The following article appears in its entirety on the National Catholic Reporter Website - ncronline.org.

Complex questions of papal infallibility

WASHINGTON -- “No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident,” says Canon 749.3 of the church’s Code of Canon Law.

Jesuit Fr. Ladislas Orsy, professor of law at Georgetown University here, cited that canon almost immediately when NCR asked him if Pope John Paul II’s 1994 teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis “that the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful” is infallible.

Orsy, a leading canonist well-known for his theological expertise, acknowledged, however, that the question of which church doctrines are taught infallibly is “extremely complex.”

Another leading Jesuit theologian, Fr. Francis Sullivan, said he thinks recent events have made it clear that the church is now presenting as infallible the teaching against women priests.

NCR raised the question after Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba, Australia, stated in a national radio interview that a letter from Pope Benedict XVI ordering his early retirement said that the late Pope John Paul II “decided infallibly and irrevocably that the church has not the right to ordain women to the priesthood.”
Benedict ordered Morris, 67 and bishop of Toowoomba for the past 18 years, to take early retirement following an investigation into a pastoral letter he wrote in December 2006 in which he expressed openness to ordaining women and married men, if the Vatican would allow it, in order to counter the priest shortage.

Sullivan -- a leading ecclesiologist who taught theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome for many years and is now professor emeritus of theology at Boston College -- also stressed the complexities of determining what church teachings are infallible.

In a telephone interview he said he did not regard Ordinatio Sacerdotalis itself as presenting an infallible papal teaching -- but he noted that a later document by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict) asserted that what John Paul affirmed in that apostolic letter represented infallible teaching -- not by the pope invoking his own authority, but as the constant teaching of the world’s bishops exercising their ordinary magisterium, or teaching authority. ...

Editor's note: For NCR's editorial on papal infallibility and women's ordination, see: Ordination ban not infallibly taught

The following editorial on the Dangers of Clericalism appeared in The (London) Tablet.

To be against clericalism is not the same as being anticlerical. The latter signifies strong secular resistance to the Catholic Church’s social and political power. Clericalism is about an excessive emphasis on the role of the clergy in the Church’s internal affairs. It implies clerical elitism, the superiority of the priesthood over the laity. Anticlericalism, as a concept in Continental European politics, is some way past its sell-by date. But clericalism is very much still in currency as a key concept in analysing the cultural factors that gave rise to the clerical sex-abuse scandal inside the Catholic Church. It has almost become de rigueur for church leaders to say they are against clericalism in this context.

Clericalism was dealt a heavy blow by the emphasis in the teaching of Vatican II on the priesthood of all believers and on common baptism. But there is evidence of a clericalist backlash among some of those undergoing training for the priesthood or recently ordained. In dress and attitude, some of them appear to hanker – almost narcissistically – after a restoration of the priest’s elevated status that characterised parish life in the 1950s. A softer form of clericalism is still apparent in diocesan structures and in the Vatican itself, where few lay people are to be found, and usually in relatively junior positions. And clericalism automatically marginalises or excludes women.
It is also sometimes implicit in the motivation of those who are pushing for the return of the Tridentine Rite to general use. While the post-Vatican II new-rite Mass emphasises the Eucharist as an activity shared by the whole community, the Mass named after the Council of Trent puts more weight on the separation of roles, with the priest active and the congregation passively watching.

The Vatican is continuing to put ammunition in the hands the pro-Tridentine lobby in the Church, as in the latest instruction, Universae Ecclesiae, issued by the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei. Does it not realise how much this will encourage divisive tensions in the Church and a spirit of reactionary rebellion against local episcopal authority, not to mention the revival of a misogynistic and elitist clericalism?

The reinstatement of the Tridentine Rite was intended to unify the Church and reconcile those alienated from it; there is a real danger of it having the opposite effect. If bishops are not alarmed by this, they should be.
Meanwhile, the latest instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) regarding the handling of clerical abuse allegations moves in the opposite direction. It recognises that while bishops cannot shirk their responsibilities, they cannot be a law unto themselves in such matters. National episcopal conferences are being required to draw up guidelines and submit them to the Vatican. The importance of cooperation with secular authorities such as the police is emphasised, though curiously the CDF only stresses the duty to report all cases where that is already required by law. It needs to be more general than that: in many countries there is no obligation to report a crime. That apart, the instruction moves the Church into the real world, with best practice (as in England and Wales, perhaps) being made the common standard. As a result, the Church will be that much less clerical – and safer.

The John Jay Report Ignores History While Focusing on the Wrong Culture!

By Vinnie Nauheimer

Roger Karban reflects on John 14:1-12. An excerpt.

Growing up Catholic, I frequently was reminded that each priest was "another Christ." John would have agreed with that appraisal. But he also would have corrected such a limited application of the title. According to his theology, a priest becomes another Christ not at his ordination, but at his baptism. The priest, along with all other Christians, are other Christs. Each of us, by our baptism, is committed and expected to carry on the ministry of the first Christ. (I've mentioned in a past commentary that the normal outward sign of our willingness to continue his ministry is our receiving from the cup during the Eucharist.)

The belief that all are other Christs is a constant theme in the Christian Scriptures. The uniqueness of this pericope is Jesus' promise that we other Christs will do "greater" things than even he accomplished.