Similar Posts
Gerry O’Connor CSsR and ACP leadership – weekly Sunday video homily
23rd Sunday Year C 2025 – theme: ‘Discipline’ Link:
Presider’s Page for 23 March (Third Sunday of Lent)
Today, as we gather to listen to the Lenten call to repentance, we worship our God of kindness who, like a patient gardener, always gives people a second chance.
In His ‘Western People’ column Brendan Hoban pays tribute to the late Colm Kilcoyne
Fr Colm Kilcoyne A gifted preacher with a real sense of place More than a week ago, in another marker of…
Letter from Rome – Robert Mickens: Pope Leo comes alive! An unscripted Leo XIV opens his heart and mind
The normally tightly-scripted pope speaks off the cuff to continental synod groups for nearly an hour, mostly in English, demonstrating pastoral sensitivity, flashes of theological brilliance, and a commitment to…
White Smoke…
Live link to Vatican News…
America Magazine: JD Vance suggests U.S. bishops only care for immigrants to protect ‘their bottom line’
Maria Wiering – OSV News, January 26, 2025 (OSV News) — Vice President JD Vance questioned the motives of the U.S. bishops’ criticism of President Donald Trump’s new immigration policies…


View the VIDEO of Fr Roy Donovan’s fearless talk to We Are Church on Youtube: https://youtu.be/fpMjDwNQOnY
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.
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.”
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