Child abuse crisis to spark Irish Catholic Church shake-up
Pope Benedict has expressed “outrage, betrayal and shame” at the sexual abuse of children by priests in Ireland, which Church leaders said would lead to a shake-up of the Irish Roman Catholic Church. Church sources expected some bishops to resign in the wake of a government report that said Church leaders in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland had covered up widespread abuse of children by priests for 30 years.
“I think that we are looking at a very significant reorganization of the Church in Ireland,” Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said after he and other Irish Church leaders held an emergency meeting with the Pope on Friday.
The Vatican said the pope would write to the Irish people about the crisis and a plan for action — the first time a pope will devote a document solely to the clergy’s abuse of children. A number of bishops who worked in Dublin during the period covered by the report are likely to offer to resign, Church sources said.
On his blog Sacri Palazzi, the well-informed Vatican watcher Andrea Tornielli wrote: “Some Irish bishops will probably resign in the next few weeks (minimum 4, maximum 10).”
Q+A – Vietnam and Vatican talk about diplomatic relations
Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet will meet Pope Benedict this week during a trip to Italy to talk about improving ties. The Vatican and the Communist-run Southeast Asian country do not have diplomatic relations. Click here for some questions and answers about the Vietnam-Vatican relationship.
This is a very good sign for both countries.
Now a days, every one will eager to know,understand, thought storming session for day today progress and for daily updates on religion, mutual co-operation,knowledge sharing, exchange of their views by available, current communication channels.
I think that, here will be a wonderful new set up will be emerged.
Good luck to both countries.
We should have some good understandings on many religious and on many ideas on several subjects for co-existence and for better sharing of cultural changes.
Pope and Irish Catholic Church to hold summit on child abuse by clergy
Ireland’s top Roman Catholic leaders will hold talks with Pope Benedict this week to formulate the Vatican’s response to an Irish government report on a 30-year cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the pope and top officials would meet Cardinal Sean Brady, head of the Irish Bishops Conference, and Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, on Friday.
The meeting was called to discuss and evaluate “the painful situation of the Church in Ireland” following the publication last month of the Murphy Commission Report. The rank of the participants — who will also include the Vatican ambassador to Dublin and top Vatican doctrinal officials — effectively makes it a rare summit about the problem of sexual abuse of children in the Irish Church.
There was no indication from the Vatican statement about what it could do to respond to the report, which said the Church’s prominence in Irish life was one of the reasons why abuses by a minority of priests were allowed to go unchecked.
One priest admitted abusing more than 100 children. Another said he had abused children every two weeks for over 25 years.
Searching for clues from the Roman Catholic-Anglican summit
There wasn’t much information in the official communique after Pope Benedict and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams met at the Vatican on Saturday. The terse text mentioned “cordial discussions” about challenges facing Christians, the need to cooperate and their intention to continue bilateral theological dialogue. The only reference to the issue of the day, Benedict’s offer to take alienated Anglicans into the Catholic Church, was mentioned in passing as “recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.” Hmm, pretty thin pickings…. The Pravda-like opaqueness of the communique (read it here) prompted me to zoom in on the photographs we got from the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano for any other clues there. Let’s see if they help as we go along. The “pope’s paper” (here in PDF) published the communique at the bottom of its front page, below two articles on the pope’s meeting with artists and one on Iran’s nuclear program. An interesting hint at the Vatican’s priorities that day.
Given this thin statement, our news story led off: “The archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Benedict agreed the need for closer ties between their churches on Saturday, in their first meeting since last month’s surprise Vatican offer to disaffected Anglicans.” Read the whole story here.
Williams later spoke to the BBC (starting at 33:19) and Vatican Radio. He told the BBC that the meeting “went as well as I could have hoped, really.” He said he expressed Anglican concerns at the way the pope’s offer — officially called an “apostolic constitution” — was handled and the two then looked ahead to future ecumenical discussions.
On Vatican Radio, he said at the start of the interview: “Clearly, many Anglicans, myself included, felt that he put us in an awkward position for a time. Not the content so much as some of the messages that were given out. So I needed to share with the pope some of those concerns andI think those were expressed and heard in a very friendly spirit.” The pope’s main message to him, Williams said, was “that the constitution did not express any change in the Vatican’s attitude towards the Anglican Communion as such.”
This diologue between the Roman Church and the Angican is very interesting. Does it have anything to do with the real Christ and His Body, the Church?It was my privilege to have the time to research some of the fundamental beliefs of the Roman Church and compare them to what God has revealed in His Owners Manual, the Bible. It was so intriguing that I wrote a book about it: Escape From Paganism. You can review it at http://www.escapefrompaganism.comLarry Ball
from UK News:
RC archbishop to Anglicans: we don’t want cafeteria Catholics
Those disaffected Anglicans in England and Wales who think they can take up Pope Benedict's offer and switch to Rome with a "pick and choose" attitude should think again, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols has said.
Many Anglicans unhappy with women's ordination and gay clergy cannot just convert to Roman Catholicism as a way out, but must accept Catholic doctrine wholeheartedly, he said.
"Nothing is envisaged in this provision that the Pope has put in place is a kind of minimalist approach to picking bits of the Catholic faith that I like and then seeing myself as it were contained as a quasi-Catholic, not a real Catholic, under the umbrella of this constitution," he said, referring to a "buffet approach" to the faith that some Catholics dismiss as "cafeteria Catholicism."
It is still unclear how many Anglicans will convert, but the invitation, in the form of what's called an Apostolic Constitution, has opened up old wounds between the Vatican and Lambeth Palace.
It has also crystallised divisions within the Church of England, the Anglican mother church.
A debate is raging over whether the Pope's offer was an act of undisguised poaching, tapping into discontent among some Anglicans. or whether it was an act of generosity, responding to calls of help.
It has also raised questions about the approach adopted by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, towards the offer - details of which he did not know until two weeks before the announcement. Some say he has been too soft, while others say he has been judicious.
In Sistine Chapel, pope tells artists beauty can lead to God
Pope Benedict met artists from around the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday and urged them to inject spirituality into their work, saying contemporary beauty was often “illusory and deceitful.”
“Beauty … can become a path toward the transcendent, toward the ultimate Mystery, toward God,” he told the artists meeting beneath the vaulted ceiling of the chapel painted by Michelangelo. “Too often … the beauty thrust upon us is illusory and deceitful … it imprisons man within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy.”
The Vatican said it invited some 500 artists to the event, regardless of religious, political or stylistic allegiances. More than 250 accepted, mostly from Italy, including singer Andrea Bocelli and award-winning film composer Ennio Morricone. Amongst the other guests were Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid, whose Maxxi modern art museum has just opened in Rome, and F. Murray Abraham, the American actor who won an Oscar for his role as Salieri in the Mozart film, Amadeus, in 1985.
Read the whole story here and the full text of the pope’s address here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNXKFYe8U OgPlease comment – the clip has relevanceIn Judaism we find beauty in creativity as well, but this has not been developed in many ultra religious circles because of the value of study in our faith.
Russian Orthodox wants joint traditional front with Catholics
Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the Russian Orthodox Church’s top official for relations with other churches, has been busy this past week putting his revived church’s stamp on the world Christian scene. Over the weekend, he urged Catholics and Orthodox to join forces to defend their traditional version of Christianity. His comments, made during a visit to Paris to inaugurate his Church’s first seminary outside of Russia, come only days after positive remarks he made last week about how the Vatican and Moscow were slowly moving towards a meeting between Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill and Pope Benedict. Also last week, Hilarion indicated the Russian Orthodox might end their ecumenical dialogue with Lutherans after Germany’s Protestants elected a divorced woman, Bishop Margot Kässmann, as the new head of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). After all this, he planned to take off for a visit to China.
At his news conference, the 43-year-old archbishop said the Catholic and Orthodox churches were “already working together in many areas. Their views are almost identical in matters of doctrine and social ethics. They could show all these values in secular society, nationally or internationally, for example regarding the concept of family, environment, economy, education etc.. Orthodox and Catholics should find a common language and speak with one voice to defend the values that derive from their faith. They could also work effectively in many areas of social and charitable work. This testimony and cooperation, I am sure, could help us take a different approach to the theological issues that divide us. They could make the question of unity more interesting to a wider audience, which is little concerned with theological issues such as the Filioque or primacy issues, but sensitive to questions that concern everyday life. I had the honour to raise these issues with His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI last September, during my visit to Rome.”
He also evoked this theme at the opening of the Russian Orthodox seminary in a former 17th-century Catholic convent in Epinay-sous-Sénart outside of Paris. “The opening of an Orthodox seminary of the Moscow Patriarchate in Paris is an unprecedented event,” he said. “The seminary is called among other things to become an important center of rapprochement between traditional Christian Churches in Europe … The primary task of Paris Seminary is to offer high-quality theological education. The seminary is also to become a link between the Russian Orthodox Church and Christians in France.”
Hilarion said Catholics and Orthodox were making progress in theological discussions on issues that split them in the Great Schism over a millennium ago. But he said the Moscow Patriarchate took a “prudent” approach to the “uncertain and distant results of theological dialogue … it knows that such a dialogue will probably take decades to come to a result.”
On that dialogue with German Protestants, Hilarion was quoted last week as citing protocol problems arising from Kässmann’s election. “We can develop the dialogue, but there are lots of simple protocol questions. How will the Patriarch address her or meet with her?” the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying. This elicited a sharp reaction from Kässman and Bishop Martin Schindehütte, Hilarion’s counterpart in the EKD. In a joint letter to Patriarch Kirill, they expressed their “great surprise and incomprehension” at his “unsuitable” remarks on her election. They said there was a Christian commandment of mutual respect “im geschwisterlichen Umgang” (in brotherly and sisterly interchange) among churches despite theological differences and regretted that a planned ceremony on November 30 to mark 50 years of EKD-Russian Orthodox dialogue had to be called off.
Pope, Moscow patriarch moving slowly towards possible meeting
A senior Russian Orthodox leader has said the idea of a meeting between Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill and Pope Benedict could be moving towards the preparation stage. Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the “foreign minister” of the Russian church, made clear that neither a date nor a location for such the long-awaited meeting was under discussion. But given the glacial pace at which progress on this issue is made, even the change in tone from Moscow is worth noting.
There has never been a meeting between a pope and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest of the Orthodox Churches that make up the second biggest Christian family after Roman Catholicism. The late Pope John Paul II wanted to make history with a visit to Russia, but strains between the Vatican and Moscow over alleged Catholic proselytising in the former Soviet Union got in the way.
The election of Pope Benedict in 2005 and of Patriarch Kirill early this year seemed to close that chapter of the churches’ bilateral relations and open a new one moving towards a possible meeting. But despite the warmer tone in comments from each side, problems still remained. Only last month, Hilarion denied reports of an impending meeting and said relations needed a “radical improvement.”
The Interfax news agency quoted Hilarion as telling reporters in Moscow: “Today it can be said that we are moving to a moment when it becomes possible to prepare a meeting between the Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow … There are no specific plans for the venue or timing of such a meeting but on both sides there is a desire to prepare it.”
Hilarion added with approval that that Benedict is “a very reserved, traditional man who does not seek the expansion of the Catholic Church to traditionally Orthodox regions.”
Cardinal Walter Kasper, the top Catholic official for ecumenical relations, made positive sounds back in September after Hilarion met Benedict at the Vatican. Last month, he said a Catholic-Orthodox theologians’ meeting in Cyprus had gone well and even discussed the question of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, one of the main issues dividing Catholics and Orthodox. There was no agreement, of course, but the two sides agreed to continue to talk — in September 2010 in Vienna.
pax
its Good news when the Orthodox joins us as Brothers we become a Real Moving Force but tradition is tradition so Ecumenism with the protestant dosent hold waters . we Roman catholic are happy being traditional because this will make us Grow and moral standing will prevail.
God Bless the Holy father pope Benedict and the Russian Patriarch Kirill
God bless.
Vatican’s Anglican plan won’t alter celibacy for most priests
The Vatican said on Monday its plan to allow married Anglican priests to convert to Catholicism does not signal any change to its age-old rule of celibacy for the overwhelming majority of Catholic priests. It set out its position in a preface to Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Constitution “Anglicanorum Coetibus” (Groups of Anglicans) regulating the admission of Anglican converts to Catholicism, including married priests and bishops.
“The possibility envisioned by the Apostolic Constitution for some married clergy within the Personal Ordinariates (the structure for ex Anglicans) does not signify any change in the Church’s discipline of clerical celibacy,” it said.
The Vatican announced last month an initiative to make it easier for conservative Anglicans who feel their church has become too liberal to convert to Catholicism. This stirred widespread speculation on what it could eventually mean for the celibacy rule in the Roman Catholic church. There was also speculation about whether men who had left the Catholic priesthood to marry and later became Anglicans could return to the Catholic priesthood and remain married.
Bishop of Guildford Christopher Hill, Chairman of the Church of England’s Council for Christian Unity, said: “We note the publication of the text of the Apostolic Constitution and its complementary norms today. It will now be for those who have requested and at this point feel impelled to seek full communion with the Roman Catholic Church to study the Apostolic Constitution carefully in the near future and to consider their options.
The Catholic Church is a communion of 21, now 22, local churches, each having its own episcopacy, rites and rituals.
There is nothing new about the move to invite the Anglicans in because it mirrors the creation of the various Uniate Eastern Catholic Churches, which worship using the rites and rituals of the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox, but profess unity with the Roman Catholic Church. Most of them have married priests as well.
Additionally, the Roman Catholic Church has been reordaining married Anglican clergy since 1980, so the married clergy part isn’t anything new.
UK’s man at Vatican stresses ties that bind
Speaking against the background noise of exploding fireworks as Britons marked the failure of the Catholic Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Britain’s man at the Vatican, Francis Campbell, stressed the ties that bind his country and the Vatican on international relations.
Campbell, a Catholic from Northern Ireland who has been UK Ambassador to the Holy See since 2005, was delivering the St Thomas More Lecture (full text here) at the Allen Hall Seminary in London’s fashionable Chelsea district.
The UK envoy emphasised how Pope Benedict’s approach to international relations had been shaped by his experience of growing up in Germany during the Nazi era. Campbell noted how Benedict, like his predecessor John Paul, “saw how fragile society actually was” and noted that he is one of the last of that generation still in authority.
Campbell underlined the common ground shared by Britain and the Vatican on issues like climate change, international development and disarmament, emphasising how the Pope’s moral authority helped to propel shared ideas.
The envoy was suitably diplomatic on media reports that the pope would visit Britain in 2010. “I couldn’t possibly comment on that,” he said. He also refused to be drawn on the biggest recent story between Rome and London, the Vatican initiative making it easier for disaffected Anglicans to convert to Catholicism.
Do you think the Vatican is a positive force in international affairs. And what about ecumenical relations between Lambeth Palace and the Vatican?
Pax
The His Excellency Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols is very Right the roman catholic church is not a Hiding place for this Anglicans. if they like the Roman catholic church they want to join because they got problem with their own kind they rebelled and protested against the catholic church now they want to come back . we have enough of rubbish in our churches ,its time for Rubbish recycling (RC).sspx and the orthodox will save our faith not the protestant. The holy father Benedict is very care full thats why he is peter. god Bless the pope and Arch bishop Vincent
Benedictine Oblate
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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“Hopelessly inadequate” is what Cardinal Sean Brady, admitted when asked about the Churches response to allegations of Priests involvement in child abuse. At Least someone is telling the truth! I mean just so I am clear on what the rules are, is the standard that when someone commits a heinous act and others in positions of authority cover it up, all they have to do is say, “oops, sorry,” when they are caught. Because you know if that is the new rule, then we can start closing down all the prisons and jails because I’m sure all the criminals caught from now on will be happy to simply say they are “just so sorry from the bottoms of their hearts”. Seriously though most Priests are there for the people and hate these criminals…this was actually interesting though…
http://ketiva.com/Religion/catholic_chur ch_asks_for_forgiveness_regarding_child_ abuse_scandal.html