1. Sex scandals rock the Catholic church. This was the most difficult year for the Irish Catholic Church for as long as anyone can remember. In May, the Ryan Report made headline news across the world when it revealed that rape and sexual molestation were “endemic” in schools and orphanages run by the Irish church over seven decades. Two months earlier, Bishop John Magee was forced to “stand aside” from the management of his Cloyne diocese, in county Cork, after an investigation, published the previous December, found that his diocese had put children at risk by failing to follow child protection guidelines.
Things got considerably worse for the church with the publication, in November, of the Murphy Report into the sexual abuse scandal in the archdiocese of Dublin. Judge Yvonne Murphy chronicled an organised cover-up of child abuse allegations in the diocese spanning a period of nearly four decades. In the wake of the report’s publication, there were unprecedented calls for the Pope’s diplomatic representative, the Papal Nuncio, to be expelled from Ireland, after it emerged that he failed to correspond directly with the Commission of Investigation. Four bishops named in the report resigned, many said belatedly. A fifth bishop, Martin Drennan of Galway, has so far resisted the growing clamour for him to also step down….
Williams list of 10 big stories reminds us Anglicans that our troubles are not really as dramatic as those still rocking the RC church. The decline in Ireland and Europe and South America is nothing short of staggering.
http://afmva.churchoftheword.net/blog/
[blockquote] America’s Episcopal Church drove a bus through the Anglican Communion’s moratorium on the appointment of gay bishops [/blockquote] Well put.
[url=http://www.brutallyhonest.org/brutally_honest/2009/12/obama-and-his-friends-preach-tolerance-but-there-is-bigotry-at-their-groups-core.html]Interesting story involving a female TEC priest[/url] for the new year.
Does anybody get the feeling there’s something wrong with the institutional church? I see abuse of power here. Jesus meant us to serve one another and to form a body, not a top-down institution. I love Jesus, and I think the church should be “where He’s at,” but I am starting to wonder if we need to look elsewhere.
This takes us dangerously off-subject, but I clicked on Timothy’s piece mentioned in # 3 above, then clicked again on the associated story of how Robin ended up at a Catholic Mass without the first idea of what to do … and found herself dragooned into being an usher. It really was a laugh-out loud piece, written with great good humour. And a reminder to us of how much we assume that first-timers in church will understand everything when in fact everything is a blank to them.
I think Helen’s analysis is astute though I am not sure that I agree with her conclusion. There are many unsung people (even some bishops) and institutions associated with the church that have never bought into the nonsense associated with the Church Triumphant and its all too cozy relationship with the corruption of power. I think of the Catholic Worker movement, the Missionaries of Charity, and a whole host of others who see the Church as the place where they worship God and draw sustenance from the spiritual heritage and treasures of the church.