Kieran Conry Resignation Highlights Faultlines in Catholic Church

By Andrew Brown
The Guardian
September 29, 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/29/kieran-conry-resignation-faultlines-catholic-church

Kieran Conry, who has announced his resignation as bishop of Arundel and Brighton. Photograph: PA

The resignation of the Roman Catholic bishop of Arundel and Brighton at the weekend has highlighted traditional faultlines in a church contending with how to handle divorce, birth control and other matters of personal and sexual morality.

Kieran Conry left a message to be read from all the pulpits of his diocese in which he confessed to having been “unfaithful to his promises as a Catholic priest”, after the Mail on Sunday published an extract from a love letter he had written to a woman whose husband is divorcing her. Conry told the newspaper that this relationship was not sexual, but that he was resigning over another relationship six years ago. He provided no further explanation.

Conry was previously in charge of press relations for the Catholic church in England and Wales, and was widely liked and trusted. “He showed how a Catholic priest could be a human being,” said one observer. “Now he has shown us in a way he’d rather not have done.”

The husband of the woman in the present case is threatening to sue the Catholic church on the grounds that it must have known about Conry’s behaviour.

Traditionalists were jubilant at his resignation. The rightwing blogger Damian Thompson paid tribute to Conry’s human qualities – “he didn’t give us any bullshit and let slip the odd bit of gossip” – but accused him of bullying a traditionalist parish that was using the Latin mass, something on which Thompson is a great deal keener than the present pope.

Conry had also been denounced for tolerating groups that question the official Catholic teaching on birth control, the remarriage of divorcees and the rights of gay people.

These are particularly neuralgic matters for the Catholic church in Britain at the moment, as one of the country’s leading liberal theologians, Prof Tina Beattie, has just been banned from lecturing in church premises in Scotland after an intervention from Rome. The denunciation of supposed heretics has been a feature of the Catholic civil wars in North America for decades now, and it appears to be spreading to this country.

The Catholic bishops of England and Wales are frequently criticised as grey liberals because they have made their peace with the wholesale rejection of the church’s sexual teaching by Britain’s middle-class Catholics. The encyclical banning artificial birth control is a dead letter to them, while in many parishes remarried worshippers are allowed communion.

Last year the church held a global inquiry into ordinary Catholics’ views on these teachings. This was widely expected to lead to some liberalisation, but the Vatican asked that the responses not be made public. While the rich and influential German church published its results, in this country Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, suppressed those of England and Wales. However, all the indications are that they will show the Catholic laity in this country take their view of sexual morality from the liberal society around them and not from the celibate conservatives in the Vatican.

Pope Francis is thought to be on the side of change here, but he is a remarkably skilled and subtle politician who will not act until he is sure of the backing of almost all the church. As a result, no dramatic developments are likely until next year, and even then nothing may come of it.

The toleration of some remarried couples is officially justified on the grounds that to turn them away from communion would cause a public scandal. But in practice it reflects the widespread belief among an ageing clergy that the official teaching is unworkable. Bishops from all around the world are going to Rome next month for the first of two meetings at which change will be discussed. Conservatives have mounted a determined pre-emptive attack of change, with five senior cardinals publishing co-ordinated broadsides against the liberals last week.

In all this, the Conry scandal will tend to increase the pressure felt by both sides. Celibacy is under attack among both clergy and laity. Marriage for clergy and remarriage for the laity will be the next battlegrounds.