Month: February 2019

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News Briefs

Cologne’s cardinal warns against inventing ‘a new Church’

February 19, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Cologne, Germany, Feb 19, 2019 / 04:38 pm ().- Noting the challenges facing the Church in Germany, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne told EWTN last week that amid dispute over the Church’s “direction”, the bishops are called to preserve the faith.

“The current situation in Germany is indeed difficult. And there does seem to be a dispute about the overall direction [of the Church], which was certainly also triggered by the abuse scandal. There are now those voices who argue it is time to cast aside everything we have hitherto held onto. To abandon old times. I think that is a very dangerous concept,” Woelki told EWTN.TV’s program director, Martin Rothweiler, Feb. 13.

“We are part of a great Tradition. The Church also stands for truths that transcend time. And it is not our task to now go and invent a new Church by ourselves. The Church is not just leverage that we have been handed to exercise [as we see fit]. Rather, it is our task as bishops to preserve the faith of the Church, as it has come down to us from the apostles, and to say and proclaim it afresh in our times, and also to preserve it for generations to come, and to express it for them in such a way that they too can encounter Christ as their salvation.”

Woelki commented that “one of the fundamental challenges” facing the Church in Germany “is to keep alive the question of God in our society as a whole. More and more people are convinced that they can live their lives rather well without God. Right there is where the Church has a very important task to play in making clear that God does exist, and that God is in fact the very origin of everything. The question of God to me therefore is one of the fundamental challenges we need to tackle.”

Woelki, 62, has been Archbishop of Cologne since 2014. He was ordained a priest of the archdiocese in 1984, and became its auxiliary bishop in 2003. He was Archbishop of Berlin from 2011 until his return to Cologne, during which time he was made a cardinal.

He was among the seven German bishops who wrote last year to the Vatican asking for clarification on the question of Protestant spouses of Catholics receiving Holy Communion, which possibility had been  promoted by the German bishops’ conference.

Woelki told EWTN.TV that Catholics in Germany are deeply concerned by the abuse crisis: “There has been a massive loss of trust both within and outside of the Church. The challenge now is how this trust can be restored.”

Regarding Church reform, Woelki noted that “it must simply be said that the Church has never been renewed by being less, but by being more” than the culture around her. “We must once again realize that as Christians, we must foster something of an alternative culture, which has to align itself solely with the standards of the Gospel and the will of Jesus Christ. And that is not less, but always more.”

This Christian culture, he said, “is not achieved by abolishing celibacy. It is not achieved by now demanding that women be admitted to the ministries. And it is also not achieved by saying that we must have a new sexual morality. No, the Gospel is and continues to be the touchstone. It is the faith of the Church that continues to be the touchstone, just as it was presented to us by John Paul II in his Catechism.”

“The challenge is precisely to witness and proclaim this timeless faith now in such a way that it becomes understandable and comprehensible to the people of today. This is a challenge that we must face up to, rather than retreating from.”

The ground for hope for the Church in Germany “is that Christ exists and remains and continues to be the Lord of the Church and that His Holy Spirit is promised and granted to us,” Woelki reflected.

“I am convinced that He will also lead us through these times. Of course, we must open ourselves to Him so that God’s Spirit can also work within us and guide us. And we mustn’t start playing Holy Spirit ourselves now.”

He said that “as bishops, we are subject to the Word of God and, like all the people and bishops before us, we must give witness to and proclaim this Word of God. In other words, Christ exists, Christ remains, and He is present. He is Lord of the Church. Just as He has led His Church through difficult times in the past, so He will lead us through these present times.”

Woelki’s faith is also “bouyed”, he said, “when I encounter young people who have let themselves be ignited by the faith of the Church. And it is the young people who seek precisely this ‘more’ of the Christian faith, who have a home in the Church, who have a home in the Eucharist, who live though he Eucharist and through adoration, and who live in the knowledge that their lives are touched by Christ.”

“That is something that encourages me, because these young people – as I experience them – live authentically and with conviction. And they simply give me hope in their witness.”

[…]

No Picture
News Briefs

Cologne’s cardinal warns against inventing ‘a new Church’

February 19, 2019 CNA Daily News 1

Cologne, Germany, Feb 19, 2019 / 04:38 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Noting the challenges facing the Church in Germany, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne told EWTN last week that amid dispute over the Church’s “direction”, the bishops are called to preserve the faith.

“The current situation in Germany is indeed difficult. And there does seem to be a dispute about the overall direction [of the Church], which was certainly also triggered by the abuse scandal. There are now those voices who argue it is time to cast aside everything we have hitherto held onto. To abandon old times. I think that is a very dangerous concept,” Woelki told EWTN.TV’s program director, Martin Rothweiler, Feb. 13.

“We are part of a great Tradition. The Church also stands for truths that transcend time. And it is not our task to now go and invent a new Church by ourselves. The Church is not just leverage that we have been handed to exercise [as we see fit]. Rather, it is our task as bishops to preserve the faith of the Church, as it has come down to us from the apostles, and to say and proclaim it afresh in our times, and also to preserve it for generations to come, and to express it for them in such a way that they too can encounter Christ as their salvation.”

Woelki commented that “one of the fundamental challenges” facing the Church in Germany “is to keep alive the question of God in our society as a whole. More and more people are convinced that they can live their lives rather well without God. Right there is where the Church has a very important task to play in making clear that God does exist, and that God is in fact the very origin of everything. The question of God to me therefore is one of the fundamental challenges we need to tackle.”

Woelki, 62, has been Archbishop of Cologne since 2014. He was ordained a priest of the archdiocese in 1984, and became its auxiliary bishop in 2003. He was Archbishop of Berlin from 2011 until his return to Cologne, during which time he was made a cardinal.

He was among the seven German bishops who wrote last year to the Vatican asking for clarification on the question of Protestant spouses of Catholics receiving Holy Communion, which possibility had been  promoted by the German bishops’ conference.

Woelki told EWTN.TV that Catholics in Germany are deeply concerned by the abuse crisis: “There has been a massive loss of trust both within and outside of the Church. The challenge now is how this trust can be restored.”

Regarding Church reform, Woelki noted that “it must simply be said that the Church has never been renewed by being less, but by being more” than the culture around her. “We must once again realize that as Christians, we must foster something of an alternative culture, which has to align itself solely with the standards of the Gospel and the will of Jesus Christ. And that is not less, but always more.”

This Christian culture, he said, “is not achieved by abolishing celibacy. It is not achieved by now demanding that women be admitted to the ministries. And it is also not achieved by saying that we must have a new sexual morality. No, the Gospel is and continues to be the touchstone. It is the faith of the Church that continues to be the touchstone, just as it was presented to us by John Paul II in his Catechism.”

“The challenge is precisely to witness and proclaim this timeless faith now in such a way that it becomes understandable and comprehensible to the people of today. This is a challenge that we must face up to, rather than retreating from.”

The ground for hope for the Church in Germany “is that Christ exists and remains and continues to be the Lord of the Church and that His Holy Spirit is promised and granted to us,” Woelki reflected.

“I am convinced that He will also lead us through these times. Of course, we must open ourselves to Him so that God’s Spirit can also work within us and guide us. And we mustn’t start playing Holy Spirit ourselves now.”

He said that “as bishops, we are subject to the Word of God and, like all the people and bishops before us, we must give witness to and proclaim this Word of God. In other words, Christ exists, Christ remains, and He is present. He is Lord of the Church. Just as He has led His Church through difficult times in the past, so He will lead us through these present times.”

Woelki’s faith is also “bouyed”, he said, “when I encounter young people who have let themselves be ignited by the faith of the Church. And it is the young people who seek precisely this ‘more’ of the Christian faith, who have a home in the Church, who have a home in the Eucharist, who live though he Eucharist and through adoration, and who live in the knowledge that their lives are touched by Christ.”

“That is something that encourages me, because these young people – as I experience them – live authentically and with conviction. And they simply give me hope in their witness.”

[…]

No Picture
News Briefs

Supreme Court overturns death penalty for man with intellectual disability

February 19, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Washington D.C., Feb 19, 2019 / 03:29 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In a ruling released Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the death penalty sentence of a Texas inmate whom the court found to be intellectually disabled.

The Catholic Mobilizing Network applauded the court’s decision, saying it “parallels a growing consensus among the American public that the death penalty is falling out of favor.”

“It is encouraging to see that even in Texas, one of the last strongholds for capital punishment in the U.S., executions like this will no longer be tolerated,” CMN’s Executive Director, Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy said in a Feb. 19 statement.

“Though Texas accounts for 13 of last year’s 25 executions, in the years since Bobby James Moore was sentenced to death, we have seen a growing number of TX District Attorneys pledging to seek the death penalty less frequently.”

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court found that “on the basis of the trial court record, Moore has shown he is a person with intellectual disability.”

Bobby James Moore had been convicted in 1980 – and again in 2001 on a retrial – of robbing a convenience store and killing an employee. He was given a death sentence.

A state habeas court, however, said that Moore met the clinical criteria for being intellectually disabled – which would exempt someone from execution under the Eighth Amendment, as the Supreme Court had ruled in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002.

With Moore, the habeas court used the standard “three-prong” test to determine intellectual disability, which is part of the clinical consensus on the matter, the Supreme Court found.

This test looked for “intellectual functioning deficits,” or an IQ score of around 70 adjusted for error; “adaptive functioning deficits”; and whether these deficits began to show when the person was still a minor.

A Texas criminal appeals court, however, disregarded five of Moore’s seven IQ scores that factored into the habeas court’s ruling, keeping only scores of 74 and 78 that Moore received in 1989 and 1973, respectively, and “discounted the lower end of the standard-error range associated with those scores,” as the Supreme Court’s opinion noted.

The appeals court ruled that according to an earlier medical standard of intellectual disability – which was in place before Moore was convicted in his 2001 re-trial – as well as according to the state’s “Briseno factors” test, Moore was eligible for the death penalty.

The Briseno factors test is a standard used by Texas in addition to the three-pronged standard for disability. The test includes questions like whether someone is able to lie, and if their neighbors thought they were disabled as a child. Critics have insisted that these factors are non-clinical.

Critics also note that the Briseno factors are not used to determine one’s eligibility for other state programs like social services. They have been used to deem others in Texas fit for the death penalty, including in 2012 a man who scored a 61 on an IQ test.

Moore’s case was eventually appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-3 decision in 2017, the Court overturned the criminal appeals court’s decision, saying the Briseno factors were outside of the clinical consensus means of evaluating one’s mental capacity and adding that the appeals court strayed from Supreme Court precedent in its decision.

The Supreme Court told the lower court to reassess Moore’s eligibility for the death penalty using the updated standards. The appeals court reconsidered the case but again concluded the Moore was eligible for the death penalty.

However, the Supreme Court said Tuesday that the appeals court demonstrated “too many instances in which, with small variations, it repeats the analysis we previously found wanting, and these same parts are critical to its ultimate conclusion.”

“We conclude that the appeals court’s opinion, when taken as a whole and when read in the light both of our prior opinion and the trial court record, rests upon analysis too much of which too closely resembles what we previously found improper,” the Supreme Court found. “And extricating that analysis from the opinion leaves too little that might warrant reaching a different conclusion than did the trial court.”

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the majority ruling, saying that the Supreme Court had not been clear in stating how lower courts should apply standards for evaluating intellectual disability. They said the role of the Supreme Court was to consider the standards used by lower courts, not to review factual findings of a particular case.

In their response to the ruling, the Catholic Mobilizing Network said they “continue to pray for Bobby James Moore’s victim, James McCarble, and his family,” and encouraged Catholics to defend all human life.

“As a Church, we are called to the work of building a culture of life that upholds human dignity,” Murphy said. “Catholics should pay attention to death penalty cases before the Supreme Court such as this one, because they serve as important measures of how the highest court in the land is working to defend or disregard human life.”

 

[…]

No Picture
News Briefs

Analysis: What can the Vatican sex abuse summit deliver?

February 18, 2019 CNA Daily News 2

Vatican City, Feb 18, 2019 / 03:45 pm (CNA).- At a press conference in Rome this morning, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago underscored the scope and expectations around this week’s global Vatican summit on sexual abuse.

 

The cardinal made it clear that the three-day meeting was strictly dealing with the abuse of minors, and would not look at wider issues of clerical sexual abuse – most notably the sexual abuse of adults, including seminarians.

 

Cupich warned that “including other topics” would “inflate expectations” and distract from “the task at hand.”

 

The cardinal’s comments came barely 48 hours after it was announced that Theodore McCarrick had been expelled from the clerical state for a number of sexual abuse-related offences, including adult seminarians in dioceses he formerly led.

 

The hour-long question and answer session offered more details about the aims of the summit, which will include the heads of bishops’ conferences from around the world. But the scrupulously narrow focus on minors, and the stated objectives of the conference raise a number of questions about what American Catholics, including many bishops, can hope to see from Rome in response to months of scandal.

 

The clear goal of the meeting is to impress upon the world’s bishops the seriousness of dealing with child sexual abuse at all levels of the Church hierarchy. To this end, Cupich highlighted measures already in place in the United States which, he noted, were proving successful, such as safe environment programs and enhanced screening of seminary candidates.

 

More broadly, bishops in the United States have noted the effectiveness of the 2002 reforms brought in by the Dallas Charter and USCCB Essential Norms, which have coincided with a steep decline in reported abuse cases.

 

But if the wider purpose of the three-day meeting is to impress the seriousness of the child abuse crisis on bishops from elsewhere, and even underscore effective measures already in place in the U.S., American focus remains on accountability for bishops and abuse cases of all kinds involving them personally.

 

—

 

Discussing the future of episcopal accountability, Cupich made a surprising reference to Come una madre amorivole, the 2016 motu proprio issued by Pope Francis setting out legal mechanisms for reporting and handling complaints against bishops, including for negligence or abuse of office in abuse cases.

 

“It is the document Come una madre amorivole that outlines procedures for holding bishops accountable,” Cupich said. The reference to Come una madre was surprising to many, since Pope Francis had previously said in public that he had abandoned these very processes.

 

During the inflight press conference on his return from Dublin in October last year, Pope Francis said he had effectively junked the procedures of Come una madre because they “weren’t practical and it also wasn’t convenient for the different cultures of the bishops that had to be judged.”

 

Francis even went as far as expressing frustration that prominent reform advocate Marie Collins, herself a survivor of sexual abuse and a former member of Francis’ own Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, was “a bit fixated” with the document not being used.

 

For Cupich to suggest that Come una madre was once again a living document suggests a possible second papal reversal by Francis on his own reforms, even though his original reservations seemed to center on the very global applicability this week’s summit is meant to address.

 

—

 

In November, an instruction from the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops prevented U.S. bishops from voting on a raft of proposed measures aimed at increasing episcopal accountability – reforms which would have addressed many of the gaps left by the non-adoption of Come una madre in the first place.

 

The move left many frustrated but, on Monday, Cupich called the Baltimore measures “problematic” and said he did not believe they would have been adopted even if a vote had taken place.

 

Cupich floated an alternative proposal of his own during the Baltimore meeting. Reportedly drafted in concert with Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Cupich’s plan would rely upon existing structures within metropolitan provinces, instead of the creation of an independent national body to oversee complaints against bishops.

 

Both the original proposals and the so-called “metropolitan model” were turned over to a special USCCB committee for further study, and are expected to be discussed again in more detail when the bishops next meet, in June of this year.  

 

Despite the Baltimore setback, Cupich said, bishops’ conferences would have an important role to play in the future.

 

“The Holy Father does want episcopal conferences to take responsibility, that was never a question, but we have to do it in such a way that we work together with each other — that is part of synodality — that is part of the collegiality that this conference wanted to highlight,” Cupich said Monday.

 

What role this will be remains to be seen and, at least so far as it extends to episcopal abuse of adults like McCarrick’s, it seems unlikely it will become much clearer during this week’s summit.

 

—

 

One thing the Chicago cardinal did say was that bishops have a personal responsibility to face up to.

 

“The Holy Father wants to make it clear to the bishops around the world, that each one of them has to claim responsibility and ownership for this problem… to make sure that people understand, on an individual basis as bishops, what their responsibilities are.”

 

Many commentators have noted in recent months that personal initiative and ownership have been distinctly lacking in some American bishops’ response to recent scandals, with many appearing to be waiting for a lead to follow, either from the USCCB or Rome.

 

A few have begun to take their own steps, especially after the inability to move forward as a group in Baltimore. Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore recently announced an independent reporting mechanism for accusations of sexual abuse in the archdiocese.

 

Other options have been discussed. It has also been proposed that the canonical role of the Promoter of Justice could be given a broader remit in diocesan child protection policy, acting as a sort of attorney general by appointment of the local bishop, but with an enhanced degree of autonomy of action.

 

Other suggestions that bishops could implement without having to seek higher approval have included the passage of more nuanced and detailed laws for handling escalating clerical misconduct, in the hopes of addressing problem behavior early – before an act of child abuse is committed.

 

Such action would also allow bishops to address the sexual abuse of victims who are not technically minors, including people in their late teenage years and seminarians. Many have noted that the current legal framework, solely reliant on an age of consent, sees a case of child sexual abuse become an instance of mere moral failure when the victim turns eighteen.

 

—

 

Cupich also told the world’s media that “there is a new day in terms of transparency,” and said that he hoped the upcoming summit would be remembered as a “turning point” in this regard.

 

It remains to be seen if this newfound commitment to transparency will extend to responding to calls for some kind of full disclosure about how Theodore McCarrick was able to rise through the episcopal ranks, despite apparent decades of complaints about his sexual abuse.

 

In Baltimore in November, Cupich spoke against a resolution by American bishops to encourage the Holy See to make available any documentation it could on that subject as soon as possible.

 

While talk at the press conference was of new days and strong messages, there is no shortage of Catholics in the United States and elsewhere already looking at this week’s meeting with a level of skepticism.

 

Indeed, the real challenge facing Cardinal Cupich and the other organizers may prove to be less about lowering “inflated expectations,” and more about convincing Catholics wearied by scandal that any progress made in the coming days will be meaningful.

[…]