The news that didn't fit
Ryan, Jerry
THE POPE & THE MILLENNIUM—I THE NEWS THAT DIDN'T FIT A REPENTANT CHURCH? Reporting the consistory of the College of Cardinals last June, the American media missed the point. Their main focus...
...Another proposal suggests a pan-Christian reunion at Bethlehem and Jerusalem, to be realized in collaboration with the World Council of Churches and the Great Council of Orthodoxy...
...The paper tries to anticipate objections to acknowledgment of Catholic crimes...
...The text also makes reference to the Galileo case and comments that further study may reveal "similar errors, or even faults, regarding the proper autonomy of science...
...6...
...But the full text of the program was leaked \oAdista.DOC, a fortnightly documentary service published in Rome, and the response within the consistory was described by an "audacious cardinal" to a writer for // Regno Attualita, a news magazine published by the Dehonian (Sacred Heart) Fathers in Bologna...
...Their main focus was on the assembly's endorsement of Pope John Paul IPs approach to the then upcoming Cairo conference on population and development...
...see separate story.] Such a confession of faults, it says, will not diminish but rather enhance the moral authority of the church by demonstrating a courageous commitment to truth...
...The Second Vatican Council and the great popes of this century are credited in the document with preparing the way for the Jubilee Year...
...His account of the coup that overturned the government of Salvador Allende in Chile appeared anonymously in Commonweal for November 2. 1973...
...Of the major points, the most surprising was a proposal that the church prepare for the third millennium through a serious examination of conscience, confessing the sins, errors of commission and omission, and even crimes committed by its representatives and in its name in the church's first 2,000 years...
...The proposal specifically cites the coercive methods used in the name of the Catholic faith in the wars of religion and during the Inquisition, describes these actions as crimes against humanity, puts them on the same footing with Hitlerism and Stalinism, and even finds a historical link: "The crimes of Hitler's Nazism and Marxist Stalinism arose from such coercive methods...
...The event was brought to my attention by Jean Francois Nothomb, director of the Jacques Maritain Institute in Rome...
...are so obsessed with pressing "practical" issues—abortion, birth control, the role of women, church-state relations—that an effort to see the church in the context of its entire history, to embrace the transcendental dimensions of that history, and to do so in a deeply ecumenical spirit raises few echoes here...
...Since an American prelate...
...Given the nature and scope of the program offered to the consistory, the failure of the American media, both Catholic and secular, to provide coverage is greatly puzzling...
...The paper asks a new martyrology which would include non-Catholics who have given their testimony of faith in Christ, among them the saints recognized by Orthodoxy and the martyrs of Protestantism...
...He now lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts...
...more importantly, it was a sidebar to the consistory's main business: preparations for observing the passing of the second millennium and the beginning of the third...
...Sinai, of all the "sons of Abraham," represented by the leaders of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, to affirm their common ancestry and the uniqueness of their God, renounce all violence among brothers, put aside antagonisms, and affirm the basic tenets of morality as given in the Decalogue...
...It is very much in line with the efforts of the Second Vatican Council—particularly in the documents on religious liberty, ecumenism, and relations with Jews and other non-Christians—to shed the triumphalism of the past and to practice humility and contrition where the record demands it...
...True, the content of the paper and the proceedings of the consistory were officially secret and as such have never been reported in L'Ossen-atore Romano...
...The endorsement was highly predictable...
...Reflections" contains other shockers...
...Editor's note: Objections did arise during the consistory...
...The multi-faceted program outlined in the document, titled "Reflections on the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000," seriously complicates the stereotype of John Paul II as a reactionary intent on consolidating the past rather than facing the future...
...Another explanation for neglect of the story may be that Catholics in the U.S...
...Further, the position paper on the observance, submitted to the cardinals with the authority of the pope, went beyond ceremony and deep into substance...
...One can only hope that attention will be paid...
...JERRY RYAN Jerry Ryan for many years lived and worked among the poor in Latin America...
...The project would be brought to realization prior to the Jubilee Year already proclaimed for the year 2000...
...Echoing a frequent theme in Catholic publications, it also asks for the canonization of more lay people, including married people...
...By implication, this spectacle of a penitent church on its knees, asking pardon of God and all his peoples for its infidelities, can be read as an invitation to individual Catholics to reexamine their own Catholicism and weed out from it any elements of self-righteousness and arrogance toward others, and to other religions to enter into a similar reevaluation of their conduct past and present...
...It calls for an assembly, to be held on Mt...
...Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, served as point man on population issues during the consistory, it may be that journalistic preoccupation with personalities and local angles distracted reporters from a far bigger story that earned more coverage in other countries— though not, in this writer's opinion, as much as the news deserved...
Vol. 121 • October 1994 • No. 18
