Added Friday 3rd August 2012
At least the late Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Martini, one time supposed papal candidate's final pronouncement is not entirely characterised by the valedictory courage familiar to those trapped in dictatorship and the Roman Catholic Church.
Martini, in a valedictory interview, says, not for the first time, that the Vatican's attitude to sexual issues is wholly inappropriate to its mission; that the bureaucracy is burgeoning and the ritual pompous.
But Martini's enigmatic call for root and branch reform, beginning with the Pope himself, is new and will, sadly, never be fully explained.
Martini, never known to be careless with his analysis, says that the church is 200 years out of date which would place its current state of mind roughly co-terminal with the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the return of assorted ancien regimes culminating, in Vatican terms, in the ultramontanist First Vatican Council. But for all his courage in office, and his illness following it, the Church might have been very different if Martini had given a little more encouragement to liberals trying to hold the line on Vatican II ecclesiology whose traduction is the route of all other concerns.
Return to All News