The Anglicans who voted against women bishops showed true Dunkirk spirit

 

Now the ‘Church in turmoil’ headline will run for another five years.

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest and a doctor of moral theology.

A meeting of the General Synod at the Assembly Hall of Church House (Photo: PA)

According to the BBC News at Ten, which led with the story last night, the defeat of the women bishops measure in the General Synod represented the victory of “a vocal minority”. I interpret this to mean that having been given a vote, these dissenters from the majority line then proceeded to use their vote as they pleased, which is not the point of voting at all, at least not as the BBC sees it. It has all gone horribly wrong. The measure was meant to be passed. Now we will all have to wait five years, according to the Synod rules, until another vote can be taken, and we have a chance to finally get it right. What the BBC neglects to mention is that if you have a free vote, well, people must be allowed to vote freely. And if you set up rules allowing for a minority to block the will of the majority, can you complain when they do? They were your rules after all.
Rather oddly, I sympathise with the liberal consensus on this one. The Church of England ordains women, and has done so for over two decades; it must therefore follow that there is no theological reason for not consecrating them as bishops. To say that woman can become priests but not bishops is illogical.
At the same time one cannot but feel a sneaking admiration for the little over a third of the members of the House of Laity, who decided to resist the inevitable. They must know, however, that their voting down the measure will delay it but not in the end stop it. The Church of England must surely have women bishops; it is only a question of when; and a question of with what safeguards for dissenters. But the “vocal minority” have stood up against the overwhelming consensus inside the Church of England, and outside it too. (It is remarkable how people who never go to church care so deeply about women bishops!) They have shown the true Dunkirk spirit – though that they succeeded may have taken some of them by surprise.
In the end, does this matter? It does, in that it means that this question is still not resolved, and it would have been nice for the new archbishop to have come into office with all this behind him. The Church of England now faces five more years of an argument which is substantially over, bar the shouting. But that shouting will go on, and it may not be pretty. Moreover, there are better things to talk about; but the media will of course stick with the “Church in turmoil” headline that it loves so much.
But if those who oppose women bishops on theological grounds think that this represents a turning point, I very much doubt that this is the case. Female ordination is now part of the Anglican landscape. This last year more women were ordained than men in the Church of England, and in the not too distant future the Anglican ministry may become predominantly female. And the funny thing is that no one really minds. Those of us who oppose female ordination – and yes, I am certainly one that holds it to be an impossibility (if I did not, I would be an Anglican) – are the sort of people who the BBC and others look upon as a vocal minority: professional pains in the neck, who really ought not to be allowed to ruin the harmony of the overwhelming consensus mentioned above.
I seem to remember, years ago, back in the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher saying something along the lines of “Women make wonderful dentists and doctors, why shouldn’t they make wonderful priests as well?” As in other matters, Mrs Thatcher spoke for so many when she uttered those words. For most of the United Kingdom, that is what the priesthood is – it is one of the caring professions, a form of social work, something that women can plainly do very well. So why shouldn’t they?
But my view of the priesthood is rather different from Mrs Thatcher’s. The priesthood is not a caring profession as such; it is a rather different line of work. In fact it is not work or a job at all. The priest exists for one thing and one thing only; all his other activities are icing on the cake; the priest is there to climb Mount Calvary and offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He is there to say hoc est enim corpus meum (“This is my body”). That is his one purpose, though he may fulfil many others as well. But amid the multitude of tasks, the centrality of the Eucharistic Sacrifice must not be lost sight of. But try to explain this to people who mutter about equality legislation being brought to bear, and it will seem to them to be antiquated nonsense.
Women priests seem perfectly natural to many Anglicans (and many liberal Roman Catholics too) because to them a priest is not really what, let us say, the Council of Trent had in mind. But I hold to the classical view of the priesthood, as exemplified by Trent and the Catholic tradition. As to the brave minority in the Synod, perhaps they may agree with me, in which case, their place is here, where I stand, on this riverbank, Tiber, not Thames.

Well, they’ve done it again. But the opponents of women bishops have only put off the evil day: and next time there may be no ‘special arrangements’

 

The arguments for women priests were wholly secular. This is, in any case, the state Church: and in the end the state will decide
 

By William Oddie on Wednesday, 21 November 2012

 

William Oddie

Dr William Oddie is a leading English Catholic writer and broadcaster. He edited The Catholic Herald from 1998 to 2004 and is the author of The Roman Option and Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy.

A member of the Synod votes 'no' on their handset (Photo: PA)

Really, you couldn’t make it up. The Church of England, because of its arcane and dysfunctional, though supposedly democratic, voting procedures, has yet again decided that someone who really is a priest (that’s what they believe), and is worthy of promotion, is not necessarily eligible to be made into a bishop.
I say nothing about the question of what is known as “the validity of Anglican orders”, except that I can’t see why any Anglican takes offence when we say that by Catholic criteria they are invalid, when it is quite clear that apart from a few Anglo-Catholics, who think they are sacrificing priests in the same sense as Catholic priests do, what the Church of England as a whole thinks a “priest” is and does is utterly different from what the Catholic Church believes about Holy Orders: in other words, we are both using the same word to describe utterly different things.
Nothing, surely, illustrates that better than the debate about “women bishops” which took place yesterday. The discussion wasn’t about the sacrament of holy orders at all: did anyone even mention such a thing, even in passing? It was all about women’s rights. In other words, this was the governing body of a wholly secularised Church talking about a wholly secular issue.
As Jemima Thackray put it in the Telegraph, “as I listened to the debate unfold, hearing progressives pitched against conservatives … I found myself being too often oddly impressed by the cases made by the anti-women bishops lobby, despite the fact that nothing would’ve pleased me more than to see women enter the episcopate. One argument kept ringing true: the claim that the pro-women campaigners were too quick to try and make the church like the world.
“Uncomfortably, I had to agree. Too many of those in favour of women bishops just sounded too… well… worldly. My reasons for thinking this differed wildly from the evangelicals who think that the church needs to be set apart, not conforming to a society which no longer sees man as the head of the woman. My main concern was that some arguments for women bishops just sounded too much like a contrived government initiative to get women into the boardroom.”
Nor, however, do I have any sympathy with those who voted against the proposed legislation because they were dissatisfied with the measures proposed to allow them to opt out of having the governance of a woman bishop over their own parish. As I argued here the last time the question came up in the Synod, simply by remaining in the Church of England, you have accepted that you are a member of a Church which has women priests: you accept, in other words, that women may be priests, that those women already ordained as such by the Church of England are validly ordained: so what are you on about? “If a woman is a priest,” as I argued last time, “then she is eligible to be a bishop. If she’s not, she isn’t. Either way, you are a member of a Church in which there are now hundreds of women priests: and whether you put yourself in a ghetto which doesn’t accept them or not, you are still in full communion with them (and don’t give me that stuff about “impaired communion”: you are in full communion with your own bishops (flying or not), who are themselves in full communion with the male bishops who ordained all these women, so you are in full communion with them: get used to it, or leave. Expecting special arrangements … that will allow you to imagine yourself on to some kind of fantasy island untroubled by women bishops as well as women priests is ludicrous.”
What has all this to do with us? Well, the Church of England is established by law under the crown; it is the state Church, so we too have a stake in it. Ultimately its affairs are regulated by Parliament: if, that is to say, the Synod had legislated to establish a female episcopate yesterday, its legislation would have had to be taken across the road and translated into English secular law by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Then the Queen would have given her assent. But in the process of becoming the law of the land, any special arrangements for dissident parishes might well have been removed: last time, members of the 30-strong parliamentary committee of MPs and peers known as the “ecclesiastical committee” (who would in effect have framed the legislation) were saying firmly that any special arrangements for dissident parishes would not be accepted by them.
So what will Parliament do now? I repeat, this is the state Church, and Parliament has the legal right to act. Chris Bryant, the Labour MP and a former Anglican priest, said before the vote that a rejection would “undoubtedly undermine” support for aspects of establishment, including bishops in the Lords.
Frank Field, who sits on the parliamentary ecclesiastical committee, said that in the event of a no vote, he would table a motion to remove the Church’s special exemptions from equality laws. “It would mean that they couldn’t continue to discriminate against women,” he said. After the vote Ben Bradshaw, the former Labour minister, said: “This means the Church is being held hostage by an unholy and unrepresentative alliance of conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics. This will add to clamour for disestablishment – there is even talk of moves in Parliament to remove the Church’s exemption from the Equality Act.” That is an idea, it seems, gaining traction: if it happened, it would open the way for women to bring a legal challenge: and if successful, that could lead to women becoming bishops without any safeguards for traditionalists at all.
If those opposed are evangelicals, they have probably already opted out of their dioceses anyway. Evangelicals have little theology of the Church, and are essentially Congregationalists. So they’ll be OK, probably. As for Anglo-Catholics, there is a place prepared for them: it’s now time to come home. The Church of England is no longer (if ever it was) any place for those of Catholic mind and heart.

Nativity donkeys and cattle are a myth, says Pope

With just over a month to go before Christmas, the Pope has declared that the presence of animals like cattle and donkeys in traditional Nativity scenes is based on little more than a myth.

The inclusion of domestic animals in the Nativity scene may have been inspired by pre-Christian traditions Photo: ALAMY

By Nick Squires, Rome

 

As churches and families around the world prepare to dust off their Nativity figures for the festive season, Benedict writes in a new book on Christ that contrary to popular belief, Jesus's birth was not presided over by oxen, asses, camels or indeed any other beasts.

"There is no mention of animals in the Gospels," he wrote in the third and last volume of his biography of Jesus Christ, which like the previous two books is expected to become an international best-seller, with an initial print run of a million copies.

The inclusion of domestic animals in the Nativity scene may have been inspired by pre-Christian traditions, for instance in the Book of Habakkuk, a part of the Hebrew Bible which was probably written by an early prophet in the seventh century BC, Benedict wrote.

But children around the world need not be too disappointed – the German pontiff said that the tradition of donkeys or oxen beside the manger was so deeply entrenched that it would doubtless survive his scepticism.

"No one will give up the oxen and the donkey in their Nativity scenes," he writes in the book, which goes on sale today/on Wednesday.

The belief that animals were in the stable where Christ was born has proved an enduring tradition even in the Vatican - the elaborate Nativity scene set up in St Peter's Square in the weeks before Christmas each year has featured livestock such as sheep.

The book, "Jesus of Nazareth - The Infancy Narratives", traces Christ's early life until the age of 12 and will be published around the world in nine languages.
Elsewhere in the book Benedict, a noted theologian who has continued his studies since becoming Pope in 2005, insists that the doctrine of the virgin birth be taken at face value and that it is an "unequivocal" pillar of Christian belief.
In a section of the book entitled "Virgin Birth - Myth or Historical Truth?", he reaffirms that Christ was not conceived through sexual intercourse but by the power of the Holy Spirit.
"The accounts of Matthew and Luke are not myths taken a stage further. They are firmly rooted, in terms of their basic conception, in the biblical tradition of God the Creator and Redeemer," he writes.
The virgin birth and the story of Christ's resurrection were "cornerstones of faith". The two previous volumes of the trilogy were published in 2007 and 2011.
The Pope also sounded a note of caution over the popular belief that angels sang to the shepherds to proclaim Christ's birth, as recalled in the Christmas carol "Hark! The herald angels sing, Glory to the new-born King."
He writes that when the gospels refer to the "heavenly host" of angels "praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest", they in fact spoke the words rather than sang them.
"According to the evangelist, the angels "said" this," Benedict writes. "But Christianity has always understood that the speech of angels is actually song, in which all the glory of the great joy that they proclaim becomes tangibly present."
The misunderstanding spawned the tradition of carol singing, the Pope said. "To this day...simple believers join in their caroling on the Holy Night, proclaiming in song the great joy that, from then until the end of time, is bestowed on all people."

Dismissed from priesthood for supporting women's ordination

Dismissed from priesthood for supporting women's ordination

[Quite right too  ... Gene]


Maryknoller dismissed from priesthood for supporting women's ordination

Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois is pictured outside the Vatican during a demonstration advocating womens' ordination in 2011. (CNS/Paul Haring)

By Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) - The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has dismissed Roy Bourgeois from the priesthood because of his participation in the invalid ordination of a woman and "a simulated Mass," the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers announced Nov. 19.

The order said in a statement the canonical dismissal came Oct. 4.

Citing Bourgeois' participation in the invalid ordination in Lexington, Ky., Aug. 9, 2008, the Maryknoll statement said, "With patience, the Holy See and the Maryknoll Society have encouraged his reconciliation with the Catholic Church."

Bourgeois could not be immediately reached for comment.

"Instead, Mr. Bourgeois chose to campaign against the teachings of the Catholic Church in secular and non-Catholic venues," the statement said. "This was done without the permission of the local U.S. Catholic bishops and while ignoring the sensitivities of the faithful across the country. Disobedience and preaching against the teaching of the Catholic Church about women's ordination led to his excommunication, dismissal and laicization."

The church holds that it has no authority to ordain women. This year at his Holy Thursday chrism Mass at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed the church's ban on women priests.

The Maryknoll statement said, "Mr. Bourgeois freely chose his views and actions, and all the members of the Maryknoll Society are saddened at the failure of reconciliation. With this parting, the Maryknoll Society warmly thanks Roy Bourgeois for his service to mission and all members wish him well in his personal life.

"In the spirit of equity and charity, Maryknoll will assist Mr. Bourgeois with this transition," the statement concluded.

Maryknoll spokesman Mike Virgintino declined further comment in a brief interview with Catholic News Service.

Bourgeois first gained the attention of Vatican authorities after participating in the attempted ordination of Janice Sevre-Duszynskaa sponsored by Roman Catholic Womenpriests Aug. 9, 2008, in Kentucky. In a meeting with his Maryknoll superiors nine days after the ceremony, he received a canonical warning related to his role. At the time, then-Father Bourgeois said he hoped the issue was settled because he had no intention of participating in any other such event.

Subsequently, he spoke about his support for women's ordination, saying it was a matter of sexism within the church that caused him to speak out.

The former priest was excommunicated Nov. 24, 2008, "latae sententiae" -- automatically -- for not recanting his public statements supporting the ordination of women. He has said that his beliefs are based on his understanding of justice and equality as expressed in the Gospel, but the Catholic Church teaches it cannot ordain women because Jesus chose only men to be his apostles.

END

Dorothy Day, once a bohemian who believed in free love, is completely a saint for our time

What sets her apart from other holy men and women is that her early lifestyle was so at odds with her life after conversion

By Francis Phillips on Monday, 19 November 2012

 

Francis Phillips

 

Dorothy Day's Cause has been endorsed by the US bishops' conference (Photo: CNS)

I was very glad to read in the Herald last Friday that the American bishops have now endorsed the Cause of Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Day, who died in 1980, was initially championed by the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York; now his successor, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, is moving her hoped-for eventual canonisation forward.
Of course, anyone considered a candidate for canonisation is by definition holy and an example to the rest of us. What sets Dorothy Day apart from other 20th-century saints is that, like St Augustine, her early life was so at odds with her life after her conversion. We know that saints struggle and are tempted like other people; but we don’t always hear of their falls from grace along the way. Day is completely a saint for our time in that her life reflected all the idealism of a typical Left-wing journalist as well as the pitfalls of the feminist movement. For a time she was a Communist; she believed in free love; she lived a bohemian existence; she had an abortion which she later bitterly regretted. But as she writes in her autobiographical work, The Long Loneliness, she could never bring herself to reject religious faith as her contemporaries did in the political and journalistic circles in which she moved.
She recalled being stirred as a child by the sight of a neighbour, a poor Irish mother of a large family, praying on her knees in complete sincerity. It was when she was pregnant for the second time and was living in a beach house on Staten Island with her lover, Forster Batterham, that she received the grace to decide to have her baby, a daughter named Tamar, baptised. That decision, and her own conversion which followed it in 1926, cost her the relationship with Batterham, an agnostic; though she never stopped loving him she made the painful decision to separate from him and turn her back on her old life; eventually she moved into New York city.
It was a very lonely period. Like many who become saints – Josemaría Escrivá, Mother Teresa and Maximilian Kolbe also come to mind in the 20th century – she sensed she had a personal mission from God, but did not know what it was or how to go about it. Providence led her to meet an odd, charismatic Frenchman, Peter Maurin, who urged her to found a newspaper and start what became the Catholic Worker Movement. It began on the Feast of St Joseph the Worker in 1933. Day had found her mission. Her considerable writing gifts were fully employed running the Catholic Worker and all her heroic generosity came into play in founding Catholic Worker hostels for the poor and unemployed. She lived in one of these hostels herself, along with her young daughter Tamar, and relinquished all thought of any privacy from then on: meals, food, company, work were all shared within the shifting, noisy, demanding community of the hostel.
Day is famous for saying “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” She meant that people often use this term about others, in order to avoid their own obligation to holiness – and she was having none of it. Along with St Francis de Sales, I would love her to become in time the patron saint of journalists.

Will We Ever Know The Truth About Rubin "Hurricane" Carter?

Will We Ever Know The Truth About Rubin "Hurricane" Carter?

By Paul Mulshine NEWARK STAR-LEDGER http://www.washtimes.com/culture/culture1-02172000.htm

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter For a comprehensive examination of the truth behind the real Hurricane Carter visit: This Site

NEWARK, N.J. - The movie "The Hurricane" claims to be based on a true story of a boxer's life. But, according to a woman named Carolyn Kelley, the movie leaves out the one fight that truly revealed the nature of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter: his one-punch knockout of her.

Mrs. Kelley, a 61-year-old from Newark, was working as a bail bondswoman in 1975 when boxer Muhammad Ali asked her to get involved in the effort to win a new trial for Mr. Carter, who claimed he had been framed in a triple murder. She devoted more than a year to raising funds for Mr. Carter. That effort was successful, and Mr. Carter's appeal was upheld.

In March 1976, Mr. Carter was released on bail to await a new trial. Six weeks later, Mrs. Kelley says, the tough middleweight boxer beat her into unconsciousness and left her lying on the floor of his hotel room.

In the months immediately after the beating, she says, she was pressured by Mr. Carter not to reveal the whole story.

In interviews with Mrs. Kelley and her son, Michael, she describes how she met Mr. Carter in Trenton State Prison. According to her, he described in detail how he had been framed by the "racist" criminal justice establishment of Passaic County, N.J. A part of his story was an assertion that the police had pressured one of his key alibi witnesses, a boxer named "Wild Bill" Hardney, to leave the state so he couldn't testify on Mr. Carter's behalf.

Mr. Hardney had gone to Maryland, Mr. Carter said. If only he could find Mr. Hardney, his former sparring partner could testify that Mr. Carter was somewhere else when the slayings occurred, she recalls Mr. Carter saying.

Click to Enlarge

Thanks in part to Mrs. Kelley's work as national director of his defense fund - and a hit song by Bob Dylan - Mr. Carter was released on bail on March 17, 1976, to await a second trial. Mrs. Kelley and Michael, then 24, became part of a triumphant Carter entourage that traveled to public appearances and fund-raisers.

The Kelleys, who are Muslims and don't drink, noticed some disturbing things about Mr. Carter. He drank large amounts of vodka, Mrs. Kelley said, and when he drank, he became abusive. He had a short temper and ordered Michael around like a servant.

But Carolyn Kelley still believed Mr. Carter had been framed, so she reacted naively when, at an event prior to the Ali-Jimmy Young fight in Landover, Md., a man called for Mr. Carter's attention.

"I heard this voice from across the room, saying, 'Hey, Rube, it's me, "Wild Bill" Hardney,' " Mrs. Kelley recalls. "The name was burned in my mind. He had told me for a year that this man could clear him. I said, 'Get a statement from him. Get a statement from him. I'm a notary.' "

Instead, Mr. Carter recoiled and his expression changed in a way that frightened her, she says. "You know how a snake is crawling on the ground and suddenly half of his body is up in the air and his tongue is sticking out, wiggling, wiggling, wiggling, and his eyes are closed almost shut?

"Here's a man he had said for years could prove he was innocent, and he's backing up and hissing like a snake," she said.

The incident put her on guard, she says, but not enough. After she returned to her hotel room, she had to phone Mr. Carter about a minor discrepancy over who would pay for the room. She called him twice, she says, and each time he cursed at her. She figured he didn't recognize her voice, so she got in her car and drove across the complex to his room.

Mr. Carter opened the door and burst into maniacal laughter, she recalls. Then he went to the bathroom and began gargling with Charlie cologne.

"Then it clicked: I had to get out of there. But there he was, between me and the door," she said.

"I didn't see it coming," she says of the punch that floored her. "I felt everything getting dark. I remember praying to Allah, 'Please help me,' and apparently Allah rolled me over, and he kicked me in the back instead of kicking my guts out. Allah saved my life."

Shortly thereafter, she says, her son was called to the room by other members of the entourage. "My mother was lying on the floor near the door. She was in a fetal position with her back to that door," he said.

The members of the security team suggested she had fallen, Mr. Kelley recalls, "but there was nothing in the room where you might fall and hit your back on, like a dresser."

He said Mr. Carter denied hitting her. Mr. Kelley took his mother to a room and iced down the large lump on her cheek and the black eyes. The next day, he put her on a plane back to Newark.

She collapsed when she got off the plane and had to be given oxygen by flight attendants. She checked into a hospital and was in traction a month later for her back injuries.

Rumors of the beating were starting to get out. Finally, Chuck Stone, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, broke the story of the beating in a front-page article.

After Mr. Stone's column ran, the beating became a national story. Mr. Carter's celebrity support melted away. Even worse for Mr. Carter, his seeming paranoia about "Wild Bill" Hardney turned out not to be paranoia after all.

At Mr. Carter's second trial, Mr. Hardney testified that Mr. Carter had asked him to back up a false alibi that had him drinking at a bar called the Nite Spot at the time of the killings. Three other Carter alibi witnesses also testified that they had lied at the first trial.

Then there was the matter of the recantation of Alfred Bello, the eyewitness who in the first trial testified that he had seen Mr. Carter leaving the murder scene but who later said he had made up that story. At the second trial, he recanted his recantation, saying he had been offered money by people close to Mr. Carter.

The jury quickly convicted Mr. Carter and co-defendant John Artis once again. The movie skips over these events, other than to state incorrectly that the second trial was before an all-white jury.

Mr. Carter has given several versions of what happened that night with Mrs. Kelley in his motel room. He said in his authorized biography that Mrs. Kelley faked the beating because they were having an affair. He also told WNEW-TV's Marvin Scott in June 1976 that Mrs. Kelley made up the story because she wanted to blackmail him out of $250,000.

One problem for Mr. Carter: Her son's account is supported by the records of her extensive injuries. A court also found that Mr. Carter beat Mrs. Kelley. Passaic County Judge William Marchese held hearings on the incident in July 1976 and changed the terms of Mr. Carter's bail after determining that the assault had occurred.

Mrs. Kelley says she chose to speak out because she is appalled that the national media are ignoring the facts of the case. She saw Mr. Carter on the recent telecast of the Golden Globe awards lecturing the show-biz audience on love.

"I sat there and my heart was beating out of my chest. I was in pain. How dare you talk about love? You can't love anyone, even yourself," Mrs. Kelley says.

Mr. Carter was convicted by two juries, but had his conviction overturned by a federal judge who had a reputation for being among the most pro-defense judges in the nation.

The prosecutor could have tried him a third time if the case had not been 22 years old at the time. So the jury is still out on just who killed those three people on that night in 1966.

But Mrs. Kelley is no longer among those who believe Mr. Carter was framed. "If he could do that to me, a woman who was no threat to him, then he has erased in my mind any doubt that he could kill three or four innocent people," she says.

Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.

Break the seal of confession? NEVER!!!

Break the seal of confession? NEVER!!!

 

 

CWN - November 16, 2012

From Our Store: Liturgical Year 2011-2012, Vol. 6: Ordinary Time Completed (eBook)

Australian editorial writers have stepped up the pressure on Church leaders to discard the confessional seal in cases of sexual abuse. Claiming that the seal may protect abusers—a proposition for which no evidence has been produced—pundits argued that a federal investigative commission should force priests to disclose the content of confessions, and suggested that the Church should voluntarily set aside the seal. Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, who has said that the seal is inviolable, has been a particular target of criticism. The cardinal’s direct and sometimes combative style makes him an easy target, some critics observed. In his own comments on the uproar, Cardinal Pell said that sex-abuse reports “filled me with horror.” He said that he was “ashamed” of involvement of Catholic priests in abuse. “I am not interested in denying the extent of wrongdoing in the Catholic Church,” he said. Nevertheless, the cardinal repeated: “the seal of Confession is inviolable.” He added that Australian law clearly respects the seal, and any assault on the seal is an assault on religious freedom. Australia’s leading Anglican prelate, Archbishop Phillip Aspinwall of Queensland, complicated matters by saying that the confessional seal does not prevent priests from reporting abuse. Cardinal Pell has been at pains to point out that priests can and should report any abuse that comes to their attention outside the confessional.