{"id":623,"date":"2008-05-10T13:31:29","date_gmt":"2008-05-10T13:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/05\/shutting-down.html"},"modified":"2008-05-10T13:31:29","modified_gmt":"2008-05-10T13:31:29","slug":"shutting-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/05\/shutting-down.html","title":{"rendered":"Shutting down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reports came last month that the Japanese bishops were going to the Vatican with concerns about the Neocatechumenal Way. <\/a>
\nToday, in The Tablet<\/em>, Robert Mickens reports that the Neocatechumenal seminary in Japan is to be closed:<\/a><\/p>\n

A NEO-CATECHUMENATE seminary in Japan is to close after the country’s bishops convinced Vatican officials that the movement was causing divisions in the Church by its way of thinking and in its attitude towards Japanese culture. Four senior Japanese bishops, including the president and vice president of the national episcopal conference, met for nearly an hour on 25 April with Pope Benedict XVI, according to a recent Union of Catholic Asian News report. It was the third time in five months that they were in Rome to express serious concerns over the presence of the Neo-Catechumenal Way in their country.
\nThe movement, founded in Spain in 1964, has spread to 105 countries and operates a missionary seminary in the small Diocese of Takamatsu some 320 miles south-west of Tokyo.
\nFrancis Xavier Osamu Mizobe, the Bishop of Takamatsu, encountered difficulties with the “Neo-Cats” four years ago when he was appointed head of the diocese. He and other bishops raised their concerns directly to the Pope and other Vatican officials last December when they came to Rome for their five-yearly ad limina visits. “In the small Catholic Church of Japan, the powerful sect-like activity of Way members is divisive and confrontational. It has caused division and strife in the Church,” said Archbishop Peter Takeo Okada of Tokyo, the bishops’ conference president, during his group address to the Pope.
\nBut it is believed that Cardinal Ivan Dias, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples (Propaganda Fidei) and favourable to the Neo-Catechumenal Way, intervened to “protect” the movement. Japan’s 16 Catholic dioceses, with 500,000 members, are directly dependent on the cardinal’s office, rather than the Congregation for Bishops or the Secretariat of State, because they are considered to be in mission territory.
\nUndeterred, Bishop Mizobe appealed to Vatican officials a second time when he came back to Rome early last month with Japan’s highest-ranking bishops. That second visit still produced no results. The bishops returned for a third time and were finally able to meet privately with Pope Benedict.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For those of you unfamiliar with the NCW – it is one of the “New Movements” flourishing in the\u00a0Church since the Second Vatican Council, with a particular emphasis on\u00a0focusing members on\u00a0living out their baptismal vows as a way of discipleship.
\nIt is hugely popular in some parts of the world, and several reports\u00a0from the Pope’s visit to the US indicate that members of the NCW were vocal, enthusiastic presences in both Washington and New York. (In fact, the family featured by the NYTimes in its coverage – the family that traveled from Texas to see the Pope – were members of NCW).
\nThere have been problems, of course. Concerns about setting up a parallel or alternative structure that\u00a0bypasses the parish. Liturgical concerns have been the subject of Vatican directives, giving the\u00a0NCW a certain amount of time (I believe up until this\u00a0year some time) to\u00a0bring their standard Mass into line with the Roman Rite. \u00a0<\/a>
\nI have absolutely no opinion on this, no personal knowledge of NCW, no inside knowledge.\u00a0 I have heard frequent complaints of a “divisive” impact, and the liturgical issues are well known. I also know that the general mode of operating among many in the Asian hierarchy still focuses on indirect “evangelization” rooted in\u00a0presence and dialogue\u00a0in a culture in culture rather than an overtly evangelistic presence.\u00a0 Who knows how all this worked together resulting in this rather dramatic move.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reports came last month that the Japanese bishops were going to the Vatican with concerns about the Neocatechumenal Way. Today, in The Tablet, Robert Mickens reports that the Neocatechumenal seminary in Japan is to be closed: A NEO-CATECHUMENATE seminary in Japan is to close after the country’s bishops convinced Vatican officials that the movement was…<\/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-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nShutting down - 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\/2008\/05\/shutting-down.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Shutting down - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Reports came last month that the Japanese bishops were going to the Vatican with concerns about the Neocatechumenal Way. 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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\/623","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=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}