What do women want from the
Church? That’s a good and important question. And an international
gathering of women this past Tuesday at the Vatican could have been a
place to find some honest answers.
But, unfortunately, one had the impression that the discussions were
hampered by the strictures of self-censorship; that is, the careful
avoidance of saying anything that could be taken by the hierarchy as
women demanding too much from churchmen who have been willing to give
only too little.
The event was the third annual “Voices of Faith,” sponsored by the
Fidel Götz Foundation. It took place in the regal setting of the Casina
Pio IV, a patrician villa inside the Vatican Gardens that houses the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
During the first couple of hours of the afternoon program, women from
various walks of life shared moving stories of how their faith has
helped them overcome abuse, poverty, blindness, and the ravages of war
or how it has given them vision and strength to help others with their
own adversities.
This was all very good, as were the various musical interludes. And
many of us were hoping that it would be but an appetizer for a much
richer fare in the second part of the program—a panel discussion on
“expanding women’s leadership in the Church.”
But this is where it became disappointingly clear that these women
were muzzling themselves. And what was most disappointing was that these
are not people who believe a woman’s place is in the home or her duty
is to be submissive to men.
Just to give you an idea, one of the panelists was the president and
CEO of Catholic Relief Services and another was a 24-year-old graduate
student at Yale. These are bright and successful women, but they—like
all the other participants that took to the microphone—were being
respectful and gracious to a fault.
One after another thanked Pope Francis for his “inspiration.” They
could hardly thank him for his support of Voices of Faith, because in
the three years the event has taken place in his backyard he has not
once publicly acknowledged it. And this year he went out of town for a
weeklong retreat two days before it took place.
The women attentively steered clear of the O-word—that is,
ordination—except for one of them to explicitly say that women’s
priesthood was “off the table.” Surprisingly, there was not even a
mention of the possibility of ordaining women deacons, which is
something bishops themselves are beginning to talk about. And no one
brought up the issue of women being allowed to preach, even during Mass,
which was advocated recently in the pages of L’Osservatore Romano.
Regrettably, one participant repeated the current pope’s refrain
about the danger of “clericalizing” women if the church were to ordain
them. No one pointed out that ordination should be about sanctioning or
deputing servant leaders and not clericalists.
But many of them did acknowledge—at least privately and during the
break—that the Catholic Church has a huge problem with attracting and
retaining young women among its members. And while they admire Pope
Francis for so much of what he has done since he became Bishop of Rome,
they feel he could and should do so much more in expanding the role of
women at all levels of decision-making and service in the Church. Again,
many of those gathered inside the Vatican Gardens said this only
quietly and off the record.
****
Another area where the Jesuit pope seems to have made little headway
during his first three years in office is in significantly changing the
complexion of the worldwide episcopate. His appointments have been a
mixed bag.
For every new bishop that comes from the front lines of pastoral work
and has the “smell of the sheep,” there are probably ten others who
have served only a few years in a parish and are being advanced up the
career ladder from a chancery office or some other elite posting.
One of the reasons for this is that the pope must rely on a process
for selecting bishops that is still very much in the grips of an
incestuous, self-perpetuating “old boys network.” Evidence is this
week’s choice of Msgr. James Checchio as the new Bishop of Metuchen in
northern New Jersey.
The forty-nine year old monsignor, a priest of the southern New
Jersey diocese of Camden, has been living in Rome for the past thirteen
years. He was first vice-rector (2003-2006) and then rector of the
Pontifical North American College (NAC). That is the same residence for
U.S. seminarians studying in the Eternal City where he lived another
five years in preparation for priesthood.
His appointment to the episcopate comes as no surprise, given that
the college has long been known as a “bishop factory.” More than half of
the thirty-three metropolitan archbishops in the United States
(including those from the Archdiocese for the Military) are alumni of
the NAC or its Casa Santa Maria residences for priests doing advanced
studies in Rome. That includes seven of the eight U.S. cardinals who are
still under the age of the eighty, the only exception being Cardinal
Seán O’Malley, a Capuchin friar.
Bishops and cardinals are a constant presence at the North American
College, which sits imposingly on the Janiculum Hill and has a
commanding view of Rome and the Vatican. And so are wealthy benefactors
of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which owns and operates what
some refer to as “the West Point of American seminaries.”
Consider also that the two American members of the Congregation for
Bishops—Cardinals Donald Wuerl and William Levada—are NAC alumni. And
the Australian member of the office that helps choose bishops, Cardinal
George Pell, has been sending students to the NAC since the 1990s when
he was Archbishop of Melbourne.
Furthermore, two other U.S. cardinals are also former rectors—Edwin
O’Brien of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher (1990-1994) and New York’s
Timothy Dolan (1994-2001). So it was only a matter of time before Msgr.
Checchio, who has overseen extensive renovations and additions to the
college, as well as increased enrollment, was to be brought into the
same episcopal club.
Meanwhile, there are three dioceses in the United States that have
been without a bishop for several months. Most important among them is
the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, which has been vacant since
last June. And the ordinaries of eight other American sees (two of them
archdioceses) have reached retirement age, as has the apostolic nuncio,
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
The natives are getting restless. Probably the nativists, too…
****
Pope Francis has a tricky relationship with his brother bishops.
Selecting new members of the hierarchy is one thing. Gaining the support
of those already in place is quite another.
Most bishops in the United States, for example, still display a sort
of ambivalence toward the pope. Only a handful of them (comparatively,
that is) are quite enthusiastic about the simpler style he models and
the pastoral priorities he has set forth. And there are still a good
number who constantly quote his predecessors, Benedict XVI or John Paul
II, rather than him.
Just south of the border in Mexico a similar dynamic has been seen
among the bishops. A number of the mitered did not take kindly to the
cautionary words that Francis issued to their episcopal conference last
month when he was in the country. He told them not to live like princes
and not to talk behind each other’s backs. “If you must fight amongst
yourselves, be men and do it face to face,” was the upshot of one
admonition.
Sources in Latin America’s most Catholic country said a number of the
bishops were hotter than a jalapeño over the pope’s not-so-veiled
criticism of them.
Perhaps none was more steamed than the Archbishop of Mexico City,
Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, who looked depressed during all five
days that he accompanied Francis on his visit. After counting to ten
numerous times, he obviously could not keep his cool any longer. Several
days ago he authorized (some believe he even wrote) an article in his
archdiocesan newspaper that many saw as a sharp rebuke of Francis.
Naturally, the cardinal (who turns seventy-five in June 2017) used
churchman double-speak and did not blame the pope directly. He blamed
others, facetiously complaining that they had badly misinformed Francis
about the bishops in Mexico. Sorry, nobody fell for that one. If there’s
a pope who knows what’s going in Latin America and one who knows its
bishops very well, it’s this pope from Argentina!
Bishops in the Americas aren’t the only ones who have had difficulty adjusting to Papa Bergoglio.
Spain has a few birds that are not so happy with him either. A good
example is the Archbishop-emeritus of Madrid, Cardinal Antonio María
Rouco Varela. He was pretty upset when the pope accepted his resignation
on his seventy-eighthbirthday in August 2014. And he was not
pleased when Francis replaced him in Madrid with Carlos Osoro Sierra,
who had been Archbishop of Valencia the previous five years. The
cardinal, who was a great ally of Benedict XVI in the culture war
against liberal society, had hoped for a different successor (probably
in both Madrid and Rome).
In the end he went quietly enough. But now, more than a
year-and-a-half later, he’s making a bold statement by announcing that
he will lead a major pilgrimage in June. No, it’s not to Rome for the
Holy Year of Mercy. And it’s not to the Holy Land, either.
According to an email sent out from Itinera Tours, a religious tour
company in Spain, Cardinal Rouco will lead “a special pilgrimage to the
most important places connected to the childhood and a early life of
Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, one of the most important intellectuals of
our time.”
The June 5-11 pilgrimage will go to Munich and ten other Bavarian
towns and villages to see the sites where “one of the most outstanding
personalities of the Catholic Church” carried out his “academic career,
his ordination as priest, archbishop and cardinal”.
Just for the record, the University of Tübingen is not part of the itinerary.
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