Tony Flannery: The Root and Branch conference in Leeds

(Updated with link to Tony’s presentation) Last weekend I attended the conference organised by Root and Branch in Leeds, entitled Empowering Ourselves. In the past fifteen years I have attended a great many Church Reform gatherings in different parts of the world, and they all, in their own way, had a lot to offer.

Link to Tony’s presentation:

But I can say that I was particularly impressed by the group of people I spent the weekend with in Leeds, the Root and Branch movement.

The attendance was in person and online. By and large they were people of roughly the same vintage as myself, and the majority female.

They were as nice a group of people as you could ask to spend a weekend with; the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly, and the quality of input and general conversation was stimulating and enlightening.

The most thing that impressed me about the people gathered was their commitment to the faith, and the church, even with all its failings. In the final session I commented on the amount of time, effort and energy they put into their struggle for Church reform, and I suggested that in some senses you could even say that ‘they were laying down their lives for their faith’.

But the pain and hurt among them was also obvious, and it consisted of two features in particular.

Firstly Pope Francis.

These people, in some ways similar to myself, had been great supporters of him, but now the mood is darker. This has to do with the way he is dealing with the issue of women deacons. Francis appointed a commission, it studied and reported, but the report was not made public. He appointed a second commission, and the exact same thing happened. In the meantime, the Synodal process produced statements saying that the issue of equality for women was one of the top concerns in most parts of the world. Francis’ response to this was to remove the question from the final Synodal gathering next month and place it instead in the hands of another commission, this time chaired by the DDF. The topic won’t be even on the agenda of the October synod. And then, to put the final nail in the coffin, he goes on CNN and states bluntly that women will never be ordained deacons in the Church, effectively blowing apart the whole synodal process, and doing so on a U.S. television network.

The handling of this whole process was deeply hurtful to the women I spent the weekend with, and I found it hard to blame them. It would be difficult to find a more committed group of people, who loved their church and to whom they faith was very precious, so why treat them in this way?

None of this was helped by Cardinal Hollerich, one of the main advisers of Francis, describing groups like Root and Branch, as ‘lobby groups’.

There was one further big hurt evident among this group. By their nature they are activists, wanting to be involved. Many of them had a long record of involvement at parish level or in other aspects of the life of the believing community. But a number of them had the experience that, after years or work and local level, and building up local involvement in many areas of parish life, there was a change of priest and the whole thing was just demolished.  There was nothing they could do, except lick their wounds and go. The priest still has all the power, which he can exercise at a whim, and has Canon Law to back him up, and in the cases I heard about this weekend, the relevant bishop did nothing.

Why is the Church so foolish that it allows its most deeply committed and involved people to be pushed aside in such a peremptory fashion, with in most cases no comeback?