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Holiday Weekend or Holy Week?

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Brendan Hoban offers a reflection on Holy Week.
“Calvary sets in consoling relief the experience of all who suffer – whether the nightmare of physical pain or the emotional trauma of significant loss or the prospect of imminent death. The human Jesus, struggling to come to terms with the reality of his predicament, echoes every human experience of suffering and of loss and reflects the complexity and confusion of emotions that attend all those caught in the slipstream of pain and loss and death.”

“The Role of the Faithful in a post-Royal Commission Church in Australia”

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The address of Vincent Long Van Nguyen, Bishop of Parramatta, to the Concerned Catholics of Canberra and Goulburn Forum on the topic of “The Role of the Faithful in a post-Royal Commission Church in Australia” has relevance not just to the church in Australia but to the universal church.
“If the priesthood has a better future, it has to be humanized; it has to find expression in better mutual support, collaboration and partnership. It has to free itself from the variant strains of clericalism such as sexism, paternalism, narcissism and superiority complex.”
“So long as we continue to make women invisible and inferior in the Church’s language, liturgy, theology and law, we impoverish ourselves as if we heard with only one ear, we saw with only one eye and we thought with only one half of the brain…”

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  2. Joe O'Leary says:

    Thanks, Colm Holmes, for that great video. Everything Fr Roy says is right, but I can hear the clericalist voices dismissing it. I wonder if some of them are still saying, “You don’t change a winning team”! I paused at 29.00 to say AMEN about the oppressive new translations.

    Unwise to give a shout-out to the Korean film Parasites without having seen it. It’s a morally very dubious piece. My impression is that the social comment of the film is a fatuous pretext for a nasty celebration of deception, theft, murder, all for fun. I see people lauding it for production values, the sort of thing one might learn in film school, comparing it with Hitchcock in this respect. I don’t think it has anything like Hitchcock’s cinematic magic.

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  3. Joe O'Leary says:

    I see “Parasite” comes flanked by pedagogic commentaries, which to my mind do not remove the suspicion of meretriciousness.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci-gFovSJf0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kx-gSK2C2Q

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhEgGxaeCqM

    PS The “visitation” of US nuns was not done by the CDF, but they did do an “assessment” of the leadership, which was a distinct process.

    “At a Dec. 16 Vatican press conference, Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, the prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, presented his congregation’s response to the report and explained that the 2009-2012 visitation was initiated because women religious are “experiencing challenging times.” There was a need to “gain deeper knowledge” of their contributions, he said, as well as the difficulties that “threaten the quality of their religious life” and, for some, their very existence.

    “The visitation, not to be confused with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s four-year doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), was an unprecedented and enormous task, involving 341 religious institutes and approximately 50,000 women religious. It did not include cloistered nuns, but the Vatican stressed that its outcome is addressed to the Church’s pastors and faithful as well as women religious themselves.”

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  4. Brendan Butler says:

    Roy Donovan, is a breath of fresh air within a staid Catholic Church.
    He identifies the growth and consolidation of clericalism , as Pope Francis constantly reiterates , as a man made structure which has fostered injustices in the Church such as the exclusion of women from ministry .
    He states that priests have been taught to consider themselves as the ‘ special ones ‘ while the priesthood of the non – ordained is disregarded.
    This hierarchical gap is reinforced by the practice of priests being called ‘ fathers’ while lay- people are identified as their ‘ children ‘ – both descriptions totally unacceptable in our 21 century as these titles reinforce inequality .
    A fist step to dismantle clericalism which creates a barrier between priests and people would be to eliminate the practice of calling priests ‘fathers’ and to address them by the names they received, like the rest of us, at Baptism.
    This alone would not dismantle clericalism but would help to create a sense of equality and mutual respect between priests and the non-ordained people of God.
    Sincerely,
    Brendan Butler

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