c. 1999 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Scottish Archbishop Keith O’Brien has expressed publicly what many prelates say only privately _ there is”tension”between diocesan bishops and Vatican officials intent on preserving the status quo in the Roman Catholic Church.”I wouldn’t say we come to blows, but the tension is there,”the prelate said Wednesday (Oct. 20) at a briefing on the bishops’ closed-door meeting of the current Second Special Assembly for Europe of the Synod of Bishops.

O’Brien also said the presence of a number of prelates from the Roman Curia, the church’s central administrative body, at the meetings tends to inhibit discussion in the working groups considering proposals to present to Pope John Paul II.”It is intimidating in a small group when you know there is not quite a phalanx but quite a number of curial bishops present,”he said.

Because of this, he said, there has been no serious attempt to address such controversial issues as the possibility of relaxing the rule of celibacy to help meet the serious shortage of priests in Europe and elsewhere in the Catholic world.”Practical things have been discussed, but there’s always a lobby of opposition among the curial area,”O’Brien said.

Bishop Roger Hollis of Portsmouth, England, commented earlier that most bishops also spoke guardedly when they addressed the full assembly, which is attended by the pope as well as curia officials.”With the best will in the world, people will want to be reasonably PC (politically correct) in the presence of authority,”he said.

Synod sources said there was informal discussion of a proposal by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan to create a”new instrument”that would give bishops more freedom and authority to tackle serious issues facing the church. But the idea apparently was frowned on by the curia and did not appear in the first draft of the bishops'”propositions”to the pope.

O’Brien, archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, said he and his fellow bishops from Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales were particularly disturbed by the Vatican’s refusal to let them offer general absolution as part of Holy Year Easter celebrations.

Although the church prefers that Catholics confess their sins individually to a priest, it also permits the sacrament of penance to be celebrated communally with individual confession and absolution and, under special circumstances, communally with general confession and general absolution.

O’Brien said the bishops planned to devote Lent next year to reconciliation and to offer general absolution on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, followed by individual confession on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week.

When the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments vetoed general absolution, Cardinal Thomas Winning of Glasgow, president of the Episcopal Conference of Scotland, made a special trip to Rome to argue the case with the prefect of the congregation, Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, O’Brien said.”Cardinal Winning told him that you won’t get a more loyal hierarchy than our three. We are not in any way far out, and we had excellent theological advice,”O’Brien recounted. But, he said, Medina Estevez was adamant.

The bishops modified their plan and now will offer a service of reconciliation without general absolution and will encourage individual confession.”We felt it better to obey, if you want to put it that way,”O’Brien said.”Vatican II said we are vicars of Christ in our own dioceses, but some of the bishops in Rome don’t think that is so.” O’Brien said that the influence of right-wing theologians and diocesan bishops appointed by John Paul has acted as a brake on the reforms that started with the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965.”The movement for reform in a very positive way has certainly slowed down because of the appointments,”he said.

The pope’s reluctance to replace aging prelates in key positions with younger men who might challenge the status quo also has had an effect, he said, creating”an older church.” In the Archdiocese of Dublin, Ireland, with 1.2 million Catholics, there were no priestly vocations this year and the two of last year have given up, O’Brien said. In his own diocese, he said, one young priest may have to care for three or four parishes in contrast to the two priests per parish when he was ordained in 1965.

Dioceses are now using funds originally meant to pay for the education of priests to train laity, both men and women, to work in the parish as teachers of the catechism and carry out other non-priestly functions.

O’Brien said that prelates from Eastern Europe were”tremendously helpful”on the question of married priests because they can discuss the experience of the Eastern Catholic churches where priests may marry before ordination.

The judgment appeared to be positive.

O’Brien said a Hungarian bishop reported that married priests served as an”example not just of priestly service but of Catholic married life itself.”He also noted that no one reported any problems created by married Anglican priests who have converted to Catholicism working side-by-side with celibate priests.”Maybe Cardinal Martini is right,”the archbishop said.”Maybe we could

use an effective body of bishops from all over the world to see what is wrong in the church and try to put it right. And not only bishops but religious and lay men and women too.”

DEA END POLK