By Jonathan Luxmoore
The Record
February 16, 2011
http://www.therecord.com.au/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2337&Itemid=28
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| German journalist Peter Seewald, who wrote Pope Benedict XVI’s new book, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times, gestures during a press conference at the Vatican last November. |
OXFORD, England - The German Bishops' conference has called for "urgent further clarification" on the "highly binding" Church teachings that over 140 theologians have called into question.
More than 140 Catholic theologians from universities in Austria, Germany and Switzerland called for the Church to take serious steps to address the problems of the priest shortage by allowing married and women priests and allowing laypeople to help select Bishops and pastors, among other changes.
Journalist Peter Seewald, whose in-depth interview with Pope Benedict XVI became the book Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times, dismissed the public protest by German-speaking theologians as "a rebellion in the nursing home."
Seewald told the Kath.net news agency that the highly-publicised statement of dissent - signed by one-third of the theology professors at Catholic universities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland - should not be interpreted as a popular uprising against Church teaching.
Rather, he said, it is a protest by the same people who have caused a crisis in Catholic teaching.
The dissident theologians, Seewald charged, are seeking to remodel the Church in their own image, adapting Catholic teachings to popular standards.
Their approach, he said, is to measure Church doctrines by the standards of popular opinion, putting themselves in the role of "chief priests of the Zeitgeist."
In his remarks on the theologians' public statement, Seewald referred to St Paul's words (2 Tim 4:3): "For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachings to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths."
A spokesman for the German Bishops' conference cautiously welcomed the theologians' memorandum, saying the professors "are contributing to debate about the future of the Church in Germany."
"The German Bishops have invited this debate," Jesuit Fr Hans Langendorfer, secretary of the German Bishops' conference, said in a 4 February statement in response to a 1,360-word memorandum, The Church in 2011: A Necessary Departure, published on 4 February by Germany's Suddeutsche Zeitung daily.
"These topics need urgent further clarification. To meet the difficult challenges facing the Church in Germany with action needs an affirmation rather than just responsiveness by the Bishops. Weighty subjects should no longer be avoided."
The Bishops will discuss the theologians' call during a plenary meeting in March, he said.
Pope Benedict XVI will visit his native Germany from 22-25 September.
The 143 professors said their appeal was made in response to the clergy sexual abuse scandals that surfaced in Europe in 2010 and the growing numbers of Catholics who have "terminated their legal membership or have privatised their spiritual life in order to protect it from the institution."
The theologians also said that the Church should "trust in people's ability to make decision and carry responsibility" in their own lives and "must not revert to paternalism."
They praised the Church's esteem for married and unmarried lives, but said this should not exclude same-sex couples and divorced and remarried couples, though the statement stopped short of asking the Church to officially sanction same-sex unions.
The Church teaches that any sexual activity outside of marriage, understood to be between a woman and a man only, is sinful.
Regarding divorce and remarriage, in the Catholic Church, civil divorce doesn't exclude one from the sacraments.
A person cannot receive the sacraments if he or she remarries outside the Church while still bound by a previous marriage.
In their statement, the theologians questioned the wisdom of lately bringing back old forms of liturgical worship and warned that liturgies were in danger of becoming "frozen in traditionalism."
"Cultural diversity enriches liturgical life," they said.
"Only when the celebration of faith takes account of concrete life situations will the Church's message reach people.
The theologians warned that community life is eroding and historical identity and social networks have given way under the priest shortage and larger and larger parishes. "Priests are 'overheated' and burnt out," they said.
"The faithful stay away when they are not trusted to share responsibility and to participate in democratic structures in the leadership of their communities. Church offices must serve the life of the communities - not the other way around."
Enacting the reforms the theologians outlined would attract people back to the Church, the statement said.
The memorandum was published two weeks after a call by eight leading Catholic members of Germany's governing Christian Democratic Union, including Norbert Lammert, president of the Bundestag, the German parliament, to make a "regional exception" by admitting married men to the priesthood.
The German Bishops have said two-thirds of all parishes will not have their own priest by 2020 and have embarked on an effort to merge parishes in response.
In a late January statement, the Bishops' conference said the relaxation of celibacy was "not foreseen for discussions" during preparations for the Pope's official September visit to Germany, his third homecoming, and would not be debated by individual Church leaders. The conference added that the issue would require a "decision binding for the whole Church" and an "appropriate preparation of public opinion", rather than being determined by the German Church alone.
In a letter to the politicians, several of whom belong to the Church's Central Committee of German Catholics, Cardinal Walter Brandmuller, retired president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, said the call "personally insults the overwhelming majority of priests who've freely chosen, lived and faithfully upheld their celibacy," and risked leading German Catholics "into schism and creation of a national Church."
However, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the former German Bishops' conference president, later dismissed Cardinal Brandmuller's letter as "one-sided," and said he was wrong to reject the views of eminent lay Catholics.
Nina Schmedding, deputy spokeswoman for the German Bishops' conference, said clerics would not comment further on the memorandum.
"We've said we'll talk about such issues as married priests, but not this year," Schmedding told CNS on 7 February.
"Our position will be the same on all such initiatives."
Additional reporting by The Record
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