Speaking at St Patrick's College in Maynooth (which is Ireland's national seminary), Martin said working at the Vatican is an unusual experience.

While in a leadership position in the then Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in 1987, Martin said on the one hand he met "some of the most intelligent, committed and enlightened men and women dedicated to the service of the Church" and was inspired by those who stood up for human rights.

However, he also witnessed "careerism and nastiness" while at the Holy See.

Most of his colleagues at the Justice and Peace council were "highly qualified laypersons and the Council could draw on expertise from Church experts, lay and clerical, around the world".

Martin said the Council for Justice and Peace's "real role" was to support what was being done at local level.

"This meant not simply being a desk-bound Vatican bureaucrat but going out to see and understand on the ground the challenges of the local churches and the experience and suffering of those local churches," he said.

Just the same, he said this didn't mean they acted like tourists, taking inessential trips and staying in hotels.

Rather, it involved staying with the local church, in difficult times and even in wartime circumstances.

It didn't include extending trips beyond the specific mission in hand either.

The outspoken prelate has criticised the Church and the Vatican on a number of occasions in the past.

As an example, days before the Papal visit to Ireland last year he criticised the Vatican's child protection office, saying Pope Francis "needs a better team around him".

Source

• Extra.ie
• Image: Extra.ie

Master of the Dominicans between 1992 and 2001, Fr Radcliffe will serve as a consultor on the pontifical council.

The council is the Vatican body devoted to social justice and human rights.

Fr Radcliffe said justice, peace and mercy are at the centre of Francis's pontificate.

The Dominican said it is an honour to offer whatever support he could.

Fr Radcliffe helped launch a social justice institute at Blackfriars College at Oxford University, where he lives.

Continue reading

Yet whenever the church tries to say something on economics, it faces a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" dilemma about whether or not to get concrete.

If the church sticks to abstract principles, it's accused of being pie in the sky and irrelevant. If it endorses specific policy proposals, it's accused of exceeding its competence, blurring the lines between church and state, and confusing prudential judgment with dogmatic certainty.

Too much specificity courts other risks too:

• Ideological criticism from the left or the right, depending upon whose ox is being gored. (A variant is ideological cherry-picking; sort of like Kennedy and the Khrushchev letter, both conservatives and liberals tend to focus on what they like in Catholic social teaching and pretend the other stuff doesn't exist.)
• Media focus on the most sensational policy stance, usually distorting the big picture. (Remember reaction to Benedict XVI's call for global governance in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate? To read paranoid anti-globalist blogs, you might have started scanning the horizon for black helicopters bearing the papal coat of arms.)

Given that this briar patch seems basically unavoidable, what's the church to do? As it happens, a new document from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, entitled "Vocation of the Business Leader", hints at an intriguing solution.

In a sound-bite, the idea is to be didactic on principle but interrogatory on policy. The church may not have to offer specific answers; perhaps it's enough to frame the right questions. Think of it as Catholic social teaching, Socrates-style.

The 32-page document is designed as a vade-mecum, or practical handbook, for business leaders trying to integrate their faith with their work. It was presented on March 30 by Cardinal Peter Turkson, a Ghanian who serves as president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, at an assembly of 2,000 Catholic businesspeople in Lyon, France. Continue reading

Sources

• John L Allen Jr. in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Catholic News Agency