ROME — Cardinal Sean O’Malley listed clerical sex abuse, reforming the Church’s administration and Christian persecution as some of the issues he thinks the next pope will have to tackle.
“The new pope will also need to face the sexual-abuse crisis that is really worrying our people,” he stated in a March 4 interview with Catholic News Agency.
Another issue on his radar is the need to improve the relationships between the various departments of the Church’s central governing body, as well as with the universal Church.
“The relationship between the Church and the Muslim world is very important as well as the Church’s persecution in many countries and the lack of education in others,” Cardinal O’Malley added.
But Cardinal O’Malley also sees that there are positive developments for the Church, since it is “growing and flourishing.”
“We know that this is true, since 4 million young people are hoping to meet with the new pope in this summer’s World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro,” said the cardinal.
Cardinal O’Malley of Boston is currently attending preliminary meetings with fellow cardinals in preparation for choosing the new pope. The gatherings include both cardinals who can vote for the next pontiff and those who are above the age limit of 80.
At the first general meeting this morning, 142 cardinals were present, but 12 had not yet arrived in Rome.
“The meetings are very important because they give us the opportunity to know us better and to share information about the Church’s situation in different parts of the world,” Cardinal O’Malley explained.
“They also help us discuss about the Church’s governing body and the characteristics we should look for in a possible papal candidate,” he added.
And it’s important that cardinals with a “very rich experience and wisdom” share it with those participating in a conclave for the first time, including himself, Cardinal O’Malley said.
The assemblies are also a “spiritual retreat” that carry “a prayerful atmosphere of deep reflection and a searching of God’s will,” he explained.
As he and his brother cardinals continue to meet and prepare for the conclave, Cardinal O’Malley is hoping that it will be like a novena.
“This needs to be like the novena before Pentecost, so that the Holy Spirit can pour over us to help us find our new Peter,” he said.
In his view, the most important thing Catholics can do now is to pray, so that the Holy Spirit guides the cardinals in the upcoming papal election: “It’s important to pray with a lot of faith and to try to do our duty of being spokespeople of the Gospel and to try to live the New Evangelization, inviting others to follow Christ.”
Alejandro Bermudez contributed to this report from Rome.
Comments
Post a Comment
I am so sick of our prelates and our leadership pandering the the media and the secularists over the sex abuse crisis. This is yesterday’s issue. The witch hunts have subsided, with many good and holy priests driven from their ministry on mere accusation. The hierarchy has thrown out canon law, and due process even when accusation cannot be substantiated by civil law. Many a good priest has been kicked out of support in their elder years to live out lives of virtual poverty, in conditions that few in this country experience.
Yet, popularist prelates like Cardinal O’Malley continue to beat the drum just to prove they “that they are in control of the issue”. Mercy, forgiviness and repentance are now gone from civil law, and from the looks of it, some in our Church are following down this path.
O’Malley has now become as relevant as Rembert Weakland, and was there ever a fiasco there! Let’s hope the Holy Spirit finds a way to delay Cardinal O’Malley’s participation in the conclave. I do not see Christ in his words.
Bishops must start handling SCANDAL within their own Diocese. Yet this never seems to be addressed.
Bishops must actively promote the study and reading of the Bible and the Catechism at home.
They must enforce Canon 915 to stop Sacrilege against the Body and Blood of our Lord,
and must enforce Canon 1399 to teach and slow Relativism, Secularism, Heresy, Schism and SCANDAL within the Church and society.
St Paul said it best: 1 Cor 5:11-13.
Bishops must teach that each Catholic Home must have:
1) A Catholic Bible;
2) The CATECHISM of the CATHOLIC CHURCH, Second Edition.
Every Catholic home should have:
3) GIRM (General Instruction of the Roman Missal) for the liturgy of the Ordinary form of the Mass;
4) Code of Canon Law (Annotated).
There is no excuse for ignorance amongst the literate.
There is no excuse for the Bishops not to teach this.
Cardinal O’Malley is right about many things. However, he is wrong about one. The Church does NOT face a “clergy sexual abuse scandal.” The Church faces a clergy homosexual scandal. If the latest news about Scotland’s Cardinal isn’t enough to highlight this problem, what will be? Since the VAST MAJORITY of children who were abused by priests were PUBESCENT MALES, it stands to reason that we have a homosexual problem. Until and unless we pronounce the truth of what faces us, there will be no remedying this problem; it will remain with us.
Deacon Ed, Words of wisdom! However, the media, which hates the Catholic Church, and at the same time promotes the homosexual agenda, finds itself in a quandry. They can’t report the truth without casting a bad light on their agenda, so they have hide behind the claims of pedophilia. Yes, Daniel the scandal is yesterday’s news; but the “news” will be with us for a long time as long as the media thinks they can use it for their benefit.
Amen to that Daniel, well said and may your words speak loudly.
The Church needs a Pope who will lead the Church by God’s will and law and not by the whims of liberals, homosexuals and those that want to appease the “people”!
Daniel: you do not know from whence you speak. Cardinal Sean, as he likes to be called, is not how you depict him. I’m not from the Boston Archdiocese but have met him at several state wide KofC functions. The man is very humble without pretentiousness. He is very open and approachable and will take the time to talk with people that he meets. He doesn’t grab the headlines - he’s to humble to do that.
Go here to learn the truth about the media’s jihad of exaggeration, bias and misinformation about the Catholic church and sex abuse.
http://www.themediareport.com/
Stop the bias! Stop the lies! Tell the truth!
You know, I’m not sure it’s a question of one variety of sexual abuse over another that’s key.Kids are just easy prey.They can be manipulated more easily & are more vulnerable.Every type of institution that works with young people has encountered the same type of abuse issues at some point.
Do you see folks out campaigning against the Boy Scouts or Penn State? I hold clergy to a higher standard, but it’s the same problem & so is the type of cover-up.
I am sure that Cardinal O’Malley is a very humble man. Person humility is not the issue. The issue is that he is permitting the media, and the secularists, to shape his thinking, and the topics on which he makes public declarations.
As we speak, Catholics in Nigeria are dying when their Churches are bombed. Christians all over the Middle East are dying, or fleeing their homelands. Copts in Eqypt are persecuted now that the Muslim Brotherhood is in control. Women are on death row in Pakistan over “accusations” of blasphemy against the Prophet of Islam. It appears to me that the Pope of the universal Church has a lot more things to worry about other than the sex abuse crisis.
Cardinal Sean may be a nice man, but he has to learn to go on the offensive against the media and the secularists. We have a lot of hard truth, concerning life and death, that needs to put back in the debate. The Cardinal does have a choice about what issues are most important, and he should proclaim what is really important.
Daniel,
Perhaps you might word it that we have a lot of things in addition to worry about.
It is quite demoralizing to see the amount of anger in some of these comments. It is a fact that the church’s sex abuse scandal is mostly old news-Thanks Be To God- but it is not old news with regard to how many of the Bishops dealt with the problem. As the father of fourteen children, I remain scandalized and distressed how men who abused children in the most heinous ways were frequently coddled and protected. It is upsetting to see these Bishops retire with honor and comfort instead of to a life of prayer and penance.
I know priests who have be falsely accused and my heart bleeds for them but I also believe that they are most Christlike, truly Alter Christus, in that suffering of being innocent and falsely accused like their Lord and Master. I pray Psalm 56 everyday that justice will be done for them. Their suffering will bear extraordinary spiritual fruits for the rest of us and the Church.
Just a final thought that has helped me with my own anger and disappointment- Below is an small and beautiful excerpt from the writings of Servant of God, Elisabeth Leseur, a French laywoman who died in 1914, which I saw this week in Magnificat:
“There is a way of living and thinking that I would name negative. another that I would name active. The first consists in seeing always what is defective in people and institutions, not so much to remedy them as to dominate them, and always looking back, and in looking for whatever separates and disunites. The second consists in joyfully looking life and its responsibilities in the face, and looking for the good in everyone in order to develop and cultivate it, and never despairing of the future, the fruit of our will, and in understanding human faults and miseries, expressing that strong compassion which results in action and no longer allows us to live a useless life
Whoever searches for the truth will find God,
As we go along, let us spread ideas, words, and desires, without looking back to see who gathers them up.”
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give The National Catholic Register permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
The time period for commenting on this article has expired.