MADISON, Wisconsin — Students returned to the classrooms of St. Ambrose Academy this week under a Wisconsin Supreme Court temporary injunction that prevents the Dane County health agency from enforcing a COVID-19 school-closure order, just […]
CNA Staff, Sep 17, 2020 / 05:15 pm (CNA).- The Diocese of Amarillo has spoken out about election-related comments from Fr. Frank Pavone, the national director of the pro-life group Priests for Life, and asked prayers for the priest.
In a Sept. 16 stat… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 17, 2020 / 05:00 pm (CNA).-
In an interview Wednesday, the chairman of the Federal Election Commission accused Catholic bishops of “hiding” behind the Church’s tax exempt status instead of backing political candidates, and insisted that priests and lay Catholics have a “right” to conduct political activity on parish premises.
The Catholic Church has had long-standing policies against endorsing particular candidates for political office. Experts in civil and canon law explained to CNA why Catholic clerics do not endorse political candidates, and why that issue touches on the religious liberty of the Church.
James E. Trainor, a Catholic, was appointed to the bipartisan commission by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate earlier this year. He spoke Wednesday in an interview with the website Church Militant.
In his interview, Trainor questioned the legal and moral authority of bishops to limit the endorsement of candidates from the pulpit and in the pews.
“I don’t think a bishop has the right to tell a priest that he can’t come out and speak… When the priest takes the vow [sic] of obedience to the bishop, it is in the area of faith and morals, but they have a higher duty to our Lord, and if the bishop is putting something out there that is not right then the priest has an obligation to the faithful to correct it,” he said.
Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, OP, is a civil and canon lawyer who was nominated by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate to the Board of Directors of the Congressionally-funded Legal Services Corporation, which provides funding for legal aid programs.
The priest, who serves as a professor of canon law at St. Patrick’s University and Seminary in California, told CNA it is not the function of clergy to instruct the laity on who they should choose in the voting booth.
“The primary end of the Church is not the ordering of civil society,” he told CNA. “The primary end of the Church is the sanctification of humanity,” he said. “While the Church is concerned that secular society be just and moral, the prudential decisions on carrying that out is properly the role of lay people in the world.”
“While it is true, as the Second Vatican Council said in Gaudium et Spes, ‘the Church and the political community in their own fields are autonomous and independent from each other,’ that autonomy of the secular world does not mean an autonomy from natural and divine law. The Church must grant to the secular government its legitimate autonomy, and the legitimate freedom of Catholics within a particular country to participate in that governance.”
“Nonetheless,” he said, “the Church has a right and duty to elucidate the moral precepts that guide a society in properly fostering the common good.”
Trainor also said bishops are too cautious about their ability to engage directly in partisan politics under civil law.
“The bishops are using their nonprofit status as a shield to hide behind,” he said, “from having to make a decision about who to support [in the elections].”
He charged that bishops choose to be silent on political matters out of concern they might lose grants received by Catholic institutions for refugee resettlement and other federal programs.
Eric Kniffin, an attorney specializing in First Amendment and religious freedom cases, told CNA that, in practice, bishops have little reason to be concerned about government ramifications from political speech.
“The Internal Revenue Code, on its face, bars tax-exempt organizations—including churches and other religious organizations—from saying anything ‘on behalf of’ or ‘in opposition to’ a political candidate,” Kniffen said. “This restriction, often referred to as the ‘Johnson Amendment,’ is still on the books, even though President Trump has directed the IRS to be lenient in its enforcement of the law.
“At a practical level, the federal government has not had much appetite to enforce this rule,” Kniffin, who has worked for the Department of Justice and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told CNA.
During the interview, Trainor also said that in his view, civil law prevents bishops from prohibiting their priests from endorsing candidates.
“If you look at it just from a legal perspective, the priest to bishop is still an employer-employee relationship and that’s the employer telling the employee what they can and cannot do.”
“We don’t tolerate that anywhere else, in fact there has been this huge uproar over NFL owners not allowing players on the field to be able to protest.”
But Kniffin told CNA that the comparison to NFL franchises was inapt, and that the legal ability of churches to regulate the actions of clergy is well established.
“The Supreme Court recently affirmed that the First Amendment’s church autonomy doctrine guarantees churches ‘independence in matters of faith and doctrine and in closely linked matters of internal government,’” he told CNA. “This doctrine prevents government from interfering with the relationship between churches and their members and between churches and their ‘ministerial’ employees.”
Fr. Pietrzyk explained that in the mind and law of the Church, the relationship between a bishop and priest is much more than employer-employee.
“It is completely inappropriate, and a violation of the Church’s legitimate autonomy, an autonomy recognized in the First Amendment to the Constitution, for a federal official to opine, under the cloak of that office, on the duty of obedience owed by a priest to his bishop,” he said.
“There is a tendency among U.S. government officials – whether federal bureaucracies or local judges – to try to fit the Church into a secular category,” he told CNA.
“Certainly there are aspects of the bishop-priest relationship that look like employment. The diocese usually pays the priest’s salary, provides him health insurance, etc. But it is an ongoing mistake on the part of secular authority, and indeed a violation of the freedom of religion, to force the employer-employee model as the primary or only way of understanding that relationship,” the priest added.
“The document Christus Dominus, a decree from the Second Vatican Council on the Pastoral Office of the Bishop, said that, ‘[Bishops] should regard the priests as sons and friends.’”
“At the same time,” Pietrzyk told CNA, “the bishop is the head of the diocese, as a father in a family. The ministry of the priest depends on his submission to the legitimate authority of his bishop. Thus, as Pope St. John Paul II wrote, ‘there can be no genuine priestly ministry except in communion with the one’s own Bishop, who deserves that filial respect and obedience.’”
“Every Catholic, and even more so a priest, has a duty to submit to the legitimate governance of their bishop,” he said.
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told CNA that in his view Trainer’s comments reflected a serious misunderstanding of the relationship between priests and bishops in the Church.
“Mr. Trainor seems woefully ill-informed about the relationship between the bishop and priests of a diocese,” Weigel said.
“He also seems to think of his fellow-Catholics as dolts who require specific instructions on voting from their religious leaders.”
Weigel reflected on a longstanding American anti-Catholic stereotype that bishops and priests direct Catholics about how to cast their votes.
Trainor’s view “mirrors the false charge laid against Catholic immigrants for decades by anti-Catholic bigots, which suggests that Mr. Trainor is also not very well versed in U.S. Catholic history,” Weigel said.
Fr. Pietrzyk told CNA that as chairman of the FEC, Trainer “is certainly free to opine on the freedom, in American law, he is not competent, however, to evaluate the provisions of ecclesiastical law.”
“The ministry of a priest in a sacred place, like a church, may be legitimately directed by a bishop,” Pietrzyk said.
“In addition, preaching within a sacred place, even a parish church, may be regulated by the diocesan bishop. Absent that guidance, a pastor does exercise that authority within his own parish. However, simply because he is the pastor does not give him the right to act contrary to the directives of his own pastor, the bishop.”
“As Pope St. John Paul II emphasized, the ministry of the pastor is not genuine when it runs contrary to the legitimate direction of his local bishop.”
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 17, 2020 / 04:01 pm (CNA).- A man has been charged after he decapitated a statue of Christ in El Paso, while the NYPD is looking for a man who threw a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe into the sidewalk outside a church in … […]
CNA Staff, Sep 17, 2020 / 03:25 pm (CNA).- The archbishop of San Francisco penned an op-ed in the Washington Post this week citing the First Amendment as he called for city officials to relax the current restrictions on public worship, which are some o… […]
Denver Newsroom, Sep 17, 2020 / 03:00 pm (CNA).- L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, reported yesterday that Pope Francis “at the end of an audience” greeted a group of some 40 people, some of whom identify as LGBT, along with their parents.
The pope told the parents that “God loves your children as they are” and “the Church loves your children as they are because they are children of God.”
Although none of the reported words from Pope Francis are new, or doctrinally problematic, they have not been confirmed by the Holy See.
But the episode drew media attention.
The Spanish blog “Religion Digital,” directed by laicized Catholic priest José Manuel Vidal offered its own version of the episode, quoting anonymously one of those who met the pope: “In the painful journey that each one of us have made as LGBT believers, I confess that I would not have imagined that we would have reached this stage; to meet in audience with the Holy Father.”
“These are the words of one of the representatives of the Italian association Tenda di Gionata (Jonathan’s Tent), of LGBT parents and children. About 40 of its members were received at the Vatican yesterday,” Religión Digital wrote, suggesting that the group had a formal, private meeting with the pope.
The Spanish blog report of the events was tweeted by Fr. James Martin, generation more media buzz.
In fact, the group Tenda di Gionata was not received in a private audience, but met briefly by the pope during the massive greetings that follow his Wednesday general audiences.
During the minute-long encounter, Mara Grassi, vice president of the association, presented Pope Francis with a Spanish translation of the booklet “Genitori Fortunati” (“Fortunate Parents”), a collection of mostly negative experiences that parents of those identifying as LGBT have had with the Catholic church. The groups also presented the pope a rainbow-colored T-shirt with the words “In love there is no fear,” a quote from 1 John 4:18.
Most of the initial coverage about the reported words of Pope Francis to Tenda di Gionata came either from L’Avvenire or the Italian socialist newspaper La Reppublica, both of which interviewed Grassi, a mother of four children, one of whom, who is 40, identifies as gay.
La Repubblica’s report included remarks from Grassi that suggest the Church’s doctrine is arbitrary or unfair.
“After I came to know that my son was homosexual, I suffered a lot because the rules of the church made me think that he was excluded from the love of God,” she said.
The L’Avvenire version of the meeting was described by journalist Luciano Moia as a historic event.
Moia offered this description of the encounter: “In the Church of Pope Francis, who wants to tear down walls and build bridges of acceptance and understanding especially with the most fragile and marginalized people, this morning’s meeting appeared to many parents as an extraordinary turning point, confirming that what is written in some recent ecclesial documents, from Amoris Laetitia to the Final Report of the Synod of Youth, can truly be translated into pastoral practice.”
Moia, the author of the book “Chiesa e Omosessualitá, Un’inchiesta alla luce del magistero di papa Francesco,” (Church and Homosexuality, an investigation under the light of Pope Francis’ Magisterium”), is longtime editor of a monthly insert in the official Catholic newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference. He has been a proponent for the Catholic Church to change its doctrine on homosexuality as expressed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, especially the concepts that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” and that they are “contrary to the natural law, and therefore, that “under no circumstances can they be approved.”
The pope’s reported remarks on Wednesday were an expression of the Church’s most basic truth: That God loves all people, and that his love is not conditional. Neither those remarks, nor his brief conversation with Tenda di Gionata, suggest an endorsement of the group’s positions, a change in Catholic doctrine, or a “turning point” of some kind in the pope’s pastoral ministry. Reports to the contrary may indicate more about the agenda of reporters than about the Gospel proclaimed by Pope Francis.
CNA Staff, Sep 17, 2020 / 12:10 pm (CNA).- Fr. Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist priest from Ireland who was barred from public ministry by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has declined to submit to four doctrinal propositions as a condition of returning to ministry.
“Fr Flannery should not return to public ministry prior to submitting a signed statement regarding his positions on homosexuality, civil unions between persons of the same sex, and the admission of women to the priesthood,” the CDF wrote to the Redemptorists, The Irish Times reported Sept. 16.
Fr. Flannery told the Irish daily, “I could not possibly sign those propositions.”
He was barred from public ministery in 2012 for his views on the nature of the sacramental priesthood and human sexuality. He had helped to found the Association of Catholic Priests, a group whose constitution places a special emphasis on “the primacy of the individual conscience” and “a redesigning of Ministry in the Church, in order to incorporate the gifts, wisdom and expertise of the entire faith community, male and female.”
Redemptorist leadership in Ireland had written to the order’s superior general, who in turn wrote to the CDF, seeking for Fr. Flannery to be allowed to minister again.
According to the Association of Catholic Priests, the CDF asked that Fr. Flannery, to return to ministry, sign a proposition that “according to the Tradition and the doctrine of the Church incorporated in the Canon Law (c. 1024), a baptized male alone receives sacred ordination validly.”
This proposition regarding the reservation of priesthood to men was supported by excerpts from St. John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and Pope Francis’ 2020 apostolic exhortation La querida Amazonia.
Regarding the moral liceity of homosexual acts, Fr. Flannery was to submit to the proposition that “Since the homosexual practices are contrary to the natural law and do not proceedfrom a genuine affective and sexual complementarity, they are not approved by the moral teaching of the Catholic Church,” supported by a quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The priest was also asked to assent to the proposition that “The Marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator (CCC 1660). Other forms of union do not correspond to God’s plan for marriage andfamily. Therefore, they are not allowed by the Catholic Church.”
This proposition on marriage was supported by the Catechism of the Catholic Church and by Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation on love in the family.
Finally, Fr. Flannery was invited to submit to the proposition that “In so far as it contradicts the foundations of a genuine Christian anthropology, gender theory is not accepted by Catholic teaching,” supported by the Congregation for Catholic Education’s 2019 document “Male and female he created them”.
The priest told The Irish Times that he has long supported and emphasized “the necessity, of full equality for women, including ordination. How could I possibly sign that first proposition.”
He called the proposition regarding homosexual acts “appalling” and said, “I could not submit to it.” He noted that he voted in favor of same-sex marriage, and that “I don’t know enough about Gender Theory to have any strong views on it, and I don’t know where that one came from.”
We Are Church Ireland, a group that supports, among other things, women’s priestly ordination, said Sept. 17 that they “fully support and applaud Fr Tony Flannery’s decision not to sign the CDF document.”
They said the propositions of the congregation “are currently being widely discussed in the Catholic Church around the world, for example at the German Synodal Way.”
“We thought that under Pope Francis dialogue was being encouraged and that “silencing” would no longer be the tool of engagement,” the group stated.
In June 2018, Pope Francis sent a 28-page letter to German Catholics urging them to focus on evangelization in the face of a “growing erosion and deterioration of faith.”
“Every time an ecclesial community has tried to get out of its problems alone, relying solely on its own strengths, methods and intelligence, it has ended up multiplying and nurturing the evils it wanted to overcome,” he wrote.
Pope Francis said that participants in the “Synodal Way” faced a particular “temptation”, at the basis of which “is the belief that the best response to the many problems and shortcomings that exist, is to reorganize things, change them and ‘put them back together’ to bring order and make ecclesial life easier by adapting it to the current logic or that of a particular group.”
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Vatican City, Sep 17, 2020 / 09:32 am (CNA).- Pope Francis’ newest prayer card, which he hands out to the people he meets, features a grandmother and grandchild from his trip to Romania in early summer 2019.
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