A prominent Nashville priest may face church discipline for criticizing Roman Catholic teaching on celibate priests, birth control and papal authority.At issue is a video posted last week on the website of St. Edward Catholic Church in Nashville. In it, the Rev. Joseph Breen, longtime pastor of St. Edward, calls for the Roman Catholic Church to allow married priests and birth control. He also claims that Catholics don't have to obey the pope.
The video was picked up by a conservative Catholic website called Creative Minority Report and posted on YouTube. Upset readers of that blog e-mailed Bishop David Choby of Nashville demanding that Breen be disciplined.
Choby met with Breen on Friday and asked him to remove the video, which Breen agreed to do. A second meeting is planned this week.
Rick Musacchio, spokes man for the Diocese of Nashville, said the bishop is looking at several possible disciplinary responses."The bishop takes this very seriously," he said.
Breen said the video was meant as an outreach to those who left the Catholic Church because they disagree with Catholic teaching.
According to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Life, about 10 percent of Americans surveyed claim to be former Catholics.
About half of former Catholics in the Pew survey said they left the church because of its ban on artificial birth control.
Breen said he wanted to show that people who disagree with the church are still welcome at St. Edward.
"Our spiritual life committee wanted to reach out to those Catholics and bring them home," he said Monday.
"For them to know that their views are not radical, that they can believe the way they do and still be part of the church's community."
Video goes viral
The video was posted on the St. Edward website and Facebook page July 20, said Jason Farris, a member of St. Edward. It got very little traffic for the first 10 days or so, Farris said. But when the video went on YouTube, the complaints surfaced.
The most upsetting aspect of the video for some staunch Catholics was Breen's assertion that they do not have to obey the pope."We owe allegiance of respect, support and prayers to the pope," Breen said Monday. "But we do not owe obedience. The only obedience that you and I owe is to the Lord's spirit and what we call the fidelity of our conscience."
As support for that claim, Breen pointed to comments made by South African Bishop Kevin Dowling earlier this year. Dowling also insists Catholics should obey their conscience first.
That claim isn't completely out of line with Catholic teaching, said Donald Cozzens, adjunct professor of theology at John Carroll University in Cleveland.
"Catholics do owe obedience to the pope and the teaching office of the church, but their first obedience is to their conscience," he said.
"This is classic Catholic teaching. But challenging the pope can't be ignored, says John Allen, senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter newspaper.
"There are certain third-rail issues in the church that if a priest or anyone publicly challenges them, the bishop is going to have to be obligated to act," Allen said.
"Publicly questioning the authority of the pope is one of those third-rail issues. It's going to paint a bishop into a corner."
Allen said bishops usually prefer to work out conflicts with priests privately. But the Internet has made that difficult.
"In the Catholic Church, just as there are in secular politics, there are activists on both left and right who do nothing else other than spend their days looking for things to get mad about."
Bishop silenced Breen
Breen is no stranger to controversy. He's a longtime critic of mandatory celibacy, saying that the Catholic Church needs married priests.
A lifelong Catholic, he's angered that the church has welcomed married former Episcopal and Lutheran ministers — such as the Rev. Prentice Dean, who was ordained in the Diocese of Nashville in February — while not allowing Catholic priests to marry.
In 1993, he wrote to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, asking all of them to push the Vatican to allow Catholic priests to marry.
Choby's predecessor, Bishop Edward Kmiec, silenced Breen for that action, forbidding him from talking to the media or preaching about any view that conflicted with church teaching.
That ban was later lifted.
Breen said that he did not mean to offend Choby or cause an incident.
The diocese had no comment about potential punishments, if any, for Breen.
Farris said church members don't want to fight over church teaching with the bishop. They just want to find a way to attract ex-Catholics, he said.
"We want people to know that whatever took them away from the church, God wants them back," he said.SIC: TCom