Priest barred by Vatican sees change in Catholic Church through voices of lay people

On the eve of an 18-city tour of the United States, Tony Flannery, an Irish priest barred from priestly ministry by the Vatican in 2012, told an Oct. 21 National Press Club Newsmaker audience that change in the Catholic Church would occur through the voices of lay people.

“I be an enormous believer in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit working through the voice of the ordinary people,” he said.

He favors wider conversations on such subjects as homosexuality, contraception, the ordination of women and second relationships but not doctrinal changes announced from above, which he feels could split the church, he said. But these issues, he made clear, were not the ones leading to his bar from priestly ministry.

The Vatican objected to Flannery’s statements that the priesthood and church as they exist were not as intended by Jesus in the gospel, he said. The objection was transmitted through the Redemptorist Congregation, a missionary society to which he has belonged for 50 years, rather than directly from the Vatican, he said. The church, in what his legal advisors called a 16th century process, provided him no opportunity for him to present his views, he said.

As punishment, the Vatican asked him to prepare a signed statement supporting all the moral teachings of the Catholic Church. He refused. “The choices open to me were very clear and very blunt,” he said.

He voiced optimism about the more open processes in the church associated with Pope Francis. He called the synod of bishops, held last week, a change in a “radical sense” because it was preceded by a questionnaire. That means, he indicated, the church was asking people for opinions, and the report will be published.

Although language more accepting of homosexuality failed to receive a necessary two-thirds vote, it did receive a majority and will be a topic of discussion leading up to next year’s synod. “The next 12 months are going to be enormously important in the life of the church,” Flannery said.

He urged lay people to organize and to “make multiple voices become one.” He cited, for example, a group of Irish women whose bishop proposed creation of a permanent diaconate, a group of lay people who assist priests, that would consist only of men. The women organized and protested, which led the bishop to reverse himself because “without their financial support and services, the whole thing would collapse in the morning,” he said.

Flannery said he believes that although ordination of women will not happen in his lifetime, it will develop through inclusion of women’s voices in conversations about the church.

Flannery strongly objected to the practice of barring people from the Eucharist as a form of punishment, which he believes is more common in the United States than in Ireland. He called the practice “appalling” and questioned how anybody who has read the gospels could possibly tell someone they were not welcome at the Eucharist. He quoted Pope Francis as saying that the service is nourishment for the weak, not a reward for the good.