Just discovered: Pope John Paul II makes partial apology for RCC's sins

From SF Gate, by Joan Ryan

THE CONFESSIONALS at Annunciation Church had red curtains heavy enough to keep my childhood sins from spilling into the sanctuary, where other sinners waited in pews like voters for their turn in the booth. I always dreaded confession, with its demand that I own up to my mistakes and weaknesses. And I was skeptical of the priest's assurance that by reciting a specific number of ``Hail Marys'' and ``Our Fathers,'' my soul would be wiped clean.

(I became especially suspicious of the whole process when, in eighth grade at a Catholic school in Florida, I was made to troop by myself down the church aisle, kneel at the altar, and in front of the whole class, pray for God's forgiveness for the offensive sin of forgetting my hat.)

Despite my skepticism, I'd usually emerge from church after confession on Saturday afternoons feeling as if I could reinvent myself as a person who didn't fight with her brothers and sisters and wasn't obsessively jealous of her friend Maureen's new white go-go boots. Asking forgiveness cleared away the past, giving me room to build something new.

I thought of those childhood confessions as I read of the remarkable ``Jubilee Year'' homily Pope John Paul II delivered on Sunday. He repented for the Catholic Church's sins over the past 2,000 years, which included injustices toward Jews, immigrants, indigenous people, the poor, the unborn and women.

``Lord God . . . at times the equality of your sons and daughters has not been acknowledged,'' he said in reference to women, ``and Christians have been guilty of attitudes of rejection and exclusion . . .''

I'll say.

As the pope spoke yesterday about the sins of gender inequality, I couldn't help but be struck -- again, still -- by the absence of women in the Vatican's vast sea of robed clergy. Did the pope grasp the irony?

I called my 67-year-old aunt in Nairobi yesterday to ask her about the pope's apology. She is a Catholic nun who has worked as a missionary in Africa for four decades. The divisiveness she has seen in African communities in the name of faith has been mirrored in her own religion. The Catholic Church is no closer to allowing women into decision-making roles at the highest levels than it was when she entered the convent as a young woman.

``Nothing has changed. And nothing is going to change under this pope. Women do not have an equal place in the church. It's one of the last bastions of inequality in modern society,'' she said. ``About two years ago, the pope said the topic of women being ordained as priests couldn't even be discussed. The topic couldn't even be discussed!''

Sr. Helene O'Sullivan is the president of Maryknoll Sisters in Ossining, N.Y., the order to which my aunt belongs. She is a patient woman, more patient than many of her sisters. She saw the pope's apology, like Saturday confessions, as a way of to cleanse the church's soul and allow for a new beginning. She called on the Catholic Church to be a model of equality for the world.

``Once you ask for forgiveness, you then ask, `Where do we go from here?''' O'Sullivan said. ``This is the start of a process, not an end.''

It is quite a remarkable and admirable thing that a church that considers itself holy, that believes its popes are guided by the hand of God, would acknowledge and ask forgiveness for mistakes of the past.

But what about the mistakes of the present? Let's hope acknowledgment of today's exclusion and rejection of women won't have to wait for whoever is pope during the next Jubilee.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/03/14/ED31477.DTL


The Roman Catholic Church has a long way to go ... but so do we all. Like the author said, it's remarkable that a church that believes its popes are guided by the hand of God would acknowledge and apologize for past mistakes. The Roman Catholic hierarchy is ossified and arrogant in assuming that their word is God's word.

In Prostestantism, the parallel sin is bibilcal inerrancy. This grew out of sola scriptura, "by scripture alone", which was the notion that the Church was subject to Scripture and not the other way around. Sola scriptura was a reaction to the Catholic leaning on church tradition, which over time had become ossified and corrupt. Now, many Protestants have become corrupted by the notion of biblical inerrancy.

Biblical inerrancy is simply another form of idolatry. The Bible is the work of men. I say "men" deliberately - all the authors were male (I've heard arguments that the Song of Solomon was written by a woman, but even if true that's just one book out of dozens). Men are as fallible as women. Human beings are full of internal contradictions, and we are restricted by the lenses our cultures teach us to use. Most of the authors of the Bible were Jewish/Hebrew - they do not represent the whole of humanity because they cannot.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy holds that the final authority to interpret the Bible rests with its magisterum, meaning the Pope plus the higher-ranking bishops. Protestants heap scorn upon this idea, and they claim that final authority rests in the individual believer ... and then they let another small handful of men decide for them how to interpret the Bible.

Anglicans have relied on a "three-legged stool" of Scripture, tradition, and reason. Methodists rely on the above three, plus experience. We should all remember that. To hold up only scripture, or tradition over scripture, or experience/reason over scripture, is idolatry.