Association of Catholic Priests - Fr Flannery Goes for the Sympathy Vote

Tuesday 22 January 2013

Father Flannery has once again been widely publicised for his predicament, as he calls it, and his foreboding that he might be excommunicated, for persisting in promoting his support for women priests and other teachings condemned by the Catholic Church (Irish Times, Examiner, 21 Dec 13).

While not impugning Father Flannery's sincerity, he shows an unfortunate misunderstanding of what the Catholic Church has always understood herself to be.

Christ, being God as well as Man, could have stayed permanently on the Earth, personally keeping us on the Straight and Narrow, but this was not His plan. Catholics teach (and can prove from history) that He established His Church to endure till the End of Time to pass on the Faith He gave us. He promised that the Church would never fail to carry out its task, although individuals might fail – Christ left us Judas and Peter as a warning from the beginning. Peter denied Christ but repented in bitter tears and was forgiven; Judas despaired and hanged himself. Christ’s Crucifixion on Calvary was meant to show us that this whole thing is not a joke.

The Church can give clear reasons for all of her teachings. Some matters are open to debate, and others are not. From the very beginning, the Church has been prepared not only to teach, but in the last resort to expel those who preach in her name something contrary to the Faith, because it leads souls away from the Way that leads to eternal life.

The Catholic Religion is the only one in the world that has an actual working mechanism for resolving disputes, which is why it has survived and maintained its integrity for 2000 years. In 2011, five Anglican bishops and hundreds of laypeople formally left the Anglican Communion and entered the Catholic Church precisely because of these things.

It is a matter of plain common sense. If there is a Soccer team, and one player insists on playing by Gaelic football rules, what will happen to the team? What action is the Captain to take? If a French teacher insists on teaching German to his class, what action will the Board of Management take? The Catholic Church, uniquely, makes the explicit claim to infallible teaching in matters of Faith and Morals. Minor matters of discipline (such as whether to eat meat on Fridays) can and have been changed; but if she reversed even one point that had previously been claimed to be infallible – such as the impossibility of ordaining women as priests – her credibility would be lost for all time. Yet the likes of the Association of Catholic Priests expect to be allowed to repudiate a huge range of clearly-defined teachings and still retain the status of a Catholic organisation.

Since the sixties, the Church has experimented with a more lenient approach than before, trying to accomplish her mission by explanation, persuasion and appeals to charity, trying at all costs to avoid disciplinary action. Unfortunately, anybody in authority can tell us what will happen if we rely on this and nothing else. Certain stubborn souls will simply refuse to comply. They will continue until somebody in authority does take action. The most outrageous deviations from Church teaching and practice have now gone uncorrected for years, and the dissidents in many cases have only grown bolder. But the Church is not a social club; it has a very grave mission. Those who genuinely cannot accept her teaching are free to leave; but they cannot have it both ways, as Fr Flannery and the highly unrepresentative Association of Catholic Priests (which he founded) seem to expect.

M. Ó Fearghail