Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

For centuries Catholic reformers have looked with the hairy eyeball at popular religion, which seems to them a mish-mash of sensuality and superstition. The suspicion continues. A responder over at John Allen’s blog claims that Pope Benedict is not consistent in his insistence on the connection of religion and reason:
in Benedict’s case he is not [...]

[Read more →]

 Supi, celibacy is going to disappear,and you can marry me - or?
 
German Catholics have long manifested a discontent with clerical celibacy. One of Luther’s first acts was to abolish clerical celibacy; Germans currently criticize Zwangszölibat, compulsory celibacy, forced celibacy. As Cardinal Brandmüller points out, the term Zwangszölibat misrepresents the discipline; no one is forced to be celibate.
 
Now [...]

[Read more →]

According to the Suddeutsche Zeitung, in 1970 several theologians wrote to the German Bishops asking that the requirement that all priests in the Latin Church to be celibate be discussed. Among the theologians were Karl Rahner, Walter Kasper, Karl Lehman – and Joseph Ratzinger, currently Pope Benedict XVI. This letter was quietly and discretely filed [...]

[Read more →]

Nicholas Cafardi has reviewed in Commonweal the muddled history of the canonical handling of abuse cases. He answers a few questions, but he says many more can be answered only by the Vatican, which has not learned to be transparent: 

What we do know is that eventually a few curial officials came to understand the insufficiency [...]

[Read more →]

Sardath said in the comments: 

This is a man who survived the Nazi genocide against the Poles, out-maneuvered the Soviets, and utterly crushed liberation theology; and yet we are to believe that he had no idea what he was doing when he signed false bank documents, had no idea that bishops and priests in Latin American [...]

[Read more →]

In his Christmas message to the curia, Pope Benedict lamented sexual abuse and said the church must reflect on what went wrong. He, as a theologian, thought that distorted moral theology in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the abuse. 

In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In [...]

[Read more →]

 
As bad as the sexual abuse in the Church has been, the official misjudgment about Maciel is even more serious. Benedict called Maciel “a false prophet” (p. 39) and such he was.
 
But this psychopathic incestuous child molester and thief not only fooled tens of thousands of Catholics, he deceived the pope. Pope John Paul II [...]

[Read more →]

\T
The Jesuit of the Future
Benedict sees homosexuality as incompatible with the priesthood, for two reasons, First, the Latin priesthood is celibate and celibacy does not have the same meaning for a homosexual and a heterosexual and second because the homosexual has a distorted view of the relationship of men and women.

Homosexuality is incompatible with the [...]

[Read more →]

Archbishop Lefebvre was unhappy with the Second Vatican Council and with the way the Church was going. He established the Society of Saint Pius X, which had some success (600,000 members, 500 priests) and became increasingly alienated from Rome. One cannot have sacraments without bishops, so to assure that the Society would have a line [...]

[Read more →]

Pope Benedict’s interview with Seewald, Light of the World, reveals a lot about how the pope thinks. I will comment separately on the issues he raises. 
Joseph Ratzinger grew in a devout Catholic family in Nazi Germany. During his adult life he saw most of the Eurasian landmass under communist dictatorships that sought to marginalize or [...]

[Read more →]

I finished my Camino on October 31, met my wife, and we stayed in Santiago until November 4, just before the arrival of the Pope. We went to Madrid for a few days and observed, among other things, the controversy started by the remarks that Benedict made to reporters on his plane: 

“In Spain, a strong, [...]

[Read more →]

Although words are not everything, they are a beginning, especially if they reveal the heart. Perhaps we can take some hope from these words of Pope Benedict: 

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the [...]

[Read more →]

I have been harsh in some remarks, but I really like Benedict. I pray for him every day, and did so when he was a cardinal. In an interview years ago he said he liked to vacation in a cooler spot than Italy, but the salary of a cardinal was not enormous. I sent him [...]

[Read more →]

John Paul II and Paul VI did not listen to the cries of violated children. Why?

I have a few sources with Vatican connections and have received fairly reliable second-hand information, and my guess at the scenario is this. 
John Paul, for reasons he refused to explain even to a cardinal who questioned him, would not act against [...]

[Read more →]

 We are witnessing a cruel irony of history: Joseph Ratzinger, one of the few ecclesiastics to evidence genuine horror at the sexual abuse of children by priests and the one pope since perhaps Pius V to act against corruption in the Church, is receiving a massive international attack for his failures in handling abuse cases. 
It [...]

[Read more →]