BATTLEPOPE!

[Ian David]

Realistic, Real-World Advice? This Will Never Do.
Published by Auguste January 31st, 2007 in Religion

Forget Buddy Christ, it’s


You and I both know that what the Catholic priesthood needs now is a good PR department. That, and women, gays, and maybe even the married, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

What they need - but I guarantee will never appreciate - is stories like this:

A yawning gulf between the stern doctrines preached by Pope Benedict and the advice offered by ordinary Roman Catholic priests has been exposed by an Italian magazine, which dispatched reporters to 24 churches around Italy where, in the confessional, they sought rulings on various thorny moral dilemmas.

One reporter for L’Espresso claimed to have let a doctor switch off the respirator that kept her father alive. “Don’t think any more about it,” she was told by a friar in Naples. “I myself, if I had a father, a wife or a child who had lived for years only because of artificial means, would pull out {the plug}…”

The church’s official teaching is that homosexuality is “disordered” and that homosexual behaviour is wrong. Yet a practising gay man in Rome was told: “Generally, the best attitude is to be yourself - what in English is called ‘coming out’.”

I predict that some Italian clergymen will soon find out what it really takes to be defrocked these days.

More:
http://pandagon.net/2007/01/31/realistic-real-world-advice-this-will-never-do/

[More Than A Feeling]

1. I would totally read that comic book. lol

I wonder what the Vatican will do in response to this report. How many of the priests who talked to this guy will they be able to find out about?

[TygrBright]

3. Rome will not take on this fight...

...and certainly not on the basis of one yellow journalism howl in (of all places) the Italian tabloid press.

They know perfectly well that official Church doctrine is many miles removed from the realities of life that confront lay people and the priests who work directly with them. They know that the brief ten to fifteen-year "sunshine period" after Vatican II let that genie out of the bottle and there's no way they can stuff it back in.

What they HAVE been doing very quietly for the last 25 years is to slowly turn over the staff at seminaries and Catholic Colleges to eliminate "the liberal element" and turn back the clock on official sanction of more compassionate, realistic spiritual direction both within the priesthood and with the priesthood/laity interface. The dripping of water on a stone, in effect. They won't beat their heads on the stone, they'll just wear it away. Slowly. Bureaucratically. Without fuss or publicity. It's what they're best at. They have nearly two millenia of experience at it.

informatively,
Bright

[rock]

2. Why am I remined of Monty Python's "The Bishop"?