{"id":427,"date":"2011-05-04T12:47:54","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T16:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=427"},"modified":"2011-05-04T12:52:02","modified_gmt":"2011-05-04T16:52:02","slug":"bishop-morris-gets-canned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/bishop-morris-gets-canned.html","title":{"rendered":"Bishop Morris gets canned"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, while the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me<\/em> of the Catholic blogosphere was in Rome being whipped<\/a> into a froth of self-appreciation by Vatican officials, far away in the Outback, Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba was getting sacked<\/a> for daring to suggest that clerical celibacy and women’s ordination ought to be open for discussion in the Catholic Church. From time to time, one of the big boys, like Cardinal Sch\u00f6nborn of Vienna, has made such a suggestion and gotten his wrist slapped<\/a>, but so far as I know, this is the first time a bishop has been cashiered for same.<\/p>\n

Morris, for his part, didn’t take the decision lying down. As he put it to a letter to his priests:<\/p>\n

“It has been my experience and the experience of others that Rome controls bishops by fear, and if you ask questions or speak openly on subjects that Rome declares closed . . . you are censored very quickly, told your leadership is defective . . . and are threatened with dismissal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, the extent to which a pope can close a discussion is itself a subject of high level debate<\/a> in conservative Catholic circles. Recently, some very conservative clerics have taken to attacking Vatican II’s pronouncements on religious liberty as illicitly violating Pius IX’s pronouncements on the subject. On the other side is Martin Rhonheimer, the Opus Dei theologian who gained some fame a few months ago for defending<\/a> the new Vatican line on AIDS and condoms.<\/p>\n

Rhonheimer draws an interesting distinction between the the pope’s magisterial interpretation<\/em> of dogma or natural law, which is infallible, and his application<\/em> of it, which is, well, fallible:<\/p>\n

In short: the teaching of Vatican II on religious freedom does not imply a new dogmatic orientation, but does take on a new orientation in the Church\u2019s social doctrine \u2013 specifically, a correction of its teaching on the mission and function of the State. The council gave the same immutable principles a new application in a new historical setting. There is no timeless dogmatic Catholic doctrine on the State \u2013 nor can there be \u2013, with the exception of those principles that are rooted in the apostolic Tradition and in Sacred Scripture. The idea of a \u201cCatholic State\u201d as the secular arm of the Church falls outside these principles, which in fact suggest a separation between the political and religious spheres.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If clerical celibacy and women’s ordination are not timeless dogmatic Catholic doctrine but applications of such doctrine in a particular historical setting, then might they not be, in the current historical setting, mistaken? Shouldn’t they be, at the very least, open for discussion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of days ago, while the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me of the Catholic blogosphere was in Rome being whipped into a froth of self-appreciation by Vatican officials, far away in the Outback, Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba was getting sacked for daring to suggest that clerical celibacy and women’s ordination ought to be open…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[29,30],"class_list":["post-427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bishop-william-morris","tag-martin-rhonheimer"],"yoast_head":"\nBishop Morris gets canned - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/05\/bishop-morris-gets-canned.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bishop Morris gets canned - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":429,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions\/429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}