ROME
The Irish Times
PADDY AGNEW
POPE BENEDICT XVI has long made it clear he believes Europe’s traditionally Christian countries need a major spiritual “dig-out” to ward off both growing secularisation and the “eclipse of the sense of God”. Two years after he created the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation, however, one is tempted to ask whether he means new evangelisation or new inquisition.
Irish public opinion is much concerned by revelations that Irish priests such as Fr Tony Flannery and Fr Brian D’Arcy have been “silenced” by the Holy See over the last two years. Yet, there a lot of people getting their knuckles rapped by the Holy See – from US nuns to Austrian priests to teachers at Catholic schools and even Holy See functionaries.
Earlier this month, Emily Herx, a literature teacher at the St Vincent De Paul Catholic School in Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, claimed she had been sacked from the school last year because she had undergone in vitro fertilisation (IVF). She claimed, in a lawsuit, that the school’s church leader, Fr John Kuzmich, had told her she was a “grave, immoral sinner” who would cause a “scandal” if people learned she had undergone IVF, while local bishop Kevin Rhoades had told her “IVF is an intrinsic evil”.
In a statement that stirs echoes of the Eileen Flynn affair in New Ross in the late 1980s, the Fort Wayne diocese publicly asserted its right as a religious employer “to make religious-based decisions consistent with its religious standards”.
Closer to home, Pope Benedict, during his traditional Maunday Thursday “Chrism” Mass at Easter, sharply rebuked more than 300 Austrian priests who had issued a “call to disobedience” on key tenets in church teaching, including regarding women’s ordination.
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