Liturgy Preparation - Association Of Catholic Priests

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Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…
March 4 2026
Joe O'Leary
Paddy, ChatGPT rules the roost now, and we are all instant experts. Neal Bray makes a good point: the very fact of calling disciples (and surely it is a fact?) sets the church in motion. The relation of church and kingdom is another quagmire. Lumen Gentium calls the church "the seed and beginning of the kingdom" which sounds more modest than the text Neal quotes from the same document. I find Augustine on the City of God quite confusing. The psychological and moral contrast of the two cities that Sean quoted is all very well, but how it relates to the historical reality of the church is unclear. The institutional church not only contains a mixture of wheat and tares but publicly acted in ways incompatible with the city of God, so that the presence of the kingdom in the church (not to speak of 'as' the church) became quite obscure. Should I consult ChatGPT?
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Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…
March 4 2026
Paddy Ferry
Joe@19, that is a really wonderful overview and analysis of the history of scriptural study and debate and we all should be so grateful to you for your great learning and for continuingly sharing it with us. Where else would we find such indept analysis? I have read your post @19 once and I am sure I will read it again and again. Definitely something for the archives. Seán@20, thank you as well. You have both contributed so much to us in your conversations on this ACP site. Joe, I have read the three books by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, The First Christmas, The Last Seven Days and the First Paul and I thought they were absolutely wonderful. They certainly brought my theological education to a new level just as you yourself have been doing for many years on this site. I wonder is John Dominic still with us. He was born in Nenagh two years before my mother-in-law, Agnes Meelam, who was 90 last week. She had never heard of John Dominic Crossan. Some scholars are now convinced that the Last Supper was not a Passover Meal because there is no way the Sanhedrin would have convened to discuss Jesus or anyone else if it was the Passover. One of the first scholars to express this point of view was an eminent German called Joseph Ratzinger.
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23 comments
Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…
March 4 2026
Neil Bray
In his book on Maurice Blondel Robert Coerpel spends a significant time dealing with the relationship between Firmin Loisy and Blondel. They had a common issue with Scolasticism. Blondel synpatised with Loisy but seriously disagreed with his orientation. Coerpel translates the aphorism written in French “Jesus preached the Kingdom, but it was the Church that came” in two different ways. He substitutes the word "parousia" for kingdom in one translation. Blondel linked the statement to the oft held opinion among the first century Christians that the final judgement (parousia) was imminent. When it didn't materialise they had to continue cooperation with God to found the Church. I adapted the following from a French article somewhere referencing Loisy. Loisy's aphorism in fact can serve as a reminder of something important. Whatever Loisy intended his words remind people that as soon as Jesus proclaims the coming of the Kingdom, He calls disciples to follow Him, whom He will gradually teach, before entrusting the flock to them. In other words, from the beginning of His preaching, Jesus summons what is already the Church, even in its visibility and, in an inchoate way, its institutional character. The Church is not a last resort, to which Jesus would have resigned Himself because he did not see the arrival of the Kingdom he announced. The Church is not an intermediary reality between Jesus and the Kingdom to come. The Church is, as the Second Vatican Council affirms, "the Kingdom of God already present in mystery" (Lumen Gentium, n. 3). When Jesus proclaims to His contemporaries that the Kingdom of God is among them, he is equally affirming that He, Jesus, is among them, and that the Church which is His body is among them. It is because Jesus is, in His own person, the Kingdom that he proclaims, that He can call the disciples with this laconic invitation: "Follow me!" Jesus is the only one who can say: "Follow me!" with this authority, because Jesus is the only one who can legitimately say like YHVH to the burning bush (Ex 3:14): "I am." As some Irish Synodal leaders say, Jesus calls people to a new life in his Kingdom, but it is Catholics, with their personal history and all that they are, that He is calling. And the Kingdom is indeed a completely different reality because it is a reality of grace, but the Kingdom flows into the reality of people's lives.
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Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…
March 4 2026
Sean O'Conaill
“Those with faith find the whole concept beyond the powers of reason. How does one blame the Father? Faithful Catholics were once trained to blame themselves individually because they were reminded repeatedly that The Blessed Trinity regarded the Passion, with Christ as sacrificial victim and priest as necessary for the salvation of each. It’s in the Bible.” (Neil Bray) What is also in the Bible - very clearly - is the psychology of those who rejected the kingdom offered by Jesus - their envy and resentment of Jesus' critique of religious ostentation and petty legalism - and Pilate's insecurity faced by the protests of those same enemies. This is not lust on anyone's part - and yet this fact was ignored in all of our younger days by a penitential preaching that focused even on miniscule breaches of the 6th commandment as the 'Sin' that put Jesus on the Cross, via the Father's 'dissatisfaction'. From the murder by Cain of Abel, through the murder of Uriah by David to the opposition to Jesus by the Herods and the Jewish elites of his time, a consistent human weakness is exposed: the fragility of human self-respect - especially on the part of those wielding power - and their consequent fear and intolerance of the negative judgement of others. This is well captured in Proverbs 29:25: “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” Even the mandatory priestly celibacy rule speaks of the misidentification of sexuality as the prime moral danger. No bishop anywhere has yet identified the 'fear of man' as the snare that trapped the hierarchy in the cover up of clerical abuse. Nor do we ever hear it preached that Jesus overcame this same fear, in accepting the Cross, as he tells us himself in John 16:33. YouCat itself 'blames the Father' by denying the role of anything but the will of God in the death of Christ. It is surely no accident that YouCat also blanks 'superbia' throughout, given that 2011 - the year of first publication - was also the year of the Vatican visitation of Ireland. That visitation ignored the 'superbia' of hierarchs but still found scapegoats for the Ryan and Murphy reports' revelations of 2009. Yes, God willed Jesus' acceptance of the cross but for the reason given by Simeon - so that the hidden thoughts of many would be revealed (Luke 2:34-35). To dismiss the 'tragic external circumstances' that reveal those hidden thoughts in scripture is to prefer oblivion on the roots of all violence and concealment and scandal. This is a betrayal of both biblical revelation and the young.
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Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…

Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…

Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…

Roy Donovan ACP Leadership Team responds to Bishop Coll on Synodality…