Questions of Vatican competence

Exploring today Pope Benedict XVI issues we have visited, the New York Times raises one question most strongly.

It comes from several directions, but most directly from a scholar interviewed for the piece:

The Vatican expert George Weigel, in a recent essay in First Things, an American religion journal, criticized the Vatican for its “chaos, confusion and incompetence.”

Regarding a Vatican examination of the Legionaries of Christ in light of recent revelations about its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, and questions raised about his closest associates, Weigel is more pointed still:

In his criticism of the Vatican hierarchy, known as the curia, Mr. Weigel said a curia that allowed the Bishop Williamson controversy to explode was not “a curia capable of conducting an investigation that can command public credibility.”

Religious discrimination?

The Alliance Defense Fund, whose focus is religious right issues, alleged last week in U.S. District Court that Los Angeles City College student Jonathan Lopez’s “Christian speech” had been censored in violation of the First Amendment.

A professor is said to have refused to let him finish a speech against gay marriage. The professor is said to have used harsh language and to have refused to issue a grade. Allegedly, there was also a threat of expulsion. All of this during the time immediately following the passage of Proposition 8.

Whatever happened (lawsuit: facts contested), a letter from the college says it is being treated as “extremely serious.”

We’ll see.

Will joins BP in hornets’ nest kicking

George Will joined Baptist Press in kicking hornets’ nests this week. Indeed, Will’s choice of nests recalled the BP response to Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI), as chronicled by Jonathan Merritt. For Will turned his acid intellectual pen to defending the pseudo science of “global cooling,” which was given some friendly treatment by BP (just as global warming got a Southern Baptist cold shoulder) while Merritt struggled vainly in 2008 to get corrective messages through to a BP editor.

Messages to Will are public, however. Neither he nor his staff need answer phone or email for compelling correctives to be filed.

Nate Silver gave Will his comeuppance over what may yet be called “Will’s Law,” as a jape.

As did Ezra Klein, who puts it:

In other words, comparing apples to apples, the scientific community didn’t believe in global cooling and does believe in global warming. Sadly, our political pundits have outsourced their scientific research to an intern charged with a superficial skim of Newsweek covers.

Sound stewardship of facts, or climate, anyone?

Maciel facts out (please); Holy See intervention in?

A letter seeking forgiveness and healing is “circulating among the 800 priests and 2500 seminarians of the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ, and also among the 65,000 lay members of the Regnum Christi apostolate.”

That letter is from the superior general of the congregation, Fr. Alvaro Corcueradoes. And it does not say:

Fr. Maciel had a daughter, a young woman now just over the age of twenty living in Spain, born from a relationship that was not sporadic, but regular, between the priest and a lover he had.

Vatican commentator Sandro Magister concludes:

In part for reasons of personal conduct, therefore, the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ no longer seems to be capable of managing its own recovery.

Current Legionaries materials generate growing clouds of satiric heat and deadly serious debate.

Meanwhile, First Things points out the necessity of complementary Catholic press “repentance and change.” He argues in persuasive bullet-point detail that there is a great deal of truth yet to be told to set things more right.

Austrian bishops push back, for peace and cooperation

Meeting in emergency session Monday, Austria’s diocesan bishops reacted with supplication to national turmoil precipitated by Pope Benedict’s readmission of a Holocaust-denying bishop and now-withdrawn appointment of an ultra-conservative as auxiliary bishop in Linz:

We hope inadequate channels of communication in the Vatican can be improved so the Pope’s service to humanity is not impaired. … We bishops will do everything within our power to insure the upcoming bishop nominations are conducted according with the official procedure, in close cooperation with the relevant Vatican officials.

What really happened? Why were some of the most decidedly conservative Catholics so displeased, while centerist Austrian Catholics began fleeing the church in droves?

Theologian Paul Zulehner of the University of Vienna, an expert on Austrian church politics, called the Gerhard Maria Wagner nomination as auxiliary bishop in Linz a “putsch” by church conservatives. Thus, “The seizure of power by the right-wingers has now failed, apparently through the clear intervention of several Austrian bishops.”

The Austrian bishops were pleading for a cessation of hostilities. They seek a re-outbreak of cooperation.