Speaking to Sonntag, the Viennese pastoral theologian said the Church must adapt to remain relevant and inclusive.

Zulehner envisions a Church that encourages active participation by all baptised members and empowers them to embrace their vocations.

"Experienced people from faithful communities of the Gospel can be proposed to a bishop to be ordained priests so that the main source of the Church, the celebration of the Eucharist, does not fall by the wayside" suggested Zulehner.

This new form of the Church "is already appearing before our eyes" the 84-year-old theologian said.

Comfortable but unsustainable Church

Professor Zulehner criticised "expectation clericalism", a long-standing reliance on ordained ministers and full-time Church staff to handle all responsibilities. This model, he said, has created a "comfortable but unsustainable" Church.

According to Zulehner, we should pray not only for "priestly vocations" but for "vocations to the Church", asking people whether they feel called to participate in various projects of the church communities.

He proposed returning to a biblical ideal of shared leadership, likening the future Church to "orchestrated choral singing" rather than a "priestly solo".

Encouraging parishes to broaden their focus, he urged prayers for all vocations, particularly in areas like peace-building, environmental care and service to the poor.

"Let's encourage young people to check whether God needs them." He believes that they join in when they are challenged and given responsibility.

The renowned theologian is firmly convinced that God is not a cynic, but that "He gives us just as many of those vocations that we need now and today as a church in our reeling world. We should be like pastoral truffle pigs who find these wonderfully fragrant mushrooms - they exist".

Sources

English Katholisch

Polonia Christiana

CathNews New Zealand

So says research expert George Barna (pictured), founder and former owner of The Barna Group, a market research firm that studies Americans' religious beliefs and behaviours.

Barna lists two other big issues for the Church today: the steady decrease in a biblical worldview and the dwindling concern for spiritual formation.

Negative trends

Over the last few decades, Barna has observed negative trends increasingly permeating Western Christianity.

"People have become more selfish, churches have become less influential, pastors have become less Bible-centric" he says.

"Families have invested less of their time and energy in spiritual growth, particularly of their children.

"The media now influences the Church more than the Church influences the media, or the culture for that matter. The Christian Body tends to get off-track, arguing about a lot of things that really don't matter."

Decline in discipleship

The decline in Jesus's mission of discipleship and a lack of solid, biblical training from seminaries is a trend that troubles Barna.

Metrics which churches use to gauge success — attendance, fundraising and infrastructure — have little to do with Jesus's mission he says.

"Jesus didn't die for any of that. So we're measuring the wrong stuff and, consequently, we get the wrong outcomes."

He also thinks seminaries lead local churches into thinking that they're actually training and providing qualifications to individuals God has called to be leaders.

They unwittingly set young ministry leaders up for failure, he claims.

What to do now

Barna advocates for a radical return to biblical roots - which would mean rethinking the modern Church structure.

The institutional Church as we've created it is man-made. It's not in the Scriptures he says.

He is urging believers to invest in children rather than buildings. "They're the future of the Church."

"We need to go back and recognise it starts with families; parents have the primary responsibility ... local churches need to support parents in that endeavour.

"If we do that, we'll be able to grow the three percent of adults who are disciples in America today to a larger proportion."

The rise of AI

Barna is concerned about the potential negative impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the Church.

"As the Body of Christ, we've got to be very suspicious of and careful about anything that even labels itself 'artificial'.

"... I just encourage genuine leaders to be very cautious about inviting any of that into our lives and ... then influence other people's lives."

Parents should check AI and media to ensure they aligns with biblical values before allowing their children to access them, he says.

Take the initiative

Finding ways to reverse negative trends and revitalise discipleship is critical says Barna.

If we don't look for such ways, the elites in our culture will have the opportunity to shut down spiritual freedom, he adds.

This is our moment. "We either will put up or shut up. And I would suggest that we put up."

Source

• Christian Post

Fr Flannery (77), suspended from public ministry by the Vatican in 2012, intends to give his views on whether "religious belief as we have known it can survive in modern Ireland".

He also intends to pay tribute to Pope Francis for "freeing up discussion, areas of study and the search for the truth".

The Redemptorist priest had been disciplined in 2012 for publicly expressing support for women's ordination and same-sex marriage and for expressing more liberal views on homosexuality.

Although he has been outspoken since his suspension and was profiled in a recent TG4 documentary, he has not given a public talk with a question-and-answer session in six years.

Read More

In France, the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE) released a shocking report last year that highlighted the systemic nature and extent of sexual abuse committed in the Church since 1950.

This has been a blow to the Church's credibility, admitted Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Rome-based Sant'Egidio Community and one of Europe's keenest observers of contemporary Catholicism.

The 72-year-old history professor analyzed the crisis and what comes next in this exclusive interview with La Croix's Bruno Bouvet and Céline Hoyeau.

La Croix: One year ago, the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE) revealed the extent of sexual abuse committed in the Church in France since 1950. How can the Church still be credible in society?

Andrea Riccardi: The credibility of the Church has been questioned several times in contemporary history.

It has been reproached for being on the side of the rich and the employers, far from the poor and the workers; close to Vichy in France and not to the Resistance, silent on the deportation of the Jews... I could go on and on.

But there is a deeper crisis of which the sexual abuse crisis is a sad aspect, a global phenomenon that I really felt the night of the Notre Dame fire.

It wasn't just the monument that was burning, but the entire Church. And it was significant that this happened in Paris and in France, which have been the historical laboratory for an encounter between the Catholic Church and modernity.

Vatican II owes an enormous debt to French Catholicism... and yet it was in France that the Church was burning.

What are the causes of this crisis?

The answer is not simple. But the Church's illness is not only a Catholic affair. This is a crisis of Christianity, of secular society. It's a European phenomenon, marked by different symptoms from one country to another.

In Italy, it's the disappearance of Christian Democracy; in Spain, the brutal passage from a Catholicism linked to Franco's authoritarian regime to secularization; in Germany, the sexual abuse scandals, but also the synodal path, which calls into question certain Vatican positions.

I also wonder about the rupture in the transmission of memory. You will tell me that the traditionalists have responded to this, but it is the minority, sectarian response of a small Church nostalgic for a recreated past.

In your recent book, La Chiesa brucia (The Church is burning) you warn against the insignificance of the Church's thinking. At what point did it lose touch with history?

Father Marie-Dominique Chenu (one of the theological experts of Vatican II, editor's note) said that there were 86 quotes of the word "history" in the Council, an absolute novelty for ecumenical councils.

There was talk of the signs of the times, of politics, of the Third World, of revolution, of conservation. History was everywhere.

Our time, on the contrary, has lost the sense of history. But looking at history gives us the strength to face the future through the complexity of situations.

The lesson of Vatican II, reactivated by Pope Francis, is that we must live in history. This means being able to read it before developing a prophecy, that is, an alternative imagination that our society, so poor in visions, needs.

This vision will come from Scripture and from the action of Christians, in service to the poor, in volunteer work.

John Paul II said that faith that does not become culture is a half-faith. Not an academic culture, but a popular culture, a faith that is thoughtful and free, but also emotional and with imagery.

The notion of crisis runs through your entire book and yet you refuse the rhetoric of decline. Why?

In European culture, people have been talking about the decline of the West for years, and it has become a manner of living or surviving.

I think there is a link between the European decline and the crisis of the Church.

Look at the election of Jorge Bergoglio: his witness as a Latin American Catholic was a shock. Ratzinger symbolized the European crisis and the crisis of the Church together, while Bergoglio embodies the energy of a Catholicism that was not tied to Europe.

I do not neglect the years of John Paul II. It is said that his pontificate was a marathon of a quarter of a century and that with his personality he covered up, basically, the weaknesses of the Church.

Wojtyla was not an illusion. He exercised a charismatic government. To be pope, one must be charismatic.

Ratzinger was not, and he resigned, apparently with good reason.

Francis, on the other hand, was the miracle, the way out of the crisis. In fact, his message is very important, with the centrality of the poor, the end of non-negotiable values, the ecological message, the encyclical Fratelli tutti...

But he doesn't have a magic wand, either. The problems have remained, starting with the drop in vocations and the problem of the priest, which the abuses have brought to light.

Where will the Church find its salvation?

I am not a prophet, but in my opinion, hope is in the prayer of the Church. We must return to Scripture, have the capacity to speak to the men and women of our time, integrate strangers, not be afraid.

The Church of St. Gregory the Great, pope and bishop of Rome, integrated the barbarians by creating a Romano-Barbaric civilization, and today in Italy we are afraid of ten boats carrying desperate people...

My conviction for the future is that Christianity has only just begun. History is not over if we discover the deep energies of Christianity.

Concerning the crisis of priests, for example. Can we leave communities without the Eucharist? Shouldn't we think of another clergy?

We talk about married clergy, but I insist on an adult clergy, married or not: not young people coming out of the seminary, but mature men, with a solid experience of life.

Christianity still has resources for us and our Europe.

• Bruno Bouvet and Céline Hoyeau write for La Croix
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

"Protecting the institution and the perpetrators was always the most important factor for the Church. (Protecting) the victims, on the other hand, simply did not occur," said the 60-year-old head of the northern German Diocese of Hildesheim.

Bishop Wilmer, who is reportedly close to Pope Francis, made his remarks to some 200 representatives of religious, social and political groups. They were gathered for an annual diocesan-sponsored reception in Hannover.

In his speech the bishop commented, "Nowadays, people trust a used car salesman more than they do a bishop".

Wilmer, whose address was titled "SOS - It is no less a matter of saving our souls", warned that the Catholic Church would no longer be able to play a dominant role in society.

"The Church as an institution will shrink and will be far more modest. It will just be one voice among many offering to explain the sense of life on earth," he said.

"While it will be smaller, it will be ecumenical. Our faith will cover a smaller area but will grow in-depth and in its Biblical roots," he predicted.

The bishop concentrated on three key questions during his address in Hannover: How much say do bishops still have today? What are people looking for? And are the Churches still of any use today?

Bishop Wilmer said the times when bishops could treat people condescendingly "from above" in a patronizing way, "let alone consider themselves above the law", are now over.

The bishop went on to insist that the distribution of power within the Church must change.

"There must be an end to above and below in the usual clerical manner," Wilmer emphasized.

He argued people are more than ever looking for orientation and stability. He said the coronavirus pandemic and climate change had exacerbated this feeling of being lost.

But the bishop lamented that at the very moment people were looking for a point of reference, the Catholic Church was facing a pile of ruins.

However, he acknowledged there was still a demand for the Church to act as a mediator and bridge-builder when interests clashed on ecological or social matters.

"A new view of sexuality is called for. We must think again about the role of the priesthood," he said. "We need gender-just participation in the Church."

Sources

La Croix International

"We are talking about the survival of the Church," Moorhead said.

Whether women have a future in the Church is no longer a women's issue but an issue for everyone, Moorhead told the 200 women of faith at the webinar.

The question for the Church, however, is - 'does the Church have a future without women?', she said.

"Of course it doesn't," Moorhead stressed. The church has no future without women.

She noted the implications of younger Catholic women falling from the Church - a Church that needs members to survive.

Another participant, Zuzanna Flisowska-Caridi of Voices of Faith, recounted her "quite extraordinary," experience of the German Church's synodal path of reform.

The process has brought together lay people, religious and bishops to discuss four major topics, she explained.

These topics cover: the way power is exercised in the Church; sexual morality; the priesthood; and the role of women in ministries and offices in the Church.

The question that needs asking now is how the German Church's experience of the synodal path can be used by the global Church. The "big question is how we organise power in our Church."

It is "a question that the Church is really afraid of, but it is a question we cannot avoid any longer," she said.

The first women's synod will be held in the UK in September, she noted. It will work internationally with women's groups for change.

Another participant, Kate McElwee, told the webinar the institutional Church's "commitment to oppression is extremely devastating."

She noted Pope Francis' call to the faithful asks us to encounter people in a genuine way. To deeply understand and transform our relationships in the world, we have to meet and talk with people, he stresses.

"So, I ask the same of him.

"Meet these women and young people and listen to their voices and honour their vocations, so that we can transform these structures that harm our entire human family," McElwee said.

Moorhead mourned the Church's total failure "to seem relevant to the generation of my daughters." She is concerned for her grandchildren who are unlikely to have the same connection with Catholicism as she or her daughters had.

"I think the Church could be far more effective in the world and could really fulfill its social justice mission and live the Gospel if it recruited women in a full way," McElwee said.

Source

• The Tablet
• Image: National Catholic Reporter