Kaylara
March 10th, 2001, 01:13 PM
Modern inquisitors are targeting intellectuals, rebel priest claims
By CHRIS McGILLION
Saturday 10 March 2001
Heretical writings: Paul Collins has decided to quit the priesthood, but the fight is not over.
Picture: JACKY GHOSSEIN
The Inquisition conjures up images of religious dissenters being tortured or put to death by mediaeval prelates seeking to protect the faithful from heresy. Too much can be made of this, but it is true that the church has shown little charity in the past to those who refused to submit to its authority.
What is more alarming is the claim that it still doesn't.
According to broadcaster and author Paul Collins, the thought police are as active in the church today as ever. But now they are hunting intellectuals, not heretics, and using more subtle weapons than the rack and stake.
As a result, Collins, who has been under investigation by the Vatican for the past three years, has announced his resignation from the priesthood. As he tells it, he can no longer, in conscience, serve a hierarchy that is "moving in an increasingly sectarian direction and watering down the catholicity of the church".
It is a serious charge - one which, given the size and influence of the church, should concern nonCatholics as much as Catholics. It will certainly divide the latter. Many will view Collins as a hero. Others, as he conceded in an interview with The Age this week, "will be having a Scotch on the rocks to celebrate" his leaving.
The challenge will be to untangle the merits of what Collins is claiming from personal judgments about him.
Since the publication of his first book, Mixed Blessings, in 1986, Collins has been on a collision course with clerical authority. What he argued in that book was that Rome was obstructing progress towards a more democratic, less institutional church.
Five years later, Collins turned his attention to the local church. In No Set Agenda, he argued that Australian Catholicism was in a state of "unarticulated, even unrealised crisis" due to its loss of direction.
God's Earth followed in 1995. This time Collins took the church to task for neglecting the environment - not least over its ban on artificial birth control.
Finally, two years later, Papal Power appeared - a study of the centralisation of power in the papacy and of what Collins maintains are the distortions of theology and tradition used to justify it. He pulled no punches: "Just as the model of the absolute monarch or dictator places the ruler not only above the state and its laws but above society itself, so the papalist interpretations of primacy and infallibility (make) the Pope into some type of solo guru and intermediary between God and the church."
Papal Power was brought to the attention of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican office charged with defending church teaching on faith and morals - the office that, under another name, oversaw the Inquisition. The congregation was told that Collins was propagating serious doctrinal errors.
The identity of the accuser in these matters is known only to the congregation - one of several of its procedures that could have been lifted from the pages of Kafka's The Trial. Since the congregation decides whether there is a case to be answered, one's judges effectively become one's prosecutors. Hearings are held in secret.
There is some suspicion that Melbourne's Archbishop George Pell, a doctrinal conservative and himself a member of the congregation, was instrumental in bringing Collins to the Vatican's attention. While this has never been proved, Pell did ban another book - Tomorrow's Catholic , by Melbourne priest Father Michael Morwood - from use in Catholic schools soon after news of the Collins investigation broke.
Dr Pell also instructed Father Morwood not to speak publicly on certain subjects covered in his book. Father Morwood left the priesthood soon after.
But Collins posed a bigger problem. His role as a media commentator and broadcaster had given him a national profile. And he was becoming well known overseas. Put simply, he was beyond the reach of local church authority.
He learnt in January, 1998, of a congregation conclusion that, in its words, a "study of (Papal Power) has revealed that it contains certain doctrinal problems". He was required to clarify them.
Collins refused to comply with this instruction until he could be assured of an open hearing. He went public instead. To his detractors, this was characteristic grandstanding.
As Collins himself explained in a letter to the congregation, it would be "disingenuous, not to say dishonest and hypocritical" of him to cooperate in procedures that he had long criticised.
Eventually he did reply in detail to the congregation's charges in a theological magazine. But the congregation had not been given an opportunity to review his comments before publication, and anyway, some congregation officials had concluded that he was utterly unrepentant.
This opinion was communicated by congregation head Cardinal Josef Ratzinger to Father Michael Curran, head of Collins' religious order - the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart - last December 18. Days earlier, Father Curran had been summonsed to Rome and quizzed by other congregation officials about why so little was being done to pull his errant priest into line.
When Collins heard of these developments recently, he decided to resign as a priest of 33 years' standing. The decision was prompted, he says, by a desire to spare his order further trouble with the Vatican and by his belief that the stifling of intellectual debate within the church has reached a point that suggests senior members of the hierarchy would prefer to "abandon most Catholics in order to form a church of the elite".
Chris McGillion is the Sydney Morning Herald religious affairs columnist.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/03/10/FFXGOD3R2KC.html
By CHRIS McGILLION
Saturday 10 March 2001
Heretical writings: Paul Collins has decided to quit the priesthood, but the fight is not over.
Picture: JACKY GHOSSEIN
The Inquisition conjures up images of religious dissenters being tortured or put to death by mediaeval prelates seeking to protect the faithful from heresy. Too much can be made of this, but it is true that the church has shown little charity in the past to those who refused to submit to its authority.
What is more alarming is the claim that it still doesn't.
According to broadcaster and author Paul Collins, the thought police are as active in the church today as ever. But now they are hunting intellectuals, not heretics, and using more subtle weapons than the rack and stake.
As a result, Collins, who has been under investigation by the Vatican for the past three years, has announced his resignation from the priesthood. As he tells it, he can no longer, in conscience, serve a hierarchy that is "moving in an increasingly sectarian direction and watering down the catholicity of the church".
It is a serious charge - one which, given the size and influence of the church, should concern nonCatholics as much as Catholics. It will certainly divide the latter. Many will view Collins as a hero. Others, as he conceded in an interview with The Age this week, "will be having a Scotch on the rocks to celebrate" his leaving.
The challenge will be to untangle the merits of what Collins is claiming from personal judgments about him.
Since the publication of his first book, Mixed Blessings, in 1986, Collins has been on a collision course with clerical authority. What he argued in that book was that Rome was obstructing progress towards a more democratic, less institutional church.
Five years later, Collins turned his attention to the local church. In No Set Agenda, he argued that Australian Catholicism was in a state of "unarticulated, even unrealised crisis" due to its loss of direction.
God's Earth followed in 1995. This time Collins took the church to task for neglecting the environment - not least over its ban on artificial birth control.
Finally, two years later, Papal Power appeared - a study of the centralisation of power in the papacy and of what Collins maintains are the distortions of theology and tradition used to justify it. He pulled no punches: "Just as the model of the absolute monarch or dictator places the ruler not only above the state and its laws but above society itself, so the papalist interpretations of primacy and infallibility (make) the Pope into some type of solo guru and intermediary between God and the church."
Papal Power was brought to the attention of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican office charged with defending church teaching on faith and morals - the office that, under another name, oversaw the Inquisition. The congregation was told that Collins was propagating serious doctrinal errors.
The identity of the accuser in these matters is known only to the congregation - one of several of its procedures that could have been lifted from the pages of Kafka's The Trial. Since the congregation decides whether there is a case to be answered, one's judges effectively become one's prosecutors. Hearings are held in secret.
There is some suspicion that Melbourne's Archbishop George Pell, a doctrinal conservative and himself a member of the congregation, was instrumental in bringing Collins to the Vatican's attention. While this has never been proved, Pell did ban another book - Tomorrow's Catholic , by Melbourne priest Father Michael Morwood - from use in Catholic schools soon after news of the Collins investigation broke.
Dr Pell also instructed Father Morwood not to speak publicly on certain subjects covered in his book. Father Morwood left the priesthood soon after.
But Collins posed a bigger problem. His role as a media commentator and broadcaster had given him a national profile. And he was becoming well known overseas. Put simply, he was beyond the reach of local church authority.
He learnt in January, 1998, of a congregation conclusion that, in its words, a "study of (Papal Power) has revealed that it contains certain doctrinal problems". He was required to clarify them.
Collins refused to comply with this instruction until he could be assured of an open hearing. He went public instead. To his detractors, this was characteristic grandstanding.
As Collins himself explained in a letter to the congregation, it would be "disingenuous, not to say dishonest and hypocritical" of him to cooperate in procedures that he had long criticised.
Eventually he did reply in detail to the congregation's charges in a theological magazine. But the congregation had not been given an opportunity to review his comments before publication, and anyway, some congregation officials had concluded that he was utterly unrepentant.
This opinion was communicated by congregation head Cardinal Josef Ratzinger to Father Michael Curran, head of Collins' religious order - the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart - last December 18. Days earlier, Father Curran had been summonsed to Rome and quizzed by other congregation officials about why so little was being done to pull his errant priest into line.
When Collins heard of these developments recently, he decided to resign as a priest of 33 years' standing. The decision was prompted, he says, by a desire to spare his order further trouble with the Vatican and by his belief that the stifling of intellectual debate within the church has reached a point that suggests senior members of the hierarchy would prefer to "abandon most Catholics in order to form a church of the elite".
Chris McGillion is the Sydney Morning Herald religious affairs columnist.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/03/10/FFXGOD3R2KC.html