Vir Ecclesiasticus

When asked for my comments on Rome’s continental law mentality and the CDF, they have to be knee-jerk. I know little about the CDF, less about continental law and almost nothing about mentality.

Aware of the CDF’s ruthless wipeout of the professional lives of so many outstanding scholars in various fields of theology, despite the international reputations crowning their work, I am leery of my own emotional reactions to the way then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, operated that Dicastery. In my opinion, he stands with Pope John Paul II as a cruel man. My emotional reactions tinge both men in the way they breathe and move and have their being.

There is that ugly picture of JPII in 1983 Mexico, wagging fingers of both hands at a kneeling Fr. Ernesto Cardinal, berating him for Liberation Theology. I still feel the anger that flushed then.

I still feel my impotent rage at his deadly cruelty to Fr. General Pedro Arrupe, SJ, at whose feet I once sat in our Scholastic’s rec room at Sophia University in Tokyo. I just don’t like Karol Jozef Wojtyla or Jozef Aloisius Ratzinger.

Therefore, I am too overwhelmingly biased to offer any worthwhile comment. They made those judgments. Only a few stood to object. Most of the rest didn’t rock the boat. Today, a few of us bemoan and know that all we can do is pray for change and toss off our own emotion-ridden obsessions with them as people I’m grateful not to have known on a personal basis. Same goes for a whole host of other politicians in national and international stages. These two are but peas in a pod among lots of pods.

A Jesuit friend of mine, objecting to my expressions of dismay with Church government, said of himself, “I am a professional churchman. That was echoed by Robert Imbelli in the Foreword to a book on Cardinal Avery Dulles: “One of the most heartfelt accolades the early Fathers could bestow on a theologian was to praise him as vir ecclesiasticus: an ecclesial man.”

I agree and maintain either expression as high regard, proper assessment, worthy title for that person’s devotion to Church. One mighty action we can do together to honor these people and the Church is to praise a good and worthy Professional Churchman by acknowledging him publicly as Vir Ecclesiasticus. While we are at it, we might just as well start choosing each Professional Churchwoman as worthy of Femina Ecclesiastica. When the two go together, side by side, we will have an authentic Church about which we may continue authentic dialogue.