So like the priests associations in Austria demanding married and women priests, the priests association in Germany demanding collegiality and allowing divorced people to receive communion and the association of priests in Ireland criticizing the new missal translation and asking for married priests, we now have a nascent association of American priests as reported in this article from NCR.
Sept 15, 2011
A national organization of Catholic priests has been formed and is in the process of informing the U.S. bishops of its existence and preparing to recruit priest members from around the country.
Fr. David Cooper, a Milwaukee pastor and chair of an eight-member organizing core said the new Association of U.S. Catholic Priests has two major goals: to reach out in fraternal support to brother priests and to create a collegial voice so priests can speak in a united way.
“More and more, priests find themselves living in isolated conditions,” Cooper told NCR, either because they are in small dioceses or in vastly scattered regions or because they find the heavy burdens of priest-scarce ministry overwhelming.
The association will stress “our common mandate to serve as Jesus served,” Cooper said, but quickly added that it will also “hold one hand out to the bishops and one hand to the baptized faithful, the laity.”
Voice will be an overarching issue, said Cooper: “For several decades priests did have a voice through priests’ senates and councils. But in 1983 through a change in Canon Law these groups became the domain of the ordinary, and we lost our collegial voice.”
However, Cooper insisted protest and disagreement will not be on the agenda of the new organization.
“During the first four years the association will be celebrating the Second Vatican Council,” he said, “and next June on the 50th anniversary of the council’s opening, we will hold a major convocation at St. Leo University in Tampa, Fla. The topic will be the liturgy, the first document approved at Vatican II.”
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Vega added he is fearful that the association, as it develops, may follow too closely in the steps of the new Irish Priests Association, which has already strongly criticized the Roman Missal translation, asked for a reconsideration of who can be called to holy orders, and endorsed the idea of a married clergy.
“Taking up those issues puts you into immediate conflict with the bishops,” said Vega.
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The creation of the association came about in part through an unlikely confluence of events: the setting up of a Web site in Seattle by Fr. Michael Ryan to allow people to protest the coming changes in the Roman Missal, the formation of the Irish Association of Priests, and an inspiration from the Pittsburgh Association of Priests.
Fr. Bernard Survil, a longtime member of the Pittsburgh group (though a priest of the Greensburg, Pa., diocese), helped organize a questionnaire mailing to priests around the country, using contact information placed on Ryan’s Web site as people signed the protest.
The questionnaire asked respondents to prioritize the same objectives the Irish had used in forming their association and to indicate their thoughts about forming a similar U.S. association.
Of the 250 priests who responded, Survil reported, the most favored objective called for an association dedicated to “full implementation of the vision and teachings of the Second Vatican Council with special emphasis on the primacy of the individual conscience, the status and participation of all the baptized, and the task of establishing a church where all believers will be treated as equals.”
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Dubi said he is hopeful the association will be successful in attracting young priests, Latino and other minority group priests and the many clergy brought in from foreign countries.
“This is going to be a great experience,” he said.
full story here
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