THE banner outside St Mary's Catholic Church, South Brisbane, reads: "Everyone has a place in the church. Every person without exception should be able to feel at home and never rejected."These are the words of Pope Benedict XVI himself. But it seems they don't apply to the community of St Mary's.
God is good. Organised religion is often not. To some in the Catholic hierarchy, it doesn't matter how much godly good you do if you don't toe the line.
The past 40 years have seen a determined fundamentalist backlash against the openness and reforms of the Second Vatican Council that began so hopefully in the 1960s.
Now an entire parish of decent, spiritual people can be threatened with expulsion from the faith because some bigot has protested to Rome that they are, horror of horrors, too tolerant and accepting of diversity.
Most parishes are burdened with a tiny minority of fundamentalist obsessives who dob in priests for supposed breaches of tradition. They are successful way beyond their numerical strength; indeed, the Vatican is notoriously deaf to anyone else in the laity, ignoring the concerns of the vast majority of those who call themselves Catholic.
Accordingly, in August last year, the Archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, wrote a letter to Peter Kennedy, St Mary's parish priest. In it he objected to the kind of prayers said at the parish's liturgies and to the style of clothing worn by Father Kennedy at Mass (Kennedy wears ordinary clothes much of the time).
It wasn't only about clothes. The parish was adapting some prayers, allowing divorced and gay people to receive the Eucharist and letting groups such as a Buddhist group and a gay choir use the church when it wasn't in use for Catholic celebrations. According to the letter, this was enough to put them outside the Catholic Church.
"The question for me," the archbishop wrote, "is not so much whether St Mary's should be closed down, but whether St Mary's will close itself down by practices that separate it from communion with the Roman Catholic Church."
Now Kennedy has been sacked and yesterday a new, Vatican-approved parish priest was shoehorned into the place. Kennedy has said that he intends to offer the 9am Mass today, and many are expected to attend.
In the meantime, the Pope is battling on another front: the public relations disaster he incurred when he rescinded the excommunication of four dissident hyper-conservative bishops.
These chaps, so much more acceptable to the Vatican than the gentle people of St Mary's, belong to the Society of St Pius X. The SSPX adheres to a form of liturgy that was rejected by the Second Vatican Council as anti-Semitic: it includes a disgraceful Good Friday prayer for the conversion of "the perfidious Jews".
Unfortunately, Richard Williamson, one of the four bishops, went further, stating on Swedish television that no more than 300,000 Jews perished under the Nazis, and that he did not believe there were gas chambers in Auschwitz.
It is baffling that the Vatican machinery that can sniff out a recalcitrant liberal in Queensland did not pick this up. For those who adhere to notions of papal infallibility, it wasn't a good look: either the Pope didn't know and blundered into this, or he knew and didn't care until the international fuss. In damage control, the Pope stated that Holocaust denial was "intolerable".
And then he had to go and threaten to excommunicate Williamson again.
Now that puts the excommunicated Kennedy and the St Mary's folk in some unpleasant company. But we have to realise that to the mindset of fundamentalists, all deviation from the party line is intolerable, so Holocaust denial is only as bad to them as some other things that wouldn't bother you or me.
Let's see: allowing women to preside at the Eucharist and preach homilies; that'll get you into heaps of strife. Bless the loving union of gay or divorced couples? Ouch. Wear ordinary clothes to celebrate Mass? That's it, you've done it now: the vestment police are at your door.
Fundamentalists are so afraid of freedom. The deity they believe in is one whose morals are like any sociopathic despot's: toe its line, obey, don't commit a thought-crime or it will chuck you into a lake of fire for all eternity. Do these worshippers ever think how they would judge a human who was such a sadistic tyrant as this nightmarish torturer-god?
But for the majority of Catholics (only 13 per cent of us even bother to go to church these days), their God does not sit there devising horrible punishments and scourging the unbeliever, but is infinitely, unconditionally loving and kind.
That's the God I can believe in.
The one who understands failure, suffering and frailty.
I hope the hierarchy of my church can rediscover the God of all creation, with the gentle son of a humble Jewish woman as our guide.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce
(Source: WT)