{"id":3624,"date":"2006-03-29T08:50:24","date_gmt":"2006-03-29T08:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/is-it-schism.html"},"modified":"2006-03-29T08:50:24","modified_gmt":"2006-03-29T08:50:24","slug":"is-it-schism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/is-it-schism.html","title":{"rendered":"Is it schism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I do believe this is one of the more important Catholic-related stories brewing these days, and one that is not getting nearly enough attention. We heard about it first a few weeks ago, when a small group of Canadian priests publicly dissented from Church teaching on some issues of sexual morality, and the bishops of Canada said there needed to be dialogue.<\/p>\n

Well, as the Montreal Gazette reports, the urge for creative, nuanced theological expression is spreading, and the theme is, "Dialogue this<\/em>!"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Canada’s Roman Catholic bishops have come under fire from a majority of the members of the country’s religious communities, comprising brothers, nuns and priests in religious orders, for what they call the bishops’ blind obedience to directives issued by the Vatican.<\/p>\n

A letter to the bishops from the Canadian Religious Conference, which represents 213 Catholic religious communities across the country, asks the church to consider offering full communion to "all marginalized persons, divorced and remarried Catholics, and to homosexuals."<\/p>\n

It also calls on the church to consider the "ordination of married men, women and elders in First Nations communities." (The elders would serve remote areas that lack priests.)<\/p>\n

The conference represents 22,000 nuns, brothers and priests in religious orders. The letter claims to represent the views of 60 per cent of them, who responded to a survey by the conference.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The text of the letter is here – it is 26 pages, pdf format.<\/a><\/p>\n

For those of you with the time, I would recommend reading it. It is a rather arrogant piece of work in which certain aspects of Canadian church life are praised, others regretted and still others hoped for. Of course, everything that is regretted (rigid liturgical norms, rigid moral strictures that don’t take into account the lived experience of people, blah, blah…) is blamed on Rome and bishops.<\/p>\n

Reading between the lines, however, one can see other tensions surfacing. Clergy from other countries are mentioned several times, resentfully, with the "hope" that these clergy would be better prepared to deal with their congregations in terms of language and culture. (I understand that there is a diocese or two out west in which quite a few of the priests, if not most of them are either Indian or African). <\/p>\n

There are a few allusions to poorly prepared priests and lifeless liturgies. <\/p>\n

There are also great concerns expressed about youth.<\/p>\n

And more griping about exclusivity and rigidity.<\/p>\n

It seems fairly clear that there are, shall we say, tensions between religious and secular priests and the hierarchy in Canada. But what was striking to me about this document was, besides the arrogance that also marks the self-proclaimed prophet, was the nagging question Well, what are you<\/u><\/em> <\/u>doing about it? <\/em><\/p>\n

If you’re concerned about getting youth more involved…isn’t that your job?<\/em> I mean, this letter supposedly represents the concerns of 22,000 religious men and women. What are they doing? Isn’t it their <\/em>job to , you know, evangelize? Are their religious communities filled with young people? No? And that’s the bishops’ <\/em>fault? Concerned about all of these "foreign" priests? Well…where are the Canadian priests you religious communities are forming? <\/p>\n

Aside from the boilerplate calls for nuance and the coy calls for rejection of one Magisterium in favor of another (because that’s what it amounts to), this letter intrigues me because it functions, unintentionally, as an indictment of the writers and signers themselves. The Church in Canada is lifeless and decrepit? Whose fault is that? Might it be, in part, the 22,000 religious charged with pastoral ministry within it? <\/p>\n

Via Mere Comments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I do believe this is one of the more important Catholic-related stories brewing these days, and one that is not getting nearly enough attention. We heard about it first a few weeks ago, when a small group of Canadian priests publicly dissented from Church teaching on some issues of sexual morality, and the bishops of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nIs it schism? - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/is-it-schism.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is it schism? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I do believe this is one of the more important Catholic-related stories brewing these days, and one that is not getting nearly enough attention. 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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. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}