Wallowing in self-pity

For someone who has supposedly been “silenced” by the mean old men at the Vatican, Fr Tony Flannery certainly does seem to enjoy the limelight a lot. Over the past year, he has spoken at conferences, given press conferences and generally bleated about his plight to anyone who would listen. On 21 January, in what was a week of fawning media attention towards the 65-year old rebel Redemptorist, he was given the space to air his views in the Irish Times.

His article drips with self-pity (“a year of tension, stress and difficult decsion-making in my life”) and with tired generalizations (“the current Vatican trend of creating a church of condemnation rather than one of compassion”). Its language is vague and hackneyed. One pities the poor readers of Reality.

Fr Flannery has a curiously contradictory attitude towards the laity. On the one hand, he seems to hold the basic liberal view that the Church should adjust its teachings to public opinon, or as he puts it, “the reality of people’s lives. This [necessitates] a willingness to listen to the people, to understand their hopes and joys, their struggles and fears.” In the years following Vatican II, “priests and people alike learned a lot how to form their consciences and make mature decisions about all areas of their lives. As priests we learned more from people than they learned from us.” It is unclear what exactly he means by this, other than perhaps that rather he decided that what his hearers own “consciences” told them was just as valid as anything the Church had to say.

However, when it comes to more conservative lay people, Father’s “willingness to listen” suddenly bridles. He may well have much to learn from the right kind of lay people, but heaven help them if they should dare to suggest that a priest should, you know, do the job of a priest. At some point after the carefree days of the sixties, “authority became centralised in the Vatican once again,” “pressure came on priests of my generation to be more explicit and decisive in presenting church teaching” and “we became aware that there were people around the country who reported any slight deviation from the official stance by a priest, for example  allowing a woman to read the Gospel at Mass.”

I was once at a Mass where a young woman read the Gospel. It was a student Mass in Germany. The priest was an old liberal who had got married some years earlier and was thus forbidden to administer the sacraments. He was an ideologue who concealed a bossy rebelliousness behind a mask of benign beardy tolerance. He used to hang open letters in prominent places protesting against the “silencing” of various dissident theologians. When, at this Mass,  a female student nervously read the Gospel, he stood benevolently by, basking in the warm glow of how enlightened and tolerant he was being. It was difficult not to think that asking her to do the reading, he was being deliberately provocative. I have never met Fr Flannery, but I seem to recognise that type in much of what he writes.

When Fr Flannery’s supporters are calling for solidarity for him, they usually compare the Church’s “rigidity” and “intransigence” with the priest’s “tolerance”. Apparently, the Fr Flannerys of this world and their media supporters are all about tolerance, freedom of ideas, freedom of speech, while only archaic institutions like the Catholic Church remain rooted in a mentality which says that all ideas are not equally valid, that some truths must be accepted and some rejected. Numerous correspondents of the broadsheet newspapers have likened Fr Flannery’s ordeal to the Inquisition.

However, secularists can be among the keenest and most ruthless heresy hunters out there. In December 2012, the German Catholic journalist Martin Lohmann was removed from his job at the Macromedia College for Media and Communication in Cologne. The reason was that he had opposed homosexual marriage and abortion in a television discussion. In a statement confirming Lohman’s dismissal, his former employers announced: “The college maintains in its core values a view of people in which different sexual orientations are respected. It rejects every form of discrimination.”

Just compare these two cases for a moment. Fr Flannery has repeatedly claimed not to believe in certain core Catholic doctrines, such as the institution of priesthood and apostolic succession. For this he has been asked not to publish a column in a magazine no one reads (come on, when was the last time you curled up with the latest edition of Reality?) and has been fêted  by an army of media well-wishers . Martin Lohmann, who has simply defended Catholic moral teaching on television, has been fired from his job. Yet Fr Flannery’s supporters give you the impression that conservative Catholics are the only people who ever practice intolerance in this enlightened age; the rest of humanity is apparently free of this vice. That conservative Catholics like Martin Lohmann suffer more for taking a stand than liberals like Fr Flannery does not seem to occur to them. Lohmann’s ordeal has gone largely unnoticed outside the German Catholic media, and what attention it has received elsewhere has been far from sympathetic. An article in the once-conservative Welt newspaper does not bother mentioning the fact that he has lost his job until six paragraphs in.

In spite of all Fr Flannery’s talk about listening to the laity and having so much to learn from everyone, there is a certain narcissism about him. The article in the Irish Times is all about him, his youthful hopes, his difficulties, his stance, his decisions, his freedom of conscience. There is very little sense in it of obedience to God or to his ecclesiastical superiors. It is not the kind of spectacle that would be likely to inspire a young man considering a vocation to the priesthood. “Enter a seminary! You too could one day be a bitter old man sitting around whining about being disempowered to anyone who will listen!”

Mark Shea wrote recently that some of the priests and bishops who failed to act against abusive priests in the United States were guilty of a strange form of clericalism; they were self-obsessed, seeing themselves as actors in a great cosmic drama in which mere laypeople just had minor parts. A similarly self-obsessed attitude, expressed in a different way, seems to be at work in Fr Flannery. He has been fortunate to pick a fight with the Church at a time when the media are furiously searching for sticks with which to beat her. As a result, his sad little story has been given an inordinate amount of attention, attention which he clearly enjoys. The fact is, were Fr Flannery one of those laymen he claims to find so inspiring; were he an angry pensioner sitting in the pub holding forth about what an outdated and unchristian institution the Church is, no one would remotely care what he had to say. But he is a priest, and that office carries a certain authority even in this day and age. It is ironic that Tony Flannery owes his pitiful celebrity to the clericalism he so opposes, or at least to what remains of it.

Careless doctors, careless headline writers

Two eye-catching articles in the Independent today. One article, regarding the report into the death of Savita Halappanavar, asks “Could X case legislation have prevented this young woman dying?” The author hums and haws for 15 paragraphs before concluding: Probably not. The reason is that the main cause of her death was the fact that the gravity of her situation was not appreciated by the doctors treating her, not the state of Irish law. “In a situation where Savita slipped further into danger while doctors apparently never realised, how could legislation possibly have saved her?”

We then get a report on Cardinal Brady’s Ash Wednesday homily, under the headline: “Instead of ‘giving up’ for Lent, give something back, says cardinal.”

So far, so predictable. Back in my primary school days, I remember being told to "do something positive" for Lent rather than give something up, and I’ve heard the same thing many times since then. It’s amazing that there are still people giving things up for Lent at all, what will all these exhortations we’ve been hearing over the years to do something positive instead.

However, in this case, nothing the cardinal is quoted as saying actually suggests that he is asking people to do something positive instead of giving something up. What he appears to be saying is that they should do something positive as well as give stuff up.  Here are his words as quoted in the article:

“People often make resolutions at the beginning of Lent, very often these are decisions to give up something, alcohol, chocolate, even television. Whilst these are worthy sacrifices, they risk being too narrow.

“Lent is also a time for something positive. Why don’t we consider, for example, reading a piece of scripture, to pray more, perhaps join in parish life, commit ourselves to get to know more about the history of salvation, to resolve to think of others before we speak.

“Lent is the interplay of prayer and fasting and alms giving. They are not ends in themselves but means to an end. The goal is to draw closer to God.”

A couple of thoughts on this. First, it is quite clear from the words quoted that the cardinal did not actually suggest that Catholics “give something back” instead of giving something up, but rather that they should do both. He explicitly says that Lent is about fasting as well as prayer. Perhaps the editor had had the “do something positive instead of giving something up” mantra drummed into his head for so many years that he just assumed that this was what Cardinal Brady had meant.

Second: the cardinal’s words about abstaining being “too narrow” was, as the politicians say, unhelpful. The media were easily able to misrepresent his words as meaning that Christians should not abstain from things during Lent, when that was not in fact what he had said.

Third, I do not share His Eminence’s apparent confidence that fasting or abstaining during Lent is so widespread these days. I remember overhearing a conversation in a cantine a few years ago. A Canadian chef was telling someone that he had asked his Irish Catholic wife what the Church’s rules on Lenten fasting were. “She couldn’t give me a clear answer,” he said. Indeed. How many people who were subjected to post-Vatican II catechesis could?

As for my own Lenten observances: I’ve given up meat and alcohol. At least Monday through Saturday; we’ll see if I have the strength to abstain from them on Sundays too. As for the “something positive” part, that has yet to be decided.