Quote of the Day

[T]he Vatican bureaucracy is the first and last line of defense for the hierarchical model of the church. It always made people stand in line, of course, for any permissions they sought and it treated with cobwebbed methods the assault of the sex abuse scandal on its badly breached defenses. It now deals with that . . . unaware that by their passivity these bureaucrats are strangling the institutional church to death. Their careers, of course, depend on their not relaxing their grip for an instant.

They also sponsor investigations, as of the American nuns who built the church and get little credit for it. They issue new regulations that haphazardly pair child abuse with ordaining women priests. Now certain officials are planning to question the visionaries of Medjugorie about exactly what was in those messages from the Blessed Mother. All this is happening while victims of sex abuse still wait to be healed, the people look for some adequate response to the sacramental shortage and they are given a translation of the Mass and its readings that was dated when Napoleon was plotting to escape from Elba.

These behaviors are discouraging to good Catholics who do not want to leave their wobbling church . . . They want to stay on as our poor bishops are ordered by Roman bureaucrats to prop up hierarchical structures at all costs. They need to encourage each other and good priests to remain calm even when a new and provocative edict is issued from the bureaucracy. Don't get involved even trying to refute these various commands. These documents are symptoms of the bureaucratic syndrome, the death rattle of every dying bureaucracy, the last crazed messages being sent out before the hierarchical model swallows its worker bees in the dust cloud of its final collapse.

Meanwhile, Vatican II Catholics may well follow the advice my psychiatrist wife and I give to healthy people when they are put upon by the unhealthy: Repeat at least twice a day, "I am not the one who is crazy here."

- Eugene Cullen Kennedy
"The Church in 2010 and France in 1940"
National Catholic Reporter
July 22, 2010

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Eugene Kennedy on Roman Catholicism's "Post-Hierarchical Blues"
Rome Falling
A Time to Re-Think the Basis and Repair the Damage
Hans Küng: "We Are Facing a Structural Problem"
Staying on Board
Re-Forming "the Vatican" Doesn't Mean Destroying the Church
Thomas Doyle: "There is Something Radically Wrong with the Institutional Catholic Church"
Game Over
The Roman Catholic Pyramid is Crumbling
An Offering of Ashes
A Brave Hope
Knowing What To Do, Knowing Why To Stay

Recommended Off-site Link:
Creating a Liberating Church - Rosemary Radford Ruether (The Progressive Catholic Voice, July 15, 2010).