|
An article by
Angela Hanley on the new liturgical texts
Abuse of Language, Abuse of
Power
http://www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie/2011/04/article-by-angela-hanley-on-the-new-liturgical-texts/
***
A
Hidden Sorrow:
Praying through reproductive loss
By Christopher
Pramuk
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=12804
***
Bill urges us
to respond to this request.
People of Faith Against the
Death Penalty and
Amnesty International USA are partnering in circulating a letter for
religious leaders to endorse on behalf of Troy Anthony Davis. Mr. Davis is a man
on Georgia’s death row and at risk of imminent execution. Significant doubts
about his guilt have been raised and remain unresolved.
Mr. Davis has been scheduled
to be executed three times and each time his execution has been stayed amid
doubts concerning the impact of numerous witness recantations and new evidence
against another suspect. He is now at risk to have a fourth execution date
scheduled. In March 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court again declined to hear his
appeal about an August 2010 decision in which a federal district court ruled
that Mr. Davis had not clearly established his innocence.
Please consider endorsing the letter urging the Georgia
State Board of Pardons and Paroles to prevent the execution of Troy Davis. You
can access it here,
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1576/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5928
Please share this letter
with other clergy and religious leaders you know.
Please complete your
endorsement right now. Time is of the essence.
For facts about this case,
and more actions to take, visit www.justicefortroy.org
***
The
following article, by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, describes former
Czechoslovakia’s experience with both a married and female clergy following the
1948 communist takeover of that country.
Czechoslovakia’s
secret Church
Throughout the 41 years of
Communist rule in the former Eastern bloc country, an underground network of
groups and individuals kept the Catholic faith alive, even to the point of
ordaining married men and women. Last week, their achievement was belatedly
honoured.
It was at a moving ceremony
at Vienna’s UN-City Church on Saturday last week, 21 years after the fall of the
Iron Curtain, that the largest and best-known underground circle in the former
Czechoslovakia – called “Koinótés” and founded by the late Bishop Felix Maria
Davidek – received the Herbert-Haag-Foundation Award for Freedom in the Church,
which is bestowed annually on persons and institutions “for courageous actions
within Christianity”.
Although a disputed and controversial figure, Felix Maria Davidek’s charisma and
his extraordinary gifts have since been recognised by many Catholic churchmen,
including bishops and cardinals. Davidek recognised the signs of the times and
his response was prophetic.
Desperate situations, in this case severe persecution by one of the most
relentless atheist regimes, merit desperate remedies and Davidek ordained
married men and women to the Catholic priesthood. The survival strategies he
undertook illuminate the Church’s potential for reform, which never ends with
the death of the reformers.
Already before the Communist takeover in 1948, Davidek was fascinated by
Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of an evolutionary progression towards greater and
greater consciousness. He was convinced that, as well as studying philosophy and
theology, seminarians should have a broad university education and also study
the humanities and sciences.
While he was a seminarian in Czechoslovakia under German occupation during the
Second World War, he dreamed of founding a Catholic university. After
ordination in 1945, Davidek continued with his university studies. He read
medicine and eventually acquired a doctorate in psychology. At the same time, he
founded the “Atheneum”, a preparatory course for young Catholics, men and women,
who had not been allowed to attend secondary schools during the German
occupation, with the aim of preparing them for matriculation and thus enabling
them to study theology.
In 1948, however, the Communists took power. Davidek continued with his Atheneum
courses in secret but soon came under police scrutiny and was imprisoned. Fellow
prisoners say he was a particularly audacious and truculent prisoner who
frequently rebelled and consequently spent long periods in isolation. During his
14 years’ incarceration he jotted down on bits of lavatory paper his meticulous
plans for the Church’s survival in an atheistic, Communist dictatorship.
The 1950s were the worst period of church persecution in Czechoslovakia. The
theological faculties at universities were closed. Only two Catholic seminaries
were allowed to remain open and both were put under state control. The bishops
had forbidden seminarians to attend these state-controlled seminaries and soon
many of them were imprisoned. One see after another became vacant and the secret
police watched all church activities closely.
When he was released in 1964, Davidek immediately began to put his plans into
action. He was soon able to gather many committed Catholics around him. They
called their group “Koinótés” (derived from koinonia, the Greek word meaning
community) and met regularly in secret at night and at the weekends as it was
compulsory to have a job in the daytime.
Davidek taught a wide range of subjects and secretly invited prominent churchmen
as guest speakers. Thanks to friends who had smuggled them in from abroad, he
was also able to study the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council and the
works of Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac and other well-known
theologians of the time with his pupils.
The biggest challenge was to secure a sufficient number of dependable priests
who could be relied on not to collaborate with the regime. Up to 1967,
candidates were sent abroad to be ordained clandestinely in Germany or Poland.
Both Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Cracow, later to become Pope John Paul II, and
Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne, then Bishop of Berlin, clandestinely
ordained Czechoslovak priests at that time.
Davidek knew he would never get permission to leave the country, so he sent Jan
Blaha, a young chemist who attended conferences abroad and was a member of
Koinótés, to Augsburg where he was clandestinely ordained by Bishop Josef
Stimpfle. A few months later, in Prague in October 1967, Blaha was consecrated
bishop by Bishop Peter Dubovsky, a Slovak Jesuit, who had himself been
clandestinely ordained. Bishop Blaha then consecrated Felix Davidek. All these
ordinations and consecrations have since been fully recognised and declared
valid by the Vatican.
From then on, Koinótés
became the nucleus of a clandestine network of committed Catholic groups in
Czechoslovakia. Davidek was convinced that the Church could only survive and
fulfil its mandate in small entities and that, as in the early Church, each
group should have its own bishop, so he soon ordained a considerable number of
them. After Soviet tanks destroyed the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968,
Davidek lived with the fear that the Communists might at any time attempt to
liquidate the Church altogether by deporting all clerics to Siberia, and so he
consecrated stand-by bishops, in reserve as it were, to take over should such a
situation arise.
He also ordained married men, at first for the Greek-Catholic rite, where it is
the custom. The Greek-Catholic Church had been dissolved by the Communists and
forcibly incorporated into the Orthodox Church and both its bishops imprisoned.
Many of its members became martyrs but some escaped and went underground.
Koinótés worked closely with these.
Later, Davidek also ordained Latin-rite married men as bi-ritual priests who
were permitted to celebrate in both rites. He even consecrated one married
bishop. One of the chief reasons for these initiatives was that the authorities
were highly unlikely to suspect married men of being priests in Latin-rite
Catholic Moravia.
Davidek also went so far as to ordain a small number of women. For some time
now, he had been discussing women’s role in the Church at the Koinótés meetings.
He was convinced that as women had baptised, distributed Communion to the sick
and had their place as women deacons in the Church’s hierarchy in the first
millennium, they were only excluded from the priesthood for historical and not
dogmatic reasons. His main reason for ordaining women was pastoral. Women in
women’s prisons, especially women Religious who were imprisoned on a large scale
and often exposed to horrible sexual torture, had no one to care for their
spiritual needs, whereas in men’s prisons there were usually several priests
among the male prisoners.
In December 1970, he called a special “pastoral synod” to discuss women’s role
in the Church, but when he put women’s ordination to the vote, half of the
Koinótés members who attended voted against it. The issue split the community
and became a benchmark in its history. A few days later, nevertheless, Davidek
ordained Ludmila Javorová, a prominent member of Koinotes, and later made her
his vicar general, which she remained until his death in 1988.
I remember discussing Bishop Davidek and his ordination of married men and women
with the late Archbishop John Bukovsky in Vienna in the late 1990s. Bukovsky,
who had by then retired, told me that the Vatican had sent him on a fact-finding
mission to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1977. He had been able to talk with
Bishop Davidek for several hours, he said, and knew that Davidek had ordained
both married men and women. “I was most surprised to be welcomed by his woman
vicar general dressed in white and wearing a cross,” he added. The ordinations
were illicit but valid, he underlined at the time, and said that Rome had been
fully informed.
When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, many clandestinely ordained priests and
bishops, especially those from Koinótés, at first had high hopes that Rome would
allow them to form a special personal prelature so that they could continue with
their work. It took years to sort out their ordination status, as clandestine
ordinations were rarely set down in writing. Most of them had to agree to be
conditionally reordained in case their ordinations were not valid. A number of
married priests were then taken over by the re-established Greek-Catholic
Church.
In 1992, those who refused to be re-ordained were forbidden to practise their
priestly ministry under threat of excommunication. And all this time, of course,
Ludmila Javorová and her women colleagues were completely ignored. At the award
ceremony she said: “The work has been begun. Others must continue it. Even if
the Vatican considers the matter closed, it is my firm belief that at some point
in the future this dossier will be reopened.”
For years after 1989, whenever I met any of these
underground priests, which I did and continue to do on a regular basis, they
still hoped against hope that Rome would change its mind. They would beg me not
to publish interviews and refused to criticise the powers-that-be in Rome in
any way in case this would damage their cause. Gradually, as the older ones died
and their numbers diminished, they realised that they had been left to their
fate. And yet they have remained what they were from the beginning – committed,
humble and loyal Catholics.
At the prize-giving ceremony in Vienna, Bishop Davidek’s Koinótés was for the
first time publicly recognised for what it was – a valiant effort to assure the
Church’s survival under persecution. In their laudation, the Swiss theologian
Professor Hans Küng of Tübingen University, Professor Hans Jorissen, a former
professor of dogmatics at Bonn University and probably the leading connoisseur
on the clandestine Church outside the former Czechoslovakia, and Professor
Walter Kirchschläger of Lucerne University, all deplored the potential that had
been lost. As Professor Jorissen said, “The concept of a missionary re-evangelisation
in the Czech Republic, which today is one of Europe’s most secularised
countries, could have used the experiences of the clandestine Church, which was,
and could still be today, a model for re-evangelisation.”
This message is repeated in a new book on the clandestine Church in the then
Czechoslovakia, Die verratene Prophetie (“Betrayed Foresight”), edited by
Erwin Koller, Professor Küng and Peter Krizan, and published in German by
Edition Exodus of Lucerne.
Bishop Dusan Spiner, who was also Davidek’s vicar general, said at the award
ceremony: “The secular world is not a continent of barbarians and heathens to
whom we must take the gospel message. It is our world and our heritage and it is
in this world that we must courageously live as a church community.”
Bishop Spiner and Ludmila Javorová came to Vienna to receive the
Herbert-Haag-Foundation Award on behalf of Koinótés. They received standing
ovations, especially when they announced that they would use the money for the
birthday celebrations of Bishop Davidek, who would have been 90 this September.
***
On aging well with prayer
Of
Many Things
By Patricia A. Kossmann
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=12812
***
Wishing all a
Blessed Holy Week and a Happy Easter! |