Mick Kelly remembers the phone call from his friend in Pakistan as if it was yesterday.

"He asked me to help out this one guy who was fleeing Pakistan, and on his way to Bangkok. That was more than five years ago," Kelly recalls.

That friend - like Mick, a Jesuit priest - was asking for the Sydney-born Kelly to give a Pakistani Christian and would-be refugee help when he arrived in Thailand's sprawling, unfamiliar capital.

"It all started by accident and has grown from there."

Kelly, a journalist by training and founder of the Melbourne-based Eureka Street magazine, had moved to Bangkok in 2009 to run UCAN, the Union of Catholic Asian News.

Ten years later, he is still in Bangkok and at the helm of UCAN, which has about 45 journalists in countries throughout the region.

But it's his "accidental" job, helping the small community of Pakistani Christian and Achmadi refugees ("it's about 400 families") trapped in a legal limbo in Bangkok, that he wants to talk about.

The families come to Xavier Hall - just a short walk from Bangkok's Victory Monument that commemorates Thailand's defeat of France in a series of skirmishes in 1941 - for food, for money, for education, for informal legal advice and - not least - spiritual counsel.

The operation runs on the smell of an oily rag, funded by donations.

The UN refugee agency officially estimates there are around 97,000 recognised refugee living in Thailand. Most are ethnic minorities from Myanmar. But there are tens of thousands more undocumented people.

The tiny cohort of Pakistani Christians and Achmadis, most of whom fled between 2012 and 2014 when tourist visas were readily available, is just one drop in a vast ocean.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age spent a day with Kelly, meeting some of the families at Xavier Hall and travelling to their tiny flats on the outskirts of the capital.

Unable to work legally, they live jammed into one room flats that cost between 3000 and 5000 Thai Baht per month (NZ$140-$240), fretting away their days inside, afraid to go out lest they be arrested and sent to Bangkok's notorious Immigration Detention Centre.

One man shared a harrowing story of how his wife had been raped, five days earlier, by Thai police. They did not want their names published, and were afraid that if they went to authorities they would invite further legal problems upon themselves. The wife sobbed, shoulders shaking.

Another woman, Soniazahid Younis, spoke though she was afraid of Thai authorities, who have held her husband Zahid in the IDC for more than a year.

She came to Xavier Hall with her four sons, Shahzaib, 16, Shahwaiz, 14, Sharaiz, 10 and Zohaib, 8, to share her story.

One day, Soniazahid says, her eldest son translating, some men came to their house, in a small village outside Lahore, and demanded that they be allowed to pray inside the house. The men were Muslims, and the Younis family is Christian.

"After that, the trouble started. They said we had converted. They said my husband's name was now Mohammed. But we are Christians. So they submitted a report of blasphemy. We were accused of desecrating the Koran" she says.
One day 40 or 50 men surrounded their home.

"They tried to choke me. They cut my husband's hand. They threatened to cut off his head," she says.

"First my husband went to Dubai, but we didn't have money for Dubai visas. So a pastor helped us, he said he had friends in Thailand. So we came here."

That was nearly six years ago. Since then, the family has lived in hiding and been unable to work. They get by on donations from Kelly and his community, and on remittances from Soniazahid's elderly father.

In January 2018, the older members of the family were thrown into the IDC, Soniazahid in the women's section of the prison, her husband and two older boys in the men's section. Her 10- and eight-year-old boys were cared for by friends.

It was only in December 2018 that a mystery benefactor paid their fines and Soniazahid and her older boys were allowed out. Her husband remains in detention.

"All we want is a better place to live, where my kids can study, where we can get a job and a house. We can never go back to Pakistan," she says.

Where does she want her family to go? Perhaps Australia, or Canada?

"The country which God has blessed for us," Soniazahid replies.

Later, Simon Sultan, a 12 year old boy from Pakistan, invites us in to his home. He is sitting on the double bed he shares with his mother, 11-year-old sister and four-year-old younger brother. Their flat is perhaps 20 metres square, ancient, the yellow paint on the walls fading, but everything is neatly arranged in the tiny space.

It's 3 o'clock on a hot January afternoon and the fan is shuddering and squeaking overhead.

Simon's mother, Rifaffat, doesn't want to be photographed but she wants the world to know her story.

"It was August 17, 2013, at around 10.30 am. That's when my husband would open his shop. He fixed motorbikes. Another man, Amjad Ali, he was jealous. So he came to the shop and he took the Koran and he ripped it. And then he told other Muslims that my husband had ripped it," she explains, her son Simon helping with the translation.

"After 10 or 15 minutes he came back with other men and that's when they tried to kill my husband. So we fled to Thailand."
"They hit him with screwdrivers and other mechanical parts, they threw food at him and spat on him. When my father ran, they tried to shoot him. But he jumped over a wall behind our shop, so the bullets hit the wall," Simon adds.

Rifaffat's husband, Justin, has been in the IDC for more than a year. One day, he went out to buy milk for their youngest son and was picked up by Thai police. Rifaffat makes money by baking naan bread for a rich Indian family, which helps them scrape by, and sends food to her husband in the prison each day via a neighbour.

"When we came from Pakistan we thought we would go to a third country after one year. But we can't go anywhere," she says.

As the Sultans' share their story, Kelly nods, grim-faced. He's heard hundreds of stories like this.
Working with these families, he later says, "has been a continuous experience of helplessness as I share the life of people who have no options and who are struggling to find the best way out of a very dark corner".

"They are escaping persecution and when they get to Bangkok they are punished. They are routinely harassed by police," he says.

He's working on a plan to get some of the families asylum in a European country which he won't name but his frustration is plain.

"I want Australia to take some of these people and help them. They fulfil all the criteria. They are fluent in English, many are tertiary-educated and they have refugee status. But they can't get to Australia because for some reason Immigration has decided Pakistanis in Thailand are just not a priority."

• James Massola is The Sydney Morning Herald's south-east Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta. He was previously chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Canberra. He has been a Walkley and Quills finalist on three occasions.
• Photo: James Massola
• This article first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.

In what is both false and misleading, Cardinal Zen keeps repeating the claim that the Vatican's behavior in its relations with Beijing on the appointment of bishops in China is "unprecedented."

It is not and it is false to claim it is as even a casual familiarity with Catholic history will show.

In fact, for 90 percent of the history of the church, processes for the selection and appointment of bishops across the Catholic Church prevailed that are identical with or very close to what is happening in China right now.

Today and for much of the last 200 years, appointments of bishops are handled in a process where a local church sends three names to Rome - to the Congregation for Bishops or to where most bishops were decided on at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples or Propaganda Fide.

These candidates are assessed and the preferred candidate is then sent to the pope for approval.

In most cases, the "preferred candidate" sent to the pope for approval and appointment is the first name proposed at the local level.

200 years is recent history

But that is - in Catholic terms - a recent development: only 200 years!

At the beginning of the 19^th century no more than 2-5 percent of the bishops of the world were directly appointed from Rome by the pope.

From the beginning of the 19^th century, a process began that has delivered us the current procedure where almost all bishops in the world owe their appointments to the pope.

This change came about following the humiliation of Pope Pius VII by Napoleon who summoned him to Notre Dame in Paris in 1804 to be a witness to his crowning as emperor.

The event as reported had Napoleon take the crown from the pope with Napoleon crowning himself.

This followed Napoleon's high handed and effective rejection of no less than 40 candidates proposed by the Vatican as bishops in France.

After the 1789 French Revolution and "The Terror" led by Robespierre, tens of thousands of French clerics fled the country and with them a vast number of bishops, leaving their Sees vacant.

Church authorities with the Vatican's approval proposed successors.

Napoleon rejected 40 of them and proposed alternatives who were appointed.

This experience led the pope to commence a campaign conducted throughout the 19^th century to recover his authority in episcopal appointments, something that was accomplished as the kingdoms and empires of Europe all were overthrown or, as happened following World War I, just discarded.

But until that point, the appointment of bishops was in the hands of various imperial authorities with the pope just ticking the box created by the various aristocratic houses.

This had huge and lasting impact especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Indeed, the process of Cardinal Zen's own appointment owed its origins to this period.

This started to happen with a stroke of the pen in 1493 when the lamentable Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, divided the "New World" between the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.

With this ruling, Portugal got access to and control of lands to the east of a line in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which meant Africa and all of Asia except the Philippines. Spain got the Philippines and all of Latin America except Brazil.

With these colonial "possessions" granted by the corrupt Alexander VI went also the right - which they already had in their homelands - to appoint bishops in their new colonies.

Colonialism had begun and with it the missionary expansion of the Roman Church but with the kings of Spain and Portugal saying who got to be bishops.

This practice continued until half way through the 20^th century with right being extended to the Anglican United Kingdom in India until its independence of Britain in 1947.

Routinely, the archbishops of Bombay and Karachi would be nominated and approved by the colonial authorities - England and Portugal - only then to approved by the pope.

The last English archbishop of Bombay - Tom Roberts - was Jesuit, plucked from his job as parish priest of the large Jesuit parish in Liverpool, St. Francis Xavier.

Come independence, he resigned; the Vatican wouldn't accept his resignation; he just vacated the See and went home to live with the English Jesuits for the rest of his life.

Applying history to today's China

Back to China and the significance of this history for current challenges.

Throughout its history since the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire in the 4^th Century AD, the papacy has always had to play politics with kingdoms and empires.

Popes fought for the church's interests; kings and princes fought for their own; both parties made concessions and shared control of vital aspects of the church's governance.

Dealing with the government of China is very different because it isn't part of the Catholic world that saw deals done between the pope and Catholic monarchs.

China's political and historical precedent is Imperial China that has always found it difficult, if not impossible, to deal with difference and the world outside the Middle Kingdom.

The Communists are no different.

Why does the Vatican do it?

For one simple reason: to preserve what little space and formal arrangements they can for the survival of the institution of the church which, after all, is their job.

Far from being the cowards and quislings Cardinal Zen would have us believe Cardinal Parolin and the Vatican's Secretariat of State are.

Standing on your dignity and only making demands and no concessions, as Cardinal Zen does, is not only a doomed strategy.

It is also an approach that is completely ignorant of what the church has done in other circumstances throughout history in contexts far less amenable than contemporary or historical China.

Take the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy in the 1920s or the Eastern Bloc Communists in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Moreover, it takes us back to what happened some 46 years ago when President Richard M Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger did what was unthinkable during the high time of the Cold War: accepted that the Chinese Communists were the established government of China and like it or not, they had to be dealt with as its government.

Many in the church today - Cardinal Zen included - act as if that's not the final word on who runs China.

All my life I have known - in the Jesuits and elsewhere - what in clerical and missionary circles were called "old China hands."

I live in a house in Bangkok that was built in the mid 1950s to accommodate a group of Jesuits expelled from China.

They simply couldn't accept what had happened in history and argued to just wait till Communist China collapses and they can go back to China and resume their work as foreign missionaries.

The "old China hands" expected Chiang Kai-shek to reclaim China and allow the missionaries to resume their work.

Dialing down the emotion

Cardinal Zen not only needs to read a bit more history. He also needs to turn the emotional volume down.

His "cops and robbers" narrative that he shouts at everyone who doesn't agree with him - this writer included - does little more than encourage anyone listening to walk away from him.

Whatever he thinks he's doing for the people he sees himself supporting, he isn't doing them any good with his approach.

The value of what he might contribute is lost in his hysterical outbursts against those he accuses of being evil.

It's some claim to be speaking for half the Catholics in China when he has no actual evidence to support the assertion about people living in a country he hasn't visited in over 20 years.

Moralize all you like, but Cardinal Zen offers no path forward.

• Father Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com. First published in ucanews.com. Reprinted with permission.

The congregation's prefect is repeating the well-trodden path of common Catholic practice - the only place for a married Catholic is in a sacramental marriage and the only way out of it is through Church courts and a decree of annulment.

In my experience as a priest, there is no more decisive and divisive moment in a Catholic's relationship with the Church than the occasion of a divorce. It can be the end or the deepening of the life of faith lived in the Church.

No healthy person goes into a marriage planning to have it fail. Such failure is painful and disappointing for all concerned. Pope Francis knows this from his own experience. His sister is a divorcee.

My parents were divorced when I was 15 years old.

Talk about breaking taboos.

In the Irish-Australian-Catholic world of the 1960s where I grew up, divorce was just not an option for practicing Catholics such as my parents were.

It provoked my grandfather to warn my mother on his deathbed she would "end up in hell!"

My mother's response was perfect for the times: "Don't worry Dad. I'm only doing it because the parish priest told me."

I know from the inside just how complex, unwished and painful a marriage break-up is.

No one chooses it but they have to deal with its consequences. And so should the Church, say the German bishops and any pastor with a heart.

In their disagreement with the congregation, the German bishops are taking an ancient and well-attested approach to handling moments of crisis and testing for Catholics that is much neglected and little spoken of in the Church today: the internal forum.

Defined in Canon 130 of the Code of Canon Law, the internal forum is for the resolution of issues that do not fit the formal judicial requirements that the Church's marriage courts require.

Sometimes for any number of reasons - insufficient evidence, the refusal by some to cooperate or participate in the process, the death of parties, the serious constraints placed on the granting of annulments placed by the Vatican - the Church court is unable to operate.

And in any event, as lawyers know well, there is no rule book they can access that covers every eventuality in human experience. Law is a blunt instrument that frequently is not equal to the challenges that the complexities of motivation, intention and circumstances present.

All the more so when subject for adjudication is the most mysterious thing we know - human relationships.

What to do

People have to get on with their lives and in the absence of a judicial process, Catholics will still want to find relationships, be happy and be fruitful.

What is being proposed in Germany is an approach that utilizes the internal forum and that focuses on the God-given gift of conscience. The Church teaches that conscience is "the most secret core and sanctuary of a man. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths."

This is not to say that everyone can make up their own rules, because what conscience reads is God's law written in our hearts.

To get the reading right, we need guidance and advice. And setting up processes to deliver that guidance, advice, judgment and healing is not always easy.

That is why the German bishops have set up a process involving a pastor and parishioners where the reality of failure and the contributions to failure made by sinful people are recognized and forgiven.

It makes sense to do this at the parish level not only because that is where we all live and celebrate our faith. It also happens to be where decisions are made and authorizations are given for a Catholic marriage in the first place.

The internal forum has become one of the Catholic Church's best kept secrets. Now the German bishops are giving it full exposure.

That will mean a lot of change because it will enable priests to be in fact the pastors they have been ordained to be.

As any priest knows, it's the people who make you the priest you become.

If this initiative in Germany spreads and next October's Extraordinary Synod on the Family looks in a pastorally constructive way at an issue facing the whole Church, lots of priests are going to be made pastors in quite new ways.

- Fr Michael Kelly is the executive director of ucanews.com. Used with permission.

In both cases - a nuncio to the Dominican Republic and, most recently, an auxiliary bishop in a diocese in southern Peru - it needed police reports and journalists' questions to bring the charges and the Church's response to light.

This is an all too familiar pattern in Western countries where the denial of reality has left the Church to be seen covering up its faults and actually complicit in the crimes once proven. The fallout in a demoralized local Church is another unfortunate outcome.

In any other large organization, protocols and procedures would fall into place immediately to acknowledge such events and what the organization is doing in response. Apparently not so for the Vatican.

Head Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, told me in a recent interview that over the last six months his work has intensified for two reasons: In keeping up with a pope who scripts his own actions and talks openly, and the absence of any structure in the Vatican for receiving and then distributing authorized information.

Come something like the standing down of two bishops pending charges and court procedures, and with all the presumption of innocence in the world until conviction, the Vatican media office is paralyzed.

It shouldn't be. Every organization in the world has contingency media plans in times of transition and for unpredictable crisis situations. Not so the Vatican, or so it seems.

The challenge of handling hot-button Catholic issues will only intensify if the first six months of the new papacy are anything to go by.

The pope has already defused one of them - homosexuality - in a single line: "Who am I to judge?" and ended what is now three and a half decades of attacks by Vatican officials on homosexuality as an "intrinsic" evil which is about as bad as you can get in the Vatican lexicon of failures.

Next month, at a meeting of the group of eight cardinals who are to be a sort of kitchen cabinet, Pope Francis has put one of his burning desires and everyone else's hot-buttons front and center: the divorced and remarried in the Catholic Church.

Turned away - which they've done in their millions - divorced and remarried Catholics are punished for the failure of the biggest risk in their lives with ecclesial exclusion and an implicit lifelong negative judgment. Not good enough says Papa Bergoglio.

And there are more difficult issues to come. Women in the Church's ministry, the celibacy of the Latin Rite (Roman) clergy, reform and transparency in the operations of Vatican offices, the role of bishops, bishops' conferences and regional collections of bishops' conferences have all been flagged either by the pope or his new secretary of state, Archbishop Parolin.

All of these have been in the "too hard" basket for more than three decades. One of these with special significance in Asia is also expected to surface in the near future.

For over three decades, the issue of the uniqueness of Christ and Christian revelation in the context of religions whose origins predate Jesus himself has been the subject of censorship and prosecution by Vatican officials to the extent that theologians in Asia are afraid to even ask questions, let alone propose answers.

Those who have tried have been excommunicated (Tissa Balasuriya, later revoked) and condemned (Jacques Dupuis) for mentioning the subject.

Others who have wanted to enter the debate have, as they've told me, been cowed into silence for fear of the wrath of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and its extensive network of spies and reporters throughout the world who "dilate" (to use the technical term) or report miscreants to what was called for 500 years the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition.

Its style of operation has been mortally wounded in the first six months of this papacy and especially in the lengthy interview given by the pope that appeared in 12 languages late last Thursday and was published by UCAN on Friday.

The pope lamented the preoccupation with rules and compliance with minutiae, not to mention liturgical paraphernalia and overdressing by clerics, preferring to focus on what is central to Catholicism - the journey of faith, the Gospel and the Sacraments.

The outstanding issues for reform of the Church are well known and named above. I think we all need to strap ourselves in for a rough ride in the coming months and years. Meanwhile, let's hope that the Vatican's information service can be of more help than it has been in cases like those of the two disgraced bishops in the past six weeks.

• Michael Kelly SJ in ucanews.com
• Published with permission

Michael Kelly SJ is the executive director of the UCAnews

Bergoglio is the first Jesuit, first Latin American and first Pope from the southern hemisphere. He is of Italian migrant parents but not a "Romano" or a Curial Cardinal, having had no time in his working life at the Vatican.

He is considered a theological conservative but an informed pastor, especially attentive to the needs of poor, reflecting that commitment in the simplicity of his own lifestyle.

It could be said that the times and forces that have shaped him, the jobs he has done and the challenges he has had to face, have prepapared him well for papacy.

Jesuit

Raised in the high time of socialist fascism - a political cocktail mixed uniquely for Argentina by Juan Peron - he joined the Jesuits in the 1950s. Quite unusually, he was made Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina in his 30s - 1973 to 1979.

The 1970s were years when the Jesuits in Argentina were riven with factions and conflicts, with many leaving the Order. The conflicts were as much about the direction for the Order and the Church - as Liberation Theology burst upon the scene in Latin America - as they were about local politics. Decades of political conflict over Juan Peron and his legacy, followed by a military dictatorship, divided Argentineans and the Jesuits there too.

Holding the Jesuits together at that time in Argentina was no slight challenge. But he was also fully engaged with a worldwide impulse for change within the Jesuits. They reached their decisive expression in 1975 at an extraordinary meeting of the highest level of governance in the Order - a General Congregation. Bergoglio was intimately involved in that process.

The chosen direction of the Jesuits incurred the wrath of the Vatican. In 1981, John Paul II set aside the head of the Order, Pedro Arrupe, and appointed a Visitor to investigate and, if needed, correct alleged excesses.

Argentina

At around the same time, military defeat by the UK over the disputed Malvinas/Falklands Islands began the process of removing the military dictatorship and restoring democracy.

Bergoglio is criticized for his apparent fence sitting during the dictatorial regime in Argentina during this period. But he led public calls for the repentance of the Church for its silence over the "dirty wars" and "disappearances" during the military dictatorship.

Bergoglio has been a bishop since 1992 and archbishop of Buenos Aires since 1998. While not the largest archdiocese in Latin America, that gives him a solid 15 years of substantial leadership experience of the political and, as an Argentinean, the economic games that are played.

His time leading that archdiocese and the Jesuits during their turmoil in the 1970s should have led him to ask the right questions, appreciate the processes required for systemic change and insight into the sort of people he needs around him to effect change.

Francis

In taking the name of Francis, Bergoglio is said to be invoking the memory of Francis of Assisi He might also have a few others in mind - two Jesuits : the missionary Francis Xavier and the third Jesuit General, Francis Borgia, a widower, father of a large family and Duke of Gandia, who joined the Jesuits in mid life and because of his administrative experience, quickly shot to the top job.

It only remains to be seen if a smart and experienced outsider is equal to the task of reforming the Curia and bringing wider Church processes closer to what Vatican II invited the Church to become.

- Michael Kelly SJ is the executive director of the ucanews.com

First published in ucanews.com

Image: Financial Review

But the parallels that are of more powerful significance are those between the Vatican, Vietnam and China, both in terms of their governance and the current state of their political lives.

All are centralized, one-party states with all power resting with a few people. All are now in turmoil amid allegations of corruption and restive movements calling for extensive change.

Throughout the Catholic world, calls for an accountable leadership and transparent processes of law and governance are matched by the evidence of disenchantment and disengagement of clergy and the faithful in many parts.

Hopes are high that the next pope will do what was laid out at the Second Vatican Council for the creation of a participatory form of governance, at diocesan, national and regional levels. What has been blocked by all popes and the Roman Curia since Vatican II now appears the Church's only administrative salvation.

Ironically, these calls are for nothing more than the implementation in the Church of what was the centerpiece of a century of papal attacks on Communism - that its centralized, authoritarian submission of all individuals and groups to the state was a violation of basic human rights and, as history has demonstrated abundantly, it just doesn't work.

Perhaps the only unique element in the battery of Catholic moral maxims is what is called the Principle of Subsidiarity. Pope Pius XI expressed the ancient principle in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno this way: "It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and a disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do."

In other words, don't operate at a national level if you can do the job better locally; and don't make decisions at a regional level if you can do the job better nationally; and certainly don't globalize (do it in Rome) if you can deliver a better result regionally. What operating according to this principle means is an administration that provides something long lost in the Catholic Church: a listening ear.

The problems of the Church have their uncanny parallel in China and Vietnam. Both are countries at the end of the revolutionary cycle, started by the great figures that gave birth to their contemporary condition - Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. It's a tell-tale sign of exhaustion when current leaders invoke the maxims of leaders who formed their thought and action to meet challenges created in the 19th century.

In China, a leadership that is two and three generations from the shaping influences on their present condition - the Long March of the 1930s and the wild and erratic leadership of the Great Helmsman of the People, Chairman Mao - are now invoking his name as vindication of their centralized, authoritarian rule.

Why? Because it's being challenged everywhere in China. As revealed by the investigative research of the New York Times and Bloomberg late last year, the new leadership is anything but new - they're all in or connected to one another through the four dominant families that have ruled China for the last 20 years.

And they're corrupt, pocketing huge wealth that only adds to the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor in the country and placing it overseas for easy access and use. There have been literally billions of US dollars skimmed from investors and would-be investors seeking swift ways to quick profits in Chinese enterprises.

You don't have to be an expert in Chinese dynastic change to hear echoes of the end of an era here. Throughout Chinese history, the break-up of a dynasty has begun with the corruption of the elite, followed by conflicts and division between rival factions, a period of civil war and then the collapse of the dynasty and its replacement by the next group of "clean" rulers.

The same is on in Vietnam. Loud protestations this past week by the Vietnamese premier that Vietnam's "one-party rule is here to stay" is in response to those in the country sick and tired of the corruption and duplicity of the ruling elite.

Current Politburo members in Hanoi are spreading it around that the premier is corrupt and, in response, he is saying "No, it's not me. It's them." Dissent is already underway and campaigns, mostly over the internet, are on to introduce the rule of law, prosecution of the corrupt, participation in decision making for those whom the decisions affect and respect for everyone's right to say what they think.

In the Church, the style of operation may be different. But the issues are the same - centralized, authoritarian rule with power to make decisions vested in a few hands, no venues for the real voice of the People of God to be heard, a gathering into Rome over the last 30 years of powers that had been delegated regionally and nationally. Examples are many:

The recent imposition from Rome of a new translation of the Missal that replaced one that had the full participation of the national Churches in the English-speaking world, all done in the name of some mysterious and as yet unidentified "more sacral" approach;

• The absence of any encouragement from the Vatican, regionally or nationally, for diocesan synods that include lay people;
• The neutralization of the international Synod of Bishops as nothing more than a rubber stamp for the Vatican Curia;
• The undermining of national bishops' conferences as anything more than repeater stations for the Vatican;
• The cancelling out of regional bishops conferences in Asia, Latin America and the United States as entities for directing thought and action in their vicinity in place of direction from the Vatican.

These are all the undoing of a Subsidiarity that was fostered in Vatican II.

The major structural difference that addresses this situation favored in Catholicism, in contrast to Communism, is this: The Catholic Church actually has a way out of the mess and into inclusion and participation, one that provides a way to address issues as they occur in the life of the Church - the principle of Subsidiarity.

It remains to be seen whether or not the Vatican will operate by this Catholic principle.

- Michael Kelly SJ is the executive director of the ucanews.com

First published in ucanews.com