Bishop Bill Morris casts a long shadow down under. Toowoomba Catholics, ticked off their bishop was ousted, have sent their missives to 1,369 Australian parishes.
(S)ome bishops, including Canberra Archbishop Mark Coleridge, have told parish priests not to distribute the letter or its request for signatures.
Of course he has. He doesn’t want the Temple Police after him. They’re as liable to turn in their grandmothers if they think it will get them in the territory of “more Catholic than the pope.”
Australia’s Catholic bishops have agreed to send parishioners’ questions to the Vatican over the early retirement of Toowoomba Bishop Bill Morris. But the 42 bishops are divided about a separate petition asking them to put particular questions to the Pope when they make their five-yearly visit to the Vatican in October(.)
They’re sending the women’s ordination question to the CDF. They’re sending the procedural questions about the removal of Bishop Morris to the Congregation of Bishops. I don’t know why.
These guys have answered these questions before. If they didn’t answer the right way about women’s ordination, they wouldn’t have gotten a whiff of a miter and crozier. And if they are inclined to question the CB directly, ditto.
What I would be interested to know (and the TP would too, I’m sure) is which bishops didn’t circular file this letter and have let their clergy and laity read it all.
22 August 2011 at 8:42 am
“These guys have answered these questions before. If they didn’t answer the right way about women’s ordination, they wouldn’t have gotten a whiff of a miter and crozier. And if they are inclined to question the CB directly, ditto.”
C’mon, Todd! Won’t you concede even the slight possibility that it isn’t careerism, but belief in the Church’s teachings on the impossibility of women’s ordination, that would prompt “these guys” to answer such a question in fidelity to the magisterium,?
22 August 2011 at 5:39 pm
The trouble is the 1996 teaching Ordinatio Sacerdotalis does not itself meet criteria required to be consistently taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium.
Documents from the Second Vatican Council (Lumen Gentium 25 d-e) make clear that five conditions must be fulfilled before the “universal ordinary magisterium” can be considered to have exercised infallible teaching:
1. The bishops of the world must be involved in a collegial exercise of teaching authority.
2. The bishops must be free to express their own considered opinion.
3. The bishops must listen to the Word of God and the sensus fidelium.
4. The teaching must concern matters relating to the object of faith.
5. The bishops must want to impose the doctrine as definitely to be held.
The bishops of the world were not consulted about this teaching and many had been on record for a number of years, both as bishops conferences and as individuals with statements that the church should open the discussion of women’s ordination. The 1996 teaching invoking infallibility is fraudulent, pure and simple.
http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/long-simmering-tension-over-creeping-infallibility#comment-214537
9 February 2012 at 9:29 pm
ordination…
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