ROME Papal audiences
During one of his most recent general audiences, Pope Paul vi spoke in English to a group from the Pontifical Beda College in Rome. "We wish," he said, "to say a special word to the Rector and community of the Pontifical Beda College, especially to those who have recently been ordained during this year of celebration of the thirteenth centenary of the birth of St Bede. Two things stand out in the life of Venerable Bede, and they are things which we know you will be proud to imitate : a dedication to priestly prayer and learning, and a deep and affectionate loyalty to the See of Rome. You who have studied for the priesthood here in Rome can follow the example of Venerable Bede by being faithful to prayer and study, and by constantly assuring those in your pastoral care that the Pope is close to them, prays for them and loves them. In this way you will strengthen the bonds of unity within the Church, and prove yourselves worthy heirs to St Bede and to his spiritual brothers, to Cuthbert and Benet Biscop, Augustine, Columba and Aidan, whose names alone are a chapter of priestly virtues and a litany of loyalty to the Church."
On another occasion speaking to participants in the ninth international congress of the International Office of Catholic Education, he said that the disappearance of Catholic education "would be an immense loss." He warned against the branding of Catholic education as class-conscious or mediocre, and the claim that it tends to preserve society's defects. (Some critics of Catholic schools in the United States have charged that parochial schools have become havens for whites trying to escape desegregation efforts, or that because of increasing tuition only the wealthy will be able to attend Catholic schools.) Rejection of any Christian institution betrays a false and dangerous view of the Church of Christ," the Pope continued. "We rightly appreciate the work accomplished by so 'many Christians in state education in various nations, but we equally emphasise that pluralism in education is part of the logic of the cultural pluralism of our civilisation. That is why we encourage you to ensure that Catholic schools may be seen as places of encounter for those who want to bear witness to Christian values in all education. This means that the persons in charge of such institutions should be able to choose their teaching personnel. A Christian school must have Christian teachers and must be solicitous for their permanent formation: this is a question of honesty towards both parents and students."
ITALY Fr Franzoni
Fr Giovanni Franzoni, former Benedictine abbot of St Paul's Outside-theWalls, announced recently to a group of followers who have set up headquarters in a warehouse not far from the Abbey of St Paul's, and to whom he has been acting as chaplain and spiritual adviser, that his order has given him the choice either of living outside Italy for a year or of facing proceedings which could expel him from his branch of the Benedictine order. He described the choice as an "ultimatum" and said it "truly gives us the measure of the lack of understanding which still divides us."
Fr Rembert Weakland, Abbot General of the Benedictine Confederation in Rome, was away and no comment was available from the Benedictines. Fr Franzoni did not indicate what his decision would be, although he has already publicly demanded a Church court hearing to judge if his ideas and teachings are at variance with the teachings of the Church.
FRANCE Cardinal Danielou
The following statement by the French hierarchy concerning Cardinal Jean Danie lou was published in Paris on 14 June: ' "A number of newspaper articles have now repeated the serious allegations made against the person of Cardinal Jean Danielou. In view of the persistence of this campaign, the cardinals and the permanent council of the episcopate find it to be their duty to bring to the attention of Catholics and of public opinion in general the following statement.
For more than 40 years, both before and after he was raised to the cardinalate, Fr Jean Danielou was immensely active in the service of the Church, and achieved worldwide recognition both for his teaching and for his theological and historical writings. Moreover, everyone is aware that, from the first, his apostolate reached out into the most varied milieux and often to the most abandoned and desperate cases, both inside and outside the Catholic world. This is a matter of solid fact which is universally recognised, and a large number of people, thany of whom owe it to his ministry that they have come into the Church, can bear witness to it. Vile allegations based on hearsay, reference to requested interviews, and snide accusations do not provide evidence sufficient to cast a slur on such an achievement. Cardinal Jean Danidlou is no longer here to defend himself. Respect for the man we knew, and concern for the truth are the sole motivation for the action we have taken here. We will not allow ourselves to be influenced by any kind of pressure. Fidelity to our episcopal mission and the trust which Catholics place in what we say require this of us.
A short editorial comment followed the statement in Le Monde: This statement, which has been in preparation for several days and in which every word has been carefully weighed, speaks of "respect for the man we knew," leaving aside the possibility that there might have been another side to the cardinal, hitherto unknown, which "concern for truth" forbids us to introduce into the argument until there has been a fuller inquiry. The expression "requested interviews" seems to refer to the one, described in one of the national dailies, with Mme Santoni, at whose flat the cardinal died on 20 May.
RHODESIA Bishop Lamont replies
The Chichester Club—a Catholic lay association for business and professional people—has requested the Pope, "in the interests of peace, racial harmony and justice," to remove Bishop Donal Lamont not only from his diocese of Umtali but from Africa. What prompted their action was the bishop's reported statement at a press conference in New York that Africans in Rhodesia lived under a reign of terror comparable to that in Nazi Germany. Nor was this the first time, said the club's chairman, that Bishop Lamont had made statements which, in addition to being "a complete and untruthful distortion of the true facts," were liable to bring discredit upon the Church no less than to cause interracial friction in Rhodesia. The chairman also said that, on almost every occasion that the bishop made statements of this kind, he hinted that he might be prohibited from returning to Rhodesia and would thus acquire the status of a martyr.
Interviewed in Umtali on 12 June, Bishop Lamont claimed that he had been misquoted. His remark, he said, had been that the ideology of racial superiority in Rhodesia did not differ in essence from that of Nazi Germany's On the contention that he was seeking political martyrdom, he commented that he was "not of the stuff of martyrs." The bishop also claimed that the Pope, while well aware of his anti-government stand, had last November given him "full approbation" and had urged him to continue his good work. He added however Bishop Lamont disclosed that, two years ago, he asked the authorities in Rome to relieve him of his responsibilities in Umtali. "I think," he added, "that I am too long on the job in Rhodesia." He went on: "I have only put into Rhodesia. I have got nothing out of it—founding schools and hospitals and clinics and a teachers' training establishment for the benefit of all the people in Rhodesia with funds brought from outside the country at little or no cost to the Rhodesian taxpayer. The work is being done under my jurisdiction by dedicated nuns and priests and brothers."
Asked about democracy in the country, he replied: "Things have to be called by their proper names. I would call Rhodesia a racist state where social injustice is given respectability by being approved of in parliament. He also reiterated his view that what Rhodesia needed was a constitutional conference at which all shades of opinion were represented.
WEST AFRICA
"Afrique Nouvelle"
Afrique Nouvelle (New Africa), the Catholic weekly which ceased publication in 1972 for financial reasons has now been relaunched as the result of insistent petitions made to the Bishops' Conference of Senegal by the general public.
Acclaimed by the European International Press Institute as the best West African newspaper, it was respected for its outspoken defence of social justice and it counted many outstanding public figures amongst contributors to its pages.
Founded by Fr Marcel Paternot and two other White Fathers in 1947 when the West African countries were still under colonial rule, the paper soon met with opposition from certain quarters who resented its forthright reporting. In 1951 this faction trumped up technical charges against it based on an obsolete point of law. This was so blatantly a cover for their resentment that something of a crisis broke out over the issue. In remote corners of West Africa people declared themselves ready to march on the court, where the case was being tried, with bows and arrows. In Paris politicians and representatives of press organisations attacked the government over it. The Minister of Overseas Territories threatened to resign. In the end the authorities saved their face by imposing a fine of £3 on the paper!
Long before independence the missionaries had already trained African staff and handed over the paper to African management. Now No. 1289 of the 24-page weekly, coming once more off the presses in the little street up behind elegant Independence Square in Dakar, carries an editorial describing it as "an African Christian journal edited and printed in Africa, seeking to promote an international African press, respecting all beliefs, encouraging reflection and action, alive to all the elements that will go to the making of the new Africa".
Current events, surveys, economics, social problems, religion, art and sport are coy ered in its pages. It starts off anew with double the number of pre-paid subscriptions it had in 1972. It is estimated that 60 per cent of its readers are under the age of 35 and 27 per cent non-Christians.
Indigenisation
The indigenisation of the clergy, for some time now the subject of much public discussion and debate, has become more topical than ever since 1 April—the deadline for all foreign businessmen to sell out to Nigerians unless they could meet certain conditions laid down with regard to capital and turnover. Early in March the Bishops' Conference appealed to the government to allow entry permits to foreign priests because the shortage of clergy in Nigeria had reached "alarming proportions." They added that they were unaware of any official government policy that vetoed the entry of missionaries, and lamented the fact that for the past three years no priests wishing to assume pastoral duties in the country had been allowed to enter. In the East Central State of Nigeria, where the Church has made phenomenal progress among the Ibo tribe, some 300 foreign priests and 200 nuns were expelled from the country at the end of the civil war in January 1970. Consequently the Church has been forced to depend ever since on local personnel, all of whom are over-extended in their efforts to keep things going.
The bishops' appeal to the government had been shortly preceded by a personal one from Archbishop Anthony Okogie of Lagos. An editorial in the Lagos Daily Times took issue with him, saying that any relaxation of the entry-visa policy would slow up the indigenisation process within the -Church and thus strike at the very basis of Nigerian independence. The editorial also recommended that the hierarchy should do what it could to persuade the Vatican to mitigate the rigorous conditions—not least celibacy—demanded of the Catholic priesthood; hereby, it argued, more home-born candidates would be attracted to join, as indeed had proved to be the case with other denominations working in the country.
This provoked a lively controversy in the paper's correspondence columns. Mr Michael Ogon, a Catholic, made the point that there are now 21 Nigerian bishops as against eleven expatriates; 370 Nigerian priests as compared with the total of 72 only ten years ago; and 700 senior seminarians, whereas 13 years ago there were a mere 166. Another Catholic, Dr K. G. Mdadiwe, after likewise underlining the fact that indigenisation of Church personnel was already well under way, argued that, in the very nature of things, the disengagement of expatriate clergy needed to be slower. He went on to say that the government itself, well aware that one cannot summarily scrap human institutions without providing substitutes, was wisely phasing its overall indigenisation programme; in a spirt of religious toleration, then, the Nigerian bishops should be left• free to decide for themselves this programme's tempo as applying to the Church. According to official figures released at the end of May, among all African seminaries currently studying at various colleges and universities in Rome the Nigerian total of 690 is the highest. (The same report states that there are 490 from Tanzania, 437 from Zaire, 375 from Uganda, 199 from Kenya, 118 from Ghana, and 110 from Madagascar.)
USA
Marriage courts The Vatican has decided to extend the special norms applicable to Church marriage courts in the USA and which were due to expire at the end of June. Fr Thomas Lynch —a prominent canon lawyer who is a past president of the organisation that drew up the 23 norms in the first place—explained that they deal with procedural matters in the Church's marriage courts when annulment cases come up, and that they enable such cases to be processed with less paperwork, fewer judges, and generally in less time. There is no doubt, Fr Lynch added, that the Vatican had Originally intended not to grant an extension of the norms. It had given an affirmative decision, though, because it clearly recognised that the American bishops were unanimously in favour of the extension, that they had based their case on "the most solid information and a real in-depth study of tribunals in the USA," and that their approach was obviously motivated more by a deep pastoral concern than by mere political expediency.
Fr Lynch conceded that the norms, helpful though they are, are nevertheless inadequate in view of the fact that the number of Catholics in the country who are divorced and remarried is estimated as anything from four to five million. He disclosed that, of all clients seeking annulments, roughly only 20 per cent can muster sufficient evidence to warrant a hearing of their case; in the past year approximately 8,500 cases had been resolved—an insignificant number, really, when one considered that nearly a million of them still remained to be heard. Concerning the forthcoming marriage-court procedures applicable to the whole Church —forming part of the overall reform of canon law which has been under way for over ten years and is expected to be completed not too many years hence—Fr Lynch expressed the hope that they would be at least as good as the present American ones. Speaking about annulment as such, he said that "it is not a gift from the Church"; rather, "it is a matter of a person's right to justice."
Churches and divorce
An interfaith conference on "The Christian Churches and divorce" was held at Graymoor Ecumenical Institute, Garrison, NY, on 3 to 5 June. Attended by about 45 people, the meeting was intended as a preliminary dialogue to the meeting of the Joint International Lutheran-ReformedCatholic Study Commission on the theology of marriage and mixed marriage, to be held
in Strasbourg in December. It was the first major ecumenical conference on marriage to be held in America since Vatican II, which was perhaps why, as Mgr Stephen Kelleher of the New York archdiocese suggested, it revealed a wide divergence of theory and practice in the various Churches.
The divergence between Churches turned out to be more in their official positions and practice than in the Views expressed at the conference. The Catholic teaching is the indissolubility of marriage. According to the Reverend Justus Fennel, the Presbyterian Church, in the tradition of the Protestant reformers, leaves the question of divorce to the State. The Presbyterian Church had itself focussed on "doctrinal matters that have little to do with the divorcing experience." There seemed to be general agreement among the representatives that divorce should be viewed in a pastoral light and deep concern was expressed that pastoral practice should be able to relate to Church doctrine.
It would seem that the Orthodox teaching and practice on divorce broadly expresses the view towards which most opinion is tending. Fr Stephanopoulos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America explained their attitude: "Ultimately sin and human frailty can and sometimes dolead to the irrevocable dissolution and the spiritual breakdown of a marriage." "The Orthodox view divorce and remarriage as a pastoral opportunity to exercise a ministry of reconciliation and restoration."
Mgr Kelleher called for a change in Catholic Church law to recognise divorce and had the support of Fr Young of the Paulist Centre at Boston, who could not see why the Church denied Catholics "the right to seek love and permanence a second time." Lately the number of annulments granted by the Church, said Mgr Kelleher, had risen sharply. Because of recent changes in jurisprudence, today "nine out of ten annulments (declarations that a previous marriage was not a true one) are granted on the basis of one form or another of lack of due discretion." Such annulments, in which the Church declares the marriage null because one partner • is schizophrenic, sociopathic, homosexual, or otherwise severely disordered, are "annulments by diagnostic epithet." "The Church should not be in the business of labelling persons as incapable of marriage," he contended. "It is my experience that the break-up of most marriages is not due to a mental, emotional or Volitional deficiency in one party. It is due to the inability of the couple to relate to each other, to complete each other, to complement each other." For the Church to call one party mentally or emotionally ill in order to label its decision an annulment rather than a divorce, he argued, "is too high a price to pay to salvage the word `indissolubility.' It is my opinion that a good number of these annulments are actually divorces." Fr McKeever, in supporting the traditional' Catholic view, pointed out that Mgr Kelleher's paper failed to make reference to the second and third goods of marriage: the good of children and the good of
society. The Episcopal Coadjutor Bishop Weinhauer, in a major address opening the conference, said that "the 'norm for man is permanent monogamous marriage" but that this norm "should not be transformed into an ecclesiastical or civil law prohibiting divorce or permitting it only in a few special cases." This interpretation he felt could be taken by some as an excuse for laxity.
Fr James Gardiner, director of communications for the Graymoor Ecumenical Institute, speaking to the press after the conference, said that the conference was a success, not in achieving an instant consensus on marriage and divorce from a wide range of Christian traditions, but in "raising the issues and getting as much input as possible."
BRAZIL More arrests
Ecclesia, the information bulletin of the archdiocese of Sao Paulo, has again had occasion to denounce the arrests of several intellectuals, including some university professors, in Sao Paulo. It also laments the fact that this new "wave of repression" has come at a time when there was reason to hope that the new government was easing its policies in "the delicate area of human rights." But in an apparent attempt to avoid endangering the improved ChurchState relations, the bulletin suggests that the federal government might not be aware of the situation in the state of Sao Paulo.
Reporting the new wave of arrests, Ecclesia says: "God's Church is anguished once more, not because of the arrests as such, but because of the flagrant disregard of the law and human rights. Well-documented facts prove that the imprisonments were carried out without judicial orders and in circumstances that in effect constitute kidnappings." It discloses that it obtained these facts, including the accusation of torture, from some of the arrested who have since been freed. It goes on to charge that those arrested have no contact with their families, that no information is given as to where they are being held, and that in many cases prisoners are placed in solitary confinement where they are subjected to pressures of a physical and moral as well as a psychological kind.
In recent months Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo had criticised another wave of arrests affecting some 50 members of Church social-action groups; most were released after spending varying amounts of time in jail. Nor is the Church the sole body to concern itself over arbitrary arrests, in Brazil. The foreign press continues to report them as and when they occur, while the Brazilian Bar Association has raised the matter of police procedure with the government. The specific charges it made were: the disappearance of persons, arbitrary arrests, policy-dictated kidnappings of those alleged to be the government's political enemies, and interrogations under torture.
It has also been reported that the small Catholic radio station owned by the diocese of Goias was closed by the government last month without prior notice. This is the third diocesan radio station to be closed since last November, the others being those run by the Sao Paulo and Maceio dioceses. A total of 116 diocesan radio stations are still in operation within the country. This summary action on the government's part, however, is on a par with its general policy towards all privately-operated radio stations, of which there are some 1,200 in the country. Broadcasting licences, the government maintains, are its own sole responsibility; neither warning nor explanation is called for if and when it decides to revoke them.
NEWS IN BRIEF
Tanzania. The general assembly of the World Union of Catholic Women's Organisations (wucwo) is to be held in Dar-es-Salaam from 14 to 24 Septemper. Dar-es-Salaam University 'will be the venue for the 250 delegates, drawn from about 70 countries, who are expected to attend this the first general assembly to be held by wucwo in Africa. Four languages—English, French, Spanish and sGerman—will be used, with a simultaneous-translation service. The assembly's main theme is to be: "wucwo as an agent of change for a more just society."
Ivory Coast. An African nurse from here —Mrs, Euganie Bahintchie—was elected president of their international organisation by the 4,000 Catholic nurses who met in Rome towards the end of May for their tenth World Congress.
Mrs Bahintchie, who succeeds Miss Marcela Ordoilez in office, is a member of the Vatican Commissions on the Family and on the Role of Women in the Church. Addressing the delegates, she drew attention to the fundamental task that confronted all engaged in health education, not least obstetricians, in Africa. She also voiced the hope that greater efforts could be mounted in Africa to eradicate malaria and other diseases, to overcome food taboos, to spread the use of vaccination, and to get women to resort to maternity clinics for their confinements.
France. As a means of preparing for Holy Year, the Marian Priestly League has, with the approval of the Congregation for the Clergy, arranged for an International Priests' Congress to be held in Paray-le-Monial from 13 to 17 Septembqr and at the Sacred Heart Basilica, Montmartre from 17 to 19 September. Among the participants will be, in addition to bishops from all five continents, Cardinals Wright, Marty, Conway, Gonzalez, Biayenda and Arns.
Czechoslovakia. All priests whose licences to exercise their priestly ministries have been withdrawn for one reason or another by the government have been given strict instructions by the Department for Church Affairs that the ban applies to their leisure hours no less than to their working ones. What occasioned this edict was the recent charge brought against a Salesian priest, who, following the withdrawal of his licence, has since been working full-time as a window-cleaner, but has been discovered doing priestly work in the evenings.
France. In the course of a private audience in May, Brother Roger, the Prior of Taize, was informed by Pope Paul vi that Cardinal Jan Willebrands, President of the Vatican Secretariat for the Union of Christians, would be present at Taize for the opening of the Council of Youth on 30 August. Final preparations for the council will take place from 19 to 29 August, and during this time the weekly international meetings of young people, which are separate from the Council of Youth, will be temporarily suspended.