Vatican Council III would be just ‘speculation fodder’ for media

IN calling for a Vatican Council III, my old sparring partner TP O’Mahony (‘Vatican must change’, January 2) shows that more than 40 years later he still hankers for the 1960s when the speculations of German theologians at Vatican II press briefings prompted Irish reporters to be commentators playing the speculation game.

The trouble (and the reason why we won’t have them even as local national ones) with council gatherings in our modern era, when they are expected by voracious (especially TV) media people to provide daily speculation fodder for them, is that that media speculation soon derails them. That happened to Vatican II. TP says says Pope John XXIII “defined its immediate task as renewing the life of the church and bringing up to date its teaching, discipline and organisation, with the unity of all Christians as the ultimate goal.”

That wasn’t the task as set out by Pope John in its opening address. It said: “Nor are we here primarily to discuss certain fundamentals of Catholic doctrine, or to restate in greater detail the traditional teaching of the fathers and of early and more recent theologians. We presume that these things are sufficiently well known and familiar to you all. There was no need to call a council merely to hold discussions of that nature ... We must work out ways and means of expounding these truths in a manner consistent with a predominantly pastoral view of the church’s teaching office.”

The speculation addiction of academic theologians diverted exchanges into cul-de-sacs in which our church continues to be stuck while pastoral problems bedevil us.

Mismanagement of those problems was the root cause of diocesan mismanagement of the tiny percentage of priests who said yes to temptations to be perverts. Instead of firing – that is, defrocking – them, their bishops covered up as they tried to rehabilitate them (as it was legal for them to do; mandatory reporting to gardaí isn’t a legal obligation, no more than is it for a teacher or doctor to whom allegations of criminal acts are conveyed). That costly experiment in compassion is now over. It’s high time we moved on in 2010.

We don’t need council talk shops to provide material for media speculation.

There is nothing wrong with our church that use of Christ’s two-handed preaching wouldn’t rectify, and could rectify even within TP’s lifetime. Indeed that use would secure turnaround within a month.

Joseph F Foyle

Sandford Road

Ranelagh

Dublin 6