Tony Flannery

My initial reaction to the statement from the Vatican ruling out the possibility of women being eligible for the diaconate in the Catholic Church was one of great sadness.

This development has something of the same feel for me as the papal document, Humanae Vitae, of 1968 declaring that the use of artificial means of contraception was a serious sin. One of the great problems with that document was that it emerged from a ‘shadowy’ group of male clerics in the Vatican — largely nameless – and that it went against what was then the developing consensus among the members of the Church.

(This is a short, and very succinct, article by Peter Keenan)

8 December will mark sixty years since the formal end to Vatican II, described by the late Fr Gabriel Daly (an Augustinian, like the new pope) as ‘a massive surgical operation carried out without anaesthetic on a patient who thought she was in the best of health’.

The “patient” is now in terminal decline, largely the result of institutional Catholicism’s culpable failure to address honestly and courageously three issues identified by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, as far back as the 1950s: 

1. Forms

Michael Morwood.

The need for theological reform

December 27, 2023

In the mid-1980s when I was at Boston College, a Jesuit university, one of the lecturers commented that the Catholic Church hierarchy was fearful of a schism in the church. Too late, he remarked, it is already here, informally. He pointed out that the majority of students at that Catholic university no longer believed the traditional story of a heavenly deity who locked people out of heaven because of the first humans’ disobedience.