The demise of contemporary catholicism and the new inquisition

In 1982 as a young woman, I converted to Roman Catholicism. Despite being born into an agnostic family, I’d managed to find a faith and chose to make my home in the Catholic Church. The reasons for this included my sense that the Church was always trying to reach out to disadvantaged youngsters like myself; the fact that the Church had large numbers of priests and daily Masses; the choice of several Masses to attend on a Sunday and the fact that the clergy I encountered were warm, friendly and passionately concerned about social justice.

Catholic priests in England at that time were cool and charismatic and my parish priest, who always wore civvies when he wasn’t saying Mass, took me to Greenham Common on a couple of occasions to meet with women who were protesting against nuclear weapons. What could impress me more, as a young idealistic woman, than a priest who cared passionately about the women who were fighting to bring about an end to nuclear weapons? I was so taken with the Catholic Church that I decided to study theology at a Catholic university affiliated college and this was very exciting and also very inclusive. There was open vibrant debate in seminars and lectures.

Vatican II was changing the Church and everyone felt equal. I remember meeting with people after lectures late in the evenings at the college bar. There was always a wide and diverse group of people chatting together socially including tutors, some of whom were priests; nuns who were studying theology and lay people of both sexes. The bar would buzz with theological discourse.

We were all so optimistic and very sure that Vatican II would enable further reform. We anticipated that celibacy would no longer be mandated and that priests would be allowed to marry before ordination, as in the Orthodox Church. We also thought that women would eventually be ordained if not as priests, at least as deacons. We were wrong on both counts but I would have been very shocked at the time if anyone had suggested to me that this would be the case. I believed I’d joined a forward-thinking Church that sought not only to enable salvation in another world but also to enable self-actualisation in this world.

Gradually, however, the Church began to change. It seemed to start a few years before Pope John Paul II wrote Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the Apostolic Letter that stated that ordination was reserved for men alone. Theological debate began to be closed down by the Vatican and many theologians, who represented some of the greatest minds in Catholicism, were treated by the hierarchy with increasing suspicion. Initially this started with Hans Kung but later included Karl Rahner, Leonardo Buff, Matthew Fox, Anthony de Gustavo Gutierrez, Edward Schillebeeckx, Eugene Drewermann and others. Not all theologians were removed from teaching but all were investigated and threatened at some point.

The main instigator of this persecution of thought was Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) who, in 1981, had been named as the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope John Paul II.

Ratzinger had originally been one of nine key Roman Catholic theologians who had driven through the reforms of Vatican II. However, a few years after the closure of the Council, he suddenly turned coat and decided that he was not in favour of the reforms after all. He later turned against some of the surviving theologians with whom he had previously worked and, after he was made Prefect, began to actively persecute them and others as ‘unorthodox’. Many leading Catholic theologians and priests who were not only extremely intelligent, but also loving and caring, either left the priesthood or the Church. These included John Wijngaards who resigned his priesthoodin 1994 after the publication of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. These priests resigned because they knew that the documentwas historically untrue. There is clear evidence that women were ordained as priests until at least the mid-fourth century. Furthermore, there is conclusive evidence that they were ordained as deacons until the ninth century.

After the Church ruled out the ordination of women, it began to step up its persecution of all those who advocated the same and banned the subject from all discussion in Catholic circles. In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI (previously Cardinal Ratzinger) declared that any woman who sought ordination and any bishop who ordained her would be excommunicated and in 2010 he categorised female ordination as ‘delicta graviora’ – a grave crime which was regarded on the same level as child abuse. These measures took the Vatican very far from just being an organisation which did not want to ordain women. They also expressed a very deeply engrained misogyny.

In 2012 Fr. Tony Flannery, an Irish priest and writer, was suspended under Pope Benedict XVI and was told that he could only return to ministry if he agreed to write and sign a statement stating that women could never be ordained as priests and that he would accept church teaching on contraception and homosexuality. He did not sign and remains suspended.

It is now over 40 years since I joined the Catholic Church in the early 1980s and during this time it has gone from being a warm, welcoming and evangelical Church to returning to its previous mediaeval position of being a hierarchical church with an inquisition using fear and coercion to control the minds of priests and lay people.

Recently, in October 2021, Pope Francis opened the Synod on Synodality and it was hoped that during the process of this synod the Church might move on to restore the female diaconate and to end the cruel practice of mandating all priests to be celibate which denies their God-given sexuality. However, the synod has been a complete sham and, although the synodal process is not yet completed, the Pope has already declared that there will be no change in regards to these matters. The Church of Vatican II was never allowed to take root and a new inquisition has now returned the Church to its medieval past. Perhaps Pope Francis may have originally intended to pursue reform but, if so, age was not on his side and he has sadly failed.

Rev. Debra Maria Flint is a Catholic writer and campaigner who left the Roman Catholic Church in order to campaign for women’s rights. She is now an ordained deacon within the Independent Catholic Movement.