Top
Catholic leaders on Tuesday told the pope they blamed a drop in
believers on the Church’s closed and bureaucratic ways and hypocrisy in
its ranks, as well as a hostile secularist society.Bishops gathered for a synod aimed at boosting the flagging Church met Pope Benedict XVI for a close-door session in which they vented their frustration and exasperation over a decline in faith.
“We have lost credibility,” Italian Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella said. “We have closed in on ourselves... we have turned a life of faith and ritual into bureaucracy,” he said.
Fisichella, who heads up the pontifical council for evangelisation, told his fellow bishops they had become “cautious about speaking out”.
After prepared speeches, some of the bishops addressed the pope. “It is difficult to find the courage to evangelise. We are afraid,” one European archbishop said. “Christians are afraid to talk to those who have distanced themselves, to those that are hostile,” he said.
While Fisichella blamed “a world permeated only by scientific culture” for the drop in believers, Philippine bishop Socrates Villegas said the root of the problem lay with the arrogance and hypocrisy within the Church itself. “Why is there a strong wave of secularisation, a storm of antipathy or plain cold indifference towards the Church in some parts of the world necessitating a new wave of evangelisation programmes?” he asked.
“Evangelisation has been hurt and continues to be impeded by the arrogance of its messengers. The hierarchy must shun arrogance, hypocrisy and bigotry. “We must punish the errant among us instead of covering up our own mistakes,” he said, in an apparent reference to the widespread child sex-abuse scandal in the Church, which involved bishops accused of protecting suspects.