Father Tony Flannery on the Cloyne Report – A Tongue the Vatican Must Rip Out and Silence for the Sake of Destroying all Dissent

http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2011/07/cloyne-report-tony-flannery.html

July 18, 2011

I am writing this on the morning after the Cloyne report, and out of the perspective of almost forty years conducting parish missions around the country.

Cloyne was always an unusual diocese, or to be more accurate, Cobh was.

In the era after Humanae Vitae, when on our missions we tried to soften the rigid implementation of that teaching in the Irish Church, we met more resistance in Cobh than anywhere else.

That Cathedral, with its scrupulous and legalistic bishop (John Ahern) and those six priests houses at the back, was easily the most clerical scene I witnessed in my time.

Men like Tim Sheahan, John Thornhill, Pat Twomey and Denis Reidy were clear and strong in their views, and were unwavering servants of the official Church line on all things. So any dialogue was almost impossible. Certainty was the order of the day.

Curiously, in the seventies, I met with more anti-clericalism in Cobh than in any place outside of Limerick or Dublin. It must be said that the atmosphere in the rest of the diocese was very different, and there were many great priests there, just as there are today, and my heart goes out to them this morning.

Then John Magee was appointed bishop. Why was he appointed? He was clearly unsuitable, and was an imposition from Rome. Was it that they wanted to get rid of him over there, or that it was a reward for covering up the circumstances of John Paul I’s death.

I don’t know, but it was a good example of the terrible policy of Episcopal appointments pursued by John Paul II, which I see as being one of the main reasons for the mess the Church finds itself in today.

He was never fully accepted, and his manner and attitudes were foreign to many of the priests and people. He gathered some kudos by promoting perpetual adoration for a time.

But I remember an old priest, now long dead, saying to me about 1990 that the diocese would reap a terrible whirlwind from the policies of John Magee.

Of course there never was an easy relationship between John Magee and Denis O’Callaghan, because O’Callaghan felt that he should have got the mitre.

So it does not surprise me to learn that a big part of the problems that was revealed yesterday had to do with a lack of communication between the two.

O’Callaghan was too much into power and position in the Church himself, as was obvious from his volte face as a moral theologian after Humanae Vitae came out.

All in all, this sorry chapter highlights a lot of what is wrong with the official Church, and with the Vatican bureaucracy. Will anything be learned? I don’t know. The abuse victims have had their day, and that is good.

And the state would appear to be responding well. The sooner the handling of everything around sexual abuse of children is dealt with by the state the better; and that is why I am no fan of Church bodies or guidelines dealing with it.

It would be much better if anyone who has a complaint in this area did not go to a bishop or a priest, but went to the civil authorities, and let them deal with it.

And if the law is not sufficiently strong to handle the complexity of the cases, then let it be changed. In that way there would be no confusion or cover-up.

In the meantime we priests struggle on.

And I would ask the people of Cloyne diocese today to be conscious of their own priest, and what it must be like for him.

Maybe a word of support or encouragement would help.

Tony Flannery

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Magee_(bishop)


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(One has to wonder if John Magee, like Justin Rigali, before their exiles from the Vatican heard one too many confessions from the fine young studs in the Swiss Guards Barracks, as their chaplains, and knew something someone powerful in the Vatican, a secret, (a dirty little German secret?), that could only destroy clerical careers instead of elevating them? Or it is all just a typical grand Peter Principle job scale thing - Vatican Style?)

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Bishop Robert Finn to be Made Cardinal in Chicago (a rumor) – Why Not! – Hates Women – Hates Gays – Hates Kids Too!

Off the record Your Holiness…Yes Holy Father, I am happy to report that the American Courts are just as Corrupt as Ray Burke’s anything done for a bribe Vatican Court. --  Very good, my son. Very good indeed. 

In reaction to the locals in Kansas City Missouri on the Facebook page “Bishop Finn Must Go” and their retarded efforts to remove the pedophile protector and enabler Bishop Robert Finn from office a comment made by “I Sinton” in my recent article posted on that Facebook page:

I’m tired of all this requests for letter writing to the pope, respectful requests for Finn to step down and other rhetoric. The big guys who wear funny hats don’t care about the little people’s ( not leprechauns little people ) opinions. If you want Finn out of office, its simple.

Start a rumor, and all it needs to be is a rumor, that after he made the ‘Boys will be boys’ comment. He paused and said ‘If I could ordain women, I wouldn’t have this problem’. 

My bet is he will be gone by Wednesday.

How long have Catholics played the game ? You know the rules: 

Ordaining women = End of the world,

Children’s physical, emotional, spiritual welfare = who cares?

I’m from Philly. PA. We do things different than youse guys. Did you hear about the trial we had recently ? 

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Bishop Bill Morris of Toowoomba - Vagina qui partem

On one hand you’ve got a Catholic like John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, weeping at his delivery of a commencement speech at Catholic University in Washington, District of Columbia, and it gets a lot of Lame Stream Media coverage.

LSM – thank you or your ghost writer for the invention of that one literary footnote Sarah.

John, were they, tears of omission, for all that you and your party have not done for the poor or for women as a good Catholic?

Speaking of women – ( and that Vagina thing ) – The Vatican did not fire bishops for sins of omission – covering up sins of pedophilia – (Jesus’ favorite forgivable sin) – No- this bishop down in Oz got the pink slip for openly talking about having a discussion about women as priests in the dying RC church.

CathBlog - Bishop Morris and the nourishment of the Eucharist

We've just celebrated Good Shepherd Sunday. A day when we read from John 10 where Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep” (John 10:11).

This week in Australia we are left puzzling over the fate of a man who has been consistently called “a great pastor” by his priests and people. I speak of Bishop (now retired) Bill Morris.

The details of Rome’s reasons for wanting his dismissal are not known. What is known is that other bishops and cardinals who protected paedophiles were not asked to resign/retire, while Bishop Morris was. Such skewed decision-making is perplexing at best and in many eyes scandalous.

At the heart of Bishop Morris’ concern lay the Eucharist and the long Catholic value of being a Eucharistic community nourished by the Word and the Table. Across Australia, such Eucharistic nourishment is becoming less and less possible.

…Parishes are joining up, placing impossible demands on a single priest to be the sole pastor for one conglomerate parish where there were once two or three or four. Dioceses are importing pastors from India, Vietnam, Africa, Poland and unfortunately many of these men lack the cultural awareness to genuinely pastor Australian Parishes. In one Parish, when the new priest arrived, the pastoral council was immediately dismissed.

Toowoomba's sacked bishop is not alone in calling for debate on women

Pope Benedict's decision this month to dismiss William "Bill" Martin Morris, bishop of the Australian diocese of Toowoomba, 190,000 square miles of bush inland from Brisbane, was a really, really sad one. Morris was accused of calling for an open debate on the ordination of women and the extension of married clergy to the whole church. In his Advent pastoral letter in 2006 he had indeed called for such debates and added that there should be similar discussion about Catholics accepting Anglican and Lutheran orders and those of the Uniting Church, a grouping of Australian Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Methodists.

It is an open secret that there is a crescendo of debate about such questions in the Catholic world. The precedents for such action are well known. There are thousands of married priests in Catholicism's eastern rites, all living – doubtless happily – with their spouses in complete harmony with Rome. Such has been the case for perhaps two millennia. And as far as female clergy are concerned, the consecration of various women to holy orders during the Stalinist dictatorship under which Czechoslovakia lived following the second world war, while never officially publicised, has never been declared invalid by the Vatican. And, leaving Czechoslovakians aside for a moment, wasn't Mary Magdalene some sort of heroine in the church's earliest days?

We all know Bishop Morris meant well but “actum de vagina pars illa arcte vetabat” - discussion about that (thing) is strictly forbidden.

Will the last few decent catholics left in the church just shut the F-up while the other bishops, the sons of Borgia, go on with their holy work?

Enjoy your retirement Bill. You, in a very good Christian sense, have earned it mate.