Gerry O’Hanlon: It Could Happen to a Bishop

It Could Happen to a Bishop

08/08/2024

From the Sacred Heart University website. Link to article:

https://sacredheartuniversity.typepad.com/go_rebuild_my_house/2024/08/it-could-happen-to-a-bishop.html

July in Ireland is the time we have our All-Ireland football and hurling championships, a bit like a Super Bowl occasion. One of the hurling stars of the Clare team who won in a thrilling final this year, Shane O’Donnell, was interviewed in the runup to the semifinal against Kilkenny. He spoke about a dark experience of concussion earlier in his career that led him to change from being a kind of spectator of sporting politics to more active involvement: “But since then, I’ve been less willing to be like, ‘Aw, you know, it’s okay…’ Or even just to go, ‘Someone else will deal with that.’”

Substitute most bishops for O’Donnell with regard to what’s going on in today’s synodal Catholic Church, and you get a surprisingly close fit. For all the encouragement to speak out candidly (parrhesia), what most bishops, in fact, seem to have done is listened patiently and generously (hypomene) but forgotten the responsibility of also speaking out about what they themselves think and believe. How else can we account for the continuing timidity of the Church around the role of women, scathingly critiqued by Tina Beattie in this 

blog 

a redacted version was also published in 

The Tablet

: “And so the process goes on—delays, deferrals, further reflections, unpublished reports—while the platitudinous waffle about women’s charisms and gifts drones on year after year.”

The role of the bishops may be a key to unlocking some of this institutional constipation. Back in the day, when contraception was the big issue, it was said that the then-Bishop of Killaloe Willie Walsh (now emeritus) used to annoy his colleagues with occasional newspaper interviews where he would simply note the concerns of married people he knew about Church teaching in areas of sexuality and his inability to give clear answers to their questions from current Church teaching. While he received much acclaim from the general public, it is reported that his reception at the next Episcopal Conference meeting was a lot cooler. Esprit de corps had been damaged, the Church had been criticized in public, and fellow bishops felt they themselves were being shown up in a bad light.

And that habit of deferential silence was the default institutional common sense of the day, which, as Lonergan astutely observed many years ago, has a habit of becoming nonsense when a new situation arises that needs a different explanation. Once the pope had called for a more synodal Church, with dialogue and open speech at its core, there was bound to be new cultural demands on us all in the Church, whatever our role. Many bishops have responded generously to the first part of the demand: to listen, in particular, to the “sense of faith of the faithful.” But they have been slower to speak out honestly, as if they do not remember that they are also part of the “faithful,” called to be open, and that, in their role as bishop, they are not merely passive conduits of teaching from “on high,” with a mission to maintain unity at all costs, but active, intelligent, critical interpreters of the tradition, the current teaching of the Church and the voices of the faithful and signs of the times. They are called, in other words, to integrate their humanity as critical and searching subjects with their leadership role as bishops.

A bishop, as Vatican II made it clear, has responsibility both for his own diocese and for the Church Universal. He is a collegial actor, with and under the Pope. At a time when the Pope himself has called for a healthy decentralization, when the current synod is urging more episcopal responsibility and effective authority, it would be a real contribution if individual bishops, or groups of them, were to propose that the ordination of women to priesthood be included as part of the material for the study groups accompanying the synodal process. Ordination, on whichever side one stands, is a totemic issue that affects all else with respect to women’s role in the Church. It is past time that the Church dealt with it by submitting it to theological scrutiny, in a synodal spirit.

Some bishops and groups of bishops (the German church in particular comes to mind) are already doing this. I would encourage others to be less cautious. I am quite sure that so many of these good men harbour doubts in their own minds about the validity of current teaching. We are all aware from so many historical instances how silence can become a kind of co-complicity. The failure to tackle this issue head-on is a scandal, using that term in its original meaning of “stumbling block” or “obstacle”—an obstacle to mission, the raison d’etre of synodality. As Tina Beattie puts it in The Tablet version of her blog: “I fail to understand how the Church can be a missionary, synodal Church when more and more women are walking away and taking their families with them, tired of being treated as second-class Catholics or as irrelevant to the main business of mission and evangelisation.”

Please, dear bishops, look inside and consider the call of the Holy Spirit.

Gerry O’Hanlon is an Irish Jesuit theologian and author.