We have the worst Pope in centuries and the Church in Germany decides this is the perfect time to do Reformation 2.0:
The 66-page report, which was adopted by a synodal working group on Dec. 3 , argues that the Church is in crisis and that various reforms are needed, including reforming power structures.
“Concrete changes are needed,” the report proposes, including the removal of “restrictions on access to the Church’s ministries.”
It also calls for a number of measures aimed at increasing accountability and thereby reducing risk of abuse, including “separation of powers” that would allow bishops to be overruled. It makes a case for greater synodality (essentially a more collegial Church), strong lay participation, and democratizing the Church, and argues for transparency in decision-making. In addition, it argues for more concerted attempts at achieving gender equality, ostensibly with the “common goal” of promoting evangelization.
Most notably, the document calls for mandatory priestly celibacy to be “reconsidered in view of pastoral challenges,” adding that such a proposed change “should lead to a vote in Germany, addressed to the Apostolic See” so that “different pastoral situations can be responded to in different ways locally.”
The report sees women’s ordination as a “question of power and separation of powers,” and claims that Pope St. John Paul II’s 1994 clear stipulation that women cannot be ordained is “often questioned.” It is necessary, the report continues, “to reconnect again” Scripture and Tradition “with the signs of the times.” The synodal path, it concludes, should also vote on the issue of women’s ordination to the Catholic priesthood.
One German priest, speaking to the Register on condition of anonymity, decried the document as a “master plan for protestantization of the Church,” and said the Church should “wake up” to what is “currently brewing in Germany, otherwise we will have a Reformation 2.0.”
Go here to read the rest. The lousier popes are at running the Church, the more free they are with statements on how to run the world.
Lay participation should mean that parishes (or clusters of parishes) have laymen acting variously as comptroller, treasurer, plant manager, and perhaps secretary. It should mean a women’s choir in the loft and a men’s schola in the sanctuary. It should mean (young, male) acolytes. It should mean the lector and the occasional lectrix. It should mean catechists preparing the young for 1st communion. It should mean fundraising committees. It should mean people organizing home-school co-operatives. It should mean that there is not one clergyman or religious employed in the diocesan chancery (and not many laymen, while we’re at it). It should mean the Knights of Columbus. It shouldn’t mean much else.
While we’re at it, the Conference of Catholic Bishops is a rabid skunk that should be put down by the local constable.
The pontiff’s objection is only to the timetable, not the substance.
The Germans are accelerating the process too much, in his view.
But they have the cash, so all he can do is make some ineffectual verbal jabs. And those impress only the dwindling number of normalcy-bias-addled papal cultists like Armstrong and a handful of other sites.
They certainly haven’t deterred the Huns in the slightest.
No, thanks. I’ve already been Episcopalian. Just didn’t work for me.