Mass. Priest calls for Pope Benedict to resign

[struggle4progress]

... Father James Scahill is an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church's handling of the sexual abuse crisis. Sunday in his sermon he called on the Pope and other church leaders whom he believes have known about sexual abuse for decades to admit what they knew and when, or step down.

Father James Scahill: "If he could do this, if he would do this, I believe he will be remembered as a great pontiff but if he can't do this, and he won't do this, then integrity should lead him to resign" ...

Father James Scahill: "Now I am glad they are doing the right thing, but the only reason they are doing the right thing, is they were caught doing the wrong thing" ...

Father James Scahill: "Well the last two masses they gave me a standing ovation" ...

http://www.necn.com/04/12/10/Mass-Priest-calls-for-Pope-Benedict-to-r/landing.html?blockID=214970&feedID=4215

[Ken Burch]

1. That's one ballsy priest!

I'm guessing they'll have him in Galileo's old cell by Thursday.

[struggle4progress]

2. It makes many years now that Galileo and his detractors alike have returned to faceless dust

I find no shortage of crimes to concern me here and now in my own generation of the living

[Ken Burch]

6. It's true that Galileo was punished a long time ago

However, the Church only officially cleared him of wrongdoing in the 1990's.

It's possible that Father Scahill will be excommunicated now and canonized a couple of centuries down the road. It's often gone that way with the really interesting martyrs.

BTW, does anybody know if the good father is related to Jeremy Scahill? It would be wicked cool if they turned out to be brothers or something.

[struggle4progress]

7. I've never heard of anyone being excommunicated for suggesting that the Pope resign

Not being Catholic, of course, I have no special insight here -- but I'll guess you just pulled that suggestion from thin air

[Ken Burch]

8. Well, it's been a long time since any Catholic HAS called for a Papal abdication

so we don't really have much to go on. They were on the verge of forcing Father Roy Bourgeois, the heroic crusader against the taxpayer-subsidized torture training academy known as the School of the Americas, because he took part in an (obviously symbolic)ceremony at which women were ordained as priests. The Vatican argument against accepting women's ordination is that none of the Apostles were women. Someone might point out that none of the Apostles were Italian, Irish, Polish or German, as far as that goes. And that all of them had been circumcised.

My point was that that institution is particularly known for not taking kindly to direct challenges to the authority of the magisterium(and what Father Scahill has done here is about as direct a challenge as you can make.)

No attack on individual Catholics was intended(I was married to one for six years until she died), but rather a comment on the nature of the institution.

[struggle4progress]

9. Hermann Haering was suggesting last year Benedict should resign over the SSPX rehabs

I don't know that he was threatened with excommunication for it

[Ken Burch]

10. OK, I hadn't heard about Haering

There's an important distinction between him and Father Scahill, though:

Scahill is a priest. Haering is a theologian. I think there may be different levels of obedience required of the two roles.
And the Vatican, as far as that goes, has been willing to excommunicate theologians(they did it to Hans Kung, for his support of liberation theology).

I don't know of any other cases of priests calling for a pope to step down since, probably, the time of the Babylonian Capitivity and the reigns of various antipopes. Even then it would've been extremely rare and of far less consequence, since electronic communications as we know them didn't exist in those eras.

[struggle4progress]

11. Kung wasn't excommunicated or defrocked, though he was silenced

[Ken Burch]

12. OK, he was silenced, but they did threaten him with excommunication

What matters is that they made it impossible for him to express his views.

Is there a point to where you're going with all these picky little responses?

You've said you're not Catholic, so why are you so touchy about any criticism of that Church?

It's not like it's even possible for the Vatican to be persecuted or subjected to any real injustice. Why do you treat the Catholic hirearchy as if they could possibly be the victims in this story?

The Roman Catholic Church an insanely wealthy, pointlessly rigid, hopelessly corrupt and sexually twisted institution. It's handful of progressive or humane positions are trivial when compared to its pointless fixation with what people do with their genitals, its demand that Catholic women reproduce until they're past the point of exhaustion, and its bizarre and sickening focus on preventing abortion to the near-exclusion(until very, recently, and even then solely do to the work of people like Sr.Helen Prejean and the Berrigan brothers)of any concern about any other form of killing.

Why are you investing so much time in hairsplitting on the Church's behalf?

It's not like they've ever done anything for you.

[struggle4progress]

15. First the facts, then the analysis. Cultivate a habit of getting details right. Why not?

It's a political website. We want to organize to win certain political fights. For correct analysis of a political situation, one needs an accurate overview of the situation. Slogans aren't useful unless they really represent realities. Inaccurate preconceptions can be quite harmful. If you want to learn from history, get the historical picture accurately in mind; if you want to learn from the present, get contemporary events accurately in mind

The world isn't constructed from our simplistic abstractions -- our simplistic abstractions are a merely a way for us to try to construct usable charts of the world: merely plastering legends There be dragons here across Terra Incognita helps no one avoid real shoals and sandbars; one wants abstractions built with careful and double-checked scrutiny

The Catholic Church is a huge institution. It obviously has its share of unsavory characters and various people whose views I rather strongly dislike. It also happens to contain a number of people I admire. The first anti-homophobic sermon I ever heard preached I heard in a Catholic church, and it had a mixed reception. Latin American Liberation Theology seems to me an enduring tradition for reading and understanding certain features of the Old and New Testaments: it is a Catholic product, born of long dialogue between Latin American Christians and their Marxist neighbors

Of course, if you look at the Church, you will find a highly imperfect institution with many unattractive blemishes and flaws. Over two millennia, it has had its share of ugly actors and unpleasant power struggles. It does not seem to me unique in that regard. One can learn from the history, but only if one can get the history right. It is, nevertheless, tiresome to see the constant knee-jerk misrepresentations: Catholics called paedophiles, the Pope called a Nazi, and so on. The "more popular than Jesus" Lennon comment has been much remembered in the last few days on DU -- but the controversy was almost entirely driven by rightwing Southern fundamentalists in the US, and the Vatican made it clear forty odd years ago that it considered the matter closed: this has not prevented media from repeatedly trying to portray the issue as a Beatles-Vatican spat, but few seem interested in getting the details right, and amid the inaccurate anti-Vatican snark of the last few days here, I suspect I am the only one who bothered to dig up the Roman Observer article to see what it actually said. There's a vicious rightwing Italian Catholic website, well-known for promoting anti-semitism and homophobia, that several times this year has attempted to add credibility to their views by "quoting" various churchmen: in the most recent case, many at DU jumped on the bandwagon, though the man "quoted" says he never even spoke to the web-publisher's reporters and disavows the views they attribute to him

What's wrong with making a careful effort to get the facts right? All of us can, with hardly any effort, find people we dislike and say unpleasant things about them: it's cheap and easy. If we want to build lasting coalitions for social justice, something more than that is required

[RagAss]

13. I'm guessing the last time it happened they were burned at the stake.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

18. History is never irrelevant.

We cannot understand the abuses of the present if we do not understand the abuses of the past. It is only from the past that we can identify the trends relevant to our modern day.

[Dorian Gray]

16. I know a few others

who feel the same way, but as far as I know, they haven't been including those thoughts in their homilies.

[Ken Burch]

17. Good for them. Perhaps they'll join this, now that the ice has been broken.

n/t.

[TZ]

3. Nice to see someone stand up to the Vatican bullies.n/t

[iris27]

4. Good for him!

Any and all church leaders who have known about this and helped keep it quiet should publicly apologize and step aside.

[laconicsax]

5. K&R

[EvolveOrConvolve]

14. This is a good start

And hopefully the first trickle in an eventual flood of good Catholics calling for the cleansing of the dirtier elements of the church.

:thumbsup: @ Father Scahill