Category Archives: Laity

Why No Feast of Christ the Prophet?

September 13, 2025Abuse of Power, Articles, Christology, Church Renewal, Jesus, Laity, Prophecy, Sexual AbuseSean O'Conaill

Jesus had no tolerance for adult destruction of childhood faith – so why did the Catholic Church’s leaders hide clerical sex abuse from parents?

At the highest level, and globally, the clerical Catholic church of the 20th century not only failed to protect children from widespread clerical sexual abuse but conspired to conceal this failure from Catholic parents – until it was revealed by the victims themselves.

Not even yet, in 2025 – under an American pope – does the hierarchical church show any determination or sense of obligation to trace this failure to its historical source, or to measure the depth of disillusionment it has caused. A call from Ireland in 2022 for a reckoning on this issue has been ignored – and so has the looming disappearance of Catholic clergy here, as vocations to that priesthood collapse.

Meanwhile state inquiries into church abuse in Ireland have indicted both clerical Catholic silence and the lay passivity that facilitated abuse in Catholic-run institutions – but even yet – despite synodality – the Irish church has had no discussion of those evils. In spite of a strong call in September 2024 by Archbishop Dermot Farrell of Dublin for an end to a ‘culture of denial’, a hopeless policy still prevails of waiting for scandals to run their course, for everyone to forget and for some amnesiac remnant to move on.

This is a policy for extinction – the complete opposite of the New Creation promised by the Christian Gospel. It is the opposite also of the transparency called for by the Synodal process initiated by Pope Francis in 2021. It would surely have been rejected by the church’s founder – whose condemnation of the adult scandalisation of children was more severe than any other.

Jesus the Ultimate Prophet

That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified for calling out mere religious performance, that he never joined the Jewish religious elite of his time, and that he condemned elitism per se, is plain from the Gospel texts that all Catholics hear at Mass. He was squarely therefore in the prophetic tradition of Judaism, and his sacrifice and death were squarely in that pattern also. He is repeatedly identified by others as a prophet (Luke 7:16, John 4:19) and his actions mirror those of Elijah, Jeremiah and Amos, in calling for justice, not empty ritual.

Moreover, Jesus explicitly identified himself with this prophetic tradition, predicting that he would suffer the same fate:

“Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build the sepulchres of the prophets and decorate the tombs of the upright, saying, ‘We would never have joined in shedding the blood of the prophets, had we lived in our ancestors’ day.’ So! Your own evidence tells against you! You are the children of those who murdered the prophets! Very well then, finish off the work that your ancestors began.” (Matt 23:29-32)

For the Franciscan Richard Rohr Jesus is therefore the ultimate prophet who challenges all religious systems from the standpoint of their victims¹. Jesus’ most dire warning against any adult action that would shatter the faith of a child (Matt 18:6) must surely be interpreted as part of that prophetic critique. Does anyone doubt that this Jesus would have had zero tolerance for clerical abuse of children – as called for by St Peter Damian in 1049 in his letter to Pope Leo IX?

Why did no bishop of the Catholic church – and no pope – ever take a similar stand?

How now, in the wake of what has happened, can Irish Catholics – or Catholics anywhere – be expected to recognise Jesus in a purely ritual and symbolic priesthood, a priesthood that remained mute – that was trained to be mute – when children were being violated? How can they be content with a church calendar, and with services, that never celebrate the prophetic character of Jesus’ sacrifice – that explain his crucifixion solely in terms of propitiation of the Father?

Jesus the Propitiator: A Failed Christology

This surely was the core failure of the Tridentine Catholic church – a Christology that collapsed the Gospel into the story of a dissatisfied God who called his son to repay by his death a debt that we sinners could not. Even the Divine Mercy devotion promoted by Pope John Paul II calls for the same despairing emphasis – as though only fifty repetitive references to Jesus’ ‘sorrowful passion’ – to be repeated forever – will somehow persuade this Father God – at last – to be merciful.

That from the beginning the Father was merciful, that Jesus was instead calling all to follow his own prophetic stance in opposing religious hypocrisy, that he was raised from death, by the Father, for this courage – and that his prophetic witness in challenging injustice – wherever it occurs – is the distinctive call to all – could not be countenanced by the Catholic Church of Christendom – the church that rewarded only compliance and passivity and called all dissent disloyal.

And this, ultimately, was the root cause of the failure of article 37 of Lumen Gentium (1964) – the Vatican II constitution on the church. This clearly pointed to the emergence of church structures in which concerns could have been raised about any matter that threatened the spiritual health and witness of the people of God. Yet only passive compliance with hierarchical decree could be tolerated, even after Vatican II – so that church of compliance was doomed to disgrace, despite the council.

Synodality too will be doomed if it does not re-centre itself on Jesus the Prophet, and reconfigure the church accordingly – with structures that allow for prophetic challenge to any abuse of ecclesial power. An annual feast day for Christ the Prophet, with a papal encyclical that does justice to this need, could signal such a reckoning – but when will we get a pope – and a hierarchy – that sees this?

[To read Brian McLaren of the Centre for Action and Contemplation on the importance of Jesus the Prophet click here.]

Notes

The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr, 2025.

The Pyramid Will Stay Inverted

May 3, 2025Abuse of Power, Articles, Benedict XVI, Christendom, Corruption, Division, Evangelisation, Francis, Hypocrisy, Laity, Magisterium, Papacy, Pope Francis, Safeguarding, Sexual Abuse, Vatican IISean O'Conaill

Pope Francis receives flowers from children at the presidential palace in Baghdad March 5, 2021. (CNS photo/Vatican Media)

Pope Francis’ enemies in the church were ‘talked up’ by some media as capable of reversing the direction he set over the twelve years of his pontificate.

However, the historical circumstances in which Francis came to the chair of Peter in 2013 had not changed by 2025. Those same circumstances made the 21st century Franciscan ‘startup’ – synodality – irreversible.

The Inverted Pyramid

“Jesus founded the Church by setting at her head the Apostolic College, in which the Apostle Peter is the ‘rock’ (cf. Mt 16:18), the one who must confirm his brethren in the faith (cf. Lk 22:32). But in this Church, as in an inverted pyramid, the top is located beneath the base.”

It was in this celebrated passage in his address to bishops in 2014 that Pope Francis first introduced the idea of the church as an upside-down pyramid, with bishops in the role of servants rather than overlords. He went on:

“Let us never forget this! For the disciples of Jesus, yesterday, today and always, the only authority is the authority of service, the only power is the power of the cross. As the Master tells us: ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave’ (Mt 20:25-27). It shall not be so among you: in this expression we touch the heart of the mystery of the Church, and we receive the enlightenment necessary to understand our hierarchical service.”

The Synodal Pathway

The Synodal Pathway then launched in Ireland and globally from 2021 followed logically – by insisting that Baptism – not Ordination – is the foundational sacrament of the church – and by calling all of the baptised people of God to communion, participation and mission

Was this vision of the church’s future truly in danger now that Francis had passed? Media would hype this as a cliff-edge moment, with the return of ‘Command Catholicism’ – a bid for tight control from above on sexual practice – a real possibility. Might that truly be the direction taken by the Conclave of 2025?

Teachers Must Also be Witnesses

To understand why this was highly unlikely we needed only to remind ourselves of a key insight of Pope Paul VI, expressed in the 1975 document Evangelii Nuntiandi. Writing on the vital topic of evangelisation – the communication of the ‘Good News’ of the Gospel to the modern world – that pope declared:

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” (Evangelii Nuntiandi 41)

An unavoidable question arose from this declaration:

If teachers are not witnesses will anyone listen?

And what of the church’s supreme teachers, its official magisterium, its bishops – who did not, as a body, witness to the paramount importance of the safeguarding of the innocence of children until – beginning in the last two decades of the 20^th century – Catholics – globally – discovered that the safety of their children had been considered much less important than the reputation of ordained men? And that this was true even of the era of Pope Paul VI?

Lay Victims of Abuse Were its Witnesses

Had even one Catholic bishop been the source of this revelation the shock would have been that much less – but in fact it had been some of the affected Catholic families – lay people – in Louisiana, USA in the mid 1980s – who first informed the wider church of this ghastly anomaly, not any Catholic bishop anywhere.

So all bishops – and all cardinals attending the 2025 Conclave – knew well that the truth of clerical sexual abuse of children was imposed upon the church not by its leaders but by the innocent victims of that abuse.

For many observant Catholics it became impossible from then on to think of bishops – the church’s official magisterium – as necessarily witnesses to the Gospel and even necessarily as exemplary moral leaders of the church. This inevitably applied also to the bishop of Rome, the pope. In the era of Pope Benedict XVI – the era in which Archbishop Bergoglio of Buenos Aires emerged as a likely successor – this was the climate that inevitably gave shape and direction to the Conclave of 2013.

Moreover, as if to underline the fact that bishops were not holy ex officio, the internal wranglings of the Vatican bureaucracy were by then also on public display – in the so-called ‘Vatileaks’ affair. Had not this same scandal helped to bring about that conclave by influencing Benedict XVI’s astonishing decision to retire? If he was truly disabled finally by insomnia, as recently reported, who can fail, now, to see the causes?

Cardinal Bergoglio Reads the Times

Francis then became the name of Benedict XVI’s successor because, more clearly than anyone else, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio saw that the centuries-old strategy of governing and leading the church by moral edict from above had backfired disastrously. Focused on imposing tight discipline on sexual morality on the non-ordained people of God it had exposed the hierarchical clerical church to the charge of rank hypocrisy, in the concealment of the sexual sins of clergy.

Who now could not see also that, on a global scale, children had been sacrificed to preserve this secret? So obviously sinful was this mistake that only penitence on the part of leadership could now be persuasive.

“I Am a Sinner!”

And so, when asked directly ‘Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?‘ the new Pope Francis declared:

“I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.“

Stunning the Catholic world as it did this declaration told us not just about Jorge Bergoglio but about the times – the circumstances – in which he had been elected. Everything else about his pontificate followed logically from this declaration. We Catholics – people, priests, bishops and even popes – are all sinners – and are taught – if we pay attention – to understand our greatest sins.

Of these perhaps the greatest is a tendency to believe that we are qualified to tell others what to do – but had not Jesus himself warned even the apostles – the very first bishops – against doing that?

The Culmination of Centuries of Scandal

Schooled well in the history of the church Francis could see also that the clerical abuse cover-up scandal was but the latest in a centuries-long series of church scandals.

Already, just before the Jubilee year 2000 Pope John Paul II had issued the document Memory and Reconciliation lamenting:

the medieval Inquisitions,
the church’s own role in causing conflicts between Christians
the persecution of Jews in Catholic countries even into modern times,
the abuse of women,
the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples in supporting European imperialism and colonialism across the globe.

Had not the church also supported imperial European regimes that had gone to total war in 1914 – a major cause of the rise of secularism and atheism in the 20th century West?

The abuse scandal – by no means over yet in 2013 (or even in 2025) – was merely the final blow – a blow delivered by a church system of ‘moralising from above‘ that had backfired – justly – on the moralisers.

The Meaning of Synodality

So, if moralising from above could not lead the church any longer, what could?

Pope Francis’ answer – an answer derived obviously from deep prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit – was synodality – communion, participation and mission – a new era in which Catholic ministers would accompany those to whom they minister – instead of talking down to them .

Those who cannot get on board with this must be prayed for very seriously – to receive the insight to understand their own times. No effective leadership can ever emerge from historical blindness, the prime disability of the church faction that opposed and sometimes disgracefully vilified Pope Francis.

Constantinian Nostalgia Not the Answer

Almost certainly the historical worldview of the opponents of synodality is one that idealises Christendom – that long era in which the church was patronised by nominally Christian kings. Even today the perceived danger of tyrannical anti-Christian government leads some to yearn for a new union of Catholic church and state – the union that began with the first Roman emperor to patronise the church – Constantine.

But who cannot see now that it was that long privileging of the church – and especially of clergy – that corrupted and divided it originally?

Had it not been the mission of the first St Francis – in the 1200s – to restore Christ’s Church in an era of nominally Christian kings?

Were not the divisions of the church – into East and West and then into the Protestant fragmentations in the West – caused and widened by that same corruption?

And what of Christian and Catholic minorities today in e.g. China, India, Pakistan, Israel and elsewhere? How could any new movement to unite church and state in the West not be seen by people of other faiths as proof of the danger of tolerating Christians anywhere?

Constantinianism – or Christian nationalism – is yet another historical cul de sac. Too close a relationship with political power will always corrupt the church and endanger the sincere belief of those without it – and reconnect the church scandalously with privilege, mendacity and violence.

No Other Future

What, truly, is the alternative to the direction that Pope Francis has set? What, truly, are the signs of these times?

What would any victim of clerical abuse – or any kind of abuse in, or by, the church – make of a turning back by bishops – to moralising from above?

Where in this media-saturated world could any bishop hope to succeed with such a strategy? Could the 2025 Conclave truly think seriously of abandoning synodality and reverting to that same stilted mode of leadership – when all who attend it will know that Pope Francis is revered globally for his humility?

Did not the Covid pandemic reveal the shortcomings of governments everywhere – and reveal also the potential of ordinary yet extraordinary people to save one another and to show us the truth of the Beatitudes? It is the compassionate and the powerless who will liberate and inherit the Earth.

All Catholic bishops and cardinals now are surely done with Lording. The only possible future for the church is to suffer – i.e. to put up with – the vulnerability of its founder – Jesus of Nazareth – rather than ever again to seek – or to accept – a position of privilege and power.

What, seriously, were the chances that the conclave of 2025 would not be led, by prayer, to see the future of the church as Pope Francis so clearly saw it?

Sean O’Conaill
April and May 2025

Time to prioritise Catholic Social Teaching!

November 12, 2014Adult Faith Formation, Articles, Catholic Social Teaching, Clericalism, Compassion, LaitySean O'Conaill

In an article for the Tablet of Nov 8th, 2014 Brendan Hoban described the Irish Catholic church as ‘on the edge of the abyss’. His argument is unavoidable and stark: while the last window of opportunity for addressing the severe clerical manpower crisis is swiftly closing there is still no sign that Irish bishops want to find an alternative to their present strategy for tackling it. This boils down to maintaining the current recruitment requirements, more intensive prayer, and trust in God – with, in Brendan’s phrase, no ‘Plan B’.

The Irish Association of Catholic Priests, which Brendan Hoban founded and helps to lead, obviously needs to be deeply concerned about this vital issue – but equally it needs to give a focused attention to something else. The drying up of Catholic clerical vocations is itself surely indicative of an island-wide loss of confidence in the relevance of the church to the other deepening Irish crisis – the crisis of secularism, north as well as south. A clergy concentrated exclusively on its own survival can only confirm this scepticism by deepening the disconnect between the internal Catholic crisis and the wider acute crisis of Irish society.

In the Irish Times of Nov 11th, 2014 Fintan O’Toole declared that we cannot now even depend upon the Irish political system to maintain the stability of the country. No single political party, and not even any coalition of parties, may be sufficiently strong after next year’s general election to form a stable government. The growing Irish preference for independent candidates speaks of a disillusionment with all of the ideologies that underlie the major parties – and even of a distrust of the constitution as it presently operates. Where is the political vision called for by the Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop Richard Clarke, in late October – and who can quarrel with his major contention: “there is a hopelessness in our land that we must also challenge in the name of Jesus Christ”?

The Crisis of Secularism

Addiction, depression, homelessness, fear of violence, loss of meaning – all these are rampant in Ireland now – and not just in Ireland either. One top US intelligence professional with thirty years of experience declares that all of the conditions necessary for revolution are present in the US and the UK – lacking only a ‘precipitant’ such as the Tunisian fruit-seller whose self-immolation set off what became known as the Arab Spring in 2010. Confirming that diagnosis, Thomas Fox of the US National Catholic Reporter has declared in the wake of the mid-term congressional elections that the US political system has effectively been bought by the anonymous oligarchy that funds the major parties – with the connivance of the US supreme court, which flunked an opportunity in 2010 to make that impossible. The long-standing argument that income inequality is a necessary spur to endeavour has given way to a revulsion at the scale of self-indulgence of the ‘1%’.

It follows that if the Irish Catholic church is facing an abyss, so is the secularist dream of no-cost inevitable progress and prosperity on the heels of the market. And right at the core of that growing secular crisis is the fear that our human susceptibility to personal corruption may triumph over all political idealism in the end – that no political movement can be trusted.

This in its essence is a spiritual crisis, with the future of the planet itself also at stake if humans cannot find an abiding integrity. For Christians the obvious route to that integrity is through a radical and penitential regrounding of ourselves in a deeper commitment – to ideals such as the common good, the protection of the weak, communal solidarity, equality of dignity, subsidiarity, simplicity of life, personal accountability and transparency.

Isn’t this where Catholic Social Teaching is deeply relevant, if all of us could simply agree to get our heads around its passionate essence? Ireland’s deepest clerical problem is surely the almost total lack of interest shown by clergy in that teaching – and their failure to engage their people in a vital discussion of all of the illnesses of modern culture. This is surely the basic reason our church cannot currently capture the idealism of most of Ireland’s younger people: the latter cannot see what the church is for, beyond levering the state to impose its own pelvic moral priorities on everyone else.

If the Irish hierarchy is to remain solely focused on those ‘culture war’ issues, and the Irish priesthood can think only about the problem of its own survival, who is to address the question of the church’s relevance to the wider spiritual and moral crisis of Irish society?

Pope Francis is surely right in believing that until we abandon an exclusive inward focus on what’s wrong in the church, and turn outward toward the greater suffering of an abandoned multitude, we cannot heal ourselves. If the Irish Catholic Church cannot address the wider crisis of Irish society why shouldn’t it disappear altogether? Discovering its mission in that regard – and as soon as possible – should surely therefore be its greatest priority – if it is ever to heal itself.

Sean O’Conaill – 12th Nov, 2014

Why are we waiting?

May 3, 2014Articles, Courage, Dialogue, Fear of Assembly, Francis, LaityEvangelii Gaudium, Pentecost, WakeSean O'Conaill

Just how many trumpet blasts do our Irish Catholic Bishops need?

First , last March we got a new pope who admitted straightaway that he too is a sinner – i.e. fallible. Numb silence followed that in Ireland, as though deep shock had overtaken his Irish episcopal hearers.

Then we had a call from Rome for something unheard of since 1965 – feedback from the people of God on family issues. Most Irish bishops again reacted with apparent shock – and then scrambled to make a token response. None asked to be personally advised by his own flock in a diocesan conference, in preparation for Vatican synods on the family this year and next. A parlous fear of assembly still ruled the Irish church.

Then in November 2013 Francis issued his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, including this:

“I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything so that the Church’s customs, way of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can suitably be channelled for evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation. “ (Evangelii Gaudium § 27)

If this wasn’t an invitation to Irish church leaders to do their own dreaming about reawakening and renewal, what on earth are they waiting for?

Yet so far, even by Easter 2014, there was no similar exhortation from any Irish bishop.

So, why are we waiting still, and what are we waiting for?

It couldn’t be for this 77 year old Argentinian’s age to catch up with him, could it?

So, as our bishops still seem to be heading away from Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus, let us pray for the Lord to take them in hand, walk with them – and make their hearts burn strongly enough to blow away the mountain of ash that keeps them so torpid. And send them racing back to us with something more like excitement than disillusionment – as well as eagerness for that elementary particle whose absence erodes their authority day after day: dialogue with the people of God.

It’s surely time for a new Pentecost in the Irish Church, and time is running out for the current generation of Irish bishops to prove that they can lead it.

Sean O’Conaill 03/05/2014

Lumen Gentium 37

The right of all Catholics to speak and to be heard!