church of crimes against children by more than a thousand priests. I asked, why is the man who is prima facie responsible, Cardinal Bernard Law, not being questioned by the forces of law and order? Why is the church allowed to be judge in its own case and enabled in effect to run private courts where gross and evil offenders end up being "forgiven"? This point must have hung in the air a bit, and perhaps lodged in Cardinal Law's own mind, because in December of that year he left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with a subpoena seeking his grand-jury testimony. Where did he go? To Rome, where he later voted in the election of Pope Benedict XVI and now presides over the beautiful church of Santa Maria Maggiore, as well as several Vatican subcommittees.
In my submission, the current scandal passed the point of no return when the Vatican officially became a hideout for a man who was little better than a fugitive from justice. By sheltering such a salient offender at its very heart, the Vatican had invited the metastasis of the horror into its bosom and thence to its very head. It is obvious that Cardinal Law could not have made his escape or been given asylum without the approval of the then pontiff and of his most trusted deputy in the matter of child-rape damage control, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Developments since that time have appalled even the most diehard papal apologists by their rapidity and scale. Not only do we have the letter that Cardinal Ratzinger sent to all Catholic bishops, enjoining them sternly to refer rape and molestation cases exclusively to his office. That would be bad enough in itself, since any person having knowledge of such a crime is legally obliged to report it to the police. But now, from Munich and Madison, Wis., and Oakland, come reports of the protection or indulgence of pederasts occurring on the pope's own watch, either during his period as bishop or his time as chief Vatican official for the defusing of the crisis. His apologists have done their best, but their Holy Father seems consistently to have been lenient or negligent with the criminals while reserving his severity only for those who complained about them.
As this became horribly obvious, I telephoned a distinguished human-rights counsel in London, Geoffrey Robertson, and asked him if the law was powerless to intervene. Not at all, was his calm reply. If His Holiness tries to travel outside his own territory—as he proposes to travel to Britain in the fall—there is no more reason for him to feel safe than there was for the once magnificently uniformed General Pinochet, who had passed a Chilean law that he thought would guarantee his own immunity, but who was visited by British bobbies all the same. As I am writing this, plaintiffs are coming forward and strategies being readied (on both sides, since the Vatican itself scents the danger). In Kentucky, a suit is before the courts seeking the testimony of the pope himself. In Britain, it is being proposed that any one of the numberless possible plaintiffs might privately serve the pope with a writ if he shows his face. Also being considered are two international approaches, one to the European Court of Human Rights and another to the International Criminal Court. The ICC—which has already this year overruled immunity and indicted the gruesome president of Sudan—can be asked to rule on "crimes against humanity"; a legal definition that happens to include any consistent pattern of rape, or exploitation of children, that has been endorsed by any government.
In Kentucky, the pope's lawyers have already signaled their intention to contest any such initiative by invoking "sovereign immunity," since His Holiness is also an alleged head of state. One wonders if sincere Catholics really desire to take refuge in this formulation. The so-called Vatican City, a political nonentity covering about 0.17 square miles of Rome, was created by Benito Mussolini in 1929 as part of his sweetheart deal between fascism and the papacy. It is the last survival of the political architecture of the Axis powers. Its bogus claim to statehood is now being used to give asylum to men like Cardinal Law.
In this instance the church damns itself both ways. It invites our challenge—this is where the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights becomes relevant—to its standing as a state. And it calls attention to the repellent origins of that same state. Currently the Holy See has it both ways. For example, it is exempt from the annual State Department Human Rights Report precisely because it is not considered a state. (It maintains only observer status at the United Nations.) So, if it now does want to claim full statehood, it follows that it should receive the full attention of the State Department for its "lay" policies, and, for that matter, the full attention of the Justice Department as well. (First order of business—why on earth are we not demanding the extradition of Cardinal Law? And why is this grave matter being left to private individuals to pursue?)
It is very difficult to resist the conclusion that this pope does not call for a serious investigation, or demand the removal of those responsible for a consistent pattern of child rape and its concealment, because to do so would be to imply the call for his own indictment. But meanwhile why are we expected to watch passively or wonder idly why the church does not clean its own filthy stable? A case in point: in 2001 Cardinal Castrillón of Colombia wrote from the Vatican to congratulate a French bishop who had risked jail rather than report an especially vicious rapist priest. Castrillón was invited this week to conduct a lavish Latin mass in Washington. The invitation was rightly withdrawn after a storm of outrage, but nobody asked why the cardinal could not be held as an accessory to an official Vatican policy that has exposed thousands of American children to rapists and sadists.
Only this past March did the church shamefacedly and reluctantly agree that all child rapists should now be handed over to the civil authorities. Thanks a lot. That was a clear admission that gross illegality, and of the nastiest kind, has been its practice up until now. Euphemisms about sin and repentance are useless. This is a question of crime—organized crime, by the way—and therefore of punishment. Or perhaps you would rather see the shade of Mussolini thrown protectively over the Vicar of Christ? The ancient Roman symbol of the fish is rotting—and rotting from the head.
I simply do not understand and never will why someones CIVIL LAWS from any country .. allowed Any Church to take any CRIMINAL (LAW) ..( especially one involved in the most heinous of all crimes against humanity with little children ) and allow them to calmly get on a plane and fly into Italy . I guess the Vatican ... and then fly off again to a beautiful island .. .Scott FREE! .... why is this possible ? ... .. what about Interpol? or something! ..
I'd love him to say no to all the dogma and rules, too .. lol, even searched just now 'could Pope Francis have stopped the excommunication of Reynold's?' .. maybe he could have .. and .. wow .. if he had, and that had then been reported how FUNTASTICO it would it have been!!! .. lolol ..but if he were that much of a rebel, of course he would never had a chance of being the Pope which .. don't know about his whole career, but would guess for some time he probably has been thinking about, anyone who gets there probably would have been .. thing is, as has been said many times by many people now over time, he is a Catholic and they are a very conservative religion .. and they have a terrible history .. still do .. for sure he has not rebelled nearly as much as many others still in the church have .. that's for sure, as if he were anywhere near that mode, to be elected Pope he would have had to fool most everyone .. even if he were the guy who might eg allow disobedience, or disrespect to the Eucharist, he would have had to be totally dishonest about many things .. as you i sure wish he would take some action against that Bernard Law guy, and others like him .. most anyone would except Law, the others and their supporters .. i really do appreciate your position .. lol .. it's one i could easily take .. my choosing not to does not mean i don't feel as strongly as you do about all of that stuff, am not letting Bergoglia of the hook for any of it .. it just means that in looking at Pope Francis i choose .. lol .. because it helps me to feel better .. to hope for, and to acknowledge some good things about him which could make a difference over time in the institution he leads .. so that's my rant on that .. :) .. oh, on the above mentioned search i got this one ..
Soon, many optimistic, not to say naïve, Catholics—and Protestants—will be shocked to learn that the kindly new Pope Francis has excommunicated an Australian priest .. http://ncronline.org/news/global/australian-priest-advocate-womens-ordination-excommunicated .. for supporting women’s ordination. Perhaps it’s all right to be obsessed with some pelvic issues after all.
According to the National Catholic Reporter, Rev. Gregory Reynolds, of Melbourne, was notified on September 18 that he had “incurred latae sententiae excommunication for throwing away the consecrated host or retaining it ‘for a sacrilegious purpose’” (Somebody in Reynolds’s small Eucharistic community had apparently given the host to a dog) as well as for “speaking publicly against church teaching.” A letter to the priests of the archdiocese clarified that Reynolds’s support of women’s ordination was a primary reason for his excommunication.
I am not among those shocked by this development. As enthusiastic commentary about the new pope flowed out from the media in recent weeks, I was reminded of a comment my husband used to make about the police in Philadelphia back when we lived there. Some poor kid shoplifted something and BAM, there’d be three police cars surrounding him. “These boys don’t play,” my hubby would say. Neither do popes and cardinals, no matter how benign they seem.
Other Catholic feminists—Mary Hunt .. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/7313/what_the_church_needs_more_than_a__good_pope_/ , for example—expressed wariness of the new pope even before Reynolds’s excommunication. It was not lost on us that even in the first interview, on the plane from Brazil .. http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-holds-press-conference-on-flight-back-from-br , Pope Francis drew the line at women’s ordination. Indeed, the clear hierarchical distinction between genders underpinned by the refusal to ordain women has been the line in the sand since just after the Roman persecution of the church. But since John Paul II’s 1994 statement declaring women’s ordination absolutely off-limits, it’s been a twofer: something the church “has always taught,” and an example of “papal infallibility.” Never mind that papal infallibility applies only to church doctrine; no pope is going to undercut his own authority.
Of course, the boys’ declaring women’s ordination the line in the sand is something just this side of a death wish for the church. Despite attempts to obscure the fact, the men now in seminaries can’t begin to replace the priests retiring and dying, or to reverse the parish closings that necessarily follow. I have been arguing for forty years that women’s ordination is a fundamentally conservative issue; I cannot tell you how many Catholic women I know who would have been perfectly happy living their lives as grunt parish priests, baptizing and marrying and burying people. Instead, they’re picketing cathedrals, or writing articles for Religion Dispatches.
Of course, Pope Francis’s position on women’s ordination doesn’t mean he won’t initiate other more moderate reforms in the Catholic church. Indeed, his position on this issue may well be an olive branch to the conservative wing of the church so as to be able to introduce other changes. Pope Bergoglio is a strategic centrist; in Argentina he proposed civil unions as a compromise between the right-wing bishops on one side and the Kirchner government’s efforts to legalize gay marriage on the other
Then again, describing Pope Francis as a “strategic centrist” may credit him and the rest of the institutional church with more coherence than is warranted. I concluded a previous version of this article with speculation that Pope Francis’s origins in a machismo culture played some role in his excommunication of Rev. Reynolds. Just after I mailed it to Religion Dispatches,, an NCR blog by Phyllis Zagano .. http://ncronline.org/blogs/just-catholic/what-pope-really-said .. appeared in my inbox. Francis had apparently spoken negatively about machismo in the original Italian version of his famous interview published last week by fifteen Jesuit journals. But somehow, the English version published in the Jesuits’ America magazine omitted the statement. Since then, America has apologized .. http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/america-apologizes-omission-francis-interview .
Maybe the pope sucker punched us by excommunicating Father Reynolds. Maybe he knew nothing about it. Maybe we’ll get a kiss tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Dario Thuburn Date October 23, 2013 - 11:56PM 5 reading now
[ VIDEO ] Pope banishes 'bishop of bling' German bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst spent nearly $42 million on his residence, prompting Pope Francis to boot him from his diocese.
The Vatican has suspended a scandal-tainted German Catholic cleric dubbed the "bling bishop" for his luxury lifestyle, despite multiple calls for the prelate to be dismissed.
"The Holy See deems it appropriate to authorise a period of leave from the diocese for Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst," the Vatican said in a statement on Wednesday.
"The Holy Father has been continuously and objectively informed of the situation," it said.
Lavish: Germany. Bishop Tebartz-van Elst is accused of wasting money to refurbish and rebuild the residence, right, for more than 31 million euros ($42 million). Photo: AP
"A situation has been created in which the bishop can no longer exercise his episcopal duties." Advertisement
It did not specify how long the bishop would have to stay away but added that this would depend on an analysis of the finances of his Limburg diocese and the responsibilities for its high costs.
The bishop flew to Rome last week with low-cost airline Ryanair to explain himself to Pope Francis – following accusations he took a business-class ticket on a trip to India and squandered money.
Suspended: Bishop of Limburg Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst. Photo: AP
His private quarters in a new diocesan building are reported to have cost some €2.9 million ($4.15 million) and included a 63-square-metre dining room and a €15,000 bathtub - using the revenue from a religious tax in Germany.
The reports have caused a scandal in Germany and sparked calls for greater transparency in Catholic Church finances - a reform aim of the new Pope who has called for a "poor church for the poor".
The 53-year-old bishop is under fire over the ostentatious building project in the ancient town of Limburg, which includes a museum, conference halls, a chapel and private apartments.
The project was approved by his predecessor and was initially valued at €5.5 million but the final bill ballooned to €31 million, including a €783,000 garden.
Bishop Tebartz-van Elst is also accused of giving false statements in court about an expensive flight he took to India to visit poor communities.
Prosecutors say the bishop gave false statements under oath in a Hamburg court battle against news weekly Der Spiegel when he denied having told the magazine's journalist that he flew business class.
Anger that taxes paid to the church by ordinary Germans are apparently being squandered has led to demonstrations outside his residence.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, daughter of a Protestant pastor, has said via her spokesman that "I can express the hope that there will be an answer for believers, for people's confidence in their church".
Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Treves, in West Germany, last week told Germany's public television chain ARD that the situation has "escalated to the extent that Bishop Franz-Peter can no longer on principle work in Limburg".
The embattled bishop has defended the project, saying the centuries-old cathedral complex adjacent to the modernist new structure is heritage protected, complicating the development.
Critics within and outside the church have contrasted the premium architectural project with the more humble style of Pope Francis and asked how much good the money could do if used as aid in poverty-stricken African countries.
Pope Francis has made several key gestures of a more humble style since coming to office in March and has condemned big-spending clerics.
Germany's top Catholic cleric, Robert Zollitsch, who met the pope last week, has set up a commission to investigate the Limburg diocese.
Polish Archbishop Jozef Michalik Sex Abuse Comments Prompt Outrage: 'Child Seeking Love' Because Of Divorced Parents
WARSAW, POLAND: Archbishop Jozef Michalik, 63, of Przmysl poses for a portrait 18 March 2004 in Warsaw, after he was elected president of the Polish Episcopal Conference succeeding Cardinal Jozef Glemp, who has held the post for 23 years. (JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's most senior Catholic cleric said children with divorced parents were sometimes more vulnerable to sexual abuse by priests, remarks that prompted a storm of outrage though the church later said it was a slip of the tongue.
The comments from Archbishop Jozef Michalik entrenched the view among some younger Poles that the church is out of touch with modern society and failing to properly confront allegations of sexual abuse by priests.
In comments shown on Tuesday by broadcaster TVN24, Michalik said child sexual abuse by priests was unacceptable, but the debate about it needed to be broadened out beyond the immediate physical or psychological wounds inflicted on the victims.
"And one has to say ... how many wounds are inflicted when parents divorce? We often hear that this inappropriate attitude (paedophilia), or abuse, manifests itself when a child is seeking love," said the clergyman, who is head of the Roman Catholic episcopate in Poland.
"It (the child) clings, it searches. It gets lost itself and then draws another person into this."
After the comments were broadcast, Polish social media networks reverberated with angry comments.
"This is disgusting, and is soaked in a sick logic, when a victim is responsible for a crime," wrote one person, who gave her name as Anna, posting on Facebook.
Another poster on the site, who identified himself as Adam, wrote: "While reading this, we can only be happy that this 'Polish institution' has committed ritual suicide."
Church authorities later on Tuesday convened a news conference to try to calm the outrage. A spokesman for the episcopate said the archbishop's comments had been a "a pure slip of the tongue" and the archbishop has been misunderstood.
Michalik himself, who was present at the news conference, apologised for the situation. "The context of my comment was as follows: a child is always innocent. But it can be hurt not only by priests but also by its own environment," he said.
Poland is one of Europe's most devoutly Catholic countries. The church's role at the centre of public life was cemented when clergymen, led by Polish-born Pope John Paul II, helped bring down Communist rule in the late 1980s.
That role is now being challenged by a generation of Poles who feel uncomfortable with the church's traditional views on issues such as abortion, divorce and same-sex partnerships.
While the Catholic church in countries such as Ireland and the United States has taken steps to be more assertive about uncovering child sex abuse by priests, in Poland it remains largely a taboo subject.
Abuse allegations are reported from time to time in the Polish media, but there has so far been no far-reaching public debate about the issue.
Pope Francis said soon after he was elected as Roman Catholic pontiff this year that he wanted to act decisively to root out sexual abuse of children by priests and ensure the perpetrators are punished.
Poland's Catholic Church Slammed On Sex Abuse And Excuse That Children Are Partly To Blame
By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA 10/23/13 02:17 AM ET EDT
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The leader of Poland's Catholic Church has come under a wave of condemnation by appearing to suggest that children are partly to blame for being sexually abused by priests.
Archbishop Jozef Michalik, head of Poland's influential Episcopate, was commenting this month on revelations about Polish pedophile priests. A child from a troubled family, Michalik told reporters, "seeks closeness with others and may get lost and may get the other person involved, too."
The words triggered an immediate uproar — one that Michalik tried to stamp out the same day by apologizing and saying he had been misunderstood. He had not, he said, meant to suggest that child victims were in any way responsible.
But the damage was done.
Ordinary citizens joined prominent politicians in expressing outrage, and intense debate continues more than two weeks later. The media pointed out that Michalik had supported a parish priest convicted in 2004 of child sex abuse, and one of the priest's victims said she was horrified by Michalik's latest remarks.
"Archbishop Michalik's words make us feel fear and revulsion," Ewa Orlowska said.
The archbishop's comments forced the Episcopate's spokesman, the Rev. Jozef Kloch, to state that Poland's church has "zero tolerance" for pedophilia but that it needs to learn how to approach and talk about the matter. The controversy has since led bishops under Michalik to apologize for "priests who have harmed children."
It all comes amid a tide of allegations that Poland's church is sweeping cases of sex abuse under the carpet, putting it at odds with Vatican efforts since 2001 to punish abusers. The scrutiny has also further undermined the church's status in Poland as a moral and political leader — cemented by Polish-born Pope John Paul II through his critical role in inspiring the fight against communism. The church's defenders say that priests are being singled out for condemnation when teachers and sports coaches have also been caught sexually abusing kids.
John Paul himself came under criticism for a reluctance to heed accusations against priests. While the Vatican in 2001 ordered bishops to submit cases of alleged pedophilia to the Holy See's review, it was largely the initiative of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. After the church sex abuse scandal erupted in 2002 in the United States, Ratzinger pressed for faster ways to permanently remove abusers from the church.
The crackdown against pedophile priests gained intensity once Ratzinger became Benedict XVI. In 2011, Benedict instructed bishops' conferences around the world to submit their own guidelines for keeping molesters out of the priesthood and to protect children.
Poland's Episcopate has issued guidelines for the church's punishment of priests and support for the victims. But it sees no need to report priests to state investigators and says that the financial compensation rests with the wrongdoer, not with the church. That approach may soon be tested by a man who is readying Poland's first sex abuse lawsuit against the church.
In several countries, including the U.S., Canada and Australia, the church has been paying millions in compensation over sex abuse cases.
Michalik also recently raised eyebrows by saying that the roots of pedophilia lay in pornography and divorce, both of which are "painful and long-lasting wounds."
The debate started last month after Dominican Republic investigators revealed child sex abuse allegations against two Polish clergymen: Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, the Vatican's ambassador, and Rev. Wojciech Gil, a parish priest. Wesolowski has been forcibly removed by the Vatican. Gil has denied sex abuse and suggested that Dominican drug mafia is taking revenge on him for his educational work.
Some 27 Polish priests have been tried for sex abuse since 2001, but most cases ended in suspended prison term — indicating a general leniency for the church in Poland, where religion is taught in schools and senior church officials attend state ceremonies.
ROME (RNS) - Vatican officials say they expect next year’s celebration for the canonizations of former popes John Paul II and John XXIII to be attended by as many as 100 heads of state in what is likely to be the biggest draw in the city since John Paul’s funeral in 2005.
The crowd estimates were made Tuesday (Oct. 22), the feast day for John Paul. This will be the last time he will be venerated as Blessed Pope John Paul II; after the canonization ceremony on April 27, 2014, he will be known as St. Pope John Paul II.
John Paul’s 2005 funeral may have been the single largest gathering in Christian history, with estimates as high as 4 million mourners gathered in the Italian capital, along with at least 80 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs.
Around 1 million faithful were estimated to have been on hand for the 2011 Mass that beatified John Paul, and nearly that many for the conclave that resulted in Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio becoming Pope Francis earlier this year.
Next year’s canonization ceremony — which is expected to draw tens of thousands of visitors from John Paul’s native Poland — should surpass both those events in terms of attendance, according to city officials.
Vatican Halts Catholic Remarriage Debate; Annulment Still Required For Divorced Couples To Receive Communion
German Archbishop Gerhard Mueller
By NICOLE WINFIELD 10/22/13 01:03 PM ET EDT
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Tuesday quashed hopes that there might be some wiggle room on one of its longstanding rules about the indissolubility of marriage, making clear that a recent German initiative on the matter was contrary to church teaching.
The Vatican's chief doctrine official, German Archbishop Gerhard Mueller, wrote Tuesday that there is no way for Catholics who divorce and remarry to receive Communion unless they get an annulment, a church ruling that their first marriage never really existed.
"God's mercy does not dispense us from following his commandments or the rules of the church," he wrote in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
Church teaching holds that Catholics who don't have their first marriage annulled before remarrying cannot participate fully in the church's sacraments because they are essentially living in sin and committing adultery. Such annulments are often impossible to get or can take years to process. The issue has vexed the Vatican for decades and has left generations of Catholics feeling shunned by their church.
Earlier this month, the German diocese of Freiburg upset the Vatican when it issued a set of guidelines explaining how such remarried Catholics could get around the rule. It said if certain criteria are met — if the spouses were trying to live according to the faith and acted with laudable motivation — they could receive Communion and other sacraments of the church.
The Vatican immediately shot down the initiative but said the matter would be discussed at a church meeting next year on the family.
Mueller's article in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano seemed aimed at ending the debate before it even off the ground.
Mueller cited repeated documents from popes past and his own office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in rejecting arguments that mercy should win out over church rules or that people should follow their own consciences to decide if their first marriage was valid or not.
"It is not for the individuals concerned to decide on its validity, but rather for the church," he wrote.
Pope Francis has acknowledged the need to address the issue and has said the church's tribunal system needs to be fixed.
Bishop’s suspension a symptom of German Catholic Church’s wealth
Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg, Germany, leaves a meeting of the Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization at the Vatican in this Oct. 19, 2012. Photo by Alessia Giuliani, courtesy CNS
(2006) Christian Weisner Photo courtesy Christian Weisner
Head of the German Bishop’s Conference, Robert Zollitsch. Photo courtesy Andreas Gerhard/Bishopric of Freiburg.
Nele Mailin Obermueller and Jabeen Bhatti | Oct 23, 2013
BERLIN (RNS) The $20,000 bathtub and $482,000 walk-in closets ordered by “Bishop Bling-Bling” — the moniker of Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, the now-suspended bishop of Limburg — have scandalized the German public.
But Tebartz-van Elst, 52, is only the latest German clergyman to run into trouble since Pope Francis took the helm of the Roman Catholic Church. Francis temporarily suspended [ http://news.yahoo.com/pope-expels-german-luxury-bishop-diocese-102947374.html ] the bishop on Wednesday while a church commission investigates the expenditures on the $42 million residence complex.
As the new pontiff tries to reform the way the church does business, German dioceses, which reportedly include the world’s wealthiest in Cologne, are chafing under the new direction as membership numbers continue to dwindle.
“Tebartz-van Elst is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Christian Weisner, spokesman for the German branch of We Are Church, an organization advocating Catholic Church reform. “There is a real clash of cultures between Germany’s current cardinals and bishops — nominated under John Paul II or Benedict XVI — and Pope Francis.”
Since becoming pope, Francis has repeatedly urged the church to strip itself of all “vanity, arrogance and pride” and humbly serve the poorest in society. Under Francis, priests living in luxury are no longer merely unseemly, but a scandal.
Still, even as Francis drives around Vatican City in a 20-year-old white Renault clunker gifted by an Italian priest, the head of the German Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, balked at the idea of giving up his company car, a BMW 740d.
“To me that car is not a status symbol, it is the office I use when I am traveling,” Zollitsch said at a press event in early October, when asked whether he would trade it down.
In Germany, most of the church’s top officials drive high-powered Mercedes, BMWs or Audis.
Other German clergymen have been chastised for lavish expenditures. Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich’s archdiocese spent around $11 million renovating the archbishop’s residence and another $13 million for a guesthouse in Rome.
Still, for German Catholics, those luxuries pale in comparison to the current case surrounding Tebartz-van Elst and the renovation of his residence in Limburg, which is close to Frankfurt. Originally, the refurbishment of the estate’s 10 buildings had been slated to cost $7.5 million but it ballooned to almost six times that amount because of extravagances such as expensive fixtures.
Carsten Frerk, who specializes on church finances in Germany, said German bishops’ reluctance to follow Francis’ new course is no surprise.
“The German Catholic Church is one of the country’s wealthiest and largest organizations and its top officials expect a certain lifestyle,” said Frerk, who has published two books on the German churches’ wealth and what he describes as their opaque financing. “But they are wary of the extent of their wealth becoming broadly known because it might lead to fewer donations.”
There are 23 million German Catholics who have declared their faith and by law must pay 8 to 10 percent of their incomes to their respective churches. That brought the Catholic Church $7.1 billion in tax revenue in 2012.
Since the secularization process instigated by Napoleon in the early 19th century, the state also pays the Protestant and Catholic churches an annual allowance as compensation, which yielded a combined total of about $12 million for the Christian groups in 2012.
But the 27 Catholic dioceses in Germany have a large number of assets, such as real estate or bonds. According to John Berwick, religious affairs analyst for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the diocese of Cologne is richer than the Vatican.
Meanwhile, the case of Tebartz-van Elst has focused the spotlight on the church’s opaque financing.
In 2010, 25 of Germany’s 27 dioceses refused to supply the newsweekly Der Spiegel with information on their budgets and assets. Following the Tebartz-van Elst scandal, several bishoprics — including Cologne, Hamburg, Essen and Munster — have made their financial figures public.
There are advantages to the German church’s wealth. Mathew Schmalz, theologian and professor at the Massachusetts-based College of the Holy Cross, who now lives in Sri Lanka, said that without its resources, the church could not support projects in developing countries.
And in Germany, that is the crux of the problem, say analysts. It is important to show congregations that clergy are not the arrogant, aloof spiritual advisers that many German Catholics believe they have become.
For example, after the spending on the renovations came to light, petitions for Tebartz-van Elst to step down circulated. But the bishop remained silent.
And even though he flew to Rome for an audience with the pope on a budget flight rather than the first-class fare, many say such a gesture was too little too late.
Now the question remains to what extent the traditional German church can keep step with Pope Francis’ reforms and whether their efforts could put a stop to their bleeding membership rolls — predicted to reduce Christians to a minority within Germany in the next 20 years.
In 2010, 181,000 left the church after the sexual abuse scandals involving German priests were made public. Another 126,000 in 2011 and 118,000 in 2012 followed suit.
“I think this conflict surrounding Tebartz-van Elst, who is not willing to resign, will be one of the defining moments for the future course of the Catholic Church,” Weisner said. “This is a historic moment in time and a unique chance for renewal.”
(Sumi Somaskanda contributed to this story from Berlin.)
Pope Francis breathes new life into Cardinal Bernardin’s contested legacy
(1983) Pope John Paul II places a red biretta on the head of Archbishop Joseph L. Bernardin of Chicago as he was elevated to cardinal during a Feb. 2 consistory at the Vatican. Cardinal Bernardin was one of 18 new cardinals invested at the service. Religion News Service file photo
(1982) The Rev. Daniel E. Pilarczyk (right) succeeded Archbishop Joseph L. Bernardin (left), who became archbishop of Chicago in July 1982. Religion New Service file photo
David Gibson | Oct 24, 2013
(RNS) The election of Pope Francis in March heralded a season of surprises for the Catholic Church, but perhaps none so unexpected – and unsettling for conservatives – as the re-emergence of the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as a model for the American Catholic future.
While there is no indication that Francis knows the writings of Bernardin, who died in 1996, many say the pope’s remarks repeatedly evoke Bernardin’s signature teachings on the “consistent ethic of life” – the view that church doctrine champions the poor and vulnerable from womb to tomb – and on finding “common ground” to heal divisions in the church.
Ironically, the re-emergence of Bernardin — a man who was admired by a young Chicago organizer named Barack Obama — is exposing the very rifts he sought to bridge, especially among conservatives who thought his broad view of Catholicism was buried with him in Mount Carmel Cemetery outside Chicago.
Francis, for example, repeatedly stresses economic justice and care for the poor as priorities for Catholics, and he warned [ http://www.religionnews.com/2013/10/01/excerpts-pope-francis-new-interview/ ] that the church has become “obsessed” with a few issues, such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality, and needs a “new balance.”
The new pope has also sought to steer the hierarchy away from conservative politics and toward a broad-based view of Catholicism “that is not just top-down but also horizontal” — focused on dialogue in the church and with the wider world.
“The point that (Bernardin’s) consistent ethic makes is exactly the same point that Pope Francis is making – let’s look at the whole picture and not just focus almost exclusively on three or so issues,” said Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, N.M., who had been close friends with Bernardin since the 1970s.
“I certainly think that if Cardinal Bernardin were alive he would be very pleased with what Pope Francis is saying and doing,” echoed Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza, retired archbishop of Galveston-Houston, whose 1998-2001 term as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was seen as one of the last in the mold of Bernardin.
“The consistent ethic of life theory that Bernardin proposed is getting a second look,” Fiorenza said.
Several other bishops, church officials and observers agreed. But if those assessments are manna to Catholics hungry for a new direction in the church, they are anathema to conservatives who believe Bernardin epitomized everything that was wrong with the U.S. church before Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI pushed the hierarchy to the right.
“The Bernardin Era is over and the Bernardin Machine is no more,” the conservative writer George Weigel wrote in the journal First Things [ http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/01/the-end-of-the-bernardin-era ] in a 2011 essay that trumpeted the end of a time “in which a liberal consensus dominated both the internal life of the Church and the Church’s address to public policy.”
The fact that Weigel and others would still be driving a stake through the heart of Bernardin’s legacy – as Peter Steinfels put it in a rejoinder [ https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/fabricating-bernardin ] in Commonweal magazine – 15 years after his death is a testimony to the stature Bernardin once had, and the angst he can still inspire.
In fact, a generation ago, Bernardin was viewed as the quintessential American churchman – a longtime president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and then its resident wise man, coaxing the hierarchy into approving landmark documents on war and poverty that shaped the public debate on faith in America.
Yet the “John Paul II bishops” who came to power in the 1980s and beyond saw Bernardin’s style and views as too accommodating, and too reluctant to mount the barricades on behalf of a more assertive Catholic identity marked by a few hallmark issues rather than a spectrum of teachings.
In the end, the cardinal who championed consultation and reconciliation was unceremoniously pushed aside by many of his own colleagues. In 1996, as he approached the end of a poignant battle with pancreatic cancer, Bernardin launched the “Common Ground Initiative” as a final effort to try to end the growing polarization in the church.
Now, however, Francis is pope, and that gives Bernardin’s acolytes some measure of hope. But the real question is whether the U.S. hierarchy is too far removed from the Bernardin era for it to make a difference.
In 2010, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Ariz., a Chicago priest who had served under Bernardin, was in line to be elected president of the USCCB when conservatives engineered the election of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan instead, a maneuver seen as the definitive end [ http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/481/the_end_of_the_bernardin_era.aspx ] of Bernardin’s influence.
“While there are still those in the conference who might like to return to the Old Ways (of Bernardin), the pope isn’t interested in that and neither, in my judgment, are a critical mass of the bishops,” Weigel wrote in an email.
“I think the conference has missed the skills of Cardinal Bernardin,” said Sheehan.
The same could be said for Catholics in general, said Bishop Michael Warfel of Great Falls-Billings, Mont., current chair of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative [ http://www.catholiccommonground.org/board ], which has struggled to remain viable in the years since Bernardin died.
“I find it ironic that it’s almost easier for Christians to talk to Jews or Muslims than it is for some Catholics to talk to each other,” Warfel said. He added that, like Bernardin, Francis “is really providing a witness to a way of leading. … He doesn’t just want to have window-dressing dialogue.”
The Rev. Thomas Nairn, a leading Catholic ethicist who has edited two books on Bernardin’s consistent ethic of life, also notes that despite attacks on Bernardin himself, the principles that he preached remain embedded in Catholic discourse.
Papal encyclicals and documents from the U.S. bishops, such as their election-year guide for Catholic voters, reflect Bernardin’s “seamless garment” ethic that decries the death penalty as well as abortion and poverty. Bernardin’s ideas are central to the DNA of the Catholic health care system, and ethicists and moral theologians invoke his ideas, even if the younger generation prefers to associate them with John Paul or Benedict.
“Cardinal Bernardin always talked about the consistent ethic as both a principle and an attitude,” Nairn said. What is new, he said, is that Francis “has returned not only to the principle of the consistent ethic of life but he has also returned to Cardinal Bernardin’s tone.”
Pope Francis' Controversial Remarks Prompt Vatican 'Damage Control'
By NICOLE WINFIELD 10/09/13 09:20 AM ET EDT
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has grabbed headlines with his off-the-cuff homilies, crowd-pleasing one-liners and lengthy interviews during which he has pontificated on everything from the church's "obsession" with rules to how he won't judge gays. But his chattiness has gotten him into some trouble, and the Vatican has gone into damage-control mode to clarify, correct or put his comments into context. Here's a look at some of Francis' more eyebrow-raising comments, and the efforts by the Vatican's spin doctors to address them.
DID FRANCIS REALLY CONSIDER TURNING DOWN THE JOB?
In an interview with the Rome daily La Repubblica, editor Eugenio Scalfari quoted the pope as saying he was "seized by a great anxiety" moments after his election and asked the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel to give him a few minutes time to think things over.
"To make it go away and relax, I closed my eyes and made every thought disappear, even the thought of refusing to accept the position, as the liturgical procedure allows," he was quoted as saying. "At a certain point I was filled with a great light. It lasted a moment, but to me it seemed very long. Then the light faded, I got up suddenly and walked into the room where the cardinals were waiting." The pope was quoted as saying he signed the acceptance form and went out on the balcony to be introduced to the world as Pope Francis.
But the Rev. Thomas Rosica, who helps with Vatican media relations, later said the interview didn't reflect Francis' real words. He said Scalfari neither recorded the conversation nor took notes, reconstructing the conversation from memory and printing it as a verbatim interview. The Vatican doesn't dispute the overall thrust of the interview, which Scalfari said he submitted to Francis for review and which the Vatican newspaper reprinted verbatim. But Rosica said the purported "mystical" experience recounted by Repubblica after the election didn't happen, though Francis himself has said previously and in public that "I didn't want to be pope."
CAN ATHEISTS BE SAVED?
One of the novelties introduced by Francis has been his daily 7 a.m. Mass in the Vatican hotel, to which groups and individuals are invited. Francis delivers homilies each day, the contents of which are summarized by Vatican Radio. On May 22, he caused no shortage of confusion when he suggested that even atheists could find salvation.
According to church teaching, the Catholic Church holds the "fullness of the means of salvation" — a message that has long been taken to mean that only Catholics can find salvation. But in his homily, Francis said: "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! 'Father, the atheists?' Even the atheists. Everyone!"
Rosica issued a lengthy "explanatory note" a few days later after being inundated with questions about whether Francis was changing church doctrine on salvation. He noted that church teaching also holds that "those who through no fault of their own" don't know about Jesus but seek God and try to do his will can also attain eternal salvation.
"Always keep in mind the audience and context of Pope Francis' homilies," Rosica cautioned. "His words are not spoken in the context of a theological faculty or academy nor in interreligious dialogue or debate. He speaks in the context of Mass."
SHOULD THE VATICAN BANK BE SAVED?
On April 24, Francis invited members of the Vatican bank to join him for Mass in the hotel. The Institute for Religious Works, as the bank is known, has been plagued by scandals — most recently over the arrest of a Vatican monsignor on charges he tried to smuggle some 20 million euro ($26 million) into Italy from Switzerland without declaring it at customs.
Given the scandals, the arrival of a reform-minded, non-nonsense pope has prompted a flurry of speculation that Francis might shut the bank down. So imagine the headlines that followed his April 24 homily, when he lamented how the church can sometimes become too bureaucratic, too much like an aid group, and that bureaucracies are necessary up to a point.
"The church isn't an NGO, it's a story of love," Francis told the bank's staff in the pews. "But there are the IOR folks here, excuse me, OK? Everything is necessary, offices are necessary, OK, but they're only necessary up to a certain point: as a help to this story of love. But when the organization loses this primary place, when the love is gone, the poor church becomes an NGO. And this isn't the way to go."
Archbishop Angelo Becciu, under secretary of the Vatican secretariat of state, told the Vatican newspaper a few days later that Francis was by no means hinting that he might shut down the Vatican bank.
THE VICAR OF CHRIST SAID WHAT?
Sometimes, Francis' one-liners don't warrant Vatican clarification, but they're worth repeating simply because they came from the lips of the Successor of Peter, Vicar of Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church:
— Francis urged the church to "strip" itself of its worldy attachment to wealth during his Oct. 4 trip to Assisi and focus instead on the basics of Christ's teachings. "You might say, 'Can't we have a more human Christianity, without the cross, without Jesus, without stripping ourselves?'" he asked rhetorically. "In this way we'd become pastry-shop Christians, like a pretty cake and nice sweet things. Pretty, but not true Christians."
— Francis was asked June 7 why he chose to live in the Vatican hotel rather than the fancier Apostolic Palace where his predecessors lived. "If I was living alone, isolated, it wouldn't be good for me," he told students of Jesuit schools. "A professor asked me the same question, 'Why don't you go and live there (in the papal apartments)'? And I replied: 'Listen to me professor, it is for psychiatric reasons.'"
— The pope has urged nuns and sisters to be like joyful mothers to the church, caring for its flock, and not act like they're "old maids." ''It makes me sad when I find sisters who aren't joyful," he lamented during his Oct. 4 visit to a cloistered convent in Assisi. "They might smile, but with just a smile they could be flight attendants!"
Given Francis' wry sense of humor and willingness to regularly ditch speeches prepared for him, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said he wants the faithful to know the difference between a pontifical joke and an encyclical, a clever quip in a homily and infallible teaching.
"There are different genres of expression, some are magisterial and official, others are more pastoral," Lombardi told The Associated Press. "They have a different doctrinal value."
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