Taussig (pictured) says the closure of the seminary in his diocese was ordered after a controversy surrounding the reception of the Eucharist during the coronavirus (COVID19) pandemic.

He also noted the Congregation said that due to the trouble the seminary had to maintain a rector (it has had seven in the past 15 years) it did not seem worth it to keep the seminary open.

The Vatican's decision to close the Argentine seminary of Santa Maria Madre de Dios Seminary in December when the academic year ends took Taussig by surprise.

"But it is a directive that comes directly from the Holy See," he says.

"As a bishop, I know that when Rome has spoken, the discussion is over."

"We bishops make a promise of fidelity and obedience to the Holy Father," said Taussig, adding that the Vatican has many perspectives to consider when making decisions and that these decisions were made in light of similar situations around the world.

He has been discussing with the Vatican where the students will be sent to continue their studies.

"We are going to discern for each [seminarian] and decide the most appropriate school and timeline for their transfer. Some will go to Mendoza, to San Juan. We will see these changes in the coming weeks."

Last month when Taussig's diocese announced the seminary's upcoming closure, he noted "difficulties that the diocese is going through were taken into consideration, in the context of the measures related to COVID-19 prevention, and the reluctance or lack of obedience to the provisions that had been established."

A large number of the priests in the San Rafael diocese have not complied with COVID-19 directives regarding the distribution of communion in the hand.

Among these priests are many former students of the Santa Maria Madre de Dios seminary, which has been seen by some to be behind the priest's "reluctance" to require communion in the hand, Taussig says.

This refusal to comply had caused "serious scandal inside and outside the seminary and diocese," he adds, pointing out that receiving the Eucharist in the hand or on the tongue are both equally accepted by the Church.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: PagadianDiocese.org

Stella (pictured), whose congregation issued the new parish instructions last month, says he would be pleased to receive the bishops "in due course" if they wanted to accept his invitation to present their objections to the instruction.

Several German bishops have sharply criticised the new parish instruction, which underlines the canon law relating to the pastoral care of parishes. Only priests can direct the pastoral care of parishes, the instruction says.

Some commentators see the instruction as a response to plans to drastically reduce the number of parishes in German dioceses.

The Vatican has already blocked the Diocese of Trier's plan to turn 800 parishes into 35. Despite this, the Archdiocese of Freiburg is continuing to press ahead with plans to reduce its 1,000 parishes to 40.

Stella says "care must be taken not to reduce the parish to the rank of ‘branch' of a ‘company' - in this case, the diocese - with the consequence that it can be ‘directed' by anyone, perhaps even by groups of ‘officials' with different skills."

In contrast, the new parish instructions encourage parishes to see themselves above all as a "missionary community," he says.

German bishops's responses to the instruction vary, with some expressing gratitude for the text, others are less positive.

One bishop sees the instruction as a "strong brake on the motivation and appreciation of the services of lay people.'

He fears the text indicates a "conversion to clericalisation" because it emphasizes the priest's role in directing parishes.

A theologian is taking another view, defending the Vatican intervention, saying: "The German criticism completely misses the actual concern of the instruction: the pastoral conversion to a missionary footing."

"But precisely this basic concern of Pope Francis would be highly topical in view of the disturbing recently published numbers of departures from the Church."

The numbers he refers to are statistics issued last month which show a record number of Catholics left the Church in Germany in 2019.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: National Catholic Register

The move by Archbishop Stephan Burger of Freiburg comes in the face of the Vatican blocking a similar plan in another German diocese.

Burger says creating the mega parishes is an adequate response to the challenges facing our archdiocese.

"At the moment, I see no reason to make any changes to the objectives and the main features of the project," he said.

On its website, the archdiocese uses Canon Law to argue for the mega parishes.

"According to canon 515 §2 it is ‘the diocesan bishop alone' who can establish, abolish or change parishes; provided due process is adhered to.

"Despite the present suspension of the implementation of the decisions of the Trier synodal assembly, we believe that neither the Congregation for the Clergy nor the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts will restrict this fundamental right of the bishop to exercise his pastoral ministry."

The Archdiocese of Freiburg, has almost 1,000 priests and serves 1.8 million Catholics.

Official statistics published in June say 22,287 people formally left the Church in the archdiocese in 2019.

The Vatican intervened last month to stop the Diocese of Trier from merging its 887 parishes into 35 larger parishes.

The intervention by the Vatican stopping the move by the Trier diocese came following a three-year diocesan synod.

The Vatican's Congregation for Clergy and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts raised concerns about "the role of the pastor in the leadership team of the parish, the service of other priests, the conception of the parish bodies, the size of the future parishes and the speed of implementation."

A final decision by the Freiburg archdiocese is due by the end of the year.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: Catholic News Agency

Stella, who is the prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, believes if the laity were more involved in priestly formation, the crisis facing the church would not be so grave.

In his view, clericalism has led to "a distorted view of authority" that has contributed to the Church's problems of sexual abuse and the abuse of power and conscience.

"Even the work of the dicastery attests that many situations in the lives of priests — generated by loneliness, tiredness and misunderstandings — would not have degenerated or would have been addressed in time if there had been listening, accompaniment and sharing by bishops and the entire Christian community," Stella says.

Addressing the problem of abuse does not depend "solely on the hierarchy and priests," Stella notes.

"On the contrary, precisely clericalism and often the reduction of the church to an elite class has generated an anomalous way of understanding authority that has devalued baptismal grace and, not infrequently, has contributed to forms of abuse, especially on a person's conscience," he says.

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Crux Now
• Image: Crux Now

During Msgr Giovanni Carrù's 20 years as pastor in a Turin parish, many paintings, statues, furniture and other objects were lost and then found in private homes.

Two candelabra ended up being among the possessions of former Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, according to a National Catholic Reporter article by investigative journalist Jason Berry.

These were returned by the cardinal.

The NCR story was based on a report in a Rome daily newspaper.

A special division of the Italian police charged with the protection of cultural heritage had two investigators focused on Msgr Carrù and missing religious property.

Authorities worked with disgruntled parishioners in the monsignor's native region of Piedmont.

Msgr Carrù is currently secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, a job that oversees the catacombs.

He worked at the Congregation for Clergy between 2003 and 2009, where he was an under-secretary.

Some sources say he got the job courtesy of former Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who also came from Piedmont.

Part of Msgr Carrù's role was there was to manage correspondence concerning sales of church properties and items of high value, in cases where bishops had to seek Vatican permission.

This saw him involved in a type of insider-trading scheme with an American company, the Follieri Group, the NCR article stated.

During a period when US bishops were closing churches at a rate of more than a one a week, Msgr Carrù was "instrumental" in "identifying prospective churches to buy and resell".

A vice-president of the Follieri Group at the time was a nephew of Cardinal Sodano.

The NCR article stated Msgr Carrù is considered an unindicted co-conspirator by the FBI for his role in the 2008 criminal scheme to sell American church property.

The Vatican Bank was used to wire payments in the scheme, which saw company founder Raffaello Follieri eventually convicted and imprisoned for five years.

Msgr Carrù was forced to leave the Congregation for Clergy in 2009.

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Addicting Info

In an address to the Congregation for Clergy on October 3, Pope Francis asked bishops to think of the good of the people of God and to study the itinerary of vocations carefully.

Vocations are a treasure from God, which are not made to "enrich" the individual alone, the Pontiff noted.

"Every vocation is for the mission, and the mission of ordained ministers is evangelisation," the Pope observed.

"The first form of evangelisation is the witness of fraternity and of communion between priests and bishop," he said.

The Pope also said he doesn't want clergy to have a limited view of themselves as being "professionals".

Instead, priests should be "free of every spiritual worldliness" and aware "that is it their lives that evangelise rather than their works".

"He who is called to the ministry is not the 'master' of his vocation, but rather the administrator of a gift that God has entrusted to him for the good of all the people, or rather for all humanity, even those who have drifted away from religious practice or do not profess faith in Christ".

Pope Francis added that "at the same time, all the Christian community is the custodian of the treasure of these vocations, destined to its service, and must always be aware of its task of promoting, welcoming and accompanying them with affection".

Similarly, the Pope reminded the clergy that they too must play their role in formation.

"This involves protecting and nurturing vocations, so that they bear mature fruit."

He noted that Jesus did not call his disciples by saying to them "come, I will explain to you", or "follow me, I will teach you".

"The formation Christ offered his disciples instead took the form of 'come and follow me', 'do as I do', and this is the method that today, too, the Church must offer her ministers."

Source

• Vatican Information Service
• Image: Catholic Herald

Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide was giving evidence at Sydney hearings by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Archbishop Wilson said the Congregation for Clergy had a history of hindering bishops' efforts to deal with child abuse allegations against priests.

"Bishops, especially in the US, were trying to deal with these cases involving abuse and the Congregation for the Clergy consistently made things difficult for them in trying to deal with that," he said.

"The Congregation for the Clergy always came down on the side of the priest," he explained.

"The instructions that they gave to the bishops were that what they had done had to be stopped or put aside, and allow the priest to go back into ministry."

The commission was considering the case of a former Wollongong parish priest, Fr John Nestor.

In 1996, he was convicted of indecently assaulting a teenager, but was acquitted the next year.

Archbishop Wilson was Bishop of Wollongong at the time.

Fr Nestor was ultimately dismissed as a priest by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.

This was after nearly 20 years of decrees, challenges and counter-challenges and after more abuse accusations surfaced.

Archbishop Wilson said a letter from the Vatican in 1998 indicated that Australia's Towards Healing protocols lacked the authority to remove a priest.

The Congregation for Clergy objected that the protocols did not have the authorisation of the Holy See.

Archbishop Wilson says he was prepared to take the matters involving Fr Nestor to Pope John Paul II, and he considered resigning.

In 2001, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger succeeded in wresting control of sex-abuse cases away from the Congregation for Clergy.

Since that time, accusations of abuse have been handled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has approved disciplinary action in several hundred cases.

Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who was prefect of the Congregation for Clergy from 1996 to 2006, acknowledged in a 2010 interview that he encouraged bishops to protect priests from prosecution for sexual abuse.

Sources

• ABC
• CWN
• Image: The Australian