Nenagh Priest at Odds with the Vatican

By Peter Gleeson
Nenagh Guardian
April 14, 2012

http://www.nenaghguardian.ie/news-detail.php?article=BY0X3N

A Nenagh born priest has this week asserted that he is at odds with the Vatican on the issue of marriage for priests and the ordination of women.

Fr Sean McDonagh said advocating to allow priests to marry was not contrary to the teachings of the church.

And he said teenagers he had spoken to in secondary schools could not understand why the Vatican would not allow women to be ordained as priests and forbid clerics from marrying.

Fr McDonagh, said his own late mother, a long serving primary school teacher in Saint Mary’s Boys National School who died ten years ago, and who was “a very pious woman”, could not understand why the Catholic Church did not allow priests to marry and women to be ordained.

“I wonder are people giving that feedback to the Vatican because things have changed,” he said. “Things have changed because the Spirit of God leads people, and very often it’s through their experience.”

Fr McDonagh said Pope Paul VI had advocated that the way of the Church was through dialogue. That was a reality of The Second Vatican Council (Vatican 11) which addressed relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the modern world in the 1960s.

However, he said that in the Catholic Church at present there was, in his view, “a total reversion to topdown leadership”.

“Rome is the central office, the CEO [the Pope] is there; they devise policies and send them out to the branch managers, who are the bishops, and they hand them out to the rest of us.”

“That is a caricature of what the Church of Jesus should be”, said Fr McDonagh, a Columban priest, who spent many years working in the missions in The Philippines. He is also the author of a number of theological books.

Citing the example of the ceremony on Easter Thursday based on Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, Fr McDonagh said this was something that the leadership of the Church today was supposed to do for its deciples, “not the other way around”.

“Unfortunately, in the Catholic Church the authority has been exercised in a very different way,” he said.

Priests like him were trying to teach the Christian message in a society that was challenging issues like clerical celibacy and the ban on ordinations of women.

“The challenge of every Christian generation is to make the Gospel relevant to this generation – not the previous generation,” he said.

Fr McDonagh said people with views like his were not just a small minority in the Church. There was “a huge percentage of Catholic people who made these decisions in the whole area of sexuality.”

“People have come to appreciate that they can be Christians and Catholics, and yet they do not follow that to the letter.”

Fr McDonagh said that for almost 1,900 years Catholics were not allowed to enter a Jewish synagogue to pray, as it was deemed to be a breach of the First Commandment. Then things changed when Pope Paul VI entered a synagogue to pray in 1965. The old rule was not sacrosanct anymore and other issues did not have to be sacrosanct either . “Things have changed,” said Fr McDonagh.

He conceded that what he was saying may be at odds with what the Vatican was saying. But he added that he had already been at odds with the Vatican on a lot of issues.

What was evident now in Ireland was the existence of “a communion where people are trying to live out as best they can the Christian faith in the service of the world and, in particular, the poor of the world.”

Fr McDonagh said one of the fundamental things regarding leadership in the Church should be to ensure that the Eucharist was available to everyone. Currently that was not happening, and it would not happen, because of the age of the clergy in Ireland.

“Almost every priest now is bald or grey. The average age of priests in Ireland is now over 60. You are seeing the collapse of priestly presence in Ireland and in other parts of the world.”

Fr McDonagh made his comments in an interview on RTE’s Radio’s “Drivetime” programme on Monday. On that day he was attending a meeting of the Association of Catholic Priests, which claims to represent more than 800 clergy.

Asked about the recent axing of Fr Tony Flannery’s column in the Redemptorist magazine, “Reality”, by the Vatican over concerns about issues the author was writing about, Fr McDonagh agreed that Fr Flannery had been effectively “gagged” by Rome. “Oh, yes, he has,” he replied.

Fr McDonagh said there had been a perception in some of Fr Flannery’s writings that priests should not be discussing issues such as the ordination of women and clerical celibacy. Fr Flannery had been told by Rome not to write about such issues.

Fr McDonagh said the Association of Catholic Priests, through its website, had received a lot of support for Fr Flannery, who was highly regarded in his own society. “He is someone who in a sense has been ticked off with this kind of restriction and I don’t think this is the way the Christian life should work.”

Asked if it was not fair for the Pope to criticise certain priests for being desperate to change the Church to accord with their own preferences and ideas, Fr McDonagh replied: “No, that is not fair.”

He said the Association of Priests was putting a question to the Vatican: was the Eucharist more central to people’s lives and a higher priority for Rome than priestly celibacy?

He added: “And if celibacy is a higher priority – well, that is not the Gospel of Jesus.”