Beyond excluding Church positions: Tony Flannery

It is now almost fifteen years since I was forbidden to exercise my priestly ministry, and I am on the verge of my eightieth birthday. The issues around which I was condemned were my writings on such matters as priesthood, women's equality, and aspects of Catholic sexual teaching.

As a Redemptorist, I had spent all my years of ministry mainly in preaching. That year, in which I was in conflict with the Vatican and my Redemptorist authorities, was not easy, but was life changing. In the end I was faced with a stark choice. Either I publicly renounce the views I had long held and written about, or I was ‘silenced’. That was a clear decision for me. How could I live with myself if I publicly stated the opposite to what I believed?

The ironic thing is that now, with open discussion in the Church during the Synodal Process, the views for which I was dismissed are widely expressed, and positively ‘middle of the road’ among Catholics, if not yet in the Vatican.

These years have been good to me. Free from the constraints of ancient Church dogma I began to delve more deeply into the Gospel message, and how it relates to modern scientific discoveries. This has led me to re-think a couple of fundamental things at the core of Church teaching since the early centuries.

What conclusions am I coming to?

God has come down out of ‘the mansion in the skies’. The Divine Presence is at the heart of creation from the very beginning many billions of years ago, and “in him we live and move and have our being”. The creation story in Genesis, like a great deal of the Bible, is not historical, but mythological story telling. So dogmas based on a historical interpretation of Genesis, like the story of our first parents in the garden, and original sin, are no longer credible to me.

Who exactly is Jesus; that is a fascinating question. I don’t accept that he was sent from Heaven to reconcile us with God, since God was never, and never could be, apart from creation. And since the Divine Presence is within each one of us, I can no longer say that Jesus is ‘the only Son of God’. It can, I believe, be said of all of us that we are children of God. But what I can happily say about Jesus is that he was a unique revelation of the presence of God in the world. Understanding his life in that way gives his message a whole new and more powerful resonance. To ‘follow Jesus’ means to open ourselves to the awareness of Divine presence as he did and illustrated by his life.

As the late, lamented Scripture scholar, Kieran O’Mahony, stated clearly, Jesus did not found a church. He lived and died a Jew. But the Church has taken possession of him in a way that I now believe has greatly curtailed the strength and beauty of his message. It asserts that one can only be saved through Christ, that he is the only pathway to salvation.

I believe that teaching would be foreign to the Jesus who lived two milennia ago. It is a teaching that excludes, and also gives enormous power to the Church. The Church does not possess or own Jesus. His fundamental teaching is much more powerful and liberating than what the Church dictates in its dogmas. It is also enormously simple.

Whoever lives in love, lives in God.

Maybe the Church authorities are right to keep me away from their pulpits!