"Reformation or Rhetoric?"

The Phoenix Annual 2013,
Clerical Errors, 
Dublin, Ireland.

THE arrival of Pope Francis has enthused Vatican II liberals around the world. In Ireland, persecuted clerical victims of an unbending Roman orthodoxy now believe a new dawn will lead to salvation for the Irish church. But will Francis deliver deeds to back up his words?

Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Charlie Brown, emerged in 2013 as Rome’s colonial governor of the post-Murphy Catholic Church, drawing parallels from dissident clergy and laity to Paul Bremer, President George Bush's supremo in Iraq who reduced that unfortunate country to ungovernability.

New Yorker Brown was appointed two years ago in the wake of Judge Yvonne Murphy’s damning report of horrendous clerical child sex abuse in the Diocese of Dublin. He was chosen by Pope Benedict XVI as his ecclesiastical hitman to remodel a discredited Irish Hierarchy.

Just as Bremer effectively operated as head of state of the internationally recognized government of Iraq ten years ago, Brown’s oversight over existing bishops was strengthened by his remit from Pope Benny to pick a new crop of younger bishops.

Bremer's lack of diplomatic experience - indeed of any meaningful experience in government – is uncannily matched by
Brown is not a Holy See career diplomat groomed in the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in the Piazza Minerva. Instead, he laboured as a backroom theologian since 1994 under the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, CDF, the former Roman Inquisition. 

Brown’s narrow worldview as a product of Middle America, reinforced by the  unquestioning enclosed ethos of seminary life and his limited pastoral experience, aggravated by his induction into the Stasi like anti-intellectualism of the CDF. 
Likewise, Bremer’s obsession with image to the neglect of substance strongly resembles  Brown’s secretive methods in his plantation of the Irish Hierarchy and his high profile participation in the consecration ceremonies of new bishops in their diocesan cathedrals, as well as his conspicuous climbing of Croagh Patrick. Yet, Brown’s projection of himself as an all-Irish American boy is not as it seems: although his mother’s maiden name was Patricia Murphy and one great grandparent was called O’Callaghan, Brown hardly knew Ireland before his appointment. Indeed, the Brown is an anglicisation of the German Braun, another shared affinity with Pope Benny. 
Looking through Brown’s cultivated smiling image to substantive engagement with the realities of the Irish Church, and Fr Brendan Hoban questioned his effectively monopolizing the arcane process of picking new bishops and suggested he was Benedict’s man. 

Like Bremer, Brown does not appreciate, much less recognise the profundity of the issues such as loss of the authority suffered by the church for the cover-ups for so long of the abuse of children as grappled by Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin. Like Martin, Brown must come to grips with the implications for church governance from a rapidly changing and secularizing Ireland if he is to bring the Church back from the brink of being a marginal voice in society. .

Brown’s Achilles heel was his enthusiastic espousal of Benedict’s policy of disciplining liberal theologians. This was prior to the dramatically unexpected resignation of Benny
in February, and the election on March 13 of the first Latin American and Jesuit, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio, as Pope Francis.  

Calling for a "poor" church in which bishops did not live like "princes", but would serve rather than dominate the People of God, Francis did not move into the Vatican's sumptuous papal apartment but opted to live on bed and board in its guest house. He defined the Church as a hospital for sinners, he branded the curial court as “the leprosy of the papacy” and he identified the grace of mercy for sinners as a key theme for his pontificate. He advocated more ecumenism and more inter-religious dialogue.

In a major interview with the Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica which was simultaneously published in the Jesuit flagship of Studies in Dublin, Francis said it was not necessary to insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods, but a new balance towards a church of mercy had to be found. “Otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards.” As a son of the church, however, he did not renounce its hardline positions.

Francis took two initiatives towards putting substance to his reformist talk: first, he established a Council of Eight Cardinals to come up with practical reform of the Curia; and two, his convening next October of an Extraordinary Synod of Bishops which will deal with unresolved issues relating to abortion, marriage and contraception.

Nonetheless, Francis’s advocacy of reform frightened Latin-cherishing Lefebvreites and conservative married clerics from Anglicanism whom Benny wooed, while not fully convincing liberals and women of the firmness of his intentions that would remove obligatory celibacy of the priesthood and allow the ordination of women as being practised by the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests led by Laois-born Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan. 
  
"Unless the structures are changed, no real change will happen," thundered rebel Redemptorist preacher and ACP founding father, Tony Flannery, at the first international gathering last month in Bergentz, Austria, of 30 leaders of reformist priest and lay organizations from six countries, the United States, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Switzerland and Austria. The gathering applauded Flannery’s insistence that church structures, such as those at the doctrinal congregation itself and the role of nuncios, needed grave reform, and they devoured reading his detailed account of the lack of due procedure by the CDF in his case against him, as recounted in his bestseller, A Question of Conscience. The consensus was that while Francis has had a good start, priests and people around the world will soon need more than words.

Another deviant on the hit list of banned theologians, Augustinian priest, Fr Iggy O’Donovan, got his counter-strike in, confirming Charlie’s nickname as Archbishop Blunderbuss. Iggy chose his award of the Freedom of Drogheda for his 12 years voluntary sector work in the town as the occasion to lament his being “delated” to Rome for allegedly administering an invalid baptism of a child, before his transfer to the Augustinian community in Limerick.

If Pope Francis is really serious about reform, he must surround himself with Vatican Two Catholics who would replace the old guard like the new Vatican Rottweiler Archbishop Gerhard Mueller, who now heads the CDF and silenced Flannery. Foolishly, Mueller sprung to the defence of his fellow German “Bishop of Bling” – Franz-Peter Tebartz-van-Elst - who spent €31 million on his new luxury mansion in his diocese of Limburg - with  €15,000 on a bathtub. Like Benny, Mueller is a former Bishop of Regensburg in which capacity he served under then Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF.

Egregiously ignoring Francis’s emphasis on mercy, Müller also declared that divorced and remarried Catholics could not be admitted to Holy Communion – they could not, he said, “appeal to God’s mercy”.

In Francis’s in-tray are a number of pressing cases requiring the Vatican to reviews its treatment of bishops and clerics who are regarded as out of line, whether over moral, financial or doctrinal matters. Present procedures are seriously defective, depriving bishops of due process to defend themselves, as was the case controversially in the 1970s as recorded by a Mayo ex-Columban missionary to Peru, Luke Waldron, in his memoir, A Dawn Unforeseen.

According to former PD constitutional reformer, Michael McDowell, Francis’s statement concerning the likelihood of the moral edifice of the church falling like a house of cards in the absence of "a new balance" is of huge significance. Without the new balance, the road to implosion is plainly open, pleads the Mad Mullah whose proffered advice to Il Papa Francesco in the SINDO was that “the starting point in church renewal must be a fundamental reconsideration of the disastrous course taken by the papacy in Humane Vitae which still discredits the church as a moral community.”

Such rabble-rousing is anathema to Charlie Brown and Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, Eamon Martin, Brown’s specially selected rising star of a new generation of bishops. Eamonn restored the medieval threat of excommunication into Irish political discourse during the Dail’s endorsement of a limited abortion law, which passed despite the protests of Charlie and Eamon.
  
The Nuncio-Armagh axis is now plotting to thwart Labour leader Eamon Gilmore’s fulfillment of his promise there will be legislation in place by autumn 2014 or spring 2015 to allow the adoption of children by gay parents in advance of a referendum on gay marriage. Charlie and Eamon will seek support among some Fine Gael TDs, who may again demand a "free vote" on the grounds that it is a matter of conscience, as will the martyred Blessed Lucinda Creighton, keen to get her revenge on Enda Kenny.

As 2013 fades into history, ghosts of the past returned to disturb Archbishop Brown’s tranquil life in his luxury residence in Cabra. Cardinal Sean Brady, who is holding on in Armagh until his 75th birthday next August, is summoned to answer a civil case in the Four Gold Mines for his alleged negligence in 1975 by a victim of Norbertine paedophile  monk, Brendan Smyth. 

Meanwhile, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin stoutly defended the 98 allegations of abuse recorded against 98 priests, the statistical reality that over 500 children may have been abused by priests in Dublin. Martin of Tours statement was in response to an ACP commissioned study concluded that the practices and procedures of the Murphy commission “fell far short” of meeting the requirements of natural and constitutional justice by naming and shaming those clerics accused of wanting in child protection between 1975 and 2004.

All of this must make Charlie regret that he did not take Mary McAleese’s advice to praise rather than persecute Flannery et al, especially now that she may become a Cardinal and perhaps even replace Mueller as head of a reformed CDF.

But better late than never for Charlie, who in his sermon at the opening Mass for the Wexford Opera Festival lauded Francis’s love for Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. If he is not kept on, Charlie might find escape under the Stars and Stripes as chaplain to Guantanomo Bay Prison.