For many of us in the Church and across society, we don't much care about that subject; we long ago made peace with being parts of communities, organizations, nations and even families where we just get on with our lives and leave running the show to those who like to be in charge of things.

But now in the Church, each of us is being presented with the challenge and opportunity to take a larger part in setting the course and managing the conduct of the very thing we are already part of — the Church.

Even in those parts of the Catholic Church where Eastern Church precedents make for different patterns of liturgy and Church structure — the Syrian tradition in India, for example — the pattern of governance is under pressure.

Our response is based on a vast slew of experience of participation in communities and their governance.

Some of it is relevant and some of it is completely irrelevant to today's challenges and opportunities to set the course and manage the conduct of our life in the Church.

For example, today we can assume greater managerial responsibilities commensurate with our qualifications and experience in particular areas of missionary or apostolic activity, whether or not we also hold or have ecclesiastical status as, for example, a cleric may enjoy.

And then there are those tasks and responsibilities that require the munus or office authorized by the clerical state.

That is exactly where the trouble starts for the exercise of governance in the Catholic Church.

Despite all manner of exhortations to share in and participate in the governance of the Church, it is simply and practically impossible without the munus that comes with orders.

Some of us live in democratic, participatory societies. Many more among us live in societies that are authoritarian and centrally controlled political entities. Very often throughout history, that experience has mistakenly been adopted as normative for church governance.

No listening; no inclusion of those on whom the changes had an impact in the decision-making process; top down, command and control management was common in medieval societies and was adopted in the Church, with ecclesiastical rationalizations providing for an operating structure that actually had no theological mandate.

An alternative collegial structure was common enough in the Middle Ages too and led to the creation of the kinds of collaborative governance better known as capitular, collegial or even conciliarist structures that still persist in religious orders and congregations that elect their leadership on a regular basis and also legislate for the conduct of their lives together in the chapter.

These are all forms of collegial, collaborative, participatory leadership.

Now, under the present pope's leadership but drawing on the encouragement and structure suggested by Vatican II, we are building a life of leadership by a synodal form of governance.

But what exactly does that mean?

It has been suggested that synods can be constructed and operated as the Church's response to democracy. But that's not really the case.

The two main forms of democracy at work or available in the world are representative democracy and participatory democracy.

Representative democracy is more common and has elected representatives voted into assemblies to legislate what those they represent consider most desirable; then, when their job is done, they can be replaced by other representatives.

Participatory democracy can only work with smaller populations where all those with a stake in the legislative outcome get to cast a vote on what that outcome is to be.

Synods are very different because only people of a certain status in the Church get to participate and not all those participating get to have an effective say in what is decided.

Sometimes, the best that many in a synod without a deliberative or decisive voice or vote can hope for is consultative status.

So, synods are not democratic. The Australian Plenary Council was like that.

The Australian Plenary Council was something like the British House of Lords whose members are not elected by anyone but constituted by birth rights or because of a status granted by the Crown — a peerage.

Synod "fathers" are all males and are in their places by virtue of their ordained status in the Church.

Most, it seems (as in Australia), are nominated by bishops and appointed, not elected.

The reach and significance of this status are plainly restricted and circumscribed and one would be hard-pressed to find the ordinary operations of a synod in the Catholic Church to be anything more than a very small step along the way to fixing the challenges to governance.

Anglican Church governance is more developed in its use of synods and we have lots to learn from them.

They aren't the last word because they reflect the church and society in which they were formed. But they would be a good place for Roman Catholics to start to learn how other voices than bishops might be heard, which is what the formalities of the Catholic process mean - bishops appoint the members of the synod and will ultimately vote on any recommendations.

The Anglicans have three houses — bishops, clergy and laypeople — established for their decision making; they have borrowed from the Orthodox and Lutheran churches.

It will now fall to Roman Catholics to learn from these other churches how to go about structuring and harmonizing these various voices for more effective governance.

Clearly, Catholics have a long way to go if they aim to catch up with Orthodox, Anglican and other Protestant structures and processes that have been developing as Catholics have put ever more trust in doing it all from Rome over the centuries.

But Catholics can't stay where they are.

They will just get bogged down in their own frequent failures to meet the challenges of the times.

• Michael Kelly SJ is a media professional with 40 years of experience in writing and reporting, editing and publishing, TV and broadcast radio production in Asia and Australia. For 10 years he led Asia's leading Church media organization - UCA News. Currently, he is the English language publisher of the respected Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica.
• First published in UCANews.com

One is in Germany and another is in Australia.

There seems little doubt that these conversations are only the first two of what will become dozens and dozens of conversations seeking to clarify what the Spirit is saying to the Churches.

The conversation in Germany has become quite complicated since Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich announced that he had submitted his resignation to the Pope on May 21.

Of course, Pope Francis can decline the offer of resignation.

Cardinal Marx has been one of Pope Francis' most forceful supporters and an advocate of the Synodal approach proposed by Pope Francis.

The declared reason for the resignation of Cardinal Marx is that his own position in Germany is untenable because of his membership of the leadership of the Church in his country that has badly mismanaged cases of sex abuse by the clergy.

How that all plays out and what impact it will have on the national Synod are matters of speculation at this point.

But what it clearly underlines is that Synods, Church governance and the Church's mission and purpose are about a lot more than its leaders, however, accomplished and distinguished.

Cardinal Marx is clearly saying that what the Church is facing in his country and of course elsewhere is the threat of driving itself off a cliff.

And at this point, the Germans are significant leaders in the response to Pope Francis' invitation to create in the Church a global community listening to what the Spirit is calling it to be.

It is not as though this is the first time the Church has ever had to manage such an invitation.

Church Councils are the most obvious examples of moments in the Church's life when the community of believers is invited to fall silent and listen to what God might be asking of it.

But there can be various realities that discourage Catholics from participating in processes and conversations about these matters that could be transformative for the Church.

First among the blockages occur when people - believers/the baptized/informed and intelligent Catholics - find out clearly and plainly that the apparent "consultation" is window dressing for a process whose outcomes have been decided and agreed by those who decide and agree on things - not by the participants

The second comes down to the realization that though they have been invited to participate in a conversation, what they have to offer is not valued, will not be listened to and is simply surplus to requirements.

The third comes down to exactly what a "synodal" conversation really is - not a vigorous exchange in a tutorial or a seminar but an exchange between searching believers who together are trying to hear the voice of the Spirit.

That search can lead to conflict as well-intentioned individuals develop perspectives and convictions across a spectrum and those perspectives and convictions can be at odds.

The temptation is to see such disagreements and contests as game stoppers, as insuperable blockages to progress especially among highly motivated and principled people.

Paradoxically, it is precisely the most highly motivated and principled who can become the most conflictive and most at odds.

And that is exacerbated if an attentive ear to the murmur of the Spirit is not there from the beginning.

Or, in other words, unless there is more in what's going on than the determination to win an argument.

In such contexts, being trapped in an ideology is the death of discernment. Ideologues have answers before they've heard the questions.

They don't need to listen, much less discern where the Spirit is calling the listeners to be.

There can be no doubt how challenging and difficult communal discernment is.

Doing it on the appropriate scale and remaining open to the numbing reach of the questions to be considered only emphasizes what a venture in faith the process is.

In today's Podcast, we address developments in Australia and Germany. Featuring in the podcast are:

• Lana Turvey-Collins who offers her view from the perspective as a key facilitator of discussions leading to and then conducted during Australia's Plenary Council;
• Patty Fawkner, leader of an Australian founded but now multinational religious congregation - the Benedictine inspired Sisters of the Good Samaritan, is an adult educator, with tertiary qualifications in arts, education, theology and spirituality.
• Frank Brennan is a Jesuit priest and Rector of Newman College in Melbourne and a leading commentator on Church and social and political issues.
• Michael Kelly is a Jesuit priest and publisher of the English edition of La Civilta Cattolica

A weekly ‘must-read' for informed Catholics, the Letter shapes and unravels the burning issues of the day in the Vatican and the Church.

The conversation on synodality offers more than "flashes" and raises important questions for the Church to consider, wrote Letter author Robert Mickens.

Referring to an hour-long conversation hosted by Dr Joe Grayland of Palmerston North between Cardinal John Dew, (Wellington), Archbishop Mark Coleridge (Brisbane) and Professor Thomas O'Loughlin (Nottingham), Mickens says it was "well worth the time" and "went quickly."

"All four of these priests offered more than just "flashes" of insight regarding synodality. They also raised important questions about this new and not always clear path the Jesuit pope has pushed the Church to embark upon," he wrote.

Speaking with CathNews from Sydney, one of the originators of "Flashes of Insight", Michael Kelly SJ, is pleased Flashes of Insight influenced Mickens sufficiently to highlight it in his Letter from Rome.

"Against a backdrop of a synod in Germany and media talk about schism, La Croix International editor Robert Mickens obviously saw value in the Flashes of Insight conversation," Kelly said.

"It (Flashes of Insight) is an obvious outcome of what the technology allows us to do when realizing value out of what is a global Catholic community," he said.

Kelly said that "people all over the world have different insights into the same events and Flashes of Insight appreciates this difference in its assessment in things we actually share."

While this type of technology has been around for several years it is only recently being more universally embraced, Kelly said.

He acknowledges it is ‘early days' for Flashes of Insight but is hopeful.

Calling it a great opportunity he says starting something afresh is fraught.

"I have some appreciation of how difficult it is to start something locally, let alone virtually but we've got the technology."

"Jesus used a technology of his time, a boat, and went out on the water to address the crowds from a better vantage point."

"We've got the internet and a range of new tools."

"It's about the mission and we're giving it a crack."

Kelly is particularly hopeful that those who engage in the process, either by participating in the conversations, joining the audience, watching, and or commenting, will benefit.

He hopes people might also share Flashes of Insight.

Inviting people to join the conversation, Kelly said Flashes of Insight is dialogue rather than a formal didactic approach.

"I've been rather encouraged, and particularly surprised how much more unworriedly critical a vast number of people, including cardinals and bishops have been".

He's calling the Vatican's same-sex blessing statement "a shot in the foot".

James Alison spoke with Professor Thomas O'Loughlin, Fr Michael Kelly SJ, hosted by Dr Joe Grayland on Flashes of Insight.

He characterised the Vatican's document as a dialogue that is failing to be dialogical.

Alison says the Vatican's statement is an attempt to shut down ‘horizontal conversation' between people by introducing a ‘vertical directive'.

The Vatican is trying to place a trump card he claims.

"It is essentially saying you can't have this discussion because I'm, right".

In this way, the Vatican's same sex blessing statement is attempting to introduce a ‘vertical absolutism into a horizontal discussion'.

One of the issues at play making this dialogue difficult is the question of authority when it comes to Natural Law, Alison noted.

"I am assuming there is a good understanding" but it must be ‘delivered to us horizontally, as something reasonable to understand' he said.

Alison says it is difficult when people hold on to a particular understanding of Natural Law that is no longer reasonable to everybody's reason.

Professor Thomas O'Loughlin picked up on a false understanding of Natural Law that equates Natural Law with a law of physics, such as the Law of Gravity.

O'Loughlin points out that Natural Law is not a perfectly deductive system but an ‘ordinance of reason' that helps us ‘make sense of reality around us' he said.

Fr Kelly said that part of the problem with the Vatican's same sex blessing statement is the process of having an answer and searching for question to fit it.

James Alison and Pope Francis

James Alison is known for his firm but patient insistence on truthfulness in matters gay as an ordinary part of basic Christianity, and for his pastoral outreach in the same sphere.

‘In trouble' for his pastoral outreach, the Congregation for the Clergy dismissed him from the clerical state, forbidding him from teaching, preaching, or presiding.

However, on 2 July 2017, Pope Francis called Alison directly telling him, "I want you to walk with deep interior freedom, following the Spirit of Jesus. And I give you the power of the keys".

Alison understood from this that Pope Francis did not perceive the congregation's decision as binding; that he treated him as a priest giving him universal jurisdiction to hear confessions and preach, the two faculties traditionally associated with the power of the keys.

Alison noted that this was how Pope Francis had acted towards those he appointed as "Mercy Priests" During the 2016 Jubilee of Mercy.

This is the first of three conversations with James Alison at Flashes of Insight.

Flashes of Insight is a video conversation that began as a way of reflecting on Church liturgy during COVID.

To get part two and part three of these conversations and more, please either "Subscribe" on YouTube, or if you would like to part of a live audience in the future, sign up at Flashes of Insight.

But there is an additional element to consider - the impact of these new circumstances on the way priests imagine and deliver their service to the Church in utterly reconfigured communities they are sent to serve.

A great deal of Catholicism is habitual - from the prayers we pray together or privately by ourselves to the respect we accord authorities in the Church or the acceptance we show to beliefs and practices we may not understand or even may disagree with if we gave ourselves the time to think about them.

Change habits or suppress them and replace them with nothing then cultural collapse follows.

As an ordained priest for 35 years, I used to think that the people made you the priest you became.

In 2020, I now think another factor needs to be taken into account - external forces that affect people and priests that are completely beyond the control of both.

That I make this comment is a measure of how simplistic my own grasp of my evolving identity is!

Despite the history of religions in so many countries that I have studied and the effects of changes in many parts of the world, it is external (and often non-religious) factors that force change on the Church.

This time with COVID-19, the changes have come through the application of rules to preserve public health.

Never mind the origins. The effects are the same: habits have been broken.

Those habits may be restored as they have been in Russia and China with puzzling application, marked by the unusual processes that gave birth to them.

One test of what's going on and what effect it will have is what it is doing to priests in the Catholic community.

Priests have been lots of things throughout the history of the Church.

What they do, what shape their ministry takes and how priests think about themselves in the Church have all changed over the life of the Church.

What we have is an identity that is best likened to minestrone soup - a combination of diverse leftovers that unite to create a mixed result of unpredictable flavours.

Or not!

What has held the identity of Catholic priests together in a stable shape that has endured so many various pressures over the last 500 years since the Council of Trent when extensive changes to the life, discipline, training and regulation of the life of priests were introduced.

This reform of the priesthood was one of the reform achievements of the Council of Trent in the 16th Century.

That Council's major legacy was the reform of the clergy in their training (seminaries) and operations (diocesan structure and operations) to correct the decadence into which the clergy and the episcopate had sunk in the medieval centuries - over the 12th to the 16th Centuries.

But the whole church globally has rarely (perhaps only during outbreaks of the Plague?) faced a set of challenges imposed from outside its own structures and by its leadership on the scale and with the reach that COVID-19 has imposed.

For those whose engagement with the Catholic Church is intimate and interpersonal such as is required of Catholics in places like China where Catholics are a tiny and often persecuted minority or in places like Japan where the minority status has been constant for centuries and for centuries that status has been accompanied by persecutions, developing a strong interior identity as Catholics has kept the flame of faith burning.

Seeking to enhance each other's pilgrim journey

In various parts of the world, there is a long history of Catholics identifying themselves in ways that have relied on non-demonstrative points of reference, known only in the family and with few if any physical reference points like churches, festivals or communally celebrated feasts.

Not so for the common mainstream of Catholics throughout the world whose faith has been shaped and carried by feasts, festivals, Seasons, devotions centred on saints and of course Sunday Mass in a local parish.

But it is fanciful to think that lifting the constraints imposed by COVID-19 restrictions will see patterns and practices applying before the restrictions just automatically resume.

Why fanciful? Because patterns of behaviour in everything - from how we interact with each other at any level down to even to what we value, esteem or despise - are all acquired characteristics, mostly from others. And without our regular repetition of them, we lose practice and they just evaporate.

Then comes the really interesting part:

• Where do we go within ourselves and, most importantly, between ourselves, to reference and reinforce what we value and wish to maintain?
• How do we ground and justify to each other what we value?
• How do we move beyond being a collection of ever more self-isolating individuals to becoming a community of people seeking to enhance each other's pilgrim journey?

And that's the question that is really important for me to answer to myself as a priest.

My clear sense of myself is as a celebrant of sacraments, communal values, beliefs and practices, of lives focused by their beliefs and celebrated at each turn in those life journeys, culminating in the final celebration of transition: death.

Those forms of engagement with believers lapsed for me last March when churches closed down in Australia where I happened to be when the restrictions were imposed.

Those forms of nourishment ceased from that time.

They might resume on a very reduced scale in Australia because we've been very well behaved and led the world in responsible behaviour around COVID.

But from what I can see around the world, life as we knew it, is a long way from resuming.

I can't speak for any other priest, but what this experience has done to me is make my approach to faith much more intimate, much less ceremonial and far less communally engaged.

I wonder what it's been like for others.

My twists and turns inwards - I am by temperament an extrovert and some forced introversion may be a good thing!

My hunch is what moves others may well depend on the depth and ready familiarity of an interior life of prayer that each priest has.

What seems clear to me is that just reviving the old forms of communal celebration in a way that doesn't acknowledge what believers have been through when deprived of their familiar communal routines will fail to meet the pastoral challenge of this moment.

Everywhere will be different and no universal directives will meet that challenge. The first thing for good pastors to do is to listen.

• Michael Kelly SJ is the CEO of UCAN Services.

Lamentable as that is, the question on many Catholics' minds is how did he reach such a position of eminence in the Catholic Church?

La Croix International's commentator Eric Hodgens has told the story of his rise in Australia and how it led to his visibility in the Vatican

But the abiding questions are two:

• How did he get to the Vatican and to a position of such significance in the administration of Vatican finances with what it now appears to be so much baggage?
• Why did Pope Francis appoint him to the kitchen cabinet at the Vatican - the C9 - at the center of the reform of the Church?

The answers are relatively simple.

The easiest is his membership of the C9 kitchen cabinet. It is composed of Cardinals from different geographic regions. At the time of its formation, Pell was the only cardinal in Oceania. It's not a race when there's only one competitor!

However, there are three reasons why Cardinal Pell reached the Vatican and they are very revealing for those who want to know how the Vatican actually works.

The first reason was that Cardinal Pell was a significant figure at the time Pope Francis was elected Pope.

He was believed to be the person organizing the numbers for the election of the candidate for the papacy preferred by Pope Benedict - Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan.

Cardinal Scola was such a favorite among the Italians that when the white smoke appeared to say a candidate had been elected, the local bishops' conference sent him a congratulatory note, only to be disappointed when it turned out to be someone else - Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Buenos Aires!

As the "numbers man" for a competitor to Pope Francis he needed to be taken seriously.

During the previous two pontificates, Pell had become a well-known and influential figure in Rome.

He was a member of two of the most significant Congregations in the Vatican bureaucracy - Bishops and Doctrine of the Faith - and so became a force to be reckoned with.

Pell's prominence would lead any new pope to the advice of Machiavelli: keep your friends close and your enemies closer!

Having Cardinal Pell in the inner circle means that what he has to say and do was far easier to inspect than it would be from the distance of Australia.

But there was an extra advantage to having him in Rome.

A physically powerful character and charmingly persuasive personality when he wanted to be, Pell dominated many of the circumstances he moved in.

He towered over the Australian bishops.

Interestingly, they never elected him to be President of their Conference.

Pell specialized in tactics that circled around any group that got in his way as he headed for influence over the key decision maker.

At the first of the two family Synod gatherings, he organized a letter to Francis from 13 eminent Synod Fathers warning the pope not to soften in the pastoral treatment of divorced and remarried Catholics.

The move unraveled when the letter was leaked and Pell's ruse exposed.

It was living proof that Pell's presence on the world stage and exposure to peers who would call his bluff meant he could no longer hold sway as he once had from the remoteness of Australia.

The scrutiny of better qualified and critical peers became another way his power surges and bullying behavior had become contained.

But his arrival in Rome had other reasons than simply containing his impact on a pontificate he never warmed to.

Pell was generally unpopular as archbishop in both Sydney and the See he led before Sydney - Melbourne which is the largest archdiocese in Australia.

His departure from Sydney was a relief to many Catholics of that city and beyond, defusing the Catholic culture wars and allowing the church to regroup after almost two decades during which Pell was the most visible, divisive and controversial Catholic in the country.

But there was one more reason to welcome Pell to Rome.

The Vatican's finances - a small affair by comparison with what he had been responsible for in Sydney and Melbourne whose assets, staff numbers and turnover dwarf the Vatican - were a running sore for the popes for decades.

When Pope Francis came to Rome, he had a simple solution: close the Vatican's bank and hand financial responsibility to a suitably qualified and professional organization whose dedicated task was transparency and accountability - virtues never reached by the Vatican's bank.

The fact that the Vatican bank - the IOR - was a purpose built entity during WW2 which did not collapse with the Italian finance system, meant those influential in the Vatican prevailed on the new pope to retain the institution. But who could run it?

Enter George Pell. Though his reputation in Australia was one for being a big spender, internationally he appears to have developed a name for administrative and financial skills.

The fit was perfect: Pell got a job Francis didn't really care about.

This all came to an end last October when his resignation was accepted - long before his conviction in December.

Now that the conviction has been made public, Pell will be sentenced and then appeal against the conviction.

That will be a long and difficult process because the only real grounds of appeal will be that the presiding judge made errors during the course of the case or in his instructions to the jury.

Judge Kidd, who heard the case is Chief Judge of the County Court of the State of Victoria, is highly respected by his peers.

Only time will tell on the appeal.

Whatever the outcome of the appeal, there are still volumes yet to be released by the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse that ended in early 2018. Whether George Pell figures in those volumes and will face charges following referrals from the Commission to the Director of Public Prosecutions is another matter for time.

• Michael Kelly SJ is the CEO of UCAN Services.

The pope described our time in the church and wider society as "not so much an era of change as a change of era."

The conviction and sentencing of the highest placed cleric in the Catholic world - Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide - and the forthcoming criminal trial of Cardinal George Pell are only the most obvious challenges faced by the Church in Australia and globally for that matter.

The pope's elliptical expression could mean just about anything you want it to. But it certainly refers to something we all know is going on - that where we've been in the church internationally and in Australia is no sure indication of where we will be soon enough.

Think about women's participation in decision making in the church, gender and identity issues and we have hardly begun the discussion.

There are so many other issues too.

What adds urgency and the unavoidability of profound change is the misnamed crisis of clerical sexual abuse.

I have believed for a long time that it's more the crisis of incompetent leadership in the church than anything to do particularly with sexual abuse.

But the challenges facing the church in need of a makeover in a new era start with "core business."

On one outstanding issue, the Catholic Church is disturbingly not even noticing the elephant in the middle of the room.

The stubborn fixation with clerical celibacy means that vast numbers in the church are deprived of the Eucharist - the "source and summit" of the church's life.

That in itself is the tip of an iceberg called ministry.

Who is admitted to what ministry?

How can the church organize and arrange its ministries so that it can do what it is founded to do - preach the Gospel and enliven the world with vibrant communities at its service?

That's why what we are experiencing is a change of era.

You don't have to be an actuary to see that the way the church was for its first 150 years in Australia is over.

The sight of half-empty churches with ageing congregations across the country is the visual representation of something far less visible: the death of a culture that kept the church afloat.

But what are we to make of the evaporation of a culture that sustained the church probably until the 1960s?

As I was part of it, I think I am experienced and qualified enough to comment.

The first thing to ask is how it could have collapsed so completely if it was so good.

And I think the answer is quite simple: it was paper thin.

If the faith was so robust among Australian Catholics, how has disintegration, alienation and dissatisfaction occurred, if not quickly then quite extensively?

"Pray, pay and obey" was the clichéd description of what was expected of lay people in a clerically dominated, authoritarian and pious church.

But first let's ask what has disintegrated?

It's not just the complete collapse of confidence in the church's leadership.

It's not even the perception that the church in Australia is just a club run by old men who have a rule book and keep telling everyone what the rules are.

It's more simple and actually very easy to understand.

Until I was about 18 years old (1971), two things fortified Catholicism in Australia and had since the 1840s.

They were tribalism and ritual conformity. Catholicism meant you were Irish or Irish-Australian.

Post-war migration had not made an extensive impact by then and the contest with the wider non-Catholic and often Masonic society still affected job opportunities, where Catholic families lived and, of course, the schools children went to.

And reinforcing the relative simplicity of the culture of the 30 or so years after the second world war was the Cold War.

It was a world where good and bad and right and wrong in an "us and them" world made us right, them wrong and the choices we had to make a great deal easier to identify.

The pre-Vatican II hierarchies of clergy and religious, the perception of priests, brothers and nuns in parishes and schools as our cultural heroes melded with the devotions, sacramental rituals, seasons and feasts that shaped Catholic faith.

The church kept growing in numbers, increasing its buildings and services.

It was boom time for a very externalized understanding of Catholicism.

A lot of it had to do with economic self-interest, upward social mobility and institutional machismo.

But that's all gone for the most part and life as a Catholic now approximates more to another favored image of the current pope than anything else: a field hospital for the wounded and dying.

And in my experience, time in hospital is always challenging and brings the patient back to basics.

One of the basics is an interior life and in all the hugger mugger of tribalism, rituals and a focus on success, there was not much opportunity provided for the development of the interior life - helping us to become more self-aware, reflective and prayerful.

In fact, I've found throughout my life as a priest that real (rather than notional) faith usually only comes to someone when they get sick, fail, lose their job, get divorced or suffer one of the myriad reversals that come along in life.

Moments of failure, rejection and disappointment are turning points.

You either dig deeper or you just park the whole subject and forget it.

We are in the first five minutes of a long day.

We are in a change of era and the shape of that era is only just beginning to be explored.

• Father Michael Kelly is a Bangkok-based Australian Jesuit who led ucanews.com from 2008 to 2018 and is now the publisher of the English editions of La Croix International and La Civilta Cattolica.

It's perched high in the Mid-Levels of Hong Kong Island, high but not quite high enough to see out over the bay and toward China where controversy has been mounting over what Vatican sources — clearly the Holy See's communications office run by American Greg Burke — claim is a fairly imminent deal with Beijing on the appointment of bishops.

Cardinal Zen's trip to Rome weeks earlier to broach the matter with Pope Francis has raised the temperature of the debate and almost certainly triggered the Vatican's anonymous drop to several media outlets.

After crossing himself, saying grace silently and then crossing himself again, the bonhomie is parked for a bit and Cardinal Zen is straight down to business.

Next to his bowl of soup ("I don't eat salad") is a printed copy of the recent comment piece by Father Michael Kelly, UCAN's executive director, titled: The Vatican-Chinese bishops kerfuffle.

But it was the subheading Cardinal Zen was focused on: "What is happening right now is no way unprecedented in recent Catholic history in China."

Cardinal Zen has made annotations in blue biro and, turning his sharp eyes on me as I try and broach the topic du jour, he lays his hand on Father Kelly's article and says: "I read this one and I find I have to put in order some facts."

"Firstly, what is happening is not normal, absolutely is novel — nothing similar has happened before," he says.

"During many years they had their own bishops, there was no communication between the church in China and the Vatican.

"So when the open policy started [under Deng Xiaoping from 1978] communication became easy, so many of the old bishops ordained illegitimately made representations to the Holy See through their friends.

"The Holy See made some investigations and approved some of them, though not all.

"The investigation was whether they were decent people and whether they were under pressure — of course they were under pressure. The investigation was about whether they were good people and many were, so the Holy See was very happy.

"They [the open church] also needed new bishops, so they used elections — actually fake elections — so the government chose people [to be bishops]. Some of these people were courageous enough to ask [the Vatican] for approval, so after some investigation by the Holy See ... they were legitimized.

"In the meantime they [the Vatican] ordained underground bishops and there was a special facility that they could ordain without approval and then seek approval later and have it ratified — this is before and immediately after the Cultural Revolution.

"Many underground bishops were arrested, so they needed to ordain their successor or even two successors. So when the Holy See got around to legitimizing them, there were often two bishops in the underground and the open church.

"In Rome the underground bishop is considered the bishop, while the one in the open church is only the auxiliary. That was the practice for several years under Cardinal Tomko [prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples]. He was from Czechoslovakia, so he knew the communists, hey? So they came to know that many people in the open church were good people, so they legitimized people in the church and they encouraged people like me to go and teach in the seminaries in China. Continue reading

Moral outrage and high emotion are a potent cocktail. Such is what is reverberating around the world right now about the Vatican's moves to replace two bishops in China.

The events have triggered reports and comments in the Catholic media and even in such apparently irreligious publications as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Before we start interpreting and analyzing and assessing what is going on, we need to get a few things clear and they are the facts:

1. In the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church (i.e. Roman Catholicism) and whether you like it or not, bishops are appointed by and remain in place at the behest and with approval of the pope; and
2. In China, and for several decades, bishops have been elected locally and without Vatican nomination or approval only later to be recognized and confirmed by the Vatican in their positions in various dioceses across China.

Retired bishop of Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun seems to claim that doing what the Vatican has done is a cowardly cowering before the communist government of the Peoples Republic of China, the abandonment of faithful Catholics and rewarding renegades and people excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

Not unprecedented

By changing bishops in two dioceses, what the Vatican is doing with the appointment of two previously excommunicated bishops is not novel.

It has happened this way in China since the 1980s.

As the Catholic Church recovered from all that the communist victory in 1949 and later the Cultural Revolution from 1966 inflicted on it, the rebuilding of the church in the 1980s was a haphazard affair.

Bishops were elected locally throughout the country in the open churches operating with government approval.

In countless instances, these were not episcopal candidates approved by Rome. But later and across the country and across the decades, private agreements between these bishops and Rome were reached.

But as bishops appointed irregularly and often ordained by other bishops who were similarly appointed without Vatican approval, they were formally speaking automatically excommunicated for these procedures.

But no great issue was made of this and the miscreant bishops and the Vatican reached compromise solutions to recognize appointments and just get on with redeveloping dioceses and the church's life.

In parallel from the 1980s and until very recently, the Vatican followed a procedure where it appointed "underground bishops," so suspicious was it of anyone — ordinary Catholic, cleric, religious or bishop — who cooperated with the openly recognized and registered Catholic communities.

This created a circumstance that has now come back to bite the Vatican and is vividly instance in the present kerfuffle.

What is happening right now is no way unprecedented in recent Catholic history in China.

The sharp edge today, as emphasized by Cardinal Zen, is that these latterly recognized bishops are being installed in dioceses where there is an already existing "underground bishop" — someone nominated, appointed and ordained with Rome's specific authorization.

The movement of bishops into and out of dioceses — either through mandatory retirement at 75 or to meet needs in another diocese — is an administrative commonplace throughout the Catholic Church.

Vatican sometimes gets it wrong

And yes, sometimes the Vatican gets those moves profoundly wrong.

I was very close to one brutal and unjust instance when an Australian bishop was removed in 2011 from the country diocese of Toowoomba in Australia when Bishop Bill Morris was forced to relinquish his diocese at the explicit urging of three cardinals.

Those cardinals operated in complete violation of the bishop's natural rights or any appreciation of the requirements of due process.

Moreover, they shifted ground on why he should be removed just to make sure he was removed. It was a disgraceful episode.

So, yes, the process can be abused by the Vatican.

But there is no doubt that the placement and removal of bishops is a power that rests with the pope who exercises that power.

Going deeper

But the issues in China go deeper than a consideration of the legitimacy of papal actions.

The allegation is that these changes put the church in the hands of the Chinese government whose agents are those to be newly appointed. And they are "excommunicants" and not worthy of the positions entrusted to them.

This assertion by Cardinal Zen and others has an almost identical precedent in the life of the church 1,600 years ago.

The church was all but divided it in North Africa in the time of St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - 430), the theological genius of late antiquity. The issue was the "Donatist Controversy."

In the last full flourish of the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire and before Christianity became the religion of the Empire under Constantine, there had been some Christians who preferred physical survival to martyrdom.

When the persecution ceased, the question became what to do with those Christians — lay people and clerics — who had gone "soft" and compromised with the Imperial authorities?

Augustine's proposal, which prevailed, was that ministry and standing in the church was not dependent on the sanctity of the office holder, that the exercise of ministry was God's work through unworthy means — weak human beings.

China today

Switch to China today — an authoritarian, one party state determined to persecute any ideological variant it deems a threat to its total control of everything in the social and political life of the nation.

The risk really isn't that the church will move ever more under the government's control.

It already is completely — whether in the open or "underground" church.

The risk in the moves now being made by the Vatican is that they will split the church in China deeply — those who accept that the Communist Party really does run China and those who believe only stubborn resistance is the way to go.

I have a cordial and friendly personal relationship with Cardinal Zen.

He is an engaging, witty and sometimes very funny person to be with.

Cardinal Zen hasn't visited China for 20 years

But his answer to this question about the church in China at least has been completely consistent for at least two decades and it comes down to the belief that the only real Catholic in China is or should prepare to be a martyr.

Over at least two decades, in the course of which he has not visited China at all, he has maintained that the only way to deal with those running the country and therefore, in a communist society, supervising the Catholic community is to have nothing to do with them.

That view is one that can be sustained from the comfortable and secure distance of Hong Kong where Cardinal Zen lives.

It's an unaffordable luxury in the Peoples Republic of China. And that is where the basic differences lie in the approach to the life of the church in China.

Two different approaches

But what Cardinal Zen has yet to answer is this question: What do you propose should be done for the millions of Catholics who have to live daily with the Communist Party measuring your every heartbeat?

There are two approaches to any set of negotiations: Walk away from the table and suspend discussions or stay at the table and negotiate the best terms you can.

Cardinal Zen is and always has been for walking away and leaving Catholics in China in all their variety to their own devices.

Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and people at the Vatican prefer to remain at the table.

• Father Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com and based in Thailand.
  First published in UCANews.com. Reprinted with permission.
  

His complaint is that he had no warning and the termination was a summary dismissal.

I don't know where the cardinal has been in recent months. But it doesn't seem to have been in Rome.

Or if he was in Rome, he must have kept his winter muffs covering his ears and fogged goggles to (not) see with.

Even from a great distance - I live in Bangkok - it's been obvious to me that if he didn't change his tune, he wasn't long for his job.

In recent months, the cardinal's had three of his clerical employees sent packing from the CDF for their reported resistance to the current pope's agenda.

Again, and as the world knows, the two lay people who resigned from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors left explicitly because of their frustration with the obstacles and blockages that CDF staff placed before action and reform. Cardinal Müller denied there was any problem.

For him then to invoke nothing short of his entitlement to remain as the reason he's most upset puts him, at least for me, in a parallel universe.

Clerical entitlement

Entitlement is just the most loathsome feature of clericalism.

It's what the retarded seminary system inculcates; it's what operates at too many levels of Church governance; and it's a million miles from the sort of sacrificial service Jesus exhorted the Apostles to in John's Gospel on the night before he died when he washed their feet and insisted, despite Peter's protests, they should do this to others.

Cardinal Müller's complaint against the pope is also about the process of his removal.

It is the complete absence of any sense of irony in this line of complaint that leaves me dumbfounded.

The cardinal headed an office in the Vatican whose modus operandi has been for about 500 years to ignore due process, deny natural rights and force those they've targeted to turn up to cross examinations where the accused is not given prior warning of the charges, who has made them or what evidence the charges are based on.

Müller is on very thin ground pursuing this line of attack to say he's suffering from lack of due process.

But what's more, what a spectacle to the world this display from Cardinal Müller is.

The abject lack of self-awareness as he digs his own hole deeper is something to witness.

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again

Everyone in any workforce, me included, is contracted for a job for a specific length of time, which then comes to an end.

Sometimes hopes for reappointment are disappointed. And at other times, employees - and some of them senior - are fired.

I've had that happen in my professional life.

It wasn't pleasant and I could have spent a lifetime in the vinegar bottle complaining about it to anyone silly enough to keep listening to me. Or, as the song goes, "you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again".

And guess what? That has been the start of some great things in life for me.

Reversals are God's opportunity to be God in our lives, if only we let Him, let go of control and start being led by the Spirit. And after all, isn't that what the Christian journey is about?

All of us in any workforce have moved on from jobs we enjoyed but in which our time has come to an end.

Some of us have been moved from a task we thought not finished.

Either way, things change.

Why?

Really because we kid ourselves if we think our lives are only in our hands. This is no lasting city, as the Letter to the Hebrews (13,14) reminds us.

And that is especially so in the Vatican.

There, all appointments are by the grace and favour of the boss - the pope - and no one should be deluded to think they have a job for life. Only the pope has a job for life or until he resigns. He's unique.

Everyone else is there to work for the company.

If you don't like the company's policies - and you're entitled not to like them - then the alternative is to go home to the diocese or religious community you were ordained to serve.

One of the worst things clericalism does to male celibates is given them a role as a substitute for a life and a personality.

In his present circumstances, Cardinal Müller has a chance to reclaim both.

• Father Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com
• First published in LaCroix International

The multi-award winning Lost in Translation, starring Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson, displays a relationship that unfolds between two Americans - a middle-aged man and a younger woman - when they meet in Japan.

Portrayed against the backdrop of Tokyo's metallic and Perspex landscape, Lost in Translation is the story of two people desperately searching for different things and hoping they can find them in one another.

But they don't, and they are left at the end of the film with a lonely emptiness both had sought to escape. They are ships that pass in the night, never noticing each other apart from what they want from each other. It is the portrayal of a relationship that isn't to be.

Each is saying to the other in their own misguided way: "Look at me!" They do not engage with each other or listen, but instead just seek to attract the notice and attention of the other.

Sometimes I think Catholics are like this couple in the way we engage with God.

My faith, all about me

What we want from our faith is all about ourselves rather than God or the faith community we share.

We can have, as Catholics, just as we do in our ordinary relationships every day, a single-minded focus on our needs, what we have sacrificed, what hurt we have endured or what splendid things we have done in our care or service of others. It's all about me!

And, as a result, we tire of God and we protect ourselves against other people.

We overpower what God or other people might ask or want of us; we maintain a relentless focus on our measured contribution and ourselves; we keep away from anyone or anything that might upset the calm and disciplined world we create and control.

And love passes us by - love of God and love of others.

The death of our faith and our love

As with the two would be lovers who pass as ships in the night, our faith dies and even our love dies for lack of nourishment.

This is the intimately personal level at which we can warp and distort our humanity as well as our Christian faith and all that it holds as a means to grow. It happens almost unconsciously even as we keep telling ourselves we are only doing what seems natural. But we aren't.

Therein lies the ambiguity: apparently good things - loving, serving, believing, worshipping - end up being bad things that distract and destroy.

And there's something else that complicates this surprise even further.

Life: what we put in, and the worlds we inhabit

Life cuts both ways and our lives do not simply amount to what we put into them or do with them, inspired or misguided as the contributions may be.

The worlds we inhabit - families, workplaces, hobbies, interests, friends, what we see and read - also shape who we are and what we become.

Those influences can enhance or distort us - as individuals, communities and nations, as believers and as Catholics.

All of us are parts of cultures that set the terms for how we grow or decline as human beings, as communities, as nations and as a Church. Rendering the Christian message in words, symbols and structures that communicate across cultures is never easy.

What began in Israel two millennia ago was interpreted by Greeks and structured by Romans. Then, 1,500 years after Jesus, all that was challenged when Christianity moved out of its European comfort zone into Asia and then Africa.

In Asia, Christianity got a mixed reception - some were attracted, many repelled it and some sought to exterminate it. The vast majority remained indifferent to what appeared to be a culturally alien import.

Today, the ambiguities of such "culture contact" are no less pressing. The Catholic Church in most parts of Asia is a minority community.

Yet its communities and leaders recognise the need for many adaptations to local customs and practices if the person and message of Jesus is to be intelligible in cultures far removed from anything Jesus and the early Christians could be expected to appreciate.

Framing the gospel message

Framing the message in a language and through symbolism that can be grasped by those not familiar with the Greco-Roman culture that Christianity adopted to explain itself is not all that happens when Christianity localises or "inculturates".

The cultures to which Christianity reaches for language and symbols also transform elements of the message not often anticipated or even consciously recognised.

At times, absorbing a local culture that may be common even to hundreds of millions of people can have the desired effect of sharing the message.

But, often unconsciously, elements of particular cultures can contribute to massive distortions of the Christian message.

Historical examples abound - from popes who ordered torture and executions as ways of defending the Catholic faith to Catholic communities who hated and killed Jews because they allegedly were responsible for killing Jesus.

Some cultural absorption and adaptation is necessary, as is evident in the way Catholics celebrate sacraments. The Passover, the use of water in baptism and the use of oil in several sacraments, are obvious instances of the employment of pre-existing symbolism to express Christian beliefs.

Distorting the Christian message

However, there is the use of cultural and political forms developed from European historical models that are today simply anachronistic, such as the monarchical papacy and the titles used by cardinals and bishops.

And then there are cultural adoptions that are downright sinister and a contradiction of the Gospel, some of them operating in Asia. Many Asian societies have inherited cultural patterns of respect, organisational hierarchy and the allocation of status that come from cultures developed long before the Gospel was preached in them.

Yet, and presumably unconsciously, Catholics, especially clerics, can model patterns of authority and social status that owe more to the native culture than the Gospel. Because Confucian societies may place clerics on a special pedestal as learned and superior beings, the clerics can come to see themselves as authoritative and significant people who don't need to seek out and serve the needy and the humble.

In Buddhist and Hindu cultures, religious people can be seen as "special" and otherworldly rather than engaged in the world of everyone else, with its pains and uncertainties.

Hiding in a status and suffocating the Gospel are easy traps to fall into in any culture unless there is the circuit breaker of an objective look at our behaviour in the light thrown on it by the person and message of Jesus.

Otherwise, hypocrisy reigns. The ambiguity of people who are falsifying the faith that they believe themselves to be the successful embodiment of is not far from the ambiguity of two people who think they're in love with each other but haven't really met.

Michael Kelly SJ is a Jesuit priest and the executive director of UCA News.

Source: UCA News

Image: UCA News

Though the pope may never have heard the line, he would know what Groucho meant. Groucho's humour had an instinctive suspicion of any establishment.

Perhaps because he is the son of Italian migrants in Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, felt what it was like to be outside the establishment of his native land.

The outsider Pope

Whether he did or didn't feel an outsider in Argentina, he brings all the marks of an outsider to his life in the Vatican - from being shocked by the papal apartments where he was expected but declined to live, to dispensing with the formality that goes with the papacy, conceived as a role and status in line with that of European monarchs.

Since arriving at the Vatican, Pope Francis has never missed an opportunity to emphasise that office in the Church is not designed for the enjoyment and enhancement of the office holder but so that better and more universal service may be offered to the people the office holder is to serve.

In doing away with a great deal of the Vatican's pomp and ceremony, Pope Francis also has abolished some titles in the Vatican such as monsignor. That title, of course, is the tip of the iceberg.

Pomp and circumstance

The ecclesiastical titles - Eminence, Excellency, My Lord, Your Grace and related aristocratic appellations - are an invention in the Italian states of the 17th century when the Church sought to match the self-aggrandising aristocracy, who used such terms to inflate their significance. Princes, dukes, counts and countesses all started referring to each other - and insisting everyone else referred to them - with ever more florid and self-enhancing references. The Church followed suit.

Pope Francis has sought to eliminate this culture of self-promotion and entitlement by attacking it at its source.

His denunciations of clericalism are frequent, heartfelt and blunt. He describes it as a disease that consumes and kills the Gospel. What is it? At one level it is the disease at work in any bureaucracy or organisation anywhere in the world.

Careerism and loyalty

Careerists set a target for themselves - some desired promotion or title and the associated privileges. They do anything to climb the ladder and get the prize. They remain silent in the face of hypocrisy, injustice, even crimes. And they do so to secure for themselves where they are with a view to where they might go.

They maintain relentless and unswerving loyalty to whomever they must to secure where they are. They pay obeisance to "makers" and "patrons" so that they can continue to enjoy preferment.

There is an even more sinister side to clericalism than these obviously odious features. What clericalism also is about is protecting priests, at any level of the hierarchy and at all costs. And too many priests presume it.

Protectionism

It is why some can be authoritarian and overbearing, exploitative of the good will of lay people and religious (especially nuns), prone to financial improprieties, be dismissive of criticism or engage in sexually inappropriate, sometimes criminal behaviour.

Why? Because they know there is very little accountability in the clerical system and bishops and religious superiors will ignore, cover up or contest legitimate complaints.

What is the motivation of Church authorities? It is an ingrained belief that investigating complaints and finding against a cleric will create scandal, disharmony and conflict.

Unfortunately, this attitude and behavioural pattern goes as high as the pope. In 1922, Pope Pius XI secretly decreed that any charges against a priest for molesting a child was to be handled internally in the Church and under a rule of secrecy, the breaking of which meant excommunication.

'Loyalty' at all costs

Before 1922, if a priest was discovered to be molesting children, he was defrocked and handed over to civil authorities for trial.

After 1922, and as required by all popes since then, all handling of clerics accused of child sexual abuse was to be handled in the Church's courts and as a Pontifical Secret - the strictest kind in the Church.

That secrecy was so strict that the existence of the decree itself was a pontifical secret, known only to bishops who literally had to keep the decree itself and any related cases in a separate safe to which only he and his vicar-general had the key. Any breech of the secrecy about the existence or associated procedures entailed excommunication, which only the pope could revoke.

The law - spelled out in the motu proprio Crimen Solicitationis - was promulgated in secret in 1922 and reconfirmed by St John XXIII in 1962.

The substance of the previous ordinances were issued under another form, with minor modifications but still subject to the absolute conditions punishable by excommunication of "Pontifical Secrecy", by St John Paul II in 1992.

Again in 2010, this directive was further slightly modified by Benedict XVI but with the same "secrecy" provisions that foster cover-ups applying.

Continuing clericalism

The law remains in force today and the whole sorry story of how the popes since 1922 have provided one of the strongest reinforcements of clericalism remains unchanged.

By not involving civil authorities, Church leadership at the highest level substituted a fig leaf of legal accountability for evildoers and reinforced the "special" character of the clergy as one that was beyond the law.

How clericalism worked in this way is spelled out in meticulous detail by Kieran Tapsel in his new book, Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse published in late May.

Francis is the third pope in recent times to ask for help in reforming the office of the Bishop of Rome, following Paul VI and John Paul II.

He has a perfect opportunity in his own hands right now to start the process and take a significant step to demolishing the culture of clericalism he laments by cancelling the pontifical secret for child sexual abuse.

Michael Kelly is a Jesuit priest and the executive director of ucanews.com

Source: UCA News

Image: UCA News

The hot button issue for the gathering is already well known - whether divorced and remarried Catholics can or should be able to receive the Eucharist.

Battles lines at the Vatican have already been drawn in the differing views expressed by the German cardinals Walter Kasper and Gerhard Mueller.

Battle lines set out in Manila

How this plays itself out in Rome in October was spelled out in Manila earlier this month when the secretary of the Vatican's Council on the Family, Archbishop Jean Lafitte, restated the failure of some Catholic authorities to engage with the reality of the family today.

The views were given at a conference in the Philippines, a country that is 86 percent Catholic.

It is atypical of the Church in Asia and most of the world, as it remains perhaps the only country in the world where the Church's influence is such that there is no civil divorce.

But on display in Manila were how one section of the Church's leadership sees the issue and will propose defense of the family in October:

This section of the Church wants all the Church to confront a relativistic culture out to destroy the family.

Understanding 'the family'

It believes that the term "family" doesn't need to be defined and can be assumed, despite plain evidence that there is no such thing as an abstract, universally applicable and accepted understanding of what the family is.

It also maintains that, while less than 20 percent of the world's population are obliged by the Church's sacramental understanding of lifelong monogamous marriage, no one should question a group of Catholics proposing a legal universal application based on Church rules.

What is frequently heard when a debate is cast in these terms, as it was in Manila, is that any slackening in opposition to same-gender partnerships or to divorce undermines the time-honored and Church-sanctioned understanding of marriage, and that same-gender partnerships are a threat to lifelong monogamous heterosexual relationships.

Marriage undermined?

The weakness in this line of argument is that there is no evidence to support it.

How does someone else's divorce undermine my commitment?

How does the same-sex attraction and commitment of a same-sex couple undermine the commitment of a committed heterosexual couple?

I don't know and can't see the evidence.

Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, it's an argument that does little to further what the Church actually wishes to foster in sacramentally confirmed, lifelong monogamous marriages. And that, after all, is the only thing the Church really has at stake anywhere in the world in the marriage debate.

Rather than simply lament that the abstract understanding of Catholic marriage isn't universally endorsed by the mostly non-Catholic world, Church leaders will do a lot to help people if they can suggest some constructive ways of engaging with the real dilemmas and choices people actually face.

'Failed marriages' and the Church

However, what will galvanize the debate in October is not gay partnerships or threats to the abstract Catholic understanding of marriage as constructed by senior male clerics.

It will be what pastors throughout the world know: how to meet the pastoral challenge of people who have failed relationships, regret the failure, still see the Catholic faith as their core and centre but are told they cannot receive the Eucharist if they have remarried without going through the Church's courts.

The issue is often portrayed as a conflict between what the Church teaches and what ordinary Catholics want. Conceived that way, it is really a phony war. There are two main ways that failed marriages can be resolved in the Catholic Church.

Marriage annulment

The first is the well known and invariably long-winded and difficult process of annulling a Catholic marriage through the Church's court procedures, called "the external forum".

It is called "external" because it is public and can work only if certain conditions are fulfilled. But it may fail for any number of reasons, some of which include: one party not participating in the process, lack of evidence and qualified canon lawyers and excessive Vatican regulations that cause parties to abandon the process.

The other, and commonly unmentioned, approach is what is called the "internal forum", which the bishops of Germany have highlighted in their procedures for their dioceses, much to the chagrin of the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Mueller, as reported frequently in ucanews.com and elsewhere in the Church's media.

The informed conscience

The "internal forum" is another word for how an informed conscience becomes part of pastoral practice and where Catholics work out their relationships with God and the Church. Conscience is, in the teaching of Vatican II, that inner core of a person's life where moral and religious norms are discovered for their application to actual life situations.

It was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who underlined the significance of conscience in the operational life of the Church when he wrote before he became Pope Benedict XVI:

"Above the pope as an expression of the binding claim of Church authority, stands one's own conscience, which has to be obeyed first of all, if need be against the demands of Church authority."

At the conference in the Philippines earlier this month, we got an insight into just where the Catholic Church has been on this subject for the last 30 years and where the opposition to more pastorally flexible approaches to dealing with marriage and divorce is coming from.

It will doubtless surface in Rome at the bishops' synod in October.

Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com

Source: UCA News

Image: UCA News

The frequently asked question is whether there is substance behind the style and if so, what does it look like?

Traces of what he draws on are there to behold - if you know what you're looking for - and offer clues to the direction in which he is leading the Church.

Pope Francis has made popular the image of the Church as a "field hospital", something deployed to bring healing to battle-scarred warriors.

Joys and hopes

But there's also an essential, if apparently little understood, connection to the mission of the Church as expressed in the opening words of Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World - Gaudium et Spes:

" The joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ." (GS, 1)

An all too familiar and contrary understanding of the Church and its mission has prevailed particularly in the last two decades and especially in the West: the fortress Church, the one locked behind its defenses and giving admission only to the pure, the elect and the approved.

In the gatherings of cardinals before he was elected, Cardinal Bergoglio was reported to have said that Catholicism has become altogether too "self-referential", a word he used to describe the situation of elitism and condescension, most particularly evident in one of his frequent objects of criticism as pope - careerist clericalism.

Self-referential used in the context of the Church easily translates to a more commonly used English term - self-absorbed.

A self-absorbed Church

This condition of self-absorption has had practical impacts throughout the world, vividly illustrated in the Church's handling of sex abuse cases. Done behind closed doors for fear of scandal, something even more scandalous was done to cover it up.

While Pope Francis has not distinguished himself yet on the subject of sex abuse and, on a couple of occasions, has shown himself to be in need of being brought up to speed on the subject, it will take too much of an imaginative leap for him to grasp the problem and authorize the relevant changes needed in the conduct of Church authorities on the issue.

Why? Because put positively, what Pope Francis is saying is that the Church gets its bearings not from its own internal fixed points but from where its vocation is to be found - where Vatican II in general but Gaudium et Spes in particular suggested it would: in its service to a world that is hungry, thirsty, bruised and in need.

St Peter Faber

One of the earliest actions of Francis as pope was to canonize a Jesuit, Peter Faber, to whom he has had a deep devotion over many years. It is in this gesture that we can see what is at work in his wider agenda.

Peter Faber was the first Jesuit priest. He was no remarkable theologian though he was a peritus at the council of Trent shortly before he died at the age of 40.

As described by the title of the best-known biography of him, Faber was "the quiet companion" whose major distinction was the accolade given him by the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, as the best director of what Ignatius created - the 30 day retreat according to his Spiritual Exercises.

Faber was above all the pastor of souls who would go to the greatest lengths to bring comfort, reconciliation and encouragement to people, often travelling great distances on foot or by horseback to minister to those in need.

Here is Pope Francis' portrait of Peter Faber whom he canonized, one that could be considered an autobiographical reflection.

Dialogue with all

For Pope Francis, Faber was a man able to "dialogue with all, even the most remote and even with his opponents. He was a man of simple piety, a certain naiveté perhaps, someone able to be available straightaway, capable of careful interior discernment, a man capable of great and strong decisions but also capable of being so gentle and loving."

This irenic approach draws deeply on the contemplative vision proposed by St Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises and in fact echoes what he suggests as the first thing someone contemplatively attuned should do when caught in controversy or dispute - be prepared to consider one's opponent as well disposed and even to force oneself to see the plausibility of what the opponent is proposing.

This is essentially a mystical rather than dogmatic approach to accepting or communicating the faith, and it seems to have its basis in the writings of a little-known Jesuit philosopher Michel de Certeau, who died in 1986.

A 'mystical' future

For de Certeau, the Church of statutes and dogmas offered no path forward for Christian faith in a pluralistic, postmodern and secular world. The future for Christians, de Certeau believed, lay in the mystical. What did he mean by that?

For de Certeau, a mystic is one who understands that life is dynamic and that any achievement or destination reached is only a prelude to a further discovery.

Where Pope Francis takes this attitude, which is essentially a contemplative and searching one rather than a didactic and dogmatic one, will be significant for where his emphasis as pope will lie.

Pope Francis believes "the correct attitude is that of St Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever".

To be a pilgrim

This view corresponds exactly with de Certeau's definition of a mystic. As with de Certeau, the pope's favourite metaphor for talking about encounters with God is travelling, or "walking" - something they both take from St Ignatius who always referred to himself as a pilgrim.

As Pope Francis puts it: "God is encountered walking, along the path. […] God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him."

Such an approach is anything but dogmatic and applies to more than the interior life, as expressed by Pope Francis during an interview published last year in America magazine.

"Human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. The view of the Church's teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong."

Being ready to receive what life experience throws up leads to another deep source which is already demonstrably part of the current pope's make-up - discernment, that daily practice of any Jesuit still in touch with what lay at the heart of the Order's Spiritual Exercises.

Making choices

But the purpose of choosing is to do something, to act. Choices are always difficult and decisions can be costly and wrong.

The discernment process the pope is most familiar with stresses the need to have as many of the facts as can be had before a decision is made.

That is where the Ignatian framework proposes attention to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and finally an act of faith in what may turn out to be right or wrong.

It is clear that Pope Francis wants action. Some things he has done quickly, like taking homosexuality off the table as a point of contest among Catholics and the quaint pageantry that passed for Catholic liturgy and ceremony at the Vatican.

Other matters of greater complexity need an inclusive process.

Access to the Eucharist for remarried divorcees, celibacy of the male clergy and the role of women in ministry in the Church are all issues that need to have substantial understanding and support before any effective and successful enactment can occur.

Only a process headed for decision that also patiently gathers people, gathers and shares the facts and viewpoints on them can take the Church beyond the paralysis that currently enfeebles it.

Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com

Source: UCAnews

Image: UCAnews

Throughout the world, but particularly in Ireland, the sense of the end of an era that delivered the largest growth in the history of the Church, something foundational is happening.

In Ireland for 150 years from the Famine in the 1840s, a cast of Catholicism was exported worldwide. It's plain that this phase in the Church's life that seemed as though it would last forever is in fact over.

For example, the Irish Jesuits who sent hundreds and hundreds of missionaries to Asia, Africa and Australia now have more members aged over 90 than they do less than 50 years of age.

They have four under 50 and can only look at "consolidating", also known as shutting up shop.

One British Jesuit told me that on current figures, there would not be a Jesuit in Britain NOT on the aged pension by the middle of the next decade.

It's not as though the statisticians throughout the Jesuits and the wider Church in Australia, Europe and the USA haven't seen it coming and haven't already been advising the Congregational and diocesan leadership for a long time on the unsustainability of various Provinces, dioceses and works.

In Europe though it appears that 'the future has arrived a little earlier than expected', as former Archbishop of Brisbane John Battersby once said of the Archdiocese!

Such has been the case for many congregations of religious women across the world far earlier than for some male clerical religious congregations and for the supply of clergy in dioceses.

For clerical religious, the provision of the sacraments has been an enduring need to meet and one that provided relevance.

That has kept numbers up quite apart from any special focus offered by the charism of founders and their relevance and attractiveness to prospective members.

But not now.

As far as absorbing the impact of these well-known and common experiences, not much work has been done apart from scaling back, sometimes done with an energetic press of the panic button by superiors and bishops to underline the urgency of their actions.

For the rank and file among religious and clergy, even if these realities were not anticipated when most joined their congregations or dioceses, the challenge is great.

The most common reaction is something I have come to call the spirituality and missiology of the last of the Mohicans.

Everyone can see the reality; everyone is reluctant to utter the D word for DEATH; everyone hopes that at least there will be something around for when the inevitable admission to the aged care facility occurs.

'Don't ask me why it's all evaporated; I'll be the last of the tribe and I don't want to have my life complicated by being asked to "please explain". The 'collapse' is the way many respond'.

At the turn of an age, as the early 20th Century French Church historian Peguy once remarked, the Church always arrives a little late and a little breathless. The turn of this one is no different because the reality is that there are no reinforcements coming from traditional sources to support existing ways of delivering the service.

For believers, the future belongs not to fears but to God.

The only authentic and spiritually persuasive response to being in the middle of a change of eras like this is one that allows the Spirit to do what the Spirit does. And what the Spirit does is always surprise.

Discipleship asks that we be attentive to the unexpected ways we may be drawn.

What I find very discouraging about ways of addressing this inescapable reality is the abject failure to see how the mission of the Church is actually delivered today.

Despite our blindness to it at times, God is still vigorously at work.

Only a conception of mission and the resources needed for it entirely reduced to clergy and religious as until recently trained and authorized could see it as something where God hasn't been energetically active.

To borrow from what Bill Clinton did to beat George Bush Senior twenty years ago - "the economy, stupid, the economy!"

The real context for the Catholic Church in Australia and much of the developed world is "the laity, stupid, the laity".

There actually has been an explosion in lay participation in ministry at every level, except the sacramental.

What's needed is to acknowledge that fact.

The acid test of whether there has been any acknowledgement of the facts is whether any real power sharing has occurred whereby lay people have become part of decision making processes of dioceses and congregations.

Lay people and women especially have taken leadership roles in the services that are offered - in health, welfare and educations - because they require a professional expertise that these days the congregations and dioceses don't have among their members.

But do lay people, and women in particular, actually become part of the processes where the most significant decisions are made - on Congregational Councils and in the diocesan bodies often reserved for exclusive clerical membership?

At a strategic and organizational level, acknowledgement of and decisive involvement by lay people in mission, leadership and ministry can go a couple of ways.

One currently proposed response to this change of eras adopted by some in the Church, and reinforced by Emeritus Pope Benedict, is quite happy to welcome this decline in the Church as we have known it.

This 'proposal of decline' as they see it, gives God an given opportunity to scale the Church back to a faithful remnant.

A faithful remnant that would be distinctive because of its orthodoxy and compliance with what Rome and its utterances required under the management of the last three decades.

Shame about the mass of Catholics, you might say. They can amuse themselves. There is the elite and that's all there really needs to be any concern for.

The more recent, but also more ancient, view - proposed by Pope Francis who also accepts a reduced size and presence of the Church as inevitable and perhaps desirable - is to say that elitism is for the birds and what is needed is for the Church to be present and make its contribution as leaven: distinctive, even vital and decisive, but not all consuming and dominating.

The faithful remnant - and not the usual clerical and religious suspects - in this view will be distinctive because it engages directly with the issues and concerns that the average person has, is in the market place and is ready to give an account of the hope they have.

It is not hidden away behind sacristy doors and locked into conversations with the already signed up membership.

However as the present becomes the future, one thing is sure, the latter won't be like the past. We might just be in a situation of such abject poverty and resourcelessness that we can allow God to be God.

Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com

Source: Pearls and Irritations

Image: ucanews.com

In both cases - a nuncio to the Dominican Republic and, most recently, an auxiliary bishop in a diocese in southern Peru - it needed police reports and journalists' questions to bring the charges and the Church's response to light.

This is an all too familiar pattern in Western countries where the denial of reality has left the Church to be seen covering up its faults and actually complicit in the crimes once proven. The fallout in a demoralized local Church is another unfortunate outcome.

In any other large organization, protocols and procedures would fall into place immediately to acknowledge such events and what the organization is doing in response. Apparently not so for the Vatican.

Head Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, told me in a recent interview that over the last six months his work has intensified for two reasons: In keeping up with a pope who scripts his own actions and talks openly, and the absence of any structure in the Vatican for receiving and then distributing authorized information.

Come something like the standing down of two bishops pending charges and court procedures, and with all the presumption of innocence in the world until conviction, the Vatican media office is paralyzed.

It shouldn't be. Every organization in the world has contingency media plans in times of transition and for unpredictable crisis situations. Not so the Vatican, or so it seems.

The challenge of handling hot-button Catholic issues will only intensify if the first six months of the new papacy are anything to go by.

The pope has already defused one of them - homosexuality - in a single line: "Who am I to judge?" and ended what is now three and a half decades of attacks by Vatican officials on homosexuality as an "intrinsic" evil which is about as bad as you can get in the Vatican lexicon of failures.

Next month, at a meeting of the group of eight cardinals who are to be a sort of kitchen cabinet, Pope Francis has put one of his burning desires and everyone else's hot-buttons front and center: the divorced and remarried in the Catholic Church.

Turned away - which they've done in their millions - divorced and remarried Catholics are punished for the failure of the biggest risk in their lives with ecclesial exclusion and an implicit lifelong negative judgment. Not good enough says Papa Bergoglio.

And there are more difficult issues to come. Women in the Church's ministry, the celibacy of the Latin Rite (Roman) clergy, reform and transparency in the operations of Vatican offices, the role of bishops, bishops' conferences and regional collections of bishops' conferences have all been flagged either by the pope or his new secretary of state, Archbishop Parolin.

All of these have been in the "too hard" basket for more than three decades. One of these with special significance in Asia is also expected to surface in the near future.

For over three decades, the issue of the uniqueness of Christ and Christian revelation in the context of religions whose origins predate Jesus himself has been the subject of censorship and prosecution by Vatican officials to the extent that theologians in Asia are afraid to even ask questions, let alone propose answers.

Those who have tried have been excommunicated (Tissa Balasuriya, later revoked) and condemned (Jacques Dupuis) for mentioning the subject.

Others who have wanted to enter the debate have, as they've told me, been cowed into silence for fear of the wrath of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and its extensive network of spies and reporters throughout the world who "dilate" (to use the technical term) or report miscreants to what was called for 500 years the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition.

Its style of operation has been mortally wounded in the first six months of this papacy and especially in the lengthy interview given by the pope that appeared in 12 languages late last Thursday and was published by UCAN on Friday.

The pope lamented the preoccupation with rules and compliance with minutiae, not to mention liturgical paraphernalia and overdressing by clerics, preferring to focus on what is central to Catholicism - the journey of faith, the Gospel and the Sacraments.

The outstanding issues for reform of the Church are well known and named above. I think we all need to strap ourselves in for a rough ride in the coming months and years. Meanwhile, let's hope that the Vatican's information service can be of more help than it has been in cases like those of the two disgraced bishops in the past six weeks.

• Michael Kelly SJ in ucanews.com
• Published with permission

Michael Kelly SJ is the executive director of the UCAnews

He is on record as being open to consider ending the celibacy rule for Roman Catholic clerics, caring about the pastoral care of divorced and remarried Catholics and reflecting the approach of Vatican II in decentralizing Church governance to allow local bishops' conferences more initiative.

There seems little doubt that change is underway and the one thing we all know about change is that it has uncertain outcomes.

We are at a turning point in the Church and it will reward inspection of the key formative experiences in Pope Francis' life to see where and how things might go in coming years.

The man clearly brings a great deal of pastoral and administrative experience as a Church leader. But about him personally there is something else.

As Jorge Bergoglio, the current pope's first and then recurrent experience of ministry as a Jesuit was his making and directing the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Twice at least he has made the 30-day retreat, and he has also guided others over many years through that experience.

The Exercises are at once a school of prayer and an experience with one purpose - making decisions about directions in life. Over four "weeks" of varying lengths, the retreatant prays for the freedom to make good decisions.

They are prayerful days when a retreatant contemplates her or his human condition as a sinner in need of God's mercy, a companion with Jesus in his preaching and healing ministry, as one beholding the sorrowful and painful death of Jesus and then asking to share the new life of Jesus' resurrection.

What impact does making a 30-day retreat have in shaping a person? As one who's done two and has planned a third one for later this year, there is one uncompromising fact that has to be taken into account: God can only work with us as we are and sometimes God hasn't got much to work with!

There is no big tally card in the sky that measures and rewards achievement of standards expected of someone making the retreat. The believer comes as he or she is, that mixture of virtue and vice, insight and stubborn blindness, intelligence and stupidity, generosity and mean spiritedness.

So there is no "standard product" at the end of the Exercises. However there are at least three things that not even the most narrow, hard-hearted and obtuse person can miss as the process of the weeks unfold.

They are:

A relentless focus on God's love for us - from the first to last period of prayer over the 30 days - that has the corresponding effect of our appreciating how far we are from being loving creatures in response. We are sinners but loved sinners, which elicits greater self-knowledge, gratitude and humility.

A constant preoccupation with the person of Jesus - in his teaching and preaching in word and deed climaxing in prolonged meditation on his death and resurrection. The helpless surrender of Jesus to God's love on Calvary and the astonishing reversal that comes with the Resurrection are seen through not only Jesus' eyes but also in the Calvaries and resurrections of the retreatant's life.

The recurrent practice of what Ignatius called the "discernment of spirits" - those mood swings and feelings in an individual that lead towards or away from deepening inner peace, joy and confidence. Those that lead to the positive feelings are believed by the retreatant to be those leading him or her to choose God's will.

Self-knowledge, humility before the facts, decisiveness until another direction presents itself for consideration, looking for the traces of God's presence to be found when a decision is taken - these are at heart what will focus the energies and priorities that Pope Francis will choose.

But as a Jesuit and a leader of them, Pope Francis is a practiced exponent of what has developed as a pattern of leadership that received its fullest expression in the Constitutions of the Order, developed over a decade by St Ignatius. The book is both a guide to administration and a set of open-ended suggestions about approaches to effective leadership.

They have been the subject of study and writing by a former American Jesuit, celebrated author and business consultant, Chris Lowney. He summarizes the Ignatian heritage of leadership as being marked by four key features that will turn up in this pontificate:

Self-awareness: A good leader in this tradition will know his or her capabilities and, as a consequence, also areas of limitation. A leader with self-knowledge surrounds him or herself with people who complement his abilities and so makes up for gaps and short-comings.

Ingenuity: Good leaders are curious and Ignatian leaders are invited to look beyond the ordinary and the possible to the magis, the Latin word Ignatius used for the "greater" or "further" we are capable of, even what seems impossible. Ignatian leaders like and embrace challenges.

Love: Ignatian prayer leads to the specific and the actual because its purpose is to have the believer find God, the source and center of love, in everyone and everything, however unlovely they may appear at first sight. It is the engine room of service and, in Ignatian prayer, is met in the desire to do the best for others and oneself.

Courage: Ignatian prayer and governance is also about taking risks., thinking big, making things happen all in the service of God and human beings. For Ignatius, making things happen for God, oneself and others means not taking blocks and knockbacks in striving to make a positive difference.

This is where Jorge Bergoglio is coming from. Only time will tell where and to what extent Pope Francis will take this formative legacy.

Source

Fr Michael Kelly SJ, is the Bangkok based executive director of UCA News. Originally published in UCA News. Used with permission.

What makes for spiritual growth? In my childhood and adolescence, it was all about going to Sunday Mass, confessing your sins once a month at least, going to Mass through the week or even attending Sunday benediction, an active interest in cultivating a devotional life fostered by the many movements that still thrived till the 1960s. These were the emblems of a thriving Catholic faith.

Mass attendance was four times what it is today, members of pious societies filling the pews at their designated Masses. Clerics in collars and soutanes and, when called on, bishops and 'experts' in particular devotions, fed the faithful with the treasures of these traditions of piety. There was always an 'authority' who could explain the mysteries and put anxious minds and hearts at rest. Authority was a big factor in Church and society. Read more

Sources

• Michael Kelly in Eureka Street

Fr Michael Kelly SJ was founding publisher of Eureka Street and is now executive director of the Bangkok-based UCAN Catholic news agency.

"We must not allow ourselves to be drawn into the murky waters of cynicism, passivity, and bitterness. However, nor must we don the rosy spectacles of illusory optimism." Tomas Halik, Czech priest and author of "Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty."

Firstly let me say how grateful I am to Rosemary Flannery and the Camino committee for inviting me here tonight. This parish is my spiritual home. I first learnt about the faith through this community; I have returned here over many decades and have felt here in conscious and real ways that that here is where I learnt what a community of faith is; and it was here more than 28 years ago that I celebrated my first Mass. Thankyou Rosemary and team. I'm so glad to be here to address something that is important to us all and central to my life - ministry. Continue reading

Sources

• Michael Kelly SJ in Eureka Street
• Image: Smell the Color Nine