| Reformers vow to push agenda beyond married
priests
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
NCR Staff
Convergence and solidarity within the Catholic reform movement
seemed the leitmotifs at a congress of the International Federation of Married
Catholic Priests held July 28-Aug. 1 at Emory University in Atlanta.
The event drew 330 activists from 17 nations. In addition to 16
associations of married priests from around the world, approximately 25 other
Catholic reform groups -- such as We Are Church, the Women’s Ordination
Conference and Catholics Speak Out -- were represented.
Canadian Bishop Remi de Roo had been scheduled to address the
conference but pulled out in May under Vatican pressure (NCR, May 21).
Australian Sacred Heart Fr. Paul Collins, facing Vatican scrutiny for his book
Papal Power, replaced de Roo.
The Atlanta event brought together the leadership ranks of a wide
spectrum of progressive Catholic groups. “People here are not concerned
only with a married priesthood,” said Loretto Sr. Maureen Fiedler of
Catholics Speak Out in a telephone interview from Atlanta. “They’re
seeking a thoroughly reformed church, with full equality for women and gays and
lesbians. All these issues have dovetailed.”
Fiedler struck the convergence theme in a homily. She predicted
changes under the next papacy but warned that these changes may come with
strings attached. “The acceptance of a married clergy is very likely to be
one of the first changes,” she said. “I will be among the first to
applaud and celebrate this step toward resurrection as long as -- for example
-- those who accept such a priesthood are not required to reject the idea that
women can be priests.
“By the same token, if women are ordained, we cannot accept a
requirement that we exclude our gay brothers or lesbian sisters, or that we
refuse Communion to those of other faith traditions, nor can any of us take
stands that exclude whole classes of people from church or
priesthood.”
Anthony Padovano, longtime leader of the American married
priests’ group CORPUS and now vice-president of the international
federation, echoed Fiedler. “If there were a readmission of noncanonical
priests and nothing else was changed, why would I go back if I would have to be
silenced on every other issue of reform?” he said in an interview.
“A truncated ministry like that would be unbearably
oppressive.” Padovano said there is a “virtual unanimity” among
the members of the CORPUS on this point.
The relationship between the married priests movement and
advocates of women’s ordination has not always been so congenial. In the
1970s and ’80s, some married priests worried about linking their cause to
what were perceived as more radical demands; at the same time, some feminist
leaders argued that CORPUS and other married priests groups remained too
clerical and too male-dominated to be effective partners for Catholic
women.
Elfriede Harth of Versailles, France, believes these antagonisms
have faded. “We see that the real issue is leadership that responds to the
needs of the community,” said Harth, coordinator of the international We
Are Church movement. “Whether that’s a married man or a woman
isn’t so important.”
We Are Church originated in Austria and Germany, where petitions
demanding church reform garnered more than 2 million signatures in the
mid-1990s.
In part, Fiedler credits Vatican intransigence for this
convergence. “If the passage of time had brought a married priesthood at
the cost of excluding women, we might not have seen this. But the fact that we
all have remained excluded from full acceptance in the church has produced a
growing sense of solidarity,” she said.
Organizers of the Atlanta conference said they had
“preliminary discussions” about calling a major world congress of
Catholic reform groups in 2002 or 2003, to be held either in Latin America or
Rome.
The conference theme at Emory was “Human Rights and
Reconciliation.” Harth argued in a speech that human rights will not be
protected in the church until it is reorganized along democratic lines.
“You know that people, and particularly young people, cannot identify with
institutional forms of religiosity that smell of the dust of absolute
monarchy,” she said.
Harth said that a democratic church would not be a religious
supermarket where people “satisfy themselves as consumers,” but
rather a place “where all voices are welcome and heard, where democratic
forms of leadership and authority unfold.” In such a church, a monarchical
papacy would become a historical curiosity.
“I dream of the day when I can go to visit the Vatican
palaces as I now go for a walk to the Castle of Versailles,” she said.
“It would certainly be a magnificent tourist attraction, but its form of
government would be a thing of the past.”
Philippe de la Chapelle, a married priest who worked at the
Vatican with the Pontifical Commission for Peace and Justice in the late 1960s,
reviewed the history of the Catholic church on human rights. Pointing to
concepts such as the right of sanctuary, he said, “The universality of
Catholicism has helped to establish a better understanding of the universality
of human rights.” Yet in critical areas such as sexuality, women, divorce
and celibacy, he said the church falls short.
“Celibacy is an individual choice, a personal agreement, not
an obligation from on high,” la Chapelle said. “A way of life so
voluntary must be freely accepted each day by an internal consent and not by an
external regulation.”
Collins’ address focused on the structural dimensions of
renewal. He warned reformers against unrealistic expectations of rapid change.
“Our asceticism must be that of knowing that personally we will probably
never achieve what we set out to do,” he said.
Collins said many Catholics are today called to be pontiffs.
Noting that the word literally means bridge-builder, Collins said reformers
must “provide the link between the Catholicism of the past and the
creative manifestations of the tradition that are yet to come.”
Daniel Maguire, professor of moral theology at Marquette
University, argued that in view of crises such as ecological devastation and
threats to peace, “the question of whether the leaders and ministers who
work on this are married on unmarried, gay or heterosexual are cast belatedly
into the abyss of pathetic irrelevancy.”
Patty Crowley, a founder of the Catholic Family Movement and a
member of Paul VI’s birth control commission, received an award at the
conference, as did representatives of the New Faith Community in Rochester,
N.Y.
Full text versions of the major addresses at the conference may
be accessed at www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/documents/index.htm
National Catholic Reporter, August 13,
1999
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