1427 K Thu 18 Jul 2002
I am impressed by Archbishop Chaput's column on St Francis. Particularly this paragraph:
Francis was always a son of the Church. And as a son, he sometimes scandalized his brothers because he always insisted on fidelity and obedience to the Holy Father and reverence for priests and bishops - even the ones whose sins meant they didn't deserve it. What Francis heard from Jesus on the Cross of San Damiano was not "replace my Church" or "reinvent my Church," but "repair my Church." And he did that in the only way that lasts - one stone at a time, with the living stones of his own life and the lives he changed through his personal witness.
A different emphasis was in an article by Brian Doyle, (The Age, 13 July, Insight page 4). His article included:
... I have three small children; I am enraged; I am afraid; I am bitter. The organisation into which I was born, in which I was schooled, to which I have devoted much of my professional life, is caught with its pants down, reveal to be a place where men at the highest levels shut their eyes to the screams of children in the next room. ...
He writes that the Catholic hierarchy is only a small percentage of the Catholic Church:
... So "the Church" will not be shattered by this horrific unveiling of rape and twisted sex and cowardly mismanagement, because the Church is us ...
What will shatter, what I pray will shatter, is the culture of power in the Catholic Church, a culture centered in Rome. ...
Its not what I pray for. I guess the words "culture of power" have a different meaning for him than for me. We want law and order. For me that means there needs to be people with the power to make laws and enforce them. This power is shared, as it should be.
Copyright J.R. Lilburne, 17 July 2002.
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