Twenty – First Century Inquisition

A Message of Colombian Theologian Carmina Navia About the Current  Situation of the Catholic Church

 

Twenty-First Century Inquisition

 

The attitude of the majority of bishops in the Bishops Conferences and the condemnations of the Vatican’s inquisitorial office (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) are becoming more and more intolerable. Every day there are fewer reasons to accept the positions of an ecclesiastical hierarchy which some time ago forgot the paths of the Gospel of Jesus. A hierarchy which, instead of accompanying, scatters here and there seeds of suffering and of monologue condemnations, which in addition are now important to very few people.

Recently the Colombian Bishops Conference decided that in the Twenty-First Century, when Western societies have carried out radical revolutions in their ways of living and of relating to each other, there is only one type of family…family which exists in their manuals— but not in their practices—, but which in the whole of society, if they are still found at all, are an infinitesimal minority.

Since this decision they oppose that homosexuals and lesbians can organize themselves emotionally, affectionately and socially, as they desire, as is better for their stability and social position. They do not recognize marriages between couples of the same sex, they oppose militantly that these couples can adopt and educate sons and daughters…all this with the argument that they do not constitute, and cannot constitute, a family, because the family—according to them the nucleus of society—is composed of a woman, a man and the children born of this union.

As I have already said, who has decreed that only this family exists, when we are talking about a model on the way to extinction? In what do they root their authority, to disregard the multiple types of family which women and men seek today? The church, instead of closely accompanying the current human searching, situates itself on an a-historical and a-spatial level to condemn sacred realities from those about which the Deity speaks to us.

In this same sense the Spanish Bishops Conference condemns (?) a theologian of the academic weight and intellectual solvency of Andres Torres Queiruga, for the simple fact of wanting to carry on a dialogue from Christian tradition with the uneasiness, the thoughts and the feelings of men and women of these years 2000. If it were not for the fact that these absurdities generate pain in many people and because they can disorient simple minds and consciences, the bishops’ declarations of condemnation would today produce laughter. Why do they not condemn sexual abuses, the immense economic injustices, the multiple examples of violence, the depredation of the planet, the usury of the financiers who are producing this crisis… This they do not condemn, no. They condemn practices of love and of dialogue, of intellectual searching, of renovation in religious practices. They condemn the earnest effort to bring theological representations up to date and the re-reading of the Biblical word.

The gold medal in this race of errors and stupidity belongs to the recent condemnation of the North American Leadership Conference of Women Religious. There are condemned, they are placed under tutelage, because—it is said from the Vatican—they are too feminist, they do not share the ecclesiastical thought about gays and about the polemics surrounding the topic of abortion and the end of life and the suffering which they carry with them.

How can one share positions which have lost the key to themselves, about topics as vital and as obscure as the limits between life and death…around condemnations of sexual practices which have always existed and which are diverse expressions of the constitution of men and women? How can they ignore the work and the practices of love and sisterhood of the nuns of that country who for centuries have accompanied people in their search for fulfillment, of struggles and of loves? How can they live at the present time on the basis of pretended orthodoxies, in the society of vulnerability and the ephemeral?

The Roman church cannot pretend to keep closing the thinking and the conscience of humanity, in a perpetual captivity. Because on a religious and spiritual level we Western men and women have entered into the age of majority and the search for love one another as I have loved you does not now pass through locks whose keys are hidden by authorities who do not live this saying, neither in the biblical sense, nor much less in a democratic sense. Fortunately the experience of the Deity and the approach to the Master of Galilee no longer pass through the offices of Rome (imperial city par excellence). As Ezekiel says from more of less 28 centuries ago: Those shepherds tremble.

 

Author : Carmiña Navia – Velasco

 

Location : Cali, Colombia

 

Date Published : May 2, 2012

 

Source : Email message to CSN

 

Link in Spanish : http://colectivomariademagdala.blogspot.com/

 

Translated By : John I. Laun, a CSN volunteer translator

 

 

 

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