VATICAN CITY
The Irish Times
PADDY AGNEW in Rome
POPE BENEDICT XVI has begun the Catholic Church’s Easter celebrations in Rome with a sharp rebuke of those priests and laity who choose to question key tenets of church teaching.
In a homily during the traditional Maundy Thursday “Chrism” Mass in St Peter’s, the Pope issued a highly unusual rebuttal to those who question Church teaching on questions such as the ordination of women. “Recently a group of priests from a European country issued a summons to disobedience . . . even to the point of disregarding definite decisions of the church’s magisterium, such as the question of women’s ordination . . . But is disobedience really a way to do this? Do we sense here . . . a desperate push to do something to change the church in accordance with one’s own preferences and ideas?”
While the pope here seems to be making a clear reference to the “Pfarrer Initiative”, promoted by over 300 Austrian priests, his hardline rejection of the call for changes also fits in perfectly with reports yesterday that dissident Irish priest Tony Flannery is under investigation by the Holy See.
Furthermore, the pope’s words this week re-echo criticism of the Irish Catholic Church expressed last month in the Holy See’s summary of the recent Apostolic Visitation to Ireland: “ . . . the visitors also encountered a certain tendency, not dominant but nevertheless fairly widespread among priests, religious and laity, to hold theological opinions at variance with the teachings of the magisterium . . .”
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