{"id":2559,"date":"2007-03-15T08:33:28","date_gmt":"2007-03-15T08:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/damian-on-sc.html"},"modified":"2007-03-15T08:33:28","modified_gmt":"2007-03-15T08:33:28","slug":"damian-on-sc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/damian-on-sc.html","title":{"rendered":"Damian on SC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Damian Thompson is the editor of the Catholic Herald, <\/a><\/em>a British Catholic paper we refer to here often. Today, he continues his fulminating against the bishops’ offices:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Real anger is building up in the parishes over the bishops\u2019 behaviour, which led to the document \u2013 Sacramentum Caritatis<\/a> – a historic, 60-page statement on the Eucharist and the Liturgy \u2013 receiving minimal coverage in most secular newspapers.<\/p>\n

The Pope\u2019s pronouncement, an Apostolic Exhortation, was a huge story for my newspaper, The Catholic Herald,<\/a> which will publish full coverage of the document this weekend.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t tell you how infuriating \u2013 and downright weird \u2013 it was to discover that our bishops just weren\u2019t interested in talking to us about its contents.<\/p>\n

So, yesterday, we took an unusual step. The Catholic Herald lodged a formal complaint with the Vatican\u2019s worldwide head of communications, Archbishop John Foley, Prefect of the Pontifical Commission for Social Communication.<\/p>\n

Why did the Bishops of England and Wales keep silent? Inevitably, conspiracy theories are already forming, suggesting that they didn\u2019t like the contents of the document. And I\u2019m sure that some of them didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Pope Benedict calls for all new priests to be trained to say the new rite of Mass in Latin \u2013 he has yet to pronounce on the future of the Old Rite<\/a> \u2013 and for a return to Gregorian chant. He also seems to shut the door on the prospect of married priests.<\/p>\n

Not the sort of thing that the English Church\u2019s right-on employees like to promulgate.<\/p>\n

But those are side issues. The real point of Sacramentum Caritatis (Sacrament of Love) was its fabulously lucid and intellectually daring synthesis of Catholic teaching on the centre of the Church\u2019s life \u2013 the Eucharist, or Holy Communion.<\/p>\n

Reading the exhortation, I was awestruck by the quality of Benedict\u2019s thinking: this is the most intellectually gifted pope for centuries. He spent months working on the document.<\/p>\n

Today, two days late, the English and Welsh bishops\u2019 website<\/a> finally posted THREE WHOLE PARAGRAPHS on the subject. The Irish bishops, in contrast, issued a long and comprehensive response, setting out all the key points, on the day of publication.<\/p>\n

So far as I am aware, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O\u2019Connor, Archbishop of Westminster,  has yet to say a word publicly about Pope Benedict\u2019s exhortation. It is inconceivable that his predecessor, Cardinal Basil Hume, would have been guilty of such an omission.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His initial blast on the subject.<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s good we don’t have that kind of problem over here. <\/a><\/p>\n

Update:<\/u><\/p>\n

I added this to the comments, but I might as well note it up here, with some elaboration.<\/p>\n

I might be wrong, but my sense of why Thompson is frustrated is not primarily because the bishops’ website didn’t fling up a link to the doc right away on their website but because, first, in his own attempt to pull a story together, he couldn’t find a bishop who cared:<\/p>\n

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I can\u2019t tell you how infuriating \u2013 and downright weird \u2013 it was to discover that our bishops just weren\u2019t interested in talking to us about its contents.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And, in addition, what Thompson seems to be saying (and he can correct me if I’m wrong) is that when you have a story like this – the story of a new, rather important and certainly interesting document coming from Rome, you know that the secular news media will run something <\/em>on it. Even though they will put it through their own filters, they will <\/em>cover it. So – shouldn’t the bishops\/national hierarchy of the Church take the lead in trying to communicate the contents of this document to the press of its own country? Aren’t they the natural go-betweens who should have had calls in to every major press office, saying, "This is going to drop on 3\/13. We’ll be ready to help you understand it and comment on it for your coverage."<\/p>\n

Yes? No?<\/p>\n

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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