Sir, – The desire for a Catholic Spring should not be confined only to personal conversion as Desmond Fisher infers (December 30th). It is not even about changing a few canon law provisions to allow married or women priests.
It implies radical surgery right into the body of the Catholic Church so as to eliminate the cancerous growths that need to be removed so that people outside the church can find its message once again a credible guide to life. What was attempted over 50 years ago at the Vatican council by Pope John XXIII was an aggiornamiento, a bringing up to date of the entire Catholic Church and it had all the makings of a springtime of new life for the church. However what we have witnessed over the past 50 years has been an undoing of any Vatican 2 reforms, epitomised by the recent unilateral Vatican decision to impose a new liturgical missal which I experienced at Christmas midnight mass as unintelligible and for all intents and purposes I might as well have been attending an all-Latin Mass.
Since Vatican 2 there have been many attempts by Catholics to create another Catholic spring especially in 1989 when over 300 theologians signed the Cologne declaration accusing the then Pope John Paul II of “overstepping and enforcing in an unadmissable way” his proper competence in doctrinal matters and of “appointing bishops without respecting the suggestions of the local church and neglecting their established rights” and his removal of theologians “as a dangerous intrusion into the freedom of research and teaching”. Pope John Paul II continually amplified the doctrine of papal infallibility and deified the concept by beatifying the author of papal infallibility Pope Pius XI. Then Pope Benedict, who since 1981 has in effect ruled the church, in turn beatified his infallible master John Paul II to further reinforce creeping papal infallibility. In effect we have an incestuous reinforcement of papal infallibility both in the way cardinals are appointed and how they in turn elect popes.
While we are all called to personal goodness we must also accept that the structures of any organisation can and do determine the obedient behaviour of its members, especially if authority is enforced in a totalitarian way.
This means that if we are to have a new Catholic Spring all structures of the church from the election of popes down to the selection of bishops and a new canon law based on justice must be open to analysis and critique.
The recent initiative of the Association of Irish Catholic Priests to hold an assembly of the Irish church where all proposals will be on the table is most welcome and all committed Catholics should support this first shoot of the newly emerging Catholic Spring. – Yours, etc,