Tony Flannery in the Irish Times: Is our innate sense of superiority holding the Catholic Church back?
Rite & Reason: Catholic Church could learn a lot from Episcopal church on homosexuality, the ordination of women and interplay between science and religion – but it won’t
Fr Tony Flannery
Sun Sept 21 2025 – 00:30
In a recent interview with the UK Catholic weekly The Tablet, former bishop and head of the Episcopal Church in Scotland Richard Holloway spoke of his resignation after attending the Lambeth Conference of 1998. He is no longer even a practising member of his Church, having lost faith in the institution.
The Lambeth Conference is an event which happens in the worldwide Anglican Communion approximately every ten years. The 1998 Conference was particularly significant as it was preoccupied by the question of homosexuality and whether people who are gay could be ordained. It became divisive and bitter, with no shortage of personal abuse.
The irony was that the greatest opposition to change at that Conference was by closeted gay men in ministry who hadn’t come to terms with their own sexuality. A similar situation is not exactly unknown in the Catholic Church today.
Holloway said that 1998 Conference was like witnessing a lynch mob. It became “a hate fest against gay people”. In the interview he said a more disturbing thought was that there is something in the very nature of religion that tended towards the kind of behaviour he saw at Lambeth.
In his book Godless Morality Holloway writes: “it seems to me that religious dogmatism complicated the struggle to live an ethical life”. What he appears to be suggesting is that religion should remove its list of dogmatic certainties and replace them with the basic principle of showing kindness to all.
I have been reading up on developments in the US Episcopal Church from the 1970s to the turn of the century, as it was there the movement for such reform began and was most active. The struggle there during those years bears an uncanny resemblance to what is now happening in the Catholic Church.
From the 1970s, three dominant issues were discussed, debated, and even fought over in the US Episcopal Church. These were the ordination of women, the church’s attitude to homosexuals and whether they could become ministers and, probably most fundamental of all, the relationship between science and religious belief, encompassing the thorny question of how to interpret Scriptures for the modern world.
It has struck me that the US Episcopal Church was 50 years ahead of Catholics in facing up to those challenges. I was surprised that, though I have followed closely the current synodal movement in the Catholic Church, and even taken part in it, at no stage did I hear any of the leading figures involved with synodality in Ireland refer to the Episcopal experience; how they went about it, what they did well, what mistakes they made, and how they reached conclusions.
Could it possibly be that we in the Catholic Church have an innate sense of superiority that entices us to believe that we don’t need to learn anything from any other Church? If so, it is a foolish error.
I was impressed by the systems and structures in the Episcopal Church put in place for dealing with these difficult questions. There was scope for very wide consultation, with debates at many levels and among many people, not just bishops and priests.
Yes, there was conflict, sometimes bitter divisions, personal attacks and all the other things that are prevalent in human disputes. It was obvious, as Holloway said, that no matter how high up the clerical ladder a person reached they were subject to the same prejudices, to be as self-serving and lacking in sympathy, as everyone else. Still progress was made, and new things began to happen.
The big advantage they had, as I see it, was that the Church within which their debates and discussions were happening actually had the authority to make decisions. There was no outside, overall authority that could overrule whatever the local church decided.
A big problem with the synodal process in the Catholic Church is that we don’t have that type of authority at local or national level and, as a consequence, the process is already showing signs of going around in circles.
We owe this, most of all, to Pope Pius IX and the First Vatican Council in 1870. Not only did that Council decree that the pope was infallible in certain circumstances, it said he had“full, supreme and universal jurisdiction over the Church, not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in matters that pertain to the discipline and Government of the Church throughout the world”.
It means that no matter what decisions are made at any level in the Church they can be wiped out by the stroke of a pen at the Vatican. Something of that happened at the Amazon Synod there a few years ago, where a large majority favoured the ordination of mature married men, but no change happened.
This gives a degree of unreality to the long series of discussions taking place in the ongoing Catholic Church synodal process and explains why we are looking so closely for signs as to where Pope Leo stands on it all.
We know he has the authority to put an end to the whole process. Hopefully, he won’t.
Fr Tony Flannery is a Redemptorist priest
“A big problem with the synodal process in the Catholic Church is that we don’t have that (Anglican) type of authority at local or national level and, as a consequence, the process is already showing signs of going around in circles.”
And yet, quoting from the Final Report of the XVIth Universal Synod in Rome, the preparatory document for the Kilkenny Pre-Assembly on Oct 18th – ‘Baptised and Sent’ – declares:
“Baptism is the foundation of Christian life. This is because it introduces everyone to the greatest gift, which is to be children of God, that is, to share in Jesus’ relationship to the Father in the Spirit. There is nothing higher than this baptismal dignity, equally bestowed upon each person, through which we are invited to clothe ourselves with Christ and be grafted onto Him like branches of the one vine.”
That direction of travel, set by Pope Francis, is a realistic response to the impact of history, characterised by scandals in the highest places – ‘relativising’ for many Catholics the authoritarianism that went with ordination and hierarchy in the church. It is supported also by basic theology – which tells us that while the pope may reside in Rome the Trinity are everywhere present – and therefore everywhere close to all of us as individuals.
The Vatican II principle that truth is also a hierarchy – discerned to enable dialogue between theologians of different Christian traditions – is also available to us as individuals, while the instruction ‘love one another’ – uttered by Christ himself – must obviously be at the summit of any hierarchy of moral obligations. That principle will surely be borne in mind by all who attend the Pre-Synodal assembly in Kilkenny on October 18th – where those who hope for a change of official church doctrine on the LGBT+ question will encounter those for whom that doctrine is unchangeable. Who knows then what the impact of ‘conversation in the spirit’ will be?
That this will probably be predominantly a lay event will further advance the emergence of Baptism as the foundational and equalising sacrament – and no-one who attends will have the personal authority to bind the conscience of anyone else.
I don’t see circularity in this process so much as the irreversible dissolution of authoritarianism. There cannot ever be a rescinding of the instruction ‘love one another’ – and the principle of freedom of conscience authorises everyone to do that as they see fit. Kindness and dogma cannot be incompatible if kindness is a dogmatic obligation at the summit of the hierarchy of truth.
“The irreversible dissolution of authoritarianism” — it seemed irreversible at the synod held in Liverpool in 1980 — it seemed irreversible in the USA in the 1960s, but now we are in a topsy-turvy world, with a US president cracking down on freedom of speech and erecting Charlie Kirk as the Horst Wessel of his regime (with compliance of Democrats, idolatrous acclaim not only of fundamentalist preachers but of Catholic priests and bishops). The Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion are a huge reservoir of biblical culture, liturgical vibrancy, theological tradition, social and charitable action, human understanding, daily prayer, and they are well able to weather storms of controversy. We have refused to learn from them or to share with them. I hear people smirking that more Catholics than Anglicans are attending church in the UK now. I hear theologians sharpening the claim that the one true church of Christ subsists in the RCC and that “our sister church” (Paul VI) is defective (in contrast to the ecclesiologist Hans Küng’s view that the one true church of Christ is the ecumenical communion of all the Christian churches). I hear conservative seminarians declare that of course women priests are just a fiction (and that all Anglican orders are null and void). Enda McDonagh urged Catholics to worship at another church once a month — and was himself a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. The conviction of our superiority has been more and more tawdry as our spiritual, liturgical, theological mediocrity has become more and more apparent, as has the mess we have inflicted on millions at the level of personal life. Pope Leo (who voted in the Republican primaries in 2012, 2014, and 2016) insists that “the doctrine will not change” (referring to such barren documents as Persona Humana, 1975, and Homosexualitatis Persona, 1986). This brought back memory of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, back from the Council, assuring the faithful in the Pro-Cathedral on 9 December 1965: “You may have been worried by much talk of changes to come. Allow me to reassure you. No change will worry the tranquillity of your Christian lives.”? Synodality might open the floodgates to dialogue and open discussion, so synodality is being emasculated before anyone has a change to discover what it is. Was there a strong ecumenical dimension to what was touted as “synodality” in recent years? We are still in a church of fear and paralysis, at least as regards dialogue, human interaction, ecumenical and interreligious exploration.
“We are still in a church of fear and paralysis, at least as regards dialogue, human interaction, ecumenical and interreligious exploration.”
That may still be true for those working within official Catholic academia – but that is the context of neither the ordinary ground-level Catholic in Ireland nor those utterly alienated from the clerical Catholic superstructure – which happens to be fading in Ireland like snow off a ditch anyway.
Are you not underestimating the liberation that comes simply from realising that the Catholic authority pyramid is not (and never was) a pyramid of virtue – or, therefore, of wisdom either? Many who come to that realisation are plugged directly into e.g.
Richard Rohr’s CAC : https://cac.org/
Or the WCCM: https://wccm.org/
These are both ecumenical also – and while what you say is true of Anglicanism it is also true that Anglicanism is also wracked by structural problems and disillusionment with leadership (over the abuse and other issues). (See:
https://anglican.ink/2024/11/18/anglicanism-is-in-its-worst-crisis-since-henry-viii/ )
As most clergy in Ireland have opted out of synodality its future is highly uncertain but what else is there to bring lay people together for Catholic discussion and the preservation and development of parish structures? It’s too early for most to be also into ecumenism but I know many who are already interested in that dimension, working under that Vatican II principle of the hierarchy of truth. Is there any major church now that hasn’t experienced internal upheaval and disillusionment with ‘structure’.
Was there ever any future in pessimism?
“It’s too early for most to be also into ecumenism” — 60 years after Vatican II?
Can you never allow for vastly different contexts, Joe?
Even rural northern Ireland – where members of the reformed churches are still into annual Orange defensiveness – is vastly different from e.g. Coleraine where I live (and have easy ecumenical contact and experience) – and Belfast and Dublin are something else again.
It follows that even the possibility of ecumenical Christian experience varies widely in Ireland, while Vatican II made almost no headway here in NI because of the Troubles, and church-going for Catholics had an awful lot to do with maintaining cultural identity – and Paisleyism had huge gravitational pull in maintaining anti-Catholic bigotry and therefore Catholic defensiveness also.
Urban sophistication is its own kind of silo, I guess. The dismissal of synodality from Japan – when it holds out virtually the only promise ongoing here of bringing many out of lay passivity at long last – is simply blinkered. You see it only, I think, as a failed hope of policy change at the top when at the base it can stir sorely disadvantaged lay people into thinking out their own faith for the first time.
Given that ‘the top’ has been so disgraced by its own lack of integrity this is itself a very narrow approach. Would it not be more sensible to conceptualise ‘the church’ as a vastly variable diaspora now, in which the importance of ‘the top’ is fading, and not where the future lies?
Sean, the context of my remarks is essentially the retrenchment which I fear is afoot in the new pontificate. Francis was fearless in his ecumenical and interreligious outreach, as the product of a great missionary order, but I think the panic occasioned by his remark in Singapore that “all religions are paths to God” (matched by his remark at the memorial service for his friend the evangelical bishop Tony Palmer that “we are all on the same path to the kingdom of God together, whether we be Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Muslim, Hindu or Buddhism — this is a theological disaster! [with a smile]”) and the indifference to the imperative of interreligious encounter issued by Vatican II (Nostra aetate) and John Paul II (Fides et ratio) marked a limit to his impact. Too much effort has been put into restricting the implications of his gestures (as in the nervous parsing of Amoris Laetitia, of the blessing of same-sex unions, etc.), instead of taking the hint and broadening it imaginatively. — I do not dismiss synodality, and want to believe in what the Japanese laywoman who took part in the synod tells me, that it inaugurates a new way of being church. But I note that Pope Leo tends to say that there is nothing new about it. — You remind me that ecumenism was a dire necessity in Ireland north and south, and that there were places like the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation — which makes it all the more tragic that we have generally been utterly indifferent to it.
Tony, what an excellent article. I
have shared it with friends. Thank you.
Initially, what surprised me was the lack of comment/ response to it. apart from Joe and Sean.
But, then again, we have to accept there are very few members of the ACP willing to express a view on anything on this site now, something Séamus has been lamenting.
I knew Richard Holloway when he was Bishop of Edinburgh and I chaired our Archdiocesan Ecumenical Commission. I haven’t seen him for many years now.
I think you are definitely right about our Catholic sense of superiority. When I hear Catholics talk about “the faith “ as if we are the only ones with that faith, I cringe.
I find it insulting to Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and the other Christians as if they somehow lack that special commodity we call faith.
Interesting to note that the most vehement voices opposed to ordaining gay men in the Anglican Church were those of men who were homosexuals themselves.
Fr. James Alison, who was honest enough not to hide his homosexuality, was suspended from his priesthood ministry because of that honesty and who then received the famous phone call from Pope Francis, did research into homosexuality in our Catholic priesthood and found that the most bitter homophobes were to be found among those priests who were themselves homosexuals.
I don’t think we need to worry about papal infallibility anymore, Tony or about Séamus’ friend, Bob aka Leo XIV.
It was revealing when I tried to start a conversation on papal infallibility on this site a few years ago only Joe O’Leary would engage with me.
There was an excellent article on Leo by Austen Ivereigh in last week’s Tablet.
I was already reassured about Leo as he seems definitely to have been Francis’ choice. I have no doubt that he will push synodality onwards.
Something that was not very widely publicised, as far as I could see, was that his first episcopal appointment in America was a Fr. Heenan who became America’s youngest bishop at 47.
However, the really interesting thing about Fr. Heenan was that he was well known in the church in America as a prominent advocate for LGBT rights and for the full involvement of LGBTs in the life of the church.
That I think says a lot about Leo.
I remember reading one the late Fr. Joe Dunn’s excellent books, either No Lions in the Hiararchy or No Vipers in the Vatican which was the first time I became aware of the large percentage of our priests who are gay. Joe’s explanation for this imbalance was his contention that gay men are more gentle and compassionate and are therefore drawn to priesthood.
I wonder is that still a convincing explanation. Or are many of these young right wing zealots who seem to make up the majority of the very few young men now entering seminary training simply using our priesthood as safe haven to hide their sexual orientation.
Thank you, again, Tony.
Paddy.
PS I should also have mentioned how fascinating I found Joe and Séan’s conversation. Mention of Synodality and rural Ireland reminded me that having bragged over here about how enthusiastically we Irish have embraced the whole concept of Synodality I then found when I went home nobody seemed to know what I was talking about.
One friend said to me that all she wants is a priest to bury her!!
Paddy, in my view sexual orientation isn’t the problem. Indications seem to suggest that gay men or no more likely to molest a child than an heterosexual man.
Pedophilia is the criminal problem in the church today. Shouldn’t all energies be invested in protection of children and blocking pedophiles at the seminary door?
M G-M @9, in Marie Keenan’s excellent book, ‘Child Sexual Abuse & the Catholic Church. Gender, Power, and Organisational Culture’ her conclusion, if I remember correctly, was that heterosexual men were more likely to sexually molest a child than a homosexual man.
She, in writing that book, had referenced many other studies into the causes of clerical child sexual abuse.
It is a good number of years since I read Marie’s book but I have referred to it over the years in defending homosexual men, especially homosexual men in the priesthood.
Fr. Tony Flannery in his excellent and more recent book ‘From the Outside’ refers to ‘the roots of the problem’ chap 7 and I would highly recommend it to you, M G-M. Tony also refers to Marie Keenan’s work.
Thanks Paddy for the information!