A serious crisis of the Church in Portugal
In May 2010, during the visit of Benedict VXI to our country, we wrote in this same newspaper a critical analysis of the Catholic Church in Portugal. Much censored, in the following weeks, she photographed her in three relevant universes of her existence and practice.
The first was what was anticipated in clear vision – a rapid and apparently irreversible modification of practical Catholics, the second what enters the structure of the Church, especially in the portrait that precedes the replacement of bishops in different dioceses; and the third, which requires a profound reform of the formation of the clergy in the face of the new communicational reality, the life of communities and the solitude of believers.
If earlier there were many reasons for problems, today’s time reveals to us a church in public bankruptcy, almost the same as we believe that an institution with millennia is wise and contains all the tools to overcome crises.
The issues of abuse in the Church, a topic of recent weeks, are not new. There is literature, good, that has been promoting the suffering of children, young people and the arms of waves of cures. But what changed, as quickly as the episcopal conferences isolated from time and in the way that justice is asserted today, almost as the ancients realized, was society and the elimination of its tolerance for heinous practices. And also the form of responsibility in which they accept themselves as neighbors and the duty of each bishop to fulfill.
The scandal that attacks the diocese of Lisbon is not only expressed by the dramatic cases, by the dramatic situation that children and families find themselves in concrete. He claims that it is in this diocese that a recognized cardinal philosopher and theologian is elected, Chancellor of the Catholic University, who, out of duty and training, could not have ceded an inch in his obligations.
There is, however, in D. Manuel Clemente an extraordinary arrogance, a classic disregard that is typical of the princes of the militant Church of clericalism. Without the grandeur of Raymond Burke, Clemente assumes a profound elitism of the cult and reveals himself in a total lack of missionary empathy.
seem that this analysis is antipathy. At all! This analysis is the result of many findings that we have been verifying over the last two decades.
In member 2008 we visited, as a member of the Government, almost all the dioceses and all the bishops. The theme was just to ask for the help of the clergy so that better information and greater protection will be provided to the foresters.
Of all the conversations we have retained in memory as country readings by D. António Marto, D. António Francisco dos Santos, D. Francisco Alves and D. Jorge Ortiga. We were left with a strong objective of two relevant groups – if one for the strong that was imposed by the Church in Portugal was imposed by the kindness, goodness and spirit of a living Church.
It remained very clear that what would become a storm, also due to the absence of records of clerics that could structure a new time. António Azevedo, D. Nuno B, D. João Lavs and D. new winds and if in solutions for emergencies.
The Episcopal Conference has today a leadership that can appear to us with the Conference of the Portuguese Church. However, the appointment of the Independent Commission, which analyzes the abuse of the last decades, seems to be in difficulty in childbirth and appears to us with difficulties in the relationship with the episcopate. And that is why it is strange, even knowing the principle of non-dependence between bishops, that D. José Ornelas has nothing here in recent days.
Portugal lived for too long the Pharisaism of D. Rino Passigato, the penultimate Apostolic Nuncio in Lisbon. The way in which one of the diocesan leaderships was carried out is paralleled in times past. The antipathy towards Monsignor Rafael do Espírito Santo, the malice in the insular dispatch of D. João Lavrador, say a lot about the iniquity that the former envoy of the Pope revealed.
However, this chosen choice once again stuck in the hands of the nunciature and managed to confirm it in the recent Archbishop Braga. A diocese is a set of communities with secular experiences. In order for these communities to be obedient sheep in the Lord’s meadow, it is necessary to read what matters in the Church and in society.
It made no sense to transfer Ultramontanism to the youngest and most dynamic diocese in the country. From Braga an Auxiliary can go to Bragança, from Bragança an archbishop can never come to Braga.
And in the same ecclesiastical movements, it also makes no sense to bring deúbal to Fatima someone who should succeed in Lisbon, the center of all nearby worlds; how it would make sense to bring someone to the Altar of Portugal who, now in Porto, understands the meaning and feeling of the believing people who arrive in Fátima.
The Portuguese bishops go out in batches of an apparatus nature. And this is bad for each of the communities. There is a lot of Church that lives and conquers every day, that reveals itself to be strong. The demeaning of priests José Nélio Pereira (Dehonians), Miguel Almeida (Jesuits), José Silva Nunes (Dominicans) or José Pinto Mendonça (Salesians) demonstrates a Church filled with joy and initiative.
Thus, the Portuguese Church will be confirmed in workers like D. Américo Aguiar, awaited in Porto, where he left a mark, but lacks bishops who get dirty in the streets of the homeless and entwine in the paths of the forgotten.
Over the past year, each of the dioceses should have been on their way to a self-analysis. The Pope’s request for Catholics to sit down and think together about the future was, however, in Portugal, of unusual poverty.
Jorge Wemans, in the digital 7 Margens, went looking for final documents of the Diocese of Lisbon and, in 30 thousand characters, he didn’t find anything relevant. For Wemans, we have utilities that are expressed in an assessment of confidence to Francisco.
In that text from Lisbon, not a single word about abuses in the Church, a topic in which the Bishop of Rome was inserted with all his strength. And that is why D. Manuel Clemente is denied kindness: the problem was not a moment of inattention like trying to pass off, the problem is really structural.
Wemans regrets, and so do we, that the Portuguese Church has not discussed anything about celibacy, about the ordination of women, about social welfare practices, about the excommunication of the remarried, about the reception of LGBT people. And we also regret the total inability to involve the laity at a time when the Laudato si’ and the Fratelli Tutti mark beyond the Vatican walls.
In short, as Aura Miguel recently wrote, “there is an inner deafness worse than physical deafness” that can only be overcome if there is “the courage to come out of oneself”.
Francisco will come to Portugal in 2023. He can come with a transformed, mobilized, able Church; or he may come with civets in a line granting an old shadow of power. It is up to the Vatican to decide. But it would not be good if, at a time when the Pope came down to welcome a million young people, he echoed around the world or all those who were abused and whom we must respect.