Church must listen to dissenters

I am appalled to read the recent report that Pope Benedict has cracked down on dissent and good priests such as Tony Flannery and Gerard Moloney.

Their ministry in honest communication appears to threaten the absolute monarchy at the Vatican. Tragically, they are among the latest theologians consigned to the gulag over the past 30 years by Cardinal Ratzinger.

I am deeply troubled as a Catholic to note that the bloody cancer of the Roman Inquisition has not gone away. Our recent hopes for a Catholic Spring seem to have been scourged, crucified and buried.

I attended the meeting in 2011 between 30 Dublin parish council representatives with Cardinal Sean O’Malley. All those people cherished the fundamental good news of Jesus Christ. However, the vast majority expressed serious dissent and questions to the Apostolic Visitor in regard to the ongoing abuse of power, women and priests in the Roman Catholic Church. Their open dissent on the issues of mandatory celibacy and the ordination of women showed that they were not going to follow absolute obedience to any monarch and that they had no intention to continue collusion in any form of abuse.

The recent summary report from the Vatican and Pope Benedict’s Holy Thursday sermon shows that the above input from lay Catholics got through to Rome. They are well aware that a large percentage of baptised Catholics do not accept the teaching of a small group of Roman clerics in regard to contraception, ordination of women, mandatory celibacy and refusal to share power with national hierarchies. In light of this widespread dissent by free lay people on human arrangements subject to change and development, it is wrong for the Roman Control Group to lock up seminarians away from those lay people or to bully good priests into silence.

It is way past time for the Roman magisterium to respect the People of God and to listen humbly to the common sense of Catholics.

I propose that we send letters of support to the good priests and silenced theologians, and that we send letters to the Papal Nuncio expressing our rejection of the Inquisition and our suggestions for radical reform.

Joe Mulvaney

Sycamore Drive

Dundrum

Dublin