Tony Flannery

(This is a short, and very succinct, article by Peter Keenan)

8 December will mark sixty years since the formal end to Vatican II, described by the late Fr Gabriel Daly (an Augustinian, like the new pope) as ‘a massive surgical operation carried out without anaesthetic on a patient who thought she was in the best of health’.

The “patient” is now in terminal decline, largely the result of institutional Catholicism’s culpable failure to address honestly and courageously three issues identified by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, as far back as the 1950s: 

1. Forms

Michael Morwood.

The need for theological reform

December 27, 2023

In the mid-1980s when I was at Boston College, a Jesuit university, one of the lecturers commented that the Catholic Church hierarchy was fearful of a schism in the church. Too late, he remarked, it is already here, informally. He pointed out that the majority of students at that Catholic university no longer believed the traditional story of a heavenly deity who locked people out of heaven because of the first humans’ disobedience.

A recent talk by a Canon Lawyer on the subject of the rights of priests in their relationship with Church authorities, whether vested in bishops, religious superiors or the members of the CDF evoked deep emotions in me, feelings which I thought I had resolved.   These emotions are rooted in my dealings with Redemptorist and Vatican authorities fourteen years ago.  I thought that I was getting on with my life and, to an extent, that is true.