Scandal at 'America'

[fix]

American Catholics, including most regular churchgoers, get their news about the church from the secular media, not from church spokespersons or official pronouncements. Most Catholics read about papal encyclicals in the papers; they don’t read encyclicals. It therefore behooves the hierarchy, if it wants to communicate with the faithful (or re-evangelize them), to act in a way that does not lend credence to the still-widespread impression that the Catholic Church is a backward-looking, essentially authoritarian, institution run by men who are afraid of open debate and intellectual inquiry. It is safe to say that the Vatican’s shocking dismissal of Rev. Thomas Reese as editor of the Jesuit magazine America has left precisely such an impression with millions of Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.
commonwealmagazine.org/article.php?id_article=1244

 

[CCF_Jeff]

From that article in Commonweal:

Does this mean that the zeal with which then-Cardinal Ratzinger harried theologians while head of the CDF will continue during his papacy?

Karl Keating discussed this type of allegation by the liberal left in one of his e-letters. He war remarking about an article in the National Catholic Reporter which listed some 24 theologians who had been disciplined by the “repressive Vatican”. He said in part:

I found remarkable two things about the list: the reasonableness of the discipline (these folks deserved what they got, and most of them deserved to get a lot more) and the shortness of the list.

Here we have a “repressive” papacy that has been around for 26 years, and the best the “National Catholic Reporter” could do was to come up with a list of only 24 people who have been disciplined under this pope. That is fewer than one per year!

…

If the Church had the kind of inquisitorial bureaucracy that its critics imagine it has, the Vatican would be disciplining 24 people each week, not 24 each 26 years. Even then, at 24 per week the total number disciplined during this papacy would be less than 7,500–not a large number when one thinks about the population and internal disarray of the Church.

However you look at it, 24 cases in 26 years is de minimis, even laughable. It means that nearly every error-pushing writer and speaker has gotten a free pass. It means that the Vatican has given the heterodox plenty of leeway–and then it has given them some more. It means there has been no persecution by Rome, no generalized heavy-handedness. If anything, it means the Vatican has been lax.

						If there is a scandal here, it is not that so many have been disciplined but that so few have been.

Maybe the editor of Commonweal fears he will be next. I doubt it, but he probably should be.

 

[fix]

CCF_Jeff:

Maybe the editor of Commonweal fears he will be next. I doubt it, but he probably should be.

I hope and pray.