Catholic Dissidents Call for Openness

[struggle4progress]

John Paul Silenced Many, Critics Say

By Alan Cooperman and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 16, 2005; Page A01

VATICAN CITY -- Some quantitative measures of John Paul II's papacy are well known: He visited more countries, named more saints and issued more teaching documents than any other pope. But there is another statistic that is seldom mentioned here: By some estimates, the Vatican silenced or reprimanded more than 100 Roman Catholic theologians during John Paul's 26-year reign.

As 115 cardinals prepare to enter a conclave Monday to elect the next pope, dissidents are calling for a new openness and willingness to debate such topics as the ordination of women, condom use to fight HIV/AIDS and the morality of homosexuality.

"Suppression of thought, loss of ideas, closing down of discussion -- that's not an act of faith. That's not of the Holy Spirit," said Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun from Erie, Pa. "Unity is good, but it has a dark side." <snip>

Their appeals for greater tolerance of dissent are echoed by theologians such as the Rev. Hans Kung of Germany and the Rev. Charles E. Curran of the United States, both of whom were stripped of authority to teach in Catholic universities under John Paul. Neither Kung nor Curran has come to Rome, but they are speaking out. "Many people are now hoping for a pope who will seriously free up the log-jam of reforms" and "have the courage to make a new start," Kung said in a statement. <snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57560-2005Apr15.html

[Voltaire99]

1. An oxymoron

Catholic dissent is an honorable, yet ultimately futile, tradition. From the Liberation Theologists treated so scurrilously by the late Pope to US thinkers like father Daniel McGuire, it's a no-win proposition.

Why waste the effort on a backwards institution? Might as well try to "reform" the Republican Party.

[emad]

2. They'll get it in sackfuls when the Rome murder trial of "God's Banker"

Roberto Calvi resumes in a few weeks time.

[BuddhaGirl]

3. great article

well worth the read.

snip:

"John Paul II's presupposition was that the church teaches the truth about humankind," Curran said in a telephone interview from Southern Methodist University in Texas, where he is a professor. "But the Catholic tradition accepts that there are different levels of truth, and more significantly, history reminds us that the hierarchical church needs to learn the truth before it can teach it."

Curran noted that the Catholic Church long accepted slavery, barred the collecting of interest on loans, opposed democracy and battled freedom of conscience, which one 19th-century pope called "the sewer into which all garbage flows."

"John Paul II said slavery is intrinsically evil. If it is intrinsically evil, why did the Roman church not condemn it until the end of the 19th century?" Curran said. "The fact that we have changed our teaching on important things like slavery shows that the hierarchical church is a learner as well as a teacher -- and therefore you cannot be so absolutely certain about your teaching."

Good points - no reason why the church can't enter the 21st century on things like birth control, divorce, gays, etc. And women priests!

[struggle4progress]

7. Curran is a really wonderful Catholic theologian. eom

[TygrBright]

4. They can "call" all they want...

...but Ratz and the neanderthals are firmly in charge. They're no more likely to get what they want than the sun is to rise in the west tomorrow.

The Church has effectively been mothballed for another century or so. Look for a "reform" movement early in the 2080s, with actual changes sometime around 2130.

That's lickety-split, for the Church, believe it or not. They're on "God's time," after all.

Meanwhile, any Catholic (especially female or gay) who wants real spiritual leadership is on their own.

sadly,
Bright

[DeepModem Mom]

5. kick

[VegasWolf]

6. Foolish people, they won't affect the Catholic mega institution no

matter how retarded that institution is.

[Merlin]

8. "Soon the speeches... will be so many words in the wind..."

"Soon the speeches... will be so many words in the wind. Meanwhile within the church there is a crisis of hope and confidence." -- Hans Kung

Under JP2's papacy and the church continued its modern day descent into calcified thought and right wing ideology.

Yes, the man knew how to play to a crowd, and travelled, and helped drive the final stake through the heart of communism. He did many beneficial things. But underlying it all was a paternalistic dogmatism that shut down all of the vibrant excitement generated by Vatican II, and that essentially told Catholic thinkers to buy into a medieval mind set or get out of the church.

If his serious and extensive flaws are ignored in the rush to exalt and canonize him, then there can be no hope for a revitalization of Catholicism in 1st world countries where people are sufficiently educated to reason for themselves, and where serious minds rightly question the foolish moral contortions of the church--like forbidding contraception at the same time it rages against abortion (think of that absurd contradiction!), and at the same time it bemoans the spread of AIDS.

I especially like the way Father Giovanni Avena puts it in the article: "They let everyone watch the rituals. Then they forbid access to reality. There is no real participation. That is why in Italy you have plazas full of people for this kind of spectacle, and empty churches." The same can be said for all Europe and for growing portions of the USA.