Danske Katolsk Orientering skriver om den tyske erkebiskopen Robert Zollitschs uttalelse om muligheten for kvinnelige diakoner, at dette skaper forvirring om (preste)embedets karakter. De skriver:

… Ifølge nyhedssitet thelocal.de (se her) afspejler Zollitschs udtalelse et årelangt ønske hos de tyske katolikkers centralkomité om at tillade kvindelige diakoner. I samme forbindelse udtalte ærkebiskoppen, at Den katolske Kirke er nødt til at reformere sig for at genvinde sin troværdighed og styrke.

Konferencen drøftede også muligheden for at tillade gengifte at bestride stillinger i kirkeligt regi, fx menighedsråd, og give dem mulighed for at modtage kommunion og bodens sakramente. ….

Zollitsch’ ønske om oprettelsen af et diakonat for kvinder blev dog hurtigt imødegået af flere af hans tyske kolleger. En talsmand for kardinal Reinhard Marx af München, som pave Frans har udpeget til at sidde i sit nye rådgivningsorgan, udtaler, at ordinerede kvindelige diakoner ”ikke er på agendaen”.

Og biskop Rudolf Voderholzer af Regensburg har udtalt, at diakonembedet er uløseligt knyttet sammen med præste- og bispeembedet og ordinationens sakramente, og ”traditionen om at kun mænd kan ordineres bygger på Bibelen”.

Kvinnelige diakoner tror ikke jeg personlig at vi kommer til å få. Og at «gjengifte ikke kan motta kommunion eller botens sakramente» er det faktisk noen katolikker som ikke kjenner til.

Jeg har nå lest 2/3 av Eamon Duffys bok «The Stripping of the Altars». Jeg er ferdig med første halvdel av boka, som tar for seg kirkelig og liturgisk praksis i England fram til 1530, og kommet et stykke inn i hva som skjedde etter kong Henriks brudd med paven, lest om flere av reformene (men det var ganske uklart de første årene om de protestantiske tendensene kom til å føre fram til endelige resultater. Jeg har bl.a. lest at hl Thomas Beckets relikvier i Canterbury var blitt ødelagt; graven åpnet, beina knust og spredd for alle vinder. Slik skriver Wikipedia om denne viktige boka:

…. The main thesis of Duffy’s book is that the Roman Catholic faith was in rude and lively health prior to the English Reformation. Duffy’s argument was written as a counterpoint to the prevailing historical belief that the Roman Catholic faith in England was a decaying force, theologically spent and unable to provide sufficient spiritual sustenance for the population at large.

Taking a broad range of evidence (accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books, graffiti, etc.), Duffy argues that every aspect of religious life prior to the Reformation was undertaken with well-meaning piety. Feast days were celebrated, fasts solemnly observed, churches decorated, images venerated, candles lit and prayers for the dead recited with regularity. Pre-Reformation Catholicism was, he argues, a deeply popular religion, practiced by all sections of society, whether noble or peasant. Earlier historians’ claims that English religious practice was becoming more individualised (with different strata of society having radically different religious lives) is contested by Duffy insisting on the continuing ‘corporate’ nature of the late medieval Catholic Church, i.e. where all members were consciously and willingly part of a single institution.

Much previous historical work on the Reformation, says Duffy, assumed it was a straightforward progression from the decaying Catholicism to the more morally pure but also more functional Protestantism. Duffy acknowledges that his thesis demands explanation of how, given the popularity of Catholicism, Protestantism was able to wipe away centuries of accumulated tradition, and do so in an incredibly short space of time. Duffy does this by proposing what he feels are a number of salient explanations — the political power of the militant Protestant clergy undertaking visitations to England’s parishes and that continued loyalty to the monarch allowed the word of the King to play a significant role in influencing public behaviour. Duffy also articulates the fact that while Catholics had the capability of rebelling against laws and edicts it was difficult for such rebellion to be sustained; there were simply no concepts of revolution or working-class solidarity by which Catholics could provide continued resistance to unpopular events.

The second part of Duffy’s book concentrates on the accelerated implementation of Protestantism in the mid sixteenth century. It charts how society reacted to Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan reform and the changes in religious practice this entailed. Duffy uncovers a succession of records, notes and images that individually reveal an assortment of changes to liturgy and custom but taken together build up to demonstrate a colossal change in English religious practice.

So we see how candlesticks and church plate had to be melted down and sold off, altar tables removed, rood screens defaced or torn down and chasubles unstitched. How walls were whitewashed, relics discarded and paintings of saints hidden in parishioners’ houses. And we also read how the other aspects of the Catholic community, such as the guild groups or particular local feast days, quickly collapsed without the economic or religious practices on which they depended. It was a painful process for Catholics, and Duffy vividly illustrates the confusion and disappointment of Catholics stripped of their familiar spiritual nourishment. …

Eamon Duffy kjenner kirkehistorien svært godt, og skriver i sin artikkelsamling «Faith of Our Fathers» om hvordan prestene hadde vært i middelalderen, og hvordan dette forandret seg med motreformasjonen:

The humble massing-priest of the Middle Ages, a sort of spiritual plumber called in only to do a job and paid off at the servant’s entrance, had acquired a mystique formerly limited to the religious. In the process, the priesthood was monasticized — clerical training, clerical dress, clerical culture, clerical spirituality were all designed to mark off the priest’s vocation and state of life as unique, mysterious, awesome in its responsibility and privilege. Friendships between priests and their parishioners were discouraged (only partly in the interests of maintaining celibacy). The priest was indeed like Melchizedek, without parentage, without roots, a man apart from other men (and especially women!).

It was a noble ideal, and carried with it the notion of the priest as lonely spiritual warrior or explorer, spending long days and nights on his knees, suffering for his people, enduring loneliness and spiritual pain for their sakes. …

I dag har mange (mest typisk for 70- og 80-tallet) enda et ideal for hvordan prestene skal være:

By contrast, we increasingly demand of our clergy that they should be animators, not masters, that they should be approachable, friendly, involved, on first-name terms. There is often among lay people a cruel naïveté about the demands that these new expectations place on clergy. We need to understand the scale of Trent’s achievement, in its refashioning and elevation of priesthood, but we need also to grasp the price and the methods which that achievement demanded. We need also to understand that the Tridentine vision is slowly but surely collapsing under the joint pressures of theological and social change. Without Tridentine structures and attitudes, we cannot have Tridentine priesthood: we cannot have our cake and eat it.

The Middle Ages had a vision of priesthood which was modest and limited. The priest was to be to the Church what the local blacksmith or carpenter was to the secular community, a conscientious workman providing essential services. He must provide with decency the sacraments and sacramentals, he must instill the bare essentials of Christian doctrine and morals into his people, dispense charity to the poor, make peace when neighbours quarrelled, avoid open scandal in his private life. He was not expected to be a preacher, or a guru, nor indeed, in any very serious sense, a spiritual expert of any sort.

Trent and the Counter-Reformation had a different, more exalted vision. The priest was to be a man apart for the people, but, it followed, also a man apart from the people: his life must be conformed to the miracle he performed each day at the altar. He was to be a man of prayer, an example of personal sanctity. He was to be expert in theology and ethics, a spiritual guide to others, and the voice of a teaching magisterium which was ever more detailed and comprehensive in its concerns. When in doubt, you should ask the priest. He was, in fact, to be what the Middle Ages had expected in a monk, though he was expected to live without the support of community.

Our present system of clerical training was designed to provide that sort of priest: it is the product of the Tridentine moment, a moment that lasted from 1560 to 1960, and those of us whose Catholicism was formed by it owe it a profound debt of gratitude. But the Tridentine moment is passing, perhaps has already passed. The sort of expertise the Tridentine priest was expected to have is now within the reach of us all, and in the West we do not need or at any rate no longer want the sort of clerical guru which Trent set itself to produce. As society changes, as the Church calls on all the laity to claim and exercise their priesthood, and as we discover that the charisms which help form the life of the Church can be given to all and not just to the clergy, we are confronted with an urgent need to reimagine the ordained priesthood, as the Counter-Reformation reimagined and reinvented it. ….

Etter konsilet kastet mange katolikker vrak på Kirkens tradisjoner, skriver Eamon Duffy. Duffy er ingen forsvarer av Kirken slik den hadde blitt i 1960, men han er samtidig svært kritisk til måten man kastet vrak på tradisjonen etter Konsilet – og at man ikke erstattet det man kastet med andre elementer fra Kirkens skattkammer. Han skriver mot slutten av sitt forord i boka ‘Faith of Our Fathers’:

It is a mystery because by and large in the past Catholic theologians advocating change, even radical change, have been as anxious to invoke the notion of tradition as those seeking to maintain the status quo. At the heart of the ‘New Theology’ of De Lubac, Congar and the other theological midwives of the Council, was a passionate call to rediscover the tradition. They set about freeing the Church from the narrow straitjacket of a debased nineteenth-century neo-scholasticism by opening up the riches of the deep tradition of the Church, in the scriptures, the liturgy, the Fathers. For them the past was not a sterile cul-de-sac to be escaped from, but an inexhaustible well of Christian experience and wisdom, which liberated theology and the Christian imagination by demonstrating how diverse, subtle, endlessly inventive the Church has been, and is called to be, in her journey through time.

Within Ultramontane Catholicism, however, the notion of tradition had been in danger of narrowing to mean little more than the current Roman theology. Pio Nono’s notorious 1870 aphorism ‘I am the tradition’, was a telling reflection of the day-to-day reality of an increasingly powerful central authority, which strangled Catholic theology (and episcopal teaching) for a century. Most of the citations in the (rejected) draft declaration of faith drawn up for the Second Vatican Council by the Holy Office under Cardinal Ottaviani, for example, were from the writings and speeches of Pius XII and his immediate predecessors: no church document earlier than the Council of Trent was cited, and there were no quotations from scripture. Tradition had shrunk from being a cathedral of the Spirit to a storeroom in the cellars of the Holy Office.

The Conciliar reforms did a great deal to correct this sterile and authoritarian notion of tradition, to recover a sense of the variety and richness of the Christian past as a resource for the Christian present. But whatever the roots of reform, much of the practical liturgical, theological and catechetical reform carried out since the Second Vatican Council was informed by a search for immediacy or authenticity of experience, rather than attentive encounter with the diversity, depth and wisdom of the tradition. In place of a philistine authoritarianism, cut off from the riches and complexity of the Christian past by a mindset described as ‘non-historical orthodoxy’, we have tended to substitute a non-historical liberalism, which has even less to offer.

Reaction was inevitable, and drew strength from the fact that the years immediately before the Council proved to have been the high-watermark of institutional Roman Catholicism in Britain and North America. In the wake of the Council, thousands and priests and religious abandoned their vocations to marry, clerical recruitment plummeted, and Catholic practice eroded. Unsurprisingly, the blame for this institutional erosion was often laid at the door of post-Conciliar change. Accordingly, over the last 20 years there has been a growing call for ‘restoration’, endorsed at the highest levels of the Church, and manifesting itself in a revived clericalism and a strong-arm exercise of ecclesiastical authority which many find deeply alienating. ‘Tradition’ has become a fraught and difficult term, invoked by self-styled ‘traditionalists’, to call a halt to change and herald a return to the forms and mindset of the recent past, rather than as a resource for change.

The essays in this book were written out of a quite contrary conviction, that an understanding of the richness of the Church’s past is a liberation, not a straitjacket. The tradition offers us a point of vantage from which to criticize the present, certainly, but it is also a source of confidence in launching into the uncharted future. Cardinal Newman once famously declared that `in another world it may be otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. The Church’s past, in all its complexity and contradictoriness, is abundant evidence that change, not stasis, is the sign of life. …

Eamon Duffy er en dyktig kirkehistoriker; har studert katolske praksis i England rundt reformasjonen svært grundig, har skrevet lange bøker om pavene og også reflektert over forholdet med sitt eget kjennskap til irsk katolisisme på 50- og 60-tallet. I forordet til boka ‘Faith og Our Fathers’ skriver han:

Roman Catholics have always attributed a special value to their Church’s past, for they believe that the saving truth of God is encountered not merely in the pages of the Bible, but in the proclamation, worship and shared experience of the Christian community — that complex expression of lived faith which we call the tradition. Yet in the latter twentieth century the Catholic Church underwent a dramatic and, to many, disturbing transformation, which seemed to open up a deep gulf between modern believers and their past. Anyone raised a Catholic before 1965 was formed in a Church which understood and presented itself as essentially timeless, its worship and its law enshrined (or, from another perspective, entombed) in the immemorial splendours of the Latin language, its authority structures dominated by its clergy, its principal teachings infallible and therefore irreformable. Roman Catholics had little contact with Christians from other traditions, and were indeed forbidden to worship or even to recite the Lord’s Prayer in common with them. A ‘fortress mentality’ prevailed, Church against world, which in Britain and in America was underpinned by the ethnic and social history of Catholics, many of whom were first-, second- or third-generation descendants of economic migrants, not always entirely at ease in the society around them.

The reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965, profoundly changed the experience of Catholics at every level. The monolith seemed to crumble, immobility gave way to flux. In the wake of the Council, worship was simplified and translated into the vernacular, and almost overnight the Latin liturgy, with its millennia-long repertoire of sacred music, became an exotic rarity: plainchant and renaissance polyphony were replaced by folk hymns accompanied by guitar and electronic keyboard. Catholic churches were ‘reordered’ to allow the clergy to face the people across the altar, and much of their traditional liturgical furniture and imagery was discarded as redundant. These ritual and organizational changes reflected profound theological reorientation as the older certainties of the seminary textbooks were challenged and replaced by theologies which emphasized engagement with social issues and openness to other Christians. Catholics were now encouraged to throw themselves into ecumenical activity, and structures were democratized to give lay people greater scope for involvement.

The religious ferment which began in the mid-1960s was part of a much wider social and cultural unsettlement. The sexual revolution which began then found its more decorous counterpart in the Roman Catholic debate over artificial methods of birth control, and the rethinking of authority and hierarchy with which Catholics were wrestling was inevitably influenced by the widespread suspicion of power and the structures of power which were the special mark of the 1960s and 1970s. It was an exhilarating time, filled with the sense of momentous and life-giving transformations, the bursting of constraints and the opening of new possibilities. For many who lived through them, myself included, these were unforgettable and formative years. But it was also a time of naive and sometimes philistine incomprehension of the past which had formed us, in which much that was precious was disparaged or discarded. In this atmosphere, to suggest that an idea or an institution was old-fashioned was often enough to discredit it. ‘Pre-Conciliar’ became a term of abuse or dismissal. It is now possible to see just how wholesale and indiscriminate this communal repudiation of the past was, and in a Church which claims to set a high theological value on tradition and continuity, this is a mystery which needs explanation. …

De siste ukene har jeg lest gjennom de nokså ulike kapitlene (de begynte som artikler i tidsskriftet ‘Priests and People’) i boka: Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition, by Eamon Duffy, Continuum. 187 pp. I First Things kan vi lese en anmeldelse av boka, som begynner slik:

Faith of our Fathers is a spirited defense of Catholic ritual, discipline, and communal observance—of the ways in which the collective wisdom of Christian tradition is passed on from one generation to another. “After thirty-five years of studying and teaching the theology and history of the Church,” writes Eamon Duffy, “I find myself living more and more out of resources acquired not in the lecture room or library, nor even at the post-conciliar liturgy, but in the narrow Catholicism of my 1950s childhood, warts and all.” This insight, says Duffy, “springs . . . from growing appreciation of just how much of the essence of Catholicism my provincial Irish childhood transmitted to me. For all its apparent narrowness, it bore stronger witness than many modern forms of Catholicism to realities which have come to seem to me infinitely precious. Its ritual absolutes and rules look legalistic, rubric-mad today: but they spoke with a sure confidence of the sacramentality of life, the rootedness of the sacred not in pious feelings of ‘spirituality,’ not in our heads or even exclusively our hearts, but in the gritty and messy realities of life, birth, death, water and stone and fire, bread and wine.”

Eamon Duffy is no traditionalist, mind you. He is calling neither for the restoration of the Tridentine Latin liturgy nor for a return to the devotional practices of past generations. Duffy is generally considered to be a man of the left, and he has been a critic of some of the policies of Pope John Paul II. Again and again in these essays he says that tradition has to do with change, adaptation, and in one place he calls it an instrument for “discovery.” Yet he has come to view the developments within Catholic life over the last two generations with mounting alarm—not because they brought change but because they ignored the deeper wellsprings that nourish and sustain Catholic piety. …