(RNS) If you think the Catholic soap opera will go off the air soon, think again. We may be watching another Reformation at work — except this time, the Catholics who don’t walk away are getting excommunicated.
Some date the Reformation to Martin Luther’s 1510 trip to Rome. The Catholic Church was raising funds to build St. Peter’s Basilica by selling indulgences. Legalities overtook common sense (you could buy your way out of a smorgasbord of sins) and theological ignorance abounded. So when Luther met indulgence salesman Johannes Tetzel, he’d had enough.
The rest, as they say, is history. Luther wasn’t the only protesting reformer. They burned John Hus at the stake a century earlier, and John Calvin caused such contentiousness in France he ran to safety in Switzerland in 1530.
There was no Twitter, no YouTube, just well-educated men who read both Latin and the times, and gained a lot of followers.
About half the world’s 2 billion Christians are Catholic, but the numbers keep shifting. Not only are folks leaving the Catholic Church in disgust over crime and cover-ups, they’re being tossed off Peter’s boat by over-zealous bishops and canon lawyers. True or not, it seems only women are caught up in the excommunication frenzy. At least that’s what has been in the news.
Take Chicago. The Rev. Daniel McCormack was a charismatic young Irish priest with a long record of abusing youngsters. Somehow the complaints were always lost. Nothing happened until a female Catholic school principal called the cops. In retrospect, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George said he’d wished he had found something “in the canons” to take care of the problem earlier.
In the canons? The archbishop needs to check canon law before he reports a crime? McCormack is now a registered sex offender, paroled after serving two years of a five-year sentence. Creepy does not begin to describe it.
There is the other possibility. Too many clerics have too many problems with women, and hence ignore anything a woman says. That seems true in the McCormack case. His victims’ mothers complained. To the archdiocese. To little avail.
In or out of Chicago, the church’s poor media profile on women pushes more people out its doors. Even when they do things right, the church often gets it wrong.
Let’s go back to Chicago. One recent news story reports the archdiocese correctly refused a Catholic funeral for a popular church volunteer who died shortly after she was ordained for the dissident Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement. The church was actually correct on this: once Catholics officially join another religious group they are ex-Catholics. It’s not that complicated.
But then the lawyers got involved. On Chicago television, the Rev. Daniel Smilanic, an archdiocesan canon lawyer involved in the McCormack fiasco, said “any woman who seeks ordination incurs excommunication.”
Wrong. No one gets booted for thought crime. You don’t get excommunicated for wanting to be ordained, only for actually getting ordained. Were that the case, at least one, possibly two, female doctors of the church (St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Catherine of Siena) would be on the beach.
The Vatican’s official disciplinary (not doctrinal) document involves “attempting” ordination — actually undergoing an ordination ceremony. That’s what she did. But, bloggers and commentators picked up on Smilanic’s choice of the word “seek.”
So now the viral story is that every woman, every teenager, every little girl who says she wants to be a priest is excommunicated by the same crowd that could not get its act together over predatory priest Dan McCormack.
And they wonder why people protest? Why people leave the church?
It looks like Chicagoland Catholicism doesn’t include women who think about getting ordained. Or, for that matter, women who think.
(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)